Continental Drift полностью

“I’m gonna tell you who that kid is,” Bob says. “And I know he’s a kid. He’s no more than twenty or twenty-one — I seen him up close. That kid is the same one who tried to rob the store and got away while I was calling the cops. That kid is the one I shoulda shot, not the other guy. That kid wanted me dead, the other guy didn’t. The kid kept telling the other guy, the guy with the shotgun at my head, to go on and blow me away! Don’t you understand? Don’t you get it? That sonofabitch was laughing at the idea of me dead! He kept trying to get the other guy to pull the trigger. The only reason I’m alive now is because the guy with the gun had enough brains or decency or whatever not to pull the trigger. But when I didn’t pull the trigger, when I left that kid lying there in his own shit on the floor, crying like a baby, begging me not to kill him, he turned around and ran away. You know the story. So I end up looking like I don’t have any brains, or else too much decency, which amounts to the same thing nowadays. No. I want that kid.”

She is squinting into his face as if trying to understand a man speaking a language she’s never learned.

“I want that kid,” he says quietly, a child selecting a teddy bear from a shelf crowded with teddy bears.

“You crazy, Bob.”

“I want that kid. He wanted me dead. Now I want him dead. If not dead, then scared shitless and in jail.”

“Yeah, well, that guy in my car ain’t the kid you want. You crazy, is what I think. Now get outa here,” she says, and she brushes past him into the living room, crosses to the front door and opens it. “That guy in my car is husband to my cousin.”

“He’s a thief. Probably a killer.”

“The guys who robbed your store was from New York anyhow,” she says. “Read the papers. You know, when it comes right down to it, Bob, you just like every other white man.”

“Don’t give me that shit! Don’t! I know who the hell tried to rob me! I know who the hell tried to get me killed! And I know who I saw in your car. I saw him just a minute ago, too, at the bottom of your street, and I called to him, and he took off running. Naturally. He knows who the hell he is, and he knows who I am, too. It’s you who doesn’t know who’s who. Not me.”

“You just now called out to him?”

“Yeah, I followed him to the end of the block.”

“What’d you say to him?”

“Nuthin. I just hollered for him to come over to the car, and he saw me and recognized me and took off running. He ducked into a bar, and I ran in after him, but the guy in the bar covered for him, they all covered for him….”

“You hollered for him to come over to your car? What for? If you so sure he’s the one robbed your store, whyn’t you call a cop? Tell me that. Whyn’t you just ask me his name and then call the cops to come pick him up so you can identify him down to the police station?”

Bob looks stonily into Marguerite’s brown eyes for a few seconds. Then he sighs heavily, and as if he’s taken off a mask, his gaze softens. “Oh, God,” he says. “Oh, God damn everything. I fucked it up. I fucked it all up, didn’t I? Everything. Everything. All of it. Done.”

Marguerite is still standing firmly by the open door, like a guard. If she’s seen his face shift or heard his words, she shows no signs of it. “You looking like a crazy white man, you come down here, and you drive up and holler for a black man to come over to your car like that, and he takes a look at you and runs off, and you wonder why? You worse’n crazy. You dumb.”

“I fucked it all up.” He drops his weight onto the sofa, and leaning his head back, closes his eyes. “That’s it. Everything. Done.”

“What’d you plan on saying to him? That woulda been a real interesting conversation.”

“Nuthin.”

“So what’d you call out to him for, then?”

Slowly, Bob lifts his shirtfront, then drops it.

Marguerite’s face, at the sight of the gun in his belt, doesn’t so much drop as slide warily to the side. “Oh-h-h,” she moans, a sound signifying both pain and insight, as if the name for the mysterious cause of the pain came to her only at the moment of feeling it.

George enters the room from a back bedroom, and Marguerite rushes to him, leaving the front door open and unattended. “Daddy,” she says, “you get on back now. We almost finished, you gonna have your supper soon. Just you go on back and watch some more TV till we done.”

The old man peers across the room at Bob, then up into his daughter’s face. “Somethin’ wrong out here?” he asks in a firm voice. “I heard you gettin’ upset,” he says to Marguerite.

“Nothing, Daddy, nothing. Now go on back.”