“Okay, first off,” Bob says, “a few months ago, I went and shot a nigger, a guy trying to rob the store, Eddie’s store. That’s one piece of information.”
Ave purses his lips and lets out a long, low-toned whistle.
“Then you oughta know that for the last six months or so, I been sleeping with a woman, a girlfriend, I guess you’d call her, not a ‘lover,’ really. And she’s a black woman. A nurse,” he adds.
“A black woman. No shit.”
“Yeah. But that’s not really the important thing about her. Anyhow, I blew the relationship today, I was kind of breaking it off with her, you know, because of the new baby and all, and I was feeling guilty and complicated about the whole thing, but I just wanted to pull back a little, to ease up while I thought things out …”
Avery interrupts to ask if Bob is in love with this woman, “this black woman,” and Bob says yes, he is in love with her, but he doesn’t know how much he’s willing to give up for that. But the real problems aren’t there, he goes on. The real problems grow out of this robbery somehow, when he shot one of the guys and let the other guy escape and then unexpectedly spotted him this afternoon, or thought he spotted him, the guy who escaped, with Marguerite …
“The black woman? Your girlfriend?”
Right, Bob says, repeating her name so he won’t have to keep going through this “black woman” business, which is starting to irritate him, though he’s not sure why. He plows on with his story, telling Avery about his having chased Cornrow to the bar and the confrontation there and the one in Marguerite’s living room, his sudden realization that he was likely to kill somebody for no good reason and his decision to deliver the gun to Eddie, since it was his gun anyhow, and then his decision, when Eddie insisted on his keeping the gun at the store, to quit his job.
He doesn’t know what’s happening, he tells Avery. He’s a changed man somehow. Maybe it doesn’t show, but inside, he’s a changed man, Bob insists, and it all started last winter, just before Christmas, when out of the blue he got himself turned around one night and ended up taking a hard, honest look at himself and his life, and what he saw made him so angry that he ended up punching the shit out of his car, which was lucky, he realizes now, because it could just as easily have been a perfect stranger he was punching, or Elaine, say.
“You took a hard look at yourself and your life and didn’t like what you saw? So you decided to come down here and work for Eddie? Ol’ Fast Eddie,” Avery says, smiling and shaking his head slowly from side to side.
“Well, you know Eddie,” Bob says, and he explains how he was led to expect that his brother would be making him a partner in his business here, liquor stores and real estate development. “And some other stuff he’s got his fingers in. Shopping centers. I don’t know.”
“Eddie’s a dealer, all right. A real horse trader. This place is made for him. Or he’s made for it.”
No, Bob says. Not true. And he tells about Eddie’s fears of being killed, his involvement, Bob is sure, with the Mafia, “or somebody a whole hell of a lot like the Mafia, somebody he owes a lot of money to. And if he can’t pay it back on time, he says he’ll end up in the back of his car in Tampa Bay.”
Avery is impressed. And his quick advice to Bob is to stay clear of his brother altogether. He tells him that he quit his job just in time, because if Eddie goes, so long as Bob is working for him Bob will go too, especially if he’s running around with a gun on him. “You don’t have a chance to explain much to these guys, Bob. They are definitely not your Catamount Savings and Loan types. What they are is very serious businessmen who enforce verbal promises by having big, ugly guys from Providence and New Jersey fly down just to break your arms and legs very slowly. I shit you not. I’ve been down here three years now, and I’ve seen a lot and heard a lot more, especially being down on the Keys, and there’s two things you end up getting killed for down here, real estate and drugs, and that’s because those are the two things you can make a killing at here. You can be a millionaire overnight, but you can get dead overnight too.”
Bob points to the turnoff for the hospital, and Avery wheels the large, glistening vehicle smoothly off the ramp, turns left at the stop sign, then pulls into the hospital parking lot and stops.
“What about you?” Bob asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, how are you making it down here? You’re obviously doing okay,” he adds, gesturing to the car that surrounds them.
Avery slings one arm over the back of his chair and faces his friend. “Hey, Bob.
