Continental Drift (16 page)

Bob had taken the news stoically, grimly, and when she was through confessing, he told her he understood her crime, but he couldn’t understand Ave’s. Several times over the next few years, Ave
wrote from Moray Key, Florida, where he’d established himself as a charter fisherman, but Bob never answered, and then all they heard from Ave was an annual Christmas card, signed with his full name, first and last, as if to admonish his friend for his silence.

Bob had not forgotten Avery Boone, but he figured he had forgiven him. Elaine’s obvious faithfulness and her shame for her one aberration helped him forgive his old pal, but so did his own affair with Doris Cleeve, which started shortly after Elaine’s confession and continued haphazardly until the week before Bob and his family left Catamount for good. He never even said goodbye to Doris Cleeve, never even told her he was leaving.

And that’s it, the entire sexual experience of Bob Dubois. On the face of it, it’s not much, but in a way, Bob made up for his paucity of actual experience by thinking about sex constantly and, for the most part, clearly. His good fortune, and perhaps hers, is that he enjoyed sex with his wife and she enjoyed it with him, so that despite his constantly thinking about sex (remembering past encounters fondly, visualizing future couplings with unusual vividness) and his use of an unexpected, if somewhat naive, gift for narrative, his thoughts rarely turned in on themselves, where they could easily have bred feelings of deprivation, self-pity and resentment. But all that, of course, was before he met and fell in love with Marguerite Dill.

They enter, Marguerite first, Bob holding the door open for her, and commence kissing in the middle of the room. Bob thinks that maybe he’d like to have the lights on, but he can’t figure out how to say so without sounding a little weird, so he lets it go and continues kissing her and fondling her long body. She’s wearing designer jeans and a gray tee shirt that advertises Disney World with the head of Mickey Mouse, whose black ears spread like a diva’s breastplate across her large, round breasts.

She’s very passionate, he thinks, as she bites, sucks, licks his face and lightly moans. Stepping her back to the bed, where she kicks off her sandals, he lays her down and proceeds to draw her jeans off, first
one leg, then the other, and then her panties, while she shrugs her way out of her tee shirt and unsnaps her bra.

Standing, Bob unbuckles unzips, unbuttons and unties his own clothing, until he, too, is naked, and hugely erect, he knows, for he can feel the weight of his cock swaying in front of him, out there in the breeze and spray like a bowsprit, and as he comes forward onto her, his mouth reaching in the darkness for her mouth, his hands reaching for her breasts, he has a quick vision of himself as a white boat, a skiff or maybe a flat-bottomed Boston whaler, sliding easily onto the hot golden sands of a tropical beach, with dark, lush jungle ahead of him, the burning sun and endless blue sky above, and behind him, the sea, surging, lifting and shoving him up and forward onto the New World.

“Go easy,” she whispers. “I’m not ready.” She holds him by the shoulders, spreads her legs and grinds her pelvis and groin against his, while he goes on kissing her along the neck, down and across her shoulders, until her moans and the heavy thrust and rub of her groin start to get to him, and he makes his first attempt to enter her.

“Easy, easy,” she warns. He’s gentle, but persistent, a man knocking lightly at a locked door, determined to wake his lover and not her maid. Wetting his fingers with spit, he reaches down and strokes her lightly with his fingertips. She arches her spine first toward him, then away, and lifting her pelvis, she opens like a flower to him. Again, he drops down and moves to enter, but again he finds himself ejected.

“Wait, wait. Kiss me. Please kiss me.”

He kisses her, starting at her face and ears, tangling his fingers in her dense hair, then down along her neck to her breasts, where he feathers her large, erect nipples lightly with his tongue, while she twists beneath him and coos with evident pleasure. Moving his mouth off her breasts to her belly, he draws his hands to her breasts and strokes her nipples with precise care, drifting with tongue, teeth and lips downward, over her hips, along the inside of her thighs, and when she spreads her thighs, he moves his mouth quickly against her cunt,
prods and probes it with his tongue, until he knows its shapes, and begins licking hungrily, noisily, with gentle precision, his heavy arms laid across her belly, his fingertips fluttering over her breasts. She has brought her naked feet together, sole against sole, and when he starts to run his prick slowly against her feet, she moves them away, as if frightened. A third time, lifting his weight onto his elbows, he attempts to enter her. A third time, he fails.

“I want to make love to you, Marguerite.”

“You are. You are. Do what you were doing. Do that.”

He lowers his mouth to her breasts and moves quickly down her body. Soon she is quivering beneath him, and after a few moments, she lifts her pelvis against him, shudders and says, “Ah-h-h!” In seconds, she has drawn him up and forward, has turned him onto his back and has buried her face in his groin, licking and sucking on his penis. Almost before he knows it is happening, it has already happened, and she leaves him for the bathroom, where he hears from behind the closed door the sound of water running.

By the time she returns, he has got under the covers of the bed. She joins him there, and wrapping her long arms around his body, she snuggles against him and says, “That was wonderful. Real nice.”

“Yeah,” he says. “No, it really was.”

“I’m sorry. I guess … I guess I’m sort of nervous and all. You know?”

“Oh, yeah, well, I didn’t even notice. I mean, that’s okay. It was really great. No kidding. You’ve got a beautiful body,” he says softly, though he hasn’t actually seen it yet, except for a glimpse as she flicked on the bathroom light and quickly closed the door behind her, a flash of brown buttock and back.

“Thanks. You’re not so bad yourself.”

A half hour later they leave the motel and drive back to Oleander Park, chatting about the Boston Red Sox, promising each other that
next spring they’ll have to go to some of the exhibition games together, since, to their mutual surprise and pleasure, they both happen to be Boston fans, or so they insist.

They kiss goodbye passionately, and she says, “I love you.” Bob steps from her car and, once outside, says, “Me too.”

But when she has gone, and he has got into his own car and has started the motor, he drops into deep confusion. What happened? What did he expect to happen? What did he want? What did he get? What did he give? As he asks the questions, one by one, he realizes that he can’t answer any of them, not a one, and consequently he does not know how he should feel now. Happy? Sated? Disappointed? Ashamed? Angry? Proud?

The only thing he does know, he tells himself, is that he loves her. Yes, he, Bob Dubois of Catamount, New Hampshire, has fallen in love with Marguerite Dill of Auburndale, Florida, by way of Macon, Georgia, where she was a Southern black woman married to a Southern black man. This means, of course, that he no longer is in love with his wife Elaine. Or so he insists.

When he moves the gearshift lever, it jams, refuses to slide into reverse. He jiggles it, wrenches it, sneaks up on it and flips it, but nothing works. He checks his watch. Ten forty-five. The only way he can get the car into gear now is to have someone sit inside the car and jiggle the shift lever while he jumps up and down on the front bumper. The highway is deserted and dark, and across the street at the housing project, everyone’s inside watching TV.

He shuts off the motor and gets out of the car, slamming the door shut. “Shit,” he says aloud, thinking of the five-mile walk ahead of him. “Shit, shit, shit.” It means walking in darkness along the gravelly shoulder of Highway 17, past Lake Louise and the moss-shrouded cypress trees and tall pines, then south on 520 past the marshes to Lake Grassey and home, unless he can talk someone into coming out here to the store at this hour to help him free the transmission. He’d call a garage, but that would cost him twenty-five bucks at least, and
he spent his last few dollars on the motel room, insisting on it, despite Marguerite’s polite suggestion that they split the cost.

Who can he call? Who does he know in this place? His brother Eddie would tell him to call a cab and then would tell him where he could buy a Chrysler Cordoba demonstrator with only 3,500 miles on it for two grand off list. A steal. Elaine would borrow a car and drive out eagerly, but she’d come with one of her friends from the trailer park, probably Ellen Skeeter, that nervous, redheaded Georgian with the sudden, loud laugh and the three-hundred-pound husband named Ron who works at the Dairy Queen in Cypress Gardens. And Elaine would wake the girls and bring them too. A big production. Lots of talk. He doesn’t want lots of talk tonight. Not now.

His brother or his wife, then. Or Marguerite. Yes, he can call Marguerite. She should be nearly home by now. Auburndale’s not that far. Unless she didn’t go straight home. Unless she stopped off for a nightcap at a bar on a corner a few blocks before her house, a dim, smoky tavern filled with black men and black women and soul music on the jukebox, and she’ll meet and drink and talk black talk with a guy she knows from the neighborhood, a tall, slim, good-looking guy named Steve or Otis, with a pencil-thin mustache and long black eyelashes, and she’ll leave with the guy and go back to his apartment, smoke some marijuana and have wild, Negro sex with him. Afterwards, they’ll lie back on his purple satin sheets, and she’ll fondle his huge prick and wonder why on earth she tried to make it with the liquor store clerk when, any time she wanted, she could have this. The guy will shrug and say, “Beats me, baby. Everybody know honkies got small dicks.”

He unlocks the door and enters the store, stopping at the threshold to flick the switch for the light over the cash register, so he can read the telephone book. Locating the name M. Dill, he starts to dial the number, when he hears a soft male voice behind him. “Hang up the phone.”

He glances over his shoulder and sees two black men, one a few
feet behind him and carrying what appears to be a shotgun, the other standing in the shadows over by the door, locking it.

Bob hangs up the phone.

“Hit the light,” the man with the shotgun tells the other. He’s young, in his early twenties, and the other is even younger. They’re both wearing nylon shirts with silver-and-black geometric patterns flashing over them, tight double-knit bell-bottomed slacks, and jogging shoes.

“What do you want to kill the lights for, man? We gotta see.”

“Hit the fucking light. We got enough light from the sign.” The man with the shotgun speaks in a slow, patient manner, as if worried about being misunderstood. The light goes out, and the store drops back into soft, gloomy semidarkness. “Now, what you got to do,” he says to Bob, “is let us make your deposit for you tonight. You understand me?”

Bob nods his head up and down, but doesn’t move the rest of his body. His feet feel bolted through to the floor, his arms bound to his sides. His heart is pounding like a pile driver, but his blood is congealed in the veins, thick and heavy, moving like cold syrup, sluggishly, reluctantly, against the frantic, terrified beat of his heart.

The man with the shotgun regards Bob quizzically. “Did you hear me, man? We going to make your deposit for you tonight.” The man has delicate, small, excellent teeth, and his skin is a yellowish color, the dimly golden shade of a pair of Italian loafers Bob was thinking of buying as soon as he got paid.

“I …” Bob carefully clears his throat. “I already made the deposit tonight. Earlier.”

The man with the shotgun motions with his head for the other man to come forward. This one’s chinless, with skin the color of brown glass, and his head is covered with tiny plaited cornrows laid in parallel strips from his forehead back to the nape of his neck, an elaborate hairdo that, to Bob, looks more like a skullcap than hair.

“Look, man,” the first one says to Bob. “Just open the fucking register, don’t be cute, and nobody gets hurt. We in a big hurry, so if
you cute, motherfucker, we just going to blow you away. Now gimme the fucking money. All of it. Checks and all.”

“I really did. I already made the deposit. Early, at nine.”

“Blow ’im away,” the younger man says. His hands open and close quickly, as if he’d like to get them around Bob’s throat. “Go on, blow the sucker off. I
hate
the sucker already. I
hate
the way he looks.” He laughs suddenly. “I
hate
’im!”

“Shut up. Get busy and find us a case of Scotch, a case of Dewar’s. I’ll take care of …”

“Fuck ’im, fuck the pig! Just blow off his fucking head!”

“Look, I’m telling the truth. I came in to make a phone call. My car …”

“Oh, man, you are so fucking stupid!” The man lifts the barrel of the shotgun and places it lightly against Bob’s chest. It’s a twenty-gauge pump with a choke, Bob notices. He looks down the long black barrel to the man at the other end. The safety is off, and the man is handling the gun firmly, but with ease. He is familiar with the gun. The stock is buried snugly under his right arm, and his right hand curls around the trigger guard, index finger laid against the trigger, while his left hand carries the weight of the gun.

The man with the cornrows has taken a step away and is watching his partner excitedly. “
Do
it! Go on,
do
the motherfucker! We can get the money without him.”

“Shut the fuck up and get the Scotch.”

“Listen, I’ll give you whatever you want, everything in the store. I don’t give a shit, it’s not my store. I’ll help you load up, even. But the register’s empty. You gotta believe me. I already made the deposit, and then I went out with my … with my girlfriend for a while, and then my transmission got jammed, it does that a lot, so I came in just to make a phone call, that’s all. We closed up at nine.”

“You’re closing now, man. We seen you closing up, which is why we come in here. But I don’t want to argue with you, white man, I just want to stop a minute in my travels, get me some change and a case of Dewar’s, and keep moving. But you making it hard for me.
We in a hurry. You understand me?” He pokes Bob’s chest with the muzzle of the gun.