His mind is flitting wildly about, a maddened bird in a cage, pursued by a word that repels him but that cannot be denied, and he hears only bits of what Elaine is telling him, for, having no sense of the impact of her use of the word, believing she was merely quoting him, reassuring him, she thought, Elaine goes on to tell him what she knows he does not want to hear. She tells him that their daughter Ruthie is ill, “emotionally disturbed,” the counselor at school said, and that she’s going to have to start getting twice weekly treatment at the mental health clinic in Marathon, which will cost money, not a lot of money, but because they’re poor, more money than they have, which is no money at all, so she, Elaine, has decided to take a job in Islamorada. In fact, she accepted the job this morning, waiting on tables at the Rusty Scupper five nights a week. “I know,” she says rapidly, trying to stave off the explosion, “I know I should’ve talked it out with you first, but it had to be done, Bob, and I just saw the sign this morning when I took the girls to the beach…. No, that’s not true. I asked Horace next door if he knew of any jobs, when he took us up to the beach, and he told me about it, and I just went in and asked about the job and got it offered to me, so I took it. And I
know I should’ve told you about Ruthie when the school called, but it was only yesterday, and it seemed so hard a thing to tell you, Bob, because of all you have to worry about, and the way you’ve been lately, kind of distant and lost in your own thoughts and depressed and all. I just wanted to wait till I had a way to pay for it before I told you about it, so it wouldn’t seem so bad.”
“Sonofabitch! There’s not any goddamn thing wrong with Ruthie that some steady discipline wouldn’t cure!” Bob smacks the flat of his hand against the counter, and his face tightens and reddens. “You never tell her to cut out that damned thumb-sucking. You just sit around whispering with her about how rotten everything is, and then I come home, and I have to be the bad guy. You tell that fancy counselor down to the school that? It’s no fucking wonder she’s acting retarded!”
“Emotionally disturbed.”
“Emotionally disturbed, then!” He bats the words back. “I can tell you about ’emotionally disturbed’! I’m ’emotionally disturbed’! I’m goddamned disturbed that you go around my back the way you do. The way you always have, too. And you know what the hell I’m talking about, so don’t give me that look. And now with this job business. Jesus H. Christ! And Horace! Horace, that fat pig, that slimy, woman-sniffing pig. I know what that guy’s interested in, don’t worry. And you do too.”
“You sound crazy. I don’t even know you anymore. I don’t know what’s important to you anymore, like I used to,” Elaine says sadly. “And I don’t know what you mean, going around behind your back. I’ve never gone around behind your back. I was just waiting until I could tell you, and we don’t talk much any …”
“Like hell!” he shouts into her face. “You know what I’m talking about. You know. You got a memory. You know.”
“No, I don’t.” She backs away from him toward the stove.
He raises and slowly extends his fist toward her. He howls. He howls like a trapped beast, and with both hands he clears the counter of bowls, dishes, kitchen implements, clock.
Elaine’s face has gone all to white, her eyes are wide with fear, and she can’t speak. From the rear of the trailer, the cries of her son start up and rise, and suddenly Elaine finds words and says, “Bob, the baby! The baby!”
But it doesn’t matter what she says, for he can no longer hear her or the baby. He lurches around the tiny, cluttered room like a blindfolded deaf man, sweeping tables and shelves clear, knocking over chairs, sending the television set crashing to the floor, the clock-radio and pole lamp beside the sofa, the floor lamp next to the easy chair, kicking at magazines, jars, ashtrays as they fall.
“Stop! Stop this!” Elaine shrieks at him. “You son of a bitch! You’re wrecking my house!”
For a split second, Bob looks over at his wife, and then, as if what he’s seen has compounded his rage, he turns on the chairs and tables, and grunting, tips onto its stiff, flat back the tattered green sofa. Elaine grabs his sleeve with both hands, and when he swings away from her grasp, her face stiffens, for suddenly she is afraid of him, of his size and force, as if he were of an utterly different species than she and her children, a huge, coarse-bodied beast with a thick hide, like a buffalo or rhinoceros, and berserk, rampaging, maddened, as if by the stings of a thousand bees.
Eyes widened, mouth open and dry, hands in tight little fists against her belly, Elaine slips by him and darts down the hall to the back of the trailer, where her baby is, while Bob continues smashing through the trailer, moving like a storm from the living room into the kitchen, then back along the narrow hallway to the bathroom, where he rips the tin medicine cabinet from the wall and kicks over the rubbish can, yanks the contents of the linen closet to the floor, and then moves on to the bedroom at the end, and when he lurches through the door, he stops, panting, enormous in the small door frame, a giant looking down on tiny beds, dolls, stuffed animals and picture puzzles, building blocks, books and pictures, articles of clothing. He hears sniffling and looks up and sees his wife in the corner of the alcove beyond, behind the crib, with the baby in her arms. And he sees that she
expects him to keep on coming, and then he sees what she sees, and he stops.
Bob hears Emma at the screened door off the living room asking in a high, scared voice if she can come inside, and the sounds of Ruthie, poor Ruthie, crying quietly behind her younger sister.
Turning, Bob shuffles slowly back through the wreckage to the front door and lets Emma come inside and then Ruthie, who, as she passes, removes her thumb from her mouth. Neither girl looks at her father.
“Mama?” Emma cries, and Bob hears Elaine call from the back room, “Here! I’m back here with Robbie!” and the two girls run toward her.
He steps outside. The trees are still dripping from the afternoon rain, and shallow puddles glisten white as milk in the yard and roadway ruts. The clouds have passed over the Keys toward the mainland, and the eastern sky, deepening into dark blue as night comes on, pulls from the horizon a large, dark orange half-moon, as if delivering it from old smoke and volcanic ash.
As soon as Bob has driven away, his red-dotted taillights disappearing around the far bend in the road, a man emerges from the trailer across the road. He’s a middle-aged man with a beer belly tightly encased in a sleeveless undershirt, barefoot with skinny legs sticking out below khaki trousers cut off at the knees. He stands in the middle of the road, snaps his fingers for his dog, which emerges obediently from under the trailer, and looks cautiously in the direction taken by Bob’s car and then over toward Bob’s darkened, now silent trailer.
Allie Hubbell, too, has come outside and stands in her yard, peering into the darkness of the road where Bob has gone. “Horace? That you?” she calls to the man.
“Yeah.”
“Some kinda ruckus.”
“I’d say so.”
“She all right, do y’ know?”
“Sonofabitch can do what he wants to his own stuff, but he better not ruin anything of mine, I’ll tell ya,” he says.
“You think we better check on Elaine?”
“Elaine?”
“Yeah. Maybe just to check, you know?”
“Naw,” he says, rubbing his grizzled chin. “You don’t wanta go buttin’ into other people’s fights. Sonofabitch better not’ve banged up any of my stuff, though, I’ll tell ya. I had some kids there once that punched a buncha holes in the walls one night when they was drunk.”
“Maybe we better just go on over and check on Elaine, make sure she’s okay.” Allie takes a step off the grass onto the road.
“Naw. She can always call the cops on the bastard if she’s scared of him. Besides, he ain’t the type to shoot or cut anybody. He might knock her around a little, but he ain’t the violent type.”
“You think so?”
“Oh, yeah,” Horace says, and he turns and starts heading back to his own trailer. “Men can tell these things about each other,” he says. “He’s harmless. Just screwed up is all. See you later,” he says, and goes inside.
Allie stands by the road for several moments, arms crossed below her breasts, hands cupping her elbows. Then she turns and slowly walks back to her trailer, where she sits down on the stoop and smokes a cigarette and watches Bob’s trailer until the lights come on inside it. Then she stands, opens the door and goes in.
By the time Bob crosses from Upper Matecumbe to Moray Key, it’s dark, and the shrimpers are already out, dozens of them leaning over the rail of the catwalk along the bridge, men, women and children with lanterns hung from the catwalk and long-handled dip nets stuck down into the channel. Bob drives by barely noticing them and does not remember that a few hours earlier he was planning to join the
shrimpers tonight. Without intending it, without particularly desiring it, almost without being aware of it, he has momentarily severed the connection between his past and his future. During this moment and the several that will immediately follow, Bob is floating free of time, a man without memories and without plans, like an infant, conscious only of the immediate present. If you stop him and ask where he is going on this tropical winter’s eve, he’ll blink and look down the hood of his car at the piles of sand, cinder block and steel, and recognizing the marina and the apartment building beside it and the Clam Shack, he’ll say, “To Moray Key.” If, when he parks the car in the lot behind the apartment building, you ask him where on the key he’s going, he’ll blink again, and noting that his car is next to Avery Boone’s van, he’ll say, “To Ave’s.” And if, as he climbs the narrow iron stairs to the second floor and pauses on the terrace before Ave’s door and raises his hand to knock, you ask him what business he has with his old friend and new partner Avery Boone on this lovely, breezy, moonlit evening, he’ll blink a third time, hold his hand in the air and say, “Why, no business at all.”
Honduras answers the door. She swings it open and stands there on one foot, like a stork resting, except that she’s not resting, she’s been painting her toenails and has hopped on her right foot from the low, blond sofa over to the door, afraid the shag rug will mess the wet paint on the toes of the left. She’s got a cigarette clamped between her lips and a tiny maroon-tipped brush in one hand.
“Oh, hi, Bob,” she says, her lips not moving, the cigarette bobbing up and down as she speaks. “C’mon in.” She turns and hops back to the couch and puts the cigarette into a conch shell and resumes painting toenails. She’s wearing a man’s pale blue dress shirt, Ave’s, and tight cut-off jeans with raggedy Daisy Mae cuffs. The gold hoops on her wrists clank against one another as she lovingly lays down the paint. “Jesus, I hate doing this,” she says, but she does it with delicate, slow, affectionate swishes, licking her lips each time she completes a swirl on one toe and moves on to the next. “What brings you out on a night like this?”
Bob doesn’t answer. He’s entered the room, closed the door behind him and is looking around him, as if it’s the first time he’s been here, though he’s been here many times, has sat at the table in the dining area off the kitchen drinking beer and talking into the night with Ave, has peered out all the windows, even bedroom windows, and admired the view of the marina, the boats tied up there, the channel and the bay beyond, has listened to the thump of the jukebox in the bar below, has used the bathroom at two in the morning before leaving to drive home to Elaine, asleep alone on the sofa in the dilapidated yellow trailer five miles away on Upper Matecumbe Key. He has said to himself, though he does not now remember it, that he would be content with an apartment like this, larger, of course, with bedrooms for the kids, and maybe two baths instead of one, but no fancier.
Honduras looks up, peers at Bob through frizzy red hair, her hand poised over the little toe of her right foot. “Ave’s not here,” she says. “Left with Tyrone this afternoon, for the Caymans, I think. Won’t be back till … Thursday? Yeah, Thursday, I think.”
Bob sits down slowly, like an old man, in the low easy chair opposite the sofa. “Got a cigarette? I left mine in the car. Or home.”
“Sure.” She tosses him a pack of Marlboro Lights. “You okay? You’re looking kind of strung out. Want a joint?”
“A joint? Okay, sure.”
“Right there, in the box on the table next to you,” she says, going back to her painting.
Bob lifts the cover of the small brass box, takes out a joint and lights it up, inhaling deeply. “Nice.”
“Sure.”
They are silent for a few moments while Bob smokes and Honduras paints, until finally she sticks her bare legs out in front of her and admires the maroon nails from a distance.
Bob says, “Want some?” and he extends the butt end of the joint to her.
“Thanks.” She plucks it from his fingertips and finishes it off.
“Good shit
, right?” “Good shit.”
“So, big man, what’s up? You are a big man, you know that?”
“Yeah.” He’s silent for a second, and then says, “Well, I’m kinda curious. How do you get this stuff? I might like some for myself. You know?”
Honduras tosses her head back and laughs, and here things start happening too fast for Bob later to recall clearly and in order. It’s not that he’s not paying attention (if anything, he’s paying too much attention). It’s that he has no conscious plan, no intent—which is to say that he’s got no connection between his past and his future, none in mind, that is. When one gives oneself over to forces larger than one’s self, like history, say, or God, or the unconscious, it’s easy to lose track of the sequence of events. One’s narrative life disappears.
Here’s what he will recall later of this evening’s events, in a sequence obtained by logic rather than memory. First, Bob and Honduras smoked another joint together. Then she told him, again, the story of how she got her name, which led to a brief discussion of Ave’s travels in the
Angel Blue
with Tyrone James, who is a Jamaican, like the man who gave Honduras her name, though not a full-blooded Arawak Indian, as that man was. Bob said, “What the fuck’s a Arawak Indian? I never heard of them. I know Abenaki, I know Apache. And then you got your Comanches, your Iroquois, your Algonquins, and so on. But I never heard of Arawak.” She explained that they were the descendants of the Indians who were in the Caribbean when Columbus discovered America, and they were tall, good-looking, fierce Indians who smoked a lot of grass and lived up in the hills of the bigger islands like Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti. And they practiced voodoo, she told Bob. “Wow,” Bob said. “That’s really far out.” Her lover, the Arawak from Jamaica, had taken her to some voodoo ceremonies in the hills. “It was really amazing,” she said. Bob believed her. “That’s how I first got into herb,” she said. “Moving it, I mean.” She explained that the Arawaks in the hills of Jamaica grew
the strongest, heaviest ganja on the island, and she got top dollar for it from rich Americans in Montego Bay, which is where and how she met the dentist from Philadelphia with the sailboat who brought her over to the Keys. And then she met Ave. “And you know the rest,” she said brightly. “No,” Bob said, “not really.” But by then he’d forgotten what he had asked her in the first place, something to do with Ave and the
Angel Blue
, something to do with Tyrone. He remembers deciding that it couldn’t have been very important, when suddenly Honduras asked him if he wanted to do a little coke. He said, “Sure, why not?” and she jumped up, drew the curtains closed, went into the bedroom and returned with a small vial. Bob remembers being excited and a little frightened, and he was relieved when he realized that he wasn’t going to have to inject the cocaine into his arm, that he could kneel down next to the glass coffee table opposite Honduras and imitate her as she rolled a fifty-dollar bill into a tube and sucked a two-inch line of the white powder into her nostril. He didn’t want to admit he hadn’t done this before, so he was glad that the procedure was simple enough that he could appear to be a practiced user. He waited for her to finish and sit back onto the sofa, and then he reached for her fifty. “You realize,” he said as he picked it up and tightened the roll, “I’m flat broke.” She smiled benevolently, and he went to work. Then, when he had sat back on the floor with his legs crossed under him, she said, “Broke is bad, big man,” and he said, “Baa-a-ad.” She laughed. It appears that at this point Bob started quizzing Honduras about voodoo, because he remembers challenging her to prove she knew how to perform a voodoo ceremony. “C’mon, prove it. And don’t just stick some pins in a doll and say some mumbo-jumbo and tell me it’s over. I know there’s more to it than that, or else people wouldn’t be so uptight about it, and it wouldn’t be such a big secret and all. It’s something black people know about, Haitians and stuff. Comes from Africa,” he said, smiling. “You ain’t black,” he said. “You white as rice. I bet I know more about voodoo than you,” he teased, and she got up and started dancing around the room, a combination of hula dance and bunny hop,
which, to Bob, was very sexy. “Bum-diddy-bum, bum-diddy-bum!” she chanted as she danced, her lips pouty and full, eyes half-closed, hands stroking her belly and thighs. The next thing Bob remembers saying is, “Let’s fuck,” and the next thing he remembers doing is fucking. It was in the bed, he knows, with the lights on, he thinks, and both of them stark naked. He swears he did it three times in quick succession and that she giggled throughout the third. When it was over, at least for him it was over, she prodded and poked at him, trying for a fourth, and he rolled away from her, saying, “Oh, Jesus, Honduras, you’re crazy. Enough is enough.” She laughed, like a spoiled, defiant child, and said, “C’mon, let’s see you get it up again. I bet you can’t.” He said, “You’re right, I can’t. You’d hafta do voodoo to get me up again. Otherwise you just gotta let nature take its course.” She jumped out of the bed and yanked on her shorts and shirt, and grabbing up his clothes, bunching them into a bundle, made for the door. “I’ll show you some voodoo! I need your clothes, that’s all,” she said, laughing. “What?” Bob cried. “Gimme my stuff!” “Nope. Gonna do some hex work with ’em. Gonna get your peter up.” “Aw, c’mon,” he begged. “Gimme my clothes.” He got out of bed and started toward her, his limp penis swinging heavily between his legs. “I got to get outa here anyhow.” She slammed the door in his face. “Hey,” he said. He caught sight of himself in the dresser mirror, a stranger’s body, a pale trunk and legs with red arms, neck and face. There were pimples on his shoulders, a dark mole under his right arm, hairy thighs and knobby knees. He wanted to cover himself, grab a blanket off the bed, tear down a curtain, anything, just get that pathetic naked pink and white thing covered and out of sight. “Hey, let’s have the clothes,” he said sternly, and he pulled on the doorknob, which came off in his hand, the door still closed. “What the fuck?” he said, examining the doorknob, and he heard Honduras laughing on the other side. “Ha ha ha! You see? Voodoo!” “Shit,” Bob said. He hollered this time. “C’mon, open the fucking door and gimme my clothes!” He slid the doorknob back onto the stem, and bearing down and twisting it at the same time, managed to turn the
knob and open the door, and he saw Honduras slipping out the farther door to the terrace, closing it behind her. He searched the living room, found no clothes, went to the front door, opened it an inch and peeked out, but she was gone. “Sonofabitch,” he whispered, and closed the door. He crossed the room and looked out the window on the far side. When he saw her down there on the pier, he cranked open the window and called, “Hey, Honduras!” He remembers her face in the dim light from the Clam Shack as she looked up at him, a joyful, young face, childlike almost, but frightening to him, as if, in her, curiosity were stronger than fear. He turned away and raced back through the bedroom to the bathroom and wrenched a towel off the rack. Tying it around his waist, he stepped out the door to the terrace and quickly walked to the stairs and down. By the time he had rounded the building and could see the boats tied up in their slips, like horses in their stalls, Honduras had started the engine of the Belinda Blue. He recognized the cough and chug and the steady, slow throb of the old Chrysler, and he started running. When he reached the slip, the boat was ten feet out. Honduras waved down at him from the bridge. “You sonofabitch! Pull that boat back in!” Bob snapped at her. “No way. Gonna put a spell on you! Gonna do some voodoo on you! Gonna put you in my pow-wah!” she said. Bob hissed at her, “Give me back my clothes, goddammit!” She threw back her head and laughed. “Try an’ get ’em!” Bob stepped swiftly to his right and ran the length of the neighboring slip, a narrow walkway off the central pier between the slip of the
Belinda Blue
and the slip for the
Angel Blue.
He reached the end of the walkway, and when he jumped, Honduras gunned the engine, and the boat churned water, lurched away, leaving open space instead of deck for Bob to come down in. He came up sputtering, slapping at the water with fury, and then lay back and treaded water and watched the
Belinda Blue
, her running lights on, cut south and head toward the bridge. He saw the shrimpers in the glow of their lanterns scramble to yank up their dip nets as the boat approached them, then it passed under and charged beyond, heading down the channel in deep water toward the open sea. He remembers
that, and he remembers swimming slowly back to the pier, climbing up, naked, then climbing back down for the towel, wringing it out and wrapping it around himself again and padding along the pier toward the Clam Shack. He returned to the apartment and took a pair of Ave’s designer jeans and a Mexican shirt from his closet and left. He closed the door behind him and started praying that he had been stupid and distracted enough to have left the keys in the car ignition. The keys are there. He says, “Thank God for something,” starts the motor, backs out of the lot and eases away from Moray Key, heading home.