They can’t afford to rent a U-Haul, so they decide to pack and carry north only their clothes, bedding, linens and kitchenware. They will leave the rest of their belongings — except for the baby’s crib and playpen, which can be tied to the roof of the car — in exchange for the rent they’ll owe for not giving a month’s notice to Horace. “Should we tell him what we’re doing?” Bob asks.
Elaine says, “No. We shouldn’t tell anyone. Once he sees the stuff we’ve left, he’ll be happy we’re gone.”
By the time the girls come home from school, Bob and Elaine have begun packing in earnest. When Ruthie and Emma learn that they are moving back to New Hampshire, and Daddy will get his old job back, and they’ll find a nice place to live, just like they used to have, the girls are visibly pleased, even Ruthie, and immediately they go to work packing their favorite toys, dolls, games and books into the boxes that Elaine brought back when she went out to close the bank account and pick up her paycheck at the Rusty Scupper.
For supper, because all the dishes, pots and pans have been wrapped and closed into boxes, Bob takes everyone out to McDonald’s in Key Largo, and though he still cannot eat — the very sight of the Big Macs and fries makes him suddenly nauseous — Bob enjoys his family’s pleasure in a way he has not for months. Their fussing and noisy delight, their impatience, their innocent, shining faces, make for him a world that, for once, is sufficient unto itself.
On the short drive back to the trailer, rain starts to fall, large, swollen drops that spatter against the windshield. Bob flips on the wipers and defogger and lights a cigarette. He’s thinking intently and has said nothing since leaving McDonald’s.
“You all right?” Elaine asks. “Want me to drive?” Robbie lies asleep on her lap.
“No. I’m okay.” The overcast sky and now the rain have brought on an early dusk, and Bob switches on the headlights.
“You should go to bed when we get home. Really, Bob. I’ll finish the packing.”
Bob exhales jets of smoke from his nostrils, and the windshield, despite the defogger fan, clouds over. Reaching one hand forward, he rubs away a square that lets him see the road directly before him. “No. I couldn’t sleep even if I wanted to. And I don’t want to.”
“You must be exhausted.”
“Yeah, sure. Of course.” He glances into the back seat. The girls are slumped in opposite corners, lost in their private thoughts. “Listen,” he says in a low voice, “I’m going to drop you and the kids at the trailer. I guess I’ve figured out what I should do with the money. And I have to do it tonight, if I’m going to do it at all. Okay?”
Elaine stares straight ahead at the windshield. After a few seconds, she reaches out with her free hand and wipes a head-sized circle clear.
Bob asks, “Don’t you want to know what I’m going to do?”
“No. Not especially, no. So long as you get rid of it, and we don’t take it with us away from here.”
“I’m going …”
“Bob, I don’t want to know. I don’t. Really. I don’t know why, but it feels … cleaner not to know. Better, for the future. Our future. Okay?”
“Okay. Good.”
She asks when he’ll be back, and he says he can’t be sure, by morning anyhow. Sooner, if he’s lucky. “And I feel lucky,” he says. “For once.”
They pull up and stop in front of the trailer, and the girls are alert as puppies again, complaining about the rain. “Just run inside. The door’s unlocked,” Elaine tells them, and they scramble from the car and splash through puddles to the trailer.
“Drive careful,” Elaine says, hefting the baby to her shoulder. “The roads are wet. I don’t want you dead.”
“You don’t?”
“Don’t joke about stuff like that, Bob. No, I feel like our life is over, though. The old life, I mean. The one we imagined when we were kids. That old me and that old you are dead already, I think. Maybe it’s good they are. I don’t know. No, I don’t want you dead, Bob. I want to grow old with you.”
“Didn’t you always want that?”
“I guess I didn’t. I just wanted to be young with you. You know? And that’s what I’ve been, until now.”
“Yeah. Me too. I feel so old now. Old as my father. It’s strange, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Be careful,” and she opens the door. She gets out of the car, grunting with the effort, slams the door closed and disappears behind the clouded glass. Stretching across the seat, Bob rubs the window clear and watches his wife climb the steps, where, as she opens the door, she shifts the baby to her hip, and then the door is closed, and she is gone.
An hour and a half later, Bob turns left in Key Largo at Blackwater Sound, crosses the bridge and leaves the Keys on the Route 1 causeway to the mainland. The rain has passed over, scudding northwest across the bay toward Naples and Fort Myers and on up the Gulf Coast, and now, ahead of Bob and slightly to his right, an egg-shaped moon droops in the purple sky over Miami. He follows the moon, its yellow light reflecting off the old canal alongside Route 1, through the Everglades to Florida City, where he picks up the Dixie Highway north through alternating suburbs and truck farms, until the suburbs take over altogether and the huge orange glow from the city, blotting out the moon and stars, fills the northern sky from east to west.
Though the land is flat, a mere three feet above sea level all the way in from the Keys to Miami, Bob feels, as he enters the gleaming city, that he’s descending from a high plateau. Along Brickell Boulevard, south of the Miami River and north of Coconut Grove, he passes between tall royal palms, and on either side, the pink mansions of deposed Latin American politicians and generals hide behind poinciana bushes and chain-link fences. Across the bay on his right is Key Biscayne. He passes terraced luxurious high-rise condominiums that house heroin and cocaine couriers from Colombia whose million-dollar cash deposits help keep Florida bankers happy, and then he drives between the banks themselves, clean white skyscrapers with window glass tinted like the sunglasses of a small-town sheriff.
When he crosses the Miami River in the center of the city, he’s downtown and can see Miami Beach across the bay, where people live in hotels and live off hotels, a city where there are no families. Then north along Biscayne Boulevard, past the grandstands from last month’s Orange Bowl parade, empty and half demolished and throwing skeletal shadows over the grass of Bay Front Park, until he passes out of downtown Miami and enters dimly lit neighborhoods where there are no more white people — no white people on the sidewalks, no white people in the stores or restaurants, no white people in the cars next to him at stoplights. This is where he wants to be. He knows, from what newspapers and boatmen on the Keys have told him, that he’s in Little Haiti now, a forty-block section of the city squeezed on the west by Liberty City, where impoverished American blacks boil in rage, and on the other three sides by neat neighborhoods of bungalows, where middle-class Cubans and whites deliver themselves and their children anxiously over to the ongoing history of the New World.
He parks the car on North Miami Avenue one block beyond Fifty-fourth Street, in front of a small grocery story open to the street and still doing business, despite the late hour. There are burlap sacks of what look like flour stacked on the sidewalk and crates of rough orange yams, plantains and red beans. Several women inside the store talk to one another, while a man with spectacles pushed up on his shiny, mahogany-brown forehead totals their purchases. Bob takes a step inside, listens to the swift, soft Creole the women are speaking, and when, at the sight of him, they go silent, he steps back to the street.