At the Whale Harbor Tackle Shop, Bob went down the row of newspaper-dispensing racks and bought the two Miami papers and the Marathon paper, and standing outside the store, leafed quickly through all three. There was nothing about the Haitians in any of them.
Maybe it never happened, he let himself think. Maybe it was a nightmare, some kind of hallucination, a craziness worse than anything I’ve ever experienced before. Is that possible? he wondered. Nothing else seemed real to him now. And for a moment at least, the split made it easy for him to believe that the part of his life which now seemed most vivid and clear to him — the trip over to New Providence, the long wait in the bay and then the arrival of the Haitians in the dinghy with Tyrone, the trip back across the straits, the sudden storm off Sunny Isles, the arrival of the coast guard cutter, and finally that awful moment when the Haitians leaped into the sea — all that might well have been experienced by Bob on a different plane of reality than the plane where everything else was taking place: Elaine and the children, home, groceries, laundry, television, a can of Schlitz from the refrigerator, work, the Belinda Blue, Ave, Ave’s arrest, Tyrone’s arrest, Honduras’s disappearance, the seizure of the boats. These things made sense. They weren’t all happy things, but they could be lived with somehow. Even the particular terrible consequences of Ave’s arrest, that is, Bob’s sudden unemployment, seemed likely, bland, vague and conditional to him, of a piece somehow with Elaine’s familiar complaints about money, his irritation and embarrassment at his wife’s having to work nights as a waitress, his anxiety over Ruthie’s deepening strangeness, his ongoing disappointment and bewildered surprise at his own inadequacy.
Could it be? Could the strong part of his life be dream and the weak part real? If so, then he was just crazy, that’s all. Crazy. A quiet kind of madman who lived his dreams and dreamed his life. Most people were a little like that anyhow, especially people whose lives, like Bob’s, were ordinary and, despite the ordinariness, gave them constant trouble. Maybe, just possibly, the awful pressures that Bob’s ordinary life had placed on him, the difficulty, for him, of living an ordinary life well, had finally made him crazy. Most men, he was sure, lived such a life easily: they worked and saved, they took care of their wives and children, who were grateful and respectful for it, and their days and nights passed cheerfully by, until finally they were gray-haired and a little fat and semiretired and spent the winters in Florida with the wife, fishing, watching baseball on TV, waiting for the kids and grandkids to come down for the holidays. But a few men, like Bob, despite their being just as intelligent, dutiful and orderly as the others, turned their ordinary lives into early disasters and never knew why. That can make a man crazy, Bob thought.
For a second, he thought of going inside the store, just in case Ted Williams was there again. He peered across the parking lot, looking for Ted’s white Chrysler, then remembered his mistake regarding the Chrysler and said to himself, See, I am crazy! What I imagine, what I remember and what I actually experience get all mixed together, and I can’t tell the difference. He was now sure that he had dreamed the death of the Haitians.
The relief and pleasure he took from the conviction lasted only a few seconds, however. As he started toward his car, he put the folded newspapers under his left arm and shoved both hands deep into his pants pockets and with his left hand instantly felt the money, a packet of bills a half-inch thick. There it was, blood money, uncounted, forgotten, invisible for whole hours at a time, then suddenly reappearing, linking everything back together again, closing and welding fast the split in his life, so that his dreams and his daily life were one thing again. It’s horrible, horrible! he thought, and he almost cried out, and he withdrew his hand as if he had touched a cold, dry serpent there.
He wandered in and out of the trailer all the rest of the afternoon, unable to leave the place, unable to sit down and make his home there, a ghostly figure who repeatedly appeared in the yard and then stood at the threshold outside the screened door for a few moments, until finally the woman and children inside felt his presence and looked up at him, and he turned away and went back to the road again. Up the lane to the highway he walked, then back, past the trailers to the water, where gulls and terns poked between chunks of coral and blond, almost translucent crabs scrambled in the shallows for shelter. A car driven by Horace came and went, and all the while Bob kept his back to the man. Around five-thirty, Allie Hubbell came home from the crafts shops in Key Largo, walking in from the bus stop on the highway, and. Bob kept his back to her too. She stood a moment on her stoop, watching him, and not until she had lit a cigarette and gone inside did he turn slowly back toward his own trailer. He stopped next to his car, got in, sat behind the wheel awhile, got out, walked to the water again, resumed peering at the horizon. The sky was low, zinc gray and smooth, like sheet metal. A steady southeast wind blew, keeping the water choppy and dark as old, cold coffee.
Finally, Elaine came out on the steps and called his name. He turned and faced her.
“You want supper?” she shouted into the wind.
He shook his head no and turned away from her, and she went quickly inside, closing both doors against the wind.
A little later, when it was nearly dark, Elaine came out again, this time wearing a pink cardigan sweater buttoned to the throat to cover her bare shoulders and the low neckline of the short black dress she wore for work. Wobbling on high heels in the sand, she came up to Bob and asked him for the car keys.
“I’m sick of taking the bus,” she said. “I hate being seen like this five nights a week, and you don’t like anybody from up there giving me a ride home, remember?”
“What’d you do last night?” he said. As if he’d asked an idle question, he pursed his lips and watched a crab at his feet scuttle to the water.
She studied his profile for a second, then said, “Sunday and Monday I’m off, Bob. Remember? I spent the evening at home, talking to the police.”
“This Tuesday?”
“Yes, this is Tuesday. What did you do last night?”
He didn’t answer.
“I said, ‘What did you do last night?’ “
“You know what I did. Where I was,” he said in a thick, sullen voice.
“No. As a matter of fact, I don’t. All I know is you left here early Sunday in the car and you drove back into the yard this morning, and that’s all I know. That’s it. Oh, yes, I know the police met you this morning at Moray Key as you came off the boat. Because they said they would, and if you hadn’t been there, they would have been back here. And I know they thought for a while you were involved with Ave’s drug business, because they said they did. Maybe they still think it. But really, in the end, that’s everything I know about you lately. You, though, you know everything about me. What I do every minute of my life. No surprises. Nothing to sneak up and hit you on the head when you’re not looking. If you told me right now this minute that for the last two days you were smuggling heroin or cocaine or whatever, guns, anything, I’d just say, ‘Oh, so that’s the kind of man he is.’ You could tell me you had a girlfriend in Miami or someplace and spent the last two days in bed with her, and I’d say the same thing. Because I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what kind of man you are, Bob. That’s the truth. You understand that? Somehow it wouldn’t seem so awful to me, so hard to take, if you didn’t know what kind of woman I am. But you do. You know me. And it’s not fair. And it’s hard. Hard. This is not like it used to be with us. And I don’t know where it went from being fair to being unfair. Because I never knew that’s what it was between us, fair. I only knew it after it was gone, after it had been unfair a long time. A long time now. And you know it. Don’t you?”