This morning, a cool, early March morning, Bob does have faith in his brother and in his brother’s system as well, his system for beating the system. After all, Bob now has a house for his family, even if it is a trailer, which at first made him feel slightly ashamed, but after a few weeks he began to look around and saw that the only people who did not live in trailers seemed to be either the kind of people he has always envied, doctors, lawyers, successful businessmen, or the kind of people he has always felt superior to, the poor whites (“crackers,” he has learned to call them), the blacks and the foreigners, Cubans mostly, but also Haitians, Jamaicans and other West Indians, though he hasn’t yet learned to tell them apart from the black Americans. He feels normal, which pleases him. His daughter Ruthie has been enrolled in school in Oleander Park, and they have figured out the school bus schedule so that every morning he is able to drink his second cup of coffee and watch her from the kitchen window as she walks down Tangelo Lane between the facing rows of trailers to the highway, where she stands with the other children from the park waiting for the bus. When the bus has picked up the children, Bob drains his cup, places it in the sink, kisses his wife goodbye, checks in the kids’ bedroom to say goodbye to Emma, if she’s awake, and leaves for work. An old ritual in a new place has been established, making the place seem familiar.
Though he works from nine to nine, and it’s dark by the time he gets home, it’s also true that the work is not difficult or especially tiring, so that when he does come home from the store he has more energy than when he got home from work in Catamount. He came home in darkness there too, at least from November till April he did. Exhausted, he usually emptied a couple of king-sized cans of Schlitz, ate supper, and fell asleep in front of the television set, only to be wakened by Elaine at nine to kiss the girls before they went to bed. He barely had enough energy or interest in his life or hers to stay awake with his wife, unless they were watching a television show that amused him. Then, finally, she would grow sleepy herself, and bored, and around eleven the two of them would climb the stairs to bed, where once or twice a week they made love, happily enough but lethargically, and fell asleep.
Since arriving in Florida, however, he helps put the girls to bed, often reading them a story, and then sits in the kitchen with his wife, talking intently to her, listening to her descriptions of her day’s events and encounters and telling her his. Even later, after they have made love, which they do more frequently now, they go on talking. All the trivia of their daily lives seem strangely significant to them — the route taken by the bus into downtown Oleander Park several miles away, the funny woman in pink hot pants at the supermarket, the cortisone cream Elaine bought at the drugstore for Emma’s rash; and on Bob’s part, the trouble he has understanding what old George Dill is saying to him but how it’s getting easier every day, so that now he not only understands George almost all the time, but he also understands the Cubans and the Haitians pretty well too, at least most of the time, and only when they speak English, of course, and so long as they know the name of what they want; and the kids with phony ID’s from the base that he can spot before they cross the parking lot by the careful, self-conscious way they walk, as if they think they’re on stage; and a long, rambling phone call from Eddie, half drunk at four in the afternoon, checking on the day’s receipts before he floats a check for a part of a tract of marshland out near a town called Yeehaw Junction (Bob swears that’s what Eddie said) that he and “some very big guys from Miami” plan to drain and cut into house lots and have a half-dozen cinder-block houses going up by the end of summer that they’ll sell by fall to generate enough cash both to pay off the note for the original purchase and get started on a second half-dozen houses, which by Christmas will have generated enough cash to finance a shopping center right there in Yeehaw Junction, a report whose coherence makes Bob feel that he really is beginning to grasp the way the system works, both the big system and Eddie’s smaller one, which feeling gives Bob, for the first time, the belief that before long he, too, will have a new, large house with a pool out on Crump Road near the yacht club and a big new air-conditioned car, a Mercedes, maybe, not an Eldorado like Eddie’s, and his kids, too, will learn how to ride horses English style and go to summer camp in New Hampshire.
He thinks, as he pulls his Chevy wagon into the lot in front of the liquor store, that tonight he’ll tell Elaine about that mist he saw rising from the lake on the way to work, how beautiful it was, and how it made him want to buy a canoe or maybe a small rowboat or another Boston whaler to replace the one he sold in New Hampshire, so he can go fishing for bass one Sunday morning soon while she and the kids are at mass.
Eddie’s store, located near where the old Seaboard Coastline Railroad tracks lean in and run alongside the highway for a few miles, is named Friendly Spirits Liquor Store, the words in gold gothic letters painted across the single plate-glass window in front. It’s a small white cinder-block building with a flat roof, which faces the highway and is hugged on three sides by citrus groves. Across the highway from the store squats a housing development for the families of enlisted men stationed at the air base, a gray, barracks-like complex of a dozen two-story buildings, parking lots and treeless, packed-dirt yards owned by the government and built by local contractors, one of whom happened to have been Eddie Dubois, who briefly established himself on paper as a painting contractor, then jobbed out the work to some students from the community college who’d advertised in the paper for house-painting work. Somewhere along the tangled line of contract negotiations and bidding for the construction of the housing project, Eddie came out with title to a house lot chopped out of the fields across the road, and with that in hand, he borrowed the money to build and stock his store, after which he absorbed his painting company into Friendly Spirits Enterprises, Inc.
Turning off Route 17, Bob notices, parked at the rear of the lot next to the Dempster-Dumpster, a red Plymouth Duster with a black woman and man sitting inside. Bob parks his car in front by the entrance, where Eddie instructed him always to park (so that he’d never seem to be without a customer), and sits at the wheel for a moment studying the couple in the Duster. On the seat next to him, inside a small canvas Barnett Bank money bag, is three hundred dollars in cash and rolled coins.
If they want the money, he decides, they can have it. All they’ve got to do is ask, and it’s theirs. He’s relieved that the gun is inside the store, on the shelf below the cash register. Defying Eddie’s instructions, Bob decided in the beginning not to carry the gun back and forth with him. Elaine pleaded with him to leave it at the store, made him picture Ruthie or Emma dead of accidentally inflicted gunshot wounds, and he said, “Okay, fine, you’re right. Just don’t mention it to Eddie, okay?” And then, having tucked it way in the back of the shelf beneath the counter, he forgot about the gun, until now, when he realizes that if he had the gun in his glove compartment, as Eddie expected him to, and if the black man and woman in the Plymouth got out of their car and strolled over to his car, he’d have to get out the gun, and when they yanked open his door and told him to give them the money bag or they’d blow his head off, he’d have to open fire, maybe hitting the man in the chest before the woman shot him in the face, killing him instantly. She’d take the money and drive away, leaving her partner lying on the parking lot, bleeding heavily and dying before the police got there to surmise that Bob got killed fending off an attempted robbery by a lone bandit.