“You forgot to get the nets,” she says, “because you saw an old retired baseball player.”
“Well, you didn’t want me to go out shrimping anyhow. All you do is bring me down about things I get excited about. You, you never get excited about anything anymore. All you do is mope around here with a long face.” He crosses to the television set and snaps it off. “I hate that fucking thing!”
“Bob, you can’t hear yourself, or you’d shut up. Can you listen to me for a minute?”
“Gimme a beer.”
Elaine gets up and opens the refrigerator and passes a can of Schlitz over the counter, as if she were a waitress and he a customer. Then she stands at the counter, both hands grasping the edge of it, and says to him, “Now, you listen to me for a few minutes. I know you’re working hard, as hard as anyone can. And I know you’re worried and scared. Like I am. And you’re right, it’s true, this life is shit,” she says, and the word “shit,” because he’s never heard her say it before, sounds to Bob so powerfully derogatory in her mouth that he shudders. To Bob, Elaine has made the term suddenly so strong that he instinctively wants to defend this life, his life, against it. But he’s too late. He has said it himself, and now, with her saying it, he sees the word and his life as one thing, as waste, excrement, offal, as a secret, dirty thing that should be hidden or buried, as a thing to be ashamed of.
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.