Continental Drift
by Russell Banks
List Price: $15.00
Pages: 432
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0060956739
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pissed
It's December 21, 1979, a
Friday, in Catamount, New Hampshire. It's late in the day, windless
and cold, bits of snow dropping from a dark, low sky. At this latitude
at this time of year, the sun sets at three forty-five, and Catamount,
a river town laid north and south between a pair of glacial moraines,
settles quickly without twilight into darkness. Light simply gets replaced
by cold, and the rest remains the same.
A half foot of
old crusty snow has covered the ground since the first week of
the month, followed by days and nights of dry cold, so that the snow has
merely aged, turning slowly gray in yards and on rooftops and in heaps
alongside the streets, pitted and spotted along sidewalks and pathways
by dogs and mottled everywhere with candy wrappers, beer cans and crumpled
cigarette packs. The parking lots and sidewalks, plowed and salted weeks
ago, are the color of ash, so that new snow gently falling comes as a
cleansing fresh coat of paint, a whitewash that hides the old, stained
and tainted world underneath.
Robert Raymond Dubois (pronounced locally as "Doo-boys"),
an oil burner repairman for the Abenaki Oil Company, walks slowly from
the squat, dark brick garage where he has parked the company truck, walks
hunched over with careful effort, like a man in a blizzard, though snow
is falling lightly and there is no wind. He wears a dark blue trooper
coat with a far collar, and a black watchcap. In one hand he carries a
black lunchbox, in the other an envelope containing his weekly paycheck,
one hundred thirty-seven dollars and forty-four cents.
Dubois thinks, A man reaches thirty, and he works at a trade
for eight years for the same company, even goes to oil burner school nights
for a year, and he stays honest, he doesn't sneak copper tubing or tools
into his car at night, he doesn't put in for time he didn't work, he doesn't
drink on the job-a man does his work, does it for eight long years, and
for that he gets to take home to his wife and two kids a weekly paycheck
for one hundred thirty-seven dollars and forty-four cents. Dirt money.
Chump change. Money gone before it's got. No money at all. Bob does not
think it, but he knows that soon the man stops smiling so easily, and
when he does smile, it's close to a sneer. And what he once was grateful
for, a job, a wife, kids, a house, he comes to regard as a burden, a weight
that pulls his chin slowly to his chest, and because he was grateful once,
he feels foolish now, cheated somehow by himself.
Dubois parks his car on Depot Street facing downhill toward
the river and tight to the tailgate of a salt-covered pickup truck. It's
snowing harder now, steadily and in large, soft flakes, and the street
is slick and white. Black footprints follow him across the street to a
brick building where there are apartments in the upper two stories and
a used clothing store, a paint store and a bar at street level, and he
enters the bar, Irwin's Restaurant and Lounge. The restaurant is in front,
a long, narrow room the size of a railroad car, filled with bright green
plastic-covered booths and Formica-topped tables. The room is brightly
lit and deserted, but in back, through an archway, the bar is dark and
crowded.
The bartender, a muscular woman in her mid-fifties with
a beer-barrel body and a large, hard, lipsticked mouth and a mass of bleached
blond hair arranged carefully to resemble a five-and-dime wig, greets
Dubois and shoves an opened bottle of Schlitz across the wet bar to him.
Her name, unbelievably, is Pearl, and she is Irwin's help. In a year Irwin
will die of a heart attack and Pearl will buy out his estate and will
finally own the business she has run for decades.
These northern New England milltown bars are like Irish
pubs. In a community closed in by weather and geography, where the men
work at jobs and the women work at home and raise children and there's
never enough money, the men and the women tend to feel angry toward one
another much of the time, especially in the evenings when the work is
done and the children are sleeping and nothing seems improved over yesterday.
It's an unhappy solution to the problem, that men and women should take
pleasure in the absence of their mates, but here it's a necessary one,
for otherwise they would beat and maim and kill one another even more
than they do.
Dubois is sitting at a small table in a shadowed corner
of the bar, talking slowly in a low voice to a woman in her mid-thirties.
Her name is Doris Cleeve. Twice divorced from brutal young men by the
time she was twenty-eight, Doris has nursed her hurt ever since with alcohol
and the company of men married to someone else. She is confused about
where to go, what to do with her life now, and as a result, she plays
her earlier life, her marriages and divorces, over and over again. As
in certain country and western records on the jukebox by the door, Doris's
past never fails to move her.
Except for her slightly underslung jaw, which makes her
seem pugnacious, she's a pretty woman and not at all pugnacious. She wears
her ash blond hair short, stylish for Catamount, and dresses in ski sweaters
and slacks, as if she thinks she is petite, though in fact she is...
Excerpted from Continental Drift © Copyright 2008 by Russell Banks. Reprinted with permission by HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
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