Foregone by Russell Banks

Author:Russell Banks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ecco
Published: 2020-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

16

RIGHT OFF, FIFE STARTS TELLING WHAT HE BELIEVES are his memories. He says he remembers spotting Nick Dafina in front of Feeney’s Pharmacy when he stopped in Strafford at the end of March in 1968. He looks off to the side and bolts past Nick’s shadow, pretending he doesn’t see or recognize him, offering Nick a chance to pretend the same. No one wants to meet an old friend suddenly, unprepared, unrehearsed, undone. Certainly not Fife, and probably not Nick, either. Fife wants Nick to slam down the hood of his red Mustang, parked, of all places, directly behind Fife’s rented Plymouth, leap into the driver’s seat, start the engine, and roar away—as Fife himself would have done if he’d had the chance.

But it’s too late. Nick’s grease-stained face, grimacing intently, turns away from his troubled engine, allowing Fife to see and recognize his face, too late for any sudden, lurching move on Fife’s part. So instead he slides nonchalantly between the rear deck of the Plymouth and the grille of Nick’s GT Fastback and drifts carefully around Nick’s arched body, which is disappearing, socket wrench in hand, beneath the hood of his car.

He crosses the empty street and walks straight to Feeney’s and enters. He heads for the cigarette counter on the left and asks the teenage girl behind the counter if he can buy a Strafford street map. She’s somebody’s younger sister, a tall, slim, bony-shouldered girl with a round, vaguely familiar, beamish face flushed with acne, a girl he believes he once knew when she was a small, rosy-cheeked child, caught now in a clutch of hormones and anxiety and longing. Whose younger sister is she? he wonders. Who is the older brother or sister she resembles? He must have known him or her in high school. He was eighteen then. Little sister has changed a lot more in the last ten years than he has. If he almost recognizes this girl, then she surely recognizes him.

She stops admiring her clawlike cerise fingernails and smiles straight into his face and says she’s sorry but she doesn’t think they have any maps. Oh, unless they’re on the magazine rack at the back of the store.

He looks quickly for the magazine rack by the wide window beside the entrance. It’s not there, he says. They’ve moved it.

Moved what? she asks, startled.

The magazine rack.

No, they didn’t. It’s down back by the lunch counter. Where it’s always been.

He likes her north-of-Boston accent. His ear has been tuned to Virginia Piedmont and Tidewater, and her flattened vowels and dropped r’s jump out at him. Right, he says. Where it’s always been.

At the rear of the store he searches through the clutter of weekly and monthly magazines and astrology guides and almanacs and hobby manuals. No Strafford street map. Not even a map of suburban Boston, which might have qualified as research material and would have justified his stopping in town, instead of sticking to the highway and zipping past the Strafford exit altogether, as he should have done.

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