Continental Drift

by Russell Banks

  “Yeah, sure I do,” Avery says. “It’s that, having complete control of your whole world. Trouble is, my whole world has expanded a little since then. I mean, I’ve got me a condo now, and this van, and I’m thinking of buying another boat, one real different from Belinda Blue, though, a sport fisherman that can go out after big game and get back before dark. Ol’ Blue’s good for taking parties out in the bay and out along the Pine Islands and so on, you know, for small stuff and maybe for some bonefishing, but it can’t handle the really heavy stuff, marlin, swordfish, the tournament fishing, where for a guy like me the big money is.”

  Bob glances at his watch and curses, opens the van door and jumps down to the pavement. “We’re late,” he says. “Visiting hours was over half an hour ago! Elaine’s gonna be pissed!”

  Avery follows him across the parking lot, assuring him as they trot along that she’ll understand, Elaine always understands how when the two of them get together they forget all about time, and she’ll especially understand now, since they haven’t seen each other in over three years and all. “We’ll just talk the nurse into letting us by,” he says, but Bob does not hear him. He’s suddenly flooded with his knowledge of Avery’s having made love to Elaine, and coupled to that knowledge, piercing it, is his realization that Avery doesn’t know about Elaine’s confession, which means that they can never talk about it, he and Avery, and so can never get it behind them. The way it is now, Avery himself would have to confess having fucked Bob’s wife, and then Bob would have to pretend to be surprised, enraged, hurt, all over again.

  As they enter the hospital lobby, half-lit and nearly deserted, Bob finds himself unexpectedly wishing that Elaine had never told him about her having slept with Avery. But then, he thinks, he would never have known who she was. It’s a terrible thing, to know someone else’s secrets, but it’s the only way you can know someone. It’s hard to say beforehand which is more to be avoided, knowing another person’s secrets or knowing no one at all.

  The nurse at the information desk by the elevators says no. They cannot go up to the maternity ward at this hour. And no, they cannot go to the nursery and see Mr. Dubois’s son. Avery smiles at the gray-faced woman, lightly touches her shoulder, which she retrieves swiftly. He tells her how far he’s come, that he’s the baby’s godfather, but no, it’s still no.

  “Forget it, Ave,” Bob says, and turns away. “We’ll come over first thing in the morning. I’m not ready tonight to tell her about the job anyhow. You know, about quitting Eddie and all. I hafta figure out how to tell her the bad news,” he says, scuffling along, head down, hands in pockets.

  Avery comes up behind him and drapes one long arm over his friend’s shoulders. “Look, Bob,” he says, “why don’t we come in together tomorrow morning real early, and we’ll go take a look at your new son and make sure he looks like you and not the milkman, right?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Okay. And then we’ll go visit your lovely young wife, and instead of giving her some bad news, let’s give her some good news.”

  “Yeah, sure. Like what?”

  “Okay. Here’s the deal. Tell her you’re gonna work with me, down in the Keys. Tell her you’re gonna run Belinda Blue for me.”

  They stop walking and face each other. “You serious?” Bob says, too surprised by the idea to know if it’s a good one.

  “Sure, I’m serious. I didn’t think of it till a minute ago, but that doesn’t mean I’m not serious. I’ll go ahead and buy this Tiara 2700 I’ve been looking at all summer, and I’ll run that, while you run ol’ Blue. Actually, if you want, you can buy into her, and we’ll split whatever profits she makes. That’s probably the best way to go. You buy into her, and we split according to how much you own. Fifty fifty, seventy-five twenty-five, or whatever you can afford. Deal?”

  “Oh, God,” Bob says, “I got to think about this. I got to think about it. It’s really a sudden development, you know. I mean, it’s a hell of a long ways from where I was a year ago, you know. I got to think on it.”

  They walk slowly across the parking lot toward Avery’s van, passing in and out of pale circles of light, two tall young men, dear friends, as close as brothers, as close as lovers, and neither. Avery’s arm is flung over Bob’s shoulder, and as they walk he explains exactly how Bob’s moving to Moray Key and running the Belinda Blue will not only save his life and the lives of his wife and three children, but will turn out to be the best time the two of them, he and Bob, will have had since they were kids.

  “Yeah,” Bob says.

  “And not only that,” Avery says. “We’ll get rich.”

  “Yeah.”

  Grand Chemin

  1

  The captain was roan-colored, bald and heavy-lidded, almost Japanese-looking, and he wasn’t so much fat as round, round-headed, thick-necked, with a wide, hard chest and belly, powerful arms, large, cruel hands and feet. He stood on the foredeck in a dark green tee shirt and floppy, stained chinos and bare feet, staring at Vanise and the boy and baby as if they were merely three unexpected, additional bits of cargo. They had stepped from behind a batch of empty oil barrels on the pier and had quickly come aboard with the man named Robbie, who had brought them across from McKissick’s farm on North Caicos. Robbie’s price for his service was easily paid. In exchange for negotiating with the captain of the Kattina, a patched and leaking prewar island freighter, and bringing Vanise, Charles and Claude Dorsinville over from North Caicos in an open fishing dinghy borrowed from his cousin, Robbie wanted only the Haitians’ absence from George McKissick’s farm. He wanted his old job back, and he wanted McKissick angry. The absence of the Haitians obtained both.

  Vanise did not ask Robbie how she would pay the captain of the Kattina, nor did either man bring the subject up. All Robbie had said was, Doan you worry none, gal, me take care of everyt’ing. Dis mon, him a fren of mine an’ long time now him owe me a payback. Then one sun-baked afternoon in October, Robbie had simply appeared at McKissick’s farm, had told her to pack her clothes in a bag and come along with him, and Vanise, with the baby in her arms, and Claude, who carried in a bundle their few clothes and some food stolen from McKissick’s kitchen, had followed Robbie across the corn fields through the palmettos and sea grapes down to the beach, where they saw the dinghy. They climbed into the boat, Robbie pushed it out, jumped in and started the motor, and in minutes they were beyond the reef and headed across the channel toward South Caicos, which they reached by nightfall, tying up in the slip next to the Kattina in Cockburn Harbour.

  The fat man said nothing to her when she and the children came aboard, looked at them as if measuring how much salt they’d displace in the hold, turned and walked to the stern, where he leaned back against the rail, crossed his meaty arms over his chest and stared down at the engine and a man who was bent over, working with a wrench. The man looked up, and Vanise saw that he was a white man, shirtless and oil-stained, with long brown hair that he flipped away from his face with a toss of his head. Then a slender young brown man emerged from the cabin near the bow and strolled by her to the others in the stern, and the three men talked for a few seconds in English.

  Abruptly, the white man swung himself onto the deck and closed the hatch on the engine, and the captain came forward to Vanise, steered her toward a hatch, opened it and waved her down the ladder that led into the darkness below. G’wan now, get down dere, he growled. He pushed them with one hand and held the hatch open with the other until they had descended and got their footing and saw that the hold was nearly filled with sacks of salt stacked on pallets, with water sloshing below the pallets. Then he closed the hatch, and they were surrounded by darkness, as if buried.

  She heard the engine turn over and catch, heard the men walk and talk abovedecks, and suddenly the boat was moving, drifting languidly. The engine chunked into gear, and the motion of the boat shifted and became purposeful, and she knew they were moving away from the pier and the village, away from the Turks and Caicos isl
ands, away from George McKissick and his farm, his drunken belligerence and his threats to turn them over to the police, away from his sudden visits to her mat in the tiny shack behind his house, away from the long, lonely months of hard work in the sun planting and tending McKissick’s corn fields and garden, cleaning his house, cooking his food, listening to his rambling, drunken speeches in English that she could understand only by ignoring the words and listening to the sounds as if they were of the wind and water, watching his face as if it were clouds on the horizon.

  The boy said, We have to stay down here so the police won’t see us. He rarely asked questions now; it seemed to him that the baby Charles would soon be the one to ask questions. Claude knew that he was a boy rapidly becoming a man and so must learn to provide answers. Also, since coming to North Caicos, he had learned to see his aunt in a different light, for though she was, to him, clearly a serviteur and possessed a surprising knowledge of the loas and had on several occasions in his presence been mounted by Agwé, her mait’-tête, so that he suspected she had become under his mother’s tutelage a hounci canzo, an initiate, he nevertheless saw her sadness now and knew that when she was silent and seemed to be looking inside herself, as she did with increasing frequency, she was not thinking of anything. She was like an animal resting. And so, instead of asking questions, he had recently taken to making statements about the world, to which her habit was to nod agreement, as if she herself knew nothing of the world.

  Claude groped his way over the bags and found a spot toward the bow where, after shoving several of the heavy sacks aside, he made a space for them to lie together. Come! he called to Vanise. Here’s a more comfortable place. He returned to where he had left her and the baby, reached out in the darkness until he felt her shoulder, took her hand and led her forward. He placed the bundle against the wooden hull and patted it with his hand. Lie down with your head here. It’s nice, he said, to listen to the water against the boat and be safe and dry inside. He moved his long legs over, made room for Vanise and the baby on his left, and stretched out in the darkness, his hands behind his head, as if waiting cheerfully for sleep.

  He did not want to think about where they were going, as he had no name for the place, nor did Vanise. They knew it was not America, not Florida, not Miami, and they knew it was not back to Haiti, where, no doubt, Victor was still rounding up people desperate and frightened enough to ignore the rumors that he seldom took people all the way to America and instead dropped them off on the deserted beaches of small islands in the Bahamas. Sometimes Victor did take people all the way to America, however, and sometimes the people he dropped off in the Turks and Caicos or Inagua Islands managed after a year or two somehow to get to Florida on their own. Then one day a letter would come from America to a hill town in the north of Haiti, and Victor’s reputation as a savior would be renewed, so that often he’d find among his passengers a man he’d carried from Le Mole and dropped off in North Caicos the year before. It was never seen as Victor’s fault that the man had not got farther from Haiti than a beach fifty miles to the north. It was the fault of a baka, an evil spirit, or the fault of the passenger himself, who had not made his engagement a strong one or had failed to feed the loas adequately or had not obtained a proper garde or wanga from a proper houngan before coming down to Victor in Le Môle to arrange for the journey over the sea to America.

  Claude had heard the name of the place they were going to, had heard the man Robbie promise it several times, but it was difficult to separate that word from the other words Robbie spoke and a struggle for Vanise and Claude just to understand that Robbie was going to help them escape from George McKissick, so they had come to concentrate on that, escaping, and to put the nature and name of the place they were going to, its distance from here, out of their minds. Wherever they went, they knew, the loas would be there, en has de l’eau. Wherever they went, there would be the island below the sea.

  The chug of the engine from the stern, the slap of the water against the bow, the steady lift and fall of the boat and the quiet slosh of bilge water below the pallets lulled the boy, and he soon slept. Perhaps the baby Charles slept, perhaps Vanise slept, perhaps Claude slept for only a second or two, he could not say, for he woke suddenly and totally without having dreamed, when he heard far to the stern the squeak of the hatch cover being lifted, then heard it clunk shut again, and saw moving sheets and circles of light coming forward, heard a man grunt with the effort of climbing over the cargo, finally saw the man, the captain, heave himself forward, until he was kneeling next to them on their couch, his shadow large and wobbly against the dark planking of the hold, his face somber, disinterested, his small eyes looking only at Vanise. She had sat up and held her son in her arms and now looked down at the top of the baby’s head, as if searching for a place to send her spirit into his.

  The fat man reached forward with his flashlight and nudged Claude, pushing him on the arm with the light. He spoke rapidly in a harsh whisper. Get now, bwoy, dis no place for you. Take dat pickney and get aft.

  Claude did as he was told, gently took the baby from Vanise’s arms and moved quickly away, sliding over the wall of cargo into the shadows beyond, where he sat down and waited and listened to the sound of the man as he struggled with his trousers, listened to the man’s coarse breath as he yanked Vanise’s clothing away and his grunts as he pushed himself into her.

  A few moments later, circles of light flashed against the hull and cargo, and the huge shadow of the fat man hove into view, and as the man passed Claude, he stopped a second and said to him, Don’t make no trouble for yourself now, bwoy. His voice was almost pleasant, advisory. Clause did not know what the words meant, however, and stared at the man’s large, bare feet.

  Bwoy! he shouted. Cyan unnerstan’ me, fuckin’ Haitians. Bwoy, just you don’t make no trouble, dat’s all. You can be whore too, y’ unnerstan’. He reached forward and grabbed Claude’s skinny shoulder. G’wan forward dere wid sister, he snarled, and lumbered away, his flashlight beam spreading white light ahead of him in circular waves.

  Claude hurried forward, the baby clinging to his hip with its legs, and once behind the wall of bags of sea salt, in darkness again, heard the fat man lift the hatch from below, heave his bulk up the ladder, then close it with a bang. The boy reached out until he felt one of Vanise’s ankles. He could hear her heavy, rasping breath, as if she had been chased by a huge, fierce animal and had barely escaped to this cavelike hiding place.

  You’ll be all right again soon, he told her.

  She asked for her baby, and he passed the child over. Then she asked him to find her headcloth, which she had lost.

  He groped between the sacks and finally came to it and handed it to her. A few seconds later, she passed the crumpled cloth back and told him to soak it in the bilge water for her, which he did. In a few moments, he could hear the baby sucking, and Vanise’s breath had slowed and disappeared beneath the sound of the water against the hull and the engine aft, and the boy leaned back again, stretched out his legs and rested.

  Sometime later, as in a dream, though it was not a dream, the slender, brown-skinned man and the white man with the long brown hair appeared in the hold together, the white man sending Claude and the baby aft with a gesture, then holding the flashlight on Vanise while the other man silently raped her. When it was the white man’s turn, he gave over the light, pulled down his trousers, said a few words in English that Claude overheard, Cunt, and, with irritation, Bloody Christ, just relax now, I ain’t gonna hurt ya, and after a while it was over, and the men had gone, once again dropping the Haitians into their pit of darkness, their cave, their black nest where the only sounds they heard were their own thoughts and the hammering of the engine and the slap of the low waves against the bow of the boat as it drove steadily west toward Great Inagua.

  Back in Cockburn Harbour, when Vanise and Charles and Claude had first descended into the hold, day had gone clean away, and night now went away too, for there was only blac
kness, broken unpredictably, swiftly and absolutely by the men from above with their flashlight and few words and quick, violent moves that seemed to relax the men for a while, as if they were injecting themselves with a drug—the fat man, who, after the first time, came with a flask of clear rum in one hand and drank from it and gave it to Vanise to sip from when he was done with her, and the slender brown man, who came to the hold alone now and tried talking to Vanise and then got angry because she would not respond, so he slapped her, and the young white man, not much older than a boy, but hairy across his chest and shoulders, his stringy long arms and legs casting wild shadows when he took the woman, as if he were beating her. When the men were down in the hold, their flashlight shattering the darkness, the place seemed tiny, cramped, closed in upon the human beings, as if they were under a huge house; but when the men had gone and had taken their light away with them, the place seemed to open up and grow enormous, like a black tent. And with both day and night gone, all of time was gone, too, except for the scratchy, mechanical time that passed through whenever the men appeared, abrasive interruptions that Claude had begun to accept like a shift in dreams, his mind returning gratefully, as soon as the men were gone, to the sweet-flowing timeless dream of perpetual darkness—when suddenly the throb of the motor ceased, and the sound of the sea smacking the planks near his head diminished, and the steady lift and drop of the boat changed to a gentle, rocking motion.

  He heard a thud against the side of the boat, and voices, the captain’s and the Englishman’s, and then, astonished, Claude heard a Haitian voice, a man shouting in Creole.