Continental Drift

by Russell Banks

  2

  Moray Key, a slender, half-mile tuft of tree-topped coral cut from the tail of Upper Matecumbe Key in 1955 by Hurricane Janet, is located on the northwest side of where three narrow channels converge. Shell Key Channel leads northeasterly into the trout and redfish grounds at the Everglades end of Florida Bay; the second, Race Channel, loops off to the western end of Florida Bay, where the bonefish and snook cruise the shallows and huge jewfish hide in the rocky deeps; the third, Teatable Key Channel, leads southwesterly under a Route 1 bridge with a twenty-foot clearance at high tide to the open sea, across Hawk’s Channel to the reef and beyond, where the bottom drops off to depths of four and six hundred feet and rises again ten and a half nautical miles away at the Hump, where the blue marlin lie waiting, where tarpon, blackfin tuna and swordfish feed.

  Moray Key, then, is a judicious place for Avery Boone to have begun his career as a fisherman. He studied the charts, talked long into the nights in bars in Islamorada and Marathon with the old hands, hired an experienced mate and explored the waters on his own, until he had memorized the channels, lights, reefs, currents and fishing grounds. His boat, the Belinda Blue, though slow and with a four-foot draft, was large and simple enough for him to take parties of four and six north into the bay, where he could fish either from the channels or, with the dinghy, on the flats; and she was enough of a deepwater boat that, once fitted with outriggers, depth sounder and fifty-channel receiver, she could be pushed as far out as the Hump and beyond. The Belinda Blue, however, compared to the flashy, fast, sports-fishing thoroughbreds that galloped to the Hump in less than an hour and returned before noon with record-breaking marlin and swordfish aboard, was a slow mule of a boat, so Ave had quickly specialized in taking amateurs, weekend fishermen from the North, families on daily outings, into the bay, leaving the deepwater fishing, the tournaments, leaving the big money, to the men whose boats were designed for nothing else.

  He didn’t care. Ave was making a living now doing what he had always regarded as recreation, and he was doing it in year-round sunshine among people he liked and admired, fishermen, bartenders, small-time drug dealers, young women whose entire wardrobes consisted of string bikinis, designer jeans and men’s dress shirts, people who’d never worked more than part-time or not at all but who managed to keep a little cocaine or grass around and always had enough money and time to sit up late drinking tequila sunrises and listening to Jimmy Buffett tapes.

  When some Miami-based developers built a forty-unit condominium complex overlooking the marina, Ave bought a unit on the second floor, above the pool and with a view of the Clam Shack below and the boats bobbing in their slips beyond. The directors of the Marathon branch of the Florida National Bank thought he was a good risk, and the Belinda Blue, appraised generously at $75,000, served as collateral. Then, one night a few months later, he met the girl named Honduras at a party aboard a sixty-foot sailing yacht owned by a Philadelphia dentist who spent his winters cruising the Caribbean with attractively tanned young male and female companions he picked up in ports like Montego Bay, Negril, Freeport and Nassau. The second Honduras saw Ave’s lean, handsome face and sandy hair, she knew his sign was Sagittarius, and ended up staying at his new condominium for several days, until the dentist in a pique left for Grand Cayman without her.

  She stayed on with Ave, and a week later he bought the van, with which, as he told the directors of the bank in Marathon, he expected to supply fresh fish from the bay to restaurants up on Key Largo and Islamorada and south in Marathon. At Honduras’s urging, however, he had the van carpeted and upholstered throughout and installed a water bed and a quadraphonic stereo system, and never carried any fish anywhere, although he and Honduras started taking off for weekends in Miami and out to Key West, where Honduras had a number of friends with no visible source of income, ex-lovers and acquaintances who hung around glossy waterfront bars and lived in furnished apartments. Many of them played musical instruments and had more than a passing acquaintance with the technical vocabulary of the film and recording industries, which impressed Avery Boone from New Hampshire. He decided he was circulating on the fringes of show business.

  His life had got expensive. But soon he was learning from his new friends how, with the Belinda Blue and his knowledge of the intricate maze of channels crisscrossing Florida Bay, he could afford that life. He risked several nighttime runs from Moray Key across to Flamingo City, loaded to the gunwales with bales of Colombia marijuana taken off a Panamanian freighter a few miles off Alligator Light, and cleared enough cash to start thinking about buying another boat, a high-speed 31-foot Tiara 3100, maybe, with twin 205-horsepower OMC Sea Drive engines, fitted with outriggers, a flying bridge and fighting chairs, a Loran C navigational unit and an extra fuel tank for occasional long-distance runs to places like Grand Cayman, the Bahamas, West Palm Beach, a boat that would let him fish the big tournaments from Pensacola to Nassau while someone else chugged in and out of Florida Bay in the Belinda Blue, lugging day-trippers and kids and dads with Christmas-present rods and reels to fish the flats, providing the business with a small but steady income and, when Ave came back in the Tiara from Grand Cayman, Nassau and West Palm Beach with plenty of cash but no fish to show for his efforts, providing a cover.

  The second the Belinda Blue touches the pier at the Moray Key Marina, Bob Dubois jumps ashore, leaving the fishermen behind him. They look up from the afterdeck, and he’s gone. “Where’d the sucker go? Hey, Cap, where’re you off to so fast?” They look around in confusion. What now? They’ve caught twenty-six fish, sea trout and redfish, had one hell of a fine morning out there on the bay, got exactly what they paid for, but they’re not sure what comes next. And the fact that just as they docked at the marina the captain of the boat took off, just jumped ashore and disappeared, leaves them confused and slightly irritated.

  The Jamaican mate says, “You wan’ keep dese fish, mon?” He wraps the last of the rods and reels in oilcloth and lays it in the locker atop the others. “Can filet dem if you want.”

  There are four fishermen, friends and relations from Columbia, Missouri, partners in an insurance company. Two are sons-in-law, the older two are brothers, all four are red-faced, with fat pink bodies, loud voices. They’ve finished their three-day convention stay in Miami and have come out to the Keys in a rented car for a few days of “R and R,” which means drinking and fishing and calculating their combined financial conquests made during the convention—a couple of real estate packages in Louisville and a chemical manufacturing company trying to get started in Arkansas. They laugh and plan and count, and they remind Bob Dubois of his brother Eddie. The ease with which they hurtle through financial abstractions brings back to Bob Eddie’s hectoring lectures, his impatience and condescension, and Bob has found himself treating his clients the same way he usually ended up treating his brother, with sullenness, feigned inattention, partial deafness—as if he were out on the bay this morning for his own private amusement and the fat men in shorts, Hawaiian shirts and bill caps were keeping him from it. Naturally, since the men have hired him, his mate and the Belinda Blue, not vice versa, they condescend to him from an even greater height than they might otherwise, calling him “Cap” and referring to the Belinda Blue as “the tub,” and when their lines snarl on the reels or tangle with one another, simply handing Bob or his mate the rod and reaching into the cooler for another cold Budweiser.

  It’s been a hard morning for Bob Dubois, then. Hard, too, for his mate, Tyrone, a knotty, dark brown Jamaican with a dense beard and finger-length dreadlocks. Tyrone is in his late thirties, has spent his entire adult life crewing for charter fishing boats on the Keys, the last three years working for Avery Boone, and it’s he more than anyone else who taught Ave, and now Ave’s old friend from the North, Bob Dubois, how and where to fish these waters. As a teenager, Tyrone fled a migrant work camp in the cane fields west of Miami and drifted across the Everglades and down the Keys, putting to good use everything he’d learned as
a boy working for white American yachtsmen back in Port Antonio. Ave’s dependence on Tyrone’s knowledge, and now Bob’s, is like that of the Americans back in Jamaica; it gives Tyrone power in a world in which he is otherwise powerless.

  One of the sons-in-law laughs and slaps Tyrone on his bare back. “You betcha goddamn ass we want them fish, boy! We earned them suckers.”

  “Paid for ’em too,” the other son-in-law adds.

  The older men, brothers, fathers of the brides, have stepped free of the boat and are waiting on the pier. One of them announces, “I’m gonna get me a real drink. An al-co-hol-ic beverage. See you boys over there at the restaurant,” he says, and he and his brother head down the pier toward the Clam Shack.

  When they reach the wobbly screened door of the place, they notice Bob a few feet away about to get into his car, and the older of the two, who wears mirror sunglasses which he no doubt fancies make him look like a state trooper, stops and hails Bob. “Hey, good buddy, you runnin’ out on us?” The younger brother, eager for his drink, has continued into the restaurant.

  “No,” Bob says.

  “Well, then, whyn’t you sit down and have a drink with us. Tell us some fish stories.” His glasses glint in the noonday sun. The man is portly and soft-fleshed, but he moves and makes faces like a man who thinks he is lean, hard-muscled and a little mean-tempered. Everything he says and does has a trace of sarcasm to it. “ ’Course, you don’t have to sit down with us if you don’t want to. That ain’t part of the deal.”

  “No. I just … I got to get on.” Bob opens the door of his green station wagon. Four hours earlier, up on the bridge of the Belinda Blue, alone, bringing the boat out of the marina at dawn and breaking the still, milky waters of the bay, he was at peace, a rock of a man, smooth-grained, balanced, centered. He was in charge, he was the captain, and for a few moments he knew he’d earned that right, which only added to his pleasure at finding himself up on the bridge, the waters spread before him newly familiar, the boat an old, trusted ally and the smell of the sea in the morning breeze filling him like a particularly cheering childhood dream, a dream of flying over the cold, gray surface of the Catamount River, of leaping from the hill above the mills, the brick smokestacks and tenements, gliding across the river to the high, ancient glacial moraine on the other side, and once on the other side, still soaring, over pine trees now, toward the mountains. He’d come down here to Moray Key and after three months of hard work under Ave’s and Tyrone’s tutelage, he’d made himself into a fisherman, not the best, not even as good as Ave, but good enough, which was something to admire, he knew, and every morning when he had occasion to take the Belinda Blue out of her slip and gunned her into the bay, he enjoyed a few moments of admiring himself. He felt like granite then, warmed by the rising sun.

  Now, however, he feels crumpled and torn, papery, subject to puffs and gusts from any direction. It’s no one’s fault. He can’t blame the man in front of him or the man’s brother or the sons-in-law. They’re nobody and everybody, the kind of people every man has to deal with to get through his day, just four more insensitive men, self-centered and arrogant and carrying wallets stuffed with credit cards and traveler’s checks that they use to buy themselves their own kind of pleasure, a few hours at a time.

  “Up to you, Cap,” the man says. “You want any of them fish for yourself? My son-in-law’s got your nigger gutting and filleting ’em right now. Too many for us.”

  “Well … thanks, no. You keep ’em.” Now, that was stupid, he thinks, and he’s grateful Elaine is not here to hear him say it. There’s fifty dollars’ worth of fish that’s going to be tossed out, she’d say, while we buy hamburger at the A & P for two dollars a pound.

  “You sure? We can’t cook ’em in our motel rooms, Cap.”

  “No, thanks,” Bob says. “I’m sick of fish.”

  “Are you, now? I’d say you’re in the wrong business, then, Cap. What would you say?” The man swings open the door of the restaurant and takes a step inside.

  “I’d say you’re right,” Bob answers, and he slides into his car and slams the door shut. Now, he thinks, let’s hope this sonofabitch starts. He turns the key in the ignition, and the engine kicks over easily and catches. Thank Christ for something.

  The Chevy wagon shudders and rattles slowly away from the marina, passes out of the parking lot and cuts behind the blond, three-story apartment building and pool, and Bob looks automatically up and sees Ave Boone standing on his tiny terrace overhead, shirtless in cut-off jeans, a cigarette in one hand, a drink in the other. Champagne-colored fiberglass drapes swell through the sliding glass doors behind Ave, and behind those drapes, Bob knows, the girl Honduras lies naked or nearly naked on the king-sized bed, her wet belly cooling under the slow-turning overhead fan. It’s a little past noon, Ave and his girlfriend have been awake for maybe an hour, and they’ve probably fucked twice, made each other gin and tonics, smoked a couple of cigarettes and listened to a new Willie Nelson tape, and now Ave has come out for a bit of air and sunshine before he showers, shaves, dresses, has lunch at the Clam Shack and strolls down the pier to his Tiara, which he’s named Angel Blue, after a famous movie star, he explained to Bob.

  He’ll hose down the decks, check the fuel tanks, and when Tyrone has finished filleting the two dozen fish caught by the insurance men from Missouri and has cleaned up the Belinda Blue, he and Ave will leave Moray Key, heading south by Teatable Key Channel under the bridge, southeasterly to the reef and then west, across open sea toward the Bahamas, Andros Island, Nassau. Bob has asked him why he makes these trips with only Tyrone aboard, and Ave has explained that he is “getting into gambling a little lately.” He wrapped his arm around Bob’s shoulder and added, “Also, pardner, I’m getting to know a lot of the big-time fishermen over there. I’m trying to get a shot on American Sportsman, that TV show. Maybe take Jerry Lewis or Kenny Rogers out for marlin. You got to know the right people for a shot like that. Publicity like that, pal, you’re set for life.”

  It makes sense, as do most of Ave’s easy, confident explanations of behavior that, to Bob, is often puzzling. What he, Bob Dubois, does every day of the week—take out in the Belinda Blue whoever will pay him for it, and when there’s no one to pay him for it, hang around the marina waiting for customers, putter around the boat, clean and oil tackle, study and memorize charts, drink beer and gossip with the other idle fishermen—that makes sense. But what Avery Boone does every day of the week—sleep till noon, play with Honduras and her friends, disappear on the Angel Blue with Tyrone every few days for a day and a night and sometimes more—that frequently does not make sense. Not to Bob. A man likes to be able to explain the things in his life that puzzle him, because if he can’t, he may have to accept his wife’s explanations for them, which in this case means that Bob would have to accept Elaine’s often-voiced, worried explanation of Ave’s behavior. “He’s in the drug business, Bob, don’t you realize that? Can’t you see the obvious, for heaven’s sake?”