Continental Drift

by Russell Banks

  “Jesus.” Bob feels himself falling backwards and down, as if down a well. In front of him and inside a small circle of blue light is Avery Boone’s back, getting smaller and more distant, while he himself descends faster and faster and waits for the crash when he hits the bottom, for that’s all that’s left to him now, a backwards plummet and then a crash, and then nothing. It’s over. He’s ruined everything, he’s lost everything, he’s given away everything. There was the house in Catamount and the Boston whaler, their furniture, shabby and mostly secondhand, but theirs, and his job at Abenaki Oil and promises of an eventual office job there—there was a life, and because it was under his control, it was his life; and then he traded a big part of that life for one with more promises and less control, but even so, it felt much of the time like his life, for there was still a part of it that he controlled; and then he made another trade, giving away control for promises again, property for dreams, each step of the way, until he’s ended up tonight with nothing but promises, dreams and fantasies left to trade with. And no takers.

  He’s run his life backwards, from what should have been the end to what should have been the beginning. He’s reached the end too soon, at thirty-one, and has nowhere else to go. You could say he shouldn’t have listened to Eddie, he shouldn’t have listened to Avery Boone, he shouldn’t have trusted these men, his brother and his best friend, men whose lives, though slightly more complicated than Bob’s, were no more in control than his, and you’d be right. You wouldn’t get any argument from Bob Dubois, not now, not tonight aboard the Angel Blue in Moray Key. He knows, however, that even if he hadn’t followed his older brother to Oleander Park and hadn’t followed Ave on down to the Keys, if instead he’d struck out for Arizona or California, where he knew no one, a stranger in a new world, he’d still end up one night just as he is now, his life a useless, valueless jumble of broken plans, frustrated ambitions, empty dreams. He’d end up with nothing to trade on.

  It’s not bad luck, Bob knows, life’s not that irrational an arrangement of forces; and though he’s no genius, it’s not plain stupidity, either, for too many stupid people get on in the world. It’s dreams. And especially the dream of the new life, the dream of starting over. The more a man trades off his known life, the one in front of him that came to him by birth and the accidents and happenstance of youth, the more of that he trades for dreams of a new life, the less power he has. Bob Dubois believes this now. But he’s fallen to a dark, cold place where the walls are sheer and slick, and all the exits have been sealed. He’s alone. He’s going to have to live here, if he’s going to live at all. This is how a good man loses his goodness.

  Ave turns and faces him. Someone aboard a ketch a few slips down is running a blender, making margaritas. “I can get you some quick money,” he says. “Not a shitload, but enough. Enough to pay for Ruthie’s shrink or whatever.”

  Bob speaks in a low, thick voice. “Not drugs. No. I still got kids. I can’t afford to lose. Like you can.”

  “Who can afford to lose? Nobody can. Anyhow, no, not dope. Haitians.”

  “Haitians?”

  “From the Bahamas. Five, six hundred a head, whatever the market bears. It’s easy. You just drop them off along the beach someplace—Key Largo, North Miami, they don’t give a shit. You can load up with ten or twenty of them over at New Providence, drop them off before daylight and be home by breakfast. Tyrone knows the lingo. He can set it up for you. All you do is drive the boat. And what you make is yours, less the twenty-five percent or whatever you work out with Tyrone. Look, I owe you, Bob.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, you do. A lotta people owe me. I’m starting to see that.”

  “You can always do dope, you know. The money’s bigger, and the work’s steadier. I mean, you run outa Haitians after a couple trips and have to wait till some more come over or save up the money for the ticket. Same with the Cubans from Mariel. But there’s always a market for coke and grass, and there’s always somebody looking for a boat to take it to the marketplace. It’s riskier, of course. They got a lot more guys out there from Customs than they do from Immigration.”

  Bob cracks open his can of Schlitz and takes a long swallow from it. “I dunno, it’s not the risk. Though that’s part of it. I just don’t like dealing with drugs somehow. I’m still a country boy at heart, I guess.”

  Ave steps forward and slaps his old friend on the shoulder and grins. “You sure are, you ol’ sonofabitch. A goddamn New Hampshire country boy!” Then he starts to laugh, and Bob joins him, lightly at first, then merely smiling, as if Ave has told a filthy joke he doesn’t quite get.

  After a few seconds, Ave stops laughing and takes a swig from his beer, wipes his chin with the back of his hand and says, “Whew! It really is funny, though, when you think about it.”

  “Yeah? What, exactly?”

  “Oh, shit, man, you know. The two of us, a coupla hicks outa the hills of New Hampshire, ending up like this. Running coke from Colombia and niggers from Haiti. It’s fucking incredible.” “Yeah. Incredible.” “I mean, who’d have thought it?” “Yeah. Who’d have thought it.”

  “I mean, you,” Ave says, pointing a finger at Bob, and he starts to laugh again. “The Granite Skate! You!”

  Action de Grâce

  1

  A few miles west of Coral Harbour and Elizabeth Town on the southwest shore of New Providence Island, the beach hooks into the sea and offers a shallow, sandy-bottomed shelter. Inside the bay and about two hundred yards off the silvery, moonlit beach, the Belinda Blue cuts her engine and drops anchor. It’s close to midnight, under a nearly full moon in a cloudless sky, and the boat, even without running lights, is easily visible from shore, a low, wide trawler fitted for sport fishing with outriggers and, according to the antennae atop the bridge, with navigational equipment.

  She rocks lightly in the quiet waters for a few moments, then there’s a splash from the starboard side. A motor-powered dinghy curves at low throttle around the stern of the trawler and heads toward shore. A black man is alone in the dinghy, half standing, one hand on the tiller, while aboard the Belinda Blue a white man can be seen making his way to the bow, where he gives several sharp tugs on the anchor line and, evidently satisfied, returns and disappears into the darkened cabin.

  It’s a warm, balmy night splashed silver-blue with moonlight, and the low waves and swells in the bay are streaked with phosphorus. Along the beach, tall, gracefully arched palms lay dark blue shadows against the white sand at their feet, and a short ways up the beach, a freshwater stream down from the inland hills emerges from the brush, broadens and empties discreetly into the bay.

  The black man in the dinghy nears the shore, then cuts to his left and cruises along the beach just beyond the breaking waves, until he passes the shallow gulley in the beach where the stream enters the bay and the waves are calmed, neutralized by the counterflow of the stream, and here he’s able to bring the boat in to shore easily and step from it directly onto the gravel. He draws the boat to shore and drags it a short distance into the brush.

  Walking quickly inland along the east bank of the stream, he’s soon beyond sight of the trawler anchored in the bay and, moments later, of the bay itself. His eyes adjust to the darkness, and he starts to see what he expected to see, a small village set among palm trees and scrubby undergrowth, a settlement of huts and shanties. He smells old woodsmoke from cold cookfires, and he smells garbage also, and human excrement and urine, poultry, pigs and goats.

  A dog starts to bark nearby, probably from underneath one of the several huts set on cinder-block posts, and then another picks it up, and then a third and fourth in the distance. The man leans down to the pathway, gropes around for a second and picks up three small stones, rough bits of limestone. He hefts them in his right hand and walks hurriedly on.

  Except for the several dogs, whose harsh cries pick up and join each other and erratically leave off, the village seems deserted. The cabins—sad, tiny, patched-together shelters against ra
in—are closed up and dark, with no cracks of light under doors, no orange glow from kerosene lanterns or candlelight flickering through windows. The man knows country villages well, and even as late at night as this, there are usually plenty of signs of life—men on stoops talking quietly, a child bawling, a boy chatting up a pretty girl at her door. This particular village is known to him, though he’s only been here in daylight, and it was crowded then, Haitians, whole families of them and separate bits and pieces of families, too, people from all over Haiti. He did his business with them, got their names down, set the price, and said he’d return soon with the boat. Now he’s back again, and he has the boat; but all the Haitians are gone.

  Moonlight falls in swatches on the tin roofs of the cabins and shacks, and thick shadows gather and shift, as if turning in sleep, as the man passes along the lane that threads through the village. He remembers a settlement in the hills behind Port Antonio in Jamaica, a place he came home to as a boy after working all week in the Port loading bananas on freighters bound for New York and Liverpool, coming home to a sleeping village, his pockets full of money, his head full of dreams of someday going to America and becoming a millionaire, like those white people on their yachts he saw every day from the United Fruit pier, where he’d stop work for a moment and stare out from under the high, corrugated iron roof of the packing house across the pier to the blue water of the bay, the sparkling, slender boats, the peach-colored people in white shorts and shirts holding frosty drinks in their hands, their pretty mouths opening and closing toward one another like the mouths of elegant birds. Six days of it, and he’d ride back up the hills on a wheezing, top-heavy, scarred and dented bus full of exhausted, sleeping workers from the piers, and he’d get off at the stop at the unpaved lane that led down to the village where he had been raised and where his mother and his younger brothers and sisters lived, and he’d begin the two-mile walk in through darkness, sudden splash of moonlight, dense shadow, between palms and impenetrable bush. Every noise from the bush made him jump, made him think, Duppy! and run a step or two, until he thought better of it, remembered he was supposed to be a man now and walk bravely through the night like one. But even so, he’d walk trembling and terrified of ghosts the whole way, until at last he reached the hamlet on the side of the ridge in the shadow of the Blue Mountains where his mother and family lived, where everyone he knew lived, and there would be a few men still playing dominoes and sipping rum by the shop who’d nod at him as he passed by, who would call, “Evenin’, Tyrone. Back from de Port fe’ good dis time, eh?” He would laugh and say, “No, mon, me home fe’ check de fambly an’ den me gone lak bird, mon.”

  At the far end of the village, where the lane curves into the bush, Tyrone turns and looks back. Where have all the people gone? He expected simply to walk into the settlement, ask for one or two of the Haitians whose names he’d taken down, go to them, have them round up the others, and then leave, all within an hour. He’s done it that way before—he assured Boone and now Boone’s friend Dubois he could do it that way again—and there’s never been a hitch. The Haitians always wait for him diligently night after night, until he finally shows up with the boat, and within minutes, he’s got their money in his pocket and has got them aboard, and by morning the Haitians are in Florida, and he and the white man who owns the boat are back on the Keys counting their money.

  Of course, you can never rely on Haitians the way you can rely on other people. They’re different somehow, almost another species, it sometimes seems, with their large, innocent eyes, their careful movements, their strange way of speaking. Creole. He learned it from the Haitians he worked with in the cane fields in Florida as a youth, when he was housed with them for months at a time in sweltering, filthy, crowded trailers. They drank the white rum they call clairin and played dominoes and listened to their music on the radio, and he, alone among the Jamaican workers, would join in, and before long he learned to talk with them, not well but enough to enjoy their company.

  The Jamaicans, most of whom were older than he, seemed to him morose, bitter, angry, in ways he was not. The Haitians, no matter what their age, seemed innocent in ways he was still trying to hold on to. If he had been a few years older, if he had known then what he learned about the world after he fled the work camp, he might never have dealt with the Haitians, but in those days he was still a boy, and like the Haitians, he felt lucky to be where he was, doing what he was doing, suffering as he was suffering.

  He sees a shadow, a man, step forward from between two cabins and then step quickly back again, a tall, thin figure with a machete or big stick in his hand. Tyrone jumps off the lane into shadows of his own.

  “Moin dit, monsieur!” Tyrone calls to the figure. “M’apé mandé qui moune….”

  No answer.

  Tyrone takes a few tentative steps toward where the figure disappeared. “Ça nous dit?” he tries. “Ma p’ mandé coumen nou’ yè, monsieur.”

  Suddenly the watery voice of an old man comes out of the darkness. “Bon soir, monsieur. Rajé gain’ zoreille, monsieur.” The shadow has become an old man wearing an undershirt, baggy pants, barefoot, hobbling on a stick.

  Tyrone approaches him, then draws back. The man’s eyes are wild, red-rimmed, and he’s grinning. A madman, Tyrone thinks. “Bon soir, Papa,” he says quietly.

  “Comment nous yé, monsieur?”

  “Bien merci,” Tyrone says.

  The old man hobbles into the lane, where Tyrone can see him clearly in the moonlight. He’s still grinning, broken-toothed, red-eyed, scrawny. “Ça nous dit? Bel Français, pas lesprit pou’ ça, monsieur.”

  “Non. Mais … où est le peuple?”

  “Eh?”

  The people, the people who live here, Tyrone says. Crazy old man, he thinks, rum-drunk, telling Tyrone his good French doesn’t make him smart, when he doesn’t understand simple words like peuple himself.

  “La famille semblé, monsieur”.

  “Coté yo, Papa?”Tyrone asks. Where are they? “Eh?”

  “Coté yo, le peuple? Les gens, Papa. Les Haitians.”

  The old man comes closer, his rum-sopped breath driving Tyrone backwards. His movements are abrupt, angry, a little confusing to Tyrone, who’s starting to worry about time. They don’t have much time to waste; none, in fact. It’s a long trip back to the Keys in the Belinda Blue, especially loaded with passengers.

  The old man is rambling in a singsong fashion, rattling out sentences Tyrone barely catches, about how he hurt his foot, why he’s here alone, who’s to blame for all his troubles. His name is François, Tyrone gathers that much, and evidently he hurt his foot because he was left unattended by the boy who was supposed to be his aide. “Gain yun grand moune qui va fâcher!” he says of himself. “Li retou ‘né pied cassé!” The old man who came home with a broken foot is going to be angry, he promises, which leads him to a litany of complaints: “Depuis moin sorti la ville, moin apé cassé piéd moin. Ça qui fait petit moun fronté.”

  Tyrone stops him, draws out his list of names, says the first name on the list, and the old man explodes with wrath, bangs his stick against the ground as if to wake the dead, for the very boy who deserted him and caused him to break his foot is nephew to that woman, who is herself a jeunesse, he claims, though Tyrone, of course, knows this about her, for he met her first of this group, met her almost a month ago, when she was in the room upstairs in the shop of the man who was murdered, Grabow, and in fact was thought by some to be the murderer, for she disappeared the same night Grabow was killed. Then, a week later, in the company of a boy who spoke some English, her nephew, probably, she came one night to Coral Harbour while Boone was over in Nassau doing his cocaine business. She had the boy call Tyrone out of a bar where he was playing dominoes and asked him to carry her over to Florida with her nephew and baby. He agreed to take them for the three hundred dollars they had, but only if she could find them ten or more additional passengers, who could pay five hundred a head, and she led him to the Haiti
ans in the settlement west of Elizabeth Town. He hadn’t asked her about Grabow; he figured that was between them, and if she did chop the man with a machete, he probably deserved it. Tyrone knew the man beat her and kept all the money she earned with her body in that tiny room above the shop. Pathetically, one night she told him, the only time she ever complained, “M’ pas ‘ti bête, m’ pas ‘ti cochon, pou’ on cové, pou’ on marré moin,” repeating in a sad, whimpering voice that she was not a little pig, a little animal that a man can keep tied up like this. Tyrone patted her tenderly on her naked shoulder, and then he walked downstairs and quickly departed, unable to look Grabow in the face. When he learned later that Grabow was dead, cut almost in half by a machete, probably by the whore he kept over his shop, Tyrone was glad.

  The old man goes on complaining about “le peuple, les gens, les Haitians … dipis temps y’ap pa’lê sou moin! Pilé pied’m ou mandé’m pardon. Ça pardon-là, wa fait pou’ moin?” and Tyrone finally interrupts him and asks to know where they’ve gone tonight.

  The old man sputters, “Le moin vlé pa’lé ou pas vie moin pa’lé!”When I want to talk, you won’t let me.

  Tyrone slaps his hands against his thighs, spins around and takes a step away. “Non mêle kilé oudé, Nég’, non mêlé jodi-à.” We’re all mixed up today.

  “Non, monsieur,” the old man calls, and scrambles after him. Then he asks for his gift, for money. “Coté ça ou ba moin pou’m alléì?”

  Tyrone digs into his pocket and comes up with some change, which he passes into the old man’s outstretched paw.

  “Merci, monsieur. Jé wè bouche pé,” he warns—see but don’t say. “La famille semblé …” he whispers, and he looks warily over his bent shoulder, like a dog warning off other dogs as he’s about to eat. “Soso na pé tué, soso, jodi-à!” A pig is to be killed today. “Pour Erzulie, ‘Ti Kita, Gé Rouge, Pié Sèche. Pour les loas, les Invisibles, monsieur!”