Continental Drift

by Russell Banks

  He can’t stop himself, however, from believing that these silent, black-skinned, utterly foreign people know something that, if he learns it himself, will make his mere survival more than possible. They cannot tell him what it is, naturally, but even if they spoke English or he spoke Creole, it could not be told. He shouts down to Tyrone, waking him this time. The Jamaican stumbles out of the cabin and blinks up at Bob.

  “Want to take the wheel awhile? I need a break,” Bob says.

  The Jamaican nods and climbs the ladder to the bridge. Bob descends, ducks into the cabin, pulls a cold beer from the locker in the galley and eases himself back on deck. Squatting, he peers into the darkness under the tarpaulin, a sudden, hot, densely aromatic darkness that makes the can of Schlitz in his hand look luminous.

  The Haitians are mostly lying down, a few seated on their heels and eating, one or two talking in low voices, several evidently asleep. But as one person, when Bob appears at the open end of their lean-to, they look up and, it seems to Bob, stare at him. He looks quickly away, sees the empty bucket and draws it toward him.

  “More water?” he asks, his voice unnaturally high.

  No one answers. They go on looking at him, their eyes large and dark brown, not curious or demanding, not hostile or friendly, either, just waiting.

  “Water? Want more water?” he repeats. He picks up the bucket and turns it upside down, as if to demonstrate its emptiness.

  A skinny teenaged boy squirms his way out of the clot of people and comes forward on his hands and knees and extends the metal dipper to Bob, then quickly retreats.

  “Merci beaucoup,” Bob says. He stands up and takes the bucket back down to the galley, refills it and returns to the Haitians, sliding it over the deck toward them.

  Again, it’s the boy who separates himself from the others by retrieving the bucket and dipper. Then, turning his narrow back to Bob, he proceeds to fill the dipper and hand it to the others, one by one—first the women, who let their children drink before they themselves drink, and then the old man and the other men—and finally he drinks. It’s hot under the tarp, but not uncomfortably so, for there’s a light breeze that sneaks across the rails at the sides. It’s dark, however, and despite the breeze, it’s close, moist with bodies crammed this tightly against one another, and Bob wonders if he should allow them to come out from under the tarp and stretch and walk about.

  He calls up to Tyrone. “Whaddaya think, be okay to let them stretch their legs a bit? Seems kinda crowded and stuffy under there.”

  The Jamaican looks down at the white man, shakes his head no and goes back to scanning the western horizon.

  Bob is sitting flat on the deck now, his legs stretched out in front of him, his can of Schlitz in one hand, a lighted cigarette in the other. He’s got himself far enough under the tarp to be wholly in the shade, so he takes off his cap and drops it onto the deck next to him. The motion of the boat is choppier than it was, and Bob can tell from the sound of the engine that it’s working harder, lugging a little. There’s been an east wind behind them all morning, and now they’ve changed course a few degrees west-southwest, and consequently the wind is hitting them slightly to port. He knocks his pack of Marlboros against his knee, extending several cigarettes from the pack, and holds the pack out to the Haitians, who still have not taken their eyes off his face.

  “Cigarette?”

  The Haitians look from his face to the pack of cigarettes, back to his face again, their expressions unchanged.

  Bob puts down his can of Schlitz and digs into his pocket for his butane lighter and again holds out the Marlboros. “C’mon, have a cigarette if you want.”

  It’s the teenaged boy who finally comes forward and takes the cigarettes from Bob’s hand. Bob passes him the lighter, and the boy draws out a cigarette for himself and passes the package around among the others, several of whom take out a single cigarette and put it between their lips. The boy lights his up and one by one lights the others. Then he turns back to Bob, passes the lighter and what’s left of the Marlboros to him, and while they smoke, resumes watching him.

  They aren’t afraid of me, Bob thinks. They can’t be—they must know I’m their friend. Quickly he corrects himself: No, I’m not their friend, and they’re not foolish enough to think it. But I’m not their boss, either, and I’m not their jailer. Who am I to these people, he wonders, and why are they treating me this way? What do they know about me that I don’t know myself?

  The question, once he’s phrased it to himself, locks into his mind and puts every other question instantly into a dependent relation, like a primary gear that drives every other lever, wheel and gear in the machine. That must be their mystery, he thinks—they all know something about me, and it’s something I don’t know myself, something crucial, something that basically defines me. And they all know it, every one of them, young and old. It’s almost as if they were born knowing it. He stares back into the eyes of the Haitians, and he can see that it’s not just knowledge of white men, and it’s not just knowledge of Americans; it’s knowledge of him, Robert Raymond Dubois, of his very center, which he imagines as a ball of red-hot liquid, like the molten core of the earth.

  For an instant, he breaks contact with the Haitians, and he thinks, This is crazy, they don’t know anything about me that isn’t obvious to anyone willing to take a quick look at me. He insists to himself that he’s making it all up. It’s only because they’re so black, so African-looking, and because they don’t speak English and he doesn’t speak Creole, that he’s attributing awesome and mysterious powers to them. It’s their silence and passivity that frighten him and seem to create a vacuum that he feels compelled to fill, and what he’s filling it with is his own confusion about who he is and why he’s here at all, here on this boat in the middle of the ocean, carting sixteen Haitians illegally to Florida, when he should by all rights be someone else someplace else, should be old Bob Dubois, say, of Catamount, New Hampshire, a nice, easygoing guy who fixes people’s broken oil burners, and on a late afternoon in winter like this, he should be heading back to the shop at Abenaki Oil Company to punch his time card, walk across the already dark parking lot, get into his cold car, listen to the motor labor against the cold and finally turn over and start, and drive down Main Street to Depot, turn left and park across from Irwin’s and go in for a couple of beers with the boys and maybe a flirt or at least a beer with his girlfriend Doris, before he gets back into his car and drives home to his wife and children and eats supper around a table with them in the warm kitchen, and later a little TV in the living room while the snow falls outside and the children sleep peacefully upstairs, until finally he and his wife grow weary of watching TV and climb the stairs to their own bedroom, where they quietly, sweetly, even, make love to one another and afterwards fall into a deep sleep.

  But that’s all gone from him now, as far away as childhood. There’s a difference, though, for childhood was taken from him, simply ripped away and devoured by time, whereas the rest, the life he believes he should be living now, Bob has given away. And he didn’t give it away bit by bit; he gave it away in chunks. What’s worse, he gave away Elaine’s life too—or at least he believes he did. She might say it differently, for she is, after all, a kind woman who, despite everything, loves him. Regardless, Bob believes that he gave away everything in exchange for nothing, for a fantasy, a dream, a wish, that he allowed to get embellished and manipulated by his brother, by his friend, by magazine articles and advertisements, by rumor, by images of men with graying hair in red sports cars driving under moonlight to meet a beautiful woman.

  He looks into the darkness at the Haitians again, and he smiles. It’s a light, sympathetic smile.

  The teenaged boy smiles back, startling Bob.

  “How’re ya doing, kid?”

  The boy looks shyly down at his lap and remains silent, but to Bob, it’s an answer, a response, and suddenly, through this boy, at least, the vacuum that the Haitians created for Bob to fill
has been broken into and filled by them, for to Bob, one of them is all of them.

  Bob says, “ ’Nother cigarette?” and holds out the package.

  The boy shakes his head no. He’s seated cross-legged next to a pretty young woman with a small child in her lap, both of whom, she and the child, continue to stare at Bob, as do all the other Haitians. But their stares no longer threaten him.

  “You understand English, kid?” Bob asks. “Comprendez English?”

  The boy smiles, shrugs, nods yes, then no, then yes again.

  “C’mon, kid, you want to ride up on the bridge?” Bob stands and puts his cap on and waves for the boy to follow. Claude slides forward and stands next to him, and when Bob climbs up to the bridge, he climbs up also.

  Tyrone studies the pair for a second, shrugs and hands the wheel over to Bob and descends without a word. At the bottom, he turns and calls, “Gulf Stream coming up! Got to keep track or you’ll move north wid it!”

  “I know, I know,” Bob says, and he peers out ahead, searching for the Stream, the green river that flows from Mexico to Newfoundland and east to Europe with the force and clarity of a great river draining half a continent. As you enter it, the color of the water changes abruptly from dark blue to deep green, and the current drags you north at up to ten knots an hour if you do not compensate for it.

  Claude stands next to Bob, and pointing out across the bow, says, “America?”

  Bob nods. He’s spotted the rich green streak ahead near the horizon, and he cuts the boat a few degrees to port so that she’ll enter the Stream at more of an angle, bringing them out, he expects, a half-dozen miles south of Key Biscayne sometime before midnight. “Yep, just over the next hill. Land of the free and home of the brave. You probably think the streets are paved with gold, right?”

  The boy looks up, not understanding. “Monsieur?”

  Bob says nothing but smiles down at the boy, who has gone quickly back to searching for America. Like me, Bob thinks. Like my father and Eddie too, and like my kids, even poor little Robbie, who’ll be as big as this kid is before I know it—like all of us up in our crow’s nests keeping our eyes peeled for the Statue of Liberty or the first glint off those gold-paved streets. America! Land, ho! Only, like Columbus and all those guys looking for the Fountain of Youth, when you finally get to America, you get something else. You get Disney World and land deals and fast-moving high-interest bank loans, and if you don’t get the hell out of the way, they’ll knock you down, cut you up with a harrow and plow you under, so they can throw some condos up on top of you or maybe a parking lot or maybe an orange grove.

  Bob looks down at the boy’s black profile, and he thinks, You’ll get to America, all right, kid, and maybe, just like me, you’ll get what you want. Whatever that is. But you’ll have to give something away for it, if you haven’t already. And when you get what you want, it’ll turn out to be not what you wanted after all, because it’ll always be worth less than what you gave away for it. In the land of the free, nothing’s free.

  The sun has yellowed and is nearing the horizon. Flattened like a waxy smear, it descends through scraps of clouds to the sea. The breeze off the portside is cool now, and the waves have grown to a high chop that causes the boat to pitch and yaw slightly as she plows on toward the west. Up on the bridge, Bob wonders what this Haitian boy will have to give away in order to get what he wants, what he may have already given away. It’s never a fair exchange, he thinks, never an even swap. When I was this kid’s age, all I wanted was to be right where I am now, running a boat from the Bahamas into the Gulf Stream as the sun sets in the west, just like the magazine picture Ave carried around in his wallet. So here I am. Only it’s not me anymore.

  “You want to take the wheel?” he asks the boy. Bob stands away and waves the boy over. Shyly, the lad moves up and places his hands on the wheel, and Bob smiles. “You look good, son! A real captain.” The boy lets a smile creep over his lips. “Here,” Bob says. “You need a captain’s hat,” and he removes his hat and sets it on the boy’s head, much smaller than Bob’s, so that the hat droops over his ears and makes him look like a child, pathetic and sad.

  “Steady as she goes, son,” Bob says. The boy nods, as if following orders. The sky in the west flows toward the horizon in streaks of orange and plum, and the sea below has turned purple and gray, with a great, long puddle of rose from the setting sun spilling over the waves toward them. Behind them, the eastern sky has deepened to a silvery blue, and stacks of cumulus clouds rise from the sea, signaling tomorrow’s weather.

  Their first sight of land is the flash of the lighthouse below Boca Raton, which tells them that the Belinda Blue has come out of the Gulf Stream farther to the north then they intended, miles from where they planned to drop off the Haitians and so far from Moray Key that they can’t hope to get home before dawn. Tyrone grumbles and blames Bob, who blames the southeast wind and his not being used to running the Belinda Blue with so much weight aboard.

  It’s dark, thickly overcast this close to shore, and the sea is high. The boat rides the swells, and when she crests, they can see the beach stretching unbroken from the pink glow of Miami in the south to the lights of Fort Lauderdale in the north. Then, when the boat slides down into the belly between the huge waves, they see nothing but a dark wall of water and a thin strip of sky overhead.

  Frightened, the Haitians have crawled aft from their lean-to, and peer wide-eyed at the sea. The pitch and roll of the boat tosses them against one another, and several of them begin to cross themselves and pray. The old woman, hiding behind the others, has started to sing, a high-pitched chanting song that repeats itself over and over. The boy Claude is still up on the bridge with Bob, where Tyrone has joined them. Claude, too, is frightened, but he watches the white man’s face closely, as if using it to guide his own emotions. Right now, the white man, who is at the wheel, seems angry with his mate, and the mate seems angry also, for they are scowling and shouting at one another in the wind.

  “For Christ’s sake, we drop them off at Hollywood or Lauderdale now, they won’t know where the hell they are! They’ll get busted in an hour. They’ll stick out like sore thumbs, for Christ’s sake! If we take them down to Coral Gables, like we said we’d do, they’ll get to cover in Little Haiti right away.”

  “Too far, Bob! Dem too heavy in dis sea, mon! Got to leave ’em up here, let ’em find dere own way!”

  Bob argues a little longer, but he knows the man is right. “All right. Hollywood, then. Be midnight by then, we can drop them by the A-One-A bridge at Bal Harbour. The water’s calm there once you get around the point. Christ only knows how they’ll get down to Miami from there, though.”

  “Not our problem, Bob.”

  “Go down and talk to them,” Bob says to Tyrone. “Tell them what’s happening, you know? Maybe one of ’em’s got family or something can come out with a car. Who knows? At least let ’em know where they’re going to get dropped off. Draw a map or something for ’em.

  Tyrone shrugs his shoulders and turns away. “Don’t make no never mind to dem, mon. Long’s dem in America.”

  “Yeah, sure, but do it anyway.” Bob brings the boat around to port, facing her into the waves, and moves the throttle forward. The boat dips and slides down and hits the gully, yaws into the sea and starts to climb again. Tyrone motions for Claude to follow, and the two of them start down from the bridge. When the boat reaches the crest and hangs there for a second before beginning the descent again, Bob looks off to his starboard side and sees the beach like a taut, thin white ribbon and believes that he can hear the waves crashing not a half mile distant. Beyond the beach he can see the lights of houses between the sea and the road to Palm Beach, where here and there cars move slowly north and south—ordinary people going about their night’s ordinary business.

  Again, the boat rolls a second and starts the drop, pitches across the smooth trough, yaws between waves and rises, and this time, when it reaches the crest of the wave, Bob lo
oks out over the dripping bow and sees the lights of another boat. It’s less than two hundred yards off the portside and headed north, and it’s a large boat, twice the size of the Belinda Blue—that’s all Bob can see of her, before the boat disappears from sight, and Bob realizes that they have pitched again and are descending. He yells for Tyrone, who’s under the tarpaulin talking to the Haitians, and frantically waves him up to the bridge. “Boat!” he shouts. “Boat!”

  Tyrone scrambles up the ladder to the bridge, and when the Belinda Blue crests again, Bob points out the lights of the stranger.

  “Coast guard,” Tyrone says. “Cut de lights.”

  Bob obeys at once. “Oh, Jesus H. Christ!” he says. “The fucking coast guard.” He can hear the twin diesels that power her and can see that, yes, it is a cutter, ninety or a hundred feet long, with the high conning tower and the fifty- and sixty-caliber machine guns bristling at the stern and bow. “I don’t think they spotted us,” Bob says. But then he realizes that the cutter is turning slowly to port. “Oh, fuck, here they come!”

  Tyrone reaches out and cuts the throttle back.

  “What the fuck you doing?”

  “Bring ’er around, gwan get dem Haitians off,” Tyrone says.

  “What? What’re you saying?” Bob grabs Tyrone’s shoulder and flips the man around to face him.

  “Dem can get to shore from here, mon!” Tyrone shouts into the wind. “It not far!”

  “Not in this sea, for Christ’s sake! We can’t do that! We can’t!”

  “Got to Bob!” The Jamaican turns away and starts to leave.

  “Wait, goddammit! I’m the fucking captain, you’re not!”