Continental Drift

by Russell Banks

  “Look, I don’t want to talk about that right now. I got enough problems without worrying about my soul too. I got a wife and three kids. What I want is for you just to take this money and make sure it goes to some people who need it. Some of these Haitians.” He pulls out the wad of bills and shows it to Allan. “It’s way over a thousand dollars. Maybe two. I haven’t even counted it. See? I don’t care how you do it, spend it on soup or clothes, or just dole it out, I don’t care.” He pushes the money at the man.

  Allan recoils and slides farther back into the van. “Put it away! People’ll see it!” He looks over Bob’s shoulder and repeats, “Put it away!”

  Bob turns. In the distance, thirty or forty feet behind him, the youths from the bar are talking to one another under a streetlight, smoking cigarettes and lounging against the brick wall of a windowless building facing the street. They ignore Bob and Allan and the van, acting as if they’re alone on the street and bored and don’t want to go home yet. The largest of the four, the man with the denim cap who spoke to Bob in the bar, has his back to Bob and chats easily with the others, making large gestures with his arms as he talks.

  Bob turns to Allan and shoves the money at him. “Here, for Christ’s sake, take it. Please, take it. I don’t know what I should do with it anymore.”

  “Just pray, Bob. I can’t take the money. And I can’t help you, only Jesus can help you. You must pray, and then Jesus will tell you what to do. Bob, I’ll pray with you, if you want. Come on,” Allan says, and he slides forward from the van and stands up. “Let’s get down here, right here on the street, and pray to Jesus. He’s here with us now, I know it, I can feel His presence. Come on, Bob,” he says, grabbing Bob’s arm.

  Bob wrenches free. “No! Just take the damned money, will you?” He waves the bills in front of the man’s face.

  “Bob, no!” Allan cries. “Just pray, that’s all you have to do. Pray to Jesus for forgiveness and guidance, and repent. That’s all you need to do. Repent. You don’t need me, Bob. You need Jesus. We all need Jesus. You’re no different than anyone else, in spite of what you’ve done.”

  Bob steps back. “You won’t take it, then.”

  Allan looks at the money clutched in Bob’s hand. “No. Lord forgive me, but I can’t. I can’t. Not unless we both pray to Jesus and He tells you it’s the right thing to do, and also tells me I should take it.” Allan gets down on his knees in the street beside the van. “Fall on your knees, Bob!” He’s sweating, and his blue eyes glisten. “Pray! Jesus will hear you. Jesus loves you, Bob.”

  Jamming the money into his pocket again, Bob wheels around and walks swiftly away. When he looks up, he sees the four young men from the bar watching him. He briefly hesitates, then keeps coming, and as he passes them, the leader of the group smiles and says, “Still out, eh? Sure you don’t want no black pussy, mister? Plenty black pussy around here.”

  Bob looks into the young man’s face. “You know what I’m looking for.”

  “Me?” He breaks into a warm smile, and his bushy sideburns spread like wings. “I can’t know what you are looking for, mister, until you have told me.”

  “Are you Haitian?”

  “Born there, yes, but American now. All of us,” he says, still smiling. “All-American boys, eh?” he adds, and he steps back and slings his long arms over the shoulders of the other young men. They all smile now, as if for a group portrait.

  “You guys were at the bar back there,” Bob says. “The bartender tell you what I asked him?” The young man’s act irritates Bob and makes him nervous. He can’t see the reason for the act, can’t figure out what kind of impression the man is trying to make on him. Bob thinks he may be making fun of him somehow.

  “He only say you a nice fellow,” the young man says. Then he moves in close and in a low voice adds, “He say you looking for somebody. True?”

  “True.”

  “Well, then, maybe we know how to find this somebody, eh?” Again, he’s expansive, arms spread, broad grin on his face. “Everybody here know everybody else, like a country village. Eh? You know that? You a smart man, I see it right off,” he says, crossing his arms over his narrow chest. Then he says, “So.”

  Bob is silent a moment. Then he, too, says, “So,” and smiles. The other three are followers of the first, their expressions and postures merely weak imitations of the tall, thin man with the Afro and sideburns, so now all five men are standing with their arms crossed and smiles on their faces. This is a game, Bob thinks. They know who I’m looking for, and they know who I am too. They know my whole story. In a minute, when they’re through playing with me, when this one has finished showing off his English, they’ll surround me, show me their knives and take the money from me.

  Bob doesn’t want that. The money is no more theirs than it is his. If he lets them take the Haitians’ money from him, it will be like throwing it away, burning it. He says, “I happen to know that somebody got to shore from that load of Haitians that drowned off Sunny Isles the other night.”

  “Ah! How do you know this, mister?”

  “I’m … I’m a fisherman. There were fifteen bodies recovered, and I heard there were sixteen Haitians on the boat.”

  “You heard this, eh?”

  Bob studies the man’s eyes, but he can’t penetrate them. The man seems purely and simply amused. “Yes. In a bar, on the Keys.”

  “Oh. Well, then, you heard the truth,” he says. “A woman, sister to a man in the neighborhood, she get through to the land and get to her brother.”

  Suddenly Bob’s chest fills as if with a large, hard, metal-skinned balloon, and his breath comes in short, rapid bursts. “You … do you know where she is?”

  “In bad shape, I hear. Very bad shape.”

  “Can you take me to her? I’ll … I’ll pay you.”

  The man turns to his comrades and murmurs in Creole for a moment, then returns to Bob. “One hundred dollars.” He’s no longer smiling.

  “Fine, that’s fine.”

  “You got to pay now, mister.”

  “Oh. Oh, sure, okay.” Bob reaches into his pocket, turns away from the group and draws the money out. Carefully, he peels off five twenties, replaces the packet of bills and hands the hundred dollars to the man. “You sure you know where this woman is?”

  “No problem, mister. Like I say, this place is a neighborhood, a country village. Her brother is a well-known man here, and my friend is friend to him, too. We hear all about this woman this morning. Everybody who wants to know about her knows about her. If you don’t want to know, you don’t. If you do, you do. Simple, eh? We know where she is right this minute, too. Not far from this spot.” He’s grinning again.

  Bob says, “All right, then. Take me to her.”

  “You got something for her, give it to me, eh? I take it to her for you, save you trouble.”

  “No. I’ll give it to her. I need to talk to her.”

  “She probably don’t speak English.”

  “That’s okay. Just take me to her.”

  “Suit yourself,” he says.

  They start walking, a shapeless group of five men, four black and one white. Shadows in moonlight of palm trees, parked cars, fences, lampposts, fly up like dark flames and lie down behind the men as they stride down Fifty-fourth Street. All the storefronts and shops are blocked and barred by iron gates and shutters; the restaurants and bars are closed, dark, empty. There is no traffic on the streets, Bob suddenly realizes, no cars or buses moving.

  They leave the sidewalk, cross a junk-strewn vacant lot on a corner of Fifty-fourth and come out on a dark side street, which draws them at once into a maze of side streets. Bob is frightened now. Two of the men are in front of him, two behind. Bob imagines coming to a sudden halt, yanking the four men to attention and holding out the packet of money to them. That’s what they want. If they take the money, all of it, just take and pocket it, and if they don’t stab him, which he knows they could easily choose to do, then he’ll be alive, safe
, free to go home to his family. But he’ll have given away his only and last chance to make the first, small attempt to purge himself of the consequences of his crime. He knows that it will take years, possibly a lifetime, for him to forgive himself, but he also knows that it is essential to the process, the necessary first step, that he somehow return the money unasked, that he not merely get rid of it by giving it to four strangers who just happen to be black and Haitian. He was wrong to try to give the money to the Christian back there, he knows now. He has to give it back to the people he took it from. That won’t make him clean again; possibly nothing will. The deaths of the Haitians will still be his fault, his crime, but he will not have traded their lives for a pocketful of ten-, twenty- and fifty-dollar bills. Instead, he will have traded their lives strictly for freedom, freedom to pack up his car and drive his wife and children back north to New Hampshire and get his old job back and rent an apartment for his family and try to build them a new life out of the scattered, cast-off pieces of their old lives. He will have done something bad, not for money, but in order to do something good. Maybe, then, if he gives the money back, he won’t be any worse than a lot of good people are, and then he will be able to start hoping for a kind of redemption.

  If he simply loses the money, however, if he gives it over at knifepoint to four young muggers on a dark back street of Miami, Florida, there will be no hope for any kind of redemption. No hope. He’s got to have hope. Hope is what must replace fantasy in his life. Without it, he’ll end up like Eddie, dead in his Eldorado, or like his father, drunk and dreaming to “Destiny’s Darling,” or like Ave Boone, cynical, small and cheap, and in jail. A dead man, a foolish man, a shallow man—these will be his alternatives. Bob wants to be a good man. And then he can begin to hope for redemption.

  They’re now deep into Little Haiti. From throat to groin, his body feels like a cold steel beam, his arms and legs hardening into cast iron, his head—eyes, mouth, nose and ears—seeming to shut down bit by bit, as if a bank of switches were being flicked off one by one. He’s panting, taking quick, shallow breaths, and knows that if he had to speak, he could not. He can barely hear their footsteps click against the pavement, cannot smell the oleander and orange blossoms, the cold cookfires from the backyards, and when finally they pass out of the maze of crosshatched streets and lanes onto an open boulevard, which he recognizes, Miami Boulevard, where he parked his car, his peripheral vision has left him altogether, and it’s as if he’s looking down a tube.

  They cross the boulevard and soon turn left and pass down a shadowed alley between two long, flaking white cinder-block warehouses. At the end of the alley, they come to another that crosses it, and at the crossing a silvery sheet of moonlight falls over them. A long-unused, rusting railroad siding sinks into the trash-littered passageway between still more old, boarded-up warehouses. They are walking slowly now and with care through splotches of darkness and moonlight, picking their way over the tracks to the farther side, where they move in single file alongside the wall of a building, touching it with their fingertips as if seeking a place to hide. Bob is aware of the Haitians’ speaking now and then to one another in Creole, but he doesn’t so much hear them speak as remember a few seconds afterwards that they have spoken.

  Suddenly he realizes that they have stopped, the tall man in front, then Bob, then the three others, and the tall one is talking in a low voice to Bob and pointing across the alley to a warehouse where a loading platform extends like a pier to the railroad tracks. A rickety wooden staircase leads from the ground to the platform, and at the end of the platform there is a large, closed cargo door. Next to it, a smaller door with a piece of old plywood over the top half lies open a few inches, as if unlocked and left ajar mere seconds ago.

  Bob steps over the railroad tracks with careful haste, like a man crossing an ice floe. He puts one foot on the crumbling steps and looks up and sees that there are people standing above him on the platform, people looking down at him, people waiting for him. They are black, three men and a woman. One man, dressed all in white with a scarlet sash around his waist, has positioned himself slightly ahead of the others and has folded his arms over his chest, like an impresario. The second is slight, wearing dark trousers and a white dress shirt, and looks downcast, like a prisoner whose confession has been extracted by torture. Behind him looms the third, a man tall as a column, sepulchral, tautly drawn to his full and amazing height and dressed in a morning coat and striped trousers and wearing sunglasses and a top hat. Holding lightly to his elegantly bent arm, like his consort, is a woman in a white frock, a very dark woman whom Bob recognizes at once. She’s the woman from the boat, saved from drowning to come back and move among the living and, when the white man presents himself, to name him to himself, that he may be judged. She’s the woman whose fate now is to say his fate to him, that he may live it out. It’s she who must endure the sight of the sign of his shame, the money clutched in his outstretched hands, and must hear him beg her to take it from him, “Please, take this from me, take the money, take it,” while bills fall like leaves from the pile in his hands, get grabbed back up from the ground and get thrust at her again and again, as he pleads, “Take it, please! Take the money!” And she’s the woman who must refuse to remove the sign of his shame, who must turn away from him now, and leading the three others, walk back through the door to the darkness beyond, leaving him alone out there, the money still in his hands, and behind him, waiting, the four young wolves who led him to this place.

  Bob turns and faces them. The leader takes a single step forward and extends his hand, palm up, for the money. Bob shakes his head slowly from side to side. Then, crushing the bills together, he stuffs the money back into his pocket. All four wolves step carefully over the railroad tracks toward him. The leader, his right hand still extended toward Bob to receive the money from him, holds a short knife in his left. The other men hold knives also.

  With a coarse shout that stops the four, Bob cries, “No! This money is mine!” And abruptly, like a boy in summer diving off a pier into a lake, he puts his hands before his face and steps forward, and at once the four men pounce on him, stabbing at him until he falls—spinning, arms and legs outstretched, spinning slowly as he falls, almost weightlessly, like a pale blossom in a storm of blossoms, filling the air with white, a delicate, slowly shifting drift through moonlight to the ground.

  Envoi

  And so ends the story of Robert Raymond Dubois, a decent man, but in all the important ways an ordinary man. One could say a common man. Even so, his bright particularity, having been delivered over to the obscurity of death, meant something larger than itself, if only to him and to those who loved him. Normally, to the rest of us, the death of a man like Bob Dubois signifies little more than the shift of a number from one column to another, from the lists of the living to the lists of the dead: one of those who make their livings with their hands becomes one of those who die at the hands of others; one of those who have lived to the age of thirty-one becomes one of those who have died by thirty-one; one of those who perpetrate crimes becomes one of those who are the victims of crimes. The larger world goes on as before, quite as if Bob Dubois never existed. In the vast generality, a statistic is merely a statistic, regardless of the column it’s in, and once an ordinary man is dead, all possibilities of his ever becoming historical, of his becoming a hero, are gone. No one will model himself on Bob Dubois; no one will reinvent him and remember the man in order to invent and make memorable himself. Even Bob’s children will forget him and the shape of his brief life. Elaine Dubois, his widow, will return to Catamount, New Hampshire, where she will devote herself to raising her three children; from here on out, it will be the whole point of her life, until long after the children have become adults. And she will never ask them to emulate their father, nor will she herself deliberately emulate him. He will be to her as Bob’s father, brother and best friend eventually became to him, an example to avoid. And the degree to which he avoided patte
rning his life on theirs is the degree to which his wife Elaine and his three children will avoid patterning their lives on his. Elaine will work on the line at the cannery until she retires at sixty-five, the first signs of emphysema starting to close in on her. Ruthie will not graduate from high school; she will marry at seventeen a boy of nineteen who works for the telephone company, and in six months she will give birth to the first of her five children, a boy she will name Sam, after her new husband’s father. Emma, after a six-week course in cosmetology, will become a beautician, and she will move into her own apartment in Catamount, buy a new red Japanese fastback coupe with number plates that say EMMA, and she will spend her winter vacations in places like Jamaica and Barbados, smoking lots of marijuana and sleeping with the local hustlers for two wild weeks before returning to Catamount and work at the beauty parlor and long nights at the bars. By the time she’s thirty, she’ll be an alcoholic, gaining weight fast, looking worriedly for a husband. The baby, Robbie, will enlist in the navy after graduation, and when he completes his basic training in San Diego, he’ll be assigned to an aircraft carrier, after which he’ll return to Catamount and become a plumber. Everything that happens in their lives after Bob Dubois’s death in Miami will seem to have happened as if he never existed. Yet surely, if he had not existed and if his life had not taken the shape he gave it, then the particulars of the lives of his wife and children would have been different. Just as Bob’s own life, without his father’s drab life behind it, would have been different. It’s those particulars that give meaning to the life of an ordinary man, a decent man, a common man. And the lengthy, detailed history of such a man must celebrate or grieve, depending on whether he lives or dies, even though nothing seems to happen as a result of his life or death—even though the Haitians keep on coming, and many of them are drowned, brutalized, cheated and exploited, and where they come from remains worse than where they are going to; and even though the men in three-piece suits behind the desks in the banks grow fatter and more secure and skillful in their work; and even though young American men and women without money, with trades instead of professions, go on breaking their lives trying to bend them around the wheel of commerce, dreaming that when the wheel turns, they will come rising up from the ground like televised gods making a brief special appearance here on earth, nothing like it before or since, such utter transcendence that any awful sacrifice is justified. The world as it is goes on being itself. Books get written—novels, stories and poems stuffed with particulars that try to tell us what the world is, as if our knowledge of people like Bob Dubois and Vanise and Claude Dorsinville will set people like them free. It will not. Knowledge of the facts of Bob’s life and death changes nothing in the world. Our celebrating his life and grieving over his death, however, will. Good cheer and mournfulness over lives other than our own, even wholly invented lives—no, especially wholly invented lives—deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to continue to be itself. Sabotage and subversion, then, are this book’s objectives. Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.