Continental Drift (47 page)

Tyrone has backed off one careful step at a time, with Claude and the baby beside him, until they have moved out of the group and are standing in the gorge a ways below the others. He sees the red-eyed face of old François in the bushes next to him. The old man sneers at the
mambo
and shouts at her.
“Nen point mambo ou houngan passé Bondieu nan pays-yà!”
There is no
mambo
or
houngan
in this country greater than God.

The woman shrieks at him.
“Enhé, enhé, enhé!”
she curses.
“Papa Ogoun qui gain’ yun mangé,
tout moune pas mange’ li!” Now, she says, where are my children? “Coté petits moin yo?” She turns and looks across the faces of the crowd.

Signaling to the pair of men with the machetes, she starts back up the rocky path toward the
hounfor
, and they follow. The others mill about for a second, cease their movement and watch her go. Then they turn, Vanise included, and begin filing down the path after Tyrone.

As one by one they pass the old man, he cackles and taps them on the shoulder with his stick. Then at last they are gone, and the old man is standing alone in the narrow gorge, mumbling and every now and then breaking into a dry laugh, as if he knows what no one else knows.

“C’est pas faute moin!”
It’s not my fault, the old man sings.
“C’est pas faute moin! C’est pas faute moin!”

Where the stream enters the sea, the Haitians come alone and in twos and threes from their huts to meet the Jamaican. In the bay, a half mile away, the trawler rocks lightly in the soft lavender predawn light, and beyond the hook of beach that protects the bay, open sea stretches straight to Africa, where the eastern sky is born, cream-colored near
the horizon, fading to zinc gray overhead. In the west, above Florida, the sky deepens to purple, with glints of stars. A pair of gulls cruise hungrily along the beach toward the sandy hook, while overhead, its huge, motionless black wings extended like shadows, a frigate bird floats, watches, prepares to dive.

The Haitians are wearing their best clothes: for most of the men, clean white shirts, dark trousers, black shoes; for the women, brightly colored cotton dresses, sandals, headscarves. They carry cardboard suitcases, woven bags and baskets into which they’ve packed a change or two of clothing, if they own that much, a few personal items, maybe a small bottle of perfume or cologne, a family photograph in a gilt frame, a Bible or prayerbook, their
gardes
and
wangas
, and food for the journey—fruit, cassava, chicken, a bottle of
clairin
, some tinned milk. They may own more than these pitiful few possessions, a pot and a pan, some dishes, gourds, tools, bedding, a bicycle, but they don’t hesitate to leave these things behind, for they are starting over, and soon, they know, they will own all the things that Americans own—houses, cars, motorcycles, TV sets, Polaroid cameras, stereos, blue jeans, electric stoves. Their lives will soon be transformed from one kind of reality, practically a nonreality, into a new and, because superior, an ultimate reality. To trade one life for another at this level is to exchange an absence for a presence, a condition for a destiny. These people are not trying merely to improve their lot; they’re trying to obtain one.

Tyrone, the Jamaican, greets them as they arrive at the beach, and he takes each of them off a few steps from the others to complete his business with them privately, for he has agreed with them separately on the cost of the journey. When he has obtained all the money, he divides it into two packets, one thicker than the other. The thicker packet he will turn over to Dubois, telling him that’s all he was able to extract from them. The other, smaller packet he will keep in a separate pocket for himself. He feels no guilt for this; without him, Dubois would have nothing to show for his trip from the Keys but a sunburn and a gasoline bill at the marina in Coral Harbour.

When the Haitians have assembled on the beach, Tyrone drags the dinghy out of the bushes and across the gray sand to the water. He jumps in, seats himself at the stern and points out the first six and waves them over toward the bow of the boat.

He hollers to the boy, Dorsinville, and instructs him to hold the bow and help the others into the boat, and the boy jumps to the task. First the old lady and the young woman with her two children come aboard, then an old man going to Florida to be with his son and daughter, and a woman whose husband went over four years ago, and a young man whose older brother is in New York.

Tyrone signals the boy to push the boat out, which he does, and then he starts the motor, brings the boat around toward the sandbar, and in seconds he has the boat slicing through the still, velvety-gray water of the bay toward the
Belinda Blue
.

It’s their faces that agitate him, Bob decides, and then he changes his
mind: No, it’s the way they move, silent as sheep and careful not to touch what the act of climbing aboard does not require them to touch. They bunch together like gazelles, nervous but apparently not frightened, and too shy to reveal their curiosity, so that their eyes seem glazed slightly, as if they’ve been stunned by the sight of the
Belinda Blue,
the tall, bulky white man standing on the deck reaching out his hand to help them board from the dinghy, the spaciousness of the boat, its long afterdeck and the cabin forward, which they glance at but do not examine, and over the cabin, the bridge, where the wheel and other controls are located, a radio squawking static and a red scanner light dancing back and forth along a band of numbers.

They seem so fragile to Bob, so delicate and sensitive, that he’s
suddenly frightened for them. Even the young men, with their hair cut close to the skull, seem fragile. He wants to reassure them somehow, to say that nothing will hurt them as long as they are under his care, nothing, not man or beast or act of God. But he knows he can’t even tell them where they are going, what time it is, what his name is, not with the half-dozen words and phrases of Québécois he learned by accident as a child, learned, despite his father’s prohibition against speaking French, from boys at school and old women at LeGrand’s grocery store on Moody Street and old men fishing from the bridge over the Catamount River. He suddenly pictures the huge green and white sign on Route 93 north at the state line between Massachusetts and New Hampshire,
Bienvenu au New Hampshire,
and he says to the Haitians,
“Bienvenu au
Belinda Blue!” They turn their coal-black faces toward him, as if wanting to hear more, and when Bob merely smiles, they look down.

The boat is crowded now, more like a ferry than a fishing boat, Bob thinks. Tyrone has come aboard and is tying the dinghy to the stern. “We got to get up a cover,” he says. He says it without looking at Bob, as if he thinks the two of them are alone on the boat.

“A cover?”

Tyrone stands, shakes out his stubby dreadlocks and comes forward to Bob, who’s poised at the foot of the ladder, about to climb to the bridge and start the engine. The sun will be up, it will soon be daylight, the Jamaican explains slowly, as if talking to a child. More worrisome than the sun and heat, if they don’t cover their cargo, they’ll be spotted by a plane or helicopter, especially later in the straits. The Bahamians won’t bother us; they’re relieved to see the Haitians go. It’s the Americans we have to worry about.

Bob nods somberly, though he resents the way the Jamaican speaks to him. In fact, he’s found it difficult to like Tyrone since he discovered the man’s connection with smuggling, first drugs with Ave and now Haitians with him. He’s not sure why this should be so, for after all, he and Ave are even more directly involved with the trade than he is, but he thinks it has something to do with Tyrone’s being
black. It’s not natural, somehow. He felt the same odd judgment come over him one morning out on Florida Bay a few weeks ago, when Bob asked Tyrone about the dreadlocks, asked him why the Rastafarians grew their hair into tubes, something he’d been wondering about since the first day he saw them.

Tyrone smiled slyly and said that white girls liked it that way.

“Oh,” Bob said. “I thought it was … you know, religious.”

“For some, sure, mon. All dat Marcus Garvey song ’n’ dance. But de white gals, mon, dem don’t want to deal wid no skinhead, dem want to deal wid Natty Dread, mon. Got to have locks, got to have plenty spliff, got to say, ‘I and I,’ sometimes. Dat way dem know you a Jamaican black mon, not de udder kind. Den you got plenty beef,” he said laughing. “Too much beef! Oh, too much beef, mon!”

Together, Bob and Tyrone rig a tarpaulin cover over the deck, stretching it taut aft from the cabin and tying it at the corners, so that it’s head-high at the cabin and waist-high at the stern. When they’re satisfied with the job, Tyrone herds the Haitians under the tarp, forcing most of them to squat below the low end, warning them that if they don’t huddle together back there, they’ll be caught by the police and thrown in jail. They understand and follow his orders quickly and efficiently.

Tyrone scrambles forward to pull up the anchor, and Bob climbs up to the bridge and starts the engine. It gurgles and chuckles and then smooths out, and when Tyrone waves up to him, Bob hits the throttle, and the aft end of the loaded boat dips, the bow rises, and the
Belinda Blue
moves out of the bay, cuts northwest along the shore of New Providence past Clifton Point, where she edges back slightly to the west and heads into open sea. The sun is two hands above the horizon now, and the blue-green water glitters like a field of crinkled steel. Gulls dart across the wake, frigate birds drift past far overhead and a school of flying fish loops by on the starboard side.

It’s a beautiful day, Bob thinks, and he says it, calls it out to Tyrone, who’s perched out on the foredeck coiling the anchor line. “It’s a beautiful day!”

The Jamaican looks up at him, cups his ear and says, “What?”

“It’s a beautiful day!”

The Jamaican nods and goes back to work.

With the extra weight of the Haitians aboard, the
Belinda Blue
wallows a bit and sits somewhat low in the water, but the day is calm, and she rides the swells and small waves with ease. Far to the south, the northern tip of Andros Island lifts like a whale, passes slowly to the east and drops again. The sun is higher now, and Bob is hot up on the bridge. He calls down to Tyrone, who’s in the cabin stretched out on a bunk, and asks him to bring him a beer. A few seconds later, Tyrone, shirtless, hands up a can of Schlitz, frosty and wet from the ice.

“Whaddaya think, the Haitians, they thirsty?”

Tyrone looks back toward the tarpaulin, steps down to the deck and peers underneath. He’ll give them a bucket of water and a dipper, he says to Bob. They’ll share it out themselves.

“Fine, fine. Poor fuckin’ bastards,” he murmurs, as Tyrone disappears below. From the moment he first saw them ride out from the beach at New Providence in the dinghy, saw how astonishingly black they were,
African,
he thought, and saw how silent and obedient, how passive they were, he’s been struck by the Haitians. There’s a mixture of passivity and will that he does not understand. They risk everything to get away from their island, give up everything, their homes, their families, forsake all they know, and then strike out across open sea for a place they’ve only heard about.

Why do they do that? he wonders. Why do they throw away everything they know and trust, no matter how bad it is, for something they know nothing about and can never trust? He’s in awe of the will it takes, the stubborn, conscious determination to get to America that each of them, from the eldest to the youngest, must own. But he can’t put that willfulness together with what he sees before him—a quiescent, silent, shy people who seem fatalistic almost, who seem ready and even willing to accept whatever is given them.

He almost envies it. The way he sees himself—a man equally willful, but only with regard to the small things, to his appetites and momentary desires, and equally passive and accepting too, but only with regard to the big things, to where he lives and how he makes his living—he is their opposite. It’s too easy to explain away the Haitians’ fatalism by pointing to their desperation, by saying that life in Haiti is so awful that anything they get, even death, is an improvement. Bob has more imagination than that. And it’s too easy to explain away their willfulness the same way. Besides, it’s not logical to ascribe two different kinds of behavior to the same cause. There’s a wisdom they possess that he doesn’t, a knowledge. The Haitians know something, about themselves, about history, about human life, that he doesn’t know. What to call it, Bob can’t say. It’s so outside his knowledge that he can’t even name it yet.

He’s intelligent and worldly enough now, however, not to confuse it with sex. That is, even though black people are still sexier to Bob than white people, it’s only because they look better to Bob, for to him, a white man, black is presence and white is absence, which means that he can see them in ways that he can’t see white people. Which also means, of course, that he can see white people in ways he’s utterly blind to in blacks, as he learned by trying to love Marguerite. Bob has become one of those fortunate few men and women who have learned, before it’s too late to enjoy it, that sex is just sex and it’s all of that as well. He can take it
and
leave it, which is a much happier condition than having to do one or the other. He’s not sure how this has happened to him, but he knows it has happened and that it has something important to do with Marguerite. There was no exact moment when his conscious understanding of his own sexuality changed; there simply came a time when he behaved differently—that is, without fantasy. As with Allie Hubbell in the trailer across the lane. As with Honduras. As with Elaine.