Continental Drift (9 page)

The candle fluttered, and we noticed that the wind and rain had resumed and were building to a roar again. The boy sat limply on a stool by the wall, his chest collapsed and his hands resting heavily on his knees. His face was blank, dark and withdrawn to a secret place of shame way inside him.

Lift the boards under the bed, we instructed him, and bring the money. Quickly.

He looked up, not understanding.

You heard. Do it.

He got up and crawled under the bed and soon was grunting and yanking at the boards there. Vanise studied him patiently, as if she were a grand lady and he retrieving a piece of dropped jewelry. She understood what he was doing and why, though he did not, and she seemed almost ready to smile. But that is because she had suffered more than he. He was merely for the first time in his life truly afraid. It was different for Vanise. Long ago, when her mother had died and then her father, and then all her brothers and sisters had died except the one who was the father of the boy, she had ended up living alone in a cabin outside Saint Louis du Nord letting men visit her and pay for her time and laughter and young girl’s body. She had passed through fear then as if through flame to the other side, where resignation abides, and then she had become Aubin’s favorite
jeunesse
for a while. He brought her back up here to Allanche, where he got a baby on her, and for a while she stepped back from resignation and began
to learn how to be a
serviteur
and feed the loas, until Aubin grew tired of her, and a new, worse thing happened to her spirit, for she stood now on the further side of resignation, where people, especially women, laugh and cry too much and too often, where nothing matters and a second later everything matters. She was emptied out, and although we could love her, we could not trust her. All of us, even Vanise herself, knew that we would live better if we sent her away, but we also knew that she would not leave now unless for a better, safer place.

The wind and rain returned and beat on our heads until morning. We knew we would survive the hurricane, but we prayed to the Virgin and to our
mait’-tête
, while Vanise and the boy put their few articles of clothing and the uncooked yams and the remainder of the American ham into two small baskets, as if they were going to market in Port-de-Paix at dawn. We prayed on our knees with all the proper words we could remember, which were not so many as we would have liked, for we were no
mambo or houngan
or even a bush priest, a
prêt’
savanne
, nor could we go out in the storm and find one to pray for us, nor would we have done so, even if the night were serene, for what Vanise and the boy and Vanise’s baby were about to do could not be told to anyone yet.

The rain stopped, and the wind turned to gusts that came and went, and soon it was silent, and we began to hear hungry seabirds returning from the hills, crossing overhead toward the sea. We opened the door, and a gray block of light from the east fell into the cabin. It was morning. The hurricane had passed, and there was a sudden swelling of joy in our bodies, a warm, filling breath of pleasure, even though we knew that, with dawn, the boy and his aunt and her baby would leave us and that, no matter what happened to them in their journey, we would not see them again. We wrapped the money in a square of scarlet cloth and handed it to Vanise.

The fisherman named Victor in Le Mole is the one that people say carries people over to America. That is how the others left. That is how your brother got to Florida.

The girl looked down at her baby in her arms and smiled a strange, grim smile.

The boy said,
Maman
? When will you come?

Soon. When there is more money for it. Soon.

He looked at his sisters on the bed and crossed to them and silently patted each on her sleeping head. Then he went to stand by the door. Come on, Vanise. We’ll have to pass a lot of people on the road, and the sooner we pass them the better.

Vanise turned away from us and strolled toward the door as if she were going to a dance. Then they were gone. The boy, who was stepping into manhood sooner than he was ready, was gone. The girl and her baby were gone. The money was gone. We remained, and the small children, they remained. The storm was over. Under the house the chickens fluttered and scratched. Aubin had dry wood he would give us if we promised to repay him quickly, but we could not go there, not yet. We would stay hungry a little longer, and perhaps by evening some of our own wood would be dry enough to burn. Then we would kill a chicken and cook it and eat it.

Bob drives, and Elaine, seated beside him, holds the road map in her lap
, and the two of them keep their eyes away from the horizons and close to the road ahead and the buildings and land abutting the road. They avert their gaze from the flat monotony of the central Florida landscape, the palmettos and citrus groves and truck farms. They ignore, they do not even notice, the absence of what Bob would call “real trees.” They look right through, as if it were invisible, the glut of McDonald’s and Burger Kings, Kentucky Fried Chickens and Pizza Huts, a long, straight tunnel of franchises broken intermittently by storefront loan companies and paved lots crammed with glistening Corvettes, T-Birds, Camaros and Trans Ams, and beyond the car dealers,
surrounded by chain-link fences, automobile graveyards, vast and disordered, dreary, colorless and indestructible. On the outskirts of every town they pass through are the miles of trailer parks laid out in grids, like the orange groves beyond them, with a geometric precision determined by the logic of ledgers instead of the logic of land, water and sky. And after the trailer parks, as the car nears another town, they pass tracts of pastel-colored cinder-block bungalows strung along cul-de-sacs and interconnected, one-lane capillaries paved with crushed limestone—instant, isolated neighborhoods, suburbs of the suburbs, reflecting not the inhabitants’ needs so much as the builders’ and landowners’ greed. And then into the towns themselves, De Land, Sanford, Altamonte Springs, they lumber down Route 4 from Daytona, the U-Haul swaying from side to side behind the car like a patient, cumbersome beast of burden, and the tracts and housing developments get replaced by high white cube-shaped structures stuffed with tiny apartments laid out so that all the windows face other windows and all the exits empty onto parking lots. Bob and Elaine cannot see, nor would you point out to them, the endless barrage of billboards, neon signs, flapping plastic banners and flags, arrows, and huge, profiled fingers pointing at them through the windshield, shrilling at them to Buy, buy, buy me now! Instead, they see gauzy wedges of pale green, yellow and pink, and now and then dots and slashes of red, orange and lavender—abstract forms and fields of color that, once seen, get translated into rough notions about efficiency, cleanliness and convenience, and these notions comfort them. For they have done a terrible and frightening thing: they have traded one life for another, and this new life is now the only one they have.

The white people they see in the towns, in cars and alongside the roads and streets resemble the people of New Hampshire, except that they wear brightly colored clothing and their skins are tanned. But for the first time in their lives, Bob and Elaine Dubois see many people of color. Hundreds of them, thousands! Not the one or two they have seen before, noticed without comment just this week, in fact, waiting on their table in a Stuckey’s outside Raleigh, North Carolina, or
pumping gas into their car on the New Jersey Turnpike. (They missed seeing them in the Bronx because Bob was so afraid of losing his way as he passed through New York City that he made Elaine watch the signs for I-95 and shout out the turns while he watched out for the cars, trucks and buses beside, behind and in front of them, the U-Haul in the rearview mirror, the bumps and potholes in the road.) Back in Catamount, there was the bald, muscular black man who ran the rug-cleaning company, and there was the tall, good-looking guy in the three-piece suit that Bob saw once in Concord, the capital, a man who was probably a lawyer working for one of the agencies housed in the Federal Building, a man he’d mentioned several times to Elaine, but she had never seen him herself. Way back, when Bob was in the service, there were many young black men and even a few black sergeants, but for Bob, who was only a kid and hung out with the kids from Maine and New Hampshire, the blacks he saw then were abstractions called niggers that frightened him the same way whorehouses in Boston and gambling in the barracks frightened him—he didn’t know the rules, and he didn’t want to embarrass himself by asking, so he kept away, kept entirely to people like himself, learned how to fix oil burners, got stationed in New England despite the war and hitchhiked home on his leaves to visit his parents and his girlfriend Elaine and lie to his buddies in the taverns.

It was still possible at the time this story takes place, the late 1970s, to grow up in America without having known a single black person well enough to learn his or her name, without having seen a black person, except on television or from a great distance, even when that person happened to be standing right next to you in line at the bank or in a cafeteria or on a bus. Bob Dubois and his wife Elaine grew up that way. But now, suddenly, as they near Oleander Park, Florida, their new home, after having sold their house in New Hampshire, after Bob’s having quit his job, after having sold everything they could sell, even Bob’s beloved Boston whaler, after having said and waved goodbye forever to everything familiar, known, understood, they come up against and are forced to see many people of color,
more of them, or so it seems, than there are white people. They see them working in gangs in the orange groves, riding in the backs of trucks, mowing lawns, striding along the highways and sidewalks, and though Bob and Elaine are safely removed from these people, protected from direct contact by their car and all their possessions and by each other, the people of color seem up close and inescapably real, as if they are suddenly banging on the windshield, yanking at the door handles, climbing over the roof and hood and shouting to one another, “Yo, man! Come on an’ check out the white folks!”

These black- and brown-skinned people, the American blacks in the department stores and supermarkets, the Jamaicans and Haitians in the fields, the Cubans in the filling stations—these working people, who got here first, belong here, not Bob and Elaine Dubois and their daughters Ruthie and Emma. It’s Bob and his family who are the newcomers at the Florida trough, and Bob is embarrassed by his lateness. He feels ugly in his winter-gray skin, ashamed of his wife’s plain looks and his children’s skinny arms and legs, he feels poor and ignorant in his noisy, dented station wagon and orange rented trailer with all their possessions jammed inside, the furniture and clothing they couldn’t or wouldn’t sell in their yard sale or through their classified ad in the
Catamount Patriot
. He feels embarrassed—that is, exposed, revealed to the world for what he is—and perhaps for the first time in his life, his entire body fills with fear.

Elaine looks quickly over at him and nervously, as if she has been reading his thoughts, says, “All those black people working in the fields and everything, they’re not really Americans, right?”

Bob says nothing, just keeps on driving.

She adds, “I’ve read they’re from Cuba and those kinds of places.”

For a moment they are silent. Then Bob says in a low voice, “Thank God for Eddie.”

“Yeah,” she says, reaching for the road map.

Elaine hates the way Eddie talks. “He has a foul mouth,” she says.

Bob, his head and both hands in the refrigerator reaching for more beer, turns and looks at her. Didn’t the man find them this trailer they bought on Lake Grassey, didn’t he give them an almost new Sony portable television as a house present, which the kids are happily watching in the back bedroom instead of hanging around in the kitchen and living room, whining and bothering the grownups, who want to talk business because tomorrow is Bob’s first day on the job, a job that his brother Eddie, for Christ’s sake, gave him? Is she unhappy here? They haven’t been in Florida a week, and already she wants to go home?
This
is home now.

“It’s just the way he talks, that’s all,” Bob explains. He whispers his words to her—Eddie and Sarah are sitting silently in the living room not ten feet away, smoking cigarettes and looking in opposite directions, Eddie at one end of the couch peering out the open screened door at the packed-dirt yard, the pink trailer across the lane, then the marsh and, beneath the soft purple shadows of dusk, the dark blue surface of Lake Grassey. Sarah, her long, thin legs crossed at the ankles, looks out the window beside her at the pale blue exterior of the trailer next door and examines it as if it were a picture of a trailer instead of the real thing.

“Eddie has a good heart,” Bob whispers. “It’s just he’s still a kid in some ways. He talks the way we did when we were kids—’fuckin’ this, ‘fuckin’ that’—that’s all. You know.” He holds three cans of Schlitz in one hand and swings the refrigerator door shut with the other.