Continental Drift (30 page)

They suffered silently, even little Charles, although now and then Vanise, in a weak, low voice, sang a line or two from a baby’s song and then left off, as if the effort were too much for her. And much later, when the heat lessened somewhat, the men came back down again, the brown Inaguan and the Englishman, laughing and drinking clear rum, sending Claude with the baby aft while they raped his aunt.

When the Haitian men came down, Claude was surprised, for they behaved like the others, even the man with the pipe, who tried to grab Claude when he stepped away from them, grasping at the boy’s trousers and yanking on them, and when Claude fought and squirmed free, the man hit the boy in the face with his fist and cursed at him and moved forward to where the others were holding Vanise against the sacks of sea salt.

They did not sleep, but, like small animals in shock after being hit by an automobile, they were not awake, either. It was cool for a measureless period of time, and then it grew hot again, like the inside of an oven, and when it was hot, the men did not come down into the hold, so that Claude almost felt grateful for the stifling, stinking heat. But soon it began to cool, and he knew they would come again, and they did, sometimes one at a time, sometimes two or even three, and eventually one of the Haitians, not the one with the pipe, grabbed Claude by his arms from behind so that he could not get away. The man threw the boy down, and when he had yanked his trousers down, the man jammed his knee between Claude’s legs and spread them and entered him—a savage tearing, a rip in both his body and his mind that made the boy scream and left him crumpled, burning with rage and shame and holding inside himself a dark star of pain. When the man was through with him, the boy cried, and when he could stop himself from crying, he picked his body up with pathetic care, as if it were not his own, and carried it forward to where Vanise lay with her child.

Then one time, after it had been cool for a long while, it did not get hot again as it usually did, and the boat began to surge and dip, and
the waves began to smack harder against the bow, until soon the boat was lifting in the water at a steep angle, as if climbing a mountain, then tipping, sliding swiftly down into a hole. The bilge water sloshed wildly, and sacks of salt shifted and fell.

Claude and Vanise and the baby scrambled about in the hold, struggling to find someplace safe, where they could curl up against one another and not get tossed about, until at last they ended clinging to the ladder below the hatch cover. Vanise held her baby with one arm, the ladder with the other. Claude, wrapping himself around both woman and child, clutched the rails of the ladder and clamped them to it, as the boat tipped and fell, then rose again and tipped and fell again.

They could hear a wind roaring abovedecks and heard waves slam against the boat with furious force and weight. Pray for us! Claude ordered. Pray to les Mystères the way you know how. Pray to Agwé, your mait’-tête, he pleaded, so the boat will not sink and drown us. Pray to the Virgin and to the saints and to Jesus Christ, to Papa Legba and Damballah and all the others. Pray! he shouted into her ear, and Vanise began to murmur incoherently, mixing half-remembered songs and prayers and chants together as best she knew how:
Coté ou yé, metté hounsi-yo dey ors, gan malice oh, cé passé’l t’ap passé. Dou quand Bon Dieu réle ou. Je vous prends pour me rendre les services que je veux, au nom de Mait’ Carrefour et de Legba, generation paternelle et maternelle, ancêtre et ancètere, Afrique et Afrique, au nom de Legba, Baltaza, Agwé, Erzulie, Ghede, Ogoun, Damballah
… and on and on, as the storm raged against them.

After a long time, Vanise grew weary and confused and too ashamed to go on, for she knew only scraps and bits of the proper prayers and calls to the loas, and she said to her nephew, I can’t! I must not! We must let le Bon Dieu take us over now.

No, he said. Go on, pray for us!

And so she resumed, throughout the storm, until, at last, the roar of the wind lowered somewhat, and the boat ceased to tip and thrash about as wildly as before, and gradually, after many hours, they
came to believe that the storm had passed by and that it could not have been a hurricane or even a northwester, but a squall, perhaps, for now they heard rain falling on the deck above their heads, steadily and heavily, without wind, and the sea seemed almost calm.

First Claude loosened his grip on the ladder, and then Vanise let go of it, and they slid slowly to the pallet below, where they lay collapsed around one another, like lovers, their child between them, about to fall peacefully asleep together. Yet even as they lay, they still clung to the base of the ladder, as if manacled to it.

The captain lifted the hatch cover and waved Claude, Vanise and the child up. It was night, and the rain had stopped. In the northwest, a crescent moon floated behind strips of silver-blue cloud, and the sea glittered with phosphorus.

The boat had rounded the western tip of New Providence Island, and when Claude and Vanise had pulled themselves up the ladder to the deck, it was as if they had returned from their own drownings. There was air here, fresh, cool air, and endless space that seemed tangible, and though it was night, the air was filled with light and the smells of what it was not—the sea, land, trees, fruit, human beings. They inhaled and looked at their hands and each other’s faces and rediscovered their own battered bodies. They looked off the starboard side and saw the headlights of automobiles beading the north coast of the island. Off the bow, they saw the first lights of the city, Nassau, casting a dull, whitish glow against the bruise-colored sky. They had come over three hundred miles as if chained in darkness, a middle passage, and the sight of so many of humanity’s lights at once was a sharp, confusing blow to them that left them stunned, for they had come to believe that, except for the six men on the boat, there was no one else left in the world. Now they looked out and saw high, rectangular hotels on Cable Beach a half mile away, glittery casinos, crowded restaurants, strings of streetlights, beacons blinking off North Cay at the entrance to the harbor, a jet plane taking off from the airport inland, banking southwest and disappearing, small boats and yachts
passing slowly out of the harbor, and there ahead of them, the city itself, with tall pink buildings, a green and white Holiday Inn and a half-dozen more hotels, with spotlights hidden among hibiscus and casuarina trees playing against the terrace windows while shadows of royal palms fluttered against brightly painted pink, yellow, white and blue walls.

They passed the large wharf and two Scandinavian cruise ships tied up there, sleek, white and huge, with strings of lights running up the masts and stacks like Christmas tree decorations, and slowly moved farther down the harbor, with Paradise Island off the portside, downtown Nassau off the starboard, where taxis cruised through Rawson Square, turned and headed out to the casinos or cross-island to the airport for late-night arrivals from London, New York and Miami.

It was as if Claude and Vanise had been carried to another planet than the one they had known, and they stood silent and awestruck, crowded with the other Haitians into the aft cabin, where the captain had told them to stay. The three Haitian men ignored Claude and Vanise now, treated them as if they had never seen the boy and the woman before and were not in the slightest interested in or even curious about them.

The captain had instructed the Haitian with the pipe to explain to the others that they should all stay low inside the cabin until the boat was tied up, and then, when it was clear that no one was watching, they were simply to walk off the boat one by one, to move down the pier and away. No one would stop them, he said, not at this hour, if they walked quickly and seemed to know where they were going. Every one of them, including Claude and Vanise, had been listed as crew members, he said. The harbormaster wouldn’t check for them until morning, if he checked at all.
Dese Bahamians, mon, him don’t care where you go, long’s you not standin’ next to him when him look for you. The captain laughed and walked
forward, while the white man steered from the bridge and brought the boat safely around and put
her with silent ease into a slip on the dark side of a small pier next to a pair of low turtle boats.

There was a moment of confusion and some heat, while the three Haitian men argued over who would leave the boat first, but the man with the pipe, called Jules by the others, prevailed. The youngest of the three would go first, then the next youngest, and finally Jules himself. They would meet on the street, he said, and he would lead them on the journey across the island to his cousin in Elizabeth Town. He glanced at a hand-drawn map, apparently sent to him by the cousin, and said he was sure Elizabeth Town was on the outskirts of Nassau and they would be able to arrive there before sunrise. He carefully folded the map and put it in his shirt pocket.

We will follow you, Claude announced.

The men turned and looked at him with mild surprise. No, you can’t do that, Jules said evenly. There would be five of us then and a baby, he said, and the police will want to know right away who we are. It’s bad enough we have three to travel together. And until we are outside the city, he instructed the other men, we should walk separately. That way, if one of us is captured, it will be too bad, but it will only be one of us. But you two, Jules said to Claude and Vanise, you and the infant, you’re on your own now. We don’t know you.

Claude said nothing. The boat bumped softly against a pair of old truck tires tied to the pier, and the Inaguan leaped out at the bow and tied the boat to a bollard there, then ran to the stern and tied her to another. The first Haitian stepped from the cabin and in seconds had strolled nonchalantly down the length of the low pier, passed through a chain-link gate at the end and down an alley beyond, until he disappeared behind a squat gray cinder-block storage building. They saw a car splash by on the street where he had disappeared, and a second later, the second Haitian left the boat. When he, too, had disappeared, Jules left.

What should we do? Vanise asked.

Follow them.

But you heard …

No matter. We’ll follow them. We can’t stay here, he said.

Our clothes, Vanise said, looking suddenly confused. Our bundle, it’s down there. We left it down there.

No matter. It’s better not to carry anything. Like them. Come, he said, grabbing her hand. Come! and he pulled her from the cabin, over the rail to the pier and quickly away from the boat, where the captain stood in the bow, hands on hips, watching.

The white man came forward and joined him. It’s pathetic, ain’t it? He flipped his long hair away from his face and lit a cigarette.

The captain nodded.
Dem Haitians, mon, dem worse’n Jamaicans. Live like dogs, mon. Tou cyan deal wid ’em like dey was normal people.

The white man smiled as if the captain had told a joke.
Ain’t that the fuckin’ truth, though.

It was late, after midnight, and the area around Bay Street and Rawson Square, downtown Nassau, was nearly deserted. Across the harbor on Paradise Island, however, and out along Cable Beach and east on Montague Bay, hotels and casinos were bustling with noise and bright lights as cars and blatting motorcycles pulled up and departed and sunburned white people laughed and danced, drank and gambled happily through the night.

The three Haitian men, Jules leading them by about a half block now, turned right at Bay Street and headed for the quiet, locked-up center of the city, past exclusive shops that hid behind iron grilles to Rawson Square, where the darkened straw market and Prince George Wharf were located. Taxis, like seabirds, swept in along Bay Street to the square, looped toward the harbor and discharged half-drunk ladies and gentlemen beside the Scandinavian cruise ships, then hurried back out to the hotels and casinos for more.

Claude, as he and Vanise came off the pier onto Bay Street,
caught sight of the last of the three men. There! he said, and he started walking quickly, pulling Vanise along behind. At the square, Jules turned left down a quiet side street and walked casually, as if heading home from a long day’s work at the straw market, past the post office and courthouse. Palm trees shuddered overhead in the light offshore breeze, and the narrow, wet street below, shiny as polished ebony from the recent rain, reflected back streetlights and lamplit second-story windows.

Then Jules was leading them uphill, away from the harbor and the downtown area, around Shirley to East Street, with the top of the hill and a water tower in the east silhouetted against a pale, peach-colored glow from Montague Bay and the Fort Montague Hotel beyond, past old pink limestone houses shuttered against the night, until at last, beyond the city, Claude and Vanise were sweating from the effort of keeping up, out of breath, and then—as the street became a darkened road leading south from Nassau and as one by one the Haitian men ahead of them disappeared into the gloom—they grew frightened again, alone in darkness, lost.

They stopped. Behind them were the lights and streets of Nassau, the hill outlined sharply against the sky, the water tower, the harbor, boats moving in and out; ahead of them, a soft, enveloping darkness that had swallowed the three Haitian men whole and was now about to swallow Claude, Vanise and Charles as well. They could feel the rough limestone road beneath their feet, but did it narrow to a pathway, did it suddenly loop to the left or right, was there a cliff at the edge of the road, a wall, a prickly hedgerow? The sky was clouded over here, remnants of the squall that had passed over them at sea; there was no moonlight, no stars.

Charles squirmed in his mother’s arms and whimpered.

Shut up, Claude whispered, and Vanise stroked the baby’s face and soothed him.

Claude could hear the men now, could hear their hard shoes crunch against the roadway and their low, melodious voices as they spoke to one another and now and then lightly laughed. He took hold
of his aunt’s sleeve and led her as if she were a stubborn child. Don’t be scared, Vanise, he said in a low voice.
Les Invisibles
are with us, always, everywhere. Even here.