Continental Drift (48 page)

By the same token—his intelligence and worldliness—Bob is unable to attribute to the Haitians’ poverty what he perceives as their wisdom. In the past, certainly, he sometimes regarded poor people
through the cracked lens of liberal guilt, but that was before he discovered that he was a poor person himself and stopped envying the rich and started hating them. That was before he learned that what was wrong with the rich was not that they had something he wanted, but that they were unconscious, often deliberately so, of the power they wielded over the lives of others. His brother Eddie was rich for a while, and Bob envied him, until he himself suffered sufficiently from his brother’s unconsciousness to begin at last to hate him, so that when Eddie lost everything, Bob discovered he could love him again. If Bob had gone on envying his brother, if he’d never learned to hate the rich man he’d become, he would have been glad when the man lost his wealth.

Bob remembers the night he shot the black man in the liquor store, and the kid with the cornrows shitting his pants in the back room, and he shudders. The sun overhead is warm on his shoulders, and the tropical sea sparkles like the laughter of children at play, while up on the bridge, his hands clamped to the wheel of the
Belinda Blue,
Bob Dubois shudders as if an arctic wind has blown over him. He remembers the night he came close to shooting a man simply because the man had a haircut like that of one of the pair who tried to rob him, the night he turned the gun over to Eddie and walked out of Eddie’s house waiting to hear the sound of Eddie using the gun on himself, half of him wanting Eddie to use it on himself, the other half struggling to erase the thought altogether. I didn’t hate Eddie then, he thinks. I envied him. It was only later, on Moray Key, when it seemed to Bob that he was now truly poor, that he could begin to give up clinging to fantasies of becoming rich. Then, when it became clear to him that he has as much chance of becoming rich as he had of becoming Ted Williams, he gave up envying those he saw as rich. That’s what freed him, he believes, to love Eddie again the night he called in such fear and pain, a lost brother returned to him for only a few moments, but returned nonetheless, and for that Bob is grateful. What Eddie did to himself he did himself, but how much sadder for Bob it would have been if, when Eddie died, Bob had been glad of it.

To say that Bob Dubois is intelligent is to say that he is able to organize his experience into a coherent narrative; to say that he’s worldly is to say that he is in the world, that he does not devour it with his fantasies. Not anymore. These are relative qualities, of course, both of them depending on the breadth and depth of Bob’s experience, and depending, then, on accident, since Bob has no particular interest in, or need for, broadening or deepening his experience per se. He’s not an especially
curious
man. Mere psychological and moral survival will be enough for him to feel able to say, in the end, if he’s given a chance to say anything at all, that he’s lived his life well. He does not need, therefore, to poke into the mystery these Haitians present to him. What are they to him or he to them, except quick means to ends? They need him to carry them to where starvation and degradation are unlikely; he needs them to help him stay there.

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.