Russell Banks: Continental Drift

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.