Russell Banks - Continental Drift

Bob races alongside the counter and darts across to the back of the store next to the open stockroom door, where he presses against the wall and listens to Cornrow on the other side struggling in the dark to escape, bumping walls, smacking against head-high stacks of beer, knocking over George Dill’s broom, panting, pushing, groping for an opening in the unpainted cinder-block wall, until, finally, there’s silence. Then Bob hears it. First a whimper, then the awful bawl of a child. And he smells it. Human shit.

He steps through the doorway, flicks on the overhead light and sees the shuddering boy huddled on the floor against the far wall, inches from the back door. The boy looks up, eyes wet, large mouth loosely open, his whole body trembling in terror. He looks around him and sees how close he is to the door, sees that one push on the crash bar would open it. Escape. Freedom. Gone from him now. “Don’t kill me, please don’t kill me!” he blubbers. “Let me go, please let me go! I didn’t do nothin’, honest. Please, mister, don’t kill me!”

Bob holds the gun out in front of him with both hands and aims it at the boy’s head. “You black sonofabitch. I oughta blow you away.”

“Aw-w-w!” the kid bawls.

“You’re disgusting.” Bob lowers the gun. He wrinkles his nose. “You stink like shit too.” He takes a step backwards. “Whew! Jesus H. Christ! You just lie there, shitpants. Lie there and stink. I don’t want your smell near me. And don’t move a muscle, or I’ll blow your fucking brains out. I’ll do you the same favor you wanted to do me.”

Slowly, Bob backs out to the counter and picks up the telephone, and laying the gun flat on the counter, punches the number for the police. “This’s Bob Dubois out at Friendly Spirits on Route 17,” he declares. “D- u-b-o-i-s . Yeah, Dubois. Spelled like that. I know, I know. Yeah, listen, I just shot a guy trying to rob the place. Friendly Spirits. Route 17. Yeah, and I got his buddy too. Got ’im right here. No, no, just one of ’em, the other guy shit his pants. Yeah. The other guy? I don’t know, I might’ve killed the guy. Yeah, Friendly Spirits. On Route 17, opposite the housing project south of the base.”

Hanging up the telephone, Bob walks with a bouncy step back to the stockroom, and when he enters the room, he sees at once that the back door lies wide open, and the boy has fled. Bob stands there, shocked, looking at the wet spot against the wall where the boy lay, then at the open door, then at the parking lot beyond.

Exhaling slowly, he suddenly, and to his surprise, feels relieved, and when he looks down at his hand and the heavy gun in it, discovers that he’s bleeding. His white short-sleeved shirt is spattered with blood, and the back of his neck and arms are laced with tiny glass cuts. They aren’t painful, but Bob knows that bits of glass are still embedded in his flesh, so he’s careful to avoid touching them.

When he checks on the man he shot, he sees immediately that the man is dead, shot twice, once in the shoulder and once in the mouth. The crumpled body lies like an island in a large, spreading puddle of blood. Suddenly nauseous, Bob jogs his way back through the store to the stockroom, then out the open door to the parking lot, where he glances at the robbers’ car, a dull, pale blue Dodge Charger with battered New York plates, and vomits onto the asphalt.

When the police arrive, he is seated cross-legged on the counter next to the cash register with his gun laid beside him, feeling giddy and swilling on a bottle of Dewar’s while light skeins of blood run down his back and arms.

The young Haitian woman, with her infant in her arms and her adolescent nephew standing beside her, watches the sea behind them slowly swallow the Haitian hills. The small, crowded boat plows northward through a choppy, slate-blue sea, toward America, Vanise believes, toward Florida, where everything will be different, where nothing except the part of her that’s inside her skull will be the same, and gradually even that will change. First the village of Le Mole at the base of the green hills is devoured, then the low slopes checkered with cane fields and coconut palms go under, gone to where the dead abide, and at last the familiar dark green hills succumb. There is no known place peering back at her from the horizon, and now she faces only a point on the compass, an abstraction called south, Adonai, that refuses to speak to her in any voice but her own.

This is a new kind of silence for Vanise, one that frightens her, and she begins to chatter at the boy, Claude, scolding him for having stolen the ham from the wrecked truck, pointing out his stupidity in having brought it back to the cabin in Allanche, his deceit in not telling them immediately where he found the ham, before they had eaten at it, so that he could have put it back uneaten before anyone discovered that it and the rest of the meat had been stolen and Aubin came looking for him, and not finding him there would punish his mother and her and her baby, unless Aubin did find him there, in which case Aubin would have taken him off to jail. We would still be at home in Allanche, she reminds him, cooking a chicken and yams on the fire, if you were a good boy. You would have your mother, and we would all have each other, if you were not a thief.

The boy looks down at the rising and falling deck. Slowly he turns away from the south and faces north. Yes, he says, but now we are going to America.

Vanise feels the weight of a huge, swelling stone in her belly. She sighs, turns away from the southern horizon to the north and starts waiting for the sight of America rising from the sea.

For centuries, men and women have sailed this passage north of Hispaniola waiting for the sight of one idea or another rising all aglitter with tangible substance from the turquoise sea. Columbus approaches from the east in search of Cathay, and Ponce de Leon cruises north from Puerto Rico looking for the fabled Bimini, and now comes Vanise, huddled by the low rail in the bow of a small wooden fishing boat out of Haiti, scouring the horizon for a glimpse of America. None of them is lost. All three know they’ll recognize the substance of their idea as soon as they see it, Columbus his Cathay, Ponce his Bimini, Vanise her Florida.

And so they do. Columbus, with a globe in his mind half the size of Ptolemy’s, knows at once that he has reached the fringes of the Empire of the Grand Khan. Ponce, coming upon an island he believes has not been seen before, in his excitement brushes too close to the uncharted reef and has to beach his ship for repairs on the shore of what, for several days, he knows is the Island of the Miraculous Waters. And Vanise, sighting a finger of green land just before sundown blots it out, knows that she has seen Florida.

Columbus, of course, has merely reached part of an archipelago that extends from continents he does not know exist, an unbroken land mass emerging from ice in the north and ice in the south and creating an almost insuperable barrier between old Europe and old Cathay. Ponce has merely landed accidentally on a small, uncharted, brush-covered island where the Indians, though peaceful, will not come out and speak to him of Bimini while he waits for his men to repair the ship.

Vanise has come to North Caicos Island, an easy place to locate exactly. With a map in hand, you can sit at a table in a city in North America, and by marking a point at 21 degrees 55 minutes north, 72 degrees 0 minutes west, you can locate where the Haitians will land tonight. Or you can draw lines, 100 nautical miles north from Cap Haitien, 400 nautical miles south-southeast from Nassau, 575 nautical miles southeast from Miami and 150 nautical miles north-northeast from Guantanamo Naval Station in Cuba. The four lines will converge over North Caicos Island, where there are a few tiny villages, Kew, Whitby and Bottle Creek, a small hotel and miles of deserted white beaches.