Russell Banks - Continental Drift

The last time he used this shed, George explains, he stored some marijuana for his brother-in-law, who made heaps of money off it and went to America and never paid him a shilling for his troubles. Ever since then, he’s kept the shed locked and empty, because every time he went near it, he got mad all over again. He figures if he lets the Haitians use it awhile, he’ll forget about his brother-in-law’s betrayal.

George points to their baskets, then inside the shed. Vanise understands, swings her baby onto her left arm and drags her basket into the darkness. Claude follows her example, and when they emerge they find George seated back on the stoop, his bottle in his lap, waving them over. Like obedient children, they go and stand before him.

He explains loudly and slowly what the arrangement will be, and though they do not understand a word of what he says, they know a bargain has been struck. In a few days, it will become clear to them that George will provide shelter and food for them, yams and corn meal, rice, chicken backs, sometimes pork and maybe fish, when he can get it cheap, and they will work for him, in the fields, house and yard, and when George drives home from town in his taxi, drunk, loud and angry at the world, he’ll stumble through the kitchen, grab his bottle and cross the backyard in the silvery moonlight to the henhouse, where he’ll swing open the door and enter. Pushing the boy off the mattress, moving the sleeping infant aside, he’ll yank down his trousers and make Vanise open up to him. The first time this happens, the boy will sit shivering all night on the stoop. After that, he will crawl into the man’s car and sleep on the back seat until daylight wakes him.

Vanise and Claude and the baby, whom they soon start to call Charles, will stay on the island of North Caicos hidden away like this for many months, before they have learned enough of George McKissick’s words to speak to the young man they replaced, Robbie, a thin, lazy brown man who comes around every week or so (more often after the morning he accidentally discovers Vanise in the yard) to make vain attempts to collect his pay.

Robbie is a kindly but stupid man, and it does not occur to him that this silent woman and boy are Haitians, until finally the boy speaks to him, asks in a halting, garbled way how to find a man with a boat to take them to America. To hurt McKissick, who now believes he will never have to pay Robbie for the work he did, and also to get his old job back, he will help them escape, he says, not to America, which is probably impossible to arrange without money, but straight to the Bahamas, where boats go all the time. There are plenty of small wooden cargo boats shipping salt for food, with captains not at all averse to carrying a pretty young Haitian woman belowdecks in a corner of the hold. If she must bring along her child and nephew, no matter. They can be shoved aside when necessary.

Columbus stayed on the island for only a few days, when, no longer afraid of being lost, certain of where he had landed, he departed for Cipangu, Japan, which “the Indians here call Cuba.” North Caicos itself became lost. The admiral’s landing and brief stay here went recorded as having occurred way to the north in the Bahamas, at Watling’s Island.

Ponce de León, after fourteen days ashore, set sail and headed north from Whitby, where a small stream parted the beach and entered the sea. Glad to be rid of the place, his head once again filled with visions of a new youth, a new life, a new old age, he quickly forgot the island. He would not even have marked it on his chart, had it not been for the reef on which his ship had foundered and were it not, therefore, a place to avoid.

1

Bob Dubois’s first call, after treatment at the Winter Haven Hospital overlooking lovely Lake Martha, is to his brother Eddie. It’s one thirty-five in the morning, he’s shot and killed a man, been rushed in a wailing ambulance through the night, had twenty-seven slivers of glass removed from his flesh and a pint of pink antiseptic daubed over half his torso, and now, in bloodstained shirt and pants, as he stands in the lobby of the emergency ward of the hospital, two car-crash victims hurtling past on rubber-wheeled stretchers, a drunken middle-aged black man with stab wounds in his bicep arguing with the nurse at the admitting desk, a white teenaged mother and pimply-faced father sitting warily in straight-backed chairs while their baby undergoes tests to determine the extent of internal damage caused by the beating they gave her, Bob calls his brother Eddie, and all Eddie wants to know is how the hell the other nigger got away.

“Whaddaya mean he ran out the back while you were calling the cops? Why didn’t you bring the bastard out front by the phone, just keep him covered?”

“Look, the kid shit his pants, he was so scared. He stunk. I didn’t want to get near him. I don’t know, I just didn’t think he had it in him to try anything, not after the way he was scared.”

“You shoulda shot the fucker in the knees. Then called the cops.”

“Christ, Eddie, he was only a kid. Maybe fifteen or so. I mean, for Christ’s sake, I was a little rattled, y’ know. What the hell do you want? I mean, I never shot a guy before. I never even got shot at before. I mean, the guy’s standing there with a fucking twenty-gauge aimed at my head. I’m lucky I’m alive. You woulda had a heart attack.”

“I woulda shot both niggers.”

Both men are silent for a few seconds. Then Eddie says, “Look, I’m sorry. It’s just that I hate those bastards. Fucking coons sit around taking welfare while we work our asses off, and then they come around with their fucking shotguns telling us to give ’em all our money. You know?”

“Yeah.”

“No, you did good, kid. I’m proud of ya. No shit. You swacked a nigger and saved the day’s take.”

“Well, I’d already made the deposit anyhow,” Bob explains. “There wasn’t any money there. The register was empty.”

Eddie doesn’t quite understand. What was Bob doing at the store, then, if he’d already made the deposit?

“I … well, I went out with someone, for a couple of drinks. Friend of mine. Then the transmission, the throw-out bearing, I think it is, got jammed. You know, like it does. So I went into the store to call Elaine or somebody to come get me.”

“Oh, yeah? You getting a little on the side, kid?”

“Oh, no, no, nothing like that. A friend of mine, guy I know.” He can’t use the story about the Budweiser salesman on Eddie.

“Sure, sure. I don’t give a shit you’re ripping off a piece of poon now and then. Just don’t do it on my time, okay? You get all the pussy you want on your own time, but I ain’t paying you to wet your dick, you know.”

“Yeah.”

“Who’s at the store right now?”

“Cops. State and local.”

“Okay, I’ll get right out there,” he says. “You, you go on home and get some sleep. I’ll see you in the morning. Is the place a mess?”

“Yeah. Lots of broken bottles. I got cut….”

“Okay, I’ll be there in the morning too. Don’t clean up until the insurance guys get there. You understand. It’s better for a big claim if the place looks like it got hit by a shit storm.”

They say goodbye and hang up, and for several minutes Bob stands by the phone trembling, as waves of rage, fatigue, horror and regret run through him, one hard upon the other, until he can no longer distinguish between them. He barely knows what part of the country he’s in, and he no longer remembers why he came here, why he left the place where he knew who he was, knew what he felt and why, knew how he felt about the people he lived with — his wife and children, his friends, his boss, his girlfriend, all of them living in the place where all the people were white and spoke the same kind of English and wanted the same things from life and knew more or less how to get them.