Russell Banks - Continental Drift

As they enter the hospital lobby, half-lit and nearly deserted, Bob finds himself unexpectedly wishing that Elaine had never told him about her having slept with Avery. But then, he thinks, he would never have known who she was. It’s a terrible thing, to know someone else’s secrets, but it’s the only way you can know someone. It’s hard to say beforehand which is more to be avoided, knowing another person’s secrets or knowing no one at all.

The nurse at the information desk by the elevators says no. They cannot go up to the maternity ward at this hour. And no, they cannot go to the nursery and see Mr. Dubois’s son. Avery smiles at the gray-faced woman, lightly touches her shoulder, which she retrieves swiftly. He tells her how far he’s come, that he’s the baby’s godfather, but no, it’s still no.

“Forget it, Ave,” Bob says, and turns away. “We’ll come over first thing in the morning. I’m not ready tonight to tell her about the job anyhow. You know, about quitting Eddie and all. I hafta figure out how to tell her the bad news,” he says, scuffling along, head down, hands in pockets.

Avery comes up behind him and drapes one long arm over his friend’s shoulders. “Look, Bob,” he says, “why don’t we come in together tomorrow morning real early, and we’ll go take a look at your new son and make sure he looks like you and not the milkman, right?”

“Yeah, right.”

“Okay. And then we’ll go visit your lovely young wife, and instead of giving her some bad news, let’s give her some good news.”

“Yeah, sure. Like what?”

“Okay. Here’s the deal. Tell her you’re gonna work with me, down in the Keys. Tell her you’re gonna run Belinda Blue for me.”

They stop walking and face each other. “You serious?” Bob says, too surprised by the idea to know if it’s a good one.

“Sure, I’m serious. I didn’t think of it till a minute ago, but that doesn’t mean I’m not serious. I’ll go ahead and buy this Tiara 2700 I’ve been looking at all summer, and I’ll run that, while you run ol’ Blue. Actually, if you want, you can buy into her, and we’ll split whatever profits she makes. That’s probably the best way to go. You buy into her, and we split according to how much you own. Fifty fifty, seventy-five twenty-five, or whatever you can afford. Deal?”

“Oh, God,” Bob says, “I got to think about this. I got to think about it. It’s really a sudden development, you know. I mean, it’s a hell of a long ways from where I was a year ago, you know. I got to think on it.”

They walk slowly across the parking lot toward Avery’s van, passing in and out of pale circles of light, two tall young men, dear friends, as close as brothers, as close as lovers, and neither. Avery’s arm is flung over Bob’s shoulder, and as they walk he explains exactly how Bob’s moving to Moray Key and running the Belinda Blue will not only save his life and the lives of his wife and three children, but will turn out to be the best time the two of them, he and Bob, will have had since they were kids.

“Yeah,” Bob says.

“And not only that,” Avery says. “We’ll get rich.”

“Yeah.”

1

The captain was roan-colored, bald and heavy-lidded, almost Japanese -looking, and he wasn’t so much fat as round, round-headed, thick-necked, with a wide, hard chest and belly, powerful arms, large, cruel hands and feet. He stood on the foredeck in a dark green tee shirt and floppy, stained chinos and bare feet, staring at Vanise and the boy and baby as if they were merely three unexpected, additional bits of cargo. They had stepped from behind a batch of empty oil barrels on the pier and had quickly come aboard with the man named Robbie, who had brought them across from McKissick’s farm on North Caicos. Robbie’s price for his service was easily paid. In exchange for negotiating with the captain of the Kattina , a patched and leaking prewar island freighter, and bringing Vanise, Charles and Claude Dorsinville over from North Caicos in an open fishing dinghy borrowed from his cousin, Robbie wanted only the Haitians’ absence from George McKissick’s farm. He wanted his old job back, and he wanted McKissick angry. The absence of the Haitians obtained both.

Vanise did not ask Robbie how she would pay the captain of the Kattina , nor did either man bring the subject up. All Robbie had said was, Doan you worry none, gal, me take care of everyt’ing. Dis mon, him a fren of mine an’ long time now him owe me a payback . Then one sun-baked afternoon in October, Robbie had simply appeared at McKissick’s farm, had told her to pack her clothes in a bag and come along with him, and Vanise, with the baby in her arms, and Claude, who carried in a bundle their few clothes and some food stolen from McKissick’s kitchen, had followed Robbie across the corn fields through the palmettos and sea grapes down to the beach, where they saw the dinghy. They climbed into the boat, Robbie pushed it out, jumped in and started the motor, and in minutes they were beyond the reef and headed across the channel toward South Caicos, which they reached by nightfall, tying up in the slip next to the Kattina in Cockburn Harbour.

The fat man said nothing to her when she and the children came aboard, looked at them as if measuring how much salt they’d displace in the hold, turned and walked to the stern, where he leaned back against the rail, crossed his meaty arms over his chest and stared down at the engine and a man who was bent over, working with a wrench. The man looked up, and Vanise saw that he was a white man, shirtless and oil-stained, with long brown hair that he flipped away from his face with a toss of his head. Then a slender young brown man emerged from the cabin near the bow and strolled by her to the others in the stern, and the three men talked for a few seconds in English.

Abruptly, the white man swung himself onto the deck and closed the hatch on the engine, and the captain came forward to Vanise, steered her toward a hatch, opened it and waved her down the ladder that led into the darkness below. G’wan now, get down dere , he growled. He pushed them with one hand and held the hatch open with the other until they had descended and got their footing and saw that the hold was nearly filled with sacks of salt stacked on pallets, with water sloshing below the pallets. Then he closed the hatch, and they were surrounded by darkness, as if buried.

She heard the engine turn over and catch, heard the men walk and talk abovedecks, and suddenly the boat was moving, drifting languidly. The engine chunked into gear, and the motion of the boat shifted and became purposeful, and she knew they were moving away from the pier and the village, away from the Turks and Caicos islands, away from George McKissick and his farm, his drunken belligerence and his threats to turn them over to the police, away from his sudden visits to her mat in the tiny shack behind his house, away from the long, lonely months of hard work in the sun planting and tending McKissick’s corn fields and garden, cleaning his house, cooking his food, listening to his rambling, drunken speeches in English that she could understand only by ignoring the words and listening to the sounds as if they were of the wind and water, watching his face as if it were clouds on the horizon.

The boy said, We have to stay down here so the police won’t see us. He rarely asked questions now; it seemed to him that the baby Charles would soon be the one to ask questions. Claude knew that he was a boy rapidly becoming a man and so must learn to provide answers. Also, since coming to North Caicos, he had learned to see his aunt in a different light, for though she was, to him, clearly a serviteur and possessed a surprising knowledge of the loas and had on several occasions in his presence been mounted by Agwé, her mait’-tête , so that he suspected she had become under his mother’s tutelage a hounci canzo, an initiate, he nevertheless saw her sadness now and knew that when she was silent and seemed to be looking inside herself, as she did with increasing frequency, she was not thinking of anything. She was like an animal resting. And so, instead of asking questions, he had recently taken to making statements about the world, to which her habit was to nod agreement, as if she herself knew nothing of the world.