Russell Banks - Continental Drift

Claude groped his way over the bags and found a spot toward the bow where, after shoving several of the heavy sacks aside, he made a space for them to lie together. Come! he called to Vanise. Here’s a more comfortable place. He returned to where he had left her and the baby, reached out in the darkness until he felt her shoulder, took her hand and led her forward. He placed the bundle against the wooden hull and patted it with his hand. Lie down with your head here. It’s nice, he said, to listen to the water against the boat and be safe and dry inside. He moved his long legs over, made room for Vanise and the baby on his left, and stretched out in the darkness, his hands behind his head, as if waiting cheerfully for sleep.

He did not want to think about where they were going, as he had no name for the place, nor did Vanise. They knew it was not America, not Florida, not Miami, and they knew it was not back to Haiti, where, no doubt, Victor was still rounding up people desperate and frightened enough to ignore the rumors that he seldom took people all the way to America and instead dropped them off on the deserted beaches of small islands in the Bahamas. Sometimes Victor did take people all the way to America, however, and sometimes the people he dropped off in the Turks and Caicos or Inagua Islands managed after a year or two somehow to get to Florida on their own. Then one day a letter would come from America to a hill town in the north of Haiti, and Victor’s reputation as a savior would be renewed, so that often he’d find among his passengers a man he’d carried from Le Mole and dropped off in North Caicos the year before. It was never seen as Victor’s fault that the man had not got farther from Haiti than a beach fifty miles to the north. It was the fault of a baka, an evil spirit, or the fault of the passenger himself, who had not made his engagement a strong one or had failed to feed the loas adequately or had not obtained a proper garde or wanga from a proper houngan before coming down to Victor in Le Môle to arrange for the journey over the sea to America.

Claude had heard the name of the place they were going to, had heard the man Robbie promise it several times, but it was difficult to separate that word from the other words Robbie spoke and a struggle for Vanise and Claude just to understand that Robbie was going to help them escape from George McKissick, so they had come to concentrate on that, escaping, and to put the nature and name of the place they were going to, its distance from here, out of their minds. Wherever they went, they knew, the loas would be there, en has de l’eau. Wherever they went, there would be the island below the sea.

The chug of the engine from the stern, the slap of the water against the bow, the steady lift and fall of the boat and the quiet slosh of bilge water below the pallets lulled the boy, and he soon slept. Perhaps the baby Charles slept, perhaps Vanise slept, perhaps Claude slept for only a second or two, he could not say, for he woke suddenly and totally without having dreamed, when he heard far to the stern the squeak of the hatch cover being lifted, then heard it clunk shut again, and saw moving sheets and circles of light coming forward, heard a man grunt with the effort of climbing over the cargo, finally saw the man, the captain, heave himself forward, until he was kneeling next to them on their couch, his shadow large and wobbly against the dark planking of the hold, his face somber, disinterested, his small eyes looking only at Vanise. She had sat up and held her son in her arms and now looked down at the top of the baby’s head, as if searching for a place to send her spirit into his.

The fat man reached forward with his flashlight and nudged Claude, pushing him on the arm with the light. He spoke rapidly in a harsh whisper . Get now, bwoy, dis no place for you. Take dat pickney and get aft .

Claude did as he was told, gently took the baby from Vanise’s arms and moved quickly away, sliding over the wall of cargo into the shadows beyond, where he sat down and waited and listened to the sound of the man as he struggled with his trousers, listened to the man’s coarse breath as he yanked Vanise’s clothing away and his grunts as he pushed himself into her.

A few moments later, circles of light flashed against the hull and cargo, and the huge shadow of the fat man hove into view, and as the man passed Claude, he stopped a second and said to him, Don’t make no trouble for yourself now, bwoy . His voice was almost pleasant, advisory. Clause did not know what the words meant, however, and stared at the man’s large, bare feet.

Bwoy ! he shouted. Cyan unnerstan’ me, fuckin’ Haitians. Bwoy, just you don’t make no trouble, dat’s all. You can be whore too, y’ unnerstan’ . He reached forward and grabbed Claude’s skinny shoulder. G’wan forward dere wid sister , he snarled, and lumbered away, his flashlight beam spreading white light ahead of him in circular waves.

Claude hurried forward, the baby clinging to his hip with its legs, and once behind the wall of bags of sea salt, in darkness again, heard the fat man lift the hatch from below, heave his bulk up the ladder, then close it with a bang. The boy reached out until he felt one of Vanise’s ankles. He could hear her heavy, rasping breath, as if she had been chased by a huge, fierce animal and had barely escaped to this cavelike hiding place.

You’ll be all right again soon, he told her.

She asked for her baby, and he passed the child over. Then she asked him to find her headcloth, which she had lost.

He groped between the sacks and finally came to it and handed it to her. A few seconds later, she passed the crumpled cloth back and told him to soak it in the bilge water for her, which he did. In a few moments, he could hear the baby sucking, and Vanise’s breath had slowed and disappeared beneath the sound of the water against the hull and the engine aft, and the boy leaned back again, stretched out his legs and rested.

Sometime later, as in a dream, though it was not a dream, the slender, brown-skinned man and the white man with the long brown hair appeared in the hold together, the white man sending Claude and the baby aft with a gesture, then holding the flashlight on Vanise while the other man silently raped her. When it was the white man’s turn, he gave over the light, pulled down his trousers, said a few words in English that Claude overheard, Cunt , and, with irritation, Bloody Christ, just relax now, I ain’t gonna hurt ya, and after a while it was over, and the men had gone, once again dropping the Haitians into their pit of darkness, their cave, their black nest where the only sounds they heard were their own thoughts and the hammering of the engine and the slap of the low waves against the bow of the boat as it drove steadily west toward Great Inagua.

Back in Cockburn Harbour, when Vanise and Charles and Claude had first descended into the hold, day had gone clean away, and night now went away too, for there was only blackness, broken unpredictably, swiftly and absolutely by the men from above with their flashlight and few words and quick, violent moves that seemed to relax the men for a while, as if they were injecting themselves with a drug — the fat man, who, after the first time, came with a flask of clear rum in one hand and drank from it and gave it to Vanise to sip from when he was done with her, and the slender brown man, who came to the hold alone now and tried talking to Vanise and then got angry because she would not respond, so he slapped her, and the young white man, not much older than a boy, but hairy across his chest and shoulders, his stringy long arms and legs casting wild shadows when he took the woman, as if he were beating her. When the men were down in the hold, their flashlight shattering the darkness, the place seemed tiny, cramped, closed in upon the human beings, as if they were under a huge house; but when the men had gone and had taken their light away with them, the place seemed to open up and grow enormous, like a black tent. And with both day and night gone, all of time was gone, too, except for the scratchy, mechanical time that passed through whenever the men appeared, abrasive interruptions that Claude had begun to accept like a shift in dreams, his mind returning gratefully, as soon as the men were gone, to the sweet-flowing timeless dream of perpetual darkness — when suddenly the throb of the motor ceased, and the sound of the sea smacking the planks near his head diminished, and the steady lift and drop of the boat changed to a gentle, rocking motion.