Russell Banks - Continental Drift

Claude could smell the sea, just over the low hill south of the village. A dog barked in the distance, then went suddenly silent. The wind shifted to the west, and Claude smelled oranges.

I’ll go and speak to them, Claude said. He passed Charles across to Vanise, led her out of the street to an alleyway between a pair of closed-up shops. Sit down here, he said, and rest.

She obeyed and sat down, tenderly arranging the sleeping child on her lap, while Claude crossed the street and walked to the cabin that the Haitians had entered.

He knocked, as Jules had done, and waited. After a moment, he knocked again. He heard movement inside, a chair scraping the floor, low male voices. He knocked again, sharply.

Who dat ? a man called from the other side. Claude recognized the voice, Jules’s, even though it spoke English.

C’est moi, he said.

Boy, you are a pest! Jules shouted in Creole. If you don’t go away now, I am going to come out there and beat you!

Got a machete here, boy! Claude heard the other man call. Chop you up!

A woman spoke rapidly and in a hushed voice to the men, and they answered, explaining, and then the woman groaned.

I am going to chop that little massisi to pieces, the man said, and Claude heard more chairs moving, feet clumping, men and women arguing. No, no, Raymond, he will leave soon. He will leave, or the police will catch him before morning. He is only a poor country boy, and the police will catch him and send him back, if we just ignore him.

They were silent then. Claude stood before the closed door, tried the latch and pushed, but it was bolted or barred from inside. Suddenly, he smelled oranges again, they were eating them inside the house, and the boy realized that he was very hungry.

He turned and crossed the lane and walked past the shacks and huts to where he’d left Vanise. When he came around the corner of the building next to the alley, one of the few two-story structures in the village, he saw that Vanise, sitting cross-legged on the sandy ground with the child sprawled in her lap, had fallen fast asleep. Her head lay back against the side of the cinder-block building, and she looked beautiful and familiar to the boy, and for the first time in many days, he thought of his mother in Allanche and his sisters and their cabin on the ridge above the sea. Even when he and Vanise and Charles had been suffering on the boat, with the men coming down into the hold to rape them, with the rats and filth and terrible stench and heat, he had not thought of his mother and sisters and the place where he had lived his whole life, for he had been ashamed and afraid and did not want to think of his mother’s face when he felt that way. Now, however, he had gone beyond shame and fear, which he did not understand, but he knew that he would never be ashamed again, nor would he ever be afraid again. And so he thought freely about his mother, imagined her dark brown face, her large, wet eyes, her smell, the smooth skin of her hands. He heard her voice, heard her sing his sisters to sleep, Bon jour, mes infants, bon jour … and he thought he heard her say to him, Oh, my poor son, how you have suffered, and how hungry you must be. Here, let me feed you, let me prepare a meal for you, my poor son. Let me comfort you.

3

In the villages of the English-speaking Caribbean, the businesses called shops are often owned and operated by middle-aged men who are entrepreneurial dreamers, men who, with a great deal of energy, diligence, gregariousness, and with a little financial acumen, combine under the roof of one small house several different business ventures — a neighborhood grocery store, pub, dry goods establishment, hardware store, taxi service, tourist guide service, restaurant, juke joint, and so on. They also sometimes venture into backroom gambling and upstairs prostitution and have been known to invest, in a small, safe way, in locally controlled real estate development, smuggling and drugs.

It was such a man as this, Jimmy Grabow, and not the local constabulary, who caught Claude and Vanise and her baby Charles asleep in the alley next to his shop, and when he discovered they were Haitians, which he did when, by poking them with his foot, he woke them and heard them speak, he did not turn them over to the town’s one police officer, who had nothing to do that day anyhow and would have welcomed the opportunity to drive to Nassau to turn the illegal aliens over the immigration office. Instead, Grabow smiled broadly, warmly, even, and took the Haitians into his shop and out back to the tiny kitchen, where he fed them leftover jerked pork and rice and beans, gave them Coca-Colas from the cooler, imported biscuits and jam, and even offered them a fresh pack of Craven A cigarettes from the rack behind the bar, which Vanise declined and Claude accepted.

Grabow was a short, compact man with light brown skin. He had excellent teeth, large as a horse’s and white, of which he was justifiably proud, and when he smiled, he pulled his lips back and showed his teeth off. He smiled often, talked rapidly and volubly and enjoyed touching people while he rattled away at them, enjoyed putting his hands on whomever he talked to, his arms around shoulders, his hands on cheeks, arms, chests, so that most people, when they left the shop, reached for their wallet, and finding it, wondered what Grabow had taken from them, for always, after talking with Grabow, one felt that somehow he’d managed to take away something that wasn’t rightfully his.

When Grabow had led Claude and Vanise and the baby to a small room upstairs and had left them there, Claude felt this way too, felt it more strongly, perhaps, then others might, because he did not understand more than a few words of what Grabow had said to him and his aunt and therefore had paid particularly close attention to the man’s inflection and his facial gestures and physical mannerisms. And when the boy asked himself what the Bahamian had taken away from them, he concluded that he had taken what little freedom remained in their possession, that scrap of freedom they’d obtained when they stepped off the Kattina in Nassau. In exchange, they had been given a meal and a pack of cigarettes, Claude knew that much, and now, apparently, they had been given shelter also.

We should leave here now, Claude said. He stood by the curtainless window and looked down on the backyard of the place, where he saw a battered old white Toyota van, odd piles of sand and cinder blocks, an outhouse, several chickens scratching in the packed dirt, and a large sleeping pig like a long gray boulder in the shade of a scrawny breadfruit tree. Beyond the yard was the ramshackle backside of the shantytown, where Jules and his friends were now, and beyond that a field of rough, dry, slowly rising ground, pocked and rocky, with small patches here and there of withered corn stalks and pole beans.

Vanise sat on the narrow bed in the corner of the room and placed the baby on the floor, where he crawled eagerly around the foot of the bed and stood, one hand clinging to the rail at the end, the other reaching for the dresser just beyond. He seemed happy for the first time since they had left North Caicos, free, finally, of his mother’s and his cousin’s arms, to move about a room, to touch and measure things with his fat hands, to test his recently discovered ability to stand.

They argued, Claude and Vanise. She would not leave. You go if you want to, she said, but Charles and I will not.

No. We should be together, but we must leave now. This man is bad, a gros neg .

Claude walked to the door, turned the knob and pulled. It wouldn’t open. The bastard locked the door, he whispered. You see ?

No, she said. Now you see .

He returned to the window and looked down again. I can jump to the ground, it’s not far. Then you can drop Charles to me, and I’ll catch him, and then you can jump down too.