Russell Banks - Continental Drift

No.

He won’t catch us. He’s busy in the bar now. I can hear him. Come, he said.

No.

Come!

No, she repeated, crossing her arms over her breasts.

Tempérament d’esclave , he cursed, and he swung himself over the windowsill and turned his long, skinny body against the side of the building, where he let himself hang by his hands, then let go. In seconds, he was gone.

Grabow was not angry or even disappointed that the boy had fled; he was relieved and only wished he’d taken the baby with him. But the baby kept the girl happy and busy, when she wasn’t fucking the men he sent upstairs to her room. The men, a few from the town but most of them from the fishing boats and yachts that tied up at the marina in Coral Harbour, just beyond the hook, paid Grabow for the girl’s services, and Grabow in return housed and fed and clothed the girl and her baby from his own stock and did not turn her over to the police, for which she seemed grateful. At least she did not resist or try to leave, which she easily could have done, just as the boy had. In fact, she could have left even more easily than Claude, for after a few weeks Grabow found it inconvenient to keep the door locked and have to let her out himself whenever she needed to go to the privy or had to wash herself or clean the baby. He soon allowed her to come down to the kitchen and feed herself and the child, allowed her to cook chickens and jerked pork and fish, Haitian style, with hot peppers and onions, for him and the bar customers, though he would not let her come out front or leave the building, except to go to the privy or to wash at the standpipe by the back door.

The room she lived in was bare and small, but not unpleasant, especially in the mornings, when sunlight streamed through the window and splashed across the painted gray floor and over the bed. She made up a bed for the baby in one of the dresser drawers and placed it in the corner of the room farthest from the window. Generally, when the men who visited her saw the baby asleep in the corner of the room, they lowered their voices and tried not to wake him, but sometimes they were drunk and noisy and even angry at the sight of the child in the room and complained of it afterwards downstairs to Grabow, so he took the dresser drawer out of the room and put it in a windowless storage room next door and made it clear to Vanise that she would have to keep the child there at night from now on.

The men who came to her, rarely more than one or two a night, were mostly seamen. They were fishermen and turtlers from the small open boats in Coral Harbour and sometimes Bahamian crewmen from the big charter boats, sometimes a Cuban or a Jamaican, and sometimes even a white man, an American, who came up the narrow stairs from the bar and spent an hour with her, fucking her and then trying to talk with her, which of course always failed, so they would often simply ramble on as if she understood.

A few of the men she liked, a short, round, chocolate-brown man who affected huge, winglike sideburns and operated the only taxi in town other than Grabow’s, and a Cuban, tall, skinny and black, who always brought Vanise a cold Heineken and seemed disappointed when the baby Charles got moved out to the storage room, and she liked a young Jamaican man who wore a carefully trimmed, very thick beard and finger-length dreadlocks, a man named Tyrone, who spoke some Creole and always rolled and smoked a cigarlike spliff of ganja before making love to her. She liked the smell of the ganja, perfumy and dry, and when he offered it to her, she accepted. It seemed to make the time with Tyrone a respite from the painful silence of her mind. For her mind, an utterly silent, burned-out charnel house by now, was filled with images of les Morts from the dark side, Ghede and Baron Cimitière, whose evil presence no longer frightened her, whose presence, in fact, she had begun to encourage and make welcome. She lay back in the dimly lit room over the shop and opened herself to these dark, malevolent spirits the same way she opened herself to the men she did not like, men who were dirty and quick and stunk of fish and rum and sweat, men who were drunk and half impotent, which made them irritable, men who fucked her in unusual ways, and now and then the man who slapped her until she wept and only then would he fuck her.

This last was Jimmy Grabow himself. It would be three or four in the morning, and the domino game downstairs would have broken up, the metal screen pulled down on the front of the shop, the lights turned off, and he would come trudging upstairs half-drunk and bumping against the sides of the walls in a way she recognized immediately. Then he’d come into her room and light the kerosene lantern on the small table next to the bed and stand over her, while she pretended to sleep.

Wake up, gal. It was always the same on nights like this. He reached down and yanked the sheet off her and examined her as if angry at what he saw, a young woman in bra and panties, sitting up and drawing herself away from him, covering her breasts and crotch with her hands, her eyes watching his so that the first time he swung his heavy hand at her face she’d know before he swung it that it was coming and could move her head slightly so as to catch the blow at an angle instead of directly.

That oughta wake you up . He unbuckled his pants and stripped them off, took off his shoes and shirt, and stood there a second, again as if angry with her. His penis hung limply between his legs. Then he hit her a second time, and her eyes filled with water from the force of the blow. A third time he hit her, and a fourth and fifth, back and forth, until at last she began to weep, and suddenly his penis was erect and Grabow was panting with excitement and from the effort of slapping the girl, and then he would come forward onto her and force his way into her.

Afterwards, in silence, he left the room, and she heard him lunging back down the stairs to the room next to the kitchen, where he slept. The next morning, he whistled cheerfully downstairs and throughout the day was kindly toward her, smiling that horse-toothed smile, chucking the baby under the chin with approval as she passed through the kitchen to the privy in the backyard.

Someday, gal , he said to her when she returned to the kitchen and started to prepare breakfast for the three of them, someday you gonna hafta get shipped back to Haiti. Bound to come. Everybody know you here, gal. So you better enjoy yourself while you can, get yourself fattened up now, while you can.

Shirtless, barefoot, a machete in one hand, a plastic water jug in the other, Claude peered into the low thatch lean-to where the old man lay at the back, sleeping on a rumpled blanket. They were deep in the Barrens, west of the airport and east of the golf course at Simms Point. The old man wore a dirty undershirt, shiny black gabardine trousers, and was barefoot. His empty rum bottle lay at his side, the cap scattered and lost somewhere in the lean-to among cook pots, a transistor radio, an old Playboy and the various hoes and rakes they used to plant and tend the marijuana plants and the plastic garbage bags they used to package it.

As Claude ducked and entered the shady lean-to, the old man stirred, groped automatically for his bottle, and lifting it, realized it was empty and woke. Bastard, he said. You finished my rum.

Claude sat down cross-legged in a corner of the hut and laid the machete carefully from knee to knee. He was growing weary of these attacks by the old man, but in the end, despite their both being Haitian, they had little else to talk about. They couldn’t talk about the Chinaman’s marijuana crop — Claude was a farmboy, young, sober and intelligent, and knew how to tend, harvest and guard the plants; the old man, an assistant tailor, drunk all the time and stupid, knew nothing of farming. And they couldn’t talk about Haiti, because the old man had come twelve years ago from where Claude had never been, a small town outside Port-au-Prince, and Claude, from Allanche in the north, had come from where the old man had never been. And they couldn’t talk about Nassau and the island of New Providence, for everything about the place that interested him — its geography, people, economics — Claude had learned in a matter of weeks, and the old man in twelve years had not learned one-half as much. As for the Chinaman, upon whose special needs and goodwill and trust Claude now depended, and the Haitian community, which Claude had penetrated the morning he fled from Grabow’s shop and returned to the door that Jules and the others had entered before him, and the Bahamian police, who, Claude now believed, would not bother him if nothing drew their attention to him, and the Bahamians in general, who seemed to have a fondness for Haitians, whom they saw as childlike in their honesty and exploitable in their need — about these, the old man had nothing to say that was of use to Claude. It does happen that sometimes the old have nothing to teach the young, except by sad example. The old man could not even tell Claude anything useful about how to get to America. He himself did not want to go to America. It’s all white people there, he had said, and they hate the blacks, and their own blacks hate all the other blacks. Their police will arrest you and put you in jail until they send you back to jail in Haiti. The Americans have an arrangement with Papa Doc …