Russell Banks - Continental Drift

The boy smiles, shrugs, nods yes, then no, then yes again.

“C’mon, kid, you want to ride up on the bridge?” Bob stands and puts his cap on and waves for the boy to follow. Claude slides forward and stands next to him, and when Bob climbs up to the bridge, he climbs up also.

Tyrone studies the pair for a second, shrugs and hands the wheel over to Bob and descends without a word. At the bottom, he turns and calls, “Gulf Stream coming up! Got to keep track or you’ll move north wid it!”

“I know, I know,” Bob says, and he peers out ahead, searching for the Stream, the green river that flows from Mexico to Newfoundland and east to Europe with the force and clarity of a great river draining half a continent. As you enter it, the color of the water changes abruptly from dark blue to deep green, and the current drags you north at up to ten knots an hour if you do not compensate for it.

Claude stands next to Bob, and pointing out across the bow, says, “America?”

Bob nods. He’s spotted the rich green streak ahead near the horizon, and he cuts the boat a few degrees to port so that she’ll enter the Stream at more of an angle, bringing them out, he expects, a half-dozen miles south of Key Biscayne sometime before midnight. “Yep, just over the next hill. Land of the free and home of the brave. You probably think the streets are paved with gold, right?”

The boy looks up, not understanding. “Monsieur?”

Bob says nothing but smiles down at the boy, who has gone quickly back to searching for America. Like me, Bob thinks. Like my father and Eddie too, and like my kids, even poor little Robbie, who’ll be as big as this kid is before I know it — like all of us up in our crow’s nests keeping our eyes peeled for the Statue of Liberty or the first glint off those gold-paved streets. America! Land, ho! Only, like Columbus and all those guys looking for the Fountain of Youth, when you finally get to America, you get something else. You get Disney World and land deals and fast-moving high-interest bank loans, and if you don’t get the hell out of the way, they’ll knock you down, cut you up with a harrow and plow you under, so they can throw some condos up on top of you or maybe a parking lot or maybe an orange grove.

Bob looks down at the boy’s black profile, and he thinks, You’ll get to America, all right, kid, and maybe, just like me, you’ll get what you want. Whatever that is. But you’ll have to give something away for it, if you haven’t already. And when you get what you want, it’ll turn out to be not what you wanted after all, because it’ll always be worth less than what you gave away for it. In the land of the free, nothing’s free.

The sun has yellowed and is nearing the horizon. Flattened like a waxy smear, it descends through scraps of clouds to the sea. The breeze off the portside is cool now, and the waves have grown to a high chop that causes the boat to pitch and yaw slightly as she plows on toward the west. Up on the bridge, Bob wonders what this Haitian boy will have to give away in order to get what he wants, what he may have already given away. It’s never a fair exchange, he thinks, never an even swap. When I was this kid’s age, all I wanted was to be right where I am now, running a boat from the Bahamas into the Gulf Stream as the sun sets in the west, just like the magazine picture Ave carried around in his wallet. So here I am. Only it’s not me anymore.

“You want to take the wheel?” he asks the boy. Bob stands away and waves the boy over. Shyly, the lad moves up and places his hands on the wheel, and Bob smiles. “You look good, son! A real captain.” The boy lets a smile creep over his lips. “Here,” Bob says. “You need a captain’s hat,” and he removes his hat and sets it on the boy’s head, much smaller than Bob’s, so that the hat droops over his ears and makes him look like a child, pathetic and sad.

“Steady as she goes, son,” Bob says. The boy nods, as if following orders. The sky in the west flows toward the horizon in streaks of orange and plum, and the sea below has turned purple and gray, with a great, long puddle of rose from the setting sun spilling over the waves toward them. Behind them, the eastern sky has deepened to a silvery blue, and stacks of cumulus clouds rise from the sea, signaling tomorrow’s weather.

Their first sight of land is the flash of the lighthouse below Boca Raton, which tells them that the Belinda Blue has come out of the Gulf Stream farther to the north then they intended, miles from where they planned to drop off the Haitians and so far from Moray Key that they can’t hope to get home before dawn. Tyrone grumbles and blames Bob, who blames the southeast wind and his not being used to running the Belinda Blue with so much weight aboard.

It’s dark, thickly overcast this close to shore, and the sea is high. The boat rides the swells, and when she crests, they can see the beach stretching unbroken from the pink glow of Miami in the south to the lights of Fort Lauderdale in the north. Then, when the boat slides down into the belly between the huge waves, they see nothing but a dark wall of water and a thin strip of sky overhead.

Frightened, the Haitians have crawled aft from their lean-to, and peer wide-eyed at the sea. The pitch and roll of the boat tosses them against one another, and several of them begin to cross themselves and pray. The old woman, hiding behind the others, has started to sing, a high-pitched chanting song that repeats itself over and over. The boy Claude is still up on the bridge with Bob, where Tyrone has joined them. Claude, too, is frightened, but he watches the white man’s face closely, as if using it to guide his own emotions. Right now, the white man, who is at the wheel, seems angry with his mate, and the mate seems angry also, for they are scowling and shouting at one another in the wind.

“For Christ’s sake, we drop them off at Hollywood or Lauderdale now, they won’t know where the hell they are! They’ll get busted in an hour. They’ll stick out like sore thumbs, for Christ’s sake! If we take them down to Coral Gables, like we said we’d do, they’ll get to cover in Little Haiti right away.”

“Too far, Bob! Dem too heavy in dis sea, mon! Got to leave ’em up here, let ’em find dere own way!”

Bob argues a little longer, but he knows the man is right. “All right. Hollywood, then. Be midnight by then, we can drop them by the A-One-A bridge at Bal Harbour. The water’s calm there once you get around the point. Christ only knows how they’ll get down to Miami from there, though.”

“Not our problem, Bob.”

“Go down and talk to them,” Bob says to Tyrone. “Tell them what’s happening, you know? Maybe one of ’em’s got family or something can come out with a car. Who knows? At least let ’em know where they’re going to get dropped off. Draw a map or something for ’em.

Tyrone shrugs his shoulders and turns away. “Don’t make no never mind to dem, mon. Long’s dem in America.”

“Yeah, sure, but do it anyway.” Bob brings the boat around to port, facing her into the waves, and moves the throttle forward. The boat dips and slides down and hits the gully, yaws into the sea and starts to climb again. Tyrone motions for Claude to follow, and the two of them start down from the bridge. When the boat reaches the crest and hangs there for a second before beginning the descent again, Bob looks off to his starboard side and sees the beach like a taut, thin white ribbon and believes that he can hear the waves crashing not a half mile distant. Beyond the beach he can see the lights of houses between the sea and the road to Palm Beach, where here and there cars move slowly north and south — ordinary people going about their night’s ordinary business.