Russell Banks - Continental Drift

Again, the boat rolls a second and starts the drop, pitches across the smooth trough, yaws between waves and rises, and this time, when it reaches the crest of the wave, Bob looks out over the dripping bow and sees the lights of another boat. It’s less than two hundred yards off the portside and headed north, and it’s a large boat, twice the size of the Belinda Blue —that’s all Bob can see of her, before the boat disappears from sight, and Bob realizes that they have pitched again and are descending. He yells for Tyrone, who’s under the tarpaulin talking to the Haitians, and frantically waves him up to the bridge. “Boat!” he shouts. “Boat!”

Tyrone scrambles up the ladder to the bridge, and when the Belinda Blue crests again, Bob points out the lights of the stranger.

“Coast guard,” Tyrone says. “Cut de lights.”

Bob obeys at once. “Oh, Jesus H. Christ!” he says. “The fucking coast guard.” He can hear the twin diesels that power her and can see that, yes, it is a cutter, ninety or a hundred feet long, with the high conning tower and the fifty- and sixty-caliber machine guns bristling at the stern and bow. “I don’t think they spotted us,” Bob says. But then he realizes that the cutter is turning slowly to port. “Oh, fuck, here they come!”

Tyrone reaches out and cuts the throttle back.

“What the fuck you doing?”

“Bring ’er around, gwan get dem Haitians off,” Tyrone says.

“What? What’re you saying?” Bob grabs Tyrone’s shoulder and flips the man around to face him.

“Dem can get to shore from here, mon!” Tyrone shouts into the wind. “It not far!”

“Not in this sea, for Christ’s sake! We can’t do that! We can’t!”

“Got to Bob!” The Jamaican turns away and starts to leave.

“Wait, goddammit! I’m the fucking captain, you’re not!”

Tyrone looks at Bob with cold disgust. “We cut dem fuckin’ Haitians loose, den maybe we get home tonight. Captain.”

“Otherwise?”

Tyrone does not answer.

Bob shouts, “They’ve got us anyhow, the coast guard! We’re caught anyhow!”

“No, dem got to stop to pick up de Haitians. Wid dem gone, de boat fast enough to get us out of here first maybe!”

“Or else we end up in jail, and they go back to Haiti! Right? Right, Tyrone?”

Again, Tyrone says nothing.

Bob says, “All right. Go ahead.” Tyrone leaps away and down the ladder.

Bob looks over the rail to the deck below, where the Jamaican frantically, roughly, yanks the Haitians out from under the tarpaulin. He’s shouting at them in Creole and Jamaican patois, making it very clear that they must jump into the water, and they must do it now. Every few seconds he points out to where they spotted the coast guard cutter, though Bob can no longer see her, for they’re down in the trough between waves again, and Tyrone pulls at their arms, shoving the Haitians toward the starboard rail, but they shake their heads no, and a few start to cry and wail, no, no, they will not go. They cling to one another and to the chocks and cleats and gunwales and look wild-eyed about them, at the towering sea, at Bob up on the bridge, at Tyrone jumping angrily about, at each other, and they weep and beg, No, no, please don’t make us leave the boat for the terrible sea.

The Belinda Blue rises to the ridge of water, and Bob sees the cutter again, now clearly turning back toward them, and they’ve got searchlights whipping wands of light across the water. “They’re turning, they’re gonna try to board us!” he yells down, and he sees Tyrone step from the cabin with a rifle in his hand, the shark gun, a 30–06 with a scope, and Bob says quietly, “Tyrone, for Christ’s sake.”

The Haitians back swiftly away from Tyrone, horrified. With the barrel of the gun, he waves them toward the rail and tells them once again to jump, but they won’t move. The babies are screaming now, and the women and several of the men are openly weeping. Claude’s face is frozen in a look of amazed grief.

Tyrone pulls the trigger and fires into the air, and one of the Haitians, the boy Claude, leaps into the water and is swept away. A second follows, and then a woman. Tyrone screams at the rest to jump, and he fires again.

Bob bellows from the bridge, “Tyrone! For Christ’s sake, stop! They’re drowning!” But the Jamaican is now bodily hurling the Haitians into the sea, one after the other, the old man, the woman with the two small children, Vanise and her child, the old woman. He’s clearing the deck of them. They weep and cry out for help from God, from the loas, from Bob, who looks on in horror, and then they are gone, lifted up by the dark waves and carried away toward the shore.

Tyrone scrambles back up to the bridge, the rifle still in his hand, and he wrenches the wheel away from Bob and hits the throttle hard, bringing the boat swiftly around to port and away. Off to the north a few hundred yards, its searchlights sweeping over the water, the cutter has slowed and stopped, for they have apparently spotted the Haitians bobbing in the water. Bob sees that they are dropping a lifeboat from the stern. He follows one of the beams of light out to where it has fixed on a head in the water, one of the young men, and then he sees the man go down. The light switches back and forth, searching for him, then seems to give up and move on, looking for others. “They’re drowning!” he cries. “They’re drowning!”

Tyrone doesn’t answer. He shoves the rifle at Bob and takes the wheel with both hands, bucking the Belinda Blue into the waves, driving her against mountains of water and quickly away from shore, heading her straight out to sea.

Bob holds the gun for a moment, looks at it as if it were a bloody ax. Then he lifts it over his head with two hands and hurls it into the sea.

Tyrone looks over his shoulder at Bob and says, “Good idea, mon. Dem prob’ly heard de shootin’. Nobody can say we de ones doin’ de shootin’ now. Got no gun, got no Haitians,” he says, smiling. Then he says, “Better clear de deck of anyt’ing dem lef’ behind, mon.”

Slowly Bob descends to the deck, and kneeling down, he crawls under the tarpaulin, reaching around in the dark, until he comes up with several battered suitcases, a cloth bundle, a woven bag, and he tosses them overboard one by one, watches them bob on the water a second, then swiftly sink.

It’s a pink dawn, the eastern sky stretched tight as silk on a frame. Overhead, blue-gray rags of cloud ride in erratic rows, while in the west, over southern Florida, the sky is dark and overcast. A man with white hair leads a nosy, head-diving dog, a blue-black Labrador, from his house and down the sandy walkway to the beach.

The man and the dog stroll easily south, and now and then the man stops and picks up a piece of weathered beach glass for his collection. The dog turns and waits, and when the man stands and moves on, the dog bounds happily ahead.

A quarter mile from where they started, the dog suddenly darts into the water, and the man stops and stares, as a body, a black woman’s body, passes by the dog and with the next wave is tossed onto the beach. A few yards beyond, a child’s body has been shoved up onto the beach, and beyond that, a pair of men lie dead on the sand.

The man counts five bodies in all, and then he turns and runs back up the beach, his dog following, to his home, where he calls the local police. “Haitians, I’m sure of it. Washing up on the sand, just like last time. Women and children this time, though. It’s just awful,” he says. “Just awful.”

A mile south of where the other bodies came to shore at Golden Beach, and five miles south of Hollywood, while ambulance crews are lugging the bodies away from the water and up the beach to the ambulances, a woman struggles through the last few waves to the shore. She is alone, a young black woman with close-cropped hair, her dress yanked away from her by the force of the water, her limbs hanging down like anchors, as she staggers, stumbles, drags herself out of the water and falls forward onto the sand. Her name is Vanise Dorsinville; she is the only Haitian to survive the journey from New Providence Island to Florida on the Belinda Blue .