Russell Banks - Continental Drift

Take a single sidestep, and go back three or four in time, over and back to the moment when Bob Dubois and Tyrone James brought the Belinda Blue into the marina at Moray Key. It’s dawn, a silver sky bleeding pink in the east. Putty-colored pelicans rise on wobbly legs and drop from their perches atop the bollards and piles of the pier, catch the damp air with ponderous wings and cruise low over the still water toward Florida Bay.

From the bridge of the Belinda Blue, Bob gazes down at two Florida state policemen standing on the pier at the end of the slip. Tyrone scrambles up to the bridge, grabs Bob’s shoulder and says in a harsh whisper, “We got to hide de money!”

“Well, where is it?” Bob spins the wheel to port and brings the bow of the boat alongside the slip and lets the engine idle noisily. One of the troopers walks forward and catches hold of the gunwale, reaches for a line and ties the bow to a low chock on the slip. The other moves toward the stern.

Tyrone hesitates. “I got it … I got it here,” he blurts, and he pulls a wad of bills from his pocket and shoves it at Bob.

“How much is it?”

“Maybe one, two thousand, maybe more.”

“You don’t know exactly?”

“No, mon! Me take what dem Haitians give me!”

“I thought you made a price.” Bob is as calm as a gravestone. “Five hundred a head.”

“You take what you get!” Tyrone says, and he pushes the bills at Bob.

“You take your cut?” Bob folds the bills into his wallet, swelling and stiffening it, and squeezes the wallet into his back pocket. It’s too tight, so he takes the money out of the wallet and shoves it into the left front pocket of his baggy chinos.

Tyrone says, “No, mon … me didn’t take de cut yet.” He glances nervously over his shoulder at the policemen below. “Just say we was fishing, Bob,” he whispers. “Dem cyan prove we wasn’t. Okay, mon?”

“Yeah.” Bob studies Tyrone’s eyes for a second and knows the Jamaican is lying to him about the money.

“Me get m’ gear from below now,” Tyrone says, and moves toward the ladder. “Just walk off like everyt’ing normal, Bob. Dem cyan prove nothing. Okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Tarpon,” he whispers. “We was lookin’ fe tarpon off New Providence. Tell ’em dat. De same fe me,” he says, heading for the cabin below.

Then one of the state troopers on the slip, the larger of the pair, hollers, “Robert Dubois?”

Bob answers, “Yeah. Be right down!” and cuts the engine.

The other trooper steps aboard, but the first reaches out and draws him back to the slip. Behind them, in the distance, a second pair of troopers jog heavily toward them from the parking lot, while from around the corner of the apartment building, three or four more, two of them carrying shotguns, and two burly, crew-cut men in loose, short-sleeved shirts and chinos, walk with alert haste past the Clam Shack and out along the pier to the Belinda Blue and what seems to be a crowd gathered at the slip, where they join the crowd, which now includes both Bob and Tyrone.

The two young plainclothes officers show their badges and swiftly shape the group and give a sudden, hard focus to it. “Both of you, hands on your heads, turn around, spread your legs.” And while one man reads from a card that tells Bob and Tyrone they have the right to remain silent, another gropes his way down their bodies, finding no weapons, except for Tyrone’s filleting knife, and missing Bob’s slab of money altogether. A third man flashes in front of Bob what he claims is a search warrant, and two or three, or maybe more — Bob can’t see to count them, for he stands facing the channel and the bridge beyond, where cars cross over to Matecumbe, their headlights glowing uselessly white in the gray, early morning light — board the Belinda Blue and begin searching her aft from the bow and inboard from the bridge down to the keel.

Bob thinks, I’m glad. It’s over and done with now, and no matter what happens, I’m glad. He fights a sudden impulse to drop his hands to his sides, to turn and face the silent men behind him and say, “Thank you,” but he knows he must not move, he must stand here on the edge of the pier, a prisoner with his hands crossed over the top of his head, or he will be shot dead. He must act the part of a man who, if given the chance, would flee, even though he feels half in love with these grim, dough-faced men, deeply grateful to them, as if they are members of a search party that, long after he gave up hope of ever being found again, has located him at last. It’s as if, by holding guns on him and arresting him and searching his boat, they have brought him back into the community of man, and he is so profoundly grateful to them for it that if he did drop his hands and turned and stepped forward, hands extended, to thank them, and if, to stop him, they fired their shotguns into his chest, it would not be a terrible thing.

But this is not to be. For no sooner have the policemen welcomed Bob Dubois back into the community than they have rejected him again, sent home in his car, with his awful secret undetected, leaving him his stinging visions of black children and women and old and young men, helpless, history-weakened people battered and driven down to death by the waves, human faces with mouths begging for what’s an absolute right, pleading for help, eyes bulging in horror as they realize what has happened to them and suddenly discover their terrible fate, to be drowned at sea, to be cast into deep, storm-torn waters at night by a white man claiming to act as their friend and savior and a black man claiming to help him at it. This is an ordinary variation of an ancient story on this part of the planet, so ordinary that even Bob Dubois knows it, and now it’s his story as well, and he knows that too.

The police finally conclude that, because of the half ounce of grass wrapped in brown paper and the unexplained thirty-two hundred dollars in cash at the bottom of Tyrone’s blue Eastern Airlines flight bag, they can charge Tyrone with possession of a controlled substance and make arrangements to charge him with intent to sell it. But shortly afterwards, in Marathon, while booking him, they discover that he is a Jamaican national with no visa, so they simply take away his money and turn him over to Immigration and Naturalization in Miami for deportation.

As for Bob, they do not believe that he is as his friend and business partner Avery Boone insists, that is, innocent of the charges they have placed against Boone himself, which charges result from Ave’s attempt the night before to deliver three-quarters of a pound of uncut cocaine to a man employed by the Federal Narcotics Commission. They do not believe that anyone, especially a man with a boat, can rub as closely to Ave’s business as Bob has and not also be profiting from it. There is no clean evidence that links Bob to Ave’s drug smuggling and sales, however, just as there is nothing and no one to tie the girl who calls herself Honduras to the trade, so both Bob and Honduras are let go. With Ave’s van, like both his boats, now impounded and his condominium instantly repossessed by the bank, Honduras packs her duffel and hitches down Route 1 to Key West, where by the following sunset she has moved into a beach house owned by a screenwriter who spends his winters on the Keys bonefishing and phoning his wife up in Michigan every few days to report on his loneliness. Unable to make bail, Ave mopes in jail in Marathon. Bob, reluctantly, goes home.