Russell Banks - Continental Drift

At six, he heard the baby wake, burble and yap to himself a few minutes and then cry to have his diapers changed. Bob rose slowly from the couch, got the bottle of apple juice from the refrigerator and headed down the hallway toward the children’s room. Elaine appeared at the door, crossed the hallway silently, as if alone there, and went into the bathroom, closing the door tightly behind her. As he entered the bedroom, softly gray in the predawn light, he heard the splash of the shower behind him. Ruthie and Emma, accustomed to their brother’s morning howl and the sounds of a parent tending to him, slept on, grabbing at the last, fat hour of sleep before they themselves had to get up.

Ruthie lay curled away from Bob, facing the wall, her thumb jammed into her mouth; Emma, in the other bed, slept on her belly, arms and legs splayed, as if swimming underwater. In the crib, which was squeezed between the dresser and the back wall of the small, crowded room, Robbie lay flat on his back, scowling and red with discomfort, until suddenly he saw Bob towering over the crib and ceased to cry.

Bob handed him the bottle, and while the baby noisily sucked at it, proceeded to strip away the sopped, plastic-lined paper diaper. When he had the baby’s bottom naked, he stopped for a moment and thought, almost amazed, as if seeing it for the first time, My God, he has a penis. Just like me. An ordinary, circumcised penis. A doctored tube coming out of his digestive tract, that’s all. It was contracted and short, shrunken to little more than thimble-sized from the cold and sudden exposure to the air. Below it swelled the testicles in their tight pouch, like the breast of a tiny, pink bird. There was no mystery, no power, no sin, no guilt. Just biology. It was terrifying for that, and for an instant, wonderful.

“Oh, Robbie,” Bob whispered.

The baby, large blue eyes peering over the cloudy bottle, looked up at his father, and though his lips and cheeks yanked furiously at the rubber nipple, the baby seemed to be smiling. Bob returned his son’s gaze for a moment, then began to examine his own hands, huge against the infant’s tiny, smooth torso, legs and feet. They were coarse hands, scratched and hairy across the tops, with thick veins zigzagging over the surface like blue bolts of lightning, and suddenly his hands looked like weapons to Bob, weapons with wills of their own, like stones that could hurl themselves, and he hauled them out of the crib and jammed them into his pockets.

Once again, his left hand felt the money, but this time, instead of pulling away from it, the hand grabbed onto the packet and held it for a long moment. “Robbie,” Bob whispered. “Robbie, your father is a terrible man. Look what he’s ended up doing,” he said, and his voice sounded like a cold wind raiding a shutter. “Just look at it.”

The baby gurgled and smiled, kicked his bare feet in the air. Across the room, Ruthie twisted in her sleep, while Emma, blinking open one eye, saw her father and instantly dove back into sleep as if into deep, warm waters.

With his hands still stuffed into his pockets, Bob slouched from the room, peering back over his shoulder as he went out. He passed down the hallway, the bathroom door still closed, and left the trailer. Outside, the air was cool and almost still, as a thin, low fog drifted off the sea and caught against the Keys, shrouding the islands in a soft, silvery mist. He could hear the water lap against the shore, as if speaking to it, but he couldn’t see the water at all.

He got into his car, and with the headlights on, drove slowly, not much faster than if he’d walked, over to Islamorada, where once again he bought newspapers. In the parking lot, inside the car, he unfolded the Miami Herald and spread it over his lap and read, for the first time, the article about the drowning of the fifteen Haitians.

15 HAITIANS DROWN OFF SUNNY ISLES

MIAMI, Feb. 12 (UPI) — Fifteen Haitians, mostly women and children, drowned this morning in choppy waters off Sunny Isles just north of here after being forced into rough seas by the captain of what Coast Guard officials said was probably an American fishing boat engaged in smuggling Haitians into Florida. The unidentified boat escaped into the darkness while crew members of the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Cape Current attempted to save the Haitians.

Immigration authorities said it was one of the worst such incidents recorded since the waves of immigrants from the impoverished Caribbean country began heading for the United States 10 years ago. Gov. Bob Graham called it “a human tragedy which has been waiting to happen,” and said he would press the Federal Government to work with Haiti to stop the flight to these shores.

In Miami, a Coast Guard spokesman said of the drownings, “It’s just such a tragedy,” adding, “It’s subhuman, what some of these smugglers will do for a few dollars.” When the fishing boat was first hailed by the Cape Current at 2:30 this morning, it was a half mile off the beach at Sunny Isles. According to the Coast Guard spokesman, the captain of the fishing boat frightened the Haitians off his boat by firing a gun into the air.

The Haitians, most of whom apparently could not swim, drowned in the six-foot chop almost immediately. It’s thought that several of them may have made it to the beach. Authorities are urging anyone who may have survived the tragedy to come forward and help identify the individuals who abandoned them to the sea.

The bodies of five men, six women and four children were taken to the Dade County morgue. A spokesman for the Medical Examiner’s office said that autopsies would be performed and that attempts would be made to identify them. “Then,” said the spokesman, “the bodies will have to be disposed of in some respectable and tasteful fashion. I don’t quite know how we’re going to do that yet.”

Bob’s chest tightened into a fist, then opened and emptied, and he wept, sitting in the shadows inside his car, surrounded by a milk-white fog, in a parking lot on an island in a sea, lifetimes and whole continents away from where none of this could have happened to him.

An hour later, he was sitting at the kitchen table, and he read the article again, studied the photograph accompanying it, read and studied as if decoding a secret message from an ally, while the girls ate breakfast in silence and gathered lunches in paper sacks and milk money for school, and Elaine in housecoat and slippers, without uttering a word, made breakfast for them all, served it and cleaned up afterwards, and the baby, on his belly in the playpen in the living room, watched.

Finally, the girls have left for school, Elaine has put Robbie back into his crib for his morning nap, and she stands at the sink, her hands in soapy water, and she looks up from the dishes every now and then at her husband bent over the newspaper.

“Awful, isn’t it?” she says, her flat, expressionless voice cracking the silence.

Bob’s face comes up as if from the bottom of the sea, white, bloated and whiskery, eyes like holes, mouth a bloodless slash, thin and drawn down, his long chin trembling.

“What is it, Bob?” she cries.

He shakes his head slowly from side to side, a sea beast shedding water in a fine spray, and opens his mouth to speak, but cannot.

“Oh, God, what’s the matter ?” Elaine rushes over to him. She holds his cold face and says again, “Bob, what’s the matter ?” She looks down at the newspaper, then back at his face. “I know, the poor Haitians. I read it when you first came in…. I was … I was looking for Ave. There wasn’t anything….” She makes her gaze drive down into her husband’s, and she sees through films, membranes, veils, curtains, doors, walls, all the way into the secret man at the center.