Continental Drift (32 page)

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 …

Bébé
_,
Claude corrected.

No. With Papa. And they send you back so he can put you in jail in Port-au-Prince forever. Better to stay here in the Bahamas, the old man said. Forget America.

Claude could never forget America. Not now, not after all he’d suffered, all the pain and humiliation and fear he’d faced and overcome for it. There was an exchange that had taken place, and he’d come out with a vision, and he clung to it, like a sailor off a sunken ship clinging to the wreckage of the ship. There was a big difference now between him and Vanise, he thought, and also between the boy he had been, as recently even as when he had been locked down in the stinking hold of the
Kattina
, and the boy he was now, raising marijuana for the Chinaman in the Barrens on New Providence, and
the difference was that while Vanise still looked to les Invisibles for definitions she could not provide herself, he was beginning to look to America for that. The loas had moved around from in front of him to the back, and in their place America had come forward, insisting, like the loas, on service and strategy, promising luxury and power, scolding, instructing and seducing him all at once, and in that way, as the loas had done before, creating him.

I know you drank off my rum, the old man said, holding the empty bottle upside down before the boy’s face, as if that were proof.

I don’t drink rum, Claude said wearily. It makes your brain mushy. Like yours. He smiled.

The old man grunted, farted loudly, and mumbling curses at the boy,
Zobop … diab
…, turned away from him.

Claude looked out from the shade of the lean-to at the marijuana plants, large, thick-stalked, mature plants cultivated in clots among small patches of corn so as to be indistinguishable from the corn if seen from the air. François, the boy said in a low voice. Tell me this, François. How come I work all day weeding and watering and tending the plants, while you sleep all day, and yet the Chinaman pays us the same? And how come I sit up all night guarding the plants alone, while you go into town and get drunk, and yet the Chinaman pays us the same? What’s your secret,
Loupgarou?

François sat up and rubbed his eyes. He stroked his grizzled chin and said, If he paid either one of us less than he does now, then he’d be paying one of us nothing. Zero.

True.

So if you want to make more money than I do, you must ask the Chinaman for a raise.

Claude smiled. You’re not as stupid as you look, he said. No, I don’t need to make more money than you do. What I want is for you to do your half of the work.

Someone has to go into town for food and report to the Chinaman about his crop, right? He told me to do that, every day, or he’d think we stole his crop ourselves or maybe got chopped up by someone
else stealing the crop or maybe got arrested by the police and were locked up over in Nassau. Unless he hears from us once a day. This is serious business, boy. We’re not out here raising yams, you know. The old man lay back on his filthy blanket and eyed the boy. Give me the water, he ordered.

Claude passed the jug of tepid water over to him. Tonight, Claude said, I’ll be the one to go into town. You can sit up and watch over the plants.

No. You don’t know where to go or what to say. I’ll have to be the one to do it.

I’ll bring you back your rum.

No, I’ll go. You stay. I know where to go. No one bothers with me. They’ll stop you.

Claude said, I know where to find the Chinaman. He’ll be with his woman, the
mambo
, his
placée
, taking all the Haitians’ money by cheating them at dominoes. I’ll just go in the back way and tell him his crop is fine, and I’ll buy you your bottle of
clairin
and some sardines and tinned beef and come back. I won’t stay all night and come back drunk in the morning like you and then have to sleep all day.

Like hell you won’t, the old man grumbled. You’ll get drunk, you’ll find yourself a jeunesse and get caught by the police or beat up by the Bahamian boys. They’ll find you dead on the beach in the morning. I know what happens to young boys like you. All you want is a
bousin
, a whore. You have to go to Nassau for that anyhow. They don’t have any whores in Elizabeth Town.

They don’t, eh?

No.

There’s one.

Which?

The one above the shop. Grabow’s whore, Claude said. You’ve heard about her, the Haitian girl he keeps there.

Yes, certainly. But that’s not for you, boy. She’s not for Haitians. Grabow, he keeps that girl for his friends and for the fishermen. If you walked in there and asked for the girl, he’d throw you out, if he didn’t
feel like turning you over to the police. Or beating on you. He’s bad, that one.

Well, Claude said, no matter. I’m not going to town for a whore.

You’re not going to town at all, François said.

Claude stood up and stepped out of the lean-to into the bright sunlight. Of course I am, he said. Give me the water, he said, pointing with the machete at the jug.

Slowly, the old man reached over and handed up the plastic container. Claude took it and tipped it up and drank, spilling water in glistening sheets down his bare chest and shoulders.

Vanise did not hear him enter the room, and when she saw him she did not at first recognize him, for somehow in the intervening weeks his face had changed. His chin line was sharper, his features had lost a boy’s softness around the cheeks and brow, and his hair had bushed out, so that he looked older, stronger, more dangerous, and for a second she thought he was a man sent up from the bar by Grabow.

As soon as she recognized him, however, she was afraid. Go away, Claude! she said. You must not be here.

He smiled. The man didn’t hear me. He’s drunk, out front at a table on the street, playing dominoes with friends. I came in the back way. Besides, he said, I’m not afraid of him. Claude was wearing his short-sleeved shirt and thin, tattered trousers and was barefoot. He carried his machete loosely at his side, as if it were a plaything.

They sat down on the bed and talked in whispers, Vanise asking questions, Claude telling her about the Chinaman and the marijuana fields and old François, and also telling her about the Haitians he had found living right here in Elizabeth Town and in the bush nearby, whole communities of them, he said, many of them working in the kitchens of the hotels and in private homes as gardeners and maids.

She did not seem impressed or even surprised, which disappointed him. There was even a
société
here, he told her, a
hounfor
with many
houncis
performing all the services for the loas, and although he himself had not yet been to any of the services, he said, as if apologizing,
he soon would go. He wished to make an
engagement
with the loas, he explained somberly, so as to get them over to America, which he now knew was not very far from here. Every day there were boats going across to Florida with Haitians on board, boats operated by Americans who knew how to carry you over to Miami itself, where there was a whole city of Haitians living in their own houses just like Americans, with automobiles and plenty of food to eat and nice clothes to wear.

She knew about the boats, she said, and how close America was. She told him about the Jamaican, Tyrone, who worked on a boat for a white American, a fishing boat they used for carrying over Haitians, as many as ten and twenty at a time, Tyrone had told her. Tyrone’s job was to round up the Haitians. The white man just drove the boat.

But it costs lots of money, she sighed. Too much.

How much?

She wasn’t sure. Hundreds of dollars, however.

Claude asked her about the baby. Where was Charles?

She explained that Grabow made her sleep the boy in the storage room next door.