Continental Drift (33 page)

Claude asked her to bring him so he could visit with him.

No, no, she said. He’ll wake up and maybe cry, and then Grabow will hear from downstairs and come up and find you.

That’s all right, Claude said. Are you his slave? He looked down at her carefully. She, too, had changed. It was as if the dark, hard thing, like a piece of coal, that had always been at the center of her mind had been heated with too hot a flame and had become a cinder that finally had crumbled to ash. He noticed the slight swelling and discoloration around her eyes and cheeks that he knew came from beatings, and her mouth, which used to be firm and tautly held against her teeth, seemed loose and slack, with all the old, familiar, irritated tension gone out of it, and all the force as well.

They both heard it at the same time, the clank of metal as Grabow drew down the shutters and closed the shop for the night.

Go now! Vanise whispered, her eyes suddenly wide with fear.

Claude stood and made for the door, but she stopped him with her hand. No, you can’t! He sleeps in a room downstairs, he’ll hear you.

Claude turned to her. Why do you stay? You can leave too, he said. Come with me.

No. I can’t.

Why? What can he do? Just leave with me now, you and Charles.

He’ll beat me. Or he’ll do something bad to Charles, give him over to the police so I’ll never see him again. Something bad will happen! I know it!

Won’t the loas protect you?

The loas are angry with me, she said. So I must stay here.

Claude grabbed her by the arm and wrenched her toward the door. Come! Wake Charles and bring him. We’ll leave here together. I know a
mambo
, the Chinaman’s woman. She’ll help you feed the loas and make a new
engagement.
I have some money, enough for a service. I can pay for it.

When he pulled open the door and stepped into the dim, narrow hallway, Grabow was almost at the top of the stairs. Their eyes met for an instant. Grabow took one more step, and Claude swung the machete, slicing the man across the midsection, opening him up like a piece of fruit. The man’s eyes, suddenly wild with horror, bulged and rolled, as he realized what had happened. As if he had a bellyache, he clasped his hands to his stomach, and they filled and overflowed at once with blood. He flung himself back against the wall of the corridor and stared open-mouthed at Claude, who swung again, an overhand chop across Grabow’s shoulder, slicing muscle and tendon all the way through to the joint. The man’s lungs instantly filled, and blood poured from his mouthful of scarlet teeth, and he went down.

Claude stared at the man’s body, and with both hands raised the machete over his head, held it there, then slowly brought it down to his side. He sucked in his breath, a loud, chugging intake of air, snapped his head to the right, and almost falling, turned away from
the corpse and stumbled back through the open door to Vanise’s room.

She had hidden herself in the far corner behind the dresser, crouched down near the floor, and she had not seen, but she knew what had happened, and she moaned quietly.

Stop that! Claude hissed. Stop!

Slowly, she rose and faced him. He was shuddering, as if a cold wind had blown over him, and he looked like a little boy again, about to cry. Beyond him she could see Grabow’s feet, like two chunks of wood. She took a step toward the door and stopped. Is he dead? she asked.

Claude could make no words. He nodded his head up and down.

Vanise took the boy’s hand in hers, and still watching Grabow’s feet, as if she expected them to move, she said, He’s dead? You know that?

He’s meat! Dead meat! he cried, and he yanked his hand away. Now, he croaked, now you can leave here!

No! No, they will find us and kill us for this! Where can we go now?

His arms at his sides, the machete still in his right hand, dripping blood onto the floor, Claude moved away from the door, as if offering it to Vanise and inviting her to step through.
America
, he said.

She placed her hands over her eyes like a blindfold, shook her head slightly and took her hands away. Then, without looking at the boy, she said, Do you know how to find this
hounfor
?

Yes.

You know the
mambo
? And you have money?

Yes. Some, a little.

We must go there, then, to the
mambo
. Wipe the machete on the bed, she instructed him calmly. I’ll make up a bundle for our clothes and Charles’s blanket, and I’ll wake Charles. We can leave by the back door downstairs, and no one will see us, she said.

Claude nodded and obeyed.

Vanise tied some clothing in a towel and left the room for the
baby. Look in his pockets, she called back. He always had plenty of money late at night. Be careful not to get any of his blood on you, she warned.

Claude stepped back to the hallway, and without looking at the man’s face or his huge wounds, carefully searched Grabow’s trouser pockets and came away with a fat roll of bills, which he showed to his aunt as she came out of the storage room, her half-awake child slung against her hip and her bundle grasped firmly in her other hand. She looked over coolly at the money and said, He must have won at dominoes tonight.

She dropped the bundle at Claude’s feet and took the money from him and stuffed it into the front of her blouse. Carry that, she said, and she stepped with care over Grabow’s legs and moved quickly into the darkness of the stairway and down. Claude picked up the bundle with his free hand and followed her.

A few miles west of Elizabeth Town, the road dips and slants toward the sea before it makes the bend at Clifton Point and curves back along the north side of the island to Nassau, and from the road, the land on both sides seems empty, save for the dense brush that grows to the edge of the pavement. The bougainvillea, cassia trees, mahoe and annatto, a tangled weave of flower, thorn and hardwood, rise up like a hedgerow and block the human life and cultivation that go on there from the sight of passersby—tourists in rented cars, teenagers on motorbikes, policemen from Nassau in their Toyotas, air-conditioned tour buses filled with peering, pink-skinned ladies and gentlemen from the continent.

North of the road and beyond the dense underbrush, the land rises, the topsoil thins out and short, reddish pine trees take over, with occasional bayberry and myrtle oak interspersed among the pine. This area is called the Barrens, and except for the sight and roar of the jets
coming in and taking off from the airport a few miles north, one could be in the wilderness. The air is usually still here, no land breeze, no sea breeze, and the sun beats down with belligerent intensity on the heads of solitary men and boys who cultivate secret marijuana patches throughout the Barrens, hauling water in barrels and buckets long distances by hand and pickup truck over rocky paths and narrow trails from as far away as Lake Killarney beyond the airport and the ponds and marshes east of Elizabeth Town.

Also here among the pine trees are small vegetable gardens planted and tended by whole families, people from the outskirts of the towns, squatters and shack people, whose lives are official secrets. They are off-islanders, most of them, illegal immigrants from Haiti, wandering foreigners whose presence on the island is officially forbidden and unofficially tolerated, for they provide a considerable part of the huge, underpaid, unprotected labor force that is required by the tourist industry on New Providence. They wash the dishes, scrub the pots, clean the toilets, clip the grass and haul the trash for the managers of the enormous glass, steel and concrete hotels and casinos in Nassau and along Cable Beach and Paradise Island, working twelve-hour days and nights six and seven days a week for wages acceptable only to someone who would otherwise starve. They perform these tasks with gratitude, good cheer and alacrity, for in Haiti, they would have no choice but to starve.

South of the road beyond Elizabeth Town and behind the thicket of small, thorny trees and bushes, the land slopes down to the sea, and set in sandy soil among the thatch palms, invisible from the road and accessible only by means of winding, overgrown trails, are crowded settlements of shacks and shanties built of driftwood and cast-off iron and plastic from the villages and towns nearby. Pigs, chickens and goats wander the sandy pathways, skinny yellow dogs sleep in the shade and naked children play in doorways or in the yards, while idle, hungry men and women lean on the sills of open windows and stare out at the sea.

Usually, no more than one person in a large family, as often a
woman as a man, a child as an adult, has been able to find work in the hotels, and this person with his few dollars a week supports the rest and bears their envy and their constant, malicious attempts to rob and cheat him. Often, if the person is a man, he drinks too much clairin, that cheap, clear, hundred-fifty-proof rum sold in bottles without labels in the village shops and kitchens, and he smokes too much marijuana, and he broods day and night on his fate, contemplating the hopelessness of his situation, until, finding himself provoked by a trivial affront, he either cuts someone with a knife or machete or is himself cut and ends up in the hospital and then in jail or ends up dead. Or else he turns to voudon and the loas,
les Invisibles
and
les Morts
, the universal spirit world from which he can draw solace and the strength of powerful allies and the sense to continue with his life.

If the person is a woman, she may not drink as much rum or smoke as much marijuana, but she, too, will brood fatalistically day and night on the difficulties of her life, its stunted, thwarted shape, and she, too, will often fall helplessly into an explosive kind of depression that can be detonated into crazed violence by an idle, careless spark, by gossip, petty thievery, a misbehaving child, a wayward man. And so she, too, in order to save herself, turns to voudon, spends her nights at the
hounfor
in prayer and song, gives herself over to the guidance of ritual and the superior, trained knowledge of a mambo or
houngan
, feeds the loas and lets herself be mounted by Papa Legba, Agwé, Ogoun and Erzulie, dances the congo dance and the yanvalon dos-bas and connects her sad, suffering moment on earth to universal time, ties the stingy ground she stands on to the huge, fecund continent of Africa, makes an impoverished, illiterate black woman’s troubles the pressing concerns of the gods.

Even before they left the road for the rocky pathway that led into the Barrens, Claude and Vanise, with Charles on her hip, heard the drums, a rapid, high-pitched, rattling sound undercut by the throb of the assator, the huge bass drum with the righteous voice of an ancient father. It was dark, very late now, and Claude, brushing back low
branches and thorny macca bushes with his machete, led his aunt by the hand over the limestone outcropping and roots that crossed the path.

The sound of the drums excited and comforted them, and they quickened their pace uphill through the brush to the pinewoods, where the sound traveled more easily and where they could make out the clang of the metal
ogan
and then the high, chanting voice of a
houngenikon
, the woman who leads the singing. A moon was on their left, full and snow white, the velvety, deep blue sky splashed with stars, and they could see their shadows on the ground, small, hunched-over companions running alongside them toward the sound of the drums and the singing, as urgent and thrilled and deeply lonely as they. When they rounded the top of the low, scrubby hill where the land fell away to a dark, brush-filled gorge below, they heard the hoot of a conch shell, long, trembling calls as old as the human species’ desire to signal its presence to itself, as old as solitude and fear, and their chests filled with light.

Claude hurried on, scrambling down toward the darkness of the gorge; Vanise halted for a second a ways behind him. Listen, she said, and Claude stood still. The conch cried out, stopped, fluttered and cried again, a musical instrument making private speech public. It’s a service for Agwé, Vanise whispered.

Your
mait’-tête
, Claude said.

Yes. How far now?

Not far. In the trees there, he said, pointing toward the dark end of the gorge, where two moonlit ridges came together as if clasping hands above the leafless, yellow-blossomed branches of a tall wildcotton tree surrounded by darker, denser, lower trees, almond and mahogany, that hid the ground from view. The
hounfor
is there, for the
société
, he said.

It’s all right, then?

Yes. We are all from Haiti. And we have money for the
mambo
to make a
service
.

You know them, Claude?

A few … some. I work for the Chinaman, who knows them all. But I have not been here to the
hounfor
before. The old man told me it was here. François, who works for the Chinaman also, he said. He turned away and resumed descending to the gorge.

Vanise shifted her child to her other hip and followed.

There was a broad footpath at the bottom that snaked in darkness through the dense brush, and the drums and singing and the steady, warbling cries of the conch shell grew louder and sharper as they made their way over roots and stones, drawing them forward and out of themselves, until soon they were walking faster, almost running, and then suddenly they were free of the darkness and stood at the edge of a large crowd of people in a clearing, men and women and a few children, most of them dressed in white, their black faces large and open and sweating cheerfully as they chatted, danced, watched and argued and sometimes moved in and out of the dense center of the crowd, where the woodpole-and-thatch peristyle itself, the temple for Agwé, could be seen.

Several Coleman lanterns glowed phosphorus white beneath the roof of the peristyle, casting long shadows over the crowd, while the mambo, in a scarlet satin dress, and her assistants, young women wearing simple white dresses, passed back and forth with baskets and bowls of flowers, cakes, pigeons, bananas, yams, oranges, rice, many kinds of food and bottles of liquor, which they placed gently before the center altar, a long, canopied table covered with white cloth. Off to one side, three lean men, like athletes, worked their drums, while the houngenikon, a gaunt, tall, aged woman, sang and chanted, and the crowd around her picked up the songs and chants and enlarged, elaborated and amplified them, as more and more men and women emerged from the darkness and underbrush that surrounded the peristyle and joined in.