Continental Drift

by Russell Banks

  He goes silent for a few seconds, scratches his belly, swigs from the rum bottle, stands and takes up the white enameled cup from in front of the dog. He fills it from the barrel and drinks. Refilling the cup, he passes it to Vanise, and she drinks, hands it back. Then the boy. George sets the cup afloat in the rain barrel and studies it for a moment.

  He’s decided not to turn them in to the police, he announces. At least not tonight. He smiles, faces them and goes inside.

  The sun has edged close to the horizon beyond the field, and the sky is splashed with long, broad, plum- and silver-colored streaks of cloud moving in from the east. The sea breeze has shifted and become a land breeze, bringing with it the smell of cassia trees and heat-dried corn stalks from the meadow in front of the low house.

  What’s he going to do? Claude asks.

  Vanise looks over her shoulder at the yellow dog, who lifts his pointed head and stares at them a second, then resumes working at the hambone. Don’t worry, Vanise says to the boy.

  A moment later, George kicks open the screened door and comes out carrying a small, stained mattress. He motions with his burly head for them to follow and hurries across the yard past the dog to the shed. Hefting the mattress onto one shoulder, he unlocks a rusty padlock on the low door and yanks it open. Then he tosses the mattress inside. He stands away and points into the darkness and says, Dere, gal, nobody gwan fine you dere. Put you in de house, but someone soon come an’ fine you, turn you in first chance.

  Vanise leans forward and peers into the darkness and heat of the hut. She smells chickens of long ago, the remnants of dried, powdered droppings ground into the dirt floor, old feathers and tufts, bits of grass and seeds, yellow hulls of ancient corn in corners, dust motes floating in the air.

  The last time he used this shed, George explains, he stored some marijuana for his brother-in-law, who made heaps of money off it and went to America and never paid him a shilling for his troubles. Ever since then, he’s kept the shed locked and empty, because every time he went near it, he got mad all over again. He figures if he lets the Haitians use it awhile, he’ll forget about his brother-in-law’s betrayal.

  George points to their baskets, then inside the shed. Vanise understands, swings her baby onto her left arm and drags her basket into the darkness. Claude follows her example, and when they emerge they find George seated back on the stoop, his bottle in his lap, waving them over. Like obedient children, they go and stand before him.

  He explains loudly and slowly what the arrangement will be, and though they do not understand a word of what he says, they know a bargain has been struck. In a few days, it will become clear to them that George will provide shelter and food for them, yams and corn meal, rice, chicken backs, sometimes pork and maybe fish, when he can get it cheap, and they will work for him, in the fields, house and yard, and when George drives home from town in his taxi, drunk, loud and angry at the world, he’ll stumble through the kitchen, grab his bottle and cross the backyard in the silvery moonlight to the henhouse, where he’ll swing open the door and enter. Pushing the boy off the mattress, moving the sleeping infant aside, he’ll yank down his trousers and make Vanise open up to him. The first time this happens, the boy will sit shivering all night on the stoop. After that, he will crawl into the man’s car and sleep on the back seat until daylight wakes him.

  Vanise and Claude and the baby, whom they soon start to call Charles, will stay on the island of North Caicos hidden away like this for many months, before they have learned enough of George McKissick’s words to speak to the young man they replaced, Robbie, a thin, lazy brown man who comes around every week or so (more often after the morning he accidentally discovers Vanise in the yard) to make vain attempts to collect his pay.

  Robbie is a kindly but stupid man, and it does not occur to him that this silent woman and boy are Haitians, until finally the boy speaks to him, asks in a halting, garbled way how to find a man with a boat to take them to America. To hurt McKissick, who now believes he will never have to pay Robbie for the work he did, and also to get his old job back, he will help them escape, he says, not to America, which is probably impossible to arrange without money, but straight to the Bahamas, where boats go all the time. There are plenty of small wooden cargo boats shipping salt for food, with captains not at all averse to carrying a pretty young Haitian woman belowdecks in a corner of the hold. If she must bring along her child and nephew, no matter. They can be shoved aside when necessary.

  Columbus stayed on the island for only a few days, when, no longer afraid of being lost, certain of where he had landed, he departed for Cipangu, Japan, which “the Indians here call Cuba.” North Caicos itself became lost. The admiral’s landing and brief stay here went recorded as having occurred way to the north in the Bahamas, at Watling’s Island.

  Ponce de León, after fourteen days ashore, set sail and headed north from Whitby, where a small stream parted the beach and entered the sea. Glad to be rid of the place, his head once again filled with visions of a new youth, a new life, a new old age, he quickly forgot the island. He would not even have marked it on his chart, had it not been for the reef on which his ship had foundered and were it not, therefore, a place to avoid.

  A Man’s Man

  1

  Bob Dubois’s first call, after treatment at the Winter Haven Hospital overlooking lovely Lake Martha, is to his brother Eddie. It’s one thirty-five in the morning, he’s shot and killed a man, been rushed in a wailing ambulance through the night, had twenty-seven slivers of glass removed from his flesh and a pint of pink antiseptic daubed over half his torso, and now, in bloodstained shirt and pants, as he stands in the lobby of the emergency ward of the hospital, two car-crash victims hurtling past on rubber-wheeled stretchers, a drunken middle-aged black man with stab wounds in his bicep arguing with the nurse at the admitting desk, a white teenaged mother and pimply-faced father sitting warily in straight-backed chairs while their baby undergoes tests to determine the extent of internal damage caused by the beating they gave her, Bob calls his brother Eddie, and all Eddie wants to know is how the hell the other nigger got away.

  “Whaddaya mean he ran out the back while you were calling the cops? Why didn’t you bring the bastard out front by the phone, just keep him covered?”

  “Look, the kid shit his pants, he was so scared. He stunk. I didn’t want to get near him. I don’t know, I just didn’t think he had it in him to try anything, not after the way he was scared.”

  “You shoulda shot the fucker in the knees. Then called the cops.”

  “Christ, Eddie, he was only a kid. Maybe fifteen or so. I mean, for Christ’s sake, I was a little rattled, y’ know. What the hell do you want? I mean, I never shot a guy before. I never even got shot at before. I mean, the guy’s standing there with a fucking twenty-gauge aimed at my head. I’m lucky I’m alive. You woulda had a heart attack.”

  “I woulda shot both niggers.”

  Both men are silent for a few seconds. Then Eddie says, “Look, I’m sorry. It’s just that I hate those bastards. Fucking coons sit around taking welfare while we work our asses off, and then they come around with their fucking shotguns telling us to give ’em all our money. You know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, you did good, kid. I’m proud of ya. No shit. You swacked a nigger and saved the day’s take.”

  “Well, I’d already made the deposit anyhow,” Bob explains. “There wasn’t any money there. The register was empty.”

  Eddie doesn’t quite understand. What was Bob doing at the store, then, if he’d already made the deposit?

  “I … well, I went out with someone, for a couple of drinks. Friend of mine. Then the transmission, the throw-out bearing, I think it is, got jammed. You know, like it does. So I went into the store to call Elaine or somebody to come get me.”

  “Oh, yeah? You getting a little on the side, kid?”

  “Oh, no, no, nothing like that. A friend of mine, guy I know.” He can’t use the story ab
out the Budweiser salesman on Eddie.

  “Sure, sure. I don’t give a shit you’re ripping off a piece of poon now and then. Just don’t do it on my time, okay? You get all the pussy you want on your own time, but I ain’t paying you to wet your dick, you know.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who’s at the store right now?”

  “Cops. State and local.”

  “Okay, I’ll get right out there,” he says. “You, you go on home and get some sleep. I’ll see you in the morning. Is the place a mess?”

  “Yeah. Lots of broken bottles. I got cut….”

  “Okay, I’ll be there in the morning too. Don’t clean up until the insurance guys get there. You understand. It’s better for a big claim if the place looks like it got hit by a shit storm.”

  They say goodbye and hang up, and for several minutes Bob stands by the phone trembling, as waves of rage, fatigue, horror and regret run through him, one hard upon the other, until he can no longer distinguish between them. He barely knows what part of the country he’s in, and he no longer remembers why he came here, why he left the place where he knew who he was, knew what he felt and why, knew how he felt about the people he lived with—his wife and children, his friends, his boss, his girlfriend, all of them living in the place where all the people were white and spoke the same kind of English and wanted the same things from life and knew more or less how to get them.

  For the first time since he came to Florida, he lets himself say to himself that he has made a terrible mistake. He should have endured the sad frustration of his life, should have been patient and waited, because it would have passed, probably once Christmas had passed, and in a few years he would have got ahead, he would have been promoted at the oil company, maybe even ended up with a desk job as a supervisor or an estimator for new work. He would still own his house on Butterick Street, his boat, the dining room set they sold for one hundred dollars in the yard sale. He’d still be able to fuck Doris Cleeve when he got a little depressed or bored, and he’d know exactly how she felt about him and how he felt about her. He wouldn’t worry if his prick was too small because he was a white man. He wouldn’t worry about how well or badly he made love, because Doris always got wet right away and sucked him right into her with obvious excitement and joy. Good old Doris Cleeve. And he wouldn’t have to think about the yellow-skinned black man lying in his own blood with a fist-sized hole in his face where his mouth and all his pretty teeth used to be, or the boy huddled in his shit against a cinder-block wall begging him not to kill him, or Eddie wondering why the hell he didn’t kill him. He wouldn’t be the man he has become, and then the man he has become would be free to go on and be someone else, some guy Bob Dubois would never miss knowing anyhow, some nervous, unsure liquor store clerk who tried and failed to make love to a pretty black woman and then almost got himself killed and had to shoot a robber because the man was black and he was not and as a result did not have the wit to talk his way out of it, when, if the robber had been white, Bob would have explained easily and nothing bad would have happened to the sad-eyed liquor store clerk working for his older, smarter brother while his wife gets more and more pregnant and life gets daily more complicated and difficult and all he can think about in the face of it is how can he redeem himself as a lover with the black woman he failed to make love to successfully. This man is not the sort of man Bob Dubois would want to know if Bob Dubois were the same man he was six months ago.

  Looking around at the strangers in the waiting room, the nurses and attendants and the occasional intern passing through, Bob suddenly feels lost to himself, as if the man he once was has been destroyed and replaced by someone he can’t recognize. It makes no difference what he does now, Bob decides. He can walk out the door to the breezy night, to the smell of magnolia and honeysuckle, to the anonymous cars passing by on their sleepy turns toward home, empty buses hissing to a stop to pick up late-night stragglers after the bars have closed, card games shut down, tempers and passions cooled enough to take back to living rooms and bedrooms—he can walk out to that world and join it, and with no one the wiser, drift on out to Highway 17, hitch a ride north as far as Atlanta, where, along about Wednesday, the police will pick him up for vagrancy. He pictures himself slumped in the back of the police car, two thick-necked young cops in front on the other side of an iron mesh barrier smoking cigarettes and talking in low Southern voices about bets they’ve placed on the All Star game this weekend. Bob doesn’t know what sport the All Stars play, or where the game is being held. He barely knows what city he’s in, what season it is (late spring, early fall, tropical midwinter?), or how he got the cuts and slashes on his neck and the backs of his arms, so that when at the police station the desk sergeant asks him about the cuts, he makes up a story, tells him he got rolled by a couple of black kids in Macon who cut him with their razors for the fun of it, and he’s believed, booked and taken to a highway work camp near Woodbine to spend thirty days cutting and burning kudzu alongside Interstate 95. After that, when he’s released, he rides with a friend from the work camp, a pickpocket who steals a car five miles from the camp, to Nashville, where the friend says they can both get work as bartenders … or he talks a local peanut farmer into hiring him as a fork-lift operator at the warehouse … or he phones his wife in Oleander Park, Florida, and tries to explain what happened to him, so that she will borrow a car from a neighbor and will pick him up and drive him home to where he used to live, with her and their two daughters and unborn son.

  He tries to explain to Elaine what has made him feel that it no longer makes any difference what he does. He tries and tries, first on the telephone from the hospital and then, beside her, in the car driving home. But he fails. First she understands too quickly and feels sorry for him; then she can’t understand at all and feels inadequate and guilty; and finally she pretends to understand and says she has felt the same way herself. It’s how it was that night in New Hampshire, little more than six months ago, when he came home weeping and they decided to move to Florida. In New Hampshire, he could weep like a child and cry, “I want … I want …” and she could respond by saying, “A new life! A fresh start! Florida!” and it didn’t matter that she didn’t understand him, or that she understood him too easily and therefore not at all. He could dream his way back to life, could make love to her and fall asleep with a smile on his face and wake the next morning believing that what he was about to do would make a difference in his life and in the lives of his wife and children. Their lives would soon be better than they had been, not because of chance or dumb luck or just rewards handed down from heaven, but because he, Bob Dubois, had decided to leave his old life behind and pack up and head south. Everything was going to be different, and better. That, most of all. Better.

  Now, however, when he cries to his wife, “I want … I want …” there is nothing she can say to make him forget that she can’t understand him at all or else thinks she understands him all too well. Consequently, his mind turns to the woman Marguerite Dill, whose love for him, if he can acquire it, will make him different from the man he is, the man who cries, “I want … I want …” Men do that to women, use them to remake themselves, just as women do it to men. Men and women seek the love of the Other so that the old, cracked and shabby self can be left behind, like a sloughed-off snakeskin, and a new self brought forward, clean, shining, glistening wetly with promise and talents the old self never owned. When you seek to acquire the love of someone who resembles you, in gender, temperament, culture or physical type, you do so for love of those aspects of yourself, gender, temperament, culture, etc.; but when you seek the love of someone different from you, you do it to be rid of yourself. And so Bob, who more than anything desires to be rid of himself, falls to contemplating the love of a Southern black woman and the kind of Northern white man it will make of him.

  Once again, he decides that he no longer loves his wife. He’s not sure what the implications of that decision are, but he hopes they don’t mean separatio
n and divorce, breaking up the family. He’s not ready for that, and even so, she, more the Catholic than he, would not permit it, no matter what the cost. They no longer quarrel, he and Elaine; that scratchy period passed the day he decided Marguerite was only a passing fancy. Since then, his days and nights with his wife and children have been peaceful, if somewhat boring. Since then, he has not had to fuss with himself to rub out the guilt he felt in the company of his children, who wanted to know, did he still love Mommy? Now, however, he fears that the nasty and exhausting quarrelsomeness that plagued them for several months in the spring will return and will quickly escalate, until he’s forced to make an impossible choice between his love for his children and his love for a woman not their mother. Bob’s no psychologist, but he knows how things go.

  On the other hand, he believes that the kind of man he will become, by virtue of his acquiring Marguerite’s love, is the kind of man who can locate with ease the excluded middle between his love for his children and his love for a woman not their mother. The man is handsome, of course, and sexy and good-humored; he’s not rich, not yet, but some men don’t have to be rich in order to seem it; he’s kind and gentle, tender to women, children and animals, without being sentimental, however, because, after all, he’s a “man’s man” as well; he’s a stern yet jocular father to his children, and he can take care of his wife too, can assume a custodial role in her life, honoring and attending to all her needs, even her sexual needs, while at the same time making plans to leave the house later, after he’s satisfied her sexual needs, to drive in his Lancia convertible across the towns of central Florida in the humid summer night to meet his beloved where she waits for him, seated elegantly at a table for two in the small back room of a restaurant that overlooks a dark, star-dappled lake, where the sound of small waves lapping tawny sands and the seductive smell of orange blossoms fill the night air. That’s the kind of man Marguerite would love.