Continental Drift

by Russell Banks

  This is your sister, eh? the man says, and he shines his light on Vanise’s face, gray now and closed to everything. Ah, he says in a low voice. Poor thing. Poor little thing.

  Where …? Émile begins.

  You wish to pay me now? the man interrupts. The Baron has already arrived. He’s eager to see you. Both of you, he adds.

  Émile reaches into his pocket and draws out the bills, two crinkled twenties, and passes them into the man’s outstretched palm.

  Come now, the man says, and he leads them into darkness, playing the beam of his light on the floor as they walk. They cross the broad expanse of the warehouse, stepping over pieces of snake-like electrical conduit, around piles of old cardboard boxes and tipped and scattered stacks of newsprint, to a set of narrow wooden stairs in the far corner. The man mounts the stairs ahead of him, and Émile sees that he is a round and not young man and is wearing white shoes, socks, trousers and shirt, with a band of red, glossy cloth tied around his thick waist. Tucked into the waistband on one side is a machete, on the other a long, narrow knife. When, at the landing at the top of the stairs, Émile gets a glimpse of the man’s face, he realizes that he has seen the man probably a hundred times on the streets of Little Haiti, a most ordinary-looking, brown-faced man, a clerk or deliveryman or barber, with round, smooth cheeks, thin mustache, high, shiny forehead with short hair graying at the temples.

  The man smiles, knocks three times loudly on the door before them, then twice. The door opens, as if by itself, Émile steps inside and brings his sister with him, and the man in white closes and locks the door behind them. They are inside la chambre de Ghede.

  The room, evidently at one time an office, is large, separated into two sections by plexiglass dividers and counters, with fly-spotted asbestos panels and old, tubeless, fluorescent light fixtures hanging half-attached from the ceiling, sheets of water-stained wallboard broken through to the lathing behind, several large desks pushed to the side to clear an open space in the front half of the room, where there is a gathering of animals—speckled hens, a black duck and a large black goat. The animals are hobbled by strings held in the hand of a teenaged boy in jeans, shirtless and barefoot, squatting on the floor. A crowd of people is clustered in the further space, but Émile can’t make out what they are doing, for the entire room is illuminated by a dozen or so candles in bottles placed erratically on the counters and desks and along the walls at the floor. Émile hears a woman weeping, sobbing loudly, as if grieving for the loss of a husband, though no one in the crowd seems to pay particular attention to anyone else. It’s as if they are in the dim, brown waiting room of a provincial train station, strangers all of them and bound for different destinations. A few people murmur a song, low, dirge-like, and a thin, high-pitched drum, a dun-dun or bébé, is being played someplace near the middle of the crowd.

  The man who brought them in tells Émile to wait by the door and disappears into the further antechamber. Émile breathes in and peers around him, first at the animals, who look half asleep, then at the boy, who is smoking a cigarette and seems bored, as if wishing he were down on Miami Avenue with his friends. All of Vanise’s weight has fallen onto Émile’s side now, and he has to work to hold her in a standing position, grabbing her under one arm and slinging the other over his shoulder.

  The air of the room is hot and ripe with the smell of sweating bodies, as if people have been dancing energetically for hours. There is also the sweet smell of white rum, cut by the smell of herbs, sharp and dry, and overripe bananas and the greasy smell of recently cooked chicken. Now Émile sees on top of one of the old desks a row of green jars and small baskets, govis, that hold the spirits of the dead, and midway along each wall, a grinning human skull set on the floor, and over his head, nailed the doorframe, what appears to be the gleaming white skull of a horse. He spins on his heels, dragging his sister’s body in a circle with him, and sees in a dim far corner of the room, beyond the animals and the boy tending them, a grave-sized mound of dirt half-covered with pale green tiles, a short cross planted at the head of the mound. In the corner opposite, three picks, three shovels and three hoes, gravedigger’s tools, lean against the wall, and on the floor before them is a balancing scale. Émile turns again, counterclockwise, and faces in the near corner a long military sword, its point up, and next to it the scabbard, lying flat on the floor. In the fourth corner of the chamber is a batch of sticks—canes and walking sticks and a furled black umbrella—leaned against the walls, as if parked there by Ghede on previous visits and forgotten afterwards.

  Suddenly, the drum is beating furiously, like the wings of a hummingbird, high, tight, too fast to separate the beats, and the crowd of people in the further section of the room is falling over itself trying to get out of the way and open a path from out of its center, when a figure nearly seven feet tall seems to rise up out of the crowd of people, as if he has been kneeling in prayer among them and has stood up. He pushes them roughly aside with a thick, gnarled stick and leaves them and passes into the section of the room where Émile—amazed, frightened, grateful—stands waiting.

  This is surely, truly, he, Brav Ghede, Baron Cimetière. This is the loa himself, with his awesome, intricate powers over death that can bring Vanise back to the world of the living. No other loa is at once so powerful and so tricky, so strong and so scheming, so kind and so cruel. And it’s a very good Ghede, too. Convincing. Émile stares up at the loa, and his breath goes away, and he is afraid that he will fall. Ghede is just as Émile hoped—taller than a man, made even taller by the battered top hat on his head, and cadaverous, with a head and face like a skull, his eyes hidden behind black, wire-rimmed glasses, his teeth large and glittering with gold. He’s wearing a mourning coat with no shirt beneath it, and his bony brown chest is slick with sweat. His striped gray trousers are held up by a thickly braided gold rope knotted over his crotch, and on his feet he wears white shoes with pointed toes. He’s a magnificent figure—awesome, frightening and delightful.

  As if she’s turned magically into a light, airy bush, Vanise no longer feels heavy to Emile, and he turns to see if she has taken her own weight onto herself, but she still leans all her weight against him, her head still hanging loosely down, eyes closed, mouth open, as if drugged. Ghede, Vanise! Émile whispers. It’s Ghede!

  Ghede smiles and pokes Vanise in the belly with his stick. In his high, whining, nasal voice, he says, Mine? Oh, monsieur, how thoughtful of you!

  No, no Brav! Émile says. I want …

  I want, I want, I want! Everyone wants, wants, wants!

  Forgive me, Ghede. She’s just come from Haiti, my sister, and the boat sank, and we found her like this, only she grows worse, and she’s called for you….

  No!

  No?

  No, no, no! Not true. Her mait’-tête is Agwé, or she’d be en bas de l’eau this moment, with all the others. Several people from the group who have gathered behind the Baron nod sagely as he speaks.

  Oh, Émile says. Agwé.

  Ghede scratches his chin and leans close to Vanise and studies her face a moment. He points at her nose, her chin, her forehead, with a long, extended forefinger, then reaches into her mouth and draws out her tongue and examines it with thumb and forefinger, rubbing it lightly, before putting it back into her mouth. Lifting up one eyelid at a time, he examines her yellow eyes. The pupils have rolled up and she looks all but dead to Emile.

  Agwé is gone now. Gone far away. Took her from the waters, then left her, the Baron says. He seems puzzled and begins mumbling in no language Émile can understand, not Creole, not French, certainly not English. Kala, kala, diman kon, lé ké dja, lé ké dja…. His mumble becomes a chant, Kala, kala, diman kon, and he starts shuffling his feet side to side and turning in a slow circle, counterclockwise. Behind him, a wizened old man with a stringy beard picks up the rhythm of Ghede’s dance with the tiny, high-pitched drum, and several people in the knot surrounding the drummer join in the chant and commence shuffling their feet
in the same odd, crablike, side-to-side step. Ghede’s face has turned to black stone, obsidian, shiny and opaque, and he dances faster and faster, over and back, from side to side, like a pendulum increasing its velocity with each new arc, and then, suddenly, he wrenches Vanise out of Emile’s arms, lurches across the room with her and tosses her onto the grave. Freed of his sister’s weight, Emile, without thinking it, has joined the dance, as if grabbed at the arms from behind by a pair of les Invisibles and thrust forward toward the other dancers and then shoved back and forth in time to their movements, until he has caught the movement on his own—then a blur, whirling motion, light creeping forward from the back of his skull, until he has been mounted, taken over, displaced by Agwé, who is immediately confronted by Ghede to learn the truth:

  Ghede: Agwé Ge-Rouge, you’ve gone off with this woman’s soul, this nice young African woman here, and she’s sad, Agwé, sad and empty, a shell, Papa. A shell.

  Agwé [in a dark, low, bubbling voice, as if from under water]: Not I, Brav. [Looks down at Vanise, examines her face carefully.] But she’s gone, all right. Too bad.

  Ghede [angry]: You’re the woman’s mait’-téte! If she’s gone, you’re gone too!

  Agwé: No.

  Ghede: No?

  Agwé: It’s her infant son, unbaptized, who’s gone off with her soul. The child’s en bas de l’eau, that’s where, and I’m with him now, Papa. Not her. It happens that way, Ghede. This one, the mother, she’s yours, if you want her, if you want to install yourself in her head.

  Ghede: Her son’s dead, eh? And how do you account for that?

  Agwé: Lots more dead, too.

  Ghede: True? [Smacks his lips, leers.]

  Agwé: True. This woman’s son, the infant. And also her nephew, a boy, Claude Dorsinville, the only son of my very own cheval here. A nice boy, too. All dead in the water, all of them, sad to say. But it was time.

  Ghede: Time! They drowned, then, these children?

  Agwé: Yes Ghede: The boat sank, and they drowned, except for this young woman?

  Agwé: No. It was evildoing. Evil. A sad thing. An evil thing.

  Ghede: Tell me!

  Agwé: The man who owns the boat sent them all over the side in a storm, fired his gun and sent them over. Evil.

  Ghede: And you went off with the infant?

  Agwé: He was not baptized. It was better for me to do that than to stay with her and let him roam, a lutin. But you can have her, if you want. You want her, Ghede?

  Ghede [Looks Vanise over with salacious precision.]: Well, yes, she’s a good meal, whether you’re hungry or not.

  Agwé: Take her, then. I’m with the child now. As for the others, they’re baptized, they’re all fine, en bas de l’eau. Even the boy, Claude, son of my cheval, he’s fine.

  Ghede: No other came out of the waters but this woman?

  Agwé: No other, and she came without me. She’s yours. You brought her out this far, Ghede. Bring her the rest of the way now.

  Ghede [with impatience]: Leave now, go on, leave! I know what I need to know! You go now, get out of here, you’ll get fed plenty in good time. You’ve got a good horse there, he’ll feed you. [Waves his assistant over to take care of Emile, and the man escorts Émile away from the crowd, calming him and talking him back out of his possession.]

  The drum and the dancing resume, with Ghede swiftly working himself into a practiced frenzy over Vanise’s inert body on the grave, until he signals for the animals to be brought forward, and his assistant, the man in white with the machete and the knife, obeys. First the speckled chickens are cut at the throat, their blood dribbled over Vanise’s bare legs. Then the duck. Same thing. And finally the black goat, lifted by two men in the air and throat cut over Vanise, blood allowed to spurt down first on Ghede with his huge mouth open and looking up as if into rain and then on Vanise, who is now awake and alert to the proceedings. Songs, initiated by Ghede, are picked up by the rest, until Ghede leaves off singing and spins, caught by the rite. He bites at his arm, wildly chewing, until controlled by his assistant, and then he bites at the carcass of the black goat. Vanise joins him, possessed now clearly by Ghede himself, in a crab-walk dance, the two facing each other, eye to eye, as equals. Song. Smell of chicken cooking. Goat carcass dragged away to be butchered and cooked. Song.

  Feeding the Loas

  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 headlig
hts 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.