Cross Current

by Christine Kling

  “What do you mean, different?”

  “Something about finding that kid, it changed you.”

  I knew it was true, but somehow his saying it seemed to imply that I had instantly become the maternal type. “Oh, B.J., cut the crap with your pseudo-psychological paranormal bullshit. Geez.” I ran my fingers through my hair. “She’s just a kid.” As I turned and made my way aft to check on our tow, I heard his soft laughter.

  It was after six by the time we made our way up the Dania Cut-off Canal toward Playboy Marine, the yard that had contracted to haul and store the Miss Agnes. The yard workers had quit for the day, but they had left the boatyard travel lift parked over the slip, the slings lowered to the perfect depth for the cruiser. B.J. and I tied the boat up and shut down the pumps. If she sank during the night, she would go down no more than eighteen inches and settle right into those slings. They could pump her out again in the morning before they hauled her out.

  I climbed aboard the Miss Agnes to take one last look around. B.J. had loaded the pumps back on Gorda, and I’d replaced my towlines with some raggedy old dock lines we’d scrounged off the travel lift. Standing on the cruiser’s deck, I imagined again the scene of fifty people and the belongings they had brought for a new life crammed into these few square feet of space.

  Beads of moisture fogged the window in the aft cabin door. As I reached for the door handle, I wondered again if there was a connection between the two jobs I’d worked that day: a boat bringing in some illegal Haitian immigrants sinks, and a day and a half later I find two Haitians offshore in a half-sunk boat. Had Solange started out aboard the Miss Agnes? The problem was that the numbers just didn’t add up. The current should have carried her much farther north. Was there a third boat we didn’t know about? When I swung the door open and peered into the cabin area, the smell of wet, rotting clothes, ammonia, and dead sea critters hit my face, and the rank sun-heated air flowed out of the enclosed space. Coughing and gasping for air, I stepped back and turned my face away from the cabin door.

  Abaco growled a low throaty growl from her post aboard Gorda. I could hear the sound of her claws clicking on the aluminum decks as she paced, wanting desperately to come protect me.

  B.J. looked down at me from atop the cement dock. “Isn’t it amazing how ripe people’s belongings can get after just a couple of days underwater? After we brought her up, we closed all those windows for a reason, Sey.”

  “Oh, man.” I closed the door to the cabin. “I don’t envy the cops who are going to have to go through the stuff in there.” The side decks were clear, so I made my way forward and tested the latch on the door to the wheelhouse. It turned, and this time I took a deep breath and held it before opening the door.

  “Sey,” B.J. said, “you do remember that we had clear instructions from the authorities not to touch anything?”

  I ignored him and peered inside.

  “You told me that this morning,” he said, “and I was careful not to disturb any evidence. Anyway, aside from that, there’s a bad vibe in there.”

  Smiling at his comments, I stepped into the wheelhouse, risking the boat’s “bad karma.” Abaco growled again, and B.J. said, “See? Even she knows.”

  “Think I’m risking some kind of Voodoo curse, eh, B.J.?” I did not consider myself either a religious or a superstitious person, and, admittedly, I did at times make light of B.J.’s mishmash spirituality, which was made up of bits of Transcendentalism, Eastern religions, aikido, and who knows what all. But deep inside, I knew that he saw and felt things that were totally beyond my ken.

  I took a breath, testing the air. It wasn’t as bad in here as it had been aft. The inside steering station on most American boats this size would boast a control panel of electronics rivaling that of an airplane cockpit. The Miss Agnes, however, had an ancient, pre-digital depth sounder with a circular flasher, and that was it. Not even a VHF radio. The compass had clearly been salvaged from a sunken sailboat. It was mounted on the cabinetry above the helm with wood blocks and nails, and I wondered what those nails did to the instrument’s accuracy. That compass had once cost somebody a bundle, but now all the plastic and metal surfaces were covered with bits of calcified shell where barnacles had once grown. It was the helm of the cruiser, though, that really showed the ingenuity of the island people. In place of a steering wheel, the boat was piloted with bicycle handlebars attached to the steering gear that protruded from the cabinetry.

  A couple of waterlogged charts were plastered to the woodwork, and other bits of paper and plastic trash littered the cabin floor. Everywhere I looked in the little cruiser’s wheelhouse, I saw another jury-rigged contraption that would have thrown most American yachtsmen into a conniption. I don’t know if it was real or just the power of suggestion from B.J., but I began to feel there was something creepy about the boat. It was depressing to think about the poverty and desperation of the people who struck out in boats like this to try to get to America, but there was something more. Despite the hot muggy air, I felt a distinct chill.

  I turned around, overcome by the desire to get off that boat as soon as possible, and I was about to step back through the doorway when I saw something stuck to the glass windshield. It was a small white rectangle of paper, and when I started to reach for it, something skittered through the trash at my feet. I jumped, letting out a high-pitched squeak.

  “Are you okay?” B.J. was squatting on the dock next to the cabin door, ready to jump to the boat’s deck.

  I pushed aside the wet cardboard on the floor and a small, pale crab scurried for another hiding place. “This place is spooking me out. I just got scared by a crab, for Pete’s sake.”

  B.J. stood up. “Come on, Sey. Let’s get out of here.”

  Leaning over the makeshift helm, I peeled the paper off the windshield. It was a business card. “Racine Toussaint” was written in plain type above a Pompano Beach address. It didn’t say what business Racine was in, but I slid it into my pocket anyway, careful not to rip the soggy paper.

  It was when I was almost out the door that I noticed the sunglasses hooked under a bungee cord that ran across the top of the steering station. Miss Agnes’s crew probably used the bungee to keep charts and equipment from blowing or rolling away out at sea. The shades stood out in that dilapidated cabin because they were obviously very expensive Polarized glasses. That brand started at over a hundred dollars a pair. A beaded string was tied between the two earpieces of the shades to keep them on the mariner’s head, and on the wide sides of the frame someone had drawn crude designs in white enamel paint: little skulls with crossbones.

  So somebody fancied himself a pirate? I slid the glasses under my T-shirt and tucked in my shirttail to hold them snug. I didn’t want any arguments from B.J. about my having taken a souvenir.

  The last fingers of pink were disappearing from the western sky by the time I dropped B.J. off at the docks close to the Dania Bridge and reached the mouth of the New River. I had piloted the tug upriver after dark many times before, but every time I appreciated the beauty of the homes as though I were seeing them for the first time. The river took on a different character when the big old oak and sea grape trees were lit by floodlights and the red and green navigational lights on the occasional pilings that marked the river’s shallows. Sound carried farther in the darkness, and soft music drifted across the water from the poolside cabana at one of the enormous homes. Many like this one were of recent construction, pseudo-Spanish, and built out to the lot’s limits after the nice little Florida bungalows built in the forties and fifties had been torn down. White twinkling lights wound round the trunks of the oaks and illuminated the three party workers slumped on high stools at the outdoor tiki bar looking bored. The party probably wouldn’t heat up for another couple of hours. That was one of the few riverfront homes with anyone in residence in June; most of the houses on either side of Gorda were shuttered and dark, their owners long since gone in preparation for the coming months of heat, humidity, an
d hurricanes.

  Abaco began to pace the decks and whine. She knew we were nearing home. I lived in a Lauderdale neighborhood called Rio Vista in what had once been a small boathouse, renovated by the previous owners into a tiny, one-bedroom cottage. It was on the property of a riverfront mansion that belonged to a Mr. Lars Larsen, owner of a national chain of muffler shops headquartered up in Milwaukee. Larsen had bought the place as his Florida winter home, and in years past, he’d often had Red tow his various yachts. When Red died, and my brothers and I sold Red’s house where Gorda used to dock, Mr. Larsen called and offered me the boathouse. He said he’d like to have an on-site caretaker for the months when he and his family were not there. The main house was a huge multitowered, Moorish edifice that dated to the 1930s, when the New River meandered through a Fort Lauderdale that was more of a frontier town, back when fish houses and vegetable docks still stood on the New River’s banks. Over the years, a succession of owners had added on rooms and towers, and today, the Larsen house looked like something created by Disney on drugs. The main house was set back from the river, but my cottage was right on the dock, and I could park Gorda just a few feet outside my front door.

  When I stepped out of the elevator on the fourth floor at Broward General Hospital, it was ten till eight, and the nurse who gave me directions to room 425 reminded me that visiting hours would be over in ten minutes. The forced congeniality and the low hum of machinery were what I most remembered about the weeks I’d spent here with Red before he died. Indoors is more indoors in a hospital; even the air tastes artificial. I knew it was the cancer that killed him, but I always felt that being shut away from the sunshine and fresh air had hurried that process along.

  Jeannie was sitting in a chair next to the bed, her fingers laced together on top of her stomach, watching the TV screen mounted high up in a corner of the room, while a strange man in a dark green uniform sat on the edge of Solange’s bed, speaking to her. The kid looked even smaller in that big white bed, especially because the man sitting next to her had the shoulders of a football player. His biceps stretched the green fabric of his uniform tight and, as he moved, the leather and web belt that held his gun creaked, a continuous reminder that the weapon was there. Again, I felt an odd twist in my gut.

  “Well, it’s about time you got here, girl.” Jeannie stood and tugged at her dress to reposition the fabric around her shoulders.

  The man stood up and reached his hand out to me. “How d’ya do,” he said. His sandy-colored hair looked a bit shaggy around the ears for a law enforcement type, and the deep tan and white creases at the corners of his blue-gray eyes told me he felt nearly as trapped inside the hospital as I did. “Name’s Elliot. I’m with the Border Patrol.”

  In his voice I heard an accent from someplace not too far north of here, which meant the South.

  “Border Patrol, huh?” I looked at the writing stitched over his breast pocket.

  “Not many folks recognize the uniform. They mostly think we’re park rangers or something.”

  I nodded. “You do kind of look like Smokey the Bear. You just need one of those hats.” I made the shape of the flat brim with my hands. He wasn’t smiling at my little joke.

  His hand had completely engulfed mine, which doesn’t happen often. I glanced down at the card he’d handed me. It said he was Russell Elliot, Senior Patrol Agent, Border Patrol.

  “My friends call me Rusty,” he said.

  “Border Patrol? As in Immigration?”

  “Basically, yeah.”

  “And just what border do you patrol? Georgia? Alabama?”

  Jeannie sighed and plopped back down in her chair.

  Agent Elliot gave me a look that said that what I thought was a clever line was something he had heard too many times. “Actually, there’s plenty of border down here in South Florida. This state has about seventeen thousand miles of coastline—more international border than any other continental state—and yet we’ve got just one other office on this coast south of Jacksonville. Sixteen people work out of our office, and there’s another ten down at the Marathon branch office in the Keys. We’re the guys who try to catch the folks who don’t come in through normal ports of entry.” His eyes flicked a quick glance at Solange, then he pressed his lips together and raised his brows as though to say “Not my fault.”

  Flashing those baby blues at me all innocent like that made me want to yank him off her bed and push him out the door. I squeezed past him and slipped between the bed and the IV stand. “How are you feeling?” I asked Solange.

  She looked more alert now, more focused, and it was obvious she had been listening, trying to understand our conversation. But when I spoke directly to her, she blinked once and then lowered her eyes.

  “She’s not saying much,” Jeannie said. “She slept for about three hours, though, after we got settled in here. I called my mother, and she came and picked the boys up. This little girl ate a pretty good dinner when she woke up, even though it looked god-awful to me, some kind of clear broth, crackers, and Jell-O. Point is, she kept it down. There was a whole room full of folk waiting for her to upchuck.” Jeannie heaved herself back up to a standing position. “It’s your shift now. I’m heading out.”

  I reached across the bed and squeezed her hand. “Thanks, Jeannie. I really owe you this time.”

  “Girl, you owe me so much, you’ll never get to even. But today was a pleasure.” She turned to Solange. “I’ll be back tomorrow. You remember what I told you, okay?” She looked at the Border Patrol agent, then gave the girl an exaggerated wink. To me she said, “I’ll call you later.”

  After Jeannie was gone, Elliot said, “May I speak to you out in the hall for a moment?”

  I wanted to get him out of there, away from Solange, and it appeared I was going to have to hear him out to make that happen. “I’ll be right back,” I told her.

  Outside the room, I pressed my back against the wall, and for the first time all day, I felt tired, felt the weight of the day’s events pressing me down. I wanted to slide my butt down to the floor and sit. What I didn’t want to do was stand out there under those fluorescent lights talking to this big man who had come to send that child back to Haiti.

  “Can we get this over with as quickly as possible?” I asked. “I’m pretty damn tired, and I’d really rather be in there with that kid than standing out here talking to you.”

  “I’ll agree not to take offense at that, if you’ll agree to tell me what happened out there.” There was a definite country sound to his voice. I guessed Georgia.

  “Look, I’ve already talked to the local cops.”

  “I know that, but this girl isn’t really their case. Their concern is the murder victim, mine is this girl.”

  It was the first time I had heard anyone involved with this case say the word. Collazo had already referred to the woman’s “attacker,” but this word was powerful: murder. “Okay, look. I’ll go through the story again, but I’m going to tell you right up front, if you’re making plans to send that kid back to Haiti, I’m going to fight you every inch.”

  He pushed away from the wall and slid his hands in his pockets. “This country’s policy is pretty clear on that.” There was a looseness about him in spite of his size, as though he were incredibly comfortable in his own skin. Under other circumstances I would have found that attractive, but now it merely irritated me. It made me have to work that much harder to not like him.

  “I don’t give a damn about your policy.”

  “If you would let me finish, what I was going to say was that I am not here this evening to talk about her deportation. Don’t get me wrong, Miss Sullivan, we may get to that, but as an unaccompanied minor, we’re not going to hustle her off into the night and onto a plane bound for Port-au-Prince.”

  Yeah, right. The Border Patrol trying to make out like they’re really just warm and fuzzy? “But you will get to that point eventually.”

  “Well” —he shrugged—“if she doesn’t have a
ny next of kin here in the States, then, yeah, probably. I’m not gonna lie to you on that.”

  “So, assuming we don’t find any next of kin in the States, how much time do I have before you get there?”

  “A week, maybe ten days, max.”

  I stared straight into those laser-like blue eyes of his. “You are not sending this one back. Whatever it takes, she’s staying.”

  “Is that a threat, Miss Sullivan?”

  I held his eyes as long as I could, but finally I had to turn my head away. I watched the nurse in the room across the hall as she carried a bedpan to the far patient and drew the curtain around the bed. The sound of the steel rings sliding on the rod reminded me of all the times I had stepped away from my father’s bed, both of us feeling awkward about the last days when his body gave out. That was before I finally said “enough” and took him home so he could die in his own bed, and the awkwardness was replaced with a sense of intimacy. I’d often wondered if that sense I had felt as I bathed him and fed him and carried him to the bathroom, that sense of such profound love, if that was the same feeling a mother got as she cared for her newborn child.

  “So tell me what happened,” he said. “How you found her.”

  I swung my head back around and blinked at him. I’d forgotten for a moment that he was there. Taking a deep breath, I saw her again sitting in that boat, resting her head just inches out of the bloody water, just staring at me with those eyes. She probably would not have survived another twenty- four hours.

  “I’ve tried to get the story from her,” he said, “but she either doesn’t understand or she won’t talk. The local cops had a Creole translator here earlier. Same thing. She wouldn’t say a word.”

  I knew how that felt; I’d been there once myself. They said I didn’t speak for three months after my mother died. I’d gone to some inner place where none of it could touch me. Once you’ve found your way to that place, it’s hard to come back.