Continental Drift

It’s their faces that agitate him, Bob decides, and then he changes his mind: No, it’s the way they move, silent as sheep and careful not to touch what the act of climbing aboard does not require them to touch. They bunch together like gazelles, nervous but apparently not frightened, and too shy to reveal their curiosity, so that their eyes seem glazed slightly, as if they’ve been stunned by the sight of the Belinda Blue, the tall, bulky white man standing on the deck reaching out his hand to help them board from the dinghy, the spaciousness of the boat, its long afterdeck and the cabin forward, which they glance at but do not examine, and over the cabin, the bridge, where the wheel and other controls are located, a radio squawking static and a red scanner light dancing back and forth along a band of numbers.

They seem so fragile to Bob, so delicate and sensitive, that he’s suddenly frightened for them. Even the young men, with their hair cut close to the skull, seem fragile. He wants to reassure them somehow, to say that nothing will hurt them as long as they are under his care, nothing, not man or beast or act of God. But he knows he can’t even tell them where they are going, what time it is, what his name is, not with the half-dozen words and phrases of Québécois he learned by accident as a child, learned, despite his father’s prohibition against speaking French, from boys at school and old women at LeGrand’s grocery store on Moody Street and old men fishing from the bridge over the Catamount River. He suddenly pictures the huge green and white sign on Route 93 north at the state line between Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Bienvenu au New Hampshire, and he says to the Haitians, “Bienvenu au Belinda Blue!” They turn their coal-black faces toward him, as if wanting to hear more, and when Bob merely smiles, they look down.

The boat is crowded now, more like a ferry than a fishing boat, Bob thinks. Tyrone has come aboard and is tying the dinghy to the stern. “We got to get up a cover,” he says. He says it without looking at Bob, as if he thinks the two of them are alone on the boat.

“A cover?”

Tyrone stands, shakes out his stubby dreadlocks and comes forward to Bob, who’s poised at the foot of the ladder, about to climb to the bridge and start the engine. The sun will be up, it will soon be daylight, the Jamaican explains slowly, as if talking to a child. More worrisome than the sun and heat, if they don’t cover their cargo, they’ll be spotted by a plane or helicopter, especially later in the straits. The Bahamians won’t bother us; they’re relieved to see the Haitians go. It’s the Americans we have to worry about.

Bob nods somberly, though he resents the way the Jamaican speaks to him. In fact, he’s found it difficult to like Tyrone since he discovered the man’s connection with smuggling, first drugs with Ave and now Haitians with him. He’s not sure why this should be so, for after all, he and Ave are even more directly involved with the trade than he is, but he thinks it has something to do with Tyrone’s being black. It’s not natural, somehow. He felt the same odd judgment come over him one morning out on Florida Bay a few weeks ago, when Bob asked Tyrone about the dreadlocks, asked him why the Rastafarians grew their hair into tubes, something he’d been wondering about since the first day he saw them.

Tyrone smiled slyly and said that white girls liked it that way.

“Oh,” Bob said. “I thought it was … you know, religious.”

“For some, sure, mon. All dat Marcus Garvey song ’n’ dance. But de white gals, mon, dem don’t want to deal wid no skinhead, dem want to deal wid Natty Dread, mon. Got to have locks, got to have plenty spliff, got to say, ‘I and I,’ sometimes. Dat way dem know you a Jamaican black mon, not de udder kind. Den you got plenty beef,” he said laughing. “Too much beef! Oh, too much beef, mon!”

Together, Bob and Tyrone rig a tarpaulin cover over the deck, stretching it taut aft from the cabin and tying it at the corners, so that it’s head-high at the cabin and waist-high at the stern. When they’re satisfied with the job, Tyrone herds the Haitians under the tarp, forcing most of them to squat below the low end, warning them that if they don’t huddle together back there, they’ll be caught by the police and thrown in jail. They understand and follow his orders quickly and efficiently.