Continental Drift

Tyrone scrambles forward to pull up the anchor, and Bob climbs up to the bridge and starts the engine. It gurgles and chuckles and then smooths out, and when Tyrone waves up to him, Bob hits the throttle, and the aft end of the loaded boat dips, the bow rises, and the Belinda Blue moves out of the bay, cuts northwest along the shore of New Providence past Clifton Point, where she edges back slightly to the west and heads into open sea. The sun is two hands above the horizon now, and the blue-green water glitters like a field of crinkled steel. Gulls dart across the wake, frigate birds drift past far overhead and a school of flying fish loops by on the starboard side.

It’s a beautiful day, Bob thinks, and he says it, calls it out to Tyrone, who’s perched out on the foredeck coiling the anchor line. “It’s a beautiful day!”

The Jamaican looks up at him, cups his ear and says, “What?”

“It’s a beautiful day!”

The Jamaican nods and goes back to work.

With the extra weight of the Haitians aboard, the Belinda Blue wallows a bit and sits somewhat low in the water, but the day is calm, and she rides the swells and small waves with ease. Far to the south, the northern tip of Andros Island lifts like a whale, passes slowly to the east and drops again. The sun is higher now, and Bob is hot up on the bridge. He calls down to Tyrone, who’s in the cabin stretched out on a bunk, and asks him to bring him a beer. A few seconds later, Tyrone, shirtless, hands up a can of Schlitz, frosty and wet from the ice.

“Whaddaya think, the Haitians, they thirsty?”

Tyrone looks back toward the tarpaulin, steps down to the deck and peers underneath. He’ll give them a bucket of water and a dipper, he says to Bob. They’ll share it out themselves.

“Fine, fine. Poor fuckin’ bastards,” he murmurs, as Tyrone disappears below. From the moment he first saw them ride out from the beach at New Providence in the dinghy, saw how astonishingly black they were, African, he thought, and saw how silent and obedient, how passive they were, he’s been struck by the Haitians. There’s a mixture of passivity and will that he does not understand. They risk everything to get away from their island, give up everything, their homes, their families, forsake all they know, and then strike out across open sea for a place they’ve only heard about.

Why do they do that? he wonders. Why do they throw away everything they know and trust, no matter how bad it is, for something they know nothing about and can never trust? He’s in awe of the will it takes, the stubborn, conscious determination to get to America that each of them, from the eldest to the youngest, must own. But he can’t put that willfulness together with what he sees before him — a quiescent, silent, shy people who seem fatalistic almost, who seem ready and even willing to accept whatever is given them.

He almost envies it. The way he sees himself — a man equally willful, but only with regard to the small things, to his appetites and momentary desires, and equally passive and accepting too, but only with regard to the big things, to where he lives and how he makes his living — he is their opposite. It’s too easy to explain away the Haitians’ fatalism by pointing to their desperation, by saying that life in Haiti is so awful that anything they get, even death, is an improvement. Bob has more imagination than that. And it’s too easy to explain away their willfulness the same way. Besides, it’s not logical to ascribe two different kinds of behavior to the same cause. There’s a wisdom they possess that he doesn’t, a knowledge. The Haitians know something, about themselves, about history, about human life, that he doesn’t know. What to call it, Bob can’t say. It’s so outside his knowledge that he can’t even name it yet.

He’s intelligent and worldly enough now, however, not to confuse it with sex. That is, even though black people are still sexier to Bob than white people, it’s only because they look better to Bob, for to him, a white man, black is presence and white is absence, which means that he can see them in ways that he can’t see white people. Which also means, of course, that he can see white people in ways he’s utterly blind to in blacks, as he learned by trying to love Marguerite. Bob has become one of those fortunate few men and women who have learned, before it’s too late to enjoy it, that sex is just sex and it’s all of that as well. He can take it and leave it, which is a much happier condition than having to do one or the other. He’s not sure how this has happened to him, but he knows it has happened and that it has something important to do with Marguerite. There was no exact moment when his conscious understanding of his own sexuality changed; there simply came a time when he behaved differently — that is, without fantasy. As with Allie Hubbell in the trailer across the lane. As with Honduras. As with Elaine.