Continental Drift

Bob says nothing but smiles down at the boy, who has gone quickly back to searching for America. Like me, Bob thinks. Like my father and Eddie too, and like my kids, even poor little Robbie, who’ll be as big as this kid is before I know it — like all of us up in our crow’s nests keeping our eyes peeled for the Statue of Liberty or the first glint off those gold-paved streets. America! Land, ho! Only, like Columbus and all those guys looking for the Fountain of Youth, when you finally get to America, you get something else. You get Disney World and land deals and fast-moving high-interest bank loans, and if you don’t get the hell out of the way, they’ll knock you down, cut you up with a harrow and plow you under, so they can throw some condos up on top of you or maybe a parking lot or maybe an orange grove.

Bob looks down at the boy’s black profile, and he thinks, You’ll get to America, all right, kid, and maybe, just like me, you’ll get what you want. Whatever that is. But you’ll have to give something away for it, if you haven’t already. And when you get what you want, it’ll turn out to be not what you wanted after all, because it’ll always be worth less than what you gave away for it. In the land of the free, nothing’s free.

The sun has yellowed and is nearing the horizon. Flattened like a waxy smear, it descends through scraps of clouds to the sea. The breeze off the portside is cool now, and the waves have grown to a high chop that causes the boat to pitch and yaw slightly as she plows on toward the west. Up on the bridge, Bob wonders what this Haitian boy will have to give away in order to get what he wants, what he may have already given away. It’s never a fair exchange, he thinks, never an even swap. When I was this kid’s age, all I wanted was to be right where I am now, running a boat from the Bahamas into the Gulf Stream as the sun sets in the west, just like the magazine picture Ave carried around in his wallet. So here I am. Only it’s not me anymore.

“You want to take the wheel?” he asks the boy. Bob stands away and waves the boy over. Shyly, the lad moves up and places his hands on the wheel, and Bob smiles. “You look good, son! A real captain.” The boy lets a smile creep over his lips. “Here,” Bob says. “You need a captain’s hat,” and he removes his hat and sets it on the boy’s head, much smaller than Bob’s, so that the hat droops over his ears and makes him look like a child, pathetic and sad.

“Steady as she goes, son,” Bob says. The boy nods, as if following orders. The sky in the west flows toward the horizon in streaks of orange and plum, and the sea below has turned purple and gray, with a great, long puddle of rose from the setting sun spilling over the waves toward them. Behind them, the eastern sky has deepened to a silvery blue, and stacks of cumulus clouds rise from the sea, signaling tomorrow’s weather.

Their first sight of land is the flash of the lighthouse below Boca Raton, which tells them that the Belinda Blue has come out of the Gulf Stream farther to the north then they intended, miles from where they planned to drop off the Haitians and so far from Moray Key that they can’t hope to get home before dawn. Tyrone grumbles and blames Bob, who blames the southeast wind and his not being used to running the Belinda Blue with so much weight aboard.

It’s dark, thickly overcast this close to shore, and the sea is high. The boat rides the swells, and when she crests, they can see the beach stretching unbroken from the pink glow of Miami in the south to the lights of Fort Lauderdale in the north. Then, when the boat slides down into the belly between the huge waves, they see nothing but a dark wall of water and a thin strip of sky overhead.

Frightened, the Haitians have crawled aft from their lean-to, and peer wide-eyed at the sea. The pitch and roll of the boat tosses them against one another, and several of them begin to cross themselves and pray. The old woman, hiding behind the others, has started to sing, a high-pitched chanting song that repeats itself over and over. The boy Claude is still up on the bridge with Bob, where Tyrone has joined them. Claude, too, is frightened, but he watches the white man’s face closely, as if using it to guide his own emotions. Right now, the white man, who is at the wheel, seems angry with his mate, and the mate seems angry also, for they are scowling and shouting at one another in the wind.

“For Christ’s sake, we drop them off at Hollywood or Lauderdale now, they won’t know where the hell they are! They’ll get busted in an hour. They’ll stick out like sore thumbs, for Christ’s sake! If we take them down to Coral Gables, like we said we’d do, they’ll get to cover in Little Haiti right away.”

“Too far, Bob! Dem too heavy in dis sea, mon! Got to leave ’em up here, let ’em find dere own way!”