Continental Drift

At the same time, possibly at the same moment, for these events have a curious way of coordinating themselves, Bob Dubois brings the Belinda Blue in from the open sea, passes under the bridge at Lower Matecumbe Key and heads for the Moray Key Marina. He cuts back the throttle as he enters the marina, letting the boat drift around to starboard so he can reverse her into the slip next to the Angel Blue, and he notices that Ave’s boat is gone from the slip.

He puts the boat into reverse, and his Jamaican mate jumps onto the deck in the bow, ready to tie her up. Bob is backing the boat skillfully into the slip, when he sees, standing on the pier, apparently waiting for them, two Florida state troopers.

The Jamaican looks up at Bob on the bridge. “Get out, Bob! Reverse de fuckin’ boat, mon, and get ’er out of here!”

Bob simply shakes his head no and calmly backs the boat into the slip.

Gan Malice O!

Two nights after the night the Haitians drowned in the waves off the beach at Sunny Isles, a man and two women lead Vanise Dorsinville from a small white bungalow in northeast Miami, out a door at the back of the house into the packed dirt yard, the ground speckled in beige and dark brown in new moonlight and shade, palm fronds beyond the rickety fence chattering in the cool breeze, cars whizzing past overhead on the throughway. They step with care through an opening in the fence, replace the loose board that hides it, and soon they are walking directly beneath the highway, Interstate 95, which swoops over them from north to south, eight lanes of steel and concrete rushing as if downhill toward the tip of the continent, with garbage, broken bottles, rusting tin cans, old tires, rats and the carcasses of cats and dogs scattered below in the tufts of long yellow grass.

Vanise leans heavily on the arm of the man, her brother and father of the boy Claude Dorsinville, who had liked and admired the white captain of the boat and had been the first of the Haitians to leap into the water, as if to show them how easy it was, and, though he could not swim at all, must have believed that he was close enough to America to walk ashore, for he made no attempt to swim, did not struggle, did not even call out, but simply went to the bottom, as if thrown surprised from a great height.

His body and the body of Vanise’s baby will eventually be found, like most of the others, bloated, purplish-gray, half eaten by sharks and birds, in the sands along the stretch of fine white beach south of Bal Harbour, by horrified joggers, beachcombers, early morning surfers and fishermen. No one will be able to identify them, although everyone will know they are the Haitians the newspapers said were cast off an American boat when the coast guard threatened to board it, a boat that slipped away while the coast guard tried to save the drowning Haitians and raced away to the south without giving up its identity or the names of the man who was the captain and the man who was his mate.

Vanise alone survived, which she believes is due to the particular intervention of Ghede, dark and malicious loa of death and regeneration, who needed one of them to survive the drownings, any one of them at all, so why not Vanise, a strong young woman with firm, warm loins, which Ghede, in his gluttony for flesh, is known to relish? Ghede, Vanise believes, wanted one of them to survive so as to feed him the others, to act as his agent, for he is a devourer of human flesh, insatiable, jackal-like, a loa who schemes endlessly to obtain what he endlessly needs. There is no other explanation for her not having drowned in the storm with the others, for she cannot swim any more than her nephew or child could, and the waters were as fierce for her as for them, the waves as heavy, the sharks as hungry, hard and swift.

People who have no power, or believe they have none, also believe that everything that happens is caused by a particular, powerful agent; people who have power, people who can rest easily saying this or that event happened “somehow,” call the others superstitious, irrational and ignorant, even stupid. The truly powerless are none of these, however, for they and perhaps they alone know that luck, bad luck as much as good, is a luxurious explanation for events. When you have even partial control over your destiny, you’re inclined to deny that you do, because you’re afraid the control will go away. That’s superstition. But when, like Vanise, you have no control over your destiny, it’s reasonable to assume that someone or something else does, which is why it’s reasonable, not irrational, for Vanise to believe that the bizarre fact of her survival, her destiny now, is due to a loa’s intervention, and because of the particulars, it’s reasonable for her to assume that the loa is Ghede.