Continental Drift

Agwé: True. This woman’s son, the infant. And also her nephew, a boy, Claude Dorsinville, the only son of my very own cheval here. A nice boy, too. All dead in the water, all of them, sad to say. But it was time.

Ghede: Time! They drowned, then, these children?

Agwé: Yes Ghede: The boat sank, and they drowned, except for this young woman?

Agwé: No. It was evildoing. Evil. A sad thing. An evil thing.

Ghede: Tell me!

Agwé: The man who owns the boat sent them all over the side in a storm, fired his gun and sent them over. Evil.

Ghede: And you went off with the infant?

Agwé: He was not baptized. It was better for me to do that than to stay with her and let him roam, a lutin. But you can have her, if you want. You want her, Ghede?

Ghede [Looks Vanise over with salacious precision.]: Well, yes, she’s a good meal, whether you’re hungry or not.

Agwé: Take her, then. I’m with the child now. As for the others, they’re baptized, they’re all fine, en bas de l’eau. Even the boy, Claude, son of my cheval, he’s fine.

Ghede: No other came out of the waters but this woman?

Agwé: No other, and she came without me. She’s yours. You brought her out this far, Ghede. Bring her the rest of the way now.

Ghede [with impatience]: Leave now, go on, leave! I know what I need to know! You go now, get out of here, you’ll get fed plenty in good time. You’ve got a good horse there, he’ll feed you. [Waves his assistant over to take care of Emile, and the man escorts Émile away from the crowd, calming him and talking him back out of his possession.]

The drum and the dancing resume, with Ghede swiftly working himself into a practiced frenzy over Vanise’s inert body on the grave, until he signals for the animals to be brought forward, and his assistant, the man in white with the machete and the knife, obeys. First the speckled chickens are cut at the throat, their blood dribbled over Vanise’s bare legs. Then the duck. Same thing. And finally the black goat, lifted by two men in the air and throat cut over Vanise, blood allowed to spurt down first on Ghede with his huge mouth open and looking up as if into rain and then on Vanise, who is now awake and alert to the proceedings. Songs, initiated by Ghede, are picked up by the rest, until Ghede leaves off singing and spins, caught by the rite. He bites at his arm, wildly chewing, until controlled by his assistant, and then he bites at the carcass of the black goat. Vanise joins him, possessed now clearly by Ghede himself, in a crab-walk dance, the two facing each other, eye to eye, as equals. Song. Smell of chicken cooking. Goat carcass dragged away to be butchered and cooked. Song.

Feeding the Loas

Take a single sidestep, and go back three or four in time, over and back to the moment when Bob Dubois and Tyrone James brought the Belinda Blue into the marina at Moray Key. It’s dawn, a silver sky bleeding pink in the east. Putty-colored pelicans rise on wobbly legs and drop from their perches atop the bollards and piles of the pier, catch the damp air with ponderous wings and cruise low over the still water toward Florida Bay.

From the bridge of the Belinda Blue, Bob gazes down at two Florida state policemen standing on the pier at the end of the slip. Tyrone scrambles up to the bridge, grabs Bob’s shoulder and says in a harsh whisper, “We got to hide de money!”

“Well, where is it?” Bob spins the wheel to port and brings the bow of the boat alongside the slip and lets the engine idle noisily. One of the troopers walks forward and catches hold of the gunwale, reaches for a line and ties the bow to a low chock on the slip. The other moves toward the stern.

Tyrone hesitates. “I got it … I got it here,” he blurts, and he pulls a wad of bills from his pocket and shoves it at Bob.

“How much is it?”

“Maybe one, two thousand, maybe more.”

“You don’t know exactly?”

“No, mon! Me take what dem Haitians give me!”

“I thought you made a price.” Bob is as calm as a gravestone. “Five hundred a head.”

“You take what you get!” Tyrone says, and he pushes the bills at Bob.

“You take your cut?” Bob folds the bills into his wallet, swelling and stiffening it, and squeezes the wallet into his back pocket. It’s too tight, so he takes the money out of the wallet and shoves it into the left front pocket of his baggy chinos.

Tyrone says, “No, mon … me didn’t take de cut yet.” He glances nervously over his shoulder at the policemen below. “Just say we was fishing, Bob,” he whispers. “Dem cyan prove we wasn’t. Okay, mon?”

“Yeah.” Bob studies Tyrone’s eyes for a second and knows the Jamaican is lying to him about the money.

“Me get m’ gear from below now,” Tyrone says, and moves toward the ladder. “Just walk off like everyt’ing normal, Bob. Dem cyan prove nothing. Okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Tarpon,” he whispers. “We was lookin’ fe tarpon off New Providence. Tell ’em dat. De same fe me,” he says, heading for the cabin below.