Continental Drift

“Drive careful,” Elaine says, hefting the baby to her shoulder. “The roads are wet. I don’t want you dead.”

“You don’t?”

“Don’t joke about stuff like that, Bob. No, I feel like our life is over, though. The old life, I mean. The one we imagined when we were kids. That old me and that old you are dead already, I think. Maybe it’s good they are. I don’t know. No, I don’t want you dead, Bob. I want to grow old with you.”

“Didn’t you always want that?”

“I guess I didn’t. I just wanted to be young with you. You know? And that’s what I’ve been, until now.”

“Yeah. Me too. I feel so old now. Old as my father. It’s strange, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Be careful,” and she opens the door. She gets out of the car, grunting with the effort, slams the door closed and disappears behind the clouded glass. Stretching across the seat, Bob rubs the window clear and watches his wife climb the steps, where, as she opens the door, she shifts the baby to her hip, and then the door is closed, and she is gone.

An hour and a half later, Bob turns left in Key Largo at Blackwater Sound, crosses the bridge and leaves the Keys on the Route 1 causeway to the mainland. The rain has passed over, scudding northwest across the bay toward Naples and Fort Myers and on up the Gulf Coast, and now, ahead of Bob and slightly to his right, an egg-shaped moon droops in the purple sky over Miami. He follows the moon, its yellow light reflecting off the old canal alongside Route 1, through the Everglades to Florida City, where he picks up the Dixie Highway north through alternating suburbs and truck farms, until the suburbs take over altogether and the huge orange glow from the city, blotting out the moon and stars, fills the northern sky from east to west.

Though the land is flat, a mere three feet above sea level all the way in from the Keys to Miami, Bob feels, as he enters the gleaming city, that he’s descending from a high plateau. Along Brickell Boulevard, south of the Miami River and north of Coconut Grove, he passes between tall royal palms, and on either side, the pink mansions of deposed Latin American politicians and generals hide behind poinciana bushes and chain-link fences. Across the bay on his right is Key Biscayne. He passes terraced luxurious high-rise condominiums that house heroin and cocaine couriers from Colombia whose million-dollar cash deposits help keep Florida bankers happy, and then he drives between the banks themselves, clean white skyscrapers with window glass tinted like the sunglasses of a small-town sheriff.

When he crosses the Miami River in the center of the city, he’s downtown and can see Miami Beach across the bay, where people live in hotels and live off hotels, a city where there are no families. Then north along Biscayne Boulevard, past the grandstands from last month’s Orange Bowl parade, empty and half demolished and throwing skeletal shadows over the grass of Bay Front Park, until he passes out of downtown Miami and enters dimly lit neighborhoods where there are no more white people — no white people on the sidewalks, no white people in the stores or restaurants, no white people in the cars next to him at stoplights. This is where he wants to be. He knows, from what newspapers and boatmen on the Keys have told him, that he’s in Little Haiti now, a forty-block section of the city squeezed on the west by Liberty City, where impoverished American blacks boil in rage, and on the other three sides by neat neighborhoods of bungalows, where middle-class Cubans and whites deliver themselves and their children anxiously over to the ongoing history of the New World.

He parks the car on North Miami Avenue one block beyond Fifty-fourth Street, in front of a small grocery story open to the street and still doing business, despite the late hour. There are burlap sacks of what look like flour stacked on the sidewalk and crates of rough orange yams, plantains and red beans. Several women inside the store talk to one another, while a man with spectacles pushed up on his shiny, mahogany-brown forehead totals their purchases. Bob takes a step inside, listens to the swift, soft Creole the women are speaking, and when, at the sight of him, they go silent, he steps back to the street.

Farther down the block, he comes to a record shop, speakers over the door shouting music onto the street, and he opens the door and walks inside. Everyone in the shop — three teenaged boys, a pair of young women, a bearded man behind the counter — stops talking and proceeds to examine a product, records, needles, plastic disks for 45s, microphones, until Bob leaves, when they resume their loud, quick conversations, and the music plays raucously over and over.