Continental Drift

At Sea

It’s their faces that agitate him, Bob decides, and then he changes his mind: No, it’s the way they move, silent as sheep and careful not to touch what the act of climbing aboard does not require them to touch. They bunch together like gazelles, nervous but apparently not frightened, and too shy to reveal their curiosity, so that their eyes seem glazed slightly, as if they’ve been stunned by the sight of the Belinda Blue, the tall, bulky white man standing on the deck reaching out his hand to help them board from the dinghy, the spaciousness of the boat, its long afterdeck and the cabin forward, which they glance at but do not examine, and over the cabin, the bridge, where the wheel and other controls are located, a radio squawking static and a red scanner light dancing back and forth along a band of numbers.

They seem so fragile to Bob, so delicate and sensitive, that he’s suddenly frightened for them. Even the young men, with their hair cut close to the skull, seem fragile. He wants to reassure them somehow, to say that nothing will hurt them as long as they are under his care, nothing, not man or beast or act of God. But he knows he can’t even tell them where they are going, what time it is, what his name is, not with the half-dozen words and phrases of Québécois he learned by accident as a child, learned, despite his father’s prohibition against speaking French, from boys at school and old women at LeGrand’s grocery store on Moody Street and old men fishing from the bridge over the Catamount River. He suddenly pictures the huge green and white sign on Route 93 north at the state line between Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Bienvenu au New Hampshire, and he says to the Haitians, “Bienvenu au Belinda Blue!” They turn their coal-black faces toward him, as if wanting to hear more, and when Bob merely smiles, they look down.

The boat is crowded now, more like a ferry than a fishing boat, Bob thinks. Tyrone has come aboard and is tying the dinghy to the stern. “We got to get up a cover,” he says. He says it without looking at Bob, as if he thinks the two of them are alone on the boat.

“A cover?”

Tyrone stands, shakes out his stubby dreadlocks and comes forward to Bob, who’s poised at the foot of the ladder, about to climb to the bridge and start the engine. The sun will be up, it will soon be daylight, the Jamaican explains slowly, as if talking to a child. More worrisome than the sun and heat, if they don’t cover their cargo, they’ll be spotted by a plane or helicopter, especially later in the straits. The Bahamians won’t bother us; they’re relieved to see the Haitians go. It’s the Americans we have to worry about.

Bob nods somberly, though he resents the way the Jamaican speaks to him. In fact, he’s found it difficult to like Tyrone since he discovered the man’s connection with smuggling, first drugs with Ave and now Haitians with him. He’s not sure why this should be so, for after all, he and Ave are even more directly involved with the trade than he is, but he thinks it has something to do with Tyrone’s being black. It’s not natural, somehow. He felt the same odd judgment come over him one morning out on Florida Bay a few weeks ago, when Bob asked Tyrone about the dreadlocks, asked him why the Rastafarians grew their hair into tubes, something he’d been wondering about since the first day he saw them.

Tyrone smiled slyly and said that white girls liked it that way.

“Oh,” Bob said. “I thought it was … you know, religious.”

“For some, sure, mon. All dat Marcus Garvey song ’n’ dance. But de white gals, mon, dem don’t want to deal wid no skinhead, dem want to deal wid Natty Dread, mon. Got to have locks, got to have plenty spliff, got to say, ‘I and I,’ sometimes. Dat way dem know you a Jamaican black mon, not de udder kind. Den you got plenty beef,” he said laughing. “Too much beef! Oh, too much beef, mon!”

Together, Bob and Tyrone rig a tarpaulin cover over the deck, stretching it taut aft from the cabin and tying it at the corners, so that it’s head-high at the cabin and waist-high at the stern. When they’re satisfied with the job, Tyrone herds the Haitians under the tarp, forcing most of them to squat below the low end, warning them that if they don’t huddle together back there, they’ll be caught by the police and thrown in jail. They understand and follow his orders quickly and efficiently.

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.

By the same token — his intelligence and worldliness — Bob is unable to attribute to the Haitians’ poverty what he perceives as their wisdom. In the past, certainly, he sometimes regarded poor people through the cracked lens of liberal guilt, but that was before he discovered that he was a poor person himself and stopped envying the rich and started hating them. That was before he learned that what was wrong with the rich was not that they had something he wanted, but that they were unconscious, often deliberately so, of the power they wielded over the lives of others. His brother Eddie was rich for a while, and Bob envied him, until he himself suffered sufficiently from his brother’s unconsciousness to begin at last to hate him, so that when Eddie lost everything, Bob discovered he could love him again. If Bob had gone on envying his brother, if he’d never learned to hate the rich man he’d become, he would have been glad when the man lost his wealth.

Bob remembers the night he shot the black man in the liquor store, and the kid with the cornrows shitting his pants in the back room, and he shudders. The sun overhead is warm on his shoulders, and the tropical sea sparkles like the laughter of children at play, while up on the bridge, his hands clamped to the wheel of the Belinda Blue, Bob Dubois shudders as if an arctic wind has blown over him. He remembers the night he came close to shooting a man simply because the man had a haircut like that of one of the pair who tried to rob him, the night he turned the gun over to Eddie and walked out of Eddie’s house waiting to hear the sound of Eddie using the gun on himself, half of him wanting Eddie to use it on himself, the other half struggling to erase the thought altogether. I didn’t hate Eddie then, he thinks. I envied him. It was only later, on Moray Key, when it seemed to Bob that he was now truly poor, that he could begin to give up clinging to fantasies of becoming rich. Then, when it became clear to him that he has as much chance of becoming rich as he had of becoming Ted Williams, he gave up envying those he saw as rich. That’s what freed him, he believes, to love Eddie again the night he called in such fear and pain, a lost brother returned to him for only a few moments, but returned nonetheless, and for that Bob is grateful. What Eddie did to himself he did himself, but how much sadder for Bob it would have been if, when Eddie died, Bob had been glad of it.

To say that Bob Dubois is intelligent is to say that he is able to organize his experience into a coherent narrative; to say that he’s worldly is to say that he is in the world, that he does not devour it with his fantasies. Not anymore. These are relative qualities, of course, both of them depending on the breadth and depth of Bob’s experience, and depending, then, on accident, since Bob has no particular interest in, or need for, broadening or deepening his experience per se. He’s not an especially curious man. Mere psychological and moral survival will be enough for him to feel able to say, in the end, if he’s given a chance to say anything at all, that he’s lived his life well. He does not need, therefore, to poke into the mystery these Haitians present to him. What are they to him or he to them, except quick means to ends? They need him to carry them to where starvation and degradation are unlikely; he needs them to help him stay there.

He can’t stop himself, however, from believing that these silent, black-skinned, utterly foreign people know something that, if he learns it himself, will make his mere survival more than possible. They cannot tell him what it is, naturally, but even if they spoke English or he spoke Creole, it could not be told. He shouts down to Tyrone, waking him this time. The Jamaican stumbles out of the cabin and blinks up at Bob.

“Want to take the wheel awhile? I need a break,” Bob says.

The Jamaican nods and climbs the ladder to the bridge. Bob descends, ducks into the cabin, pulls a cold beer from the locker in the galley and eases himself back on deck. Squatting, he peers into the darkness under the tarpaulin, a sudden, hot, densely aromatic darkness that makes the can of Schlitz in his hand look luminous.

The Haitians are mostly lying down, a few seated on their heels and eating, one or two talking in low voices, several evidently asleep. But as one person, when Bob appears at the open end of their lean-to, they look up and, it seems to Bob, stare at him. He looks quickly away, sees the empty bucket and draws it toward him.

“More water?” he asks, his voice unnaturally high.

No one answers. They go on looking at him, their eyes large and dark brown, not curious or demanding, not hostile or friendly, either, just waiting.

“Water? Want more water?” he repeats. He picks up the bucket and turns it upside down, as if to demonstrate its emptiness.

A skinny teenaged boy squirms his way out of the clot of people and comes forward on his hands and knees and extends the metal dipper to Bob, then quickly retreats.

“Merci beaucoup,” Bob says. He stands up and takes the bucket back down to the galley, refills it and returns to the Haitians, sliding it over the deck toward them.

Again, it’s the boy who separates himself from the others by retrieving the bucket and dipper. Then, turning his narrow back to Bob, he proceeds to fill the dipper and hand it to the others, one by one — first the women, who let their children drink before they themselves drink, and then the old man and the other men — and finally he drinks. It’s hot under the tarp, but not uncomfortably so, for there’s a light breeze that sneaks across the rails at the sides. It’s dark, however, and despite the breeze, it’s close, moist with bodies crammed this tightly against one another, and Bob wonders if he should allow them to come out from under the tarp and stretch and walk about.

He calls up to Tyrone. “Whaddaya think, be okay to let them stretch their legs a bit? Seems kinda crowded and stuffy under there.”

The Jamaican looks down at the white man, shakes his head no and goes back to scanning the western horizon.

Bob is sitting flat on the deck now, his legs stretched out in front of him, his can of Schlitz in one hand, a lighted cigarette in the other. He’s got himself far enough under the tarp to be wholly in the shade, so he takes off his cap and drops it onto the deck next to him. The motion of the boat is choppier than it was, and Bob can tell from the sound of the engine that it’s working harder, lugging a little. There’s been an east wind behind them all morning, and now they’ve changed course a few degrees west-southwest, and consequently the wind is hitting them slightly to port. He knocks his pack of Marlboros against his knee, extending several cigarettes from the pack, and holds the pack out to the Haitians, who still have not taken their eyes off his face.

“Cigarette?”

The Haitians look from his face to the pack of cigarettes, back to his face again, their expressions unchanged.

Bob puts down his can of Schlitz and digs into his pocket for his butane lighter and again holds out the Marlboros. “C’mon, have a cigarette if you want.”

It’s the teenaged boy who finally comes forward and takes the cigarettes from Bob’s hand. Bob passes him the lighter, and the boy draws out a cigarette for himself and passes the package around among the others, several of whom take out a single cigarette and put it between their lips. The boy lights his up and one by one lights the others. Then he turns back to Bob, passes the lighter and what’s left of the Marlboros to him, and while they smoke, resumes watching him.

They aren’t afraid of me, Bob thinks. They can’t be — they must know I’m their friend. Quickly he corrects himself: No, I’m not their friend, and they’re not foolish enough to think it. But I’m not their boss, either, and I’m not their jailer. Who am I to these people, he wonders, and why are they treating me this way? What do they know about me that I don’t know myself?

The question, once he’s phrased it to himself, locks into his mind and puts every other question instantly into a dependent relation, like a primary gear that drives every other lever, wheel and gear in the machine. That must be their mystery, he thinks — they all know something about me, and it’s something I don’t know myself, something crucial, something that basically defines me. And they all know it, every one of them, young and old. It’s almost as if they were born knowing it. He stares back into the eyes of the Haitians, and he can see that it’s not just knowledge of white men, and it’s not just knowledge of Americans; it’s knowledge of him, Robert Raymond Dubois, of his very center, which he imagines as a ball of red-hot liquid, like the molten core of the earth.

For an instant, he breaks contact with the Haitians, and he thinks, This is crazy, they don’t know anything about me that isn’t obvious to anyone willing to take a quick look at me. He insists to himself that he’s making it all up. It’s only because they’re so black, so African-looking, and because they don’t speak English and he doesn’t speak Creole, that he’s attributing awesome and mysterious powers to them. It’s their silence and passivity that frighten him and seem to create a vacuum that he feels compelled to fill, and what he’s filling it with is his own confusion about who he is and why he’s here at all, here on this boat in the middle of the ocean, carting sixteen Haitians illegally to Florida, when he should by all rights be someone else someplace else, should be old Bob Dubois, say, of Catamount, New Hampshire, a nice, easygoing guy who fixes people’s broken oil burners, and on a late afternoon in winter like this, he should be heading back to the shop at Abenaki Oil Company to punch his time card, walk across the already dark parking lot, get into his cold car, listen to the motor labor against the cold and finally turn over and start, and drive down Main Street to Depot, turn left and park across from Irwin’s and go in for a couple of beers with the boys and maybe a flirt or at least a beer with his girlfriend Doris, before he gets back into his car and drives home to his wife and children and eats supper around a table with them in the warm kitchen, and later a little TV in the living room while the snow falls outside and the children sleep peacefully upstairs, until finally he and his wife grow weary of watching TV and climb the stairs to their own bedroom, where they quietly, sweetly, even, make love to one another and afterwards fall into a deep sleep.

But that’s all gone from him now, as far away as childhood. There’s a difference, though, for childhood was taken from him, simply ripped away and devoured by time, whereas the rest, the life he believes he should be living now, Bob has given away. And he didn’t give it away bit by bit; he gave it away in chunks. What’s worse, he gave away Elaine’s life too — or at least he believes he did. She might say it differently, for she is, after all, a kind woman who, despite everything, loves him. Regardless, Bob believes that he gave away everything in exchange for nothing, for a fantasy, a dream, a wish, that he allowed to get embellished and manipulated by his brother, by his friend, by magazine articles and advertisements, by rumor, by images of men with graying hair in red sports cars driving under moonlight to meet a beautiful woman.

He looks into the darkness at the Haitians again, and he smiles. It’s a light, sympathetic smile.

The teenaged boy smiles back, startling Bob.

“How’re ya doing, kid?”

The boy looks shyly down at his lap and remains silent, but to Bob, it’s an answer, a response, and suddenly, through this boy, at least, the vacuum that the Haitians created for Bob to fill has been broken into and filled by them, for to Bob, one of them is all of them.

Bob says, “ ’Nother cigarette?” and holds out the package.

The boy shakes his head no. He’s seated cross-legged next to a pretty young woman with a small child in her lap, both of whom, she and the child, continue to stare at Bob, as do all the other Haitians. But their stares no longer threaten him.

“You understand English, kid?” Bob asks. “Comprendez English?”

The boy smiles, shrugs, nods yes, then no, then yes again.

“C’mon, kid, you want to ride up on the bridge?” Bob stands and puts his cap on and waves for the boy to follow. Claude slides forward and stands next to him, and when Bob climbs up to the bridge, he climbs up also.

Tyrone studies the pair for a second, shrugs and hands the wheel over to Bob and descends without a word. At the bottom, he turns and calls, “Gulf Stream coming up! Got to keep track or you’ll move north wid it!”

“I know, I know,” Bob says, and he peers out ahead, searching for the Stream, the green river that flows from Mexico to Newfoundland and east to Europe with the force and clarity of a great river draining half a continent. As you enter it, the color of the water changes abruptly from dark blue to deep green, and the current drags you north at up to ten knots an hour if you do not compensate for it.

Claude stands next to Bob, and pointing out across the bow, says, “America?”

Bob nods. He’s spotted the rich green streak ahead near the horizon, and he cuts the boat a few degrees to port so that she’ll enter the Stream at more of an angle, bringing them out, he expects, a half-dozen miles south of Key Biscayne sometime before midnight. “Yep, just over the next hill. Land of the free and home of the brave. You probably think the streets are paved with gold, right?”

The boy looks up, not understanding. “Monsieur?”

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!”

Bob argues a little longer, but he knows the man is right. “All right. Hollywood, then. Be midnight by then, we can drop them by the A-One-A bridge at Bal Harbour. The water’s calm there once you get around the point. Christ only knows how they’ll get down to Miami from there, though.”

“Not our problem, Bob.”

“Go down and talk to them,” Bob says to Tyrone. “Tell them what’s happening, you know? Maybe one of ’em’s got family or something can come out with a car. Who knows? At least let ’em know where they’re going to get dropped off. Draw a map or something for ’em.

Tyrone shrugs his shoulders and turns away. “Don’t make no never mind to dem, mon. Long’s dem in America.”

“Yeah, sure, but do it anyway.” Bob brings the boat around to port, facing her into the waves, and moves the throttle forward. The boat dips and slides down and hits the gully, yaws into the sea and starts to climb again. Tyrone motions for Claude to follow, and the two of them start down from the bridge. When the boat reaches the crest and hangs there for a second before beginning the descent again, Bob looks off to his starboard side and sees the beach like a taut, thin white ribbon and believes that he can hear the waves crashing not a half mile distant. Beyond the beach he can see the lights of houses between the sea and the road to Palm Beach, where here and there cars move slowly north and south — ordinary people going about their night’s ordinary business.

Again, the boat rolls a second and starts the drop, pitches across the smooth trough, yaws between waves and rises, and this time, when it reaches the crest of the wave, Bob looks out over the dripping bow and sees the lights of another boat. It’s less than two hundred yards off the portside and headed north, and it’s a large boat, twice the size of the Belinda Blue—that’s all Bob can see of her, before the boat disappears from sight, and Bob realizes that they have pitched again and are descending. He yells for Tyrone, who’s under the tarpaulin talking to the Haitians, and frantically waves him up to the bridge. “Boat!” he shouts. “Boat!”

Tyrone scrambles up the ladder to the bridge, and when the Belinda Blue crests again, Bob points out the lights of the stranger.

“Coast guard,” Tyrone says. “Cut de lights.”

Bob obeys at once. “Oh, Jesus H. Christ!” he says. “The fucking coast guard.” He can hear the twin diesels that power her and can see that, yes, it is a cutter, ninety or a hundred feet long, with the high conning tower and the fifty- and sixty-caliber machine guns bristling at the stern and bow. “I don’t think they spotted us,” Bob says. But then he realizes that the cutter is turning slowly to port. “Oh, fuck, here they come!”

Tyrone reaches out and cuts the throttle back.

“What the fuck you doing?”

“Bring ’er around, gwan get dem Haitians off,” Tyrone says.

“What? What’re you saying?” Bob grabs Tyrone’s shoulder and flips the man around to face him.

“Dem can get to shore from here, mon!” Tyrone shouts into the wind. “It not far!”

“Not in this sea, for Christ’s sake! We can’t do that! We can’t!”

“Got to Bob!” The Jamaican turns away and starts to leave.

“Wait, goddammit! I’m the fucking captain, you’re not!”

Tyrone looks at Bob with cold disgust. “We cut dem fuckin’ Haitians loose, den maybe we get home tonight. Captain.”

“Otherwise?”

Tyrone does not answer.

Bob shouts, “They’ve got us anyhow, the coast guard! We’re caught anyhow!”

“No, dem got to stop to pick up de Haitians. Wid dem gone, de boat fast enough to get us out of here first maybe!”

“Or else we end up in jail, and they go back to Haiti! Right? Right, Tyrone?”

Again, Tyrone says nothing.

Bob says, “All right. Go ahead.” Tyrone leaps away and down the ladder.

Bob looks over the rail to the deck below, where the Jamaican frantically, roughly, yanks the Haitians out from under the tarpaulin. He’s shouting at them in Creole and Jamaican patois, making it very clear that they must jump into the water, and they must do it now. Every few seconds he points out to where they spotted the coast guard cutter, though Bob can no longer see her, for they’re down in the trough between waves again, and Tyrone pulls at their arms, shoving the Haitians toward the starboard rail, but they shake their heads no, and a few start to cry and wail, no, no, they will not go. They cling to one another and to the chocks and cleats and gunwales and look wild-eyed about them, at the towering sea, at Bob up on the bridge, at Tyrone jumping angrily about, at each other, and they weep and beg, No, no, please don’t make us leave the boat for the terrible sea.

The Belinda Blue rises to the ridge of water, and Bob sees the cutter again, now clearly turning back toward them, and they’ve got searchlights whipping wands of light across the water. “They’re turning, they’re gonna try to board us!” he yells down, and he sees Tyrone step from the cabin with a rifle in his hand, the shark gun, a 30–06 with a scope, and Bob says quietly, “Tyrone, for Christ’s sake.”

The Haitians back swiftly away from Tyrone, horrified. With the barrel of the gun, he waves them toward the rail and tells them once again to jump, but they won’t move. The babies are screaming now, and the women and several of the men are openly weeping. Claude’s face is frozen in a look of amazed grief.

Tyrone pulls the trigger and fires into the air, and one of the Haitians, the boy Claude, leaps into the water and is swept away. A second follows, and then a woman. Tyrone screams at the rest to jump, and he fires again.

Bob bellows from the bridge, “Tyrone! For Christ’s sake, stop! They’re drowning!” But the Jamaican is now bodily hurling the Haitians into the sea, one after the other, the old man, the woman with the two small children, Vanise and her child, the old woman. He’s clearing the deck of them. They weep and cry out for help from God, from the loas, from Bob, who looks on in horror, and then they are gone, lifted up by the dark waves and carried away toward the shore.

Tyrone scrambles back up to the bridge, the rifle still in his hand, and he wrenches the wheel away from Bob and hits the throttle hard, bringing the boat swiftly around to port and away. Off to the north a few hundred yards, its searchlights sweeping over the water, the cutter has slowed and stopped, for they have apparently spotted the Haitians bobbing in the water. Bob sees that they are dropping a lifeboat from the stern. He follows one of the beams of light out to where it has fixed on a head in the water, one of the young men, and then he sees the man go down. The light switches back and forth, searching for him, then seems to give up and move on, looking for others. “They’re drowning!” he cries. “They’re drowning!”

Tyrone doesn’t answer. He shoves the rifle at Bob and takes the wheel with both hands, bucking the Belinda Blue into the waves, driving her against mountains of water and quickly away from shore, heading her straight out to sea.

Bob holds the gun for a moment, looks at it as if it were a bloody ax. Then he lifts it over his head with two hands and hurls it into the sea.

Tyrone looks over his shoulder at Bob and says, “Good idea, mon. Dem prob’ly heard de shootin’. Nobody can say we de ones doin’ de shootin’ now. Got no gun, got no Haitians,” he says, smiling. Then he says, “Better clear de deck of anyt’ing dem lef’ behind, mon.”

Slowly Bob descends to the deck, and kneeling down, he crawls under the tarpaulin, reaching around in the dark, until he comes up with several battered suitcases, a cloth bundle, a woven bag, and he tosses them overboard one by one, watches them bob on the water a second, then swiftly sink.

It’s a pink dawn, the eastern sky stretched tight as silk on a frame. Overhead, blue-gray rags of cloud ride in erratic rows, while in the west, over southern Florida, the sky is dark and overcast. A man with white hair leads a nosy, head-diving dog, a blue-black Labrador, from his house and down the sandy walkway to the beach.

The man and the dog stroll easily south, and now and then the man stops and picks up a piece of weathered beach glass for his collection. The dog turns and waits, and when the man stands and moves on, the dog bounds happily ahead.

A quarter mile from where they started, the dog suddenly darts into the water, and the man stops and stares, as a body, a black woman’s body, passes by the dog and with the next wave is tossed onto the beach. A few yards beyond, a child’s body has been shoved up onto the beach, and beyond that, a pair of men lie dead on the sand.

The man counts five bodies in all, and then he turns and runs back up the beach, his dog following, to his home, where he calls the local police. “Haitians, I’m sure of it. Washing up on the sand, just like last time. Women and children this time, though. It’s just awful,” he says. “Just awful.”

A mile south of where the other bodies came to shore at Golden Beach, and five miles south of Hollywood, while ambulance crews are lugging the bodies away from the water and up the beach to the ambulances, a woman struggles through the last few waves to the shore. She is alone, a young black woman with close-cropped hair, her dress yanked away from her by the force of the water, her limbs hanging down like anchors, as she staggers, stumbles, drags herself out of the water and falls forward onto the sand. Her name is Vanise Dorsinville; she is the only Haitian to survive the journey from New Providence Island to Florida on the Belinda Blue.

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.