Continental Drift

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.

Then one of the state troopers on the slip, the larger of the pair, hollers, “Robert Dubois?”

Bob answers, “Yeah. Be right down!” and cuts the engine.

The other trooper steps aboard, but the first reaches out and draws him back to the slip. Behind them, in the distance, a second pair of troopers jog heavily toward them from the parking lot, while from around the corner of the apartment building, three or four more, two of them carrying shotguns, and two burly, crew-cut men in loose, short-sleeved shirts and chinos, walk with alert haste past the Clam Shack and out along the pier to the Belinda Blue and what seems to be a crowd gathered at the slip, where they join the crowd, which now includes both Bob and Tyrone.

The two young plainclothes officers show their badges and swiftly shape the group and give a sudden, hard focus to it. “Both of you, hands on your heads, turn around, spread your legs.” And while one man reads from a card that tells Bob and Tyrone they have the right to remain silent, another gropes his way down their bodies, finding no weapons, except for Tyrone’s filleting knife, and missing Bob’s slab of money altogether. A third man flashes in front of Bob what he claims is a search warrant, and two or three, or maybe more — Bob can’t see to count them, for he stands facing the channel and the bridge beyond, where cars cross over to Matecumbe, their headlights glowing uselessly white in the gray, early morning light — board the Belinda Blue and begin searching her aft from the bow and inboard from the bridge down to the keel.

Bob thinks, I’m glad. It’s over and done with now, and no matter what happens, I’m glad. He fights a sudden impulse to drop his hands to his sides, to turn and face the silent men behind him and say, “Thank you,” but he knows he must not move, he must stand here on the edge of the pier, a prisoner with his hands crossed over the top of his head, or he will be shot dead. He must act the part of a man who, if given the chance, would flee, even though he feels half in love with these grim, dough-faced men, deeply grateful to them, as if they are members of a search party that, long after he gave up hope of ever being found again, has located him at last. It’s as if, by holding guns on him and arresting him and searching his boat, they have brought him back into the community of man, and he is so profoundly grateful to them for it that if he did drop his hands and turned and stepped forward, hands extended, to thank them, and if, to stop him, they fired their shotguns into his chest, it would not be a terrible thing.

But this is not to be. For no sooner have the policemen welcomed Bob Dubois back into the community than they have rejected him again, sent home in his car, with his awful secret undetected, leaving him his stinging visions of black children and women and old and young men, helpless, history-weakened people battered and driven down to death by the waves, human faces with mouths begging for what’s an absolute right, pleading for help, eyes bulging in horror as they realize what has happened to them and suddenly discover their terrible fate, to be drowned at sea, to be cast into deep, storm-torn waters at night by a white man claiming to act as their friend and savior and a black man claiming to help him at it. This is an ordinary variation of an ancient story on this part of the planet, so ordinary that even Bob Dubois knows it, and now it’s his story as well, and he knows that too.

The police finally conclude that, because of the half ounce of grass wrapped in brown paper and the unexplained thirty-two hundred dollars in cash at the bottom of Tyrone’s blue Eastern Airlines flight bag, they can charge Tyrone with possession of a controlled substance and make arrangements to charge him with intent to sell it. But shortly afterwards, in Marathon, while booking him, they discover that he is a Jamaican national with no visa, so they simply take away his money and turn him over to Immigration and Naturalization in Miami for deportation.

As for Bob, they do not believe that he is as his friend and business partner Avery Boone insists, that is, innocent of the charges they have placed against Boone himself, which charges result from Ave’s attempt the night before to deliver three-quarters of a pound of uncut cocaine to a man employed by the Federal Narcotics Commission. They do not believe that anyone, especially a man with a boat, can rub as closely to Ave’s business as Bob has and not also be profiting from it. There is no clean evidence that links Bob to Ave’s drug smuggling and sales, however, just as there is nothing and no one to tie the girl who calls herself Honduras to the trade, so both Bob and Honduras are let go. With Ave’s van, like both his boats, now impounded and his condominium instantly repossessed by the bank, Honduras packs her duffel and hitches down Route 1 to Key West, where by the following sunset she has moved into a beach house owned by a screenwriter who spends his winters on the Keys bonefishing and phoning his wife up in Michigan every few days to report on his loneliness. Unable to make bail, Ave mopes in jail in Marathon. Bob, reluctantly, goes home.

Bob lays the newspaper down on the kitchen table. There is a photograph above the article, and he studies it for a moment as if trying to memorize every element of the picture, as if preparing to draw a copy for himself. With his fingertip he traces the dark line between the white beach and the gray sea, from the upper right corner diagonally across to the lower left. Then he traces the outline of the black body lying face down on the beach, a woman, her arms folded under her chest, the soles of her bare feet facing the camera.

“Awful, isn’t it?” Elaine says, looking over his shoulder from the sink, where she stands, eggy plate in hand, cleaning the breakfast dishes while Robbie takes his morning nap. The girls have left for school. Bob has been home for a day and a night now, since being released by the police, but he has not slept. He’s reading this morning’s newspaper for the fifth or sixth time, smoking his third pack of cigarettes since walking in the door yesterday at ten, bleary-eyed, limp-limbed and, for the most part, silent.

He didn’t have to tell her about Ave. She’d already been informed by the police the previous evening, when, after arresting him in a bar in Key Largo, they’d raided Ave’s apartment, detained Honduras, impounded the Angel Blue and gone looking for Bob, Tyrone and the Belinda Blue. Confident that Bob was in no way involved in Ave’s smuggling and drug selling, Elaine nonetheless was terrified for him. She repeated to the police what Bob had told her, that he’d gone to New Providence in the Bahamas to take a large party of French Canadians out tarpon fishing and would return the next morning. When the police had finally seemed to believe her and had driven off, she got down on her knees right there in the living room and prayed straight out that Bob had not unknowingly allowed the Belinda Blue to carry drugs for Ave. Bob was capable of that, she knew. He’s not stupid, she thought, and he’s not naive about Ave’s business, not anymore, but even so, she knew that his capacity to behave as if he were both was great. His arrival home, then, relieved her, as if a terrible and likely disaster had been barely but wholly avoided.

His behavior afterwards confused her, however, and then it began to frighten her. He went out around noon and bought copies of all the newspapers he could find, the Miami Herald, the Marathon Keynoter, the Key West Citizen, examined each one carefully, and apparently not finding what he was searching for, tossed them all into the trash can under the sink. Elaine assumed he was looking for accounts of Ave’s arrest.

“It won’t be in the papers till tomorrow,” she told him. “Or tonight at the earliest. If then. They don’t write about those things anymore, they’re so common.”

“What things?” he snapped. He had turned on the radio and was spinning the dial rapidly past music, stopping for a few seconds whenever he found a news broadcast, then, when it turned out to be a weather or sports report, moving impatiently on.

“You know. Drugs. Except when it’s millions of dollars’ worth. Ave’s not one of those big-time drug dealers, I’m sure. Which means he’ll probably have to go to jail. It’s always the big guys who get off, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s awful, though,” she said, her voice going tender. “I know how you must feel. I feel it too.”

“About what?”

“Ave. Him going to jail.”

“Yeah. He’ll do okay, though. A couple of years, maybe.”

“But then he’ll have to start all over again,” she said. “With nothing.” She stood behind him, her hands lightly kneading his taut shoulders, while he went on fiddling with the radio. “Why don’t you try to sleep? You must be exhausted after all this. Otherwise, you won’t be able to stay awake tonight when I’m at work….”

“I’ll stay awake,” he said, cutting her off.

And, indeed, he did stay awake. He lay down in the kids’ room and tried to nap while Elaine ironed in the living room, but in five minutes he was back in the kitchen, flipping the dial of the radio back and forth, then drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, pacing from room to room in the trailer and outside in the cluttered yard, walking to the sea, where, lost in a reverie, he’d stand a moment, then quickly step away, as if discovering he’d walked to the edge of a cliff.

He was shuffling back toward the trailer when he saw his daughters coming toward him along the sandy lane from the school bus stop. Emma waved and walked faster toward him, but Ruthie showed no sign of recognition and fell behind her younger sister.

Bob scooped Emma into his arms, lifted her up and leaned his weight against the front fender of the car. “Hi, baby. How’d it go? Good day at school? You like kindergarten?”

“Yeah,” she said, and shoving a fistful of crumpled paper in his face, she said, “Look! I got a star for drawing.” Then she wrinkled up her face and pulled away. “Yuck, Daddy! Whiskers!”

Bob put her down, spread out the sheet of paper and studied her drawing for a moment, lollipop people in front of a rectangle that, despite the absence of windows and doors, was clearly meant to represent their trailer. The broad crayon strokes against tan, pulpy paper had caught with precision the faded shade of flaking yellow. In the foreground, there were five stick figures of various sizes with large, disk-like heads, all but one of the five, the tiniest, wearing grim faces, mouths that were straight lines, eyebrows pointing down in scowls.

“Who’s the happy one here?” Bob asked. “The little guy.”

“Robbie. That’s Robbie.”

“How come he’s the only one who’s happy?” Ruthie had come up to them and stood silently behind Emma and peered anxiously back over her shoulder at the trailer, as if expecting someone to come out the door and scold her.

“Hi, Roots,” Bob said. “How’s it going?”

She turned and faced him, her dark head a heavy blossom on a thin stalk.

“You okay?” Bob said too quickly.

She nodded.

“Good day?”

Emma looked at the ground, as if embarrassed by her older sister, who nodded again, silent and withdrawn.

“Did you see Emma’s drawing?” Bob asked. “Isn’t it terrific? Look, here’s Robbie, smiling to beat the band.” He held the sheet of paper out before her and pointed with his finger at the figure that was Robbie. Ruthie raised her eyes and glanced at the drawing.

“Which one’s Ruthie?” Bob asked, turning to Emma. “It’s hard to tell.” Indeed, of the five figures, the three in the center were as alike as triplets, all with sour expressions and masses of dark curls on their heads. The tiny, bald, grinning figure on the left was the baby, of course, and the large, bald, frowning figure on the right, though the same size as the triplets, was clearly Bob. The three females in the center, as grim and harsh-looking as Furies, were drawn exactly alike.

“That’s Mama,” Emma said, pointing at the Fury standing next to Bob. “And that’s Ruthie. I’m next.”

Ruthie’s interest in the picture suddenly flared, and she edged closer and seemed about to smile.

“How come only Robbie’s little? All the rest of us are the same size,” Bob said. He could see them now, all five of them, exactly as Emma had. The Dubois Family — an angry male out on the right and, despite his proximity to the others, a solitary, who’s either in command of the others or their surly slave; then three angry females at the center; and last, as solitary as the first, a male, but half the size of the others and wearing a silly grin on his face.

“Well … Robbie’s a baby,” Emma said.

“He doesn’t know anything yet,” Ruthie added in a low voice.

To Bob, the three females seemed to be glancing toward the man, as if angry at him, whereas the man, like the baby, seemed to be looking straight out at the world. “Who’re you guys mad at?” Bob asked. “You all look so mad.”

“I don’t know,” Emma said slowly. “I think … I think everybody’s worried. That’s why Robbie’s smiling. He’s not worried yet. He’s only a baby.”

“Well, what’re we worried about?” Bob asked. “The way all you guys are looking at me, you must think I’m the one who made you worry or something.” He laughed, but it was thin.

“No. We’re just worried, that’s all. About things. School and stuff, and supper. Stuff like that …”

“You’re not mad at me, then?”

“No,” Ruthie pronounced.

“I’ll make another picture later,” Emma said, and grabbing the sheet of paper, she started for the trailer. “One that shows us happy. Like Robbie.” Ruthie turned and followed, her sweater, held by one sleeve, dragging the ground behind her.

“That’s all right,” Bob said. “This one’s fine. I like this one fine.”

Then he, too, entered the trailer. He told Elaine he was going up to Islamorada for the evening papers, grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and went out again.

“Take the girls with you!” Elaine called through the screened door.

“They don’t want to go,” he said, and kept moving.

Elaine turned to her daughters, both already in front of the TV, watching a soap opera. “Don’t you want to go to the store with Daddy?”

“No,” Ruthie said without turning.

“Emma?”

“Nope.”

Robbie was crying loudly now from the bedroom. “Ruthie, go change your brother’s diapers and bring him out here.”

Ruthie didn’t respond.

“Ruth! You heard me!”

In silence, the girl got up, her eyes fixed on the TV screen, and edged backwards from the room.

“For God’s sake, move! The baby’s crying and wet!” She slammed the iron back and forth over the wrinkled blouse, muttering to herself as she worked, “This family … this damned family. The way we ignore everyone around here …”

Ruthie returned carrying Robbie and deposited him like a teddy bear in the plastic playpen in the center of the room. Unable to sit yet, he immediately collapsed into a reddening heap. By the time Ruthie had returned to her seat on the floor in front of the TV, the baby was howling.

Elaine stood at the ironing board and watched him. Ruthie sucked her thumb and stared at the doctor and nurse making love on leather upholstered furniture in the doctor’s paneled, book-lined office. Emma leaned forward and turned up the volume.

At the Whale Harbor Tackle Shop, Bob went down the row of newspaper-dispensing racks and bought the two Miami papers and the Marathon paper, and standing outside the store, leafed quickly through all three. There was nothing about the Haitians in any of them.

Maybe it never happened, he let himself think. Maybe it was a nightmare, some kind of hallucination, a craziness worse than anything I’ve ever experienced before. Is that possible? he wondered. Nothing else seemed real to him now. And for a moment at least, the split made it easy for him to believe that the part of his life which now seemed most vivid and clear to him — the trip over to New Providence, the long wait in the bay and then the arrival of the Haitians in the dinghy with Tyrone, the trip back across the straits, the sudden storm off Sunny Isles, the arrival of the coast guard cutter, and finally that awful moment when the Haitians leaped into the sea — all that might well have been experienced by Bob on a different plane of reality than the plane where everything else was taking place: Elaine and the children, home, groceries, laundry, television, a can of Schlitz from the refrigerator, work, the Belinda Blue, Ave, Ave’s arrest, Tyrone’s arrest, Honduras’s disappearance, the seizure of the boats. These things made sense. They weren’t all happy things, but they could be lived with somehow. Even the particular terrible consequences of Ave’s arrest, that is, Bob’s sudden unemployment, seemed likely, bland, vague and conditional to him, of a piece somehow with Elaine’s familiar complaints about money, his irritation and embarrassment at his wife’s having to work nights as a waitress, his anxiety over Ruthie’s deepening strangeness, his ongoing disappointment and bewildered surprise at his own inadequacy.

Could it be? Could the strong part of his life be dream and the weak part real? If so, then he was just crazy, that’s all. Crazy. A quiet kind of madman who lived his dreams and dreamed his life. Most people were a little like that anyhow, especially people whose lives, like Bob’s, were ordinary and, despite the ordinariness, gave them constant trouble. Maybe, just possibly, the awful pressures that Bob’s ordinary life had placed on him, the difficulty, for him, of living an ordinary life well, had finally made him crazy. Most men, he was sure, lived such a life easily: they worked and saved, they took care of their wives and children, who were grateful and respectful for it, and their days and nights passed cheerfully by, until finally they were gray-haired and a little fat and semiretired and spent the winters in Florida with the wife, fishing, watching baseball on TV, waiting for the kids and grandkids to come down for the holidays. But a few men, like Bob, despite their being just as intelligent, dutiful and orderly as the others, turned their ordinary lives into early disasters and never knew why. That can make a man crazy, Bob thought.

For a second, he thought of going inside the store, just in case Ted Williams was there again. He peered across the parking lot, looking for Ted’s white Chrysler, then remembered his mistake regarding the Chrysler and said to himself, See, I am crazy! What I imagine, what I remember and what I actually experience get all mixed together, and I can’t tell the difference. He was now sure that he had dreamed the death of the Haitians.

The relief and pleasure he took from the conviction lasted only a few seconds, however. As he started toward his car, he put the folded newspapers under his left arm and shoved both hands deep into his pants pockets and with his left hand instantly felt the money, a packet of bills a half-inch thick. There it was, blood money, uncounted, forgotten, invisible for whole hours at a time, then suddenly reappearing, linking everything back together again, closing and welding fast the split in his life, so that his dreams and his daily life were one thing again. It’s horrible, horrible! he thought, and he almost cried out, and he withdrew his hand as if he had touched a cold, dry serpent there.

He wandered in and out of the trailer all the rest of the afternoon, unable to leave the place, unable to sit down and make his home there, a ghostly figure who repeatedly appeared in the yard and then stood at the threshold outside the screened door for a few moments, until finally the woman and children inside felt his presence and looked up at him, and he turned away and went back to the road again. Up the lane to the highway he walked, then back, past the trailers to the water, where gulls and terns poked between chunks of coral and blond, almost translucent crabs scrambled in the shallows for shelter. A car driven by Horace came and went, and all the while Bob kept his back to the man. Around five-thirty, Allie Hubbell came home from the crafts shops in Key Largo, walking in from the bus stop on the highway, and. Bob kept his back to her too. She stood a moment on her stoop, watching him, and not until she had lit a cigarette and gone inside did he turn slowly back toward his own trailer. He stopped next to his car, got in, sat behind the wheel awhile, got out, walked to the water again, resumed peering at the horizon. The sky was low, zinc gray and smooth, like sheet metal. A steady southeast wind blew, keeping the water choppy and dark as old, cold coffee.

Finally, Elaine came out on the steps and called his name. He turned and faced her.

“You want supper?” she shouted into the wind.

He shook his head no and turned away from her, and she went quickly inside, closing both doors against the wind.

A little later, when it was nearly dark, Elaine came out again, this time wearing a pink cardigan sweater buttoned to the throat to cover her bare shoulders and the low neckline of the short black dress she wore for work. Wobbling on high heels in the sand, she came up to Bob and asked him for the car keys.

“I’m sick of taking the bus,” she said. “I hate being seen like this five nights a week, and you don’t like anybody from up there giving me a ride home, remember?”

“What’d you do last night?” he said. As if he’d asked an idle question, he pursed his lips and watched a crab at his feet scuttle to the water.

She studied his profile for a second, then said, “Sunday and Monday I’m off, Bob. Remember? I spent the evening at home, talking to the police.”

“This Tuesday?”

“Yes, this is Tuesday. What did you do last night?”

He didn’t answer.

“I said, ‘What did you do last night?’ “

“You know what I did. Where I was,” he said in a thick, sullen voice.

“No. As a matter of fact, I don’t. All I know is you left here early Sunday in the car and you drove back into the yard this morning, and that’s all I know. That’s it. Oh, yes, I know the police met you this morning at Moray Key as you came off the boat. Because they said they would, and if you hadn’t been there, they would have been back here. And I know they thought for a while you were involved with Ave’s drug business, because they said they did. Maybe they still think it. But really, in the end, that’s everything I know about you lately. You, though, you know everything about me. What I do every minute of my life. No surprises. Nothing to sneak up and hit you on the head when you’re not looking. If you told me right now this minute that for the last two days you were smuggling heroin or cocaine or whatever, guns, anything, I’d just say, ‘Oh, so that’s the kind of man he is.’ You could tell me you had a girlfriend in Miami or someplace and spent the last two days in bed with her, and I’d say the same thing. Because I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what kind of man you are, Bob. That’s the truth. You understand that? Somehow it wouldn’t seem so awful to me, so hard to take, if you didn’t know what kind of woman I am. But you do. You know me. And it’s not fair. And it’s hard. Hard. This is not like it used to be with us. And I don’t know where it went from being fair to being unfair. Because I never knew that’s what it was between us, fair. I only knew it after it was gone, after it had been unfair a long time. A long time now. And you know it. Don’t you?”

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t look at her eyes, so he turned away from her altogether and faced the darkening sea.

Finally, he said, “You can quit that job. Tonight, if you want. You don’t have to go in. Just call and say you quit. I made … I made good money this trip.”

“Running drugs.”

“No, no. Fishing. A big party. Big spenders.”

“Bob,” she said, and she sighed. “I just don’t … I don’t believe you, Bob.” She looked at his broad back, a wall, and shook her head slowly.

“Well … what if I did, what if I did do something that was illegal … and got away with it? What the hell difference, what would that make different, to you, I mean?”

“I’d think you were stupid,” she said. “And lucky. For once in your life. No, I don’t know what difference it’d make, really.”

“Well, let’s say I did, okay? Let’s say I came out with a lot of money. Not a whole lot, but enough to let you quit that fucking job. Would you? Quit the job?”

She was silent for a moment, and he turned back around and faced her.

“Well?” he asked.

“No. No, I wouldn’t quit.”

“Why not?”

“Because … because it’s drug money, Bob. It’s not like winning the state lottery or something, for God’s sake. It’s drug money.” She tilted her head up at him and examined his large, dark face. “This is what I mean, about not knowing you anymore. No, you keep your drug money. Buy yourself a new car with it, if you want. Anything. But don’t buy anything for me with it, or for the children. Just don’t. As far as I’m concerned, you can throw it in the ocean. I don’t want it touching me or my children, that’s all.”

“Why, for Christ’s sake? What’s the big deal it’s illegal? Lots of things are illegal and we do them.”

“Like what?”

He hesitated a second. “Well, you know. Little things. Drinking and driving. You know what I mean. And what about Eddie, for Christ’s sake? You think he wasn’t doing anything illegal? And Ave? You didn’t seem to mind it when what Eddie or Ave did ended up benefiting you.”

“They’re not you, Bob. And Eddie’s dead. Ave’s in jail. But even if that wasn’t true, even if they were still out there, still getting away with it, like you think you just did, it’d be the same. Look at me, Bob. I’m not crying. Not anymore. And I’m not yelling. Not that anymore, either. I’m just saying. I’m not upset, and I’m not angry. I’m just saying.”

“Saying what, for Christ’s sake? You don’t love me anymore? Is that what you’re saying? I’m too stupid, or … or I’m too illegal, or … or immoral? Or what?”

“No. Not that, none of that. Something else. It’s more complicated.” She seemed genuinely puzzled. “I don’t know … something worse, maybe.”

“What could be worse?”

“To love you and not know you, I guess. That’d be worse. For me.”

“Jesus H. Christ, Elaine! You know me.”

“No. Not anymore. And I don’t know why, if it’s because you’ve changed who you are since we left New Hampshire, or because things have happened to you since then. Bad things. Things I didn’t even know were happening, some of them. All I’m sure of is I don’t know who you are anymore.”

“You know me.”

She smiled. “I’m going to be late for work. Let me have the keys. We can talk later if you want.”

He gave her the keys. “I hate that fucking job. More than you can ever imagine. That you have to do that.”

“I hate it too, Bob. More than you can ever imagine. But it’s legal. And right now, it’s the only job we’ve got.” She turned and started toward the car.

“Elaine! What … what can I do?”

She kept walking.

“Do you want to go back to New Hampshire?” he called out. “Is that what you want?”

She stopped, turned and said, “Yes. Yes, I do.” Then she opened the car door and got in. A few seconds later, she was gone, and it was dark. Slowly, Bob crossed the yard and went inside to his children.

Elaine came home at one-fifteen, stopping only for a moment in the living room, as if to give Bob a chance to look up from the David Letterman show and ask her to sit down, have a cup of tea, talk things over. He didn’t. All he did was glance at her when she came through the door and then look back at the TV screen as she crossed the room. She called from the kids’ bedroom, “ ’Night, Bob,” and he answered, “’Night,” and that was it. They no longer slept together.

He watched the TV screen inattentively, as if instead it were watching him, until the National Anthem was played at two-thirty and programming ceased. A half hour later, he realized that the blue eye in front of him was dead, and he reached over and flicked it off. With the lights on, he lay back on the sofa and tried to sleep. He squirmed and bent and unbent himself, but his body felt like a sack of nails to him, painful in any position, until finally he gave up trying, sat and smoked cigarettes, finished all the beer in the refrigerator and read People magazine twice, until it disgusted him, and he threw it on the floor. All those happy, pretty, successful people — he hated them because he knew they didn’t really exist, and he hated even more the magazine that glorified them and in that way made them exist, actors, rock musicians, famous writers, politicians. Those aren’t people, he fumed, they’re photographs.

At six, he heard the baby wake, burble and yap to himself a few minutes and then cry to have his diapers changed. Bob rose slowly from the couch, got the bottle of apple juice from the refrigerator and headed down the hallway toward the children’s room. Elaine appeared at the door, crossed the hallway silently, as if alone there, and went into the bathroom, closing the door tightly behind her. As he entered the bedroom, softly gray in the predawn light, he heard the splash of the shower behind him. Ruthie and Emma, accustomed to their brother’s morning howl and the sounds of a parent tending to him, slept on, grabbing at the last, fat hour of sleep before they themselves had to get up.

Ruthie lay curled away from Bob, facing the wall, her thumb jammed into her mouth; Emma, in the other bed, slept on her belly, arms and legs splayed, as if swimming underwater. In the crib, which was squeezed between the dresser and the back wall of the small, crowded room, Robbie lay flat on his back, scowling and red with discomfort, until suddenly he saw Bob towering over the crib and ceased to cry.

Bob handed him the bottle, and while the baby noisily sucked at it, proceeded to strip away the sopped, plastic-lined paper diaper. When he had the baby’s bottom naked, he stopped for a moment and thought, almost amazed, as if seeing it for the first time, My God, he has a penis. Just like me. An ordinary, circumcised penis. A doctored tube coming out of his digestive tract, that’s all. It was contracted and short, shrunken to little more than thimble-sized from the cold and sudden exposure to the air. Below it swelled the testicles in their tight pouch, like the breast of a tiny, pink bird. There was no mystery, no power, no sin, no guilt. Just biology. It was terrifying for that, and for an instant, wonderful.

“Oh, Robbie,” Bob whispered.

The baby, large blue eyes peering over the cloudy bottle, looked up at his father, and though his lips and cheeks yanked furiously at the rubber nipple, the baby seemed to be smiling. Bob returned his son’s gaze for a moment, then began to examine his own hands, huge against the infant’s tiny, smooth torso, legs and feet. They were coarse hands, scratched and hairy across the tops, with thick veins zigzagging over the surface like blue bolts of lightning, and suddenly his hands looked like weapons to Bob, weapons with wills of their own, like stones that could hurl themselves, and he hauled them out of the crib and jammed them into his pockets.

Once again, his left hand felt the money, but this time, instead of pulling away from it, the hand grabbed onto the packet and held it for a long moment. “Robbie,” Bob whispered. “Robbie, your father is a terrible man. Look what he’s ended up doing,” he said, and his voice sounded like a cold wind raiding a shutter. “Just look at it.”

The baby gurgled and smiled, kicked his bare feet in the air. Across the room, Ruthie twisted in her sleep, while Emma, blinking open one eye, saw her father and instantly dove back into sleep as if into deep, warm waters.

With his hands still stuffed into his pockets, Bob slouched from the room, peering back over his shoulder as he went out. He passed down the hallway, the bathroom door still closed, and left the trailer. Outside, the air was cool and almost still, as a thin, low fog drifted off the sea and caught against the Keys, shrouding the islands in a soft, silvery mist. He could hear the water lap against the shore, as if speaking to it, but he couldn’t see the water at all.

He got into his car, and with the headlights on, drove slowly, not much faster than if he’d walked, over to Islamorada, where once again he bought newspapers. In the parking lot, inside the car, he unfolded the Miami Herald and spread it over his lap and read, for the first time, the article about the drowning of the fifteen Haitians.

15 HAITIANS DROWN OFF SUNNY ISLES

MIAMI, Feb. 12 (UPI) — Fifteen Haitians, mostly women and children, drowned this morning in choppy waters off Sunny Isles just north of here after being forced into rough seas by the captain of what Coast Guard officials said was probably an American fishing boat engaged in smuggling Haitians into Florida. The unidentified boat escaped into the darkness while crew members of the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Cape Current attempted to save the Haitians.

Immigration authorities said it was one of the worst such incidents recorded since the waves of immigrants from the impoverished Caribbean country began heading for the United States 10 years ago. Gov. Bob Graham called it “a human tragedy which has been waiting to happen,” and said he would press the Federal Government to work with Haiti to stop the flight to these shores.

In Miami, a Coast Guard spokesman said of the drownings, “It’s just such a tragedy,” adding, “It’s subhuman, what some of these smugglers will do for a few dollars.” When the fishing boat was first hailed by the Cape Current at 2:30 this morning, it was a half mile off the beach at Sunny Isles. According to the Coast Guard spokesman, the captain of the fishing boat frightened the Haitians off his boat by firing a gun into the air.

The Haitians, most of whom apparently could not swim, drowned in the six-foot chop almost immediately. It’s thought that several of them may have made it to the beach. Authorities are urging anyone who may have survived the tragedy to come forward and help identify the individuals who abandoned them to the sea.

The bodies of five men, six women and four children were taken to the Dade County morgue. A spokesman for the Medical Examiner’s office said that autopsies would be performed and that attempts would be made to identify them. “Then,” said the spokesman, “the bodies will have to be disposed of in some respectable and tasteful fashion. I don’t quite know how we’re going to do that yet.”

Bob’s chest tightened into a fist, then opened and emptied, and he wept, sitting in the shadows inside his car, surrounded by a milk-white fog, in a parking lot on an island in a sea, lifetimes and whole continents away from where none of this could have happened to him.

An hour later, he was sitting at the kitchen table, and he read the article again, studied the photograph accompanying it, read and studied as if decoding a secret message from an ally, while the girls ate breakfast in silence and gathered lunches in paper sacks and milk money for school, and Elaine in housecoat and slippers, without uttering a word, made breakfast for them all, served it and cleaned up afterwards, and the baby, on his belly in the playpen in the living room, watched.

Finally, the girls have left for school, Elaine has put Robbie back into his crib for his morning nap, and she stands at the sink, her hands in soapy water, and she looks up from the dishes every now and then at her husband bent over the newspaper.

“Awful, isn’t it?” she says, her flat, expressionless voice cracking the silence.

Bob’s face comes up as if from the bottom of the sea, white, bloated and whiskery, eyes like holes, mouth a bloodless slash, thin and drawn down, his long chin trembling.

“What is it, Bob?” she cries.

He shakes his head slowly from side to side, a sea beast shedding water in a fine spray, and opens his mouth to speak, but cannot.

“Oh, God, what’s the matter?” Elaine rushes over to him. She holds his cold face and says again, “Bob, what’s the matter?” She looks down at the newspaper, then back at his face. “I know, the poor Haitians. I read it when you first came in…. I was … I was looking for Ave. There wasn’t anything….” She makes her gaze drive down into her husband’s, and she sees through films, membranes, veils, curtains, doors, walls, all the way into the secret man at the center.

She knows now. She knows what he has done. She knows at last who he is. She pulls back in horror. Then an instant passes, and she comes quickly forward and cradles his head against her breast. “Oh, my God, Bob. My God.”

Suddenly, she pushes him violently away from her. His body flops back against the chair, and he says, “I … I don’t … I can’t …”

“Shut up! Just shut up! Don’t say anything!” Slowly, as if afraid she will break, she moves to the other side of the table and sits down opposite him. In silence, they sit there, staring at each other, husband and wife and the third person their marriage has made of them and who, at this moment, stands before them, a monster.

By noon, they have decided what to do. It comes out slowly, without argument or discussion, sentence by sentence, cell by cell, like a healing. First Bob quietly announces, “We should leave here.” Then, after several minutes, Elaine says they should go back to New Hampshire, where Bob has a trade and can find work.

A little while later, Bob says they should pack up and leave now, as soon as possible, before they spend all their money here in Florida. Elaine agrees. She should quit her job now, pick up her pay this afternoon and take from the bank the few hundred dollars they have left in the checking account.

For a long time, they say nothing more, until Elaine says that the money Bob took from the Haitians should not leave Florida with them. “It’s worse than drug money,” she says.

“No. You’re right. I don’t know what I should do with it, though. I can’t turn it in to the police. It’s a lot of money, though,” he adds.

They are silent for a while, then Elaine says, “Shouldn’t you give it over to Ave somehow? That’s where it belongs. It’s evil money. Or what’s-his-name, Tyrone.”

“No, what I should do is give it back to the Haitians. If I could figure out how.”

For the first time, as they make their plans, they are speaking of “should” and “should not,” and they do it stiffly, awkwardly, for these are words that make it difficult to mingle fantasy with hope. The sentences fit clumsily in their mouths and stumble over tongue, teeth and lips, as if either the words and grammar or the mouths were not their own. But Bob and Elaine struggle on, for they know now that this is the only way a new life can be made. And they must make a new life; the old one has died and is rotting. They are living on a corpse that has begun to stink.

They can’t afford to rent a U-Haul, so they decide to pack and carry north only their clothes, bedding, linens and kitchenware. They will leave the rest of their belongings — except for the baby’s crib and playpen, which can be tied to the roof of the car — in exchange for the rent they’ll owe for not giving a month’s notice to Horace. “Should we tell him what we’re doing?” Bob asks.

Elaine says, “No. We shouldn’t tell anyone. Once he sees the stuff we’ve left, he’ll be happy we’re gone.”

By the time the girls come home from school, Bob and Elaine have begun packing in earnest. When Ruthie and Emma learn that they are moving back to New Hampshire, and Daddy will get his old job back, and they’ll find a nice place to live, just like they used to have, the girls are visibly pleased, even Ruthie, and immediately they go to work packing their favorite toys, dolls, games and books into the boxes that Elaine brought back when she went out to close the bank account and pick up her paycheck at the Rusty Scupper.

For supper, because all the dishes, pots and pans have been wrapped and closed into boxes, Bob takes everyone out to McDonald’s in Key Largo, and though he still cannot eat — the very sight of the Big Macs and fries makes him suddenly nauseous — Bob enjoys his family’s pleasure in a way he has not for months. Their fussing and noisy delight, their impatience, their innocent, shining faces, make for him a world that, for once, is sufficient unto itself.

On the short drive back to the trailer, rain starts to fall, large, swollen drops that spatter against the windshield. Bob flips on the wipers and defogger and lights a cigarette. He’s thinking intently and has said nothing since leaving McDonald’s.

“You all right?” Elaine asks. “Want me to drive?” Robbie lies asleep on her lap.

“No. I’m okay.” The overcast sky and now the rain have brought on an early dusk, and Bob switches on the headlights.

“You should go to bed when we get home. Really, Bob. I’ll finish the packing.”

Bob exhales jets of smoke from his nostrils, and the windshield, despite the defogger fan, clouds over. Reaching one hand forward, he rubs away a square that lets him see the road directly before him. “No. I couldn’t sleep even if I wanted to. And I don’t want to.”

“You must be exhausted.”

“Yeah, sure. Of course.” He glances into the back seat. The girls are slumped in opposite corners, lost in their private thoughts. “Listen,” he says in a low voice, “I’m going to drop you and the kids at the trailer. I guess I’ve figured out what I should do with the money. And I have to do it tonight, if I’m going to do it at all. Okay?”

Elaine stares straight ahead at the windshield. After a few seconds, she reaches out with her free hand and wipes a head-sized circle clear.

Bob asks, “Don’t you want to know what I’m going to do?”

“No. Not especially, no. So long as you get rid of it, and we don’t take it with us away from here.”

“I’m going …”

“Bob, I don’t want to know. I don’t. Really. I don’t know why, but it feels … cleaner not to know. Better, for the future. Our future. Okay?”

“Okay. Good.”

She asks when he’ll be back, and he says he can’t be sure, by morning anyhow. Sooner, if he’s lucky. “And I feel lucky,” he says. “For once.”

They pull up and stop in front of the trailer, and the girls are alert as puppies again, complaining about the rain. “Just run inside. The door’s unlocked,” Elaine tells them, and they scramble from the car and splash through puddles to the trailer.

“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.

He enters a restaurant on Fifty-fourth with closed Venetian blinds facing the street. A slender brown woman holding long, narrow menus greets him at the door and in French-accented English politely asks how many people are in his party. Bob peers across the room, sees large, beefy black men in three-piece suits, fashionably dressed women, a few children at table, and he says, “I’m … I’m looking for someone.” He pretends to search the room for a friend, then says, “No, sorry, he’s not here yet, thanks,” and ducks out.

In a bar, seated on a stool at the far end, Bob orders a Schlitz from a short, stocky, mustachioed man wearing a cream-colored silk vest buttoned tightly across his belly. There are a dozen or more booths and small tables behind him, where three or four women, young and pretty, wearing heavy makeup and miniskirts and glittery, low-cut blouses, sit alone, one woman to a table, drinking. At the bar, four or five young men, boys almost, who seem to know each other and the bartender as well, talk, drink, smoke cigarettes and snap fingers in time to the music blatting from the jukebox in the corner by the open door. It’s what brought Bob in from the street in the first place, the music, Haitian, loud, friendly, warm and available to anyone willing to listen.

The bartender brings the beer and glass and sets them down in front of Bob without once looking at him.

“How much?”

“One dollar fifty.”

Bob hands two ones over. “Keep the change.”

“Thanks,” the man says, and starts to move away.

“Quiet tonight.”

“Yes. Well, Wednesday, you know. It’s late.”

“Say, listen. Ah … I was wondering,” Bob says.

“Yes?”

“You’re Haitian, right? That’s a Haitian accent, right?”

The man examines Bob for a few seconds, this battered white man, large, unshaven, eyes in caves, clothes dirty and rumpled, and he says, “Yes, I am Haitian.”

“Cigarette?” Bob says, pushing his pack forward.

The man hesitates, then takes one. “Thanks.”

Bob lights his cigarette. “You probably know about those Haitians that drowned day before yesterday, right?”

The man steps back. “Well, yes. From the newspapers.” He eyes Bob warily.

“Me too. From the papers, I mean. Sad, isn’t it?”

“Ah, yes. But it happens. Such things happen.”

“But some get through anyhow, right? Some of them make it to shore. I read that.”

“I suppose so.” The man starts to leave. Farther down the bar, the young men have ceased talking and have taken up watching Bob and the bartender. There are four of them, two with bushy Afro haircuts and long sideburns, the other two, younger, with short haircuts. All four are dressed up for a night out, billowy nylon shirts cut and unbuttoned to expose their chests, tight, bell-bottomed slacks, slipon shoes with pointed toes. Two of them wear heavy gold chains around their necks and copper bracelets on their wrists. All four are faceless to Bob, kids out looking for some action. He supposes they have a car parked outside, a beat-up Olds or Pontiac with elaborate hub caps, the dash and rear deck covered with pile carpeting.

“Listen, friend, can I ask you something?”

The bartender returns, and Bob slides a ten-dollar bill across the bar. “I was wondering …” he says in a low, confidential voice, “if you could tell me something.”

The bartender palms the ten and pockets it without changing his expression of calm, mild curiosity.

“Those Haitians who drowned the other day. I wondered if there were any survivors. You know?”

“I think not. No survivors. The sea was rough. Why do you ask?”

“Well, see, I got a friend, Haitian guy who works for me, out on the Keys, and he’s looking for his people, his family, see, and he was wondering.”

“Why will he not come and ask himself, then? Why do you ask?”

“Yeah, I understand that, I realize how it looks, me doing the asking and all. But, y’ see, he’s got to be careful about that sort of thing. You know. Because of his papers not being so good. You understand.”

“Ah. Yes.” The man turns away again. “I am sorry, mister, I know nothing of the people from the boats.”

“Wait!” Bob says. Reaching into his pocket and drawing out the packet of money, he peels off a twenty and lays it on the bar.

The bartender stares for a second at the thick wad of bills in Bob’s hand, then at the twenty before him. “I know nothing of those people. You should drink your beer and go. We close soon,” he says, and walks slowly but emphatically away.

Bob picks up the twenty and wraps it around the others and shoves the money back into his pocket. Finishing off his beer in one long gulp, he slides off the stool and makes for the door. As he passes the young men at the bar, they turn and watch him.

“Hey, mister!” one calls. He’s tall and broad-shouldered and wears a thick denim cap nested in his huge, bulbous Afro.

Bob turns and says, “Yeah?”

“You want something? Maybe you want a girlfriend, eh?” he says, winking and flashing a wide grin.

“No, thanks,” Bob says, and he steps outside to the street. Behind him, the youths laugh and start talking in Creole to the bartender, who ignores their questions and proceeds to grab up their glasses and empty bottles and hurry them out the door.

Down on Fifty-fourth, a few blocks east of where I-95 soars overhead, Bob spots in the distance a small clot of people, a few women and children, but mostly old men, shaky, decrepit-looking, dressed in rags and ill-fitting castoffs. The people have gathered on the sidewalk beside the open side door of a large brown and white Dodge van. Attached to the top of the van and running the length of it, like a political poster, a large, hand-painted sign cries: The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand! Repent! Matthew 10:7.

As Bob nears the group beside the van, he sees at the center a tall young white man, blond and wearing jeans and a hooded gray sweatshirt with Florida State emblazoned across the front. Inside the van, a woman, also in jeans and sweatshirt, with the hood pulled over her head like a monk’s cowl, hands the young man, in sequence, parcels wrapped in brown paper and then what appear to be paper cups of hot soup. The young man in turn passes the goods to the people gathered around him, first a parcel, then a cup of steaming soup, which the recipient, tucking the parcel under his or her arm and stepping away from the van, slurps down in relative privacy and furtiveness, as if hunger were a slightly embarrassing secret.

Bob edges up to the van, hears the young white man speak Creole to the people, who remain silent, who simply reach out, take the parcel with one hand, the soup with the other, and back away to make room for the next person to come forward. And in a few moments, Bob himself is the next person.

The white man is in his early twenties and extremely tall, several inches taller than Bob. He’s gaunt rather than skinny, a physically strong man overworked, and his short, straight hair is thin and already disappearing at the temples, giving his face an unnatural boniness for one so young. His bright blue eyes are small and deepset, a Swedish or Norwegian face, with large bones and delicate skin. Holding a parcel in one long hand and a cup of soup in the other, he says to Bob, “Praise the Lord, brother,” as if it were a command, the price of the gifts.

“Praise the Lord,” Bob murmurs, but he refuses the gifts and steps aside to let an old, bewhiskered fellow behind him take them. “I want to talk to you a minute.” “Oh?”

“Yes. It’s important.”

“Okay. Sure. Jennie,” the man calls to the woman inside the van. “Can you handle the rest yourself? There’s only a couple more.”

The young woman sticks her head outside, examines Bob, then the remaining Haitians. “Okay, sure, Allan. No problem.” She’s a pretty young woman, Bob notices, with freckles on her face and neck. She pushes back her hood, revealing long, pale brown hair tied in a ponytail that swishes heavily, healthily, as she hands out the parcels and ladles the soup from a large stainless-steel drum.

Allan walks around to the rear of the van, pulls open the door and sits wearily down inside, his feet up on the bumper. “Hi. My name’s Allan,” he says, extending his hand.

“Bob.”

They shake hands, and Allan says, “You wanted to talk. You look worried, brother.”

“I am. I need some help.”

“Of course. We all do. Are you saved, Bob?”

“What?”

“Do you know Jesus, Bob?”

“Jesus? Know him? Well, I guess not, no. I mean, I’m … no.”

“You haven’t given your life over to Jesus yet?”

“I guess not. No, not really.”

“That’s okay,” Allan says brightly. “You will, Bob.”

“I will?”

“What church do you belong to, Bob?”

“Well, none, I guess. I mean, I was raised Roman Catholic. But I haven’t been in a while. You know.”

“Things are pretty bad, though, aren’t they, Bob?”

“Yeah.” Then, impatiently, “Listen, I have to ask you how to do something for me … for these Haitians and all.”

“Okay, sure, Bob.”

“Well, you sort of specialize in helping out the Haitians, right? I mean, the refugees.”

“They’re the lost sheep of Israel. But we do the Lord’s work everywhere, Bob. Jesus said, ‘He that receiveth you receiveth me.’ So there you are. But yes, we’re helping the Haitians especially. They need food and clothes, so we find Christians who’ll pay for it, and then we give it out to them. Jesus said, ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a net that was cast into the sea and gathered of every kind.’ Do you know your Bible, Bob?”

“No. Not really.”

“Read it, Bob. It’s God’s word.”

“Yeah, I will. Look, Allan, I got some money here, a lot of money, and I want you to give it to the Haitians. These people here, people like them.”

“God bless you, Bob! That’s incredible, brother. Praise the Lord!” The man claps Bob on both shoulders. “God bless you!”

“Well, no, it’s not my money, exactly. It … it really belongs to them, see. The Haitians. And I’m trying to get it back to them somehow, that’s all.”

“How’s that, Bob?”

Bob studies the man for a second, then says, “You guys are like priests, right? I mean, I tell you something, it’s confidential, isn’t it?”

“I am a servant of the Lord, Bob, yes, but a far cry from a Catholic priest, I’m afraid.” Allan laughs. Then seriously, “Whatever you tell me, brother, I’ll hold in strictest confidence. Unburden yourself, Bob.”

Bob takes a deep breath. “Well, I’m a fisherman, see, and I brought some Haitians over from the Bahamas … a while ago. They paid me for it. Anyhow, well, some of them didn’t quite make it, if you know what I mean….”

“No. What do you mean?”

Bob lowers his voice almost to a whisper. “Some of them drowned. Coming ashore.”

Allan looks into Bob’s dark eyes for a long moment. “Some of them drowned? Coming ashore?”

“Yes.”

“You brought them over in your boat? And some of them drowned?”

“Well … yeah.”

“Then you … you’re that man in the papers with the boat, up at Sunny Isles?”

“Yes. I am.”

Allan brings his large hands to his mouth, lifts them to his forehead, and cries, “Oh, my God! That’s awful!” He gapes at Bob and whispers, “Lord have mercy on your soul, Bob.” He studies Bob’s face for a moment, as if to determine his sanity, then says, “I … I don’t know what to tell you. Except that you should get down on your knees, you should give yourself over to Jesus, Bob. Save your soul, brother,” he pleads. “Now, before it’s too late.”

“Look, I don’t want to talk about that right now. I got enough problems without worrying about my soul too. I got a wife and three kids. What I want is for you just to take this money and make sure it goes to some people who need it. Some of these Haitians.” He pulls out the wad of bills and shows it to Allan. “It’s way over a thousand dollars. Maybe two. I haven’t even counted it. See? I don’t care how you do it, spend it on soup or clothes, or just dole it out, I don’t care.” He pushes the money at the man.

Allan recoils and slides farther back into the van. “Put it away! People’ll see it!” He looks over Bob’s shoulder and repeats, “Put it away!”

Bob turns. In the distance, thirty or forty feet behind him, the youths from the bar are talking to one another under a streetlight, smoking cigarettes and lounging against the brick wall of a windowless building facing the street. They ignore Bob and Allan and the van, acting as if they’re alone on the street and bored and don’t want to go home yet. The largest of the four, the man with the denim cap who spoke to Bob in the bar, has his back to Bob and chats easily with the others, making large gestures with his arms as he talks.

Bob turns to Allan and shoves the money at him. “Here, for Christ’s sake, take it. Please, take it. I don’t know what I should do with it anymore.”

“Just pray, Bob. I can’t take the money. And I can’t help you, only Jesus can help you. You must pray, and then Jesus will tell you what to do. Bob, I’ll pray with you, if you want. Come on,” Allan says, and he slides forward from the van and stands up. “Let’s get down here, right here on the street, and pray to Jesus. He’s here with us now, I know it, I can feel His presence. Come on, Bob,” he says, grabbing Bob’s arm.

Bob wrenches free. “No! Just take the damned money, will you?” He waves the bills in front of the man’s face.

“Bob, no!” Allan cries. “Just pray, that’s all you have to do. Pray to Jesus for forgiveness and guidance, and repent. That’s all you need to do. Repent. You don’t need me, Bob. You need Jesus. We all need Jesus. You’re no different than anyone else, in spite of what you’ve done.”

Bob steps back. “You won’t take it, then.”

Allan looks at the money clutched in Bob’s hand. “No. Lord forgive me, but I can’t. I can’t. Not unless we both pray to Jesus and He tells you it’s the right thing to do, and also tells me I should take it.” Allan gets down on his knees in the street beside the van. “Fall on your knees, Bob!” He’s sweating, and his blue eyes glisten. “Pray! Jesus will hear you. Jesus loves you, Bob.”

Jamming the money into his pocket again, Bob wheels around and walks swiftly away. When he looks up, he sees the four young men from the bar watching him. He briefly hesitates, then keeps coming, and as he passes them, the leader of the group smiles and says, “Still out, eh? Sure you don’t want no black pussy, mister? Plenty black pussy around here.”

Bob looks into the young man’s face. “You know what I’m looking for.”

“Me?” He breaks into a warm smile, and his bushy sideburns spread like wings. “I can’t know what you are looking for, mister, until you have told me.”

“Are you Haitian?”

“Born there, yes, but American now. All of us,” he says, still smiling. “All-American boys, eh?” he adds, and he steps back and slings his long arms over the shoulders of the other young men. They all smile now, as if for a group portrait.

“You guys were at the bar back there,” Bob says. “The bartender tell you what I asked him?” The young man’s act irritates Bob and makes him nervous. He can’t see the reason for the act, can’t figure out what kind of impression the man is trying to make on him. Bob thinks he may be making fun of him somehow.

“He only say you a nice fellow,” the young man says. Then he moves in close and in a low voice adds, “He say you looking for somebody. True?”

“True.”

“Well, then, maybe we know how to find this somebody, eh?” Again, he’s expansive, arms spread, broad grin on his face. “Everybody here know everybody else, like a country village. Eh? You know that? You a smart man, I see it right off,” he says, crossing his arms over his narrow chest. Then he says, “So.”

Bob is silent a moment. Then he, too, says, “So,” and smiles. The other three are followers of the first, their expressions and postures merely weak imitations of the tall, thin man with the Afro and sideburns, so now all five men are standing with their arms crossed and smiles on their faces. This is a game, Bob thinks. They know who I’m looking for, and they know who I am too. They know my whole story. In a minute, when they’re through playing with me, when this one has finished showing off his English, they’ll surround me, show me their knives and take the money from me.

Bob doesn’t want that. The money is no more theirs than it is his. If he lets them take the Haitians’ money from him, it will be like throwing it away, burning it. He says, “I happen to know that somebody got to shore from that load of Haitians that drowned off Sunny Isles the other night.”

“Ah! How do you know this, mister?”

“I’m … I’m a fisherman. There were fifteen bodies recovered, and I heard there were sixteen Haitians on the boat.”

“You heard this, eh?”

Bob studies the man’s eyes, but he can’t penetrate them. The man seems purely and simply amused. “Yes. In a bar, on the Keys.”

“Oh. Well, then, you heard the truth,” he says. “A woman, sister to a man in the neighborhood, she get through to the land and get to her brother.”

Suddenly Bob’s chest fills as if with a large, hard, metal-skinned balloon, and his breath comes in short, rapid bursts. “You … do you know where she is?”

“In bad shape, I hear. Very bad shape.”

“Can you take me to her? I’ll … I’ll pay you.”

The man turns to his comrades and murmurs in Creole for a moment, then returns to Bob. “One hundred dollars.” He’s no longer smiling.

“Fine, that’s fine.”

“You got to pay now, mister.”

“Oh. Oh, sure, okay.” Bob reaches into his pocket, turns away from the group and draws the money out. Carefully, he peels off five twenties, replaces the packet of bills and hands the hundred dollars to the man. “You sure you know where this woman is?”

“No problem, mister. Like I say, this place is a neighborhood, a country village. Her brother is a well-known man here, and my friend is friend to him, too. We hear all about this woman this morning. Everybody who wants to know about her knows about her. If you don’t want to know, you don’t. If you do, you do. Simple, eh? We know where she is right this minute, too. Not far from this spot.” He’s grinning again.

Bob says, “All right, then. Take me to her.”

“You got something for her, give it to me, eh? I take it to her for you, save you trouble.”

“No. I’ll give it to her. I need to talk to her.”

“She probably don’t speak English.”

“That’s okay. Just take me to her.”

“Suit yourself,” he says.

They start walking, a shapeless group of five men, four black and one white. Shadows in moonlight of palm trees, parked cars, fences, lampposts, fly up like dark flames and lie down behind the men as they stride down Fifty-fourth Street. All the storefronts and shops are blocked and barred by iron gates and shutters; the restaurants and bars are closed, dark, empty. There is no traffic on the streets, Bob suddenly realizes, no cars or buses moving.

They leave the sidewalk, cross a junk-strewn vacant lot on a corner of Fifty-fourth and come out on a dark side street, which draws them at once into a maze of side streets. Bob is frightened now. Two of the men are in front of him, two behind. Bob imagines coming to a sudden halt, yanking the four men to attention and holding out the packet of money to them. That’s what they want. If they take the money, all of it, just take and pocket it, and if they don’t stab him, which he knows they could easily choose to do, then he’ll be alive, safe, free to go home to his family. But he’ll have given away his only and last chance to make the first, small attempt to purge himself of the consequences of his crime. He knows that it will take years, possibly a lifetime, for him to forgive himself, but he also knows that it is essential to the process, the necessary first step, that he somehow return the money unasked, that he not merely get rid of it by giving it to four strangers who just happen to be black and Haitian. He was wrong to try to give the money to the Christian back there, he knows now. He has to give it back to the people he took it from. That won’t make him clean again; possibly nothing will. The deaths of the Haitians will still be his fault, his crime, but he will not have traded their lives for a pocketful of ten-, twenty- and fifty-dollar bills. Instead, he will have traded their lives strictly for freedom, freedom to pack up his car and drive his wife and children back north to New Hampshire and get his old job back and rent an apartment for his family and try to build them a new life out of the scattered, cast-off pieces of their old lives. He will have done something bad, not for money, but in order to do something good. Maybe, then, if he gives the money back, he won’t be any worse than a lot of good people are, and then he will be able to start hoping for a kind of redemption.

If he simply loses the money, however, if he gives it over at knifepoint to four young muggers on a dark back street of Miami, Florida, there will be no hope for any kind of redemption. No hope. He’s got to have hope. Hope is what must replace fantasy in his life. Without it, he’ll end up like Eddie, dead in his Eldorado, or like his father, drunk and dreaming to “Destiny’s Darling,” or like Ave Boone, cynical, small and cheap, and in jail. A dead man, a foolish man, a shallow man — these will be his alternatives. Bob wants to be a good man. And then he can begin to hope for redemption.

They’re now deep into Little Haiti. From throat to groin, his body feels like a cold steel beam, his arms and legs hardening into cast iron, his head — eyes, mouth, nose and ears — seeming to shut down bit by bit, as if a bank of switches were being flicked off one by one. He’s panting, taking quick, shallow breaths, and knows that if he had to speak, he could not. He can barely hear their footsteps click against the pavement, cannot smell the oleander and orange blossoms, the cold cookfires from the backyards, and when finally they pass out of the maze of crosshatched streets and lanes onto an open boulevard, which he recognizes, Miami Boulevard, where he parked his car, his peripheral vision has left him altogether, and it’s as if he’s looking down a tube.

They cross the boulevard and soon turn left and pass down a shadowed alley between two long, flaking white cinder-block warehouses. At the end of the alley, they come to another that crosses it, and at the crossing a silvery sheet of moonlight falls over them. A long-unused, rusting railroad siding sinks into the trash-littered passageway between still more old, boarded-up warehouses. They are walking slowly now and with care through splotches of darkness and moonlight, picking their way over the tracks to the farther side, where they move in single file alongside the wall of a building, touching it with their fingertips as if seeking a place to hide. Bob is aware of the Haitians’ speaking now and then to one another in Creole, but he doesn’t so much hear them speak as remember a few seconds afterwards that they have spoken.

Suddenly he realizes that they have stopped, the tall man in front, then Bob, then the three others, and the tall one is talking in a low voice to Bob and pointing across the alley to a warehouse where a loading platform extends like a pier to the railroad tracks. A rickety wooden staircase leads from the ground to the platform, and at the end of the platform there is a large, closed cargo door. Next to it, a smaller door with a piece of old plywood over the top half lies open a few inches, as if unlocked and left ajar mere seconds ago.

Bob steps over the railroad tracks with careful haste, like a man crossing an ice floe. He puts one foot on the crumbling steps and looks up and sees that there are people standing above him on the platform, people looking down at him, people waiting for him. They are black, three men and a woman. One man, dressed all in white with a scarlet sash around his waist, has positioned himself slightly ahead of the others and has folded his arms over his chest, like an impresario. The second is slight, wearing dark trousers and a white dress shirt, and looks downcast, like a prisoner whose confession has been extracted by torture. Behind him looms the third, a man tall as a column, sepulchral, tautly drawn to his full and amazing height and dressed in a morning coat and striped trousers and wearing sunglasses and a top hat. Holding lightly to his elegantly bent arm, like his consort, is a woman in a white frock, a very dark woman whom Bob recognizes at once. She’s the woman from the boat, saved from drowning to come back and move among the living and, when the white man presents himself, to name him to himself, that he may be judged. She’s the woman whose fate now is to say his fate to him, that he may live it out. It’s she who must endure the sight of the sign of his shame, the money clutched in his outstretched hands, and must hear him beg her to take it from him, “Please, take this from me, take the money, take it,” while bills fall like leaves from the pile in his hands, get grabbed back up from the ground and get thrust at her again and again, as he pleads, “Take it, please! Take the money!” And she’s the woman who must refuse to remove the sign of his shame, who must turn away from him now, and leading the three others, walk back through the door to the darkness beyond, leaving him alone out there, the money still in his hands, and behind him, waiting, the four young wolves who led him to this place.

Bob turns and faces them. The leader takes a single step forward and extends his hand, palm up, for the money. Bob shakes his head slowly from side to side. Then, crushing the bills together, he stuffs the money back into his pocket. All four wolves step carefully over the railroad tracks toward him. The leader, his right hand still extended toward Bob to receive the money from him, holds a short knife in his left. The other men hold knives also.

With a coarse shout that stops the four, Bob cries, “No! This money is mine!” And abruptly, like a boy in summer diving off a pier into a lake, he puts his hands before his face and steps forward, and at once the four men pounce on him, stabbing at him until he falls — spinning, arms and legs outstretched, spinning slowly as he falls, almost weightlessly, like a pale blossom in a storm of blossoms, filling the air with white, a delicate, slowly shifting drift through moonlight to the ground.