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.