Continental Drift (51 page)

The man who brought them in tells Émile to wait by the door and disappears into the further antechamber. Émile breathes in and peers around him, first at the animals, who look half asleep, then at the boy, who is smoking a cigarette and seems bored, as if wishing he were down on Miami Avenue with his friends. All of Vanise’s weight has fallen onto Émile’s side now, and he has to work to hold her in a standing position, grabbing her under one arm and slinging the other over his shoulder.

The air of the room is hot and ripe with the smell of sweating bodies, as if people have been dancing energetically for hours. There is also the sweet smell of white rum, cut by the smell of herbs, sharp and dry, and overripe bananas and the greasy smell of recently cooked chicken. Now Émile sees on top of one of the old desks a row of green jars and small baskets,
govis,
that hold the spirits of the dead, and midway along each wall, a grinning human skull set on the floor, and over his head, nailed the doorframe, what appears to be the gleaming white skull of a horse. He spins on his heels, dragging his sister’s body in a circle with him, and sees in a dim far corner of the room, beyond the animals and the boy tending them, a grave-sized mound of dirt
half-covered with pale green tiles, a short cross planted at the head of the mound. In the corner opposite, three picks, three shovels and three hoes, gravedigger’s tools, lean against the wall, and on the floor before them is a balancing scale. Émile turns again, counterclockwise, and faces in the near corner a long military sword, its point up, and next to it the scabbard, lying flat on the floor. In the fourth corner of the chamber is a batch of sticks—canes and walking sticks and a furled black umbrella—leaned against the walls, as if parked there by Ghede on previous visits and forgotten afterwards.

Suddenly, the drum is beating furiously, like the wings of a hummingbird, high, tight, too fast to separate the beats, and the crowd of people in the further section of the room is falling over itself trying to get out of the way and open a path from out of its center, when a figure nearly seven feet tall seems to rise up out of the crowd of people, as if he has been kneeling in prayer among them and has stood up. He pushes them roughly aside with a thick, gnarled stick and leaves them and passes into the section of the room where Émile—amazed, frightened, grateful—stands waiting.

This is surely, truly, he, Brav Ghede, Baron Cimetière. This is the loa himself, with his awesome, intricate powers over death that can bring Vanise back to the world of the living. No other loa is at once so powerful and so tricky, so strong and so scheming, so kind and so cruel. And it’s a very good Ghede, too. Convincing. Émile stares up at the loa, and his breath goes away, and he is afraid that he will fall. Ghede is just as Émile hoped—taller than a man, made even taller by the battered top hat on his head, and cadaverous, with a head and face like a skull, his eyes hidden behind black, wire-rimmed glasses, his teeth large and glittering with gold. He’s wearing a mourning coat with no shirt beneath it, and his bony brown chest is slick with sweat. His striped gray trousers are held up by a thickly braided gold rope knotted over his crotch, and on his feet he wears white shoes with pointed toes. He’s a magnificent figure—awesome, frightening and delightful.

As if she’s turned magically into a light, airy bush, Vanise no
longer feels heavy to Emile, and he turns to see if she has taken her own weight onto herself, but she still leans all her weight against him, her head still hanging loosely down, eyes closed, mouth open, as if drugged. Ghede, Vanise! Émile whispers. It’s Ghede!

Ghede smiles and pokes Vanise in the belly with his stick. In his high, whining, nasal voice, he says,
Mine?
Oh, monsieur, how
thoughtful
of you!

No, no Brav! Émile says. I want …

I want, I want, I want!
Everyone
wants, wants, wants!

Forgive me, Ghede. She’s just come from Haiti, my sister, and the boat sank, and we found her like this, only she grows worse, and she’s called for you….

No!

No?

No, no, no! Not true. Her
mait’-tête
is Agwé, or she’d be
en bas de l’eau
this moment, with all the others. Several people from the group who have gathered behind the Baron nod sagely as he speaks.

Oh, Émile says. Agwé.

Ghede scratches his chin and leans close to Vanise and studies her face a moment. He points at her nose, her chin, her forehead, with a long, extended forefinger, then reaches into her mouth and draws out her tongue and examines it with thumb and forefinger, rubbing it lightly, before putting it back into her mouth. Lifting up one eyelid at a time, he examines her yellow eyes. The pupils have rolled up and she looks all but dead to Emile.

Agwé is gone now. Gone far away. Took her from the waters, then left her, the Baron says. He seems puzzled and begins mumbling in no language Émile can understand, not Creole, not French, certainly not English.
Kala, kala, diman kon, lé ké dja, lé ké dja
…. His mumble becomes a chant,
Kala, kala, diman kon,
and he starts shuffling his feet side to side and turning in a slow circle, counterclockwise. Behind him, a wizened old man with a stringy beard picks up the rhythm of Ghede’s dance with the tiny, high-pitched drum, and several people in the knot surrounding the drummer join in the chant
and commence shuffling their feet in the same odd, crablike, side-to-side step. Ghede’s face has turned to black stone, obsidian, shiny and opaque, and he dances faster and faster, over and back, from side to side, like a pendulum increasing its velocity with each new arc, and then, suddenly, he wrenches Vanise out of Emile’s arms, lurches across the room with her and tosses her onto the grave. Freed of his sister’s weight, Emile, without thinking it, has joined the dance, as if grabbed at the arms from behind by a pair of l
es Invisibles
and thrust forward toward the other dancers and then shoved back and forth in time to their movements, until he has caught the movement on his own—then a blur, whirling motion, light creeping forward from the back of his skull, until he has been mounted, taken over, displaced by Agwé, who is immediately confronted by Ghede to learn the truth:

Ghede: Agwé Ge-Rouge, you’ve gone off with this woman’s soul, this nice young African woman here, and she’s sad, Agwé, sad and empty, a shell, Papa. A shell.

Agwé [in a dark, low, bubbling voice, as if from under water]: Not I, Brav. [Looks down at Vanise, examines her face carefully.] But she’s gone, all right. Too bad.

Ghede [angry]: You’re the woman’s
mait’-téte!
If she’s gone, you’re gone too!

Agwé: No.

Ghede: No?

Agwé: It’s her infant son, unbaptized, who’s gone off with her soul. The child’s
en bas de l’eau,
that’s where, and I’m with
him
now, Papa. Not her. It happens that way, Ghede. This one, the mother, she’s yours, if you want her, if you want to install yourself in her head.

Ghede: Her son’s dead, eh? And how do you account for that?

Agwé: Lots more dead, too.

Ghede: True? [Smacks his lips, leers.]

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

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

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

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

Ghede: Tell me!

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

Ghede: And you went off with the infant?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.