Текст книги "Cross Current"

Автор книги: Christine Kling

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

He waved his arms in the air. “Don’t talk to me about daughters. When a daughter won’t let her old man see his own grandson because of some half-breed kid down on a shithole of an island, you know the world is fucked up. I never should have told her about the kid in the first place. But there it is. I don’t get to see my grandson, my one and only male heir, until I can prove that the kid is in America, living with a family. Ha!” he said. “I’ll place her with a family all right.”

“A restavek. You plan to make your own daughter a child slave, in the States?”

“Beautiful, right? Get paid coming and going. Plus, I get my grandson. Best gig I ever come up with. Used to be my guys took a boat south and bought the product—coke—now the product pays them! Best part is the kids take up less room on the boats. And the market in the States ... you would not believe it. No wages, no Social Security, and they work twice as hard as any Yank kids would. We’ve had a waiting list from the very start.”

I was scrubbing the last of the blood off the vinyl, and I sat up on my heels when Joe said, “You about done there? Good.” One minute I was sitting on top of the engine housing on the back of this ocean racer, getting ready to climb down into the cockpit, and then I saw Joe slide the throttles forward as he shouted, “So long, Sullivan.”

The boat leaped into motion like a panther after her prey, and I tumbled in a backward somersault off the transom, back into the sea.

I came up sputtering, having swallowed a mouthful of seawater in my surprise. I heard the engine roar through both the water and the air. As the distance between the boat and me grew, a wave lifted me, and I saw Joe at the helm. He didn’t even bother looking back. When I crested the next swell, I could no longer find him. The boat must be in a trough, I thought. He couldn’t have disappeared that quickly.

Or could he? I stopped dog paddling for a few seconds to listen, and the weight of my shoes and clothes pulled me down so that a wind wave broke over my head, and I went under. I pushed back up to the surface and sucked in a breath of air so violently that it hurt. It seemed to scrape the back of my throat and stretch the limits of my chest. I clawed at the surface of the water, thrashing, trying desperately to keep my head from going under again. Finally, I recognized what I was feeling: panic. I’d seen it in a hundred near drowning victims but had never expected to experience it myself. I kicked off my shoes while I blew some air into my buoyancy compensator, then I rolled onto my back and floated, slowing my breathing and my heart rate.

Too bad I couldn’t slow my mind as well. Thoughts kept tumbling in this chaotic montage. When people talked about that cliché of your life flash before your eyes, I always thought it would be like a feature film played on super-fast-forward, and you would watch yourself grow up and then old, like in time-lapse photography. But that wasn’t what I was seeing at all. One minute I was trying to calculate how long we had been traveling in Rusty’s boat, and at what speed, in order to figure out how far we’d made it across the current, and then, bam! My mind jumped to an image of my mother laughing and tickling Pit, and then, bam! An image of her cold and wet and blue on the beach, and then, bam! I’d see a seventeen-year-old girl I once pulled from the sea, her hair dry, still wearing her life jacket, no water in her lungs, dead from hypothermia three days after her family’s fishing boat sank out in the Gulf Stream.

Images flitted in and out of my brain as though I had lost control of my own mind. I saw Gil’s face again when the gun was pressed to his forehead, his eyes showing something that looked almost like relief. His body was here in the water with me, floating somewhere, possibly not far off, leaking blood and attracting . . . what? I lifted my arm out of the water and looked at the puckered white skin around the wound in my own arm. At least there was no more blood there. Straight beneath me, thousands of feet down, was an unexplored world. Humans had never walked down there, and no one really knew much about those depths or what lived down there. Sharks? I saw myself then from beneath, floating at the surface, as though I had stepped outside my body, swum underneath, and looked up, and then I realized I was just replaying a scene from the movie Jaws. My mind pictured whales and sea monsters, even Nemo’s giant squid. None of that frightened me.

Hypothermia. That was how I would die.

XXVIII

Swimming seemed pointless. The buoyancy compensator was inflated just enough so that I could float on my back. Which direction would I go? As far out into the Stream as I was, the current would be pushing me along no matter what I did.

My thoughts bumped around my brain so haphazardly that it occurred to me that “train of thought” was grossly inaccurate. It wasn’t a straight rail in my head, but more like a traffic jam, a major snarled-up mess in a place with no roads. The ocean is like that. A place to get lost.

I’d been dozing, floating on my back since daybreak, when the vibrations started up. I didn’t know what it was at first. I’d only heard the sound of outboards through the water before. When I realized it was an engine of some kind, I stopped floating on my back and searched the horizon. As I crested the top of the next swell, I saw a long white cruise ship three to four miles off and coming my way.

The damn thing passed me less than a mile off. I flailed my arms and screamed, but a lot of good that did me on that rainy, overcast day. I wished like hell that I had some of the flares that went down with Rusty’s boat. Why hadn’t I tucked one or two of those in my pockets? I was laughing out loud at that thought when the ship passed at its closest point. I could even see people leaning over the rail on the upper decks. Not many, just a few loners in rain slickers, out enjoying the dark, brooding afternoon. I thought about the dry beds and hot meals and long lives that awaited them. The ship disappeared over the horizon in a matter of minutes. That was when I cried for the first time that day.

At some point, a band of blue appeared at the horizon—I did not know whether it was east or west or whatever. The sky that had been this big gray dome slowly metamorphosed into individual clouds with depth and design and beauty. B.J. would have loved those clouds, and he would have started seeing shapes and pointing things out to me—animals, mountains, and faces, shapes that I never would have been able to see on my own. I tried to look at the clouds as B.J. would, tried to see the world and my predicament as he would see it, and thinking about him, trying to get at the essence of him like that, made me feel angry. I’m not ready to let go of him yet, I thought, not ready to say good-bye to that. . . what? What did I call what I felt for him?

How poor our language was with this one word: love. The Polynesians had dozens of words for coconut, the Eskimos had their variations to describe snow, but we had only this one word to communicate the most important aspect of life, the multitude of ways we can connect with other beings. What I felt for my parents, my brothers, Jeannie, my dog, B.J., and now Solange—all were variations of this emotion, yet all were so different. How could that one little four-letter word encompass all that range of pain and joy and sorrow?

I tried to focus, to slow my mind down. I felt that I was on the verge of some moment of enlightenment. Then a larger than normal wind wave slapped me on the side of my face, and I snorted seawater up my nose and swallowed a mouthful. Coughing and gagging, fighting against the burning sensation in my sinuses, I thought, I’m not ready to drown yet. I need more time, dammit.

Time. It appeared to lose all meaning out there. The day seemed to not want to end, yet I was not looking forward to the dark. When I became aware that I was cold, I realized that I had been cold for a very long time. I began kicking and rubbing my skin, trying to warm myself up. The wind had dropped down to almost nothing, and while there was still some swell, there were no longer the little wind waves that splashed me in the face.

Three times during the day I saw helicopters or planes pass overhead, and I waved and shouted as I had at the cruise ship, but I’d flown in an airplane over these same waters before. I knew how unlikely it was that anybody up there would be able to spot a person in the water. I wondered if all the air traffic had anything to do with me. Had Rusty reported his boat missing?

Two large clouds parted and a column of sunlight lit up a small circle of ocean not far from me. It reminded me of those paintings of angels or Jesus, where they stood in a shaft of celestial light. Maybe this was a sign, maybe a miracle was about to take place, another boat would appear, and I would be plucked from the sea. I waited, allowing myself a tiny bit of hope. The lovely shaft of light broadened as the clouds drifted apart, and soon the whole sky was flecked with spots of blue. No boat appeared, and I beat my hands against the surface of the sea, splashing my own face, angry at myself for wanting to believe.

When the sunlight finally reached my part of the ocean, I could feel the temperature change. I closed my eyes, pointed my face to the sun, and let the heat soak into my skin. I leaned the top of my head back, and my feet floated right to the surface. I began to feel some warmth, even in my legs.

For a time, I actually dozed off into real sleep. That bit of late afternoon sunny warmth reenergized me, and when I woke, I remembered that I had those candy bars in my pocket. The saltwater had not penetrated the vacuum foil wrapper, so when I tore it open with my teeth, the chocolate bar inside was squished but dry. I usually complained about the chalky taste of those health food store protein bars when B.J. offered me one, but this one tasted so good, I nearly gobbled down the second as well. I pulled it out of my pocket but then stuck it back, thinking that night was coming, and it would take every bit of energy I had to survive through those long dark hours.

Night came on as quickly as the cruise ship had passed. It seemed as though one minute there was sun, then a flamboyant red sky had melted into a million stars. The sky was not as dark as it had been the night before. Out of reach of all the mainland lights, there were so many stars there was little black sky left. I couldn’t ever remember having seen so many stars.

No, that’s not true, I thought. There was that time, down in the Dry Tortugas with Neal, my former boyfriend. Neal, who had shown me the stars, named the constellations, and made love to me on the sand of an island that disappeared at high tide.

Was Neal waiting for me at the Crossroads, along with my mother and Red and my dear friend Elysia and Margot and all the others I had not saved?

The skin on my fingers had lost all sensation. When I touched my fingers to my dry cheeks, it felt like I was pressing slimy sea creatures to my skin. I put a finger in my mouth, and it was more like a cold thin pickle than a part of me.

Sleep was the enemy, and I battled against it by singing songs I’d learned as a child, songs like “This Land Is Your Land” and “America, the Beautiful,” by gliding my hands through the water and watching the blue green contrails of bioluminescence sparking off my fingertips, by naming the stars and constellations I could remember: Orion, Betelgeuse, Altair, Sirius.

Just in case there really was some kind of search-and-rescue effort happening out there, I turned on my little strobe light. It had a big pin on one side, and I had attached it to one of the straps on my buoyancy compensator. As I adjusted the straps on the BC, I felt Racine’s pouch float up under my chin. I grasped it tight in my fist and stared upward, but the bright flashes of my strobe blinded my night vision, ruining my view of the stars. I was way beyond caring what seemed rational and what did not. I called her name out loud, La Sirene, and I told her that I didn’t believe, but if she wanted to help me anyway, I wouldn’t turn down the offer. That made me smile, and I wondered if it would be the last time.

It didn’t take long once it was dark for the cold to set in. I tried curling my body into a ball, swimming, rubbing my limbs, but nothing worked. A part of me welcomed the numbness because it stopped the aches in my body and the pain in my head. At one moment, I was sure I heard my mother’s voice, and we had quite a long conversation. She told me drowning really wasn’t so bad. “Sey, dear, when you’ve really had enough, just breathe the water. Simply put your head under and breathe.”

“Mother,” I said as I kicked my legs, spinning my body around looking over the waves. “Mother, where are you?” She wouldn’t answer me, and I was so cold. And so sleepy. I would never do as she said, never breathe in water, but it would be nice to stop struggling and sleep for a little while. Maybe, just maybe, the darkness and cold would be gone if I could only sleep through the night. Yes, sleep.

XXIX

I was down in a deep, dark cave where the cold and damp got into your bones. Waiting, but for what, I wasn’t sure. Then I saw a shaft of light shining in the cave, just like the light I had seen at the surface. And she was there, crying, asking me to hurry, please. I pushed back the strands of my long black hair that were floating in the water, waving about my head as she reached out to me. Help me, I heard her say inside my head, just like that first day I’d found her. Help me. You promised. I called out to her, Where are you? I could see her, but I could not reach her. When she answered, she asked, Who are you? and I told her, La Sirene.

A hand grabbed hold of my clothing and started pulling me up toward the surface. I struggled, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. Then I heard the voice of a man speaking Creole, and I knew I was not going to let them take me away from Solange again.

“No,” I cried out, and swung my fists at the arms that grasped my clothes. I was dragged into the bottom of a boat, and a plastic tarp was thrown over me. I felt the weight of several people lying on top of me. I stopped struggling because if they didn’t get off me, I would soon suffocate.

The corner of the tarp lifted. My strobe light was still flashing in my eyes, and I couldn’t see anything. A hand reached in and turned off the light. Red lights continued to dance in my vision.

“Lady?” someone said. It was a young man’s voice, and the accent was distinctly Haitian. Maybe this was another of Malheur’s henchmen. “You okay, lady?”

I tried to blink away the red spots. My eyes began to focus on the person nearest me, a woman. Her skin was very dark, and she was wearing a headscarf. She was the one sitting on my midriff. The young man was behind her, and there were other faces behind them, more and more as my eyes started to see better.

“What—” I tried to speak, but with the woman sitting on my diaphragm, it was difficult to get enough air. Then I looked up, above all their faces, and I saw the sail. It was made of flour sacks and other odd bits of fabric. It puffed out, round-bellied and pulling hard in the strong night winds. I looked back at the woman sitting on me. “Can I get up?” My voice sounded strange even to me.

A puzzled look crossed her face, and she looked over her shoulder at the young man. He smiled and nodded, saying something to her in Creole. She laughed and wiggled her way to a stance.

When I tried to stand, I discovered my legs could not support me, and I collapsed back to the deck of their boat. In the moment I had tried to rise, however, I had seen that the boat I was on was only about thirty-five feet long. People were packed into every square inch of space. They had squeezed even closer together to make space to pull me aboard. There, where I collapsed on the deck, exhausted and suffering from hypothermia, the lady who had been sitting on me took over and began to undress me.

I didn’t have the strength to object. She removed all my wet clothes and paused as she fingered the pouch at my throat.

“No,” I told her, not yet wanting to remove the pouch.

She smiled and muttered to herself as she wrapped me, naked, in a blanket. She was telling a story to the others in Creole as she began to rub my arms and legs, and I heard the same words repeated, passed from person to person across the crowded vessel. In the starlight, I saw face after face smiling in my direction. The woman handed me a plastic water jug and I drank the water in great gulps.

When the young man came close to the woman rubbing my legs, I asked him, “Do you have any idea how far we are from Florida?”

He shook his head. “We leave Haiti five days ago. Weather very bad.” He pointed toward the bow of the boat. “Florida, soon.”

He looked to be no more than eighteen years old. “What is your name?” I asked him.

“Henri Goinave.”

“Will you please tell the captain, thank you, thank him for saving me.”

The young man smiled shyly. “Oui,” he said. “He is my papa.”

The woman who had been rubbing my back then handed me a plastic glass. Thinking it contained more water, I took a big gulp, then grimaced at the taste of the raw burning liquor. Many of the people near enough to see me laughed and talked around me. Their voices reminded me of Solange. I returned the glass, and she handed me a comb and a fragment of a mirror.

“Thank you,” I said to the woman, and I began to comb some of the knots out of my hair. The voices around me grew louder, and it seemed everyone on the boat was watching me. Then, to the young man, I added, “Can you tell everyone thank you?”

“You make them very happy.”

“Why?”

“La Sirene will guide us to Florida.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“When we saw you in the sea, we spoke, and you say your name is La Sirene.”

“No, I was dreaming.”

He shook his head. “Eyes open,” he said. “And we asked you in Creole.”

Henri was shaking my shoulder. “Miss,” he said. He pointed to the bow. “Florida.”

I sat up and stretched my legs out. I’d been dreaming again about Solange. She kept crying out, Help me. It took me a few seconds to get her voice out of my head. I tried to stand and realized I hurt in every part of my body. The woman who had undressed me earlier arrived with my shorts and T-shirt. They were stiff with salt, but nearly dry. Once I had dressed, Henri motioned for me to follow him. When I stood, I saw the bright lights of the Florida coastline no more than a mile off our beam. Henri led me through all the people sitting, sleeping, but mostly standing and staring at the lights. At the bow of the vessel, he introduced me to a distinguished-looking gray-bearded man who stood staring at the lights.

"Papa, ici c’est La Sirene.”

The older man was wearing a dark shirt buttoned to the neck. He nodded and shook my hand, then turned to his son and acted as though I were not there. While they spoke to each other in Creole, I searched the coastline for a familiar landmark, trying to figure out where we were. Finally, I spotted the Hillsboro Light to the south of us. We would be off the coast of Deerfield Beach, then. I was amazed that the Coast Guard had not yet intercepted us. It looked to me like the boat was making a good four to five knots through the water, and we were headed straight for the beach.

“Henri, can you tell your father that there is a harbor entrance back to the south of us. It isn’t very far.” The young man translated what I said, and then the older man spoke to him at length, frowning and ignoring me.

“My father says if we go into the harbor, they will only send us back to Haiti. He says we will land on the beach.”

I could see even from as far out as we were that there was surf breaking on the beach, swell left over from the weather system that had passed over us. The hotel lights lit the mist from the breaking waves. I’d seen boats go on the beach in weather like this, and it wasn’t a pretty picture. “Henri, tell your father that people will get hurt and drown if he beaches a boat this size.” Again, he translated, and again the father was very emotional in his reply, but he would not look at me.

“My father says everyone on the boat agrees. We didn’t come this far to look at the sand and trees of Florida and then get sent back to Haiti. We come to stay, even if some die getting there. Some will live, and they will be free.”

I looked around me, and I saw weak, sick, tired adults, some teens, and a few younger children. “Do any of these people know how to swim?” I asked.

“Few,” Henri said. “I do. I lived in Miami for two years, and I learned to swim in school.”

“Good. Henri, will you tell your father that I am a trained lifeguard, and I am the captain of my own boat, a tugboat. If he will listen to me, maybe nobody will get hurt.”

The old man looked at me for the first time, and I saw questions in his eyes. He was trying to decide whether or not to believe me. I held his gaze, willing him to trust me. Finally, he nodded.

“Okay, Henri, this is what we’ll do.” I explained to him that we would have to get just outside the surf line and then sail parallel to the coast, luffing the sails until we felt a big set of breakers pass. We’d then make our turn and try to sail in on the smaller set. The point was we didn’t want the boat to broach, or turn sideways and roll over while surfing in on a wave. The shore was so close. This section of the beach was where the private homes north of Hillsboro ended and condos began. The swim ashore would be nothing for me, even as exhausted as I was. That beach was life and liberty and happiness for the folks on this boat, and it was very possible some of them would not make it.

The sky was just starting to lighten along the eastern horizon when we tightened the sheets and felt the wind begin to push us onto the beach. Some early-morning beach walker whipped the T-shirt from around his shoulders and waved it at us, swinging it round his head. I wasn’t sure what he was signaling, if he was saying come on or go back. The first couple of waves passed under us as mere ripples, barely lifting the heavy island boat. It was the third wave that came and lifted our stern, and when I looked at the old man, I could see that though he gripped the wheel, he had lost all steerage as we started to surf toward the shore. I clutched the pouch at my neck and figured it couldn’t do any harm to ask La Sirene once more to watch out for us, to help us make it ashore.

The old boat must have had a nice long keel on her, as we held a steady course and made it through the surf without broaching. It was only when the bow grounded that the stern swung around, and the whole boat rolled onto its side. We had grounded on a sandbar about forty feet from the beach.

People were scrambling everywhere. Many had been thrown off the boat when she rolled. Children were crying, and I heard splashing and saw folks running up the beach in every direction. I jumped off the boat and was surprised to find the water nearly over my head. Many of the smaller people on board would need help getting to shallow water. I ferried children and women to where they could reach shore. The waves continued to roll in, battering the sick and the weary even when they’d found bottom under their feet. Many jumped off the boat and went straight down and had to be plucked, sputtering, from underwater. My body ached in every fiber, and each time I turned back toward that listing wreck, I thought my arms would not be able to grasp another person. On my fourth trip, I carried in a little boy, no more than five years old, and looked around for an adult to take charge of him. I was startled to look up and see Racine Toussaint standing there at the water’s edge, holding up the hem of a long black dress.

“I’ll take him,” she said, reaching with one arm.

Someone a few feet away shouted something in Creole, and I felt the temperament of everyone change. Racine took the child, turned, and without another word disappeared into the darkness. Beyond the sand, I saw blue and red flashing lights, and I knew that some would get caught, but others still might make it away. I stayed in the water until the last person was off the boat and clear of the breakers, then I swam away from the wreck down the beach to where a small unit of condos had a back door onto the beach. To the east, the sky had turned a whitish blue and the clouds on the horizon looked like ash-covered charcoal with the glow of the occasional burning ember shining through. I exited the water, not sure I had the strength to stand, and staggered right into the building. No one paid any attention to me. There were far more Haitians than there were cops on the scene.

I walked through the condo lobby, down the driveway, and out to A1A. I could still see blue flashing lights to the south, so I turned north and began walking along the highway toward the city of Deerfield Beach. I was gauging the distance to a small minimart where I might locate a telephone when an older-model station wagon pulled up alongside me and stopped. I bent down to look inside the dark car, but before I could make out the identity of the driver, I heard Racine Toussaint’s gravelly voice say, “Get in.”