Shirtless, barefoot, a machete in one hand, a plastic water jug in the other, Claude peered into the low thatch lean-to where the old man lay at the back, sleeping on a rumpled blanket. They were deep in the Barrens, west of the airport and east of the golf course at Simms Point. The old man wore a dirty undershirt, shiny black gabardine trousers, and was barefoot. His empty rum bottle lay at his side, the cap scattered and lost somewhere in the lean-to among cook pots, a transistor radio, an old
As Claude ducked and entered the shady lean-to, the old man stirred, groped automatically for his bottle, and lifting it, realized it was empty and woke. Bastard, he said. You finished my rum.
Claude sat down cross-legged in a corner of the hut and laid the machete carefully from knee to knee. He was growing weary of these attacks by the old man, but in the end, despite their both being Haitian, they had little else to talk about. They couldn’t talk about the Chinaman’s marijuana crop — Claude was a farmboy, young, sober and intelligent, and knew how to tend, harvest and guard the plants; the old man, an assistant tailor, drunk all the time and stupid, knew nothing of farming. And they couldn’t talk about Haiti, because the old man had come twelve years ago from where Claude had never been, a small town outside Port-au-Prince, and Claude, from Allanche in the north, had come from where the old man had never been. And they couldn’t talk about Nassau and the island of New Providence, for everything about the place that interested him — its geography, people, economics — Claude had learned in a matter of weeks, and the old man in twelve years had not learned one-half as much. As for the Chinaman, upon whose special needs and goodwill and trust Claude now depended, and the Haitian community, which Claude had penetrated the morning he fled from Grabow’s shop and returned to the door that Jules and the others had entered before him, and the Bahamian police, who, Claude now believed, would not bother him if nothing drew their attention to him, and the Bahamians in general, who seemed to have a fondness for Haitians, whom they saw as childlike in their honesty and exploitable in their need — about these, the old man had nothing to say that was of use to Claude. It does happen that sometimes the old have nothing to teach the young, except by sad example. The old man could not even tell Claude anything useful about how to get to America. He himself did not want to go to America. It’s all white people there, he had said, and they hate the blacks, and their own blacks hate all the other blacks. Their police will arrest you and put you in jail until they send you back to jail in Haiti. The Americans have an arrangement with Papa Doc …
No. With Papa. And they send you back so he can put you in jail in Port-au-Prince forever. Better to stay here in the Bahamas, the old man said. Forget America.
Claude could never forget America. Not now, not after all he’d suffered, all the pain and humiliation and fear he’d faced and overcome for it. There was an exchange that had taken place, and he’d come out with a vision, and he clung to it, like a sailor off a sunken ship clinging to the wreckage of the ship. There was a big difference now between him and Vanise, he thought, and also between the boy he had been, as recently even as when he had been locked down in the stinking hold of the
I know you drank off my rum, the old man said, holding the empty bottle upside down before the boy’s face, as if that were proof.
I don’t drink rum, Claude said wearily. It makes your brain mushy. Like yours. He smiled.
The old man grunted, farted loudly, and mumbling curses at the boy,
