Continental Drift полностью

His life had got expensive. But soon he was learning from his new friends how, with the Belinda Blue and his knowledge of the intricate maze of channels crisscrossing Florida Bay, he could afford that life. He risked several nighttime runs from Moray Key across to Flamingo City, loaded to the gunwales with bales of Colombia marijuana taken off a Panamanian freighter a few miles off Alligator Light, and cleared enough cash to start thinking about buying another boat, a high-speed 31-foot Tiara 3100, maybe, with twin 205-horsepower OMC Sea Drive engines, fitted with outriggers, a flying bridge and fighting chairs, a Loran C navigational unit and an extra fuel tank for occasional long-distance runs to places like Grand Cayman, the Bahamas, West Palm Beach, a boat that would let him fish the big tournaments from Pensacola to Nassau while someone else chugged in and out of Florida Bay in the Belinda Blue, lugging day-trippers and kids and dads with Christmas-present rods and reels to fish the flats, providing the business with a small but steady income and, when Ave came back in the Tiara from Grand Cayman, Nassau and West Palm Beach with plenty of cash but no fish to show for his efforts, providing a cover.

The second the Belinda Blue touches the pier at the Moray Key Marina, Bob Dubois jumps ashore, leaving the fishermen behind him. They look up from the afterdeck, and he’s gone. “Where’d the sucker go? Hey, Cap, where’re you off to so fast?” They look around in confusion. What now? They’ve caught twenty-six fish, sea trout and redfish, had one hell of a fine morning out there on the bay, got exactly what they paid for, but they’re not sure what comes next. And the fact that just as they docked at the marina the captain of the boat took off, just jumped ashore and disappeared, leaves them confused and slightly irritated.

The Jamaican mate says, “You wan’ keep dese fish, mon?” He wraps the last of the rods and reels in oilcloth and lays it in the locker atop the others. “Can filet dem if you want.”

There are four fishermen, friends and relations from Columbia, Missouri, partners in an insurance company. Two are sons-in-law, the older two are brothers, all four are red-faced, with fat pink bodies, loud voices. They’ve finished their three-day convention stay in Miami and have come out to the Keys in a rented car for a few days of “R and R,” which means drinking and fishing and calculating their combined financial conquests made during the convention — a couple of real estate packages in Louisville and a chemical manufacturing company trying to get started in Arkansas. They laugh and plan and count, and they remind Bob Dubois of his brother Eddie. The ease with which they hurtle through financial abstractions brings back to Bob Eddie’s hectoring lectures, his impatience and condescension, and Bob has found himself treating his clients the same way he usually ended up treating his brother, with sullenness, feigned inattention, partial deafness — as if he were out on the bay this morning for his own private amusement and the fat men in shorts, Hawaiian shirts and bill caps were keeping him from it. Naturally, since the men have hired him, his mate and the Belinda Blue, not vice versa, they condescend to him from an even greater height than they might otherwise, calling him “Cap” and referring to the Belinda Blue as “the tub,” and when their lines snarl on the reels or tangle with one another, simply handing Bob or his mate the rod and reaching into the cooler for another cold Budweiser.

It’s been a hard morning for Bob Dubois, then. Hard, too, for his mate, Tyrone, a knotty, dark brown Jamaican with a dense beard and finger-length dreadlocks. Tyrone is in his late thirties, has spent his entire adult life crewing for charter fishing boats on the Keys, the last three years working for Avery Boone, and it’s he more than anyone else who taught Ave, and now Ave’s old friend from the North, Bob Dubois, how and where to fish these waters. As a teenager, Tyrone fled a migrant work camp in the cane fields west of Miami and drifted across the Everglades and down the Keys, putting to good use everything he’d learned as a boy working for white American yachtsmen back in Port Antonio. Ave’s dependence on Tyrone’s knowledge, and now Bob’s, is like that of the Americans back in Jamaica; it gives Tyrone power in a world in which he is otherwise powerless.

One of the sons-in-law laughs and slaps Tyrone on his bare back. “You betcha goddamn ass we want them fish, boy! We earned them suckers.”

“Paid for ’em too,” the other son-in-law adds.

The older men, brothers, fathers of the brides, have stepped free of the boat and are waiting on the pier. One of them announces, “I’m gonna get me a real drink. An al-co-hol-ic beverage. See you boys over there at the restaurant,” he says, and he and his brother head down the pier toward the Clam Shack.