They leave the sidewalk, cross a junk-strewn vacant lot on a corner of Fifty-fourth and come out on a dark side street, which draws them at once into a maze of side streets. Bob is frightened now. Two of the men are in front of him, two behind. Bob imagines coming to a sudden halt, yanking the four men to attention and holding out the packet of money to them. That’s what they want. If they take the money, all of it, just take and pocket it, and if they don’t stab him, which he knows they could easily choose to do, then he’ll be alive, safe, free to go home to his family. But he’ll have given away his only and last chance to make the first, small attempt to purge himself of the consequences of his crime. He knows that it will take years, possibly a lifetime, for him to forgive himself, but he also knows that it is essential to the process, the necessary first step, that he somehow return the money unasked, that he not merely get rid of it by giving it to four strangers who just happen to be black and Haitian. He was wrong to try to give the money to the Christian back there, he knows now. He has to give it back to the people he took it from. That won’t make him clean again; possibly nothing will. The deaths of the Haitians will still be his fault, his crime, but he will not have traded their lives for a pocketful of ten-, twenty- and fifty-dollar bills. Instead, he will have traded their lives strictly for freedom, freedom to pack up his car and drive his wife and children back north to New Hampshire and get his old job back and rent an apartment for his family and try to build them a new life out of the scattered, cast-off pieces of their old lives. He will have done something bad, not for money, but in order to do something good. Maybe, then, if he gives the money back, he won’t be any worse than a lot of good people are, and then he will be able to start hoping for a kind of redemption.
If he simply loses the money, however, if he gives it over at knifepoint to four young muggers on a dark back street of Miami, Florida, there will be no hope for any kind of redemption. No hope. He’s got to have hope. Hope is what must replace fantasy in his life. Without it, he’ll end up like Eddie, dead in his Eldorado, or like his father, drunk and dreaming to “Destiny’s Darling,” or like Ave Boone, cynical, small and cheap, and in jail. A dead man, a foolish man, a shallow man — these will be his alternatives. Bob wants to be a good man. And then he can begin to hope for redemption.
They’re now deep into Little Haiti. From throat to groin, his body feels like a cold steel beam, his arms and legs hardening into cast iron, his head — eyes, mouth, nose and ears — seeming to shut down bit by bit, as if a bank of switches were being flicked off one by one. He’s panting, taking quick, shallow breaths, and knows that if he had to speak, he could not. He can barely hear their footsteps click against the pavement, cannot smell the oleander and orange blossoms, the cold cookfires from the backyards, and when finally they pass out of the maze of crosshatched streets and lanes onto an open boulevard, which he recognizes, Miami Boulevard, where he parked his car, his peripheral vision has left him altogether, and it’s as if he’s looking down a tube.
They cross the boulevard and soon turn left and pass down a shadowed alley between two long, flaking white cinder-block warehouses. At the end of the alley, they come to another that crosses it, and at the crossing a silvery sheet of moonlight falls over them. A long-unused, rusting railroad siding sinks into the trash-littered passageway between still more old, boarded-up warehouses. They are walking slowly now and with care through splotches of darkness and moonlight, picking their way over the tracks to the farther side, where they move in single file alongside the wall of a building, touching it with their fingertips as if seeking a place to hide. Bob is aware of the Haitians’ speaking now and then to one another in Creole, but he doesn’t so much hear them speak as remember a few seconds afterwards that they have spoken.
Suddenly he realizes that they have stopped, the tall man in front, then Bob, then the three others, and the tall one is talking in a low voice to Bob and pointing across the alley to a warehouse where a loading platform extends like a pier to the railroad tracks. A rickety wooden staircase leads from the ground to the platform, and at the end of the platform there is a large, closed cargo door. Next to it, a smaller door with a piece of old plywood over the top half lies open a few inches, as if unlocked and left ajar mere seconds ago.
