Continental Drift полностью

Grabow was a short, compact man with light brown skin. He had excellent teeth, large as a horse’s and white, of which he was justifiably proud, and when he smiled, he pulled his lips back and showed his teeth off. He smiled often, talked rapidly and volubly and enjoyed touching people while he rattled away at them, enjoyed putting his hands on whomever he talked to, his arms around shoulders, his hands on cheeks, arms, chests, so that most people, when they left the shop, reached for their wallet, and finding it, wondered what Grabow had taken from them, for always, after talking with Grabow, one felt that somehow he’d managed to take away something that wasn’t rightfully his.

When Grabow had led Claude and Vanise and the baby to a small room upstairs and had left them there, Claude felt this way too, felt it more strongly, perhaps, then others might, because he did not understand more than a few words of what Grabow had said to him and his aunt and therefore had paid particularly close attention to the man’s inflection and his facial gestures and physical mannerisms. And when the boy asked himself what the Bahamian had taken away from them, he concluded that he had taken what little freedom remained in their possession, that scrap of freedom they’d obtained when they stepped off the Kattina in Nassau. In exchange, they had been given a meal and a pack of cigarettes, Claude knew that much, and now, apparently, they had been given shelter also.

We should leave here now, Claude said. He stood by the curtainless window and looked down on the backyard of the place, where he saw a battered old white Toyota van, odd piles of sand and cinder blocks, an outhouse, several chickens scratching in the packed dirt, and a large sleeping pig like a long gray boulder in the shade of a scrawny breadfruit tree. Beyond the yard was the ramshackle backside of the shantytown, where Jules and his friends were now, and beyond that a field of rough, dry, slowly rising ground, pocked and rocky, with small patches here and there of withered corn stalks and pole beans.

Vanise sat on the narrow bed in the corner of the room and placed the baby on the floor, where he crawled eagerly around the foot of the bed and stood, one hand clinging to the rail at the end, the other reaching for the dresser just beyond. He seemed happy for the first time since they had left North Caicos, free, finally, of his mother’s and his cousin’s arms, to move about a room, to touch and measure things with his fat hands, to test his recently discovered ability to stand.

They argued, Claude and Vanise. She would not leave. You go if you want to, she said, but Charles and I will not.

No. We should be together, but we must leave now. This man is bad, a gros neg.

Claude walked to the door, turned the knob and pulled. It wouldn’t open. The bastard locked the door, he whispered. You see?

No, she said. Now you see.

He returned to the window and looked down again. I can jump to the ground, it’s not far. Then you can drop Charles to me, and I’ll catch him, and then you can jump down too.

No.

He won’t catch us. He’s busy in the bar now. I can hear him. Come, he said.

No.

Come!

No, she repeated, crossing her arms over her breasts.

Tempérament d’esclave, he cursed, and he swung himself over the windowsill and turned his long, skinny body against the side of the building, where he let himself hang by his hands, then let go. In seconds, he was gone.

Grabow was not angry or even disappointed that the boy had fled; he was relieved and only wished he’d taken the baby with him. But the baby kept the girl happy and busy, when she wasn’t fucking the men he sent upstairs to her room. The men, a few from the town but most of them from the fishing boats and yachts that tied up at the marina in Coral Harbour, just beyond the hook, paid Grabow for the girl’s services, and Grabow in return housed and fed and clothed the girl and her baby from his own stock and did not turn her over to the police, for which she seemed grateful. At least she did not resist or try to leave, which she easily could have done, just as the boy had. In fact, she could have left even more easily than Claude, for after a few weeks Grabow found it inconvenient to keep the door locked and have to let her out himself whenever she needed to go to the privy or had to wash herself or clean the baby. He soon allowed her to come down to the kitchen and feed herself and the child, allowed her to cook chickens and jerked pork and fish, Haitian style, with hot peppers and onions, for him and the bar customers, though he would not let her come out front or leave the building, except to go to the privy or to wash at the standpipe by the back door.