“You guys were at the bar back there,” Bob says. “The bartender tell you what I asked him?” The young man’s act irritates Bob and makes him nervous. He can’t see the reason for the act, can’t figure out what kind of impression the man is trying to make on him. Bob thinks he may be making fun of him somehow.
“He only say you a nice fellow,” the young man says. Then he moves in close and in a low voice adds, “He say you looking for somebody. True?”
“True.”
“Well, then, maybe we know how to find this somebody, eh?” Again, he’s expansive, arms spread, broad grin on his face. “Everybody here know everybody else, like a country village. Eh? You know that? You a smart man, I see it right off,” he says, crossing his arms over his narrow chest. Then he says, “So.”
Bob is silent a moment. Then he, too, says, “So,” and smiles. The other three are followers of the first, their expressions and postures merely weak imitations of the tall, thin man with the Afro and sideburns, so now all five men are standing with their arms crossed and smiles on their faces. This is a game, Bob thinks. They know who I’m looking for, and they know who I am too. They know my whole story. In a minute, when they’re through playing with me, when this one has finished showing off his English, they’ll surround me, show me their knives and take the money from me.
Bob doesn’t want that. The money is no more theirs than it is his. If he lets them take the Haitians’ money from him, it will be like throwing it away, burning it. He says, “I happen to know that somebody got to shore from that load of Haitians that drowned off Sunny Isles the other night.”
“Ah! How do you know this, mister?”
“I’m … I’m a fisherman. There were fifteen bodies recovered, and I heard there were sixteen Haitians on the boat.”
“You heard this, eh?”
Bob studies the man’s eyes, but he can’t penetrate them. The man seems purely and simply amused. “Yes. In a bar, on the Keys.”
“Oh. Well, then, you heard the truth,” he says. “A woman, sister to a man in the neighborhood, she get through to the land and get to her brother.”
Suddenly Bob’s chest fills as if with a large, hard, metal-skinned balloon, and his breath comes in short, rapid bursts. “You … do you know where she is?”
“In bad shape, I hear. Very bad shape.”
“Can you take me to her? I’ll … I’ll pay you.”
The man turns to his comrades and murmurs in Creole for a moment, then returns to Bob. “One hundred dollars.” He’s no longer smiling.
“Fine, that’s fine.”
“You got to pay now, mister.”
“Oh. Oh, sure, okay.” Bob reaches into his pocket, turns away from the group and draws the money out. Carefully, he peels off five twenties, replaces the packet of bills and hands the hundred dollars to the man. “You sure you know where this woman is?”
“No problem, mister. Like I say, this place is a neighborhood, a country village. Her brother is a well-known man here, and my friend is friend to him, too. We hear all about this woman this morning. Everybody who wants to know about her knows about her. If you don’t want to know, you don’t. If you do, you do. Simple, eh? We know where she is right this minute, too. Not far from this spot.” He’s grinning again.
Bob says, “All right, then. Take me to her.”
“You got something for her, give it to me, eh? I take it to her for you, save you trouble.”
“No. I’ll give it to her. I need to talk to her.”
“She probably don’t speak English.”
“That’s okay. Just take me to her.”
“Suit yourself,” he says.
They start walking, a shapeless group of five men, four black and one white. Shadows in moonlight of palm trees, parked cars, fences, lampposts, fly up like dark flames and lie down behind the men as they stride down Fifty-fourth Street. All the storefronts and shops are blocked and barred by iron gates and shutters; the restaurants and bars are closed, dark, empty. There is no traffic on the streets, Bob suddenly realizes, no cars or buses moving.
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.