Swimming in the Volcano
Page 1
Praise for
Swimming in the Volcano:
“A stunning tour de force ... In some of the most brilliantly sinuous and seductive prose being written today, Shacochis summons the spirits of guilt and innocence, of love and hate, of white and black, [and] of America and the Third World.”
—Newsday (New York)
“Swimming in the Volcano is sharp, fluid storytelling ... [with] scenes of harsh power and immense range.... Shacochis has created an absorbing group of protagonists, and ... remarkable language [that] maintains the highest level of emotional melodrama amid an ever-thickening backdrop of political implication.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Big, lush ... rich ... Swimming in the Volcano is a mural, a tapestry, a gallery. Shacochis projects a series of nightmarish, psychotropic, fatally beautiful impressions, [creating] an indelible impression of the state of mind that is St. Catherine.”
—San Diego Union Tribune
“A dark novel reminiscent of Nostromo in its meditations on how the innocent become swept up in political foment, and of Faulkner in its rolling sentence structures that continually wrestle with contradictions.”
—Booklist
“Shacochis proves himself to be the rarest of contemporary American novelists, a writer with a worldview.... Swimming in the Volcano is a reminder of literature’s finest affirmation: that life itself is an exotic journey, a trip to an unknown island, a one-way ticket to the heart’s interior.”
—Conde Nast Traveler
Also by Bob Shacochis
EASY IN THE ISLANDS
THE NEXT NEW WORLD
DOMESTICITY
THE IMMACULATE INVASION
SWIMMING IN THE VOLCANO
A NOVEL
Bob Shacochis
Copyright © 1993 by Bob Shacochis
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada
First published in 1993 in the United States by Charles Scribner’s Sons and in Canada by Maxwell Macmillan Canada, Inc.
Printed by special arrangement with Simon & Schuster.
Excerpts from the following work have appeared in Intro, Vogue, GQ, Outside, and Clockwatch Review.
The author wishes to express his gratitude to the Florida Arts Council and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters for their generous and timely support.
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint excerpts from the following works:
Heather McHugh, “Have or Love” and “The Ghost” from To the Quick, copyright © 1987 by Heather McHugh.
Julian Evans, Transit of Venus: Travels in the Pacific, copyright © 1992 by Julian Evans. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books.
The Never-Ending by Andrew Hudgins. Copyright © 1991 by Andrew Hudgins. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Co. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Shacochis, Bob.
Swimming in the volcano: a novel/Bob Shacochis.
p. cm.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9931-7
1. Americans—Caribbean Area—Fiction. 2. Caribbean Area—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.H284S94 2004
813′.54—dc22 2003067576
Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Author’s Note
The trilevel presentation of an imaginary West Indian dialect (provincial, standardized provincial, standard) is an intentional—and, the writer hopes, comprehensible—act of bridging between popular and conventional usage.
SWIMMING IN THE VOLCANO
Prologue
September 1976
On the northern end of the Caribbean island of St. Catherine, there is an active volcano, Mount Soufrière. Dormant since its last eruption in 1902, its massive crater had collected a brown hot lake of tropical rains, and magma formed a fiery island within the lake in a gradual reawakening not many years ago. La Soufrière, as if aware of her accelerating metamorphosis from beauty to beast, had been increasingly moody, an unpredictable and worrisome neighbor to the island’s citizens. The government of St. Catherine responded by establishing a monitoring station, and the Ministry of Agriculture was prompted to send a man up Soufrière, the forest ranger Godfred Ballantyne, on a weekly basis to check the equipment housed on the volcano’s rim.
Several months after the American economist Mitchell Wilson had been assigned to the ministry, he expressed an interest in seeing the volcano himself, and the chief agricultural officer arranged for Ballantyne to take the American up the mountain with him.
From the outskirts of Queenstown, the capital at the bottom of the island, they drove recklessly northward for over thirty miles, the Land Rover straining on a broken roadway of switchbacks and climbs, the flank of the volcano and its cloud-smothered peak sometimes in sight, rising glorious from the monotonous spread of jungle and surrounded by her court, the lesser mountains of the north. They stopped once, flagged to the roadside at Camell by apologetic national police, confident men, vain in their uniforms, leopard fatigues and burgundy berets. Their papers were examined and returned by the officer in charge, who joked with the forest ranger Ballantyne, talking to him as if he were a medical doctor assigned La Soufrière as a patient, and acknowledged his white passenger with a perfunctory salute.
Two hours out from the city, they turned inland until the dirt road they bounced over ended in a breezy plantation of coconut palms. Wheel tracks flattened the underbrush ahead, two pale compressed lines that burrowed from sight within yards, and Ballantyne downshifted into their channel and drove ahead until the right front wheel slammed into an unseen hole. Wilson’s hand flew up to keep himself from banging into the windshield.
“Ahlright,” Ballantyne said, and decisively set the emergency brake on the incline. Even after he had removed the key and pocketed it, the engine continued to stutter before it died with a pop. The fumes of the overheated engine filled the cab of the Rover, stinging Wilson’s eyes and increasing the nausea he felt from the ride which was like being on a rowboat in open water. Ballantyne laid a hand on the white man’s shoulder. When he realized the hand had no message to deliver, Wilson looked at it sideways, puzzled.
Ballantyne was an iron-muscled man, not large but stoutly built, possessing a rugger player’s body best suited for pushing through walls of opponents. He leaned across the seat to make a show of scrutinizing the shoes on Wilson’s feet. Then the ranger took his hand away and sat back, one thick arm draped on the steering wheel, still looking at Wilson, sizing him up, the white man becoming embarrassed by the close attention paid him, Ballantyne’s sober eyes so clearly focused on his basic worth.
“What are we doing?”
“You cy-ahn run?” the ranger asked plainly. He glanced at his gold wristwatch.
From where they were in the palms the path to the volcano’s summit rose more than four thou
sand feet in six miles, sometimes at a grade equal to a stepladder’s, through lowland jungle, strands of bamboo and waist-high begonia, tropical rain forest, high elevation scrub, devil cane and grasses canyoned by old lava flows, then fields of perpetually glistening ferns before the cinder wasteland of the crown. Wilson thought the man was joking.
Ballantyne smiled, and his smile was a subtle transformation that domesticated him. “You believe so?” he said. He bounded out of the Rover and was running before Wilson could say another word.
In the first hour of their ascent Wilson was able to stay with him. The second hour, as the slope became more slippery and precarious, the ranger would be out of sight for long intervals, his head eventually visible, bobbing through the flora several hundred yards up the trail. The weather changed from steamy to temperate, then chilled blasts of wind caught them as they came out of the forest onto the austere scarps and ridges where nothing tall could grow. For the final half hour he could see Ballantyne far ahead of him when the clouds permitted, loping across the dark lava and through the scrub onto the ugly cone, going up and up and up.
Wilson’s clothes were clinging wet from sweat and sudden rain-showers by the time he reached the top, twenty minutes behind Ballantyne. The quick swirl of clouds provided minimum visibility— he knew that they were at elevation primarily because Ballantyne was no longer running, he had stopped and was waiting for him, his back sheltered against an outcropping of twisted rock to escape the cold gusts. Wilson sat down next to him, huddling into the same rift, feeling not so much in the tropics as in the Scottish highlands in April. The flood of mist rolled by at arm’s length in front of them, swift and horizontal.
From his haversack the forest ranger rummaged out two sugar apples. As he bit into one with large teeth, he offered the other to Wilson. Because he was disoriented and beginning to wear down, Wilson’s gaze lingered stupidly on the open bag in the dirt, seeing but not registering its remaining contents. The apple remained in front of him in the air, its skin vividly saffron in the black man’s grip, the only color at the top of La Soufrière. Ballantyne raised his eyebrows and shrugged, dropping the fruit into Wilson’s lap. Wilson picked it up and nibbled at its sweetness as they waited together in the dripping rocks with no thoughts to share, until the cloud they were inside of passed along so that they might have a view of what was below.
In time, as if the light around them came from candles surging with a fresh draft, the gloom brightened and the nimbostratus that was on the mountain began to drag off the far rim and tear into pieces, first a white edge of sunlight, then a distant patch of milky blue that was both sea and sky, next the circling shape of the burnt crown, and then, as though a lid had been pried and removed, the immense bore of the volcano’s crater, shattering any sense of human proportion.
To Wilson, the scale seemed borrowed from another world—a fantasy land of fire giants, a geography more dreamlike and therefore more threatening than it actually appeared or was. The light spilled into the huge bowl and they could see across the span of the vent almost a mile to the sheer walls of the opposite side. There was no slope, only a raw precipice of rock that dropped straight for hundreds of feet to the surface of a doomed lake. The interior island appeared incongruous, inappropriate and trashy, as if somehow an old coal barge had been abandoned here in the eye of disaster, the cargo still smoldering in the hold, latent, a glowing seedbed that would one day blossom with a ferocity that no one could imagine. Gliding down into the crater, a frigate bird rocketed skyward as it encountered the thermals above the island.
They were standing on the east rim. Looking down underneath the ceiling of staggered cumulus that had replaced the mist, Wilson could turn and see the ocean on all but the southern horizon. From here, he understood how manageable a country became when one looked down on it from a great height, and he understood that coming to St. Catherine from the United States produced the same effect in his thinking.
The wind began to blow again, throwing a sandy ash into their faces. They jogged along the rock-strewn edge of the cavity to the southwest rim where a small concrete blockhouse contained sensor instruments. Wilson felt exhilarated. The earth had become grotesquely exaggerated, and although there was no danger, it seemed that if by chance he were to lose his footing on this crest above the green jungles and the smoky hole, only the most extreme of fates awaited his fall, glory or perdition, lightness or darkness. There would be nothing halfway about the consequence.
Ballantyne continued running past the turnoff trail that cut across a rough knoll to the monitoring station. Eighteen months ago someone had mashed up the instruments soon after they were installed by a group of scientists from four nations, but no one outside the ministry was supposed to know this, though, of course, everyone did. The vandalism, pointless as it was, was easy for Wilson to imagine. The islanders seemed to have an unlimited capacity for petty rage as well as ecstasy, the schizophrenic fevers of the tropics.
Ballantyne’s job, readjusted to this circumstance, was to measure the height of the water in the lake and record its temperature. Wilson didn’t see how anybody could get down to the floor of the crater without rapelling gear. But there was a vague path stepped into the wall where the rim dipped and flattened in the southwest quadrant. It was very steep, yet passable, the ranger said, so down they went.
Soufrière was the name given to the mountain by the French when they came ashore three centuries ago. The word meant sulfur and Wilson inhaled strong sour puffs of it. The trail plunged, tightly traversing unsettled rock and crumbling soil, jagging around brittle igneous fingers of stone, and it demanded more strength and concentration than the running had. From their new vantage point Wilson saw that underneath a fractured crust, the top of the island was a furnace of orange cinders. They reached bottom, standing on a shelf of piled ellipsoidal rock that was younger than they were. Ground zero. Wilson tried to visualize the mountain shuddering and dancing, heaving up in one convulsion that would deafen everything of lesser existence and shake the island to its prehistoric foundation. Its single thunderous message would be delivered in supernatural fires, a heat that was both the end and the beginning, the destruction, as much the creation, of the world—but it was impossible to imagine such an event. The problem again was one of proportion, and of elemental propensity. Human beings controlled their own affairs. Mountains did not explode. No other logic led to the future.
Ballantyne checked the water level. Despite a constant replenishment by storms, the level had been receding at the rate of two inches per week for several months, which Ballantyne took for a sign that the core was heating up. That such a phenomenon was being understood in simple schoolroom fashion impressed Wilson. The forestry ranger stooped on the incline of the shore with what looked like a meat thermometer to take a reading. Ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit. He sat down in the coarse, spurlike gravel, unlaced and removed his dusty boots, peeled his socks, and then stripped completely, finally pulling off his wristwatch and setting it atop his shirt. Ballantyne was going out to the base of the inner island for another reading, its nearest point about a hundred-yard swim from where they were. He approached the water cautiously but then threw himself in, executing a dive that placed the impact fully on his chest, his head remaining doglike above the surface. Wilson removed his own clothes and went with him.
The water, the color of murky old tea, smelled foul and felt oily and dense, hard to stay afloat in, currentless but not calm. Wilson had not realized he was exerting himself beyond his limits. Water came into his mouth, a bitter mustard taste, and he gagged and spit it back out. Breaststroking through the spa of the lake’s warmth, he began to experience vertigo, his muscles growing weightless. He frightened himself into clawing ahead the last few yards to where Ballantyne rested belly-deep on the black tailings of the island. The rocks were all small; none appeared too heavy to lift, and each had precise edges, as if it had been broken by prisoners with sledgehammers, a tableau still seen in St. Catherine’s
quarries. The rubble rose in an abrupt bank twenty-five feet above them.
“Should we be out here?” Wilson gasped, trying to control his breathing. It was apparent to him that there must be some risk in swimming out to the island, for Ballantyne’s movements, slow and careful and alert, were the physical clichés of impending trouble.
Ballantyne wagged a finger, dismissing any breach of faith in his judgment. “Only watch you doan slip into La Soufrière’s arse,” he said, holding the thermometer underwater with his other hand. He told Wilson not to try to climb on the island, to move with eyes in his feet along the pitch of the slanting bottom so he wouldn’t start a slide that would bury them together, poaching their bodies like fish in a kettle. The right side of his body was submerged up to his shoulder, invisible directly below the surface. Ballantyne suggested to Wilson that he stick his hand down into the rocks as he was doing, and Wilson wiggled his fingers into a cleft until the tips were scalded.
Cookin nice, no?
They paddled back, worked themselves into the discomfort of their wet clothes, and started out of the crater after Ballantyne had made notations in his logbook. The forest ranger hopped ahead of him from foothold to foothold like a young ram. Using his hands with almost every step, his boots searching for traction through the surface layer of lapilli, Wilson crawled tenuously up the side, thinking this must be what it feels like to be stuck halfway up a skyscraper. His last energy shivered out of him with each fresh gust of wind. Ballantyne was waiting for him at the top but began to run again as Wilson pulled himself out of the hole. After several feeble strides Wilson halted, his exhaustion absolute, without even the desire to go on. Ballantyne saw him lie down in the cinders and trotted back.
“What the hell are you running for? I can’t do it.”
Ballantyne hovered over him, a flat silhouette against the blue wash, as laconic as a god. “I’m in trainin,” he said. “You see?”