In the months Mitchell had lived and worked on St. Catherine, he mailed two postcards, inscribing them with typical postcard language, to Johnnie in Hawaii. He had kept in random touch with her over the years since they had separated, the nature of the touch sometimes forlorn, sometimes smart-alecky, sometimes lonely, and the most prevalent tone was that of friendship, a seasoned song of tacit forgiveness and never, he hoped, anything but realistic. She had telegrammed back a shocking message just days ago: I want to see you. Will arrive in St. Catherine a.m., 3/30/77. Surprised? Your friend, Johanna.
He hissed those words under his breath, your friend, his fingers digging mindlessly into the clear plastic packets of prophylactics. His sinuses felt as though Styrofoam cubes had been brutally inserted into their cavities. When did she start calling herself Johanna anyway? My fucking friend, he cursed on the floor of the Comet. My friend, my private merchant of love and treachery, a southern belle with a slow white fire thrumming in her veins the last he saw her.
Isaac’s prelude of honking ended with a sharp bang into something distressingly solid. There was a nauseating sensation of uncontrolled coupling and then a swaying release. He lay on the horn again; there was another, more violent bang. Mitchell emerged from behind the seat only high enough to see what had happened and was disheartened. The Comet was boxed in by a steady flow of traffic chugging up Ooah Mountain and a frightened lady driver ahead of them going down too slow for the Comet’s independent rate of descent. They had rammed her, she had defensively and stupidly applied the brakes after they had disengaged, and Miss Defy struck her a second time, losing a few miles per hour from the impact and a moderate rise in the road, and the woman ahead, panicking, accelerated out of sight.
At twenty miles per hour they approached a curve requesting ten. Rummy sweat dribbled off Isaac’s forehead and obscured his vision. Entering the turn, Isaac cranked the wheel, his elbows flapping, and the Comet responded as if the asphalt had turned to ice. The traction gone, Miss Defy rotated gracefully around the bend of the parabola and whipped full circle back into the straightaway, steady again, just like you see in the movies, Mitchell gasping and shrunken but Isaac far in rapture over his accomplishment.
“I nevah see such as daht before, mahn,” he said, marveling at the stunt.
In the abbreviated distance ahead, the driver of the car they had crumped swerved half off the road, perpendicular into the entrance of a dirt drive. She exited her vehicle, a late-model Morris, shiny black, with imposing fury. She was a sizable woman and burly, her bosom swinging underneath a yellow blouse, and she charged into the road to flag them down and give Isaac a thrashing. The bumper on the rear of her Morris had an experimental shape to it, the taillights ceased to exist—small damage all told. Isaac was helpless to obey her directions. He took his hands off the wheel and raised them level with his ears as Miss Defy rolled past, not merely to advertise his innocence, but to express his exasperation at being the object of this person’s wrath. Since he had knocked into her without malice or intent, he seemed to be saying with his shrugging gesture, she herself might take a moment to consider that he was only a poor man about to be crushed by a destiny he could no longer persuade.
The gesture was sincere but ill-timed. Like a horse with a plan of its own, the Comet veered radically to the left, pulled by wheels last aligned in another era. There were no drainage ditches here, the shoulders too abrupt, the slope too precipitous, to collect water. Miss Defy catapulted off the surface of the earth, nothing in sight for a brief eternity but a blue horizon scratched with clouds. They completed their arc and nosed downward, hopping back onto rough ground, their jaws slamming shut, the tops of their heads denting the inside of the roof, making stars explode behind their eyes. Isaac hung courageously to the wheel as they plunged. Mercy, mercy, mercy, he croaked, his first surrender to fatalism. They rumbled through dry brush, the Comet an ocher dust storm lashed by branches and spiky shoots. There were noises to fear—something substantial ripped from the undercarriage and the thumping of a tire burst into shreds. Scrub hens bounced off the windshield and iguanas skated across the plane of the hood. Isaac resembled a captain at the helm in high seas. They regained the pavement by dozing through a low rock wall, circumventing two impossible curves above in the road by the grace of this route. Through a final turn, Miss Defy boomeranged sloppily and was expelled off the black tongue of the mountain onto the flat shorn vale of the airstrip, leaking an inauspicious trail of prophylactics from a gash in the floorboard. Isaac guided the car into a newly planted cane field and they rolled peacefully for fifty feet until it died in the dirt. The whole episode had seemed unreal in a gross, cheap way.
Mitchell asked Isaac if he was okay. He looked sleepyheaded, overcome with lassitude, as if he wanted to dream backward through the catastrophe and nullify it. He closed his eyes and held the side of his skull; lazy blood seeped through the spaces between his fingers.
“Wha?” Isaac said, rocking with pain. “Me ear bust in twos.”
Without much conviction, he affirmed his well-being and then complained further of a sprained ankle, a wrenched knee, and a sore chest from being hammered into the steering column. With sighing despondency he turned off the radio and dismantled it, even yanking the speakers from their door mounts, the silence as sad as taps played at a memorial service. A lot of noise remained in Mitchell’s own ears, a high-volume residue of calypso, brain-shaking, accompanied by the distant rasp of waves on the beach at the edge of the coastal plain. Mitchell wobbled out of the back of the Comet and stood with his hands thrust into his pockets, trying to think of what he could say to Isaac that would not sound like eulogy. Nothing but the bleakest remarks came to mind. Isaac, without Miss Defy, owned nothing. He sat like a deposed carnival king in his chariot, the strips of pompons from off the windows draped over his shoulders like a tawdry royal stole.
They walked away from the car as if they never had any business with it, as if the misfortune it represented, the perils and the fear, had been sustained by others. The Comet was something done with, finish up, that national litany Mitchell heard whenever he turned a corner, like the brake fluid in the weird island garages, finish up, like potatoes or milk or soap in the markets, finish up, like schoolbooks for the children, like the phone service that only went to one out of every four customers who wanted it, like the Carib Indians and the secret language of their women, like slavery, like the old regime of crooks and thugs Edison Banks had disposed of or co-opted so shrewdly, like the plantations and the plantocracy and the sugar industry and last night’s bottle of strong rum and like a thousand other pieces of junk pushed off the narrow roads of St. Catherine into the embrace of the bush, the Comet Miss Defy had joined the chorus of this collective destiny, had run itself into the ground and was now for all time finish up, bequeathed to scavengers, jerry-riggers, scrap revivalists, trash hobbyists, bugs, birds, lizards, rain, sun, moon, and myth.
“Coconut oil,” Isaac mused. He refused self-pity. “Why I believe daht shit, Wilson?”
Chapter 2
The LIAT desk had not yet opened although there was laughter and short-wave radio garble coming through the closed door behind the ticket counter, nor was the Customs staging area preparing for operation as it should have been, because Johnnie’s flight was scheduled to arrive momentarily. The souvenir stand, purveyor of inexpertly screened tee shirts, coconut shell ashtrays, and conch shell lamps, was still locked up, as was the Batik Boutique, a mystery shop which Mitchell couldn’t recall ever seeing open. In fact, the Brandon Vale airport had all the charm and credibility of a foreclosed and abandoned warehouse. It was a venue of pathos and prayers, a wretched place for passengers concerned with their welfare. At one end of the long flat salmon-colored complex stood the control tower, an edifice modeled along the lines of a prison fortification. On the opposite end of the building, constructed as an entrepreneurial afterthought, a hand-hewn timber and thatched roof parasite living off the sluggish metabolism of the terminal
, was a bar, and the bar was open for business.
Saconi was in there at one of the tables, blithe and ambivalent in the diffused natural light. His companion of choice, a Michoacán acoustic guitar inside a tattered cardboard case, was propped on the seat next to him, and an uncapped bottle of reputable scotch, a rudiment of inspiration, stood centered on the varnished plywood of the table. A master lyricist and a performer both hostile and seductive to the legions of his audience, Saconi had composed the “Edison Banks Calypso”—not for money alone—and was therefore much in favor these days, even though his current single lectured the coalition for acting like a jackass with a head at each end, its two mouths both straining to reach the same mango hanging from a branch. He had recorded in Trinidad, Port of Spain, the New York of the lower Caribbean, toured up and down the islands, and received occasional airplay for his albums as far away as Toronto and London. He was a celebrity and a hero of upliftment. The success he had earned was as much a source of boasting as it was of envious disdain for the people of St. Catherine, his people, and his relative worldliness was tolerated the same way illiterates will tolerate a friend who reads books. Because of his lover, a doughnut-hipped Peace Corps volunteer known as Big Sally, Saconi was familiar with the tribe of expatriates on the island, and chronically skeptical of the more transitory community of foreign professionals—the consultants, bankers, multinational representatives, mafiosi, political sightseers, aid administrators and pirates, the army of surrogate invaders who believed they could float St. Catherine into some nirvanic backwater of their own influence.
When they shambled in, Saconi looked them up and down and snorted. Isaac limped and carried his radio equipment, stiff wires dangling from its housing like chicken feet. One of his ears was split and raw. Mitchell had a bib of drying blood on the front of his shirt.
“Who strike de fust blow?”
Saconi’s speaking voice itself was laden with cushiony music. He had a marimba for vocal chords, producing syllables lubricated with a range of tonal inflections governed by West African rhythms. Mitchell loved to listen to him, despite his attitude which was often ironic, curried enough to divide the meek from the sportsmen.
“Satan,” Isaac answered miserably. Saconi pointed his finger at Mitchell.
“Don’t look at me,” Mitchell protested.
“What, you not Satan? I hear some talk Satan is a backra mahn, you know. God, Lucifer—all dem big shots is backra, white like you.”
Mitchell was never certain, on the several occasions they had been together, how much racial conviction lay behind the musician’s wit. Saconi expressed himself with a tooth-hidden smile, a mock severity to the intelligence of his eyes, and a taunting posture that could turn willowy and fettled without notice.
“Admit it, Wilson. Somehow you twistin up dis poor fella Isaac’s life. You born into it, eh?”
“Offer us a seat,” Mitchell said. “All we expect is a small act of decency and a drink to calm us down.”
They could skip wisecracks across the opaque depths of their histories, ridicule the swirl of centuries at their backs, but the other hand was perpetually occupied with more serious work, dismissing the fence of distance between races and cultures that made any search for brotherhood too arduous for pastime. Most attempts of this sort were charades, performances in masquerade. Mitchell was by nature cautious with people although the island seemed to contradict this tendency in him. Isaac he knew was trustworthy on all accounts, as a friend without an agenda of need or expectation. Saconi he wasn’t sure about.
“A blameless white guy,” the musician said to Isaac. “Imagine daht.”
Isaac’s spirit was overburdened and he couldn’t be enticed to play. “Miss Defy finish up,” he reported sadly. “Ooah Mountain mash she.” He told the story of what had occurred as if it were a natural phenomenon, not mechanical failing or human error. Saconi let him moon a little longer over the bottle of scotch before he waved him on it with a grousing air of obligation.
“Take heart, bruddah,” said the composer Saconi. “Miss Defy nevah finish so. Calypso redeem she to you.”
“Cy-ahnt drive a fuckin song,” Isaac said. Restitution in any form was a rarity on St. Catherine though its promise was as common as sunrise. He grimaced with the bottle to his mouth, drank, and gave it back with a smack of appreciation.
“Mitchell,” Saconi said, “you must import womahn? De shelves not stocked to suit you, bruddah?” He poured himself another inch of whiskey, the gold rings on his fingers tapping the glass, restless percussion.
Johnnie’s coming burned Mitchell’s stomach and crowded his thoughts. He had no idea of the implications of her visit; he couldn’t have been more nonplussed if Jacqueline Onassis had sent him a note on personal stationery saying prepare the spare room and cancel all appointments. He repeated what he had rehearsed over and over again to himself. “She’s an old friend. Somebody I used to know.” She was probably just stopping over on the way to the Vatican to kiss the Pope’s knuckles, off to southern Africa to photograph beasts, en route to Bangkok to teach English as a second language ... answering a siren call, fueled by an exotic cause, a process in which he would appear spliced in for a ten-second cameo, a minor, fleeting effect.
“Friend,” said Saconi, inflecting the word so that its content was erotic.
“I haven’t seen her in years.”
“You ain discovah a nice black Catherinian picky-head puss? Wha? And I tell myself you is a skinsmahn, Wilson? Dese gy-url here love to cook and sweep and suck, bwoy. You missin out.”
Mitchell felt overly soreheaded but smiled back at Saconi idiotically, trying to maintain goodwill. They had been standing around the table like two rubes with the sense knocked out of them. Mitchell pulled out a chair, stepped in front of it, squatted to sit down. Saconi extended his leg and kicked the chair away. Like scales set to mismatched weights, relationships that traversed cultural grooves took some adjustment before they balanced effectively. Often it took Mitchell a second to figure out the exchange factor on what was taking place around him.
“Excuse me,” he said, “this isn’t my country. I don’t know when somebody’s being an asshole.”
Instead of an apology, Saconi lectured them. “You two fellas lookin bummy, you know. If you sit with a famous guy like me you muss wash you face. Look de snotty bloodstring hangin out you nose, Mitchell, and dut on you cheek, and hair all stickied wit some kinda shit. And Isaac, what a razzy sight him is, wit tree and leaf in he locks, and busted pants, and like some goat chew on he ear. Christ, mahn—wash up, sit down, take a civilized drink like gentlemens, nuh?, not scamps. What de womahn feel, Mitchell, when she see such a messy guy like you wit dis ragboy Isaac to greet she?”
“We too ugly to sit wit Saconi,” Isaac said, sagging with resignation. He plucked a twig from his electrocuted hair and glared at it, seeing evidence of disgrace, dissipation, ruination. “Me life comin straight reverse to naught.” Had the Lord decided to take everything away from him today? Suffering the antiprogress of his fortune, he deposited the last relics of Miss Defy on the table and turned away, and together he and Mitchell shuffled back into the terminal to the bathroom, another of the airport’s idiosyncratic constructions, for it was obvious the architect who designed it had never worked with big spaces before and felt licensed to be extravagant with areas usually assigned more economically. The janitor’s broom closet, for instance, was larger than the janitor’s one-room shack where he lived with wife and babies on the slope of Zion Hill, and although its installations were conventional—two urinals, a pair of toilet stalls, one sink—the lavatory was vast enough for a square dance. It had a hallowed atmosphere which it certainly didn’t deserve.
Mitchell bowed over the sink, his eyes closed, to wash his face and mustache, hawking up globs of blood from the top of his throat. When he opened his eyes again he was staring at a pinkish whirlpool running into the drain. Straddling one of the urinals, Isaac was mumbling, ostensibly engaged in mo
re ancestral dialogue, putting in requests for a return to favor and maybe an Impala convertible like the one Kingsley, the potentate of agriculture and natural affairs and Mitchell’s boss, drove around, the envy of every motorist and dream motorist on the island. To console Isaac was pointless. The man seemed to Mitchell a veteran of adversity, someone who knew how to roll and spring and rise again, groping for the bright side of squalid circumstance, however elusive. He had developed his own system for outlasting loss, setback, and failure—the island quotients provided by x, y, and z, fill in the blanks with whatever imperial power or local politician, economy, and dates best applied to the list of current grievances.
Initially Mitchell had been wary of Isaac’s queer habit, this dick chatter that was close to shamanism, an alien form of eccentricity that he couldn’t accept with any seriousness.
“It’s the wackiest thing I’ve ever heard,” Mitchell had declared the first month on St. Catherine, when Saconi’s girlfriend Sally tried to explain Isaac’s preoccupation with genitalia—his own and everybody else’s.
Swimming in the Volcano Page 3
