Mitchell didn’t look for sense in that rationale. On his cheeks were tears steamed out of their ducts by the toxic atmosphere. Hot and cold tears, drops of luckless outrage and the smooth beads of the melancholy he fought, and behind them pooling up, tears of desperate laughter. What wretchedness was this of a morning, to be borne down the slopes of Ooah Mountain in a brakeless vehicle, to have his nose accordianed into a plump oozing throb, to helplessly watch a bum spirit away his shirt, to have his old sweetheart pinwheeling above the ocean while the pilot read the newspaper and a team of controllers and kibitzers couldn’t start their backup generator, or find replacements for their battery-pacs? Why was Johnnie coming here anyway? She had not given him time to say no to the idea, which is what, given the chance, he would have said.
* * *
“Mistah Foreign Fuckin Aid,” Saconi said, hearing how Mitchell came by the slime-haloed steer on his front, “give de shurt off he back to a needy mahn. Real grahss root movement, bwoy.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Mitchell replied, wishing he weren’t so ginger around Saconi’s clever mouth.
They sat along a concrete bench on the deck of the terminal’s roof. Isaac wanted to stay below and view the fiasco to its finish, but they had coaxed him away from the unwholesome black clouds and an abundance of deputized firemen who had taken advantage of the situation to be pushy. A society that did not plug its culture into television preserved in its citizens a fresh and invigorating appreciation of catastrophe down to the crudest detail, for catastrophe, if it didn’t include you, was a windfall of entertainment. Isaac had to admit that the inferno of the LIAT office was a dull event after all, though an appreciated diversion from his own troubles. So they retreated to the bar for plastic cups of ice, then to the rooftop for the visceral sense of being above mundane concerns, Isaac weak on the stairs with further loss. Saconi had left the car stereo and speakers unattended. Now they were gone, thieved (naturally, compulsively, instinctively), and the musician made no attempt to assume responsibility.
The view from the roof had all of geography’s headlines—the possessive, sheltering sea; the mountains with their illusion of a spectacular land mass—and, abstracted as Mitchell stared at the blank strip of possibility that was the runway, he measured the vicissitudes of this strange way of life on St. Catherine, a communal life that was definitely predisposed to fakery and magic-in-the-night, to blood-drawing sight gags and all seductive forms of low comedy, this against the reliability of the land, rich and giving and embracing after centuries of abuse. Nothing formed as strong a bond for the people discarded here by empires—not history, not politics, not religion—as the intimate resource of the land on which they were once no more than two-legged oxen. He looked at the houses built on Ooah Mountain and Zion Hill, like cotton patches of color sewn into the human poverty of the lush slopes, banana and cocoa plantations threading the hollows and crests, the blue-green range of peaks to the north, their jungles a thick sponge for the nurturing radiance of the early sun, and told himself that all you had to do was get a little leverage on your troubles and woes and paradise could almost happen.
Then he thought, this stupid island.
Saconi uncased his instrument and picked a sequence of notes, snapped and then sustained on the metal strings, boingy sounds that suggested flying fish careening over the waves in Los Muertos Channel. Isaac fretted and sucked whiskey, the bottle slanted into his mouth. The scotch sparkled and flashed in its chamber, a liquid anodyne. He took a long therapeutic swallow and put ice cubes in his mouth, crushing them between large molars. Mitchell filled his cup halfway and then passed the bottle to Saconi, who topped off his own cup and routed the bottle back to Isaac. Saconi started playing again, strangling a country-and-western tune, oleaginous and distantly familiar, out of the guitar. They passed the bottle a fourth and fifth time, an eighth and ninth time, and Isaac finished it off, scowling at the bottom.
Then Isaac jerked up from the bench and wobbled until he found his equilibrium, his muscles operating on the faintest neural messages. In front of them, a parapet of arabesque cinderblocks laid waist-high along the roof’s edge prevented drunks and children from stepping off into space. Isaac went to it to spit down on the world and purge his nostrils, which he did with a fair amount of wet noises. Afterward he cocked his skinny hips and rested on his elbows, reviewing what he could see of his nation.
“Look aht daht foolishness, bwoy,” he said after a while. There was no encouragement to the words so Mitchell didn’t consider it a recommendation. Saconi glanced up absently, involved with music. The alcohol began to soften Mitchell’s physical perspective, made him feel loose as water, drifting, and the effort to keep himself awake culminated in the idea of standing up. He braced himself on invisible supports until he thought it wise to go forward, and once alongside Isaac, peered beyond the line of the roof with a dimwitted fascination. He asked what was going on, but it was plain to see. On the tarmac below the fire truck had caught fire, its hood raised like a shout and its engine undergoing a shower from its own hose.
“Is this a special day or something?”
“Nah.”
“Day of Judgment?”
“Same as ahlways, mahn.”
“Murphy’s Day?”
“Moiphy?”
“Yeah, you know. Murphy’s Law—everything goes wrong.”
Isaac corrected him, stone-eyed and somber. “We is Pollimen Tree.”
“Oh,” Mitchell said, nodding his head uncertainly. “What kind of tree?”
“Pollimen Tree. Daht’s de best we mahnage as yet.”
Mitchell pondered this insight, baffled; perhaps it contained a truth or ideology he had missed. Pollimen Tree, he said over and over to himself, until it evolved into parliamentary and he expected it to reveal some cornerpiece of knowledge, but its syllables grew meaningless and reverted back to nonsense.
“This place is the shits,” Mitchell announced vacantly.
Saconi stopped playing, his hand muffling the strings, and lifted his head. “I’ll write daht song,” he said, giving Mitchell an unfriendly wink. “It will be about you, Mistah Good Guy.”
“Hey, why don’t you fuck off.” The scotch went toxic in his veins. “You’re always riding my ass, Saconi. What the hell do you want from me anyway?”
“Yeah, yeah, Wilson. Want some of daht yankee humor, bruddah.”
“Today it’s being tested.”
“Oh ho. I see, I see. Wilson, hear now, what you believe a good humor fah in de fust place?”
Regret made Saconi’s weak grin sadly honest. He pivoted around so he could lie down on the bench, hugging his guitar—this is how he would look when they laid him to rest in his coffin. He pumped his groin into the soundbox and smacked a sharp cord, singing like a cowboy in a mournful tremolo. ‘“A-we ahll issa slapstick, enna you-ahll issa big stick’—how de next line go, Mitch?”
“Oh me,” Saconi sighed when Mitchell shunned his invitation to sport along. He put aside his instrument and sat straight up. “Doan be vexed, Mitchie, eh?” To press his appeal he joined them at the wall, creating a mopey trio, three dogs in the pound.
“Your wisecracks—” Mitchell said, and clamped his mouth tight before he could say are unfair.
“Look, tek no offense, mahn. Rudeness have a big mahket in dis place. Is my life, ya know, to twist straight and straighten twist.”
“Rudeness, teefin, devilment, mash up,” Isaac added, graduating his misfortune to general conditions.
Their collective mood had found its cellar, a malaise like a ladder they had descended rung by rung. Mitchell wished to make some definitive statement on his own behalf, explain why he had come to St. Catherine, how he should be treated during his tenure. Justification whirled down toward his lips like an insect that flew too randomly to anticipate and capture. “Uh, uh,” he heard himself grunt. The danger was to say anything trite but he lacked the facility to say anything more complex than a footman’s proclamations. H
e was too high, his brain too hazed. He felt like cartoon footage, the Saturday-night evolution of Kurtz ... go ashore, get ripped and hazardous with the locals.
“I am a guest,” he proclaimed, “of the frigging queen.”
“True,” Isaac said, intent on studying the sky to the south for sight of the incoming plane. In his concentration he resembled a black tomcat willing a sparrow out of a tree. “We ahll in de same leaky boat.”
“Queen finish up, mahn. You too late. People runnin queenless now.”
“Same boat,” Isaac affirmed. He nodded out to sea, a plane there sinking out of the blue through blades of sunlight, a bright angel of glass.
“Is the plane on fire too?”
“Nah.”
Mitchell felt queasy. The plane’s wings flared violent white, twin furnaces in the tropic heat.
“You happy now?”
“No.”
The last time he had seen Johnnie, five years ago in the mountains of Virginia, she wore a navy blue pea coat which she kept on all day as she lay on the couch in his apartment, a used syringe thrown down on the carpet, recovering from an abortion—her second, to the best of his knowledge. He remained on campus, in the arts and sciences library, until late at night, reading the same three or four sentences in a botany textbook again and again, but they guarded a meaning that was indecipherable. He was home for half an hour, hadn’t opened his mouth and neither had Johnnie, when she got up from the couch where she had been picking at imaginary blemishes and said, I think I’ll just leave, all right?, and she did. But he had never answered her, had never said all right, go. The day before he had told her, “I spend three bucks a week on Trojans because the pill makes you waterlogged and puffy. How’d you get pregnant?” She said she didn’t know, and kept saying it until she had convinced herself it was true. He wouldn’t have even known about it if he hadn’t answered the phone, the clinic wanting to confirm her appointment.
The plane banked east to north into its landing pattern and glided onto the runway, raising an assembly of cattle egrets from the guinea grass as it touched. The birds scattered and flapped like snow-white handkerchiefs thrown into the air, fluttering in the propwash. The machine shimmered through watery heat waves the length of the pale concrete, losing its shape, melting and re-forming, not entirely real to Mitchell, given its alleged cargo of one old girlfriend well educated in betrayal. The roar from the engines faded, crescendoed, diminished, the pilot taxiing down from the end of the strip, the biggest noise on the island and Johnnie embedded therein, closing her magazine, checking her makeup, if she ever ended her pretense against the stuff, replacing the gum in her mouth with a new stick to clear the taste of tobacco if she still smoked—the woman he had once loved flying back into his life for a reason he could not say, and did not want to think about. The plane inched up to the terminal, scaring him.
Mitchell knew they must look predatory on the spread of the low roof. The sound of the propellers whining increased his agitation, but when the noise stopped so did his courage, a hasty resolve to grant reconciliation only as a diplomatic favor. Maybe if he just cut his heart out and tossed it down to her she’d get back on the plane and leave, he thought. A ground crew idled over to chopblock the landing gear and manhandle the luggage. The hatch in the cabin was lowered, folding stairs released from inside, and a stewardess in a lime-green pantsuit descended like the Queen of Sheba, patting her blown hair back into its cone. She was professionally discreet in her acknowledgment of the smoldering fire truck, the charcoaled entrance to the airline’s ops room only thirty yards away, offering her attendant’s aloof vision of a world in good order, a world safe and sane.
“Long time since I jook daht gy-url,” said Saconi, and Mitchell, who had been ruminating in his own language over an identical fact in regard to Johnnie, felt enlisted into a larger conspiracy. “She know how to play special,” Saconi concluded, “but she doan know how to be special.”
In the hatchway behind the stewardess stood a man dressed like a dentist in white knit trousers and a powder-blue shirt-jac, the clinical style of the modern West Indian man of affairs. His name was Vincent Archibol, and he was mesmerizingly handsome, to the degree of glamor. He clambered down the steps as if he were hurrying to take ownership of the island, swinging a briefcase in his hand, his neck encircled by a braid of gold.
“Hail de conquerin hero,” Saconi said.
Vincent Archibol was one of Edison Banks’ oldest friends and followers, another architect of the coalition, the beneficiary of PEP’s successful maneuvering to combine the foreign and diplomatic portfolios, thus depriving Kingsley of a voice abroad. Archibol now served St. Catherine as her ambassador to the United Nations, where he enjoyed firsthand the courtship of the continents, and ranted selectively against their hegemony. Mitchell had not been introduced to him as he had the other bulls of state, though he had encountered his reputation for progressive action often enough. Archibol and Banks were the darlings of the new generation of patriots on the island.
There was a sudden renewal of Isaac’s distress. “Oh yeeiii yi yiii,” he whimpered miserably. “Look de shitty luck God givin me today. Look, look,” he instructed, covering his eyes with one hand and pointing with the other at a woman advancing out onto the tarmac to embrace the homecoming ambassador. Archibol was shoved backward from the thrust of her bosom. They gave each other a brisk and publicly conscious dose of affection. Mitchell didn’t recognize her face, but he remembered the square-shouldered heft of the woman, the nightmarish breasts, and the yellow blouse from the roadside of Ooah Mountain.
“Why you cryin so?” Saconi challenged Isaac. “You lucky, bwoy, she ain marry you.”
“Isaac ran into her car this morning up on the mountain.”
“Isaac smash Archibo’s wife?” Saconi asked, his eyes signaling mischief. “Hey,” he hollered crudely down at the couple as they were passing into the building through the Customs gate, “Am-bahssa-mahn, you muss keep daht womahn from behavin so reckless when you away, nuh?”
Archibol disappeared with ministerial imperiousness through the entrance, but his wife paused a step, craning her neck to look up, her hand in a salute to shade her eyes, her heavy slick red lips pursed in an expression of such censorship that her very essence seemed to be intolerance, and the capacity to make that intolerance effective against all violations, real or imagined. Isaac, horrified, ducked behind the ornamental wall and slugged Saconi in the thigh. Mitchell watched Archibol’s wife march after her husband.
“Why you do daht? Why you play de fool, Saconi?” Isaac railed. “Why you behave so bumby-head? Why you so smahtass, eh? Why you want to fuck me up?”
Saconi threw up his hands. “What she cy-ahn do, mahn? She ain see us, besides. Juss have a bit of fun, ya know.”
“She ain have to see us, she juss smell we, like tiger,” Isaac said, back on his feet and shaking with anger. Mitchell had never seen him lose his temper before, and Isaac was different as a shouter, more like one of the crowd, alien and potent. “You set me on de run,” Isaac said, stabbing the musician’s chest with his finger. “I ain limin about fah she to kick me ass when Customs finish.”
“Tek it easy,” said Saconi, making a grudging effort to calm him down. “Tek it easy.”
Isaac snickered; his face glazed with woodenness. “Easy ain de way it come.” Saconi’s insolence had reminded the former owner of Miss Defy how little of anything he could afford, including protection from power. “Sorry, Mitchie,” he said, close to defeat, “I goin go. I gone now,” and though Mitchell reached out to pacify him, to do or say something to stop his fugitivisim before it got started, Isaac was, as he said, gone.
Saconi was not inclined to acts of contrition. “Craziness get in him,” Saconi said. “Him hit’n run and he worry? Hah, you jokin, mahn. Hit’n run, daht’s de fuckin national anthem here, in dis place, in dis time. Ain no one give a shit.”
Passengers continued to disembark, the majority of them Catherinians rebou
nding home, sharing the same bright countenance, relief or triumph—ain no place like dis sweet island, they were saying, or, I only comin back to let you see I mek sometin of meself, eh? Look de Rolex, mahn. Check it out. A few white faces like china masks bobbed in the flow, come to conduct odd business, seek expensive pleasures, practice Edwardian statecraft, force a broadening of the democratic horizon. Mitchell wished them all good and speedy purchase as he searched for Johnnie in the herd. Maybe she wasn’t coming after all, maybe in the midst of some induced state this was her idea of a memorable prank, her cracked sense of humor reaching out to Mitchell to arouse the vestige of romance that shadowed his heart, gathering a line of data for future use: obsession plus love decreases at such and such a rate per year of separation, squared by distance, until even the strongest of previous attachments have achieved a certain entropic quantity, a formulaic numbness, a death. Tilled soil erodes, doesn’t it? she had asked him one day, smoking a joint and thumbing through one of his sourcebooks. Today’s gardens are tomorrow’s deserts. He could picture her back in Hawaii, giggling as only a girl who refused to be serious could giggle, as she tried to guess whether or not he took her telegram at face value. He was sorrier than he should have been that she was not on the flight, but then there she was, incredibly there she was, and he gazed upon her with all the unstudied intensity of a fellow who had just been shipped a mail-order bride, a tingling in his heels, ready to leave, to bolt. Now it was beginning, he thought, the sequel to the original production: Kids Fucking Up. This was the new show—no rehearsals, no script, only old times and unacquainted adults in an extemporaneous staging, amateurs’ manqué with a fragile morale, everything handicapped by the blunt disaster of their last co-starring performance. A role like this, a role that returned ex-lovers and secret sorrows into the lights, could only punish its players, and punishment would be its only merit.
There she was, maneuvering through the dim background into the open hatch, enormous straw bags looped over each slender arm. Mitchell asked himself why he should believe the sight of her and answered, believe, believe, in the grasp of an undisciplined reality, believe whatever you see. He asked himself without joy, what does this mean? what does this mean? what does this mean? until his throat constricted and he repulsed what felt like a chemical release of sentimentality. Is this anybody I know? he wondered: the same woman who jilted a beau from the Naval Academy to take up with him during their senior year in high school, burning the cadet’s photograph, like an effigy of a boring future, in front of him in the ashtray of her Volkswagen and, to underscore her change of heart, slipping her panties off from under her skirt without being asked; the same one who skipped thirty-one days of class with him throughout the autumn and early winter in favor of a mutual curriculum of sensual studies, first dry-humping in the basement of her parents’ split-level, cocooned in cheap incense and the music of a new San Francisco, her pelvis drubbing his crotch with such fury that he suspected her passion was abnormal, that most girls weren’t like this or they’d all be locked away; the same woman who once fretted about if other girls got as wet as she did, the same one who asked him to masturbate for her so she could inspect this male novelty at close range, the same person who one afternoon announced, This is the day I want you to make love to me for real but first you have to stop looking like you’re about to take an exam, and when he entered her she hid her face in his shoulder and sobbed, with pain, he supposed, although he heard something else that he had never heard before, and when he tried to withdraw out of confusion she said, No, it’s all right, leave it there, I’ve got to get used to it inside me. Then afterward she cried with strained happiness about what-it-meant while he lay beside her with her pillow over his head, the pillow she slept on each night alone in her room, the queen of his imagination, and he trembled like a bad dog because he had gotten so deep into her world, as if he had been issued a temporary visa into a forbidden country, and the pleasure of being admitted into that foreign place astounded him, and he said to her what everybody says, and meant it with gratitude and great conviction, and she said what anybody would say who thought they had fallen in love forever—completing the first stage of a process that now seemed like the biggest prank in all creation, for how could the sacred and precious and sublime collapse so inevitably into the sophomoric, with such a premonition, a prescience that lit the darkness like a flare, that it would do it again and again throughout the course of a life, until complacency ruled.
Swimming in the Volcano Page 5
