Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  Sure, I knew her, Mitchell thought, you bet, but she had gone away. She had dropped out of her second year at Sweet Briar to come live with him in Charlottesville while he studied for a degree that tried to absurdly navigate the crosscurrents of his father’s bureaucratic expectations and his own generation’s retreat to the land. She left seventeen months later. When her letters started to arrive in the mail, he answered back like a dutiful brother, keeping in touch, wishing her happiness on her birthdays, peace with each new year she welcomed without him, finally comfortable with a ritual of civility, and here she was again, back before him, not an answered prayer, coming down the stairs with big straw bags filled with the objects that were necessary to her on her journey, her sandaled feet reading each step carefully under the obstruction of her load, her legs concealed to the middle of her calves by a loose skirt made from blue jeans. She lagged to hitch the bigger bag over her shoulder, her breasts outlined perfectly during this readjustment under her sleeveless olive jersey. Before she continued she looked quickly around, smiling with unwarranted reciprocity as if she were aware of someone she had not yet identified paying her attention. Wave, Mitchell told himself, but his hand stayed where it was. They were nothing more than two people about to meet for the first time after years of hearing anecdotes of each other from friends in common. Any other view was pointless, since she had not traveled this far, had she, to resurrect old pain or start new fires.

  “Which one yours?” Saconi asked.

  Mitchell did not want to debate the issue of possession with Saconi. The one that was his was the one neither of them could see, a girl with a Raphaelite luxuriance of hair, on her back in a Virginia pasture, shouting out at the October sky that the world was changing just about as fast as she could ask it to. But her caramel hair was lighter than Mitchell recalled, and drastically shorter, banded into a cool ponytail. She wore a white sun visor, a red lightning bolt emblazoned on the bill, and aviator sunglasses, so that there really wasn’t much visible of her face except her mouth, set with lines of determination, the scrolled upper lip and the fat, pouty lower one closed tight over a tongue he heard rehearsing lines and lies that he wished she would swallow.

  “Come, Wilson. We goin serenade dis gy-url.”

  Saconi exploded into performance, wildly strumming the guitar strings with a beat only roosters could dance to, yapping a frantic calypso in the whiny Methedrine voice some of the island talent had copied from the mainland to the south. It was so ridiculous Mitchell shook his head and reluctantly smiled.

  “Come on, Wilson. Come, come.”

  “She’s not worth it.”

  “Come, mahn. Come.”

  Saconi accelerated the tempo; the music earned its right to obedience through sheer aggression. Mitchell’s feet, aided by a lingering alcoholic freedom, moved on their own into a shortened two-step, and he was married to the cadence before he knew it. St. Catherine, he thought, you are wicked, wicked, to deny a man his self-pity. Johnnie saw them and waved excitedly, her hand restricted though by the bag on her arm. She stopped to appreciate the scene on the roof. Her mouth cracked open and she nodded her head as if she had foreseen just such a reception: spreeing, singing, fine-looking men and a bath of sunlight to herald the wonder of entry into a different kingdom, these fetching arrangements on the other side of leavetaking.

  “God,” Mitchell had to admit, “I love airports.”

  Chapter 3

  They went back down into the charry murk of the terminal, the floor spotted with puddles and tracked grime. In the happy crowd assembled outside the glassed-in Customs area, Mitchell found Tillman Hyde, the proprietor of Rosehill Plantation. Tillman had inherited the tourist resort from his late father, an advertising executive turned addict of exotic speculations, and Tillman, in the absence of any other commitment besides late nights and unproductive days as a club-hound in Manhattan, had decided to manage the place himself hands-on against the advice of family lawyers and bankers, who had a constitutional aversion to the idea of one loser operating another. They did not foresee that Tillman’s personality, a tranquility they had judged vagrant, would conform so successfully with the requirements of the job, the obstacles to conducting ordinary business that no reasonable person should have to tolerate.

  “I don’t suppose you hire out, do you?” Tillman said, his eyes running over Mitchell. “St. Catherine must be getting to you. You look very local this morning.”

  Tillman had current information on the airport vaudeville. The tower crew, mad at everybody, had insisted on hot-wiring their backup generator to the battery of the fire truck. The cables were attached carelessly to their posts and the battery blew up. One man was trundled away to the hospital, his face sprayed with acid. A belated inspection of the old generator’s spark plugs revealed they were corroded beyond use; a new set was procured. Another triumph in the day-by-day siege of technology upon the collective wit. The plane was invited down from its holding pattern over Los Muertos Channel.

  Tillman was at the airport to collect his latest arrivals, among them the newest recruit in a seemingly inexhaustible supply of girls he had dated in New York City. He pointed her out to Mitchell and Saconi, a mere wafer of womanhood, blond hair and a face shaped like a strawberry. She was at Johnnie’s side, sharing confidential laughter, jitter-bugging, not ashamed of her energy or the excitement of being a newcomer. She was one of the first to claim her luggage and escape through the queue, dashing into Tillman’s arms to bestow a genuine kiss, one of her legs raised like a flamingo’s while she delivered it. “What a flight,” she exclaimed. Her voice was sharp with urban assertiveness. She whirled around, her hair elevating with girlish flair off the slopes of her cheeks. “It was strictly the twilight zone. We could see the pilot fall asleep reading the newspaper. What’s going on here anyway? Is there a war?” You could tell from the eagerness of her smile that a war would be just the thing. Her name was Adrian. She was the publicist for a syndicate of galleries in Soho, an impresario of special events. Dressed in Eddie Bauer sportswear, safari garb from the young boy’s rack, she looked lifted from the pages of Seventeen, Miss Global Frolic, her lips with an acrylic shine, her skin unblemished but for the splatter of butterscotch freckles on each pink cheek and brow, altogether too cute for the world outside of vanity magazines and so, Mitchell surmised, a woman who saw pampering as an inalienable right.

  “Are you two meeting somebody?” Tillman asked, looking from Saconi to Mitchell.

  “His girlfriend,” Adrian volunteered. “I met her on the plane.”

  “I didn’t know you had a girlfriend,” said Tillman.

  “I don’t.”

  Adrian’s eyes widened. “Oh, terrific,” she said tartly. “That’s news to Johanna.”

  “Sounds like you’re in for some fun,” Tillman grinned, tugging Adrian backward. He picked up her canvas suitcase and directed her toward a group of pale and weary North Americans filing through the Customs door.

  “Wait and meet her,” Mitchell said. He wanted them there as insulation against the rising goose bumps, the dwindling oxygen, the cool agony and the deadpan heart that were the messengers of Johnnie’s imminence. But Tillman’s flock was waiting, they had to go, and Saconi begged off too to catch a charter flight to Cotton Island where the Princess kept him on retainer to entertain at her playpen for terminal bloodlines and her pukka friends. He swaggered off to the airport’s only gate where an official was taking down the number 1 and replacing it with the number 2. No baggage but his guitar in a scuffed case. Whatever the musician needed, Princess’ staff would provide and Saconi didn’t want to underuse the privilege. People stepped into his way for a word, island women turned their heads brazenly, called to him, eh, eh, tek me where you goin, mahn, sing baby sweet fah me. Mitchell turned back to his own object of private fame, femme vital and femme fatale, the love that had slipped through his fingers, the celebrity of his one great personal disaster.

  What Mitchell watched through the glass wall wa
s all too familiar: Johnnie dicking around, the exclusive style of behavior as if her timing, like Greenwich’s, set the pace for everyone else, oblivious not to people but to what was most practical. Not a gal for shortcuts or even direct routes. He saw her squat like a coolie, draping her skirt between her legs, and tear through one of the handbags looking for her passport. Finally she lurched away from the luggage queue, swinging gear onto a processing table to be inspected by a rigid agent. Mitchell groaned when he saw her old backpack, utilitarian relic of hippie days. Where did she think she was? The Appalachian trail? You could feel the creepy gratitude of the customs officer as he shed his boredom and upended the pack, letting its contents rain out. Johnnie’s shoulders tightened and flinched under the loathsome and darkly violating caress of the procedure. The man scattered the pile of her clothes like a deck of tarot cards, pawing through it for signs of her fortune. He rubbed the black material of a bra between thumb and forefinger. He opened a pill bottle and inhaled its aroma. He unzipped her cosmetic bag and emptied it as if it were filled with jewels. When he selected her blue diaphragm case and was about to unclasp it, she snatched it out of his hands before he understood how to pry the clamshell edges open.

  In shock, Mitchell prayed for her to put it back down.

  What was she trying to do, the naif, in a land she had never been before and probably never imagined, painting herself a target for a man who ached to put his two-hour special training in the hideaways of the body to use, and here was Johnnie offering him an invitation to the full range of secret spots, not just physical access but unrestricted license to interiors, the attics and cellars of her identity. The Tourist Board needed more truth in advertising, a poster with a guy like this one with hammerhead eyes, his handsome braided tunic and officer’s cap, his grin studded with a gold tooth, a speculum in his breast pocket underneath a colorful row of bogus medals of honor, his left hand drawing a chalky surgical glove down over his upraised right hand, the fingers juxtaposed with the immaculate sails of a yacht, an umbrella of palm trees, a bikinied woman about to enter the perilous sea. Regardless of the undertow of danger, Johnnie would not give back the diaphragm case. Not only would she not return it, she shook it like a safe pass in the man’s deadly humorless face. Her protest, inaudible through the glass barrier, made Mitchell so angry that he thought, whatever she got she deserved. But people in St. Catherine, even uniformed homicidals on the civil payroll, weren’t so simple, or at least you could say that their simplicity came with a tradition of ingenuity. They loved big mouths and big wind, they admired fights and fighters for the honesty of expression as long as no one pulled punches, as long as passions were ignited, and the fighter, especially the one who represented the rightful cause, was as blind and defenseless as Johnnie. A crab confronting the fisherman, a slave back-talking a master, the island romance with futility.

  The agent’s face became a small nova of pleasure and he accepted Johnnie’s tantrum as his light amusement for the day. He obviously enjoyed her show of fury and checked his fellow officers and even the head porter to see if they appreciated that he was the inspiration for this little white fuckable, beatable treasure of foolish defiance. Johnnie twisted an arm behind her to point randomly into the terminal, apparently giving Mitchell’s name as a counterbalance of authority. Mitchell saw the villain shift his eyes beyond her, scanning the crowd behind the sheet of grease-smeared window to locate the man she claimed as patron. Mitchell dropped his head, a lesser St. Peter, denying the challenge to be held accountable because of the outlandish judgment of this woman.

  Her passport was returned and the agent advanced down the table, automatically clearing the next three passengers in line, Johnnie forgotten except in mockery. She restuffed her belongings into the backpack with sharp jabs, ramming her clothes into its mouth, hoisted her straw bags to the crooks of her elbows and reared up, tempestuous, her lips still moving and not likely in thanks. The exit door kicked open.

  “What a complete bastard,” she said with reckless disregard that he might hear her. Her hip blocked the door’s return swing and she muscled through unassisted, hung with possessions. “I’ve had it with men like that. They can go screw themselves because they’re not screwing me.” She turned her head toward Mitchell, her mouth exasperated. “Can’t you help,” she said, a demanding boldness in her voice that didn’t match the picture he had of her, the private composition, the image that had nothing to do with other people, or the chess game of social issues, or the public performances. In private, the Johnnie that Mitchell knew had been trapped in the flux of ambivalence for who was right and what was wrong. That Johnnie never learned to scream, never participated in confrontation, walked away from fire as if she were doused in gasoline.

  A bag slipped off her arm and pooched to the floor. She stayed where she was and tried to come to some conclusion about Mitchell’s immobility, the few yards of one kind of distance that remained between them. “That other cocksucker only gave me two weeks,” she said. “The guidebook says I’m entitled to three months.” Implicit in the way she stood there, in the agitated way she spoke, in the matter-of-fact manner she was trying to uphold, was the expanding reality of her decision to come this way, back to Mitchell. Maybe she realized how tough she was playing it because she untensed, dropped the aggression of her shoulders, and reversed the lines of her mouth into a shy smile. “Hello,” she said and laughed self-consciously, shaking her head. “Are you ready for me?”

  “It can be changed,” Mitchell croaked, breaking out from his severe daze. She gave him a puzzled look and he said, “Your visa, I’ll take it to the Immigration Office later on today,” but when he reached for her passport she inserted it back into the handbag. Mitchell grabbed the other tote but wouldn’t let himself touch her, sure something would go spontaneously wrong if he touched her so readily. And wasn’t two weeks enough anyway? Three months took the form of cruel and unusual punishment, and what about the Sierra backpack and the two piddly grassmat handbags? What was she, a gypsy? Three months on an aspirin and a change of underwear?

  “Improper border behavior,” Mitchell advised coldly. “You don’t grab things out of a customs officer’s hand.”

  “Perhaps,” she said. She smiled in a way he knew too well—a suck on the lemon of irony. She raised her arms and flopped them against her sides. “I didn’t know what else to do. I have five grams of coke taped to my diaphragm.”

  He stood staring at her, stunned by her audacity.

  She knew all the admonishments, all the sermons. She threw herself at him to cut short any scolding, kissing him on the cheek, her lips a sticky press, her arms around him, her hands remembering his back.

  “Look at you,” she said, “you look so good, and so-o serious.” Her head tilted back to really take him in for the first time. Her sunglasses disturb me, was all Mitchell could think. “So how have you been, Mitch?” The hug he traded with her was feeble. I can’t see you, he thought. You can be anybody. Maybe there was no Johnnie anymore, maybe nobody lasted unless you stayed glued to their side.

  “So what have you been up to?” Her voice sped nervously along. “You have dirt in your hair, in case you didn’t know. And what’s with this shirt?” Her fingernails grazed the exposed inch of his stomach. “Your banjo here looks pretty. A little skinny maybe. Tight. Hard. I’ve been associating with slobs.”

  Mitchell had forgotten she chattered a lot, this inflated gaiety, whenever she was hyper or high. Whatever she read she was easily persuaded by. One month a Buddhist, the next a disciple of Ram Dass, a stretch of infernal depression instigated by Camus. Virginia Woolf and primal therapy. It had been difficult to keep his equilibrium with her as she exchanged one sensibility for another, a honeybee in well-pollinated gardens of thought. That was five years ago and more. He hated this reunion, hated everything about it.