Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  Lloyd Peters—the former civics teacher at St. John’s; a Boston-trained lawyer and now, by choice, minister of information—had educated Banks in this aesthetic, but the youthful Banks had allowed his own immaturity to color it—which was not intellectual immaturity but moral naïveté—and now, as prime minister, he placed an unfortunate faith in love and forgiveness, and it was Lloyd Peters’ mandate not to dissuade him from this faith, not likely at any rate, but to protect him from its consequence. There were occasions when Peters looked at his former student—Banks’ piercing visage of a gaunt nobleman, like a reproduction of an El Greco Moor, the crescents of inanimate flesh that drooped from the bridge of his nose to below the flat sockets of his lugubrious owl eyes, giving the impression of someone often overtaken by bouts of melancholic insomnia—and thought of him as a romantic anachronism, a monarch from a golden age, so contrary to the blunt West Africanness of an Archibol or a Kingsley, the minister of agriculture, or Peters himself, as polished and lacquered as Guinea totems. Eddy acted as if he had lost a world he never had, thought Peters.

  Nevertheless—and it was not a masquerade but a separate self—in crowds or addressing parliament, the prime minister was, as a man of the people, a charismatic lion; an object of veneration and source of national pride. He was not the distant, preoccupied man known to his closest associates, nor was his mind perpetually inhabited by matters of state, or circumscribed by the images of power. He could be lighthearted and teasing, yet impervious to social niceties, never shaking a hand or asking after wives and kids, but he was famous for showing up unannounced at the wattle huts of villagers with a sack of groceries in his arms—For the children, a little something, eh? he’d say—and then sit to share their country dinners of dasheen and gristle. For superficial gestures and synthetic contact he showed little tolerance, but he would come to his work at Government House from his modest two-bed up the hill in Cunningham’s, the middle-class suburb where he was raised, riding the crowded lorries with the laborers, grinning attentively at his constituents, not quite knowing what to say to them but more interested in listening anyway, joining the good-natured laughter that rolled with their criticisms, a son or brother who awoke their loyalty, and their ribbing would turn away from pal-o-tics or pol-i-tricks to life’s more vital topics, women and cricket and sailing and fishing, farming, building, the art and science of normalcy, the dream that they carried to consummate the greatness of Edison Banks.

  They agreed on goals—the coalition was a marriage of convenience, a hybrid fruit meant to bloom only once, briefly, for display, for color, and then be promptly discarded, and a more prolific and pure variety grafted to its roots. Unhouse Kingsley, they all agreed: it was both as simple and as complicated as that, for once you invited the devil to your table, he would eat and eat and eat, and always call for more, and could not be discouraged or dislodged by mere force alone. Shove his face into his own shit, they were learning, and he will devour it, smacking his lips.

  They agreed on goals, but on the path they had chosen, they were running out of solid ground: parliament, the courts, the constitution, so defiled by the former government. Rule of law. Unlike their opposition, they were young men, they had no time to waste, they had waited a year, and a year was plenty, a year was enough. A year without change, some of them argued, was too much. They agreed on ends but not on means, yet now the resistance of those among them most unwilling to risk bolder actions, to risk risk itself, had begun to waver, a change of atmosphere for which Lloyd Peters gave himself credit. They were less reluctant to try things out, test the limits, make things up—like this gerrymandering so artfully introduced, at Peters’ suggestion, into the land reform program—as they go along. But Kingsley had not taken their bait, he had not dug in his heels and reacted predictably when they shoved his face into his own shit and began, without his knowledge or consent, to shuffle the peasant communities squatting on the government estates and relocate them irrationally (but temporarily, insisted Banks) on unsuitable lands. Dispossess the peasantry. Blame it on Kingsley, the minister given authority over these affairs.

  They didn’t expect the scheme to work, but that, too, was part of its beauty. It was a constitutional issue and would be tossed up through the courts, yet by then it would be too late. Kingsley’s constituency would be decimated. Better still, Kingsley’s own frustrations and impatience would accelerate his demise, he would make a mistake, invite disaster, and then anything was possible. What might he do? Who knew, who could say? They would welcome resistance in any of its forms, but Joshua Kingsley had said nothing and done nothing to undermine himself. He continued doing as he had done since the beginning—dragging his ass—mouthing his allegiance to the land reform program insofar as it achieved the restoration of the sugar industry—and this to the dismay of his ministry’s own experts.

  Sugar was his phoenix, all he secretly cared about. If he could have that, Kingsley believed, he could have everything. He, himself, would be restored.

  Lloyd Peters was not going to let him have it—which is not to say he disagreed with the minister of agriculture about the power of sugar, because the Achilles heel of every revolution was the economy, and to make a strong economy the masses needed discipline, they needed organization, needed control and structure.

  They needed sugar. And, if not sugar, they needed hell, as they had never known it, to focus their hearts and minds, but he could not say these things as yet to the men assembled in the room. The triumph of their compromise still rang in their ears. No one was actually prepared to say the word revolution —the one word in their vocabulary softened by success. No, they found themselves forced to say to the world, we are not a revolution, we are a coalition.

  No, Peters was determined to make them admit, we are who we dreamed we are, we are the revo, and we have come.

  Like shaking a box of bees, Lloyd Peters had encouraged Basil Hamilton, the minister of public works, to propose; had himself put those words into the man’s mouth so that he could weigh them, as if for the first time, when Basil spoke. Hamilton sat now between the prime minister and Foreign Minister Archibol, sharing the couch with them; it was Basil’s infatuation with naive grassroots reform that excited him, and he was already positioned in the shadows to assume Joshua Kingsley’s important portfolio, should the coalition ever dissolve—when it dissolved—in order to remake itself into the lean, firm, and efficient industry of truth in action they always meant it to be.

  But in the stagecraft of dethronement, Kingsley had not taken the bait, had not even blinked. Trapped into administering a reform program he did not wholly advocate and could not as a politician survive, he neither protested the unauthorized relocations nor acknowledged their existence and thereby admit that the process was out of his control, the power and influence of his office stolen. Why didn’t he resist, why didn’t he resign, why didn’t he have the sense to remove his fat sow self from the road so the future could pass around? This wasn’t like Kingsley, and they didn’t know what to think. Perhaps they were missing something. Perhaps they were wrong to wait for a response, since they knew it would come, the bees would sting, sooner or later, the way they were pressing the old man. Joshua throwin old womens out they house and home, people were saying, and not a peep heard from the old bastard.

  Lloyd Peters licked his purple lips. “Troublesome rumors, nuh?” he said enticingly, and the council began. It became for him a matter of momentum, to preserve the endgame from the dilution of indecision. The issue of dismissal was raised again, and again rejected: Joshua must be finessed into a position of impotency, said Banks, not martyred only to be resurrected by a reactionary opposition.

  Peters looked toward Selwyn Walker, hoping he would speak. Walker had been a less than average student at St. John’s, the captain of the soccer team, cocky and popular, fearless. He had attended the study group simply because, in Peters’ opinion, he had a keen nose for winning—he had smelled conflict in the group’s makeshift kitchen, and it
had whetted his appetite. Now it so happened he was the only one of four lieutenant commanders on the National Police Force indoctrinated into PEP objectives from the beginning, the one officer of significant rank who had been cruelly beaten by his fellow members of the force during the days of opposition to Pepper, and you do not question the loyalty of such a man, you simply destroy him if he turns on you. What he lacked, Peters believed, in intellectual capacity he compensated for in hubris and bravery, and in the less glamorous skills of logistics, but Peters was convinced the man was not sophisticated to the degree that he would relish a theory, hold the structure of it in his mind like an architect his building, a surgeon his anatomical branchings; not interested in the immaterial skeletons of theory on which all creation hung, yet he was deft—or at least not clumsy—with strategy, and his tactical instincts were of real value, here at the vanguard of a new St. Catherine. If there was a problem with Walker, Peters had to concede, it was that the man, like Banks, but from an opposite pole, was tempted by disillusionment, counting the endless moments it sometimes seemed to take for the gears of change to spin. Unknown to everybody but the men in the room, Selwyn Walker was, in the coming months, to inaugurate the formation of a national defense guard, to counteract the imbalance of the national police, whose commandant remained strapped by corruption and blood to Kingsley and the conservative members of the coalition, Pepper’s old cohorts, who had betrayed him but not yet and never would be satisfied with Edison Banks and his club of supercilious schoolboys.

  Selwyn Walker’s steel-rimmed spectacles magnified the flickering energy in his eyes, eyes gone prematurely weak after his beatings by Pepper’s men; they scouted his superiors’ nuances like a radar imager, mused Peters, watching the light spark in diamonds on the lenses. Walker looked a bit like a towering black Gandhi, the ascetic severity of his face mocked by an unfortunate pair of jug ears. Walker’s head was shaved, in military fashion, and Peters focused on its dark, icy gleam, wondering if the shaving, the deliberate baldness, represented some sort of ... what? Again the word immaturity came to mind. Archibol spoke, making some damn speech clouded by righteousness and vanity, and Peters said to himself, Save it for them damn fools in New York. “We are not afraid, we are confident,” Archibol was saying.

  Last Friday, the Agricultural Credit Union in Comfort, a town in the interior, below the wilds of Soufrière, had been robbed, and that same night, Peters had seen Selwyn Walker at the bar of the Admiralty Club in Churchill Bay, and they had spoken, only briefly, about the robbery, and what some people perceived as increasing lawlessness in certain parts of the island associated with the oppostion.

  Suppose, Selwyn, Peters had said in a casual voice, there was a force up north.

  Force?

  Suppose, for the sake of argument, man, the true perpetrators of this crime are our enemies. That these crimes are political crimes. This banditry. This lawlessness.

  Just hooligans and rastas, eh?

  All crimes are political crimes when they are committed within the context of the economic violence of imperialism, true?

  True, true.

  Suppose there is a force, and that force is against us.

  Walker had exhaled air out of his nose—a disdainful snort. That would not be smart.

  Imagine Delwyn Pepper, up so in New York, washing his hands of our business. Eh? He would ever do that? Ever? Eh?

  Not smart.

  Imagine Kingsley, Pepper’s right hand, telling the man, “Don’t come to me with your money and tricks.” Eh? Kingsley?

  Not smart at all.

  All I am saying is, we could not stand by, or we would be lost, eh?

  Selwyn Walker said nothing more on the subject, but he met Peters’ eyes, and his look was thoughtful.

  I believe I know how to make you say what it is you must say, Lloyd Peters told Walker in his mind, then as now, studying him across the room where he sat in his straight-backed chair, facing the prime minister’s Queen Anne sofa and boxed in a sunbeam, having no aversion to the broiling morning light of the tropics. Kingsley is not merely a master of our own trickery, but a force within us, a necessary side of our own personality, not to be uprooted by games, nor withered by our posturing and improvisation. You will say it, Selwyn, and we will send Archibol back to New York, believing it, defending us with the credibility of an outraged heart, and Hamilton out into the streets, believing it, sowing that belief among the masses, and you and they will make it true.

  “You are spoilin for a fight, eh, Selwyn?” Peters said, half jokingly, and then immediately changed his manner, reciting in all seriousness what Banks had made clear, time after time, that nonviolence was the signature of the noblest cause, and of the men dedicated to that cause.

  “And Archibol is right,” Banks added, unsmiling. “We have nothing to fear.”

  “But that is not natural,” complained Selwyn Walker, closing his eyes and slowly opening them, as if he would sigh. “That is not positive. That is cowardly, under the circumstances.”

  “True and not true,” declared Banks. “Nonviolence is an act of supreme faith, and supreme intelligence. You will see. The masses will see. Only God would know otherwise.”

  Lloyd Peters wanted to know. “What circumstances, Selwyn?”

  The lieutenant commander tightened his lips and appeared agitated, grim. Joshua Kingsley is wiser than all God-foolishness, Selwyn Walker said to himself, bursting with an anger he would not permit himself to express out loud. I can say this, because Joshua Kingsley is the rot and filth that ignorant men name the devil. I am the man who does know. Because I am the man who must stand in front of him and take his bullet, I am the man who does know. Because I am the man you will ask to cut out his tongue, and slay his bad children, I am the man who does know. Because, Eddy, I am your emissary to Hell and its horrors, I know.

  “Tell us,” said Lloyd Peters. “What circumstances?”

  Banks shifted his gaze to Peters as if he finally realized where all this murky talk was leading. “Tell us, Selwyn,” he said.

  Selwyn Walker glanced at Edison Banks with impenetrable composure, rejecting his own misgivings, the qualms he felt in answering—the answer or the lie he had just heard the prime minister solicit, to legitimize their hard business. But once he opened his mouth, there would be no falsehood, now or ever, only a revelation gathered from something not unlike a time capsule, but sent backward from the near future to its point of conception in reality. He was not a liar, he was a visionary, a priest of the seen and the unseen.

  He told them he had received reports that had caused him grave concern. Reports that alleged that Joshua Kingsley had men up north—agents, traitors—in the mountains, in the forests behind La Soufrière. They were organizing, they were ... up to no good. He was unprepared for their skepticism, especially Lloyd Peters’, but then he felt that their doubts comforted him, minimizing his anxiety.

  “But, dis a fahntasy, mahn,” guffawed Peters.

  “Folks talkin shit,” said Archibol.

  Walker conceded he could offer only circumstantial, inconclusive evidence, at the moment, but that he would fail in his duty to them if he did not express his suspicion. A reliable source had eluded him, although certain other prospects had yet to be properly investigated. He paused to gauge the impact of these qualifications, but rather than an air of foreboding descending into the room there was satisfaction, glad relief; his message was welcomed. You see, I was right, Selwyn Walker told himself. He had not been summoned here today to be cheated, to condone girlish intrigues, but to be anointed and sent forth. He took his hands from the armrests of his chair and placed them atop his knees, since his legs jittered, betraying his excitement.

  Lloyd Peters advised him to check and double check the information, before reporting back to them, or initiating a response. We must remember, he cautioned, the virtue of our cause.

  Within the depths of Edison Banks’ eyes there seemed to be an intellect in danger of being exhausted by its ow
n singular abilities, yet unhurried and clinically objective nonetheless. His elbow was on the sofa’s arm, his neatly bearded chin in the palm of his slender hand, as he listened and agreed and voiced his reservations.

  “But patiently, no? Don’t be bloody, Selwyn.”

  Because if you are bloody you will lure Pepper back into it, from the North, and he will bring the North with him. Don’t be bloody, Selwyn, or our children will starve. Don’t be bloody, Selwyn, or we must live with Americans or Cubans or Russians in our homes. Don’t be artless, Selwyn—the rise of one art and the fall of another takes time. Every procedure has its art; every art has its careful science. Collect the evidence, detain the guilty, let the people judge for themselves, and the coalition will split apart without unseemly artifice, and the world itself will smile because we are not savages, and no one will be against us, even if they are not with us, and there will be no guns to put away, because what is most difficult is to resist the temptation not to put away the lightning of democracy which is the justice of the gun, but this is a storm we cannot live with, and that is why we have worn our masks of coalition for so long, and dissimulated ourselves, and brought this unwholesome pressure gradually to bear upon our people, and exposed them to these confusions, so that finally a small discretion—and not wrath, and not vengeance, and not chaos—could make us free. Don’t be bloody, Selwyn. It is a game of blood and history—true and not true. But I will not look upon the blood of my people, and you will not show it to me, because you will be loving—however you have loved your people and your nation, you must now show them both a greater love, a love transcendent and pure—and you will be clever, I trust you will be clever, Selwyn. We are not clowns, our country is not a comedy, although many wish to see it that way; we are not Hamlets, our country is not a tragedy, although many people want to see it that way too.