Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  And breakfast was being served on a while-it-lasts basis.

  Opening the brown skin with his fingernail, Mitchell peeled a plantain and sliced the dry-smelling fruit lengthwise into strips. The oil in the pan on the hotplate heated up, spitting when he crushed a garlic clove and threw it in, followed by the plantain.

  “Beautiful smells,” Johnnie crowed from across the house. “Coconut oil and garlic.”

  Mitchell looked up toward the network of roofbeams as though she might materialize there.

  A pot of milk bubbled. Into it he crumbled a waxy plug of cocoa, stirred in ground bay leaf, salt, and sugar. The plantain strips turned the color of old teeth. The countertop refrigerator periodically contributed its own scat riffs to the music of the cooking, a three-beat gurgle, a two-four chug. In his better moods Mitchell would drum on it with fork and spoon. From its sweating interior he took a mixing bowl of day-old batter.

  “I’m cooking tree-tree fritters,” he announced. He speared the plantain to one side of the pan and ladled in four globs of batter. There was a loud sound, the wardrobe being shoved across the floor. Johnnie rearranging her new hideout.

  “Were you talking to me?”

  “Tree-tree.”

  “Ye-eah?” A scrape and rumble, and then a bang.

  “Tiny little fish that swim from the ocean into the river mouths, the same time every year. Millions of them, no bigger than pins. You didn’t know that you timed your visit for tree-tree season, did you?” Hammering vibrated through the house. “What are you doing back there?”

  “Just livening up this dark space ... did you say we’re having fish?”

  She came to the kitchen singing, a cappella, a capriccio, notes released from her mouth like sonorous bubbles, sort of a parody of a torch song that she sang, it was clear from her face, because she was happy. In her hand she wielded the blunt instrument of a wooden-soled sandal. Mitchell stood by flipping through the Crier, St. Catherine’s one independent newspaper, printed twice weekly and distributed on Tuesdays and Fridays, Saturdays at the latest, having chartered itself with the imperative of entering a few facts into the national dialogue.

  “It says here,” he said, reading, “‘A man the people of Plaisance call Booty, or some call Sneak, though that is not the fellow’s name for he is in truth named Cyril Balcombe, was apprehended Monday last for the crime of praedial larceny, whereupon, in accordance with recent legislation sponsored by the Honorable Joshua Kingsley and the PEAS coalition, the said legislation designed to halt such piratical acts, Mr. Balcombe was taken before the steps of the Town Station the following day by order of the Magistrate, removed of his trousers, and caned on the buttocks by the Corporal there on duty in full view of the public and children, who loudly counted out the entire sentence of strokes, twenty in all. Mr. Balcombe was then required to pay a fine and permitted to return home on probation, where he was later that same day seen at rest in his yard hammock in a position favoring his recent injuries. Mr. Balcombe occupied his recovery by dictating to his son, who loyally recorded the father’s words in his grammar school composition book. When asked by a neighbor what it was his son copied for him, Mr. Balcombe stated that the beating he had just received at the hands of the authorities had inspired in him a calypso, which he hoped to sell to an unnamed performer at some future date to advertise his innocence in the affair. Mr. Balcombe added that the name of the calypso that “had been lashed from me” was “I Tek a Whippin, Jack Nasty Tek De Pig.”’”

  “My goodness”—Johnnie rolled her eyes—“did you just make that up?”

  Mitchell glibly told her that in St. Catherine all the old thrills were making a comeback. The minister of agriculture had reinstated classical punishment by delivering the first hot stroke of justice to the first guilty arse the government could lay its hands on. The countryfolks loved it. “Teef a cow, tek a bow,” the schoolchildren rhymed. Mitchell had been there—it was at an agricultural fair in Kingsley’s home parish—and the audience cheered: “Lash him, poppi, strike him straight on, mahn.” You could call it Bligh’s legacy—breadfruit, the bull pizzle, the cat-o’-nine-tails. Food and discipline as the base ingredients of civilization.

  “Hawaii could use a system like that,” was all Johnnie said on the subject.

  Oil foamed around the islands of fritters, heat escaped through their centers to the pimpled surface. Johnnie took up the spatula in her free hand and poked at them, bending closer to look. “What are these?” she asked.

  “I’m doing that.” Mitchell folded the newspaper closed and blocked Johnnie out of his way, grabbing the turner.

  “Jehovah cooks breakfast. Oh yes,” she said, playfully waving at his head with the sandal. “I have not forgotten Mitchell’s house rules. Thou shalt not interfere with thy cook. Thou shalt not leave illegal things lying around in plain sight. Thou shalt tidy up thine own mess, wherever it comes from. Thou shalt not covet the rewards of thy lover’s ambition. What have I missed?”

  He flipped the fritters, thanked by a small ovation of grease. “Stop threatening me with a Dr. Scholl’s,” he advised. “Are you ready to eat?”

  “Almost,” she said. “Do you have any tacks? It’ll only take a second.”

  “What is it you’re doing?”

  “Hanging up a map of South America. National Geographic —big.”

  He gestured toward a column of drawers in the row of cabinets set underneath the counter. “Look around in there,” he told her, and kept busy cutting ripe guavas in half. She pulled open several, dug through them, closed all but one back.

  “Mitch?”

  “Yeah?”

  Her tone was incredulous. “What are you doing with so many rubbers?” she asked. “There must be two hundred of them.” She scooped a fistful and let them trickle.

  “I’m a very popular guy on this island.”

  “I guess so.”

  Embarrassed, he went to the cupboard for the enamel plates and silverware. Johnnie found the tacks in the bottom drawer and, whirling on her heels, marched out of the kitchen. Mitchell turned around just in time to see her stick her tongue out at him. Seconds later, a rapping fired through the cottage, a house now inhabited with echoes from another place they would call their own. A house where a woman’s words could drift freely from corner to corner and gather in the cobwebs under the roof to form with his, as if their business together would be best conducted, like comic strip characters, in the neutral space above their heads.

  In the fullness of the morning, the air on the veranda where Mitchell had carried their breakfast smelled much like baked grass, a lulling scent with an arid sweetness to it that passed across the house from east to west stowed on the Trades, a caravan of fragrance, interrupted at intervals by the effervescence of a thousand buds and oils and essences of the warming land itself, their syrupy heaviness levitating in the heat, thronging the atmosphere like an aromatic muster of souls. He filled his lungs a few times because it was impossible to resist the intense intimacy of the land, not just to smell, but to breathe as if it were an act of drinking, to respire and absorb. A maverick whiff of crotchy odor from the forests would sometimes stray into the stream, from off the inland hills, and eddies of saltiness, like the smell of damp saltine crackers, as the lobe of Howard Bay twitched against the open jaws of the shoreline. He drew hard, but this style of breathing also made him wince, reminding him of the fatness of his clobbered nose.

  “Doesn’t it hurt?” Johnnie asked, breaking open a tree-tree fritter and with a chary look inspecting its countless white threads, pinpoint beads of black eyeballs attached to each strand. She looked over at him, her brow pinched. “It looks swollen. Maybe you’d better see a doctor.”

  “No. Don’t need to.”

  He drank from a cup of oily cocoa tea, put it back on the packing crate they were using for a table, opened his mouth but thought better of it and said nothing more. She raised her eyes expectantly but hesitated herself. The flatness that was suddenly upon them
appalled Mitchell and he wondered what to do. Johnnie finally took a prim bite of a fritter and chewed experimentally.

  “What is this I’m eating?”

  “I told you before but you weren’t listening. Those are worms. A breakfast special.”

  She looked, appropriately, nicked by the sarcasm of his tone. It was clear he wasn’t trying to get her to laugh. She returned the fritter solemnly to her plate and spooned a purple-pink hemisphere of guava instead, her mouth purse-lipped from its tartness. Mitchell was bored with his seriousness, bewildered and alarmed—even though he had figured it would happen this way—by the chip that rose on his shoulder at the first sight of Johnnie. This weary business of memory, wholly errant. The brain briefing the glands from dog-eared files. Sniffing sniffing sniffing at her passage through the house, an enraged fascination with the intoxicating trail. Goddamn it, he said to himself, enough, enough—this wasn’t his life, this wasn’t what was important. What he truly needed was an opening in his perception of her, a way to appreciate a new Johnnie, even if he couldn’t persuade himself that that was what she was.

  It was not a miracle, her return, nor was it a curse. Don’t be stupid about this, Mitchell warned himself. Don’t make it such a big deal.

  Johnnie took a slow deep breath, pressed her knees together to reinforce her composure, and looked at Mitchell with more earnestness than he ever thought possible. Academy Awards, he thought.

  “Talk to me, Mitch, okay? Please? Do you want me on my knees?”

  Mitchell fidgeted on the crate he sat on. “I don’t have any control here,” he protested.

  “Well, that’s not true,” she responded immediately. “You can make this into anything you want.”

  “Oh?”

  His mouth remained in the sulk that the vowel had sponsored. He could feel his eyebrows declare independence—they saluted, they chopped down, they came together like two fuzzy magnets. He was trying to see into her through a kaleidoscope of minced feelings, the composition altering with each degree of rotation of the Johnnie being revealed, splitting and shifting and merging from one instant to the next. Well, brother, what do you say to a girl not seen or heard from for five years. Who, what, when, why, and how, the reportorial motif? Oh, it’s you, as though the time apart was of no more consequence than a nap, an errand in town. Oh, it’s you, where the hell have you been? Without a working hypothesis, the gulf between them widened and shrank, drained and filled on a confounding schedule. If his mute resistance was getting to her, it was also affecting Mitchell in an even worse way, tipping the rocker.

  Whatever Johnnie was thinking, she appeared to surrender to it. She screwed a cigarette into the groove of her lips and sent a beam of smoke down toward the piebald waters where the reef scalloped the bay. The sea was a peacock blue beyond the fields of turtle grass until coral spotted and ridged the bottom, and roved by gasps of wind printing blurred foil tracks on the clean surface. The friction between air and water, these hot patches of light, leaped randomly throughout the harbor on their inevitable course to land to where Johnnie and Mitchell sat in resigned meditation. Everything that had happened between two people, Mitchell saw, could be remembered if you just kept focused on the sea, and everything could be dismissed and forgotten with the future always forcing its pulse, wave after wave rolling out from the great silence. Johnnie seemed mesmerized by a frigate bird set free in endless space. He stole a glance at her profile, saw her eyelids lowering, the lashes knobbed with heavy bits of mascara. She was about to fall asleep. The silence was conspiring with an intolerable sorrow.

  “You’ve got to be tired.”

  Her eyes slowly reopened. “I’m all right.”

  “Why don’t you go in and go to bed.”

  “Not yet.” Her head started to bob but she made sure it didn’t, straightening her spine. The skin of her face had slackened, allowing the promise of future jowls and a loose chin. Her eyes were rimmed with the price of traversing oceans, the jump of time zones. And, too, her constant sniffing made it obvious she had been helping herself along the way to the drug in the diaphragm case. “Mitch, why did you send me all those letters? They made it impossible to forget you.” She set her breakfast plate down from her lap. “Okay, I suppose that’s why you sent them.”

  “Well then.”

  “Well then! You have to say more than that.”

  “There’s no more to say than that.”

  He tried to recall what it was he had written to her over the past years. Second-page news, miniature visions, adolescent restlessness and chitchat, oblique hints of lust, queries about beaus, peculiar events witnessed, the illness of his father (she had liked him for the plodding bureaucratic thoroughness with which he kept up his wooded property, which is just about the only place she ever saw him), incidental juvenile musings on loss and pain, all the funks like Fifties tearjerk tunes, rigidly objective abstracts on the absurdly powerful astonishment of heartbreak. Consistently some wit or clever attempts to pitch at her, keep it fresh in her mind what a smart guy he was, always good for a chuckle, yet why he did this he really couldn’t say. Not to play coy with himself, but each time he wrote her he believed had its own isolation and purity, not linked to any greater motive than could be assigned to ham radio operators—which Mitchell knew was no more true than the idea of birds migrating arbitrarily but he would not, certainly not now, confronted with the deed, admit it.

  “If there’s so much to say,” he dared her, “you say it. Nobody twisted your arm and made you write back.”

  She was pleased that the moment had come, after these dodges and dead-ends, for her to address the apocrypha of their relationship. She smiled eagerly and stubbed her cigarette, which had stayed in her mouth even though it had burned down to the filter. She lit another, craving everything all at once, and told Mitchell what he never knew—what the letters had meant to her.

  “At first it was like being tailed by one of those guys who gets a fix on you, you know, takes an interest after seeing you once in a restaurant or pumping gas into your car, and you become his obsession. You begin to notice him everywhere you go, and you realize you’re not having any luck in getting rid of him, you can’t shake him loose. You feel as if you’ve been adopted by a pervert, some nimrod, and there doesn’t seem to be much you can do about it. I wanted to shriek, every time I went to the mailbox and there was a Charlottesville postmark. I wanted to scream, Why don’t you shut up? Why don’t you go away? Stop harassing me. But Daddy kept forwarding your letters as I tramped west, and like a dope I kept opening them.”

  She laughed lightly, holding up a finger when she saw he was going to interrupt. “Let me finish what I was saying about the letters, before you start stewing again. Unlike the way things are going at the moment, you refused to be silent. That was your secret weapon, that’s what you were doing, wasn’t it? It amazed me, to tell you the truth, that you could be so stubborn. It was so nonchalant, so cavalier, your defiance, so gentlemanly, and I didn’t expect it. It dawned on me I really meant something to you, you know. It rattled me that you could still care, considering what I put you through. I mean, that was terrible, Mitch. And I didn’t think your caring was very healthy.”

  “If caring wasn’t a form of sickness, your father and every other shrink would be out of a job.”

  “Look,” she went on, becoming more animated. An ash from the cigarette had landed on her breast and she brushed it off, leaving a gray smudge above her left nipple. Mitchell aimed his attention there as if it were a problem to be solved. “Look, I thought your game was to haunt me, to keep reminding me how fucked up I was. But you never tried to nail me into a coffin of guilt—or if you did, honey, you were sure shrewd about it, you know. None of your letters were like you’re being now ... so how could I not respond. I mean, am I supposed to be from another planet or what. Why sack everything, why go for the total wipeout? That’s how whores are treated, trash, and as mixed up as I was, that’s what I thought I had coming. You know? But
there you were offering me something beautiful and I admit it, I was confused by that. Who wouldn’t be? It took me a while, but I had to write back, send you a card like on your birthday or Christmas. Most of it was pretty superficial, I know, and I know how crazy it sounds now, but I started to believe that we had never split up, that an accident had separated us but that it was only a question of time ... do you know what I mean?”

  Mitchell rubbed the back of his neck, scowling. He knew what she meant, and it put him in no mood for clearing up their relationship as neatly as she was doing it. A sugar finch landed on the feeder that dangled from the eave, just a calabash shell with sugar water in it, and he watched it, not knowing why it could contribute to his rage.

  “Don’t make it all sound so goddamn noble,” he said. “It’s been five years. I’ve had other girlfriends. I write letters to plenty of women. They write back. They fly in infrequently though.” The things he wanted and the things he didn’t want—Johnnie had them all in a tangle. Lately Mitchell had been wanting a girlfriend and he kept finding candidates too, when he was drunk, and discarding them when he was sober. Here in front of him was the only woman he had known whom he couldn’t evict from his thoughts, an early Christmas for his loneliness, and he was maneuvering to make her cry and do what she said he was too much a gentleman for in his letters, an objective he apparently had no qualms about face to face.