Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  Johnnie blanched. “I didn’t think about other women, I guess,” she said. “You always left that part out.”

  “Did you think you had crippled me?” Mitchell was grinding his teeth, fuming, provoked by her dispensation of honest secrets. “Give me a fucking break, okay. Why should it all mean anything now?”

  “It doesn’t,” she moaned, and wrapped her hands in the cloth of her skirt. Her face reddened, on the verge of tears. “Please don’t be a son of a bitch, Mitchell. My life has not been easy. You have a right to do what you’re doing, but please don’t go after me so hard.”

  “Lord Almighty. How subtle you’ve become.”

  “Fuck you,” Johnnie said in anguish. “You have to be able to afford to be subtle first. I have to pay my way as I go.”

  “So go ahead—confess, confess,” he shrugged. “Catharsis”—a pop of dyslexia went off behind his eyes—“th-the cathartic ecstasy. Make us both wretched ... more wretched.” He was becoming demented. “So, tell me, how’s the you-know-what business these days.”

  “Aren’t you smart?” she said furiously. “Of course it’s drugs, you prick. Drugs, sex, rock and roll—all the naughty stuff, all the decadence, I’m behind it all. I’m the queen bee of the generation.” Mitchell started to tell her that he knew all along but she stamped her foot so he wouldn’t go on. “Man, would you just fucking listen. Please.” Her expression was as willful and wild as he had ever seen it. She couldn’t moderate her voice. Mitchell listened to its quivering and thought, breakdown time. “When we lived together—it wasn’t very long ago but the world was such a different place then. And I didn’t know anything. I had nothing to compare you to.”

  “You once compared me to a jackass.”

  “Oh, you are a jackass, you. Just listen to me, Mitchell.” Her rueful laugh frightened him. “The men I’ve known these past five years, they’ve been beasts, monsters. I didn’t deserve them, I really didn’t, but there they were, worshiping themselves and making me feel like shit underfoot. Through it all, you jackass, you were in the mother-fucking mailbox—”

  “Old jack-in-the-box.”

  “Damn it, will you please let me finish. There you were, a phenomenon, a precious phantom. Finally, I suppose I romanticized you—how could I not. You persuaded me to have a second try. Wait—” Anticipating him, she stiff-armed the air, then dropped her hand across the crate onto his. A sheaf of hair fell across her eyes and she tossed it back in frustration. “Don’t say it. I know you weren’t trying to encourage me.”

  Mitchell couldn’t comprehend why she was working so hard to sell her story. The door was open. Here she was. Why press the case? “You can stay as long as you need to,” he said wearily. “Okay? No more interrogation. I’ll leave you alone.”

  She withdrew her hand and brought both of them to cover her face, her fingers fanned from cheek to cheek, barring her inchoate eyes, their light now more brown than green, and sad. “You wanted to see me again, didn’t you?” she murmured. “Despite all this, you wanted me back, or have I really messed up?”

  “That’s a very interesting question,” Mitchell said.

  “Interesting!” Her head flew back and she pushed out of her sitting position, maddened to the point of assault, clamping her hands on his ears as if she were about to twist him around until his neck snapped. “You sit there like an Indian and tell me I’ve raised an interesting supposition. You spook in the mailbox. You cocksucker.” She dropped all her weight against him and they tumbled off the crate, Johnnie atop him, squatting on his stomach. “Don’t you dare say that, you nasty martyr. You Saint Mitchell.”

  “Get off.”

  “No.”

  “Come on.”

  “Not until you confess what’s in that heart of yours.” She cocked her head and pretended to listen carefully.

  “That,” he said, imperturbable, “is the sound of the little fish of charity, swimming in circles, happy to be of service. They only come once a year and you want to show them a bad time.” He moved his hips to budge her off but she strained against him, a counterthrust that shocked with erotic energy. I don’t want you to touch me this much, this quick, he thought out of self-preservation, the round dull blades of her pelvis digging into his groin, their bodies poised for a large lapse into sexual fluency, the language of that distant intimate world where they had grown up together, a small alphabet with a boggling capacity for meaning. Maybe we could dance first, something, anything to work up properly to this level of mock copulation about to turn real. It was merciless, this itch, and Mitchell was beginning to see that the largest share of Johnnie he had held on to as his own, his mnemonics of her, his mantra and his movie of this woman, was a spellbinding sequence of carnal images and sweaty vignettes, an index of lovemaking that dominated the archives of his memory of her. The notion crossed his mind that, healthy or aberrant, fair or unjust, in her long absence he had distilled Johnnie into a private stock of pornography. Reduced and reproduced through countless daydreams and night visions, transmuted into a benevolent succubus, she had lived with him twice the time as in the original version, and this newest Johnnie of the batch, mounted above him, was a source of pure upheaval.

  She resumed her tricky polemic, her pitch. “Something kept shining on, Mitchell, bright as the north star,” she said, an alluring whisper, her voice dropping lower and lower, “and I followed it here.”

  Mitchell felt too furtive and pathetic and would not respond. The heat from Johnnie’s legs and bottom sank like radioactivity into his flesh, cunning isotopes. He squirmed under her. She rocked perfectly in sync with his movement so he stopped.

  “Johnnie—” he started to say, but she placed a finger on his lips. Bold, worn out, plumes of hair-thin crosshatchings framed the expression of her eyes where one emotion collided with another and paid the toll of contradiction, like shoals thrown up where two currents opposed each other. Deception, passion, their separate reversals—Mitchell could see exactly where they met, barely visible still but given a few years they would advertise an overt brand of duplicity.

  “What we had should never have ended. I invite you to gloat,” she said to him, yet she seemed the one to be gloating. “If you want a true confession, there it is.”

  “What did we have?” The question seemed justified.

  She hovered over him, inches away and bending closer by fractions, her smile enlarging from seductiveness to a wide leer, her makeup breaking down into crystallized particles, a granulation meshed by pores swelling in the tropical heat, the relentlessness of travel; layers of her skin dissolving before his harsh scrutiny; the leathery chap of her lips; a yellowness to the teeth farther back in her mouth, scored and packed with amalgamate. Mitchell blinked and the grotesque focus relaxed, softening her features.

  “Do you want me back, Mitchell? Just say it, one way or the other.”

  “Hey, forget that question.” He propped himself up on his elbows and Johnnie, gripping his biceps, pushed into him.

  “I believe you, Mitchell,” she whispered urgently.

  Through an injured nose Mitchell inhaled whiffs of her hair, her soap and protein. Nothing registered was recognizable as belonging exclusively to Johnnie, and nothing she had said made sense except as subterfuge, because all she was was a runaway, and she had run away from so many people and things that she had begun to repeat herself, lost in her own momentum, a child resurrecting old toys. Her pubis was like a mallet struck against his own, urging him to acquiesce, and her breath pumped into his ear, a narcotic. Mitchell visualized a hormonal flow chart that resembled a metropolitan subway system, all lines headed for the downtown station. The picture went black and he rolled out from under her.

  “You too fahst, gy-url.”

  Johnnie stayed flat on her back, staggered, her legs and arms spread-eagled as though she had fallen from the sky, coaxing her breathing back from its galloping pace. She lifted her head, chagrined but still not thoroughly daunted, her look telling him she unders
tood—whether true or not—what had happened. “Shit,” she said, and let her skull thump back on the floor.

  “I’m sorry, I have to go to work.”

  “Stay. Take the day off. Celebrate me. I need to be celebrated. I really need it, Mitch.”

  “I can’t. I’ll be home in a few hours.”

  He took the guava skins from the plates and flung them into the trees and vines where the side yard ended—just for the relief of throwing, the response of muscles, the useless power. A path led through the underbrush to the shanty of a woman named Mrs. Fetchalub, his closest neighbor. Her weedy children would scamper up to practice karate in the clearing of his property. The playing inevitably ended when one of the kids whirl-kicked another and the victim would crawl off into the bush, yelping like a puppy.

  “Mitchell?”

  On the floor of the veranda, Johnnie appeared expired, undone, physically rebuked, her toes and fingers and eyes swollen, her hair spread in limp swirls, the blue skirt wrinkled and misshapen. She wasn’t looking at him; in fact, her eyes were closed.

  “I’m not a bad person,” she said. “I don’t want you to think that.”

  Chapter 7

  Too weary to ride his bike the three miles into town, Mitchell walked up to the road and took a jitney, grateful for its rank overload of passengers, as anonymous and without expectation as detainees being delivered to a labor camp. He stayed on the transport all the way to Scuffletown, the endlessly propagating pocket of coastal slum on the far side of Queen’s Drop. He could think of nothing else outside of the travesty of Johnnie’s preposterous and damningly provocative justification for being there, until the driver got involved in a race with another jitney around the loop of Belmont Park as they entered the capital, and the sudden violence of speed jolted his concern for Isaac, and Isaac’s troubles restored some perspective to his own.

  Scuffletown was what the world would be—what the world was, actually, in a great many places—without technology, or without a respect for craftsmen and a simple communal standard of caring. It was an overpopulated sprawl of throw-together, condemned by a process greater than any single man’s lack of ambition or resource. It smoked and smoldered and festered like the waterfront encampment of a shipwrecked army, without the heart to live in anything but temporary quarters. Latent removal, kinetic transience, those were the essences of Scuffletown. Everyone who lived there believed they would walk away from it tomorrow and never return. Its crowded haphazardness, so offensively threatening to Mitchell’s sensibilities, was inherent in this disavowal of permanence, and so the community depended not on the government or populist campaigns or even a modest self-reliance for general housekeeping and renewal but on such catastrophes as hurricanes and fires. Scuffletown, ultimately, was the civil service’s pet metaphor for its own ineptness: you’d sooner find a property title in S-town, the hackneyed joke went, than modernize the national hospital, or make sense out of a ministry’s bookkeeping system.

  Mitchell knew he didn’t belong here on its sea-damp unpaved lanes, carefully stretching his legs across sewage trenches, deaf to anyone who approached him for any reason. Scuffletown was semiferal, a bit of behavioral wilderness sometimes dangerous because you could never tell what would be found inciting by the short-fused people you encountered there. One time a man powdered head to toe in sulfur-colored dust had demanded Mitchell give him his tennis shoes. He blocked Mitchell’s way but then the condition for passage was abruptly dropped and Mitchell walked on. On another trip to Isaac’s, when Mitchell stumbled over the point of a rock embedded in the road, a teenage boy came hurtling out of a yard to curse like a psychopath in his face, as if he were a dog asserting its territorial domain, its instinct engaged at the moment Mitchell’s gait faltered. But all in all Scuffletown was not as it appeared. Behind the hellishness there were often extraordinary humans going about their daily business, carrying on a struggle for sanity, grasping at middle-class straws. Such was Isaac’s mother, who had been raised by her grandparents in the country, where she had learned about the island’s wild herbs and bushes. Now, when she wasn’t cooking meals for the Jesuits at St. Mark’s Secondary, she practiced folk medicine out of the three-room house in Scuffletown where she lived with her four sons, Isaac being the eldest, and for her service she collected a trickle of coins still called shillings by the poor.

  That area of tamped and oil-stained sandy dirt in front of the shingled house, previously reserved for Miss Defy: its emptiness filled Mitchell with regret as he came past an untrimmed hedge of ixora into the Knowles’ family compound. The yard was spared the neighborhood’s general desolation by a giant cutlass-scarred hulk of an almond tree and its green chapel of limbs, a bench and a seat from an old schoolbus near its base to accommodate the men and women there to consult with Scuffletown’s bush doctress and receive her herbs and tonics. Mitchell had never been to the house without seeing the seating fully occupied, S-town’s seniors arthritically husking nuts until Mrs. Knowles walked down the hill from St. Mark’s twice a day between breakfast and lunch and again in the afternoon, when the top half of the dutch door would fling open and she would call her patients up to the stoop. For any condition dire and unmanageable they had to drag themselves to the government doctor at Public Health, but for treatment of everyday maladies—the rheumatics and gizzard ache, swamp chill and numerous varieties of rash—Mrs. Knowles’ cures were just the thing, and the price never compounded the ailment.

  Mitchell nodded at the almond pickers camped in the shade, a quartet of uniformly skinny turkey-necked old men, outgrown by their trousers and fiercely bleached shirts buttoned to the throat. To escape astronomical tides, the unpainted house was lifted off the ground on short posts, and he climbed a set of uneven steps, stopping at the threshold, to present himself to Isaac’s mother. Mrs. Knowles sat just inside out of the sun, her feet on the floor and her bottom resting on the edge of a stool drawn up to a sewing table with the undercarriage stripped of its machine. She was emptying the contents of a stone mortar, a tobacco-colored crush of leaves, onto a scrap of coarse paper. A pestle lay nearby next to a modest pile of assorted coins, a pocketknife, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a ball of string, a juice glass full of powder-blue berries. She twisted the corners of the paper together into a wick, and, raising her voice but not her head, summoned her customer from the yard.

  “Mistah Chubbs,” she commanded. “Come.”

  Mitchell stepped aside to make room on the stoop for feeble Mr. Chubbs, who pocketed his remedy in the tent of his pants, counted out his pennies, and left. Mrs. Knowles reached behind her for a ledger on a shelf, opened it, and recorded the transaction with a ballpoint pen tied with rubber bands to the belt of her housedress.

  “Good day, Mistah Wilson,” she said finally, bringing Mitchell to attention with her oblique courtesy. She closed the book and peered up at him over the frame of her reading glasses. There was an unaccountable authority to Isaac’s mother, as if she knew very well the habits and manners of a life different than the one she had settled for, in circumstances where dignity was more than just a refusal to be common. She studied Mitchell with her customary expression of controlled distaste, as though she had a privileged knowledge of him, given access to a dossier he himself had never seen, the contents of which were apparently not flattering.

  “Good day, Mrs. Knowles,” he chimed in response to her own reedy voice. Her presence was like the law. He felt an intractable obligation to be on his best behavior in her vicinity.

  “I’ve come to check on Isaac.”

  She said he hadn’t been home for two days. Mitchell cringed inwardly, dreading the report he must now make. She listened to the bad news without any noticeable reaction.

  “Yes, someone come tell me he see Isaac’s vehicle in de field cane.”

  Her steely motherhood enervated him. Of course she would have gotten wind of the mishap through the island’s network of eager witnesses. “Well,” Mitchell uttered with downcast eyes, chastened
by his exposure to Mrs. Knowles, “I only wanted to make sure Isaac was all right. He got bumped around ... nothing serious though.”

  “Be it so, Mistah Wilson. I shall tell Isaac you stop in when he reach home.” She clasped her hands in a prayerful attitude, the gesture of a headmistress or a nun dismissing a mischief-maker. He started down the steps but turned back. Mrs. Knowles remained immobile.

  “I was wondering, do you have anything to make me sleep better?”

  Wordlessly, she stood up from the stool, aging and diminutive but by no means frail, and swept to the rear of the room, behind a vinyl-covered sofa to a pressed tin cupboard, a plaster Christ, garishly painted, hammered above on a cross, blessing her secrets. She returned in a minute to hand Mitchell a twine-bound bundle of green sprigs that smelled like musty basil. “Boil de leaf and drink de liquor,” she instructed. She gave him something else inside a twist of brown paper. “And dis,” she added, “if de nose continue to bleed, nuh?” She looked beyond him out the door. “Hallo, Mistah Atkin,” she called. “Come straight up, please. What is it you wish, mahn?”

  In all his life Mitchell couldn’t recall a day being so queered by what fell unprecedented into it out of the blue, and on his walk back to Queen’s Drop and the esplanade he ended up with a dollar haircut, another of fate’s small extortions that he hadn’t planned on and definitely didn’t want, unless it was going to advance his sense of a world brimmed with queer opportunity. Instead, he was being used as an example for the other side of the debate, set out in a pond where chance and coincidence circled like sharks. As Mitchell hiked through Scuffletown on the nameless harbor street that was little more than a widened ditch, clogged with motor scooters and foot traffic and an occasional rogue flatbed truck hauling sand away from the dirty beach, and donkeys with swollen panniers of charcoal or yams or stockgrass, he began to feel pressed and soon enough he was certain that someone inhabited his shadow—in the S-town idiom, a dog-dance, someone keeping cadence with his own determined pace. He was always a push-ahead walker through the stony looks and silent mendication of the streets, past the burlap-shuttered windows of the dismal shanties, the morose self-absorption of rum shop clientele, the vagrant hostility of youth gangs lounging against broken-down walls, clustered in garbage-sown lots. There was much to see but frankly Mitchell didn’t care to see it. It was out of character for him to slow up so he changed his line of direction instead of his swift step, hoping the hound would move ahead and be gone, but all this accomplished was to provoke a hissing campaign. Terrific, Mitchell cursed without turning around. He was being dogged by one of the militantly useless.