Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  “Ssssssst ... blaireau.”

  A blaireau was not much of a beast, but the anachronistic Creole slur tweaked Mitchell’s curiosity. If he was to be identified as a carrier of geopolitical virus and racial infection, he would have chosen to be represented by a varmint with a more noxious reputation than the blond island raccoon. What kind of a world was this anyway where raccoons had to take the blame for rats. For the most part, Mitchell didn’t care any longer who fucked who, when, how, or why, because there was no doubt in his mind that he was not the oppressor or his direct descendent or his surrogate, and he knew that guys like the one probably on his heels were revolutionary fantasts, prodded by demons which for lack of a better name Mitchell called the Barbeques, since these particular malefactors were great advocates of arson, enraptured by the vision of persons, institutions, countries, and even systems of thought bursting into fire.

  When Mitchell stagger-stepped, his shadow, thrown out of dog-dance rhythm, walked smack into his back. Mitchell pivoted reluctantly to get the confrontation over with. Dressed in surplus camouflage pants and a pale blue tee shirt advertising Disney World, his ridiculously large paratrooper boots worn with no better reason than as weapons, he shifted his weight from leg to leg, a surprisingly puny but lithe youth with brimstone eyes fixed unwaveringly on Mitchell’s own. In proper acolyte fashion, the guy’s head was shaved right down to his nicked, morocco scalp. His sour lips were encircled by a devilish mustache and goatee, or rather a goatee that would have been truly evil-looking on a less boyish mug. Born to be a fucking nuisance, Mitchell thought, perhaps giving himself too much credit for upstandingness. Mitchell took his cue from the Latter Day Saints, smiling.

  “Are you going where I’m going, brother?”

  The youth was momentarily stumped, but recovered enough to extract a handgun from the baggy pockets of his fatigues, and although he didn’t exactly aim it at Mitchell, the way he enjoyed testing the weight in his palm suggested the aim would follow the splendid thrill of having a gun in his hand, in daylight and on a crowded street. Here we go, Mitchell thought, still smiling with sham crusading fellowship of the heaven-bound yet unable to speak. The Barbeques were really mixing it up in this rookie’s brain. It was no use trying to pacify him, and no good trying to explain, if Mitchell could, that he was more or less on his side, that Mitchell too believed in the folk remedies of change and justice—and Mitchell sure as hell knew they didn’t look like this. Here was what happened when the Barbeques got excited and lifted one of St. Catherine’s assholes out of the slumber of Pavlovian drool and snarl, promoting them to assholes with a vital agenda. Mitchell squinted at the pistol—he had seen so few handguns in his life he couldn’t even be positive this one was real.

  “Where you belong, eh?” It was an ambiguous challenge, almost a repartee to his own inquiry, and the guy scowled, shocking Mitchell further by slipping the gun back into his pants. He wasn’t going to be shot—immediately, anyway—for being smug.

  Likewise, he wasn’t going to stand still as a bull’s-eye for every fucker’s manhood on the island. Mitchell pivoted a second time and began to hurry away. The guy’s hand dropped on Mitchell’s shoulder. Where you belong? It was a damn good question but Mitchell wasn’t in the mood to open up for it. Without looking around, Mitchell dipped and side-stepped away from under his grasp, its pinch of overgrown fingernails, and ducked briskly onto a footpath that ran between the shanties to the first sanctuary in sight, two outdoor barbers plying their trade on the bottle-littered beach. One of them worked on a drowsing customer who sat on a plank of driftwood stretched between the trunks of two coconut palms undermined by erosion, their crowns phototropically bent, reared like snakes on the defense. The other barber perched nearby on a limestone outcropping and ruminated on the view of Queen’s Drop’s placid harbor, two freighters off-loading at the wharves. There was an available seat, a metal kitchen chair with its back snapped off. Mitchell plunked down on it as though he were late for an appointment. The barber engaged with his client paused. The one on the rock looked over slowly, highly suspicious. The emissary of the Barbeques had tailed Mitchell as far as the top of the beach and hesitated to come closer. Whatever prevented his approach did not however apply to his tongue.

  “You ain belonga we, eh? Which side you from?”

  Did he mean Windward or Leeward, Mitchell wondered. Or did he mean right or wrong?

  The barber on the rock stood up, quick to understand what was happening. He advanced with his scissors pointed at Mitchell’s assailant’s chest. Mitchell couldn’t make up his mind to warn him about the gun.

  “Move on, toughie,” the barber commanded in a voice not easily ignored. “You ain trouble today, bwoy.” The barber, who had a pugilist’s face and muscles that seemed flexed even in their relaxed state, clearly was a local personality of no slight reputation, someone you didn’t fool with, even with an armed advantage. More than the potential for violence, the youth’s grin, a reptilian disfigurement of an attitude that had already gone too far, got to Mitchell. He decided he was staying put. The barber came back to his rock and sat down.

  “Pay him no mind, mahn,” he said, staring back out into the harbor. “Daht bwoy juss noise on de road.”

  The second barber, plump and correspondingly jovial, resumed his leisurely clipping after cutting his eyes in the direction of the militant shadow. “Daht bwoy,” he explained while gently stroking the pate of his still-drowsing customer, “him go off on a wuk boat lass year ... Panama line, eh Jonesy?, and come home wit he head spinnin in shit. Pay him no mind, skip.”

  “He has a gun in his pocket.”

  “Oh ho? Maybe so, but him ain got no bullet.”

  Out of the corner of Mitchell’s eye, he could see the youth dawdling not so far down the erratic row of gray shacks, in no rush to disappear, and could hear him cussing and mumbling as his boots bulldozed through the sand.

  “Can I get a haircut?” Mitchell asked.

  The proposition alarmed the barber on the rock. He thought about it, frowning, his face seamed with doubt. He glanced over at his colleague and then back at Mitchell.

  “I ain ahs yet cut a white mahn’s locks,” he confessed, adding, “I ain so much ahs touch a white mahn’s head in me life.”

  “You pussy, bwoy,” the second barber hee-hawed. Mitchell saw him wink his way. “He fraid, skip.”

  Neither barber, in their tight-fitting tee shirts and faded bathing trunks, appeared lacking in backbone or mettle. Both were as burly as stevedores, which likely was their preferred profession. The one named Jonesy, looking undecided, spread open the scissors in his hand and, in one of the many thin channels of ideograms worn into the limestone, began an irresolute sharpening of the blades. There was a rock like this one, custard limestone, to the rear of the beach in Howard Bay, the site of the first white settlement on the island, where for centuries men had honed their cutlasses, their machetes and butcher knives, the steel filing an inscrutable map of lines sliced deep in the stone. Tillman, when Mitchell stayed at Rosehill Plantation during his first weeks on the island, had been the one to show Mitchell the block. He remembered him saying, Here, look at this ... this rock is St. Catherine. It’s all right here in the limestone.

  Jonesy shook out the cloth he had been sitting on, a flour sack with its seams unstitched, and draped it over Mitchell’s shoulders, tucking the top edge into the collar of the white man’s workshirt. He stood back with his hands on his stout hips, sucking his teeth, sizing up the intricacies of the job before him. His misgivings seemed to cause him indigestion. He burped nervously and took a step toward Mitchell.

  “I ain know about dis,” he worried. He was on his guard, watching Mitchell as if there were a wildcat poised on his skull. “I ain know but one style.”

  Mitchell too was beginning to think the haircut was no longer a necessary tactic. The conflict had been effectively preempted, the kid had shoveled himself out of sight, and Jonesy seemed to think he couldn’t lay his
hands on Mitchell without a degree from beauty college. But the other barber merrily taunted his partner forward until the issue became a point of honor, advising him to just trim around until he got a feel for it. Jonesy bent his knees and walked a circle around Mitchell, scrutinizing the length and thickness of his hair, the wave of incomprehensible curls that swept back from Mitchell’s forehead past his eyes, the feathering at the nape of Mitchell’s neck. He reached for one of these bunches and rubbed it tentatively between thumb and forefinger. “Oh ho,” he said, enlightened, locating by his touch a problem that confirmed what his professional eye had suspected. Taking a primitive turtle shell pick-comb from his waistband, he raked Mitchell’s hair with considerate strokes first one way then another, learning who knows what from his experiment. The partner observed this grim procrastination and told Jonesy once again that he was impaired by fundamental pussiness. Eventually Jonesy settled on a starting point—to the front of Mitchell’s right ear, where the flaxen current of hair rippled into an abrupt sideburn—and commenced snipping, strand by individual strand. After only a minute of this fastidious work Jonesy’s colleague hummed critically, and then he began to scoff and kibitz.

  “Nah, daht ain de way you snip a white fella’s roof.”

  Six more hairs fell, one at a time, all cursive els to the precise zeroes and cramped esses the barber customarily manufactured with his scissors. Mitchell watched a bead of sweat slide from the barber’s forehead and off the tip of his meaty nose.

  “Nah, you too shy, bwoy, peck peck peckin so, like de mahn have a blahck fella’s wool.” The rounder barber abandoned his own somnolent customer to shamble over and supervise Jonesy.

  “Lean into it so.” The second man pantomimed hedge shearing.

  “There’s no hurry.” Mitchell flinched.

  “Progress slow, bwoy. By de time Jonesy reach de next side, de bush grow bahck on de fust.”

  Jonesy jerked his head with exasperation toward the forgotten customer. “Gwan bahck to Alphonse. Him goin wake up soon.”

  “Here now, look,” the second barber said, unable to keep himself from intervening. There was a slicing bite from the slim metal blades. A sheaf of sun-lightened hair bounced down Mitchell’s arm into the sand.

  “Too deep, nuh?” said Jonesy.

  “Fuss, fuss. You ain see ahead to de finish line.” Another batch fell free, scattering in Mitchell’s lap. “Look how she smood right up,” boasted the happy barber. Jonesy was sent away to continue grooming the drowser, who had just come from an eleven-to-eleven shift at the Ju-C bottling factory, according to Mitchell’s new attendant. Mitchell shut his eyes, resigned to the usurper’s brazen self-confidence, his native enthusiasm for defoliation. The scissors drove and plowed everywhere on Mitchell’s scalp, giving the impression that his hair was being scythed by a mad anarchist, an outcast of the trade.

  “‘Scuse, skippah, but I does enjoy conversation and psychology while in operation.”

  “I think you might be trimming it too short.”

  “Too shawt? Nah, skip, plenty locks left up here.” The barber tousled what remained on Mitchell’s scalp to prove his point; Mitchell felt bristles springing back into place. “So, skip, Abdul give you a fright, nuh? Daht bwoy low on brainage.”

  “Who’s Abdul?”

  “Daht bwoy people does cy-ahll Petey. He name heself Abdul, heh-heh. Abdul, like ahn Arab mahn. De fella tryin to hawk de gun.”

  “Wait a minute,” Mitchell argued. “He wasn’t walking around trying to become salesman of the week.”

  “Aw,” sympathized the barber, “doan pay him no mind. Petey got a rude technique, eh? Him a dontcarish fella, a simple bwoy wit rough fancy. But de bwoy’s muddah sick, ya know, and I does believe he lookin to sell daht gun he teef someplace when he ship out.”

  Mitchell didn’t welcome the barber’s rationalization, though it explained the odd way the kid had displayed the gun. Now everything seemed foolish again and Mitchell felt queasy, a player that can’t be retired off the field no matter how many wrong moves he’s made. He tried to look over at the drowser, full of envy for how well he was handling his affairs, but the barber twisted Mitchell’s head like a top and Mitchell closed his eyes, willing to let things happen.

  “So, skip,” the barber talked on as his scissors harvested, “ain many tourists take de Queen’s road ahll de way to Scuff Town.”

  Mitchell had a weakness, one that he was overly conscious of, of describing, popularizing, and, if it came to that, defending his presence on the island.

  “I’m not a tourist,” he answered glumly, still finding it hard to break the routine. “I live in Howard Bay.”

  “True?” said the barber. “So how you find life on St. Catherine?”

  “Piss-to-windward,” Mitchell said, which was the accepted Catherinian response. In the wake of the barber’s explosive laughter, which affected Mitchell like a gate swinging open, he pushed right along into a rant, a billingsgate monologue of details about Johnnie.

  “Mmm, mmm,” the barber grunted happily, a confidante to many tales of woe. “True, true,” as if he had known everything all along.

  “The contact had worn thin. In another year or less, she would have vanished into oblivion.”

  “Right, right.” The barber wheezed with pleasure.

  “And now here she is, staying at my house. Like a robber come back to the bank to open an account.”

  The barber, who had ceased his clipping at the start of this outpouring, nodded appreciatively. “You see daht a lot in Scuffyville, skippah. We is dy-ahmn funny daht way.”

  “The thing is,” Mitchell lamented, “she knows I know. So why the snowjob?”

  “Snowjob?”

  “Exactly. Why can’t she just play an old friend passing through and leave it at that? Instead, she’s going in for this big Hollywood performance.”

  The barber paused to mull this over. “You must outwit she,” he decided. “Employ psychology.”

  Mitchell realized, beyond the concord of the moment’s dialogue, they were both incurable in their separate points of view. He shut his mouth now that the fellow had passed on his wisdom, and resolved to shut it in a more than immediate context, that is, to leave Johnnie alone, to help her in any way she needed to be helped.

  The scissors passed over his head in a final strafing. A thunderstruck congregation of bowl-bellied raglings and uniformed schoolchildren, off for lunch, had swarmed out of the dirt yards and shanties to witness this mysterious event, a white man getting scalped on the Scuffletown beach. Only now, surveying the amazement on the children’s smooth faces, Mitchell felt utterly estranged from the surroundings, and saw what only a camera would compose: a young man hunkered on the fringe of a foreign slum, a North American with an anemic hard-luck story he has recently divulged to the gathering. His ankles are reddened by sand-flea bites, his head has been shorn to indicate his reduction in status. The expression on his face suggests he has unraveled under cross-examination, that he’s been placed on trial before a mob of youngsters and beachkids and defended himself without cleverness, and that momentarily the children will bind him up and stew his unworthy carcass in a man-sized cookpot on the once glorious strand. A wanderer, the camera would show, on the brink of the disastrous.

  The barber swept the clippings from Mitchell’s neck and shoulders with a palm frond. One preschool ragling, whose tee shirt wouldn’t have made it at a carwash, asked a companion with white paste smeared around his mouth if Mitchell were the queen. A girl in a school frock rapped the questioner from behind for this gross mistake. A number of mutts shook themselves out from the throng and discovered each other in the open space between Mitchell and the ring of children. Two scabby males lunged together, fighting at, and then on top of, his feet. The barber who would employ psychology stepped into the fray, kicking the closest dog with such force that, instantly, it pissed blood, squatting like a female. Its former foe did the yipping and crying, however, racing down the windrow of the tide
line like a haunted fox.

  “Pay dem beast no mind,” Jonesy said, still engaged with piecework on the drowser, the most carefree soul in Scuffletown.

  The Ministry of Agriculture, emptied for lunch, was a veritable Swiss embassy of escape, a haven from the outlandish conspiracies of the outside world. The greatest loss of the unemployed on St. Catherine was that they were without a workplace to hide in. Mitchell trudged down the hall toward his corner office, detouring into the washroom to assess the damage to his hair. The cut wasn’t so bad, actually, only shorter than it had been in many years. He stared at himself in the filmy mirror, accepting the conclusion that short hair made him look older and, unfortunately, mean.

  On his desk were two memos, reminders that Mitchell was part of a greater plan and bigger operation than the bagatelles of his private life. One informed him that the team he worked with had gone up the leeward coast for the day—another survey, the third, of the Phibbs Estate. The second memo officially required his attendance at a staff meeting called for Friday, the day after tomorrow, written and placed there on his vintage manual typewriter. The note was signed and dated by the chief agricultural officer, Mr. Samuels. Work to do, Mr. Samuels announced. I work, you work, he she and it works, Mitchell muttered, making an effort to focus on what he should be doing, the churning distraction of Johnnie reestablished in his head, a nagging grind, like a cement mixer operating one street over. God works, the devil works, the planet resonates with the dialectic of their labor while the idle luxuriate in desolation. That’s right, Mitchell said, responding to his own rhetoric. Slackers beware. Something unexpected had come up, the note told him. Quite right. The unexpected always does.