Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  He didn’t have to be at the ministry today, especially now that he knew the Public Lands Development Programme (PLDP) team was out charting the hills and ravines, the disputed pasturelands. Indeed, no one ever said a word to Mitchell on the days he failed to show. When he had moved in last September, he was delegated responsibilities, anointed with a puff of confidence, allowed all the occupational freedoms and available resources he should require, and subsequently ignored. Well, it didn’t disturb him. Mitchell liked his work, even as he was beginning to discover it was irrelevant, that its contribution would be negligible, until certain political matters within the coalition were laid to rest. Then perhaps he would be called upon, and he would be ready, sitting on the answers in a lotus position, the ministry’s own imported guru from the Church of the Impossible Reform.

  There was little reason to be there today, but anywhere was better than Howard Bay, making cocoa tea for Johnnie. Forget that. How much time would it take to recover from the lightning bolt of her reappearance, that smelly sachet of words she unpacked to set up housekeeping. Am I to be loved? Mitchell wondered, but it was not a serious question. There was love and there was leverage, and no mercy to the fools caught between the two.

  Using a pencil, he slit open a thick package of current market reports posted from USDA/Washington and spent the rest of the day trekking through a friendly forest of statistics, updating forecasts he had compiled for the island’s crops, rewriting sections of the PLDP proposal newly affected by trends he determined in world prices. Keeping the ship in shape, no urgency to it. He could have been daydreaming in a cathedral to the vaulted echoes of an Anglican choir. Numbers and music shared of course the same patterns of elegance, even when the figures exalted only aubergines.

  Or ... bananas, Mitchell stage-whispered, giddy as the afternoon slipped on. The people of London are rioting for bananas. They must have more of these sweet yellow tubes—they demand it. More vanilla for their cakes. More ginger for their beer. The people in London are begging for their goddamn bananas.

  Mitchell occupied himself this way until late in the afternoon when his ability to manipulate the ten-fingered chords of calculations faltered, the sheets of statistics fusing together into a jungle of Sanskrit. He admitted he was dead tired and therefore must return home.

  The windward coast jitney dropped him off on the road above the cottage at dusk. He thought he would be greeted by an atmosphere he was less accustomed to than the silence he found behind the door. Johnnie? he said, without getting a response. Maybe she was gone already, another of her assaults on this day of inexplicable recesses in reality, but of course the house would feel different, would feel right, if that were true.

  “Hello,” Mitchell said. “Johnnie?”

  He went to the kitchen and drank orange juice out of a jar in the refrigerator. Through the bank of louvered windows he checked for her but she wasn’t there, even though that’s where he had pictured her, in the hammock reading a book, watching the waves strike the reef, writing postcards to her chain of exes, painting her fingernails. Mitchell needed now to see her perform the most ordinary habits. From the primary specifics of her life, perhaps, he would gain a foothold on this slippery business of being near her again.

  He returned through the house to her room. The door was half opened, the new curtains drawn but the windows unshuttered, inhaling and exhaling the last hour of light with the breeze cuffing the shore. She was fast asleep under the mosquito netting, stopped in her tracks by sleep, her lower legs off the mattress as though she had collapsed without the strength to make herself comfortable. Her skirt and top lay puddled on the floor where she had taken them off. Her body was twisted, her spine flat but her hips rotated at an angle, one thigh thrown over the other, her hands pressed between the flesh below her crotch. The blue panties narrowed and vanished into the gaunt hemispheres of her buttocks. It brought on an unwanted craving, to see her like this, to be able to study her without any emotion or misunderstanding or ploy raising a barrier. If Mitchell held her right now, without disturbing her, the embrace had the potential for innocence, a contact timeless and sublime. Yet she would wake at his touch and misinterpret what he was feeling, his simple desire for holding her, and he would be unable to articulate his motivation. Even thinking about it ruined the moment of anticipation, made the mood illicit, and then the whole scene was trapped in artifice, as though he had walked in on a setup.

  What a strange girl, Mitchell thought, lifting the gauze, bending over her sleeping form, examining her mouth, the lips parted and peaceful yet constrained by a tension that began in a heaviness near the corner of each eye and weighed through the flesh to meet, in parallel swoops, at her chin. Five years ago, losing her was like a practice session with death. Beyond the skin and tissue and blood of that mouth were biochemical imprints, like an abandoned code, of what he had been, and it was just fine with Mitchell that she had taken that other self of his away with her. Whatever else Johnnie intended to bring back to him besides herself, Mitchell wanted no part of it.

  He took a final step and crouched down only inches from touching her. Her breasts were much smaller than he remembered them, and there was a reason for that. They were evenly though lightly tanned, capped with nipples like tarnished pennies, and their shape did not flatten out like jellyfish the way the breasts of most women did when they were on their backs. His nearness must have probed into the gravity of her sleep; her mouth twitched and her eyelids crumpled, papery and blue. Mitchell slowly withdrew, again tracing the length of her with his memory. Her abdomen had a slight, robust puff to it because of the way she was folded. Her legs shifted a few inches as he backed up another step and he saw the first of the other girl’s secrets, a longish scar on the inside of her right knee, a bubble gum cigar where something had taken a chunk out of her. He winced and looked away, finishing his inspection. Her feet were black-soled and much abused. Maybe she had walked barefoot for five years. One of her big toes had an old sticker of scab on it behind the nail. The toe next to it had obviously healed crooked from a break. The sides and bottoms were padded with hard-looking calluses and spattered with the gloss of little scars. An attempt had been made to resurrect their femininity, red polish dabbed on the nails, but nothing could save them from looking like the feet of a homeless vagrant.

  Mitchell let out his breath and stood up, worried about what would happen next. He had never meant to reclaim or re-create her, not in the flesh. That wasn’t it at all. That wasn’t why he wrote the letters, sent the cards, phoned once a year on her birthday, but now he was drearily confused, divided, and as Johnnie had known, unready, a state of being he seemed dumbly fated to keep rediscovering, for what he did next was to step quietly over to the chair next to the wardrobe and do a bit of snooping through one of Johnnie’s straw handbags. Dollar bills and ECC bank notes, a packet of airplane peanuts, cigarettes, Tampax, Chapstick, a plane ticket voucher booked one-way: Honolulu, Los Angeles, Denver, Miami, Antigua, Barbados, St. Catherine, with a return leg to Barbados. Johnnie’s Atlas of Mundi Novus, her own New World. And her passport, her picture flirting with the camera, issued to Johanna Mae Fernandez. Somewhere out on the trail, Johnnie had taken an alias or gotten married.

  He got out of the room, carefully shutting the door behind him. Food and convalescence were as far as Mitchell needed to think. He went back through the dark house to the kitchen, not bothering with lights, and set a pan of water to boil on the hotplate with Isaac’s mother’s leaves. He fixed a bachelor’s dinner, a sandwich made with a stale roll and canned cheese and mustard, ate it while he walked around, restless, making sure the doors and windows were locked for the night. In another hour the southeastern district where he lived would be plunged into blackness as the island’s utility company cut the power, shedding electricity for a four-hour span, rotating districts each night to conserve energy and distribute hardship equally. Teef time, the islanders called it.

  The tea had a mushroomy flavor to it, woodsy, w
ith an aftertaste of quinine. It seemed to parch his mouth as he gulped it down. Mitchell went to his own room, lay on top of the bedspread, anxious to feel sleepy, praying to be taken out, but his mind started up again like a squirrel on a tree limb somewhere above, nattering rodent invective, and just as he was beginning to despair that Mrs. Knowles’ bush tea was worthless, he became concurrently afraid that it was something more than a mere sedative. There was a sensation of a hallucinogenic door being swung open. Mitchell’s squirrel brain was chased off by the gathering presence of something owl-like and large, a winged shape which kept expanding, and he felt himself being squeezed so hard that tears came to his eyes. This near-panic was followed by a relaxation of the effect and then an overwhelming sense of well-being, but—and this was entirely lucid—there was a horizon defined by a profound melancholy, and he was traveling toward it at great speed. Before he could get there, Mitchell felt himself being slammed down, getting knocked to his knees in rough shorebreak and sucked along a silky bottom into unconsciousness.

  Chapter 8

  The minister of agriculture’s three-car motorcade ascended a dirt road to an isolated clearing in the humid bush from where Mitchell, his imported American, had spent all morning surveying the possibilities of the land below, a high jungled-up valley in Kingsley’s home district, a copra plantation until the end of the second world war. Evidently, Kingsley had ordered the rugged excursion on impulse, interrupting an audience with some visiting delegation of what—investors?—to drag them all out into the countryside. His solemn entourage followed a step behind him, perspiring in their business suits, while the drivers remained with the vehicles. The noise from one of their car radios sounded thin and ineffective and even, Mitchell thought, oddly nostalgic and comforting within the scope of the mountain and all the territory opened up to the view below them.

  The minister, it seemed, had an urge to hear Mitchell talk. Tell me about what you see, Mistah Wilson, he said with a disarmingly shy grin, this fat old man with power. Please, go ahead. Say. He encouraged the air with his hands. Runnels of sweat darkened the front of his white shirt and spread in a line along his waistband. Stickers clung to his trousers from the grasses he had walked through.

  Mitchell explained how the valley could best be transformed into a showcase of agrarian production: diversify crops, introduce high-profit exotics, irrigate the lowlands and plant labor-intensive rice, establish a regional base of agri-industries. Arable land was such and such a percent. Grazing land was such and such.

  Kingsley stood by and listened, nodding serenely, as if there were a rare pleasure to be gained from hearing an outsider speak of the future of the land the old man had been born to. He radiated peace of spirit, love of home. Then, without a visible change of mood, he became inscrutable.

  And Mistah Wilson, you have seen my bad children, nuh?

  Sir?

  Here. Up in the bush.

  I don’t understand, Minister.

  Jack Nasty? You see him too?

  No, sir. Nobody.

  You have become very important to me, Mistah Wilson. To our efforts, he said, his expression darkening, not to be trifled with, and then he left, followed by his flock of puzzled guests, without saying another word.

  Not without difficulty, the three cars were turned around in the rough clearing and disappeared in front of a column of yellow dust. The dust, chasing the invisible cars down the mountain, had its own dislocated beauty, like sky writing, or a long celebratory streamer being unfurled on the slope. When silence returned to the mountainside, Mitchell sat down on a flat rock with his notepad and, for a reason he could not fathom, sketched smokestacks and freeways and skyscrapers into the panorama of the valley, a fantasy of urban defilement that he exed over and threw into the weeds.

  Kingsley was one of the Katie-boys, one of the few, who had the authority to get things done, but what Mitchell had seen for himself of Kingsley was not sufficient to develop a reliable opinion of the man. They had met only once before, on Mitchell’s first day of work, directed into the Honorable J. W. Kingsley’s unpresuming office through a door no more auspicious than a broom closet’s to have his hand taken indifferently into the minister’s corpulent paw. The new agricultural economist, the CAO Mr. Samuels said, introducing Mitchell.

  You shall learn something here, Mistah Wilson, Kingsley told him. His countenance remained impersonal, tutorial, as if it were essential that Mitchell understand that his education had begun at that very moment. Mitchell felt an old instinct return, the rebelliousness of the precocious student, but the chief agricultural officer ushered him from the office before he could diplomatically remind the minister that their incipient relationship was not conceived as a one-way street, that the island’s request for assistance was not the equivalent of creating an opportunity for a white boy to earn postgraduate credit hours. He would have stuck his young foot in it too if Samuels hadn’t whisked him away to a sequence of more affable introductions, fellows genuinely pleased to have Mitchell aboard.

  Like everybody else on St. Catherine, Mitchell tried to remember to dial in Kingsley’s Sunday night radio speeches—monologues about bizarre phenomena, seasoned with religious metaphor and mysticism, cunningly pierced with one-line directives concerning the most current legislation, and innuendos about unnamed enemies. He had heard Kingsley give a speech on sunglasses and hats, the effects these items produced in their wearers—the minister did not like caps or tinted glasses that obscured the face; he considered them styles of the criminal class. The hour-long analysis ended in an exhortation to plant seven more tons of carrots in the northern co-ops. Mitchell had heard a speech about Savannah, Georgia, which Kingsley had apparently visited in the wintertime as a young cook’s mate aboard a freighter. This particular and peculiar soliloquy focused on grilled meats, the inhumanity of racism compounded by cold weather, and finally the efficacy of the Monroe Doctrine, which Kingsley was all for, he vowed, though he lambasted its inconsistent interpretation by American presidents. There were speeches about telekinetic force and herbal cures for cancer, one about how Moses and Joshua divided the land beyond the Jordan River for the men of Israel, one which ended citing a new charter for the Marketing Board but which began with a tribute to Lord Mountbatten, a strange thirdhand account of episodes with the earl in India during the world war. The plagues of communism, Arab control of the planet’s oil, muckraking journalism, and insupportable tariffs were noted at random throughout most; of Kingsley’s presentations. His broadcasts were, in fact, sort of a folk hit, a screwy evening’s entertainment in the shops and shanties burning their lanterns throughout the isolated countryside, like boats at sea dependent on the air waves to assure them they were part of the black, larger world beyond the light.

  Why had Kingsley sought him out this morning, far out here in the bush? Mitchell couldn’t say, but the minister’s appearance, so unlikely, disturbed him, providing notice that attention had somehow gathered around him, and Mitchell wasn’t a person who appreciated unsolicited attention. Instead of returning to the ministry offices to do the paperwork he had planned, Mitchell stayed on that flat rock throughout the afternoon, staring at the land below like a hawk, like a lone wolf, secure in the knowledge of being far removed from the necessary pursuits of bureaucratic survival.

  He sat, perched in the sun, knowing this was the last frontier for the convertive passions. The tropics. Impure and trodden though it may be, the world between Cancer and Capricorn was remote enough to still have its hinterland attraction, that psychic glint and sparkle in the smoky rags of its wilderness for pioneers born belatedly into the Aquarian Age. For what passed in the twentieth century as frontiersmen: would-be individualists rebelling against the vague brutalities of middle-class lives; centurions from the suburbs, the offshore mavericks, the missionaries of industry and guardians of the endangered thing; the mall culture fugitives, the explorers of psy-choactivity; the Marco Polos of consumerism and the Magellans of avarice; the cinema bwanas, the
pilgrims of strangeness, the glory dreamers—all the restless souls who were going to jump right out of their skin unless they moved out in the direction of the equator, latitude zero, a band of the world that offered opportunities of the absolute—absolute success, absolute failure, absolute depravity. They came to it not as they would have in the past, as men encountering an enslaved virgin who would acquiesce to rough treatment, but as courtiers trying to win the attention of a harridan widow, a mauled-over bitch who had inherited the broken kingdoms of her ancestors. Either way, you could hardly call it romance.

  When Mitchell was growing up back in the Sixties, it was supposed that the Western nations had launched a war of money against the world’s weaklings, paving the filthy streets of their cities with gold, but whoever believed that was conveniently deluded. The cash boomeranged back home into the accounts of all the players, or fattened the waistlines of baby-faced potentates by another twelve inches. Sometimes the money never existed at all, except as an imaginary understanding, like Peter Pan, or the tooth fairy. It was a magic act, the foreign aid biz. One hundred percent overhead. He had never heard it discussed in terms of changing some poor fellow’s hard life for the better except in classrooms or on television. Almost every economist he knew at the university behaved like a demagogic oracle from the Middle Ages. They found more ways to explain things then there were things to explain. Out in the field, the only programs that ever got off the ground played as a quick fix for junked-out clients.