Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  “Didn’t you tell me you had hired an entire new staff?”

  “Two sets of them in the past month. They won’t stay.” The former cook threw in the apron when Tillman’s mother died, deciding to go home to her village on the leeward side where she was born. Now she was raising grandchildren while her daughters froze in Boston and Montreal. He had hired several cooks since then, same with the maids. After a day or two they complained of headaches, cramps, shivers. They believed there was a spell cast on Rosehill and claimed to see the duppy of Tillman’s mother swimming around the corridors of the manor house, enticing them with a fruit slice on a spoon. With the next group of people he hired, Tillman said he would bring in an exorcist, or fake an exorcism, something to soothe the native imaginations of the labor pool.

  In the refrigerator, there was some unlikely aborted thing squashed into a stainless-steel bowl. Mitchell suggested the exorcist start here. “What is this creature,” he asked, poking its plastic-white surface. “And is it edible?”

  It happened to be an octopus a fisherman had brought Tillman two or three days ago. He had removed its skin and parboiled it and there it sat, chilled and bald and dead, a snack of weird marine life. Mitchell ruminated on the hideous milky flesh, thinking, I am going to eat that octopus. He lifted the animal by a flaccid, slippery tentacle and bit off about four inches, the tasteless meat expanding in his mouth as he chewed, the sucker nodules like hard silicone jujubes, and his jaw soon hurt from grinding on it. He tried to swallow but gagged. Johnnie came out of breath into the kitchen while he stood there choking, holding the octopus like Medusa’s head.

  “Fucking Christ!” She did a double take. “What in the world are you trying to eat?” She set her tub of dishes down and fanned herself with a saucer, her face flushed. Mitchell slipped the octopus into the slops bucket where it would be delivered as breakfast to an island pig, and tried to recover his dignity.

  “You look as if you’ve been dancing,” he said.

  “I have. Your rum punch has made people stinko. I’ve been goosed and hugged I don’t know how many times.”

  “Where’s Adrian?” Tillman wondered, drying his hands on the curtain above the sink.

  Johnnie rolled her eyes and said Adrian had been captured by an obnoxious German and made to sit in his lap.

  “That may be merely justice at work.”

  “All right,” said Tillman as he switched to a clean shirt. “Let’s all escape.” They had prevailed with great courage in the trenches of tourism, but enough was enough.

  On the other side of the door, the restaurant was experiencing a communal release of inhibition. A foursome of silver-haired diners were on their feet interpreting the loud reggae music through geriatric experiments in body language, their dancing a quasi-erotic hybrid of the polka and the twist. A young man and a young woman who had dined separately had discovered they were both from the Midwest and were introducing themselves with vigorous kisses and bottom squeezing. A man Mitchell had last seen sullen, dressed in a polyester suit like a television deacon, sang the chorus of the island’s most current hit, “You Sexy Thing,” to his pudding-faced wife, who reacted with a fierce broadcast of contempt. A trio of marmish women, red as radishes from the sun, hooked their arms around each other and sought to make a respectable exit but entangled their six feet and crumbled, in slow motion, down. Another pair of women with bleached hair and big red mouths slandered one another, their Long Island accents like dentist drills whining through the general turbulence while their husbands slumped in their chairs, puffing cigars. Other ladies cooled themselves off with napkin fans, tugged their skirts up past midthigh, loosened the top buttons of their blouses. Half the diners seemed to be sharing wanton jokes and coarse anecdotes with the other half who, trying to be receptive, fought to keep their eyes from crossing.

  They rescued Adrian from her Aryan kidnapper just as he began to fold with sentimentality. Tillman locked the kitchen and the bar cabinets and put another record on the stereo, a Sinatra album to sedate his guests, nudge them toward the maudlin stage of intoxication that the German had pioneered. In a short speech Tillman bid the customers good evening, told them they were on their own, encouraged them to feel at home—which meant they should not destroy anything on the premises.

  “Douse the lights,” a celebrant yelled as the Sinatra came over the sound system, and his call was approved by consensus.

  Out in the breezeway Tillman confronted Adrian. “Did you make that man cry?”

  “No! That ass told me he cried all the time because he had missed the war.”

  Inside the foyer the night desk clerk, a slim young black woman with a dandelion puff of hair, was asleep on her stool, slumped onto her arms, a pencil planted in one fist, a neat stack of schoolbooks off to the side. Adrian snorted. “Why couldn’t she help out in the restaurant when that other bitch quit?”

  “That person’s doing exactly what I pay her to do,” Tillman said, unaffected by Adrian’s tone.

  “She seems absolutely useless to me,” Adrian replied as they walked past the unconscious girl and out the front door. “I don’t see how you can run a business this way.”

  Tillman said he thought getting accepted premed at Harvard hardly struck him as useless, that the girl had no peace at home, and no money, and so on the contrary her presence was useful because it made him feel useful, able to provide her with a small amount of both. Tillman put his arm around Adrian’s shoulder.

  “I didn’t mind that much, really,” Adrian cooed. Oh, brother, Mitchell thought; Johnnie suppressed a snort. “But my feet are killing me.”

  “Shhh.” Tillman made everyone stop. “Listen ... hear it?”

  Quietly they huddled together on the cobbles of the drive. Artificial embers of colored light were suspended in a fragrant moist hush of darkness pinholed high above by brighter than ever stars. The ubiquitous flora gushed in waves around them, soft, curling, ticklish. They listened with progressive expectations—What do you want the world to be? the night asked, and could this be it? There was a big noise. Invisible insects and frogs transmitted a fuzzy radio hum of startling magnitude. A breeze fluffed the topmost branches of a mass of mango trees so that the leaves reflected scratches of light and looked like a school of bait fish changing direction, turning toward the attraction of a rising half moon.

  “Hear it?” Tillman repeated.

  Smooth pebbles plunked into different volumes of water—music. Round notes effervesced up the hill from the beach, were lost in eddies and dead pockets and then recovered, fading but heard again as if they rode a tidal flux in the atmosphere. Pan music, the latent harmony in metal, resurrected from debris on the wharves and refineries of Trinidad by illiterate laborers. Those men had taught themselves how to seize what was empty and refill it with desire. For any magic, emptiness was the first criterion—a space, an object, a human soul or a steel petrol drum drained of its former content and then reconstituted to carry the flow of something vital, like these sounds in the night.

  The spell of listening was broken by Grampa Hell the gardener materializing out of the darkness, greeting them with a grunt and a flash from the blade of his machete before he disappeared again into a tunnel of his own making. Tillman led them onward to his estate runabout, a battered but rebuilt Mahari Citroen, roofless and windowless with lawn chairs for seats and a body of shellacked plywood. Underdog, Rosehill’s mutt, was asleep in it and they chased him out, climbed in themselves.

  “Are we ready?” Tillman asked, picking through his ring of keys. Mitchell wasn’t but failed to say so. He wanted to remain as they were for eternity, in the dark and ready to go, Rosehill all lit up with pointless celebration and the liquid music from below heard and not heard, spindrift melody so delicate you could believe if you wanted that it came from inside yourself.

  “Fire her up,” Johnnie said. Adrian bounced in her seat.

  “Ready, steady, go.”

  Inserting the key, Tillman demolished every illus
ion of peace born by the night air, for the Mahari without a muffler had the vocal chords of heavy machinery. Mitchell, who had lost faith in modern forms of transportation on Ooah Mountain, was nervous in his flimsy seat, expecting the worst, a part of him even welcoming it. “Into the sea,” he shouted over the noise. Tillman wiggled the shifter into first gear and they chugged forward down the ravine of the drive, the volume of the puny two-cylinder motor reaching a warlike howl, each cobblestone registered rudely through worn-out shocks, steering around crapauds illuminated like petty thieves in the sweep of headlights. Next to Mitchell Johnnie did something mildly exaggerated and rambunctious—she stood up for the thrill of the wind, though they couldn’t have been more exposed to it as they were—and even though at first Mitchell tried to restrain her he stopped himself and simply held on to her knees and watched her above him, anonymous in the rush through the dark, and continued on a train of reasoning he had boarded since seeing her at the airport, hearing her inadequate justification for her return. He was forced to recognize that, for the sake of love itself, every statement of love must be judged harshly, that the planet was inflated with unwarranted statements of love, swollen with the prayers and invocations of love in books, on television, in advertisements as well as on gravestones, a frightful escalation in the volume of love’s voice that was slowly scarring his inner ear, rendering unfit his ability to hear what others truly felt, and if it kept on, one day he would likely find himself tone deaf to humanity, which is a way of saying he would mistake every human sound as the plea of men and women he could not possibly help.

  Rosehill’s beach bar had a personality that made it ideologically separate from the hotel on the hill. If the Plantation was, in a manner of speaking, a tomb or theme park or museum for the march of European sensibilities through the West Indies, then the beach bar was one of the island’s stewpots for tomorrow’s national picnic, the we-ahll-is-one picnic promised by the calypso singers, the trade unions, the ministers, the churchmen, by men as opposed in their vision as Joshua Kingsley and Edison Banks. So the beach bar complemented the mother operation with a life of its own, the offspring of a parent who found it necessary to draw a line between who could be brought home and who could not. A hotel overrun by local characters whose profession seemed to be overrunning places was not colorful and authentic, merely volatile. The bar therefore existed as a buffer, a free-market zone serving anyone who bellied forward into it with no apparent mischief in mind. The concrete dance patio was available to every kid courageous enough to come out of the bushes, any teenager with enough aplomb and pluck to approach the young women of another country, another class, a different race; any coconut higgler or hand-line fisherman who secretly believed there was a playboy prince inside of him, waiting for an invitation to rule a corner of the world. And for tourists the aura of the beach bar was in fact an exotic authenticity, and though it wasn’t as raw as they eagerly perceived, it was a legitimate Third World medium for them to stir themselves into, a genuine black experience of the type they feared and avoided at home.

  For a time the popularity of the bar had declined along with the hotel’s due to the former bartender, the spiteful Jevanee, who favored local thugs and took forever to attend to paying customers. Now Jevanee was gone, jailed for assaulting a police officer who tried to prevent him from hacking Tillman to pieces with a machete. A man of notoriety in the islands, Winston Peabody, once known for his devastating arm as a cricket bowler until disabled in a car accident, replaced Jevanee behind the bar, and was given full authority to manage the establishment as he saw fit. He fired the Mind Invaders, the steel band that had been a fixture at the bar for years, and replaced them with Monkeyjunk, a band of pansmen Winston was promoting for carnival’s Road March competition. The combination of Winston’s solicitude and the unorthodox tunes of Monkeyjunk—an eclectic repertoire of original compositions they called tropoblues, well-known calypsos, Hollywood show tunes, and baroque concertos—revitalized the failing beach bar. It was hot again with action, busy on week nights, pulsating on weekends.

  The palm grove that horseshoed around the bar and opened up to the water of Howard Bay was pegged with onlookers, villagers from Augustine, a line of stoic hucksters, old women or girls with wooden trays of cigarettes, homemade sweets and roasted peanuts, Chiclets, fruits and cakes, roti and small plastic baggies of moonshine rum. Children, some only toddlers, played half dressed in the sand at their feet. A gang of self-conscious boys who hadn’t yet found the backbone to step from the trees to the dance patio, to come out in their tattered clothes and uneducated minds and parrot what they had been taught to say—We ahll is one—to learn if it were true or not, evaluated and processed every detail of the spectacle before them as if it were a heavenly apparition in their eyes, without precedent in their pubescent lives. As the four of them walked from the parking area along a fieldstone path, Adrian was made uncomfortable by the presence of the boys in the shadows. “What are they looking at?” she said, making a hostile face at the shapes standing among the trees.

  Tillman suggested they were looking at a way of life, nothing more ominous than that. But that was ominous enough for Adrian. “My way of life doesn’t translate to foreign black boys,” she said, raising her voice so it could be heard by the shadows. “I wish they’d look somewhere else and not at me.”

  Mitchell laughed unkindly. “That’s exactly what everybody in the government says.”

  Tillman, mollifying her, told Adrian not to take the attention personally, and led them into the crowd, past the crush of the dance floor to an empty oceanside café table under a shelter of rustling palm thatch resembling a hairy mushroom cap. Johnnie lit a cigarette and leaned back, a visiting queen of the night. What made her beautiful was the way she responded to all signs of mobilization with a conspiratorial nod, affirming whatever was buoyant and fast and prodigious, as if she had a private arrangement to be welcomed as a member of any group seeking pleasure. She could thrive in a place like this, and more than once Mitchell had looked at her and felt she might do or be anything at all, that she was a woman on the fringe of a glittering potential, moving closer and closer toward its center, It was Mitchell’s most generous thought of Johnnie.

  Tillman and Mitchell collected round after round of drinks from the bar, and for a while they talked, inhaling deep luxurious breaths of the moist air off Howard Bay—Tillman’s attention wandering to the two resident misfits who lurked among the customers, one named Davidius and the other dubbed by the locals The Missing Link, for his apish appearance and retarded intelligence, two defective roosters prospecting the henhouse, operating on the not unheard of theory that white tourist girls would fuck a black man for the asking. Adrian shuddered as Tillman pointed them out, the small and twisted Davidius, broadcasting animal rut and violation; the hulk of the Link, with an idiot’s fascination for the female gender, animated baby dolls which he bumbled behind and groped after with the clumsy love of a nursling.

  “You shouldn’t allow them on the premises.”

  “Who ... the tourists?”

  “Of course not,” Adrian said. “Those two. They’re not even human.”

  Mitchell drawled that exclusion was the rule of the past that led to the excesses of the present. Democracy must be an open door, and so on.

  “Oh, don’t go on with that,” Adrian said. Adrian saw Mitchell studying her with soft menace and asked, “What is it you do on this island? What brought you here, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Agricultural adventurism.” Mitchell suddenly felt very short-tempered. “And you?” he asked, leaping right into an answer. “You’ve come to stain yourself a little before going off on a real vacation somewhere where the prices on the wine list exceed the per capita income of a country like this one.”

  To his great surprise, Adrian burst into laughter. “That’s such clichéd thinking, you know. Not to mention sanctimonious.”

  But clichés get superior mileage in the Third World, Mitchell
wanted to say, thinking, Why bother? She was twenty-four years old, pretty, and successful for her age. Europe was her model, her reference, for the world outside of the States. “Look, I don’t want to be a bitch,” Adrian said, starting to raise her chin and then catching herself. “I’ve been running nonstop in the city for months. I was ready for a time-out, I wanted to sit on the beach and read and get a tan—and look what I got. I mean, there are just certain things you’ll never get me to accept.” But she was focused on Tillman now, showing him a pouting smile. And Mitchell wasn’t listening. Johnnie, looking away out over the water at the semaphore of a thunderhead signaling from the south, had reached under the table to take his hand.

  “Let’s dance,” Johnnie whispered in his ear.

  Mitchell made excuses, but she ignored his inertia, made him get on his feet, walk, hold her. He felt drenched in warm soft pellets of musical rain. What notes were these anyway, banged out on a pan, petrol drums forged into spinets and harpsichords? In their plumage of tie-dyed tee shirts and red drawstring pants, Monkeyjunk was beating its wings upward, their drums yielding breath after sorrowful breath of continental sentiment. He had a weakness for the lament of a keyboard and the pansmen were reinventing something very sad, something that venerated beauty and sadness. The music sifted down upon them, and Mitchell felt astonished by the unreality of the woman he held in his arms, tortured by the substance of her.

  Bach? he wondered, amazed.

  “Mitch, are you okay?”

  Though he knew he looked strangulated, contradicted, he nodded.

  “You were just looking so down.”

  They revolved under the stars. Her forehead was pearled with moisture, her arms glistening and her body so hot he could feel the change of temperature she caused in the air. He saw The Missing Link pass by, shambling like a bear, everybody’s partner, craning and witless, his steam-shovel jaw slack on its hinges. The music clattered like a piano left out in the rain. This was their togetherness, she facing the mountains, he facing the sea; when he saw land, she saw water; this chaining, a troublesome irresolution, a troublesome certainty; her, her. Whatever direction they slid and balanced, the world was this timeless cruel harmony of yoked opposition, a pattern difficult to follow gracefully outside the steps of the dancing. The heat and careful pressure at the base of his spine came from Johnnie’s hand, and she whispered to him about the fulcrum of his own hand on her, how nice it was—five years of not-knowing reduced by their hands held just this way to one knowing touch. The moment of gliding touch across the contour of a hip, the oiled texture of skin, network of muscles; the discovery that years could be preserved or lost in fingertips, could be inventoried and warehoused in the most delicate conduits of flesh.