Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  “Ballantyne, what’s going on? Why do I feel like this is not a friendly act, you picking me up?”

  Ballantyne snorted and looked over, his eyes a mystery yet nevertheless playful. Clearly, it put him in a good humor to make his passenger uncomfortable. “You too nervous, Wilson. Dey postpone it, you know.”

  “Why?”

  “Who am I, mahn? Dem big shots ain goin tell me.”

  “So why are we headed to leeward?”

  “Kingsley.”

  Mitchell sat back, giving this idea solemn consideration, both flattered and wary that he was being summoned to an audience with the honorable minister—the crackpot, the tyrant, the has-been. Well, okay, good; he had something to say to Kingsley and it was this: Listen, I’m one of the planet’s last humanitarians, I’m a ready-made fairy godmother, but I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, I don’t know who wants what, why don’t you tell me what to do? He put another piece of bread in his mouth and chewed. Ahead of them, not far inland, a bulldozer nuzzled the pale saline-drenched crown of a modest hill, pushing dirt around in a pretense that this stretch of forsaken littoral was somehow livable. There had once been an ancient Arawak village up there, Mitchell had seen the shards during the survey, and now it was being turned like a thin compost, the infertile clay hidden under a sedimentary blanket of volcanic ash and goat droppings and useless minerals now exposed and yellowing under the wet sun. It was a Public Lands Development project: peasants from one of the northwest estates would be resettled here, he had heard. Mitchell didn’t have to be a soil expert to know that unless the newcomers were given livestock to graze they would be better off in Scuffletown, since they would not survive here, let alone prosper. Nobody ever had and nobody ever would grow anything on this coastal plain, pressed so hard by the Atlantic. He had recommended the peasants remain where they were until a more forgiving site could be identified and purchased, if need be, and although the chief agricultural officer agreed, there was nothing to be done about it because now the coalition was insisting on the relocation—turning people off good land and marrying them to bad. The last bite of bread in his mouth turned to mud, and he could not swallow.

  “What do you know about this,” he finally asked the forest ranger, driven by the need to have an ally.

  “You get mixed up wit some shit is all I know.”

  It was not what Mitchell had expected to hear.

  The coast changed. The land convulsed upward, the spine of a mountain snapped off into the sea and beyond that another giant opened wide, spreading its spurs like two burly legs, the white cascade of a river dribbling from the crotch into the ecstatic blue of a bay. Still not in view but not far now was the old town of Ferguson, once a thriving sugar port but now barely inhabited. There they would turn off the coastal highway onto the inland track that serpentined down into the valley named after the seedbed of civilization, Sumeria, and then over to the leeward village of Cape Molasses, so christened in 1743 in remembrance of a family of French settlers boiled alive by the Black Caribs in raw cane syrup the previous year, on land that would one day be known as Jack Dawes Estate.

  On the road west they passed a seemingly arbitrary sequence of twice-forgotten hamlets, incestuous clusters of families with piercing eyes, where even the chickens wore their feathers like shreds of rags, and larger jungle-crushed villages, vibrating in silence, small lots of humanity impacted in time, unmapped and nameless in the house of their nation, the world itself unnamed beyond the few steps it took to draw water from a spring, to pull a mango from a century-old tree, to pry a stone from the ruin of a mill to use to bank a cookfire.

  As they neared the leeward coast and entered Kingsley’s home parish the lurching, twisting rhythm of the journey changed. Ballantyne stopped frequently, here at a shuttered rum shop, here where a bridge spanned a silty, gurgling river, here under a tamarind tree where two men sat on buckets and slapped domino tiles on a plank they supported with their knees. A man put a large green pumpkin into the open bed of the Rover and shimmed it with a rock, to keep it from tumbling around. One woman gave them a potato sack of crayfish her children had collected from the river, and another added a cardboard box full of cashew fruit. The man at the bridge contributed a dasheen root that resembled the testicle of an ox. The man at the end of the footpath produced a stubbly hand of maugh-faughbaugh bananas. The bed of the Rover piled up. A girl handed six anthuriums into the cab. Further along they collected a fighting cock in a reed cage, a soup turtle, an oozing lump of honeycomb bundled in ginger leaf, a dead monkey, rank and stiff as a board, a bag of cherry tomatoes, a braid of garlic bulbs, a tray of roasted groundnuts.

  No price was named or money exchanged. At first Mitchell was left to imagine that all this booty deposited into the Rover, the fruit of a deceptive abundance, a deception that was also a way of life, a way of life that was only a limited dialect of the language of survival—all this was being gathered as a form of tax or tribute. But Ballantyne clucked at such a theory. These people knew, he said, these country people knew who they were, where they were going, when they might pass. They were Maroons—nobody told them but they knew. Nobody asked them to go into the bush or into their scrappy gardens, harvesting what they chose to spare, and then materialize like visions of tormented saints in the niches and cavities of vegetation, dressed like John the Baptist, flagging the minister’s Rover to a stop when it appeared, long after they had recognized its sound in the valley, around a bend. Nobody said, Love Poppi. Nobody instructed the land or the servants of the land, Give to your father. From a speechless people, a world with no tongue, these gifts were the currency of expression. Only Kingsley knew how to interpret them, he was their translator, the interlocutor in the redundant dialogue between silence and power, he was the host, the medium through which their lives might be channeled into a fist of words to shake in the face of something unseeable filled with wild, confusing, ravenous energies. Along the lane to Jack Dawes Estate, Ballantyne was waved over to take on a cargo of waternuts, yams, sapodilla and soursops, a brindled piglet, starved and squealing with worms in its eyes, oranges and lemons, melons and christophenes, and each giver added to an inventory of whispered petitions kept by Ballantyne.

  —Speak to Poppi, sah. Water comin foul from de white dust de men put on de hill and me wife and kids all crampy.

  —Tell Poppi me cy-ahnt find no rice and no oil in de shop.

  —Speak to de ministah, sah. Please fah me. Me husband twist he leg and snap it and now Juney say he lose he job and a next fella come from St. Vincent and tek it.

  —Hear now, Ballantyne. De mahn say pull up me croppa onions and bag dem and leave dem by de shed fah de truck. Truck doan come to fetch, eh? Rain wet de bags and de onions tek up a smell. Truck suppose to come on Monday but ain reach till Friday. Dem onions rot up and de mahn say dem onions no good, bwoy, and he ain pay a cent.

  —Tell Poppi teef come and eat me next goat, and daht one de nanny.

  —Tell Poppi dirt fall down from where de fellas plant arrowroot and break me house.

  —Tell Poppi worms get in me new baby and mek she dead.

  —Tell Poppi me faddah lose he hand in de machine at Blackstones and de clinic fella won’t come to help, him say he busy.

  —Speak to Poppi. Tell him massas day done ain reach here as yet.

  He was seeing too much of this, the prolonged despair throughout the countryside, it made him feel empty and far away, after a point the distinctions began to blur, and you argued with yourself that there was no such thing as the modern world, that it didn’t exist, anywhere, but then after a while you went home and there it was, right inside the door, and then you almost stopped believing in the incurable epidemic of misfortune and put all your faith in that boy of Miss Sindra’s or Miss Bynum’s whom the government made a foreman. Juney, moving up in the world, taking no one with him.

  Then, even at a distance, there was a chance you’d begin to think like the Barbeques, that the solution to problems so mult
itudinous as to form a critical mass of suffering was pyromania. Burn everything down.

  The sky had darkened by the time they pulled into the clearing where Kingsley had built his two-story house. Ballantyne parked near the kitchen door to unload the cornucopia but wouldn’t accept Mitchell’s help, instead sending him around the yard and its neatly tended flower beds to the elevated veranda, where he tapped on the glass pane of the front door and watched through the lace as a woman shuffled across the floor and let him in, telling him Kingsley would soon be there and take a seat, she would bring him something to drink. Mitchell sank down into a cushioned chair, its gingham fabric reeking of mildew, placed at a right angle to a vinyl-covered couch. The room opened at back into a dining area, an oval table made of maple, or maple-colored, six ladderback chairs. Nothing he could see identified the occupants of the house beyond the functional, no art on the walls, no icons or family pictures or degrees or certificates or framed commendations, no trappings of influence, nothing to suggest a personality or boast an achievement, only a round wall clock and unstained wood and a chapel-like hush disrupted at intervals by pots clattering in the kitchen, the entire space cooled by a watery green light diffused through floor-to-ceiling windows that fronted the veranda. I am in a jungle, Mitchell told himself. I am in a small place cast off from the world, the land a hot lake on a blue prairie of ocean. Start there, with Caliban ascending the throne. All this time on St. Catherine he had been thinking there is a beginning and we have left it and we are traveling ahead, but the movement was an illusion, its current proof none other than Johnnie. There was only a beginning and it kept layering outward and then folding back into itself, always re-creating an unresolved zero, as if it were an irresistible force, known and preferred. Why am I so moody, he wondered, I’m not like this, am I? I’m gung-ho. The door had been left open and a crow walked in off the porch, cocked its head at Mitchell and flapped back outside. He wanted a drink, scotch, he wanted to sleep. What he couldn’t understand was why he had ever considered something so self-defeating as innocence to be a virtue.

  Without realizing why it was happening Mitchell watched the room lose its tranquil submarine radiance, the light becoming so heavy it seemed to collapse, and then it began to rain. The downpour did not intensify by degrees but simply gushed forth with biblical fury, vertical and windless. Outside the row of windows everything blurred into vague gunmetal shapes sagging in the torrent. The rain blasted against the zinc roof, humming and buzzing, rattled cutaneous leaves into an uproar, a cataclysm of swirling particles and splintering forms. A rust-colored spray rebounded as high as the top step of the veranda, kicking a mash into the air that would later dry and stipple, leaving the false border of a floodline. He reevaluated the room he was in and concluded its defining motif was nothing to steal. Thus the invention of Switzerland, to hoard it away. A mist entered the house and dragged over him, spreading an even weight against his skin when a minute ago there was nothing. I can’t be rescued, he thought, because that’s what it felt like to be sitting alone in Joshua Kingsley’s country house, isolated in the turbine roar and thunder of the rain, without a clue, really, why he was here. This land business. Reform. He was biased—money, love, power, memory, blood, food, and finally a grave, that’s what land was, everything, actually, and it was no secret though maybe some Zen-like riddle that to reform it all you had to do was reform the reformers, who he believed were committed to the ideal that justice was a matter of ownership, when it was nothing quite so elementary and absolute.

  His co-workers at the ministry told him, This is an asshole country, but they couldn’t truly tell him why. A Brit who had spent three years on a soil conservation project in Africa had pulled Mitchell aside at a party to confide that he hated to admit it, but blacks could not work together. Sure, Mitchell agreed with a nasty look, You’re right, the blacks should model themselves after the Europeans, who had a splendid record relating to each other during the twentieth century—or any other century you’d care to name.

  How did he come to be among such men? he asked himself. Couldn’t they persist in their glories and failures without him, rocket to the moon and banish plagues back to their source in the underworld, build cities as extravagant as an emperor’s birthday cake, trade hearts with corpses, spin a symphony into the ether and retrieve it in Hong Kong, start their wars and finish their wars and rip off each other’s balls, all without him? But now he had his finger on what he needed to be rescued from most, this screaming desire to give it all away, to say It’s all yours, have fun, don’t break your neck on it. All yours—let me be.

  The rain had made him deaf, gave him, gave him vertigo, a sense that he was unmoored and drifting away. Even with the minister in the room, they wouldn’t be able to hear what the other had to say. What is this like, what does this remind me of, he asked himself. To be here, to have this happening, the claustrophobia of their fatuous intrigues? He felt as if he were about to be prosecuted, that’s how alone he felt. This lush, seething insularity—what am I supposed to be learning, what are the lessons here? The self-reflection, the eclipse of the rain, the constant waiting for answers. If ever he was a being in suspension, dangled in some huge amniotic sac of ambivalence, this was it. Maybe the house shifted, maybe the rain slowed—things began to change. For no good reason besides being broken his nose began to bleed, he could feel it get hot and wet inside, and he put his head back, stared at the beaded ceiling, its paint blisters and its cobwebs and its silent roaming lizards, and drank the flow until it stopped. I can’t be rescued, Mitchell thought; rescued from exaggeration, rescued from the malicious inflation of everything I know to be true.

  The kitchen door opened a crack and a servant, her head bound tightly in blue cloth, peeked into the room. Her lips moved but it was not clear if she was talking to him or somebody else behind her because he could not hear in the whitewater din of the rain. The door opened wider and Ballantyne passed through as the woman stepped aside with a smirk in Mitchell’s direction, apparently in response to something the forest ranger had said. He carried a tray—two water glasses, a bowl of ice, a plastic pitcher of water, a bottle of Pinch—over to the table and then returned to the kitchen. Mitchell marveled that despite the humidity, and the activity of the morning, while Mitchell’s own clothes looked like he had slept in them, Ballantyne’s khaki shirt-jac looked, with its fastidious creases, as if it had just been ironed. Its square tail flapped over his buttocks, which appeared enormous, twin sacks of cement, in Ballantyne’s tan slacks. And those feet. His toes fanned out from the front of his rubber sandals like a cluster of cocoa plugs.

  It dawned on Mitchell that the forest ranger had somehow been awarded immunity from bureaucratic process, given an enviable measure of independence in a ministry that was timid about personal responsibility. He rarely saw Ballantyne at the compound, entering or leaving the office of Mr. Samuels, the CAO, and never at a staff meeting. There were infrequent times in the field when Mitchell would cross his path, Ballantyne engrossed in some form of woodsmandry, the planting or felling of trees, orchestrating slash and burn, appearing and disappearing through the smoke along a line of transparent flames searing a hillside. Or they might pass on the road, Ballantyne at the wheel of the Land Rover truck assigned to him by the ministry, the bed crammed with day laborers bounced around and knocked into each other, their faces forever stoic, captives of Ballantyne’s driving. And once Ballantyne had come to Wilson’s desk seeking information about the mahogany trade. He had purchased some land in the high country behind the volcano, virgin forest, and hoped he might find a better market for the lumber he milled than the regional one provided by Caricom. Mitchell promised to look into it and, at Ballantyne’s insistence, they adjourned to Bim’s Creole Kitchen for lunch. Bim’s occupied the first floor of the Seamen’s Union Hall. The air inside was rank with the fishy oils of stewing porpoise. They sat on folding chairs around a plywood table, drinking brown beer until they had achieved a state of alcoholic bonho
mie. At some point, Ballantyne’s preferred topic became that of the hunt. Working in the mountains, he often carried a rifle strapped to his back to shoot agouti and manicou, tattoo, mongoose, wild pig and goat, blaireaux, bush fowl which he called ginny birds, monkeys that hung in the layers of jungle canopy as passively as fruit. He called them apes. Wilson had asked if the forest ranger was ever worried about bandits. The police checkpoints on the roads entering the northern parishes were at least a cosmetic attempt to stem the recent spread of what was being called Jack Nastyism. The government had reported an increase in violent crime in the north, though no one could point to a parallel increase in arrests. Even the existence of such incidents was in dispute, since murders were recorded without the evidence of bodies, and robberies without the corroboration of victims. The perpetrators were alleged to be hiding out in the mountains, but Wilson hadn’t heard about anybody up there, bivouacked in the roadless forests, except doubtful rumors of a handful of Rastafarian clones who grew vegetables and herb and supposedly ran about naked.

  Ballantyne had scanned Mitchell’s face with a look that, though not hostile, suggested that he didn’t like his courage to be questioned. It seemed to be a sore point with him. “Nobody trouble me,” he snorted. Don’t believe it, he said. There are no bandits.

  “Why the reports?” asked Mitchell. “Why all the bad news?”

  “Daht is Jack Nasty, mahn. He movin up in de world.”

  “Who is Jack Nasty? Who’s he supposed to be?”

  “You tell me.”

  Ballantyne changed the subject back to his infatuation with hunting, firepower. He hoped one day for the opportunity to indulge in his greatest fantasy—firing a machine gun, preferably into something big: a cow, or an automobile. Just once, to see what it looked like and felt like, then he would know and get it out of his mind.