Kingsley began to massage his forehead with his meaty, veal-colored fingers, and when he took his hand away, his eyes were once again clear and alert, absolving, condemning, ordaining. Small lenses of moisture percolated to the surface of his shiny brow. The white floss of hair that circled his pate had uncombed itself. He sighed grimly. “Let us speak of some private situations, Wilson. Isaac Knowles is my godson, you know?”
Mitchell’s lips parted silently and Kingsley registered this reaction. He was a bad friend, guilty—with the advent of Johnnie, Isaac had slipped far from the forefront of his thoughts. And now this—Isaac’s symbolic guardian was Kingsley.
“I see you don’t know that. Isaac never say, eh? Well, he slow to claim me.” Kingsley said he needed to know what his economist and his godchild had been up to. Mitchell didn’t understand the question; Kingsley repeated it.
Mitchell was utterly puzzled by the minister’s implication that he and Isaac were “up to something.” They were friends, they ran into each other regularly. Mitchell was stumped and said so, unable to imagine the basis for Kingsley’s concern, its ominous, patriarchal overtone.
“Nothin then?”
Mitchell replied with an inquisitive, baffled smile. “Nothing.”.
Kingsley sat immobilized, only the muscles of his jaw pulsing. He seem bored now, and he blinked at Mitchell with imperious indifference. “Don’t you cause me some trouble, Mistah Wilson,” he said. “Watch what you do.”
“I don’t know what you mean. Really.”
“You’re an American, nuh? Americans cause trouble.”
“Not me.” Mitchell stumbled in his response, losing his composure. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
It got worse. Kingsley made Mitchell’s blood jump and left him speechless by telling him to send away the woman who had come to visit him, that she was a fugitive, though from what he wouldn’t say, that she had the wrong friends, people it would be very unwise for him to be associated with. He was put in the awkward position of defending Johnnie, which he did with feeble conviction, his instincts telling him whatever Kingsley knew about her, and however he knew it, was likely to be right. Still, he resented it, this intrusion into his private affairs, he was a free man, not a bootblack, but it made him feel as if he were spiraling down a hole.
“Somebody’s telling you lies, Mr. Minister.”
“Everybody’s tellin me lies, Mistah Wilson. How sweet they sound.” He looked at his wristwatch and sat straight. “But suit yourself, mahn. The girl leavin in twelve days regardless, Immigration tell me.” His face contorted in loose ripples of effort as he stood up energetically to take his leave. The lower buttons of his shirt had come unfastened and his stomach ripened outward like an enormous eggplant. Their eyes connected for a moment and he looked at his economist as if Mitchell had conducted himself shrewdly, yet he had no glimmer of what manner of infidelity Kingsley imagined of him. He pressed Mitchell to visit him again, anytime, he enjoyed visitors and their views.
“Ballantyne say you run fast,” Kingsley said as an afterthought. “Very fast.”
Chapter 12
They took the leeward coastal route south, crossing the Waterloo Range and down onto open but haphazardly cultivated land along the placid littoral, driving right through the middle of Plaissance, a former cocoa plantation, the trees now old and unproductive, a spare harvest of beans spread out on mats to dry along the roadside. Mitchell had been here a month before with two PLDP interviewers. They registered farmers hoeing their fields by hand, clearing bush, farmers coming out of the jungle shouldering gunny sacks of cassava, farmers in trees, farmers in mud, farmers in the rivers washing carrots. They talked with farmers stretched out on rough-hewn palettes roofed with banana leaves, sleeping off their midday meal, farmers in their wattle huts, the more industrious in their board or block houses. There were no landlords and many of the tenants couldn’t afford the token annual rent exacted by the government. What do you grow? they asked them. How much do you grow? How much do you sell? Do you keep livestock? Do you need help, do you share the harvest, do you do it all by yourself? Can you feed your family? Do you have work elsewhere? Where? they asked, to a man. Hope flickered. With lowered heads and timid voices the farmers would answer the interviewers, Mitchell uncertain if it were possible they were ashamed of themselves, their meager livelihood, or if they were only shy, introverting themselves as a defense, because these men who were asking the questions were the government, and it was the law to answer. But in between questions they directed themselves at Mitchell, imploring him with bleary chestnut eyes.
On the outskirts of the town of Peru, Ballantyne ignored a police checkpoint, downshifting but not stopping, acknowledging the uniformed trio with a cavalier wave of his hand.
“They know you around here,” Mitchell remarked, but Ballantyne ignored this, too. Farther down the road, he swung out into the oncoming lane to pass a convoy of three trucks, of the type used to transport livestock, open-topped, the bed enclosed with high slatted walls, only these were filled with people, peasants, about a hundred packed into the back of each truck with their belongings, flour sacks of clothing, kerosene lamps, garden tools, wedding photographs, cook pots. They looked as if they were being detained. They looked like refugees. Mitchell asked Ballantyne who they were. The forest ranger craned his neck to inspect them as they went by.
“Dem from Plaissance, I believe. Bein moved off to Windward.”
“They don’t seem happy about it, do they?”
“I doan believe so. Dis business gettin out of hand, bwoy.”
It disturbed him, it made him discouraged, the land program was meant to be an occasion of opportunity and celebration, but now it seemed increasingly infected by cross-purposes, souring by the day. Where that put him he couldn’t yet see but he had a contribution to make here, nobody could refute that.
Ballantyne took a left at the intersection in the center of Peru, then turned again onto a dirt lane that brought them to a concrete house, painted pink and shaded by a grove of avocado pears. They would only be a minute, Ballantyne said, tooting the horn and parking. A man trotted out of the house, in shorts scissored off from a pair of workpants, and a soiled undershirt. The shape of his face was a bit pushed in and he had frantic eyes, but he greeted them with a wave of cheerfulness and embracing hospitality, insisting they come inside, they would talk inside the house, they would have a little drink, Mitchell too, this was an honor.
In the main room—Mitchell could hardly call it a living room—they sat on upturned banana packing crates, low to the floor around a primitive table. The shutters had been thrown open to receive the listless breeze left behind by the rain; a green parrot preened itself on one of the windowsills. It seemed the man had cut down some timber and wanted Ballantyne to purchase it; Ballantyne, on the other hand, was trying to harden his bargaining position by explaining to the man he had cut the wood illegally, since he couldn’t produce a permit, and Ballantyne had seen the wood, it was on government land, it wasn’t even top quality, it wasn’t worth the trouble to him and so on. They negotiated, firing away at each other in patois so deep and quick Mitchell could barely understand it, let alone develop an interest in the topic, and his thoughts wandered off in a direction of their own. He had to track down Isaac for an insight into Kingsley’s reprimand, bizarre paranoid nonsense, if that’s what it was. And yet the minister’s stage managing and duplicity had no peculiar effect on him, now that he thought about it, except for giving him a vaguely imperiled sense that he had been discovered, he was no more an outsider, invisible, untouchable. The situation wasn’t bad though, it was just screwy, and there was no compelling reason to walk away.
Johnnie, however, was another story altogether. He was being haunted by Johnnie, and it horrified him that Kingsley and God knows who else had found her worthy of their attentions. Apparently she was a Telex celebrity, had found her way onto lists. The escalating nightmare of the drug business, the old college crowd be
ing withered by more serious players, would be the context for such notoriety. She had tacked a map of South America to her wall. She had the wrong friends, according to Kingsley, which didn’t bode well for her independence, but he wasn’t going to ask her, she would have to tell him. Or not. He dared himself to turn off the lights, deny her haven. He talked to himself, conjuring up the circumstances under which he had fallen for Johnnie: Could you run that back in slow motion; I must have overlooked what was there, just plain missed it. The phrase in love needled him. He grounded there as if it were a shoal surrounding a harbor where he planned to anchor. Lean hard enough on those words and they swung open like a trapdoor. You were evicted from one country and fated to dwell in another where everything you once knew would be useless, where all the sensory images a lover collected—the way her fingers lodged in the hair on the back of your head, the smell of her wardrobe, her makeup arrayed on the bathroom counter, the flavor of her mouth, the sounds she made when she cried or when she came, her look when she disagreed with an opinion, the luxurious or scatterbrained way she dressed herself in the morning—where all the echoing intensity of emotions and the arcane catalogue of memory with its obscure dates and locations and fragmented events never aggregated into an answer you could rely on, except in desperation, a last-ditch act of faith. In love perhaps was another way to describe being lost, without the impulse to remember where you came from. He excised the words from his vocabulary until further notice and received in return the scene he wanted, the one that begged review:
Nighttime; a school parking lot; in the near distance, the dome of artificial light over the football field, the off-key halftime sounds of the marching band oompahed into the frosty air. Johnnie’s red Volkswagen, the door open, the radio on loud. Johnnie, wearing a Villager blouse, a white sweater tied over her hips, a Scottish tartan wraparound skirt fastened with a large gold safety pin. Black stockings that made a girl’s legs transcend flesh and blood and become art, a dangerous incitement. She held a bottle of white wine to her mouth like a crystal trumpet, and she danced by herself, waltzing steps meant for the late September moon, a white eyelash caught on the screen of heaven. That was it, scant evidence for all that followed. A sentimental snapshot of the wholesome past, encoded with painful contests of will and future abdications from reality. He watched her, holding his breath, riveted by her boldness, her unilateral claim on the night, the thrilling aura of confidence that surrounded her which he mistook for self-knowledge, he watched her until she sat back down in her car, singing, and then he backed off into the shadows and retraced his steps back to the much diminished glory of the game, knowing enough not to disturb her, not yet, not until he could match the tenor of her optimism, the autonomy with which she guided herself into the world. One way or the other, he had been watching her ever since, mesmerized. He couldn’t stop watching her; it wasn’t possible.
The head of the household prodded his guests to join him in a drink. On an enameled tray he brought out a pitty of strong rum and three teacups, the porcelain stained and crackled like the mesh in the skin of a snake. He quartered a lime with his pocketknife and poured out an extreme dose into each of the cups, emptying his own down his gullet to set a manly example of style. Mitchell sipped the homemade rum tasting of jet fuel, looking over the rim of the cup at the man who monitored his progress with unabashed scrutiny. There was a devious air to the farmer’s hospitality that made Mitchell uneasy and he frowned back at him, thinking, What is it that you want? Ballantyne took a refill, as content as a plant being watered, disregarding Mitchell’s restlessness. Without his help, the two black men finished off the pitty and a second one was brought from the kitchen by a chubby hippo-faced teenage girl, her skull bound with a red bandanna, her teeth oversized and square as dice. The backs of her shoes were crushed down by her heels and she did not pick up her feet when she walked. Her dress, a brown polyester shift, was unzipped in the back, her bra visible across the darkness of her flesh like a plaster bandage.
This is my daughter—Dis me dottah—the farmer declared, after she had slogged back to the kitchen. His pride in her was distorted by his anxious, lopsided grin. Ballantyne grunted indifferently. Mitchell put his cup to his mouth. The man divvied the second pint of rum.
“Priscilla,” he said, naming the girl for them.
“Yes, Poppi,” she answered from back within the house, thinking she was being called.
“Blasted gy-url,” the farmer said to himself out loud, then shouted back for her to hush. Mitchell was shocked to see the man signaling him with sly winks. He thrust out his lower lip and jerked his chin toward the kitchen doorway. “Want to mek a baby wit she?” he asked in a conspiratorial voice.
Ballantyne sniggered and Mitchell chuckled too. With an awkward smile he gulped what remained of his moonshine and set the cup on the table. It took so little to get fucked up on a hot day, you were already halfway along the second you stepped into it.
“Yes,” the father of the girl continued with unyielding enthusiasm. “Mek a baby wit she.” Priscilla came to stand on the threshold of the room, her eyes downcast, her hands straight at her sides. Mitchell couldn’t believe he was giving her a second look. Thoroughly unable to perceive her sexuality he turned away, mortified. He looked at Ballantyne, hunched over and bug-eyed, ready to die laughing. “No thanks,” Mitchell blurted out. “Really.” His cheeks felt feverish from the blood rising into them.
“A baby,” the farmer persisted. He gestured with his head for Mitchell to turn around to inspect the scene behind him at the end of a short hallway. A door opened to a bed with rumpled white sheeting, a wrought-iron headboard with two graceful arches dovetailing at the center, like a boldline drawing of buttocks. A beam of sharp light cut the mattress in half. Mitchell was struck by the absence of pillows. He looked back at the eager, expectant farmer, his face expanded with a lurid grin, and allowed his repugnance to show, though that was the extent of his failure of etiquette.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to get back to the ministry. She seems like a perfectly lovely girl.”
Ballantyne smothered his laughter. Mitchell, incredulous, listened to the girl’s father’s jovial reassurances. “It ain goin tek a full day to give she de medicine, bwoy. You jus mek it. We tek charge of de after-wahds.”
The man’s sincerity was so outlandish Mitchell panicked. He stood up suddenly and made for the door, getting knifed by sunshine as he hopped down into the dirt yard and marched to the Rover and sprawled across the seat. Jesus! he thought. Unwillingly he pictured himself screwing the girl zombie on the sagging mattress, mommi and poppi standing by, murmuring approval. The notion came to him again that he was some current brand of freak centurion of an overrated empire, wandering into these out-of-the-way villages to be heralded as the arbiter of freedom.
“She clean, mahn,” he heard the man propose loudly from inside the house, a final attempt to negotiate a profit that was beyond Mitchell’s ability to calculate. Was there anyone in the world for whom the girl could offer a soul, a heart, be anything more than meat, subhuman. The images of intercourse with the girl made Mitchell feel blasphemous, then indignant. He toyed with the truth that the man inside the house didn’t deserve to live. Ballantyne stuck his head in the window, snorting, and Mitchell sat up to let him in.
“Fuck you,” Mitchell snapped. “Go ahead and laugh. You probably get a commission.”
Ballantyne was so amused that tears rolled from his eyes and he thumped the steering wheel with his fist.
“Why didn’t he ask you to fuck her? Tell me I’m a bigot, I don’t give a shit.”
Ballantyne finally controlled himself enough to say you wouldn’t catch him poking his thing into such a homely cow of a girl. As Ballantyne fit the key into the ignition, Mitchell noticed the man come out on his stoop, holding his jaw, blood running from his mouth through his fingers as he stood watching them drive away.
“What happened to him?”
“He decide to sell.”
“You have a daughter, don’t you?”
“Two. He give a very good price, you know.”
They rode back to Queenstown in a silence made steamy by the aftermath of heavy rains.
Walking from the Rover to the stairs up to the main floor of the ministry, Mitchell noticed the veterinarian’s assistant Morrison lurking in the mouth of the cave that was the supply room which doubled as his office and decided to stop in. Morrison was incapable of concealing his hostility and Mitchell realized he found the vet assistant’s displays bracing, cathartic, mildly addictive, and he naturally assumed that his own skeptical attitudes made them comrades in subversion. He had nicknamed Morrison The Prophet.
“What’s up, Morrison?” asked Mitchell as they gripped each other’s hands.
“Mahn, I ain goin vaccinate no more sheeps. Dey does piss all over me pants and shoes. A fella cy-ahn only tek so much piss before he move on. Wilson, you hear de big news?” He drew his finger across his throat from ear to ear. “Dey unload Samuels dis mornin.”
“I heard. What do you think it means?”
“It means Kingsley is next, mahn. Banks goin string him up.” Morrison had a gleam in his eyes that Mitchell described to himself as the end of charity.
“I don’t know,” Mitchell worried. “This crusade might be a little hasty, at least in its method of enforcement.” He mentioned the trucks he had seen on the road north of Peru, ferrying off the peasants who had settled on the common lands of Plaissance to a relocation site that as far as Mitchell knew was unspecified, and likely unprepared.
“Banks ain move dem people. Look to Kingsley, Wilson.”
“Why would Kingsley do that? He’s the one hollering they should stay put.” Morrison glared at him and scoffed. “You tell me, mahn. You tell me. What you is doin anyway, lickin Kingsley’s arse?”
Swimming in the Volcano Page 22
