“Me!” Mitchell protested.
“Puppetshow,” said Morrison, and made himself busy.
Mitchell went upstairs, wanting to hide out in his office and ruminate on Kingsley and his latest chicanery. But his office wasn’t isolated from the world, everyone from old women hucksters to muddy farmers in from the countryside, town drunks and curious children, once even a black-bellied sheep, had materialized at his door, and as he walked down the hall he knew someone was in there now, waiting for him, telegraphing his presence by slapping out a syncopated rhythm on the surface of his desk. At first he didn’t recognize the kid, but then he looked closer and identified him as one of Isaac’s younger brothers. Without a word he sprung to his feet and handed Mitchell a note, folded carefully into quarters. Mitchell opened it.
Dear Mr. Wilson—
We are missing Isaac. He has not come back.
Signed, Mrs. Clara Knowles.
“Where does she think he is?” he asked the boy.
“Me no know.”
He told the boy to tell his mother not to worry, he’d find Isaac—either in bed with a woman or in a bar with a bottle, taking consolation for his loss of Miss Defy—and encourage him to check in at home. “Cool,” said the boy, full of high nervous energy, and left.
Mitchell put his briefcase down, closed the door, removed his bookpack from his shoulders, and changed into the fresh oxford shirt he always carried in it for times when he’d return to the ministry, drenched in sweat from being out in the field. On his desk was another note, this one from Johnnie, telling him she had come into town to have lunch with him but no one knew where he was. Next to it was a mimeographed memorandum signed by the deputy minister, announcing Hudson’s appointment as CAO. Mitchell crumpled both and pitched them into the wastebasket.
He went to the window and watched the cars, beat-up minis and dusty sedans, entering and leaving the compound. The late afternoon sun faded all the bright tropical colors, emptied streets, made the Friday tailings of commerce and labor ugly. All the myriad annoyances of island life that only yesterday seemed so inclined toward comedy today produced in him a latent rage of incapacitation. Without success Mitchell tried telephoning Tillman at Rosehill, to learn if he knew of Isaac’s whereabouts. Twice the phone was picked up at the other end by people who seemed part of a practical joke. His third attempt was even more farcical. Somehow the operator connected him with Radio 805. It was the daily “Bob Marley Hour,” call in your dedication. He could hear the music and its pile-driving thump in the background. The deejay asked if Mitchell wanted to request a tune. A cleansing breeze puffed through the window; the papers on his desk vibrated and floated and then landed. To prevent documents from blowing around, there were small round beach stones throughout the ministry, as though they had been issued by General Services.
“No thanks,” said Mitchell. “I think I’m getting the Marley thing all mixed up.”
He asked the switchboard to try to put him through again, weighing down his papers with the stones as he waited. The phone rang. A lorry hammered along the street below the open windows, its load of cement bags bouncing up a gray dust that wafted through the leaves of a colossal ficus tree. Somewhere in the whitewashed recesses of the building a secretary tapped in indecisive spurts on a manual typewriter. At the other end of the line, Tillman answered the phone.
“Hey, buddy,” he said jauntily. “We’re bachelors again.” Adrian, Johnnie, and Big Sally had talked their way aboard one of the charter planes and were down on Cotton Island. Saconi was having a party
They discussed Isaac’s disappearance and Tillman, speculating on the various possibilities, confirmed Mitchell’s own sense of what had happened to their friend, and his mind was eased.
“Did you know that Kingsley is Isaac’s godfather?”
“No kidding?” said Tillman, but he wasn’t surprised. “These are all one people, one family here. That’s the problem. Hurt one and you hurt them all, but you can only help them out one person at a time.”
“I’m not ready to believe that.”
“Yet.”
Chapter 13
Gleaming puddles, clean black windows into nowhere, lay in a sheet of patches across the uneven stones of the floor—if they gave him no water, is that what he must do, lap them up like a dog; now it has come to this: dogness?—and it was from within the puddles that the depth and cold smell of silence seemed to emanate. High up on one of the walls, out of reach, was the joke of a bare light bulb, its topside crusted with filth, its socket combed with mud dauber’s nests, and higher still a white lance of daylight shot through a hole no larger than a loaf of bread where the rock wall intersected with the mossy bricks of the vaulting. The casement was splattered with bat lime, the wall covered with a long beard of it, almost to the floor. Up there was ground level, where the world began. He knew exactly where he was—in the hands of the Allambys, that family of moneylenders and debt collectors who had spread throughout the islands in the nineteenth century and were the source of the popular expression which meant to be in a hole with nobody to throw you a rope, to be in a bad way without the chance for a reprieve. In the hands of the Allambys, which meant don’t fret yourself with being saved because nobody listening.
The under-the-earth air, its uncirculated sadness, was not unfamiliar to him; was, even, reminiscent of childhood games, crawling into dark spaces and beneath floorboards and under porches, hiding from his brothers, escaping punishment, which ultimately could not be escaped but only deferred, and bwoy he take some good whippings in his day, but here the odors of concealment were institutionally poisoned with carbolic acid and lye, and it was frightening for a space this size, which could sleep a dozen men, all lying on their own pallets, to be without people, to be without enterprise, and to be without noise except for the batbirds and rats and ghost lizards and such.
It was a room unlike any Isaac had ever known or entered, and that fact alone was worthy of fear, opening upon a side of his life he had never bothered to imagine.
Loneliness.
Like himself a plot of rich green thriving guinea grass, and the loneliness a hungry herd of goats grazing him bare, mouthful by mouthful.
He had used a tin bucket before, and worse, but this one was a nastiness, with its dry turd like a moldy egg of shit at the bottom.
Still, it was not terrible to be here, as if he were packed away into the eroded recess of the roots of a mighty tree that sat perched on a channel of silence, and time flattened into a cool riffling peace, eddying into a harbor that would accept only the shallowest draft of thought, by the bargeload. There was no misunderstanding—he was here, forgotten in a rockstone dungeon cell above the careenage in old Fort Gregory because duplicity and swindle were something big men did to little men without thinking too much and perhaps even without malice, as though they were unable to step around it, as though it were how things got done. He had anticipated it, almost, climbing into Archibol’s car, and now here he was with a bung-up ear and mashed rib and the dogness that was an empty belly, and it was harsh but not so unpredictable, and no longer ridiculous once the heavy wooden door closed and locked behind him and the fellows on the other side, the one who delivered him here, said, Here now, that was nobody, and the fellow already here, the one who received him, said, Eh-eh, true, true, since him end up no place, and they receded like duppies, and that was how long ago?
He spit. Niggerbwoys in uniform. Mahn, what is that nonsense. And the worst of the lot was Selwyn Walker, he in his khaki short-pants and half-sleeve blouse, the patent leather shoes with their gray film of dust, the drab knee socks with limp tassels, the kneecaps of his skinny legs like chocolate biscuits, his bootoo swaggerstick tapping his calf. That was schoolboy puppetshow in truth. In his office there were no windows so you could say he lock himself up too in a fashion. There was a plastic couch, and a chair with arms and cloth cushions. In one corner, where an umbrella stand might be, was a rock carving so large it must have taken a gang
of men to fetch it up. The petroglyph’s design was of a headdress, or a rising sun, or a ceremonial axe, a handle leading to a half circle of blade. Isaac had seen that sort of thing plenty out in the bush, along the rivers, and it never failed to spook him. There was a bigshot desk and a bank of radio equipment stacked like crates on a table; a metal supply cabinet and a glass-enclosed bookcase. Shit on the wall, paper certificate and such. A row of perfectly polished hardback shoes on the floor near an empty water cooler, hot plate with an enameled teakettle, clump of soggy bags on a dish like old Kotex. If this how bigshot lookin these days, Isaac had told himself, I ain impressed. Walker wanted them to sit on the couch. They took opposite ends. Walker removed his officer’s cap and crossed his tantieman legs and began this same line of bullshittyness about Isaac’s father. I knew Crissy well, you know, he said. He was a hero of independence, St. Catherine’s own son. All the bigshots knew his father, all said the same thing from the same page of bullshit, he was this and that and would be PM today if he weren’t such a jackass fool as to listen to them and finish up the only man killed stonedead in the Sugar War. But there were no songs about Crissy Knowles, even Saconi had missed that boat, no plaques in commemoration, no fucking liberator on horseback statue courtesy of that shitass Archibol, no Crissy Knowles Memorial Park, no scholarship fund, no schools bearing his name. He was the hero whom everybody wanted to go away, stay buried in his poorman’s grave.
“He would have made prime minister, you know,” Walker said, petting the hat in his lap like a house cat. “He gone too soon fah St. Kate but not so soon he miss seeing how things turnin out, nuh?”
Selwyn on parade to kiss a deadman’s arse! Like father like son, that was the point he was steering toward, and Isaac couldn’t help himself, he let loose with mouthyness, and said No, sah! I ain dead as yet but you can kiss me ass too if you gettin into the habit, bwoy.
End of talky-talk.
Without stirring, he sat on the edge of the metal webbing that served as a cot, the frame anchored into the stones, sitting long enough for his mind to empty and refill with the pure solace of remembering, vents opening and closing throughout the tunnel of time that was his past. He ached for a taste of scotch whiskey, to be sharing a tall golden bottle of it with his boyhood friends in the villages that formed like carbuncles on Jack Dawes Estate, to be with those simple people again, earth-nurtured people, not lord-it-over-everybody cityfolk, laughing and scuffling and crawling around the bush like berrypaint Indians. His childhood home had smelled of saltfish and gardenias and Limacol, and when they left all they took with them was the white rose his father had planted in front of the old mud-walled house the day he married his mother, and now she kept it in an oil drum filled with Jack Dawes dirt in the rear yard. He resolved then and there to flee the city, go country, back to the land, and be ... be like what? he wondered, and heard the answer in his head, like Rasta John Baptist wandering the wilderness in animal skin and monkey-free, eating fruit and root. The reality of being cast down into gloomy purgatory returned, the feel like a molten corkscrew being tugged and twisted through his gut, and he thought, I ain care for this shitass country anymore, I ain care if them all die-up. In his bone weariness, he rocked back and forth, in and out of sleep, sideslipping down like a leaf into unconsciousness and then bursting out, seconds later, into a fragmented appreciation of his predicament. Calling up the old men under the bwa homme tree—the heroes of the bedtime stories his mother once told him—because only the domino players could help him face this tribulation, for they were—he had made them into—a tribunal of absolution, for even a stop-short-educated country-come-to-town boy such as himself knew that the dead were no more than the dark hidden half of the same journey to which the living were also committed, and these men, the ancestors of his imagination, held no grudges though it was true, yes, it was true that they were fallen men, defeated men, men who never had a cockroach chance against a lifetime of rascality and foul play, and when his mother’s voice mother-preached tolerance and generosity, he was baffled, he would not claim these things as his, and it was then that the domino players were born into voices of their own, all except justdead Crissy, who hadn’t ripened yet to these empathies and was part of no community of forgiveness. All this to occupy Isaac’s interpenetrating undercurrents of thought, half asleep, half awake, and increasingly miserable on both sides of the divide. Like-father-like-son was his great temptation. He felt oppressed by the merchants of forgiveness who were powerless to help him, the least able to right a wrong, because more than anything else in his life, now that he had to stop to think about it, he needed to be contradicted in the pain that was his alone. If he had less of an imagination he would not have a sober day to his credit, or if he had lost control of it he might have waged a futile, centerless war against any target in striking distance. Who or what would be ineligible, he could not say, not comprehending the nature of the desire to forgive. What act of forgiveness was not diluted by the endless range of cause and effect through which it traveled? Who was to blame for the sediments of misfortune that composed the history of a place like St. Catherine, or a man like Crissy Knowles? God? Was God the one who must be forgiven? Wasn’t that itself an unforgivable act, to behold God as an object of forgiveness? No man could afford God’s scrutiny by being so brazen. Things bad enough—don’t tempt God. But if God is a sinning God, who confess God, eh?
Oh ho. God. The outside father, the never-home father. I ain going waste my breath.
He lapsed into an arduous counting that seemed destined never to resolve itself. Miss Defy was gone—okay, so it is so. He liked cars but most of all he liked the rituals that were the small private pleasures of possession, so it was these he counted. He counted the favorite tee shirts and jerseys that had become the rags with which he bathed Miss Defy over the last three years —the two-stripe one, the baseball one, the play mas one —counted the countless times he had wiggled on his backside in the dirt to lie underneath her and view the filthy beauty of her manifold and pans and hoses, counted the times he had driven up the well-paved east Edison Banks side of the island to jook country girls in the rear seat, counted the spidery wirings he had improvised in Miss Defy’s electrics. When he finished counting the number of times it was absolutely mandatory to honk the horn on any given day when you drove from Front Street to Cyril Abbott Square, he counted a day’s worth of errands and stops and hellos, run-insides and pass-bys and pull-overs and go-arounds and drop-offs —all of which he was being denied like a banker denied his deals, car or no car, and then forlornly he counted the forms of employment he now had little choice but to beg for, mantling himself in subservient manners —Mistah Honeychurch, you does have work fah an honest bwoy? —humping bananas, watching cow, rowing boat, carrying sack, sweeping floor, digging hole, painting board, fixing engine, breaking rock, pounding nail, chopping tree, making road, pulling root, emptying can and such but oh ho, you can’t cut Crissy’s cane, hear? And now Isaac in a whirlwind dream of hurried counting made an inventory of the things he loved the most but took for granted, these were the everythings that were the songs running through his heart, in and out of the vents through which mortality flowed —eh-eh —picking bush tea with his mum, talking to women on the phone, smell of baby powder on a girl’s bubbies, the noise and flood of a river after heavy rains, the ale of his grandmother’s breath when she kissed him good night, the streets of Scuffletown first thing in the morning, the music of calypso and all that jump-up craziness; the sight of the old-woman higgler Miss Elizabeth being rowed home at twilight across the harbor in a pirogue, standing straightback in the stern like a proud schoolgirl, buttermilk and sugar finches and the smell of pussy and land-crab stew, old-timers dancing the quadrille dance to the music of jawbone and washtub, the ivory palaces of thunderheads and the glass-blue of the sea, that is a good good thing; and jokes, such as he and Juney Gonsalves sneaking into the funeral parlor where them had laid out Old Fire and Brimstone, the Jack Dawes preacher who had bee
n hell on all we boys and girls, and he held open the lid of Old Fire’s coffinbox while Juney taped the center picture of a Playboy magazine to the inside so preacher have a naked white gal in his face for all eternity; and a hot hot cup of salty cocoa tea; and this word camphor, the way it was said: cyam-pha, which is the big soft noise of a ship’s engine starting up below deck, and them British and stateside paperbooks with the good news of kookooma science, blood pudding and souse and roti dripping grease, bwoy, and wind-shaped trees high on the cliffs, the ocean scaled of its burning light, and the beauty of a strongback horse wading in pink seawater at sunrise; all the pretty pretty faces of the girls, and the sweet anticipation of seeing their dark eyes overtaken by the pleasuredream (and what is this the papers does say, that if a fella misses sex fah one month, sperm go to his head???), and the Friday night lorries headed out of town with all the happy people going home sweet home, and m’pé, m’sen, my father, truth is a process which is infinite, and love is a hole you drop into, it is a grave. And Isaac climbed an echoing ladder of footsteps to an aureole of consciousness, rolling his eyes open like a crocodile’s to see that his life had seemed to rush backward within the song, as the lives of those who are dying are said to do, and he stopped, terrified, feeling the presence of truth in his blood, with time so endless we are all lost forever in its chambers, and his eyes rolled open like a crocodile’s only a second before he was brought roughly to his feet, and he was taken in escort across the courtyard and dragged down a flight of slippery wet steps, which he counted one by one and then began again, counting one by one while his body was stripped bare and his head crudely shaven and then in a circle of yellow light he learned that he was incapable of answering questions in such a way as to save himself from dogness —but tell me what is all this royal poppycock ratshit fuss they making about the guy Wilson? —and when the two men who held him and the two men who beat him had finished, his testicles were like churchbell clappers, and the men under the bwa homme tree had converged on the pitiable novelty of Isaac’s doghood, commenting on how well it suited him, his friend-of-man attitude toward the world, trying to lift his spirits by baying in solidarity while Isaac bayed the lead, marveling at the ease of canine speech in his throat, how well it expressed the vital particulars, a language of liver and lungs and glands, until finally he lay down on the floor, urinated blood with great relief, and pulled an invisible blanket over his head.
Swimming in the Volcano Page 23
