Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  “Find Erzulie Mary, bwoy. Pluck she out.”

  It was when the priest pushed his arm impossibly forward that the boy realized he was being swallowed, and when his fingers brushed against the hard skin of the fetish that had been implanted inside his mother by her wretched lover, he shouted out, and jumped to withdraw his arm but couldn’t budge against the weight that held him. The clouds roiled and bucked around the limb of his right arm; Emma Quashie heard the goddess within them speak in a thunderclap —Cock of Almighty Christ —and struggled with the priest to make him release the child. Don’t look, begged the women of the walls, where he had been hiding with them, below the water. But now he was too afraid to stay with them. He ran squealing from this safe place, opened his eyes, and looked upon the first heartstopping assault of the demons that had launched an invasion into his life and there in his hand, when he finally twisted away and his devoured arm was spit back onto his body, the claw thing, black and scaly, its talons wrapped around the blue eye of a marble. The women called him back and he went toward them haltingly, having lost trust in their protection, and he barely noticed the priest douse and wash his arm in white rum, was less and less aware of his mother dressing him, and then he was being lifted up into the embrace of the undersea women and carried home to bed.

  “Where is Cassy?” Rupert Quashie asked at supper that night, and his wife told him the boy seemed to have a touch of the influenza. Less than a month had passed when his father stopped home to tell Emma that a house had caught fire early that morning, the house where Miss Diedra and the priest lived, and them burn up.

  “I ain surprise,” clucked Emma. “I ain surprise.” The man so careless with rum and candles.

  Chapter 15

  At ages five, six, and seven, Cassius went to school with his sisters, and though he wasn’t smart, he wasn’t dim-witted either. Dutifully, he learned his letters and numbers and was taught to read his primers. With the other boys, he began to reverse the course of the mothering that had circumscribed their lives. He learned to play marbles and kick a soccer ball, lash the air with a cricket bat; learned to push back when he, smaller than the other boys his age, was pushed; to hold his tears inside and to show no public respect for girls, but to obey teachers, parents, and the old people. Roaming with schoolmates in the afternoons and weekends and holidays, he found out how to capture land crabs for his mother’s cookpot, and catch iguana, though he hated them, with a stick and wire; how to hit birds and bush cats with a slingshot; how to take a cow to pasture, and bring it back when it wouldn’t come, and how, with the other boys, to hold a she-goat by the head and slurp milk from her titties, and how to beg a shilling from the tourists who came on the ferry, and in sailboats, and to crawl and paddle in the shallows of the harbor without stepping on the spines of an urchin; how to steal fruit, how to climb mango trees and shinny up coconut palms; how to race down a hill alongside an old tire, keeping it upright with a flat stick, and how to use a machete properly so you didn’t hack off your own fingers. How to jump from rock to rock atop the windward cliffs, how to tell jokes and how to lie, and how to run fast enough past graveyards before the duppies saw you, because he, of all the boys, knew what would happen then. In the midst of the other children, he was an able student of all these things, helping to construct their happiness, and his, and the wonder of that pretty sunswept world, where nothing seemed too much out of place, or wrong. As for the priest and Miss Diedra, they had dissolved into smoke even before they had burned themselves up, so that when he heard his parents speak of the fire that had consumed them, he, the boy Cassius, didn’t know who they were talking about, though sometimes late at night would come a whiff of their char, and he would know without knowing, and remember the undersea women.

  But for one responsibility that had been given him by his mother, these years of his boyhood would have remained spellbound by precious normality, especially since his mother had given up on the church. Instead, Cassius had cause to learn the meaning of rage, and what it felt like to have an enemy so strong as to be immune from defeat. Rage meant you couldn’t stop somebody from making you do what you didn’t want, and having an enemy felt like you never knew what bad thing was going to happen next.

  While the boy was still small, Collymore sent Emma Quashie’s fish up the road with one of her neighbors who had come down to Norman’s Cove in the afternoons to buy from the boats. He was an unreliable supplier, though, skipping days, sending trash fish or the first caught, uncleaned, gone dry and soft in the sun or flattened under the bigger, fresher fish. Exasperated, Emma went herself one evening to the spot where Collymore rigged his scales on the limb of a sea grape. He was stooped at the water, yanking the skin from a jumbo-size oldwife.

  “Collymore, how you get so clevah to cheat me, eh?” she said, hawking at her feet. “Come, give me daht nice oldwife, or is baby you muss mek room fah, in de boat.”

  There was no escaping it: fish must pay for the boy, either with Emma Quashie or the next house. And his own mother already keeping two pickaninnies he make, and put she foot down, won’t take three. And them babies but fancy-pants girls, sad to say, and each one due a piece of fish. And Quashie have the only boy, and the mother dead. Resigned, he held the oldwife out to her, because he wanted that boy.

  “When he cy-ahn row a boat,” he reminded Emma Quashie, “send him down by me.”

  This was their agreement but as time passed, Emma thought little of it, considering only that the fish was rightfully hers.

  The day she decided that Cassius was old enough to walk the road by himself, she gave him an errand that from then on would be his alone—to go to Norman’s Cove when the fishermen came back ashore and collect a piece of fish from the man named Collymore. His instructions were to take nothing less from the fisherman than a nice piece, and so he set off over Paley’s Hill, wearing a frond basket like a chinaman’s hat, eager to serve his mother. In front of the one pointed out to him as Collymore, he stood happily and repeated what he had been told to say: Me muddah wish fah a nice piece. No one had to tell Collymore who the boy was—he had Miss Diedra’s puniness, her turned-up squash of nose and cocoa coloring, and Collymore’s own slanty eyes. The fisherman ignored him, looking over the boy’s head to the knot of customers higgling with the catch, and served them all, tucking their money into the pocket of his frayed bathing trunks, until only the boy remained, timid now and puzzled, his basket held out in front of him like a beggar’s bowl. Cassius had not been given money; he worried that his mother had made a mistake, that the man knew about it and would be angry. He came and towered straight over the boy. All Cassius could see was the thick rope of the man’s penis, tented within the fisherman’s damp suit, and he quickly took a step back in the sand.

  “Who you, bwoy?” Collymore demanded.

  “Cassius Quashie.” By now he was sorry he had come to Norman’s Cove.

  “Lehwe see you money.”

  The boy wasn’t going to talk about money, since he didn’t know about it, and he stood his ground, only hoping his mother had not been wrong. Collymore asked him how old he was, but Cassius wasn’t going to speak again.

  “You is a fuckin peewee, nuh?”

  The leering disgust in the man’s tone caused the boy to flinch, his face contorted as if he were trying to hold back tears. Collymore strutted over to his boat, raised a sleek machete, and gutted an unusually large parrot fish that he had set aside to sell to Mama Smallhorne for her two-table restaurant. It was a giant fish—a fish as big as the boy himself—and with a mordant grin, he held it horizontal, an extravagant offering, above the boy’s basket and let it drop. The sudden weight was a stroke of sleep, deadening Cassius’ grip, flicking in and out once through his head. There was the basket in the sand, the fish’s big square clown’s head and rigid fan of tail overgrowing and crushing the rim, something funny in that but he wasn’t about to laugh, and only because he hated the fisherman so much for persecuting him was he able to make himself not cry.
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br />   “Tell Miss Quashie here is a nice piece and to hell wit she. Tek it up, peewee. Go, I tell you!”

  The boy was being stupid now, staring at the bright turquoise-armored fish as though he were waiting to hear it confirm its own impossible heaviness. He had to leave, to get away from the man Collymore, who was still there to bully him, yet each time he tried to lift the basket he couldn’t find its balance, and the fish plopped out until its slime had a crust of sand stuck to it.

  “We is on de tough-up program now, peewee, you and me. Pick it up so, eh?” Before the boy could jump back, Collymore had him by the right hand, forcing it into the slit belly of the fish, sliding it upward across the wet surface of flesh to where the line ended at the finned peak of its throat. The boy’s heart pounded madly and he didn’t know why, just that his eyes hurt, and he could be made sick touching the fish this way. He tried to run but the fisherman held him fast, helped him raise the fish by the bones below the gills, then took his own hand away, and the fish fell back to the sand. “Pick it up so,” said Collymore and then, losing all interest in the boy’s dilemma, walked away back to his boat.

  It was the first time the boy was seized, complete and head-on, by hatred, and he knew instinctively that you do not provide satisfaction for someone you hate, but do all you can to deny them. Somehow he managed to scoop the fish back into the crumpled basket and drag it like a sled down the beach to where the bush began, and the path went up into it to traverse Paley’s Hill, taking him out to the road and then the hamlet out on Hammon’s Bight. The sun had just stepped down from the last bank of clouds on the horizon into its perfect form, became a living, tangible object, prepared to die in the water, and the sight of it goaded the boy, because he was terrified of being outside of his own house after dark. It was not fear, however, but his newborn brawny hatred that hauled the parrot fish up Paley’s Hill. Encircling the sand-pasted body of the fish with his short arms, he hoisted it against his chest, its bone head gluey, pressing into his face, its leak of pink syrupy fluids soiling his clothes. As he walked and stumbled up the path toward the summit, he could feel the gritty scales shaving his bare arms, the tail fin slapping his knees. Near the top, his foot banged into a rock and he toppled over, his fall cushioned by the fish, although the dorsal fin punctured a line of stigmata through the flesh of his arm. He was used to being a mess, and even liked it, but this was not the kind of dirtiness he could be friends with—the smeared snotty slime on his clothes, the foul stickiness drying on his face, the stinging blood on his hand. He felt unclean as he never had before, out romping in the yards and mud and scrub. He ran back down the path for the basket, smashing it in frustration into the branches of thorn acacia and pigeon pea through which the footpath tunneled. He lifted the fish again, made the crest of Paley’s Hill and started down but now his arms ached so thoroughly he knew he could no longer carry the fish this way, and after the drama of several lunging steps, he threw it down again. Almost in a panic—the shadows looked like closing teeth as the sun went down, below him, out at sea—he hurried back for the basket, then back to the fish, its position marked by hovering gulls. This time, when he tried to raise it, he felt the sear of hot needles along his arms, sprinkling down his legs and the tops of his feet, and saw too late that the fish swarmed with fire ants. The birds told him to leave the fish where it was, for them, and go home. In a fury, he tore a leafy branch from a bush and swept the ants away, then remembering about the gills, threaded the broken end through them and out the fish’s beaked mouth so that the branch became a handle and in this way, walking backward in a crouch, he dragged the fish down the harborside slope to the edge of the road, scurried back up the hill for the useless basket, and each step back he found himself deeper in the spreading black fog of night that was his poisoned imagination. A raven had landed on the fish and was pecking out its eye. Before he could chase it off, a cat pounced out of the dark weeds, and then two more, wild, screeching duppy noise. He felt more helpless than ever as he watched them fight among themselves over the mound of the fish, ripping at the cut in its belly, and when he kicked at them they slashed his ankle with their claws. He found a big stick and beat at them mercilessly, blow after blow, for how long he didn’t know, until out of the darkness a hand grabbed his arm and he swung the stick to beat at it too but the stick was taken away from him. He was lifted into the air and put on a donkey, and given his basket to hold. The fish was loaded into a pannier, and he was taken home, a man he couldn’t see leading the donkey by a rope. “Miss Quashie,” the man called out when they were in Cassius’ yard, “I find de child along de road, tekkin a dislike to parrot fish. Him flog it so, I say to meself, what bahd baka ting is dis.” Cassius was a small boy, six years old, his size held back a year by Miss Diedra. The dead fish had felt as heavy to him as the cross they made Jesus carry, but he carried it anyway, until the baka things came, and fireflies boiled in his vision. When he saw his mother open the door he cried.

  Emma Quashie said nothing to soothe the child, other than to go wash himself and hush, because even bunged up and filthy, the parrot fish was a great windfall for her kitchen, a private’s wage in the colonial police being nothing to brag about. But, eh! what a damn dirty trick Collymore play on the boy, she thought, and at dinner made a point of praising him for his strength, to carry such a cow of a fish over the hill. The boy’s face brightened momentarily, but it would take more flattery than she had to give to dispel the stubbornness that had come into him, a companion to the hatred. He had been strong, that was true, but the way it came to him was an unwanted discovery, exhausting and frightening. He ate only the rice and peas on his plate, avoiding the chunks of fish his mother had stewed, though only yesterday they were his favorite. Later that evening, when his father came off duty and entered the children’s bedroom to kiss them goodnight, Cassius reached out uncertainly to touch the spot on his father’s belt where he wore his holster. He had seen men carry rifles to hunt birds or wild goats, but he wasn’t sure for what purpose his father wore a gun, only that it was something of indescribable power, like a bolt of lightning.

  “Where de gun, Poppi?” he asked sleepily as his father brushed his lips on his forehead.

  “Put away, like you, in its bed.”

  “What it fah?”

  Rupert Quashie chuckled softly. “To save me arse from bahd men.”

  “Huh?”

  One of his sisters poked him to be quiet.

  “A fella give me de devil, I muss fire it, ya know.”

  “Wha happen?”

  “Him fall dead, and ain trouble nobody again.”

  “Poppi,” his oldest sister tattled, sitting up in bed, “Cassy want you to fire de gun upon de mahn Collymore.” The boy nodded his head shyly, hoping this was not too much to ask.

  “What you say, bwoy?” his father said, merry with feigned alarm. “What Collymore do to you?”

  Cassius described his ordeal. When he held up his hand to show his father the puncture wounds he had received, his father kissed them, sweetly laughing, pulled the sheet up on the boy and his sisters and petted the tops of their heads, like melons in a market.

  “Yes,” Rupert comforted the boy. “But you bring de fish anyway, eh?” He loved children but knew Emma was tired out from making her two, and now swallowed clinic pills to thwart his seed. He knew that Collymore sent fish to help feed the boy, but did not think of him as a son, as Rupert did. “You triumph. Collymore muss believe you is special, to give such a faht fish.”

  Cassius remembered the spite in the fisherman’s eyes, how he held the parrot fish above the basket and released it like a brilliant blue bomb, and was not swayed by his father’s words. Collymore tried to defeat him, Collymore desired to see him cry. The boy couldn’t accept this behavior, except as he knew it in the schoolyard, where boys pushed each other down on the soccer field. But grown-ups ain push you down, he rationalized, but does give you a spank if you misbehave or talk rude. Collymore use the fish to push me down, the
child thought, arriving at a startling but logical conclusion. And now he wanted his father to go push Collymore down in return, but his father wouldn’t do it. He fell asleep dreaming though that Rupert Quashie went to the beach and pushed Collymore down with his gun. Thus would a boy’s dignity be restored, but it did not happen.

  He put the grave injustice Collymore had committed out of his thoughts until the following week when, arriving home from school, his mother met him with a new basket and told him, Go fetch a second nice piece when Collymore’s boat reach. He dawdled, afraid to say no or resist her or speak his mind. She took notice of his rare procrastination and broke a switch from the croton bush in front of the house.

  “No, Momma, no!” He skipped away from her, feeling the quick hot lines of her impatience on his backside, and ran to the edge of the yard. “Momma, lehwe buy a piece from a next boat,” he mumbled. His hatred for Collymore swelled and flooded through him, not letting him forget that it was now part of him, and it seemed filled with the presence of creatures larger than the parrot fish, hideous things he refused to look at, and even harder to carry. Worse, this second surge brought a treacherous discovery, since it had the power to make him feel ashamed.