Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  “Breeze sweet dis mornin, peewee. You will come to love a breeze dis sweet.” Collymore laughed—he was happy. The boy was small, too young, without experience and afraid—Quashie bring him down unripe, eh?—but Collymore looked forward to teaching him, being the expert, the authority—and sure the boy have capacity, nuh? since them already take him to the schoolhouse. But—tch!—him mule-headed.

  Halfway across the flats, the troll line sprang so taut the peg in the gunwale it was tied to creaked and hummed with tension. Collymore yoked the steering harness around his legs, clasped the sheetline in the gap between his big toe and the others. Bending over the side, he began to haul in the fish, stiff dripping loops of heavy nylon balling haywire at his feet.

  “Flats always bring a nice barra at sunrise, ya know.”

  The boy heard angry, powerful splashes. Heard the fisherman grunt and curse admiringly.

  “Watch youself, peewee. Mistah Barra is a mahd, mahd fellow.”

  Cassius didn’t care. He lived on a small island, ate fish regularly, but never had to bother with a live one. He didn’t care about the barra—why should he!—or Collymore, or the boat, or his wet shoes. Even the pain in his head and the dizziness in his stomach were things not to care about. Go to hell, go to hell, go to hell, he prayed to himself. Mahn, you go to hell.

  Then the barracuda, huge and enraged, was in the boat between them, flashing like the blade of a cutlass in the heat of battle. Almost immediately, both the boy’s legs were slashed and bleeding and he was somehow up in the bow, holding on to the mast for his life, watching in horror as Collymore crushed the murderous head of the fish with a lead-weighted pipe, and blood sprayed.

  “Oh ho, what I say, bwoy? Cy-ahnt be dreamin when barra reach de boat.”

  Cassius hyperventilated, his nostrils dilated and his eyes bulging. Bright blood was splattered across the chest of his starched white shirt as though it had been shaken out of a mop. His fear made him wild inside, made tongues of flame spin behind his eyes, he fell: an incomprehensible impulse to jump out of the boat, dive underwater to find—what?—at least to get away from what was now perfectly clear to him, because his father Rupert Quashie had taken him to see The Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor, so his nightmares were no different than this moment, and his life was now no different than the film, out here so far from land with Collymore, and the sea ruled by monsters who lived within the night below the surface. He bawled inconsolably. He chattered nonsense. He trembled and clawed the mast as if he meant to scale it.

  Collymore pointed the catboat into the wind. After tearing the spoon from the ferocious jaws of the barracuda, shoving the fish under the center seat to protect it from the sun, he stood up and walked the length of the boat, a master of balance. The boy panicked and tried more desperately to shinny up the mast. The delirious noise of a small animal came from his throat.

  “You ain no pussy cyaht, peewee,” Collymore said with firmness in his voice. He peeled the boy’s fingers from the wood and swung him over and down, replacing him on the seat. “You ain no monkey, mast ain monkey tree. Here now, hold steady so I cy-ahn speck how Mistah Barra nasty up dese legs!”

  With the calabash bailer, he scooped seawater and washed the boy’s cuts. They were many, as if a comb of needles had been dragged across both shins, but only superficially, and there was no cause for concern, at least no cause that Collymore could recognize. The saltwater stung and the boy winced through his tears, not knowing it was saltwater that had woken him up to the world. Although he felt the barracuda inside of him, alive, shredding him to pieces, each minute he drifted farther down into a strange calm, as though he’d been drugged, and a blankness settled across his face, masking his anguish.

  Collymore returned aft, trimmed the sail, and the boat speeded ahead. “So now you introduce to Mistah Barra,” he chuckled, feeling for the first time a great bond of intimacy with the boy, now that he’d been bloodied. “Dey ain teach you about Mistah Barra in school? What! True negligence! Me Gawd, daht was de ABC of barra, peewee. A-B-C!”

  The fisherman brayed laughter, pleased with his joke, and delighted to see the boy had composed himself. A tenderness passed through Collymore like a bird, and he wanted the boy to come to love the sea as he did, because it was beautiful and honest in its indifference, it gave a man the only freedom that tasted pure, and because there was nothing else in life to love. But Cassius—whatever he would have been otherwise without this fate, his soul—was an uprooted seedling.

  The sea grew agitated as they approached the lee of the barrier reefs that sheltered Cotton Island from the unchecked force of the Atlantic, the eternal sweep of currents from an Africa submerged far off in their lives. The concussion of surf began to thicken the air; an arcade of fragmented rainbows shifted brilliantly along the spine of collapsed breakers. Coming so near, like this, it was a great spectacle, both exhilarating and of a consummate threat, like stepping aside as a herd of wild horses galloped past, and it left all men speechless—the immeasurable upswelling of the universe of ocean against the fragile coral defense of an island so small that even now, this close, it was no more than a mere smudge on the horizon. Collymore bid the boy to look, for it was a sight as irresistible to the eyes as a city ablaze with flames in the night, but Cassius remained hunched and dull-eyed and removed, far back into himself. Yet when the fisherman piloted the boat through the turbulent cut in the reef and into the high swells beyond, which surrounded them, tossed them high and low like a door perpetually opening and closing upon a boundless field of towering indigo cusps, the change of movement commanded the boy to awareness. He lifted his head and looked fully around, stricken, finally looking at Collymore in frozen, silent appeal until, with a roll of his eyes and a resignation that overcame even horror, he vomited the thin contents of his stomach into his lap. Like an invisible boxer, the jar and rock of the boat pummeled him, even as the puking spasms made it impossible to support himself upright. He tumbled backward, throwing himself yet being thrown, to crawl along the bottom of the boat like a beaten dog and lay propped against the ribs of the bow when he could go no further, moaning and heaving, foamy bile hanging off his chin, then pissing too into his blue schoolboy shorts, knowing that this was the worst—that he was nothing; that nothing could be altered; that nothing could be forgiven.

  For a good ways more, Collymore sailed onward to the offshore banks and then anchored. He fished into the middle of the day for red snapper and was lucky. Occasionally he spoke to the boy, but only to hear his own voice; he pitied the child, understanding there was no comfort for him on earth but land itself. Beyond this, he had no other insight into the boy’s misery; nor, on his terms, required one. By the time Collymore restepped the mast and hauled his lump of heavy scrap iron from the deep, the boat was carpeted with gold-orange fish, and six inches of bilge water lapped against the boy, soaking him with blood and slime. As they sailed, Collymore bailed with the calabash shell, his arm dipping mechanically and his face serene, and he sang a Jim Reeves ballad popular among the fisherman—

  Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone,

  And let’s pretend we’re together, all alone.

  Collymore had never spoken into a telephone, but he knew plenty of women with sweet lips, and the goal of his life was to be alone with them all.

  Inside the reef, on calmer waters, the boy gratefully nodded off to sleep, exhausted by his ordeal. He lay mostly on his stomach, hugging the angle of the hull, his underside drenched with filth, a reddish hue to his exposed skin where the sun had cooked him. Collymore steered off his heading to the islet called Palm Cay and sailed the boat aground on the sands of its isolation. He lifted the groggy Cassius in his arms and perched him on the bow and removed his shoes, pouring a pink syrupy bilge out of their interior, stripped the listless boy and lay him mercifully on his back in the clear, tame water where the child bobbed, half submerged, eyes closed like a shipwreck victim. Collymore rinsed out the soiled clothes and spread them on
basalt rocks, farther up the tidal slope of the beach, to dry.

  “You will find it come easier, peewee,” he said as he slapped the first of the fish down on planks of the bow, and opened it with his machete. “Tomorrow and de next time and de next, it will come easy, come nice, and you will say, ‘Mahn, here is a life I does like/” The boy gave no response but only floated, still listless, feeling as hollow and light as a balloon while his clothes dried and Collymore cleaned the catch, throwing guts to the pelicans that suddenly appeared, and he listened, whenever his ears broke out of the water, to the wild, Sinbad wind of their wings.

  That night, put to bed on an old car seat in the front room of his father’s shanty, Cassius rose with the late moon and ran away, back to the only place his running could take him, home to the Quashies. He was dressed in an oversized white tee shirt, yellowed from wear and containing the sulfuric smell of its owner, that Collymore had given him, so that passing through the bush on Paley’s Hill Cassius reproduced the image of his own mother in years past, immaculate in her white smock, leaving her stepmother’s house to join the Holy Rollers on the beach. He moved fast along the path, as much in dread of having his liberty aborted by Collymore as of the baka things that were out there too, roaming the darkness with him, and he was out of breath by the time he reached the Quashies’ stoop; tears had painted two silvery lunar channels of reflected light down the length of his cheeks.

  He threw himself hard against the dutch door, beat it with the heels of his hands and kicked, crying for his mother and father to take him in. The hamlet dogs erupted, formed a pack and dashed into the yard, barking madly, and the boy’s own wails were absorbed by this invasion of noise. Only he could hear himself, and what he heard was only another voice in the general blow-up—the weakest, the one that no one heeded—and yet his place in the dogs’ chorus made him stronger, as if they had come to be his allies, as if they understood what he wanted, and how to make it happen. From inside, he heard Rupert’s weak voice interrupt the darkness: Emma, wha happen? Cashy outside. Let him in. Emma? Emma? Footsteps from within, identical to his own heart in sound and rhythm, but they remained clear of the door. Then he could hear the susurration of his mother’s whispers, explaining to his father, but he didn’t know what she was saying. Emma had in fact experienced misgivings about handing the boy over to his true father, and had not found the courage to mention the act to her husband. Kneeling now at his bedside, in her guilt, she lied and found relief, seeing her husband believe her tale, that Collymore himself had come unexpectedly that morning to reclaim the boy, and she dared not deny the fisherman’s right to his own flesh. In the darkness, she sensed her husband’s sad acceptance of the act, and when his hand searched out hers in comfort for this loss of their adopted son, she herself was half convinced that her story was true, and nothing could be done to change its consequence; nothing would ever make it different. She resolved, patting Rupert’s hand and replacing it on his chest, to let the child bawl himself out and then, with no attention paid him, he would readily find his way back to where he belonged. But, eh! what a scene he make, screaming so, walloping the door, and them dogs like baka brothers to him, joining in.

  Meanwhile, the side shutters had burst open, and Cassius raced to them, roaring with hope, his sobbing intensified by the flare of hope through his body. There he stood below the sill, transfixed in anticipation, tongues of flame darting at the edge of his vision as he stared up at the pigtailed heads of his sisters, gazing down at him with interest. “Cashy,” the oldest whispered conspiratorially, “bwoy, you mek a row! Is you ahll right? What is fishenin like? Did you reach St. Kate-side? Mommi does say—” They were sucked back into the darkness, vanished, replaced by his mother’s plump forearms, drawing the shutters closed and, with them, his heart. He had not seen her face, and never would again. The dogs seemed to find significance in the latching of the shutters; they grew bold and chased the boy down the road, where the baka things waited, to harry him up Paley’s Hill and—but he would not say or think it—home.

  Chapter 16

  By summer, Rupert Quashie’s injuries had healed as well as they would. He asked to be returned to duty; was offered—and accepted—a promotion and minor administrative posting on the island of Montserrat. Two months had passed since Emma had exiled Cassius with only the clothes on his back. Even now, she refused to think of him, and as she packed what she could of her house into cardboard boxes and baskets and a rusty footlocker, when she came across the boy’s few things she began to throw them out, and would have, if Rupert had not noticed what she was doing. How the boy get by with no clothes? he wondered, but restrained himself from asking why she hadn’t sent them. Since his recovery, she had been high-strung and testy; his transfer seemed to rejuvenate her, and so he was more inclined to let her be, and simply picked the clothes out of the trash pile himself, while she was at a neighbor’s, folded them, inserted an envelope and a gift into the center of the stack, and tied the bundle with cord. He knew the boy had been schooled long enough to read and write, so he had written a short note: Cassius: Here is clothes you leave behind. Miss Emma and I and girls going to Montserrat—2 days. You was a good boy and we miss your many smiles. Love, Rupt. Quashie P.S. Why Colly more not come to collect the clothes? Tell him I say he must treat you right.

  The gift he sent along was his brass-plated police badge. In Montserrat he would say it was lost, and be issued another.

  He enlisted one of the girls to deliver the bundle to Norman’s Cove where she set it down in the sand in front of Collymore’s door and left in a hurry, ravaged by the clouds of mosquitoes that hung in the stifling air. When he returned that evening from the sea, as mindless and unseeing as a zombie, his knuckles scraped and his hands cut and swollen from a day of line-fishing that would have exhausted most grown men, Cassius walked straight past the package and into the shack, to his car seat, and lay down, his flesh throbbing and vibrating, the hallucinatory nature of his fatigue already shifting beyond consciousness, into rapid-fire dreams. By now his school clothes were as odious and torn as slaughterhouse rags, with fish scales permanently affixed to their threads, never completely dry, and starchy with an accumulation of salt and crud. Gone-to-the-devil, Collymore had remarked, not with concern, for he himself was proud to fly the stained flags of a fisherman’s rugged life. Still, returning home from his rum shop meal, it satisfied him to find the bundle of clothes at the door. He picked it up and set it inside the front room, and left a bag of blood sausage and bread for the boy’s breakfast on the small table, the room’s only other furnishing, against the wall.

  Not until the weekend did Collymore remember the bundle and tell the boy—he had to be told—to untie it. There were three pairs of pants, three long-sleeved shirts, three undershirts and underpants, and a handkerchief—his rightful inheritance, and no more. He read the letter from Rupert without expression; its message came like a stale breath that had somehow been exhaled from a corpse. The page was undated, but the boy had lost track of the days anyway. As far as he knew, the Quashies had not yet departed Cotton Island, but the implied invitation to come say his good-bye was unintelligible to him: it rang once against the shield of his heart and echoed away into a fog. There was a constant gravity to the boy now that did not allow for human affairs that existed outside the sphere of Collymore.

  The badge, however, attracted him, with the same ravenous and inexorable appetite of a fish committed to a lure. Immediately, the badge became an emotional horizon for the boy, reduced to seductive flashes but in proximity, bearing the illusion of attainment. He pinned it to his fresh shirt, the fabric retaining a trace of the garlic smells of his childhood, and wore it continuously, despite the teasing it earned him from the fishermen, and the apt nickname, Private. The weight of the badge became a timepiece, measuring a basic cycle. Only when a shirt became so threadbare it would no longer hold the formidable brass pin would Cassius throw the garment away, and wear another from his scanty wardrobe. As if his
own needs were at best equal to the requirements of a piece of metal. It was a primitive’s love, a sensation, and nothing more, so completely had he been severed from his past and its symbols, and as a pretty thing that suggested unidentified powers he wore it daily for two years, until he lost it, capsized in the water, on a day when Collymore was reckless enough to flaunt a squall, attempting to outrun it in a catboat overloaded with a bounty of conch. The wind filled the sail like uncontrollable anger. With no freeboard to counterbalance, the leeward rail pressed down, admitting the flood, and the boy bailed furiously. Collymore, exalted by their speed, the bravado of their furrowing wake, refused to release the sheetline until it was too late. A severe gust blasted into them, standing the boat on its beam so that it swallowed enough water to plunge to the bottom, thirty feet below. For hours, Collymore and the boy swam toward shore through a tempest of gale-driven rain, the surface a gyrating hive of transparent liquid bees. The boy dog-paddled with closed eyes and followed the sound of Collymore, not having learned how to swim properly, and since his mouth stayed mostly in the water, he whimpered through his nose, expecting any second to be pulled under and drowned by an inhuman hand wrapping like a thick noose around his ankle. When they finally made the coast, Cassius discovered the badge was gone, and no search would bring it back.

  The catboat though was another matter. Cassius spent what was for him a pleasure-filled night of restlessness, imagining the storm had saved him from this slavery he had been cast into. He squirmed on his car seat until morning, trying to see the outline of freedom that had been restored to his life, and was never more dejected than when Collymore marched him to the beach and they set out with two other fishing crews and resurfaced the boat. The salvagers even dove up the sluggish conch. Collymore and the boy returned to shore with it; they cleaned the meat from the shells until midday, and Cassius was given the rare reward of a fair-weather afternoon to himself, to squander as he pleased.