As he pleased!—but this was the anxious, haunted liberty of an amnesiac, a cheerless interlude from the drudgery and torpor of the boat; its eternal Present, expanding without change. He felt embalmed in salt and foreignness, walking the road to town, and soon turned back, preferring to stay near Collymore’s shanty, craving nothing as much as his bed. He stared at goats and cattle as if trying to determine the secret of superiority. There had been other days too when Collymore had set him loose, but he spent them no differently, without joy or purpose. Because he had no money, he had no business in town, with its memories of Saturday morning sweets, or the cool magical darkness of the flim shows. Nostalgia was the same for him as starvation, and he could not endure its deep, inner pressures. And he avoided what was, in his mind, the great human commerce and communion of the public dock, because even on an impoverished island where rags and clothes were too often synonymous, his were the most offensive, his body itself was an obscenity of neglect, and he was rebuffed for his crudity and for being the simpleton that the brilliance of the sun out on the water had made of him, framing his thoughts and feelings in a perpetual stupor. Truly, he became accustomed to this state, recognized it as his nature, inescapable, and so was able to provide himself with life’s most austere comfort and permitted himself to believe that he deserved his downfall. Most of all, on these miscarried excursions beyond the wilderness of his new world, he could not stand the sight or company of his former schoolmates and their tenacious silence, looking him over, he thought, as if he had become disfigured or deformed. As if they were frightened of him. It was left to him then to bank away his penny allowances of freedom, as if they were given to him in a currency that was not exchangeable, and this is what he did, lingering in the shade of the sea grapes, sitting on a wooden fish box and snapping twigs between his growing fists, smoking cigarette butts he had scavenged off the road, killing mosquitoes and lizards and listening to birds, sitting and waiting beneath the monolithic shadow of his father, a gray soul in a limitless purgatory, waiting for the shadow to be thrown aside, or down.
In the third year of Cassius’ servitude, a princess, he heard, came and restored an old plantation house on Cotton Island, a place where she could hide away from the world, and enjoy her holidays. The following year, on the perimeter of her compound, a small but exclusive hotel had opened, inaugurating the island’s entry into the age of tourism, and the hotel prided itself on serving its guests enormous lobsters, brought fresh from the sea. To help fill this new and lucrative demand, Collymore had purchased a speargun and skin-diving gear. Though he was in poor shape for diving, and his debaucheries frequently modified his greed, even being bad at spearing crawfish, as he called them, was, for a time, profitable, especially after the ferry service improved, and the restaurant owners from St. Catherine came down to make deals with the fishermen.
One day, before the shallows had been hunted bare, the boy sat in the boat, manning its homemade oars, trailing after Collymore, who was up and down in the water like a seal. On one of his dives, the fisherman poked his head under a ledge of coral, sighting down into a narrow canyon of blue light flurried with motes of plankton, and saw two things that caused him excitement. The first, and first to be dealt with before he could slide deeper under the canopy of the ledge where it cracked and chambered, was an olive-hued conger eel, surely as long as his own leg but with ten times the power in its sleek, flat muscle; and beyond, just the wavering tips visible past the serpentine roll of the eel’s body, the antennae of a lobster that he guessed to be as long and round as his thigh. Though he couldn’t see the crawfish, back in its hole, Collymore took several blind shots at it, firing beneath the eel, without success. He tried jabbing at the eel with the gun to prompt it out of its sanctuary, but the creature only made threatening feints, brainless and territorial, and Collymore made the unhappy decision that he would have to shoot it. Given such a large and unmoving target, though, he aimed too casually—the shot was poor, not a kill shot—and the eel vanished before his eyes, wedging itself within the rocks, the shaft of the steel spear clanking like the bell of a sunken ship.
Dozens of times, Collymore dove, struggled and ascended, back and forth between the fluid mirror of the surface and the twilight of the coral crevice, without retrieving his gun. Finally, he had the boy hand him the iron-tipped pole he carried in the boat, designed for such occasions as this. Its weight raced him to the ocean floor where he set about splitting and prying apart the coralheads where the eel had receded, fleeing to the surface as his air ran out, then back down again, as Cassius hovered the boat in the current. This was exhausting work—when the eel eventually materialized out of a cloud of pulverized coral, impaled and writhing, a tendon ripped from the flank of a giant, Collymore barely had time to grab the gun; barely the energy to haul this monstrous nuisance to the surface, a greenish smoke of blood trailing from its wound.
Cassius heard the fisherman blow the water from his snorkel. Nothing seemed amiss—Collymore had not even bothered to describe the problem to him, saying only that the spear had gotten jammed in the rocks. The boy hadn’t volunteered to anchor off and help. As much as Cassius hated being in the boat, it was nothing compared to the panic he felt being in the water itself, far from shore. He pictured himself drowning, or being eaten—the two most inconceivably desolate and hellish fates that were the flirtations of every sailor and fisherman who ever left land. From this obsession he had only one remedy, a release, one rite of exorcism, however temporary and futile, and he found it in the customary violence of his occupation—the gratification he received from hammering to death a big, bloated fish was immense—and he became his most articulate in the expression of this violence. Each fish became an emissary from the chimeric wilds of his imagination; each blow he delivered to its bony plate of skull was accompanied by a monologue of childish condemnation.
It seemed to him right now that Collymore was resting, catching his breath. If Cassius had suspected otherwise, he would have been prepared and braced, the lead-weighted bludgeon in his hand, for the battle ahead of him. Instead, he was half lost in lassitude, managing a slow-motion tug of the oars to keep the boat near Collymore, who was somewhere close in front of him, off the bow.
“Come! Come! Come!”
Collymore had something for him. The urgency in his voice was not unfamiliar. The boy pulled ahead.
“Kill it! Kill it!”
Without further warning, into the stern of the boat dropped a monster of Sinbad proportions, whirling itself into multiple forms. In the eel’s fury, it bent the shaft of the spear shot through its flesh into a right angle against the hull. The boy immediately let go of the oars and stood up in his seat, mortified, breathless, watching the beast smash and toss, strain, all neck, the Sinbad thing, an incarnation of utter virulence, wanting him, wanting at the boy, popping into the air as if it danced on a red-hot griddle. Motion that was pure wickedness, thoughtless and crazy—just to look at it made Cassius feel he was floating. He knew it was going to get him and it did. He knew, because, “Look—It got me!” he screamed. Astonishing, how he screamed. “It got me! It eat me!”—there it was, a lightning bolt clapped onto his leg. He wasn’t even sure what it was, had never seen such a thing, and here it was stuck on his leg, its terrible beaked jaws snapped shut around his shin bone, sinking down into the meat of his calf. He was still a small boy, his youth blistered and festering, but he knew what to say as he grabbed for the pipe and battered it and battered it and battered it, all movement a target, anything a target, holding the pipe in both hands and chopping it down with surprising force, pulping the beast’s flesh, his eyes held in shuddering enchantment by the aqueous snake eyes of the eel, and each blow no different than if it had struck himself simultaneously, so said his pain, beating and beating and blood spurting everywhere—Cunt! You cunt! You muddah cunt! Clot cunt! Cunt hole! Cunt!
Nothing alive in the world closes with such finality as the jaws of a conger eel. Even after he had clubbed it to
death it was part of him, his ball and chain.
Collymore heaved himself into the boat and slapped the boy until his senses returned, prying the club from his mortal grip. He severed the eel from its head, but wasn’t strong enough—or cruel enough, even him—to unlock the jaws and set the child free.
* * *
Collymore had long since been fed up with the boy, his weakness and fears, the exaggerated gestures of persecution; the numb, averted eyes, stagnant pools of hostility; his ears that heard nothing—nothing—but the distant amorous sighs of land; least of all the ulcerous hate, which wouldn’t have been so bad if it provoked the boy, lit a fire beneath his scrawny arse, challenged him, as it had long ago with the parrot fish, made him rise up erect with the vital energies of vengeance—but it didn’t: the boy was too slow, buried within himself in an envelope of malaise, to employ even one of the many chastening advantages of hatred. He had no pride in a good day’s work, no blood that natural wonder could put a fever into, no home in his heart for stories, not a part in him that Collymore could see that ever warmed up to the world, and this was not what the fisherman had bargained for when he bargained for a son. Collymore’s love for the boy blew in and blew out, in their first months together, like a rogue south wind; now he only expected to get whatever labor he could wring out of the boy’s body, harden him up for the day when he would not be there in the morning, tucked on the car seat, when he would just wander off and disappear like a wary dog, to fend for himself.
Sometimes when Cassius shut his eyes the sun was brighter than ever; the spell-binding labor of the boat and its intervals of boredom as unrestful as illness. There was no remedy for it, and time slid off its shell unnoticed; no parole except for the unforgettable ache of Sundays with their strange church-echo, mother-echo—the psalm-singing of feral lovemaking from the back room, the radio’s melodies a sour harmony, as Collymore jooked the island girls on his mattress pad.
On stormy days Collymore took refuge in Mamma Smallhorne’s rumshop and the boy submerged as far as he could take himself into the badness of the weather. At their worst, these days were his only ally, preventing the boat from being launched, sometimes days in a row. On most nights he slept consumed by dreams of fright, something scaring the breath out of him, he didn’t know what, dreams as bottomless as the blue water.
Despite his own sense of doom, and the more visceral feeling that Collymore would work him until he was dead, the boy survived, growing into a wiry adolescence. Though he was still and always would be short, with bandy legs (the right one ornamented with a spectacular braid of scar tissue from the eel, like the stitching on a baseball), his leanness concealed the true capacity of his young strength. He had become a tireless spartan worker who never seemed to register ordinary pain or fatigue. He could haul fish twice his weight into the boat with ease, row cheerlessly from dawn to dusk without faltering rhythm. He was morose, and because Collymore both cursed and bragged about him to the other fishermen, he had a contradictory reputation for courage—some swore he had it, some said the boy was the most gutless runt that ever put off from shore in a catboat. No one in the community of Norman’s Cove knew him well, no one wanted to, no one saw any benefit to it, and so he remained a constant to all whose lives he drifted past, and especially to Collymore—a vacant, impassive, stony, difficult youth, notable only for his spinelessness. Only a few looked close enough to see in him a silence as fatal as a viper’s.
He premeditated nothing. No dreams, no fantasies, visions or revelations showed him a course of action. He was living the Sinbad thing. He just knew. There was nothing he could do to make himself ready for trouble, except to know it was coming.
Came his last summering with Collymore, a day they sailed outside the reef to turtle during the time when the hawksbills and loggerheads and greens completed their solitary migrations to mate in island waters. The breeze was mild, the swells lulling. They appeared to sail forward into an olympian theater or coliseum of sluggish cumuli—to Cassius a basket of smoke; to Collymore, only lazy clouds—spread with an awning of colorless overcast. With the surface so obliquely illuminated, the water was at its richest sapphire, the intimacy of its depths opening upward, magnified, shifting and smeared, then transparent and miragelike. Often they saw birds resting on the slicks, and the seascape itself was a stage-set drama that lacked the energy to gather its elements together and begin.
The first turtle had sounded and Collymore had furled the sail, lowered the mast across the boat’s three seats, and ordered the boy to the oars. When his father had first made him do it, years before, Cassius had suffered as an oarsman, fighting the clumsy sticks in their rope locks, but by now he preferred it, the fully occupied mindlessness of the synchronized strokes, the backward-facing position of the rower, the moving ahead without looking ahead, proceeding into a future that required nothing more than infrequent, over-the-shoulder glances. There were calluses on his hands hard enough to stop a thorn. Sometimes he rowed naked, took off his rags and stowed them in a piece of oilcloth until they were coming ashore, but today he wore a pair of tattered swim trunks and a gray-colored shirt, buttonless and with the sleeves removed, like a vest. He stretched, dipped, pulled, released; stretched, dipped, pulled, released and thought about the mongrel bitch that had bellied under Collymore’s shanty a month back and given birth to a litter of worms that had now turned into puppies. Yesterday was Sunday, and he had decided to take one of the puppies for a walk. He tied a piece of twine around its neck for a leash. Its legs weren’t used to walking. He dragged the puppy around Norman’s Cove for an hour and then threw it away, because it was dead, choked by the twine. He rowed on, thinking to himself, There are one two three four five more puppies. No, six. No, seven. No, five.
Collymore was on his stomach in the bow, peering into a water-glass, a window into the ocean, trying to spot the turtle which he knew would be suspended below them like a hummingbird as it fed on the reef. Come in! he would call to the boy, or Go out! Slow it! Wait up! Pull!—de boat, de boat, eh? me no say pull you peeny sparrow cock—me say de boat! Pull!
He located the turtle—turtles! a pair of greens. A slyness tempered his voice at such moments of discovery; Cassius heard it and smirked to himself as he was ordered to rest the oars. It used to be that Collymore hunted turtles with a ring net, as some of the old-timers still did, but Cotton Island had changed over the past five years, and all the able fishermen had grown addicted to the excitement of the gun. Collymore removed his tee shirt, strapped on mask and fins, and eased himself noiselessly over the side so as not to alarm the prey. Cassius handed out the long gun to him; Collymore armed it, stretching its rubber sling to where its metal clasp fit into its notch in the spear shaft. He filled his lungs and dove.
A minute passed. The boy, hearing water clear from Collymore’s snorkel, sculled the boat ahead. Glancing sideways, he saw Collymore veer off, roll and gracefully arch like a porpoise, and go down again. Cassius idly repositioned the boat and daydreamed of riding the ferry to St. Catherine, where he imagined it was possible to attend something much like the chariot races in Ben Hur; then he dreamed of asking the man he still believed was his real father, Rupert Quashie, if he could have a bicycle. He recited the rote exercises he had learned in school. Naught and one is one. Britain—b-r-i-t-a-i-n. Majesty—m-a-g-no, m-a-j—Collymore was back on the surface, his face in the water, a sound like muffled whoops piping from his snorkel, alerting the boy. Cassius rowed, knowing there would be a turtle to load. When the boat was alongside the diver, Collymore handed him the gun; the boy stood up and retrieved its tether until it brought him the butt of the spear. He prepared for resistance, but felt only cold weight, and then he could see that Collymore had done something oafish and ignoble, had shot two turtles at once, and had shot them through the shell, which was considered an amateurish method, and problematic, since the idea was to hit the turtle in one of its fins. Such a shot demanded expert marksmanship but meant the boat took a live turtle. No one wou
ld pay money for dead turtles that had ridden in the sun all day, so these were turtles they would have to eat themselves, or give away. Worse, they were small greens, their shells of no value—the male no more than fifteen pounds, the female less. The boy jerked them in over the gunwale, his father giving an unnecessary push from underneath. Collymore slid the mask up to his forehead. He spit out the mouthpiece of the snorkel, his eyes cunning and merry.
“Two fah one,” he boasted. “I strike dem while dey was jookin, bwoy.” For a moment, he wanted the boy to share his amusement, to applaud his marksmanship. Then he remembered it was an empty cause. The boy had never laughed, smiled, never appreciated. If you wanted so little as to hear his mumbly voice, you had to make him speak, prod him to open his mouth. “Who you see as yet get two fah one?” he continued with diminished enthusiasm. “Trevor? Robertson?” He named his two closest rivals in the fishing fleet from Cotton Island, men married to the sea as he was. Uncharacteristically, the boy answered.
“Dem dead up.”
Neither in tone nor expression had the boy altered his basic remoteness with this observation, but to Collymore, having starved on the youth’s scant responses for six years, having just made what he knew himself to be an infelicitous, shameful kill shot, these three words burned in his ears. The boy would never respect him, never have confidence, never be a worthy companion, never be but an anchor on the few simple glories Collymore labored to raise from the world. He heard dem dead up as the first note on a scale of challenges, tantamount to a declaration of forthcoming independence. This meant Cassius had entered into his age of rebellion; the time when they would war against each other for dominance had arrived, sooner than he had reckoned, and this knowledge infuriated Collymore. He reared straight up out of the water to his waist, grabbing the nap of the boy’s hair, uncut for more than a year, frizzed and orangish from its bleach of salt, and yanked him flapping into the water.
Swimming in the Volcano Page 29
