Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  It was in her waterfront school where the defective, shadow-filled children of St. Catherine found sanctuary. She harbored the babies afflicted by God—a blame she was willing to assign—the babies carelessly disabled in the womb, the blind lost children who were unbearable bad luck to a family already crushed by poverty, the deaf children timid as finches with no greater faculty of expression than a bird’s. All the conventionally impaired were, in their deformity and hopelessness, bitter fruit fallen from the same tree as the mongoloids and autistics—untrainable, unmanageable, otherworldly beings. Occasionally in her canvassing of the villages, she would even find a child collared and leashed to a tree shading the shanty of the resigned parents, utterly frazzled or numbed by their misfortune. Struggling in the middle of the flock were the gently retarded children, submerged in their own strange joys, painful mirrors of love and horror. And even such a gathering of outcasts had its own, orphaned not by death but by virtue of their own lives; empty, nocturnal, estranged—a five-year-old with no arms, no intelligence, and a perpetually scabbed face. A boy born with flippers, which never ceased twitching. A hydrocephalic who apparently survived on insects and weeds when his distraught mother reached the point where she was too appalled by this thing she had made to keep feeding it.

  The first week of school, one of the autistics, a small girl so feral she might have been the incarnation of an alley cat, had bitten an actual mouthful of flesh from above Sally’s knee during a tantrum. With diabolically bright eyes she swallowed the bite and began to hophophop, still hopping when Sally returned from the hospital, the wound closed with a black web of stitches, her rear end throbbing because the RPN had broken a needle in it.

  Those she couldn’t educate, she struggled to pacify and soothe, and the ones who resisted domestication, she battled, for her own survival as well, telling herself it was for their souls.

  * * *

  The day had been uncustomarily trying, credit that to a new boy brought in from the countryside with scummy eyes, an eleven-year-old named Trevor about whom nobody could say what was wrong, though Sally suspected his was a hyperactivity that could be medicated down to some metabolic level of normalcy. His psychology though was another story. From the time he walked in, Trevor had persisted in a relentless, sexually precise assault on all the girls in the school, going so far as to pinch one of Sally’s breasts, hard; she had lost control and kicked him, also hard, in the shin, hard enough for obsidian tears to pour down his cheeks. Then she wanted to run away but could only count the hours, tending to one crisis after another, before the day was through and she could bail out to Cotton Island for a weekend’s r-and-r.

  Keeping the school open past midafternoon was impossible anyway, a matter of passing the threshold of endurance for Sally and her two trainees, for the parents who walked from throughout the southern quarter of the island to deliver and retrieve the students, as they were euphemistically called, since education was really not the point of the school, not yet; and for the children themselves, relief from the exhausting ordeal of unscrambling the humanity that was placed so differently and behind so many obstacles in each of them. The ministry van arrived to collect the abandoned children and the eight boys and girls sent from up the northward coasts. Sally assisted the driver, loading kids, strapping the ones who required restraint into their seats, bestowing kisses, and off they went back to the convent of the Sisters of Mercy where they were monitored like clinic patients and allowed the charity of room and board. She lingered outside, mothering the rest of the group, releasing them one by one to a parent or aunt or older sibling, and then returned to the decrepit building, once a small warehouse for a cooperative of onion growers, smelling still of their harvest, its cavernous concrete walls blackened and streaked by mold. She had been promised paint, cheery colors, but wasn’t going to hold her breath waiting around for it. The two aides were straightening up and she joined in to turn the tiny chairs upright, empty the chamber pots, mop urine from the floor, wash the spoons from the daily lunch sponsored by the Rotarians, gather all the toys, donated broken like her children. Sighing in unison, the three women locked the door behind them and exchanged hugs in the sunlight, laughing at the lingering smell of onions they inhaled off each other’s clothes.

  “Vincent stick a palmetto bug way he nose. I does have to dig it out wit me house key.”

  “What’s Hyacinth’s mother like?” Sally wondered. “That little girl has bruises on her back. Her mother wants me to believe she fell down.”

  “Watch she doan knock you too, Miss Sally. Daht womahn have a mean streak.”

  “I’m going to say something to her.”

  “Robert laugh today, you know, Miss Sally. Oh, what a pretty sound he mek to test a heart.”

  Their throats constricted and they embraced again, wiping tears from their eyes, and said good-bye for the weekend, Sally buoyant, walking away through the crowd on the street, the emptiness that she had once felt back in her other life long gone, the island had filled it in, and why this place, so radically different than all she had known, she couldn’t say. She could not grasp the meaning of the change, and didn’t dare search for it.

  She was a farm girl from the western edge of the Flint Hills of Kansas, corn-fed in the heartlands of the continent on an ocean-lonely prairie. Her body, she had told herself in college, watching slides in art history class, was classically robust, yet undernourished by a sequence of fair-skinned square-chested young men who quickly spent their brief uprisings and then settled in to make the most conservative investments in passion and joy—not quite grown-up men with plenty of convictions harvested direct from the soil, but little in their chemistry that could live beyond the county line, past Wichita, past Emporia, past Topeka. Not interested in Kansas City, some would say. Too many niggers.

  She taught special children—retarded kids—in a temporary building—a trailer, really—on the grounds of the regional elementary school, after graduating from the state university in Wichita, but within two years, lethargy wrapped around her life like a blanket during a fever, empty minutes building hollow hours, fragile days, an existence that lost its grip on time and began to spoil in its protective shell. She believed herself unborn. I want more experience than seems to be available, she confided to whoever wanted to listen—Sally’s problem, whatever it was, something without a true shape. She cursed the professors in Wichita for teaching her to read and appreciate and distinguish, to dream and to believe, as an act of intelligence rather than faith. She cursed them for the window of life’s promises they dared to showcase, and she cursed herself for paying attention, when clearly not many did. Why get yourself educated if it only made you unhappy? She struggled to analyze whether this was a naive point of view, or worthless cynicism. Her parents casually suggested that what she was feeling was an unadmitted desire to marry and be a mother, a path to fulfillment they would permit no one, especially their own daughter, to challenge or diminish. That’s not it, she would snap back, though she knew she was a type, somewhere in the back of her mind—one of those females who could populate the world.

  She began dating a guy she had known in high school. Nothing remarkable about him, but he had been sent to Vietnam and there had lost his boyish swagger. Now he was responsible and thoughtful but also a degree withdrawn, robbed of the spark of trouble-making she had girlishly loved to hate, and seemed more than ever of her kind—normal, a good and steady man. Liked to drink, but wasn’t crazy. Before long she knew he wanted to marry her but wouldn’t propose until she made it clear the answer would be yes. Yes, darling. Yes.

  She remembered with numbing clarity the day one life ended and another stubbornly pushed out into the middle of an antiseptic wasteland, the day of a spring blizzard that frothed out of the Rockies and raced across the plains with no advance warning, burying the state in cementlike snow that froze overnight after the wind had ridged it into high dunes. She joined her boyfriend in his four-wheel drive truck, reconnoitering the vast pasture
s of his father’s ranch on the lookout for livestock trapped by the weather. It was a profound disheartenment, to crawl across the ranch in the great primitive silence of the aftermath, her boyfriend—Jerry was his name—seeing the future, his future, theirs, knocked back away from him by just that much, what a bad spring storm could do to a herd. Then the truck went off the ledge of an old creek bed tapered by a drift and they were stuck until well after dark, when his father brought a tractor out to look for them.

  They waited to be rescued and Jerry drank—not nips but deadening mouthfuls—from the fifth of peppermint schnapps he carried in the glove box. He was, in his unassuming way, a comfortable man to be with though a cautious speaker, convinced that most of what people said between themselves was more than obvious anyway. That was pride. Pride that all he did, every deliberate movement, gesture, and nuance, was rendered perfectly clear by his fundamental decency. He wished to be kind and good, and he was. And yet even that caused a bend of despair in her hope, made her see herself as a prisoner to a methodical man inspired solely by decency. She would be willing to gamble if she knew it would be enough, but she didn’t know. When she felt the truck slide and whip off solid ground and sink on its frame it seemed not inevitable but a lucky breach of routine, that what was happening was happening because they were both too weak and proud to talk about what was below the surface of their lives, air out their dreams. Shipwrecked in that frozen sea she craved that conversation then, she wanted the resolutions that would help her navigate the years she would board and ride to her prime, age thirty and beyond.

  The tailpipe was beneath the snow and rather than dig it out he cut the engine, inviting the emptiness to join them. They sat and listened to the ticking of the engine fading as it cooled. Within minutes, the windows were blocked out by an opaque film of ice, forcing them to reel in their thoughts to accommodate the sudden reduced scope.

  “Well, here we are,” she said, much more solemn than she intended. Finally, they were bound together, as they might always be.

  There’s all this space, she had said, spreading her hands and extending them into the distance they could no longer see, and all of it pressing in.

  “Do you know what I mean, or at least do you know what I feel?”

  She had felt her blood heating up with something other than springtime, as if she were being prodded by an unseen force toward inexplicable acts, obscure desires, but the real point was that more and more she felt unafraid, almost reckless, prepared to take a chance, and that could mean marrying him, or maybe she was understanding that she wasn’t settler stock after all. To be born into it was not to be given a choice.

  “I wouldn’t have stopped here, a hundred years ago,” she said, perhaps too fiercely, with an implicit contempt that she didn’t feel. She could see she had hurt him.

  “I can’t see how it matters where you stop,” he said, a reproach for denying him the rightness of his own choices, “just so you do. Some day, before you burn yourself out.”

  I hope it wasn’t girls like me you were fighting for, she apologized to him, far inside herself.

  “This is a morale problem,” he said, combing her hair back from her face with his red hand. “Trust me. I understand.”

  She exposed more and more of her thoughts, stripping herself, surprised by her brazenness because she had never said these things before, not even in her own head, because they were until now only sensations of hunger and need, bereft of voice, and no telling how trustworthy. I feel isolated, she confessed, almost pleading. I feel forced into place. I feel passed by and forgotten. He grunted and drank his schnapps and let her reveal herself. She asked him, leaning toward him in earnest concentration to receive his response, what he thought he would be doing anyway, fifteen years down the road.

  “What you see,” he answered, and tucked a pinch of snuff under his lip, and he tipped his head at the coming darkness.

  With his bare hand he cleared a circle through the frost on the windshield and squinted out at the colorless twilight spreading through space, even the fence line gone, and no lights on shore. For him it was only a visitation of unexpected weather, and just as it sifted down on them it would lift away. Nothing could prevent its passing and the idea was to hold on. But for Sally the quiet life she had been enduring, what was yesterday only a persistent nagging mood, had bumped against something deeper, something immovable that was not temporary, and she wondered, How did I arrive at this boldness, where did juvenile fantasies end, and an imagination you could work with begin? Was it as simple as loving life too much? If that was so, loving life this way was madness, it swept you out on the edge of propriety, it drove you wild. And if you resisted, it poisoned you.

  She felt a tremor of real fear—was she wise and strong enough for this, her own imagination—her own illusions?—parenting her into another life? But how could anyone possibly know? What she knew was that for the first time she was wide awake to what she would become if she stayed, and the first casualty would be her momentum, that motion or energy that was hers because she was young and unimpeded. Out here—with Jerry or without him—it would unravel into complacency, and there she would sit, a Mother Goose in Kansas, and never knowing otherwise. She wanted to give this expanded idea of freedom a run for its money. It was her birthright, she saw that now. It explained everything.

  The window within the window Jerry had made had iced over again, and he pawed at it, smearing out an opening. Outside, with nightfall, a luminous hush had transformed the snow into something peaceful and welcoming, Christmasy. But the feeling only lasted for an instant, receding into the distant lowing of cattle, which sounded like the misery of ghosts being blown across the plains.

  “I think I’m going to have to leave,” she said and, looking at his reaction, pushed her back against the door, recoiling from his misshapen expression, the way he peered at her, as if she were a serious problem he better find a solution to, now. He was drunk enough by then and misunderstood her, imagining she had determined to get out of the truck, defy both his decency and the deadly weather and hike back to the farmhouse. He seemed to fall across the seat onto her, grabbing her roughly to stop her from opening the door, inadvertently tugged her hair and hurt her neck, and she was almost grateful for this, the physical dimension of his anger.

  “You’re insane, fucking insane,” he spit, the words thick and minty. “You’ll kill yourself.” He looked away to say in disgust, stupid fucking bitch, and then snorted, relaxing his hold on her, and then turned back, shoving his red face into hers. “You won’t make it. You’ll die. You’re not getting out of here, understand?”

  Instinctively, she brushed his cheek with a kiss. “I love you,” she answered apologetically, but she didn’t, she said it only to console him, as she imagined she would have to say to him or somebody else, and for the same reason, if she remained out here on the prairies.

  She had no money saved, no friends in places distinct from where she was now. Any ticket out was the right ticket. The news made her mother sit by herself in the living room and cry, somehow hurt and then exasperated; it made her father take a second, probing and unfriendly look at her. “For God’s sake, where in the world is St. Catherine?” her mother asked in distress. “It doesn’t matter, Mom,” Sally told her with a smile she regretted. “I don’t really care where it is.” Her father went to the bookcase and pulled out a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, one of the few times she ever saw him with a book in his hand that was not a manual. He scanned the entry for the island and shook his head. “You might as well be in Africa,” he said.

  “Thank God it isn’t Africa,” her mother responded, thinking only of her daughter’s welfare.

  After school Sally’s time was her own, on those days free of administrative loose ends, and she spent it with a sense of unrestricted wealth, heading for the scarcely populated beaches or the fragrant carnival-like crush of the market. Or she would walk back to the house to write ebullient, almost boastful letters to Ka
nsas, or read her weekly novel snatched from the shelves of the expats; wash laundry by hand and foot in the shower, which turned out to be quite good exercise, or practice the harmonica she had promised to teach herself to play (the irony of “Home on the Range” didn’t faze her), or trek to the Botanic Gardens and sketch flowers. On Tuesday afternoons she would brief sponsors at the Ministry of Education, lest they disremember her crusade, and on Wednesday evenings she would go to the club where Saconi rehearsed with his band. And though she wasn’t immune to the camaraderie to be enjoyed in the volunteer community, she found that her old reasons for seeking them out—to compare strategies and tell interminable war stories—were moot, once the school was operative, and she felt less and less compelled to spend time among people whose experiences seemed so suffocatingly close to her own. She knew too that some of them, despite their talk about compassion and justice and the other pet ideals that flew like banners in their rhetoric, disapproved of her relationship with Saconi, a few accused her of being a camp follower, groupie, whatever, a plain Jane promenading with her handsome black stud, something naughty to write in her journal, she was exploiting him, he was exploiting her, blah blah blah, endlessly and unkindly, until she made a point of keeping separate these two facets of her life in St. Catherine, as much as that was possible in such a dab of a country.

  Today, however, she walked along the length of the busy quay toward the center of Queenstown and Government House, past glistening stevedores stripped to the waist, their heads cooled with wet rags, the impoverished fleet of workboats hugging the wharf, their eczemic hulls flaking chips of blue and white paint into the harbor, solitary sails patched and soiled with age; past the herb-heads squatting on the edge of the dock, perched on the huge capstans, lined up like pelicans facing the sea as they brazenly shared a cone of ganja; through a mob of older schoolgirls, forms five and six, in white knee socks and bursting white blouses, their style to leave the blouse untucked over the pleats of their blue skirts, the younger girls from the middle schools in plain jumpers, hair braided with ribbons; past the makeshift stalls of the weary hucksters unable to afford the fee at the government’s new covered market, the women with their egglike skulls wrapped in bright-colored cloth, hovering over pyramids of avocado pears, oranges and limes and hideous soursop, papayas, and just-ripe mangoes, first of the season, garlic bulbs and pigeon peas and bundles of coriander and basil and thyme tied with thread, the more competitive of the women barking for Sally’s attention but only receiving the briefest fragment of smile. But she returned the long incredulous look of a girl in flowered cotton underpants, her mother beside her in a sack shift, the muscles veined and lumped in the wood of the woman’s legs, their feet powdered with white dust, each carrying a rank basket of ballyhoo on her head with the most erect posture imaginable. As if they had not yet been permitted to play in the twentieth century, children too young for school rolled hoops salvaged from old bicycle wheels, guiding the rims with flat sticks, or sat in the packed dirt and shot marbles. A man roasted a breadfruit on a brazier of coals until its skin was as black as a bowling ball. A knot of scampy, tattered boys surrounded the movie advertisements pasted to a cinderblock wall, goggling at the posters: Hell Up in Harlem and Bogard: Beat Him to Win, plus the latest kung fu neck-busters from Taiwan. The proprietors of the rum sheds nodded amiably as she passed, their sideburns like scimitars, and Sally saw the policeman with the close-cropped mustache who had once humiliated Saconi in front of her by asking him to produce identification, the rotten shit, and up ahead was the crazy man called Long Time who had helped dig the Panama Canal, sailors in straw cowboy hats, fishermen down on the water cleaning a mossy mound of conch, ugly-footed beggars with rheumy eyes, ships’ pursers with clipboards and gold-framed sunglasses, a group of idle taxi drivers having a smoke-and-joke, basket weavers, fishmongers, bloody butchers in their filthy stalls, boys pushing wheelbarrows of ice, vendors of hawksbill combs and black coral jewelry, waternut men like artillery captains standing by their mound of shells, curry-makers and roti-rollers, sidewalk preachers, staggering drunks and hefty, handsome women and mutant dogs lapping at jade green puddles and a leper with no nose and a crusty, suppurating mouth-hole, riding a donkey; an osprey ascending into the sky with a dead rat in its talons. And who could say she was not entitled to all she saw, that this world too was hers, a part of the human dowry, that the big-shouldered woman with the hockey player’s legs, the white lady dressed in the pink sunshift batiked with frangipani blossoms, the girl bare to the golden upper rise of her breasts and sweating like a man, her inner hair plastered along her neck, a few slick brown tendrils curling across her throat, who could say she wasn’t herself part of the life of the city? No one could tell her she didn’t belong there because she could no longer say it to herself, not since she had become married to the island’s sorrows and frustrations, its threats and wonders, so that what was normal in a normal life had been redefined, transformed, its seams loosened to accommodate her, and not since she had resolved during the days in bed spent grieving for her shattered purity, frightened by her own bullheadedness, that St. Catherine could defeat her if it chose but she was staying, she was willing to assume the costs, whatever the asking price was for this dazzling enthrallment of human energy.