Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  And here, she even frowned at the cruise ship anchored in the harbor for a half-day stopover—God, was there anything worse than a tourist? At least she had found her own way around that problem. My, my, Miss Sally, she chided herself, what’s gotten into you?

  She turned landward up Drake Street with its lemon-washed, cream-trimmed colonial facades. The block she was on thundered with music, a calypso from Saconi’s new album, Free Costs Dear, pumped out for public consumption by the stereo system at Calvin Da Silva’s Disc Den. Calvin, in a tiger-striped dashiki and stocking cap, saluted with his raised fist from behind the shop’s counter as she passed his open door. Sally waved back. Are you deaf yet? she mouthed. She pointed at her ears and shook her head, watching Calvin’s lips move, a sentence destroyed by the hurricane of sound. He stood serenely in the calm eye of fanaticism while walls fissured and foundations cracked in the buildings on the street.

  She couldn’t fathom the point of such loudness, less a gift than a nuisance. In Sally’s opinion, Calvin was too shrewd for his own good in his appreciation of Saconi and his music. He emceed the local concerts and was more than a little responsible for the management and promotion that had popularized the musician throughout the Antilles. In return Saconi proudly—and foolishly, she would say—displayed the lack of business sense attributed to artists. The record merchant controlled the books—to his own advantage, Sally suspected, but Saconi refused to discuss such a bourgeois matter. Less than a year ago Calvin, proselytizing brotherhood, persuaded Saconi to break with the distributorship that handled his label because it was run by light-skinned East Indians—coolies—in Trinidad. What about double standards? she had protested privately to Saconi, but he assured her his only motive was to assert control over his own future. They screw you for pennies same as dollars, Calvin told Saconi—virile black boys were too ignorant to be anything but what history and nature and foreign entrepreneurs said they were: slaves. Next Da Silva formed his own recording company to shape the range of Saconi’s creative and financial affairs, but Saconi seemed no better off than before. Watch out for Calvin, Sally had warned. Try to understand brotherhood, he had told her. But he’s not black, Sally had argued, he’s rich—there’s a difference. Afterward, Saconi composed “Rise to White” in response to the conversation, the number-one single in the Caribbean for three consecutive weeks last fall. Calvin had no inkling he was the subject of the hit.

  But Sally had learned, or thought she had, anyway, that Saconi, with sly complicity, encouraged Calvin’s ambition because he recognized himself in it, and he could not disapprove of what he himself was guilty. It was a game the two men played with each other, she realized, and throughout her year on the island Saconi’s friends had become her friends, both their faults and their virtues acceptable to her. Or at least familiar. They were rude with women but they treated her implicitly with respect. They loved children but they were mystified by the attention she lavished on the ones whom they thought, trapped in genetic cocoons, were better off dead. Individually, the men were solicitous and cheerful but when they congregated she receded from their grace. Though their racial and sexual innuendos never targeted her, no one thought anything of asking her to fix and serve drinks, cook a meal, wipe a spill from the floor, fetch cigarettes from the shop. The women, however, were like any other in her presence, some jealous, some morose and empty, some cyclones of self-infatuation, always a few as easygoing as loving sisters. Despite their differences, there was an abundance of joyous times—the beach cookouts, the backstage parties, the card games at her kitchen table, the exhilaration in the cramped studio when a song coalesced for the first time, the family reunions and boat excursions, the dinners cooked by adoring mothers, women as solid as oak trees who gave her oily kisses and squeezed her hand, regarding her, it sometimes seemed, as a living symbol of their sons’ success.

  She thought of going back to the Disc Den and inviting Calvin and the others down to the fete on Cotton Island but then she decided no, Saconi would have already seen to it if he wanted them down there and besides, the parties on Cotton Island were almost exclusively European—white, wealthy, and decadent—and for reasons best known to Saconi, he indulged the Princess and agreed to play her private troubadour. Unlike the others, he had transcended whatever insecurities came with being born on island soil, and he would never react to Sally—she believed this deeply—as if she were declaring, by her pleasure, one world inferior to another.

  In the road ahead was a man asleep, being licked and nuzzled by a pack of dogs. Traffic detoured around him, honking. She stepped off the sidewalk to try to wake him only to see that he wasn’t asleep at all, just lying there with his eyes closed, his mouth curved in a heavenly smile, murmuring endearments to the dogs. She walked on, ever amazed by life in St. Catherine.

  Chapter 18

  What she planned to do was invite Mitchell and Tillman; Isaac too if he were around, since he and Mitchell, though not inseparable, had a friendship that she could easily envy. With them she would be most relaxed in a place like Cotton, and they would value the break from routine. Too many of the American or European men she had met on St. Catherine were encyclopedias of arrogance and conceit, businessmen and sportsmen and financiers and functionaries who suggested they represented, in some vague but consequential capacity, this country or that multinational, and then launched monologues detailing the most outlandish schemes: a toy factory that would employ thousands; the importation of camels as a source of supplementary protein; a program to train fishermen to navigate with the use of sophisticated equipment that they would never in their lives be able to afford and didn’t need anyway. At first she thought these men were innocuous, but after hearing their litany of illusions and false promises again and again, she came to believe that such men, serving themselves with their bedeviled imaginations and lopsided pragmatism, were somehow the enemies of the world. As far as she was concerned, fellows like Tillman and Mitchell, with their ironic professionalism and understated dedication to improving the lot of the island, helped restore the balance upset by the flow of haughty clowns through St. Catherine. They weren’t missionaries or closet emperors or ne’er-do-wells hidden in the ranks of the terminally sincere; they didn’t pretend to have the answers, they weren’t fools but fighters, and they made her laugh. That was enough.

  Then too there was the fact that both men had received lady friends out of the sky this week, as if they had heated up with romance according to the same emotional clock, and Sally was attracted by the possibilities the women’s arrival offered for uninfluenced female companionship, objective female minds that would not take her independence as a personal affront. She had noticed the four of them coming into the beach bar last night, but her ride back to town was leaving and she had no opportunity to say hello. She looked forward to meeting them because she had an intimation, inexplicably, that one or both of the women had something to give her, if only their confidence, the sense of being a fellow traveler—but how strange, she thought, that coming so far on her own, surviving and even prospering for a year and a half in a foreign land, she felt a hunger for this sort of, what ... certification? Just don’t let them be that certain type of female who will be your best friend ever for about twenty minutes, she prayed.

  Switching her overnight bag to her other shoulder, Sally mounted the steps to the Ministry of Agriculture. Mitchell was not in his office and none of the secretaries was certain if he had come in that day or not. Sally groaned, asked to use the phone and dialed Rosehill. The line was busy the first time she tried to get through, and seemed utterly dead on the second. She tried the phone on another desk with similar results. She went down the dusty hall to Mitchell’s office and explored it for clues but found nothing that could suggest his presence except for a tin cup of cold black coffee. She tried once more to get through to Rosehill, using the phone on Mitchell’s paper-scattered desk, and was grateful to hear her call ring and answered.

  “Is Tillman there?” she asked.r />
  “Him outside,” a male voice said, and hung up.

  She left the ministry and went across the road to stand under a colossal pink trumpet tree, waiting for an eastbound passenger lorry to take her to Howard Bay. The shade of a every big tree in the city served as a stop for public transport and as she joined the others gathered there, a gust ruffled through the overhead branches and the queue was showered with hundreds of plump, leafy flowers, stuck in people’s hair, burying their feet. Since noon the skies had been patrolled by lone clouds full as watering cans that tipped their content in a vertical deluge as they passed languidly over the island. It would soon rain again, she knew, and she urged the lorry along as she saw it turn up from the harbor, as ceremoniously painted as an elephant in the King of Siam’s court, and stutter toward their stop. Its brakes sang in different keys; a boy vaulted down from its flat bed with a two-tiered box of steps. Gunnysacks and parcels were handed up. A grandmother with an Easter hat was half lifted aboard by her elbows. Sally waited to climb on last but an old man lingered behind, exhorting her to go ahead.

  “He holdin back fah a look up ladies’ dresses,” someone on the truck, a woman in white gloves who sat on her bench with her forearms atop her knees, hunched, as if she were on the toilet, observed. She focused on the old man as he hauled himself in and looked for a seat. “Ain what you want get you fat, Mistah Johnson,” the woman harumphed. Sally, embarrassed, sat as far away from the dowager as she could. The boy reloaded the staircase and the lorry jerked forward; he pinballed from one passenger to another collecting fares. Mister Johnson had been forced to sit almost opposite his adversary; she glowered at him, tugged the hem of her dress toward the moons of her knees and, farther down the road, began to harangue the dickens out of him, cataloguing every trespass and shortcoming she could name. Obviously the two had known each other all their lives. Suddenly she was on her feet, swinging her big plastic purse by its strap into the side of his head.

  “Stop!” she screeched. No one but Sally appeared dismayed by the spectacle. “Stop dis truck! I ain ridin wit dis mahn!” But the driver continued on to the next roadside queue. Only then was the woman able to satisfy herself. She threw the man named Mister Johnson off the truck, sat back down, and said not another word.

  “She his wife, you know,” the girl sitting next to Sally told her. The girl, in her early twenties, Sally guessed, wore cheap baggy jeans and a man’s long-sleeved shirt with the cuffs buttoned, her feet in chewed-up ballet slippers. She had overapplied makeup to sculpt her eyes like Nefertiti’s, and whatever she put on her lips made them appear enameled, stiff as cartilage. Leaning into Sally, she giggled.

  “He marry six times in seventy years and keep disrememberin dis lady de current wife. She ride de transport huntin fah de old mahn.” Sally inhaled the spearmint of the girl’s breath and snickered too, opening the envelope of space she assigned herself on the lorries. Their bodies pressed together with the lurch and bounce of the road. The inborn warmth of the black girl’s manner appealed to her.

  “You de gal dey call Big, true?”

  Sally nodded and the girl glanced away, a stranger again. They rode without speaking until the next stop, when the woman changed her seat, making Sally wonder what lies she had heard. Then at the Charing Cross stop she came back, wedging herself between Sally and the man who had taken her place. Tears threatened to spill from the corners of her extravagant eyes.

  “I wish you’d tell me what’s wrong,” Sally coaxed. The girl bent her head in mysterious anguish and her hand sought out Sally’s like a lost child. She had heard stories, she said—Sally cringed but she needn’t have—stories that said she came to help the children born mahd. Sally did not yet know what to answer so she told the girl her actual name.

  “Jolene,” the girl reciprocated, and wiped her eyes with the back of her free hand. She worked in Scuffletown, at her uncle’s upholstery shop. Her own family lived in Retreat, the northernmost village on the windward side, and she was on her way home for her monthly visit. There was a baby in the family—her sister’s baby, she hastened to explain. A little boy, four years old, and there was something very, very wrong with him. Him juss make a moo sound, Miss Sally. Not a word in de bwoy’s head. Him goony. And he shake like so—she held out her hand to demonstrate. Nobody had the slightest idea what to do with him except let him be, but Jolene often wondered if there was a medicine Sally kept at her school to treat such a case.

  “There’s no medicine, Jolene, but I can help him. Tell your sister to bring the boy down from the country.”

  But Jolene seemed to resist this solution—the family was too poor, the sister was overprotective, the father was ashamed to have the child in public. Sally tried to no avail to coach Jolene on the arguments she could use to convince her sister.

  “No, no,” Jolene sniffed, a distant, detached look coming over her. “She doan listen. She ain goin do it.”

  The road curved down toward Howard Bay and into the path of an isolated squall advancing along the shoreline. The interior of the cloud flickered with diffused bursts of light, and a wavering curtain of rain, dun-colored, cut a line across the ground, obliterating all that lay behind it. The inevitability of being drenched made the passengers glum as convicts. In the popular imagination of Catherinians, a good soaking by the weather was tantamount to falling through ice into a pond. Sally once considered the local attitude about rain an example of mass hypochondria until she larked home one day to Ballycieux Lane in a drizzle, a pleasant climatic change after two months of error-free skies, and spent the next fortnight miserable with walking pneumonia.

  A handful of passengers banged on the roof of the lorry’s cab demanding to be let off. They sprinted into the underbrush on the roadside and crouched under wild tannia leaves, pulling the plants over them like green slickers. The passengers who remained on board sheltered their heads with schoolbooks, newspaper, purses, nylon shopping bags as the drops began to sizzle around them with a roar like burning cane. The two women hugged each other, Jolene’s sparkling head tucked under the white woman’s chin, her vinyl suitcase, held together with cord, laid across her thighs. Mother and child in flood, Sally thought, seeing an image of herself from a distance. The lorry splashed along the scoop of coast past the ghost figures of pedestrians, banana leaves like umbrellas raised above their skulls.

  “Jolene,” Sally urged, hunched into the other woman’s heat. “Bring the boy back down from the country with you. I’ll take him in, I promise.” Licks of steam rose from along the black girl’s spine as though her spirit escaped, wisp after wisp, and she shivered, not answering. Sally craned her neck and peered into the silvery heart of the rainfall, trying to locate herself but all she saw were the anonymous outlines of palm trees, darts thrown into the spray. Jolene kept her face hidden, the rain settled throughout the coils of her hair like beads of glycerine.