Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  “Well, soon,” Tillman answered, but he sounded noncommittal. “I’ll see if I can arrange something.”

  Sally forced herself to smile; she was too conscious of the crescent shape her lips made, mimicked by the hammock. “His idea of a good time is to work himself to death.”

  “That would be one thing, if it was just himself,” crabbed Adrian.

  “It’s not that simple. Rosehill hangs on by the thinnest of threads.” His tone changed, tried to be magnanimous, but resentment sat heavy in the words nonetheless. “But that shouldn’t concern you. You came here to enjoy yourself and you should. Go to Cotton. Sally will take you.”

  “Sure,” Sally chirped, concealing her disappointment. What was she getting herself into, with these spoiled women, their slippery moods? It was the bonhomie of the males she had sought, primarily, as though they could guarantee the quality of the weekend, keep her engaged and protected when Saconi was otherwise occupied, then recede like wise brothers at the proper moment. It was something that a woman had to think about beforehand, but even in this respect her common sense had not prevailed, since here she was, about to be saddled with two strangers, one beyond pleasing, the other one in need of a minder. Well, okay, this is all my doing, she told herself, and I’m not feeble, I have the capacity to deal with it and besides, it’s only a party, a weekend, a jaunt across the channel. For the first time since she had walked up, she felt Adrian paying her real attention, forming an appraisal of her personality, now that she might wish to invest in it.

  “Come on along. We’ll have more fun without this spoiler anyway. Just us girls. Maybe Johnnie and Mitchell too.”

  “Johnnie’s going?” Adrian said, perking up; she seemed to want no further inducement than this.

  “Wait, wait.” Tillman jumped to his feet, as though he had heard something of great significance. “You’ve talked to Mitchell? Why didn’t you say so? What’s the news on Isaac? He’s all right, isn’t he?”

  Sally registered a chill spreading across her shoulder blades. You learned to live with the lack of telephone and reliable media but when the grapevine failed or excluded you, you might as well be living in a cave on the moon. “What are you talking about? What’s wrong with Isaac?” she said, firing off the questions. “Mitchell wasn’t home and Johanna never mentioned Isaac’s name. What’s happened?”

  “He smashed up his old Comet.”

  Yes, she said, relaxing, she had heard that, had seen a crumpled Miss Defy too, out in the greening fields of Brandon Vale, and she had heard that Mitchell was with him when the brakes failed at the top of Mount Windsor, and that they were both fine except for a few bangs and bruises.

  “But that’s not all of it,” Tillman added. “No one’s seen Isaac since. He’s been swallowed up. Hasn’t been home, and he’s not in the bars, and his girlfriends don’t seem to know anything about it.” He paused to consider. “There’s something eerie about it, don’t you think.”

  “Damn, I don’t know,” she said, inclined to believe there was some better explanation for Isaac’s disappearance than whatever vague disaster Tillman was suggesting. Knowing Saconi as well as she did, she doubted it were possible to canvass all of any man’s lovers, to have access to his complete list of sanctuaries, or to expect that whatever loss he incurred, he would react rationally. “I’m sure he’s depressed, bad. Miss Defy was his baby.”

  “The guy’s probably holed up somewhere with a bottle,” said Adrian, emanating competence of opinion. “I know I would be.”

  “No you wouldn’t,” replied Tillman. He tried to make it sound like a compliment but instead seemed to accuse her of dishonesty. “You’d deal with it. You’d stampede. You’d overcome.”

  “Maybe she’s right, Tillman,” said Sally, simply agreeing with Adrian. Making peace between the couple seemed out of the question. “There’s another possibility too. Did Isaac know Saconi was going to Cotton?” Tillman thought that was likely. “Well, maybe he took the ferry down yesterday morning. To make it easier to forget.”

  Tillman seemed to find this notion perfectly acceptable. He faced Adrian and solicited the answer she had yet to give. “Would you like to go?”

  “Yes,” she said, the spite removed from her voice. “I would. If you don’t mind. Then next week, we can do something together, a picnic or a hike.” She shoved her sunglasses up into her ginger hair as if this were the only gesture that would validate her sincerity. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing to apologize for. Sometimes something bad happens and I think it’s me that’s the victim, not the other person.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Adrian. “Any woman would.” She turned to Sally. “Tillman’s hell-bent on reeducating me,” she reached up to tousle his hair, “and as I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’m failing the class so far.”

  It was impossible to court her with one crisis after another breaking into the flow, but if she would just step away for a day or two, he promised, she would arrive back in a newly ordered universe where she would ascend to the throne of his attention.. Then, starting fresh on Monday, there’d be plenty of time for love.

  “It’s plain to see,” Adrian said with playful affection, “that I am being evacuated.”

  Sally breathed a sigh of temporary relief—at least there was something more to Adrian than poutiness and vanity. After she had packed an overnight bag, Tillman, who had to go supervise the new cook who didn’t yet know her way around the kitchen, offered to have one of Grampa Hell’s helpers, Junior, drive them across to Mitchell’s and then over Mount Windsor to the airport. Junior, all fantasy life or ego or just plain recklessness, revved the engine of Rosehill’s station wagon and set down a patch of rubber exiting the circle turnaround, disinterested in impressing either his employer or his passengers with moderation.

  Johnnie met them at the door wearing white jeans and a blouse, a straw bag strapped over her shoulder; she looked alarmingly restive and feverish, clear-eyed to a fault. “You’re back,” she said with exaggerated relief, as though she had waited and waited and worried and doubted. She embraced one and then the other of her new friends, incongruently skittish, almost brittle with gratitude. With her face ducked briefly over Johnnie’s shoulder—Johanna, whatever—Sally sniffed for signs of Mitchell’s dinner but smelled nothing more appetizing than the woman’s neck-splash of musky perfume. In horizontal shafts, the sun beamed directly through the veranda windows at the rear of the house.

  “And you’re mad at me.”

  Sally couldn’t keep herself from scoffing; then she understood that this was still another form of Johnnie’s random flirtation.

  “Girl, snap out of it,” Adrian said, light with mirth. “What have you been taking? We have a plane to catch.”

  Sally had to ask, “Why would I be mad at you?” although any more of the vacillations between coherence and riddling nonsense and she would gladly entertain the thought.

  Johnnie tried to explain. “I don’t know. I feel like such a mess sometimes. Mad, because I decided not to wait for Mitchell. Because I have no idea where he is or when he’s coming home. I went to his office at noon but nobody had seen him. Because I don’t know if I should be here. Because this might be an unforgivable mistake. What if he doesn’t want to go? He’ll be mad at me, won’t he? Or maybe he’ll be thrilled. I left him a note. Do you think I shouldn’t go?” Both Sally and Adrian looked at her strangely, with traces of alarm and sympathy, as if she were a bird flapping hopelessly against a window-pane, and she caught herself, backed up, squeezed Sally’s arm to allay her judgment. “Okay, Jesus, you must think I’m a total wreck.” They laughed nervously, all three of them.

  “Sometimes my paranoia overwhelms me.” She bowed her head, shaking it self-deprecatingly and laughing.

  Adrian looped her arm around Johnnie’s waist and walked her inside. “We spell that cocaine,” she stage-whispered, mischievous, and they all giggled again to relieve the tension.

&nb
sp; “Mitchell will come meet us, won’t he, if that’s what he really wants. What he probably wants is for me to leave.”

  “He’ll come meet us,” Sally assured her. She didn’t know if that was true, but it didn’t feel like a lie. “I’m sure there’s nothing he’d rather do, if he can get away.”

  “Let’s not squander our opportunities, darling,” Adrian encouraged.

  “Oh you’re right,” Johnnie sang blithely, and suddenly it was like she had never panicked. Suddenly she was all resource and resilience. “Everything will work out. It always does.”

  On the veranda, Sally gathered her clothes, still a little damp and likely they would probably remain that way. How can I trust her? Sally wondered, finding Johnnie’s behavior too perplexing for words. She was beguiling, even as a woman in the process of coming apart—if that’s indeed what was happening. Even the contradictions from which she so artfully managed to twist free, like some emotional Houdini, seemed part of a conspiracy of inchoate passions, as if Johnnie were in a rush to invent herself, once and for all.

  Sally heard the engines before she saw the plane—the STOL De Havilland gaining altitude over the channel. She scanned the glaring skies and there it was, a slip of light, spermatoid, arrowing toward the violent egg of afternoon sun.

  “Fuck! There goes our flight. We’ve got to hurry before all the charter pilots head for the bars.”

  Forty-five minutes later they were in the air themselves, breathless and trouble-free, the altitude affecting them like a stimulant. The pilot had a cooler of beer on ice, which he encouraged them to start in on.

  “I told you,” Johnnie reminded them. It would all work out.

  Chapter 19

  Cassius Collymore had a uniform. It was precious to him, he had paid dearly for it in ways no one could imagine, but even still he wasn’t supposed to be seen in the uniform except on special occasions, in the presence of special people, and never out on the streets.

  He had a new name too—Corporal Iman Ibrahim—but he didn’t have a desk. Not everyone did, although Selwyn had let him sit at one, off in the corner of the small bullpen adjacent to the inner offices of the headquarters of the National Police, five days straight throughout the course of his first week in Queenstown. During the entire week the desk was home, the center of a homeless universe.

  Whoever had lived there at the desk before him had carved into its top, gouging through the layers of ancient varnish into the yellow wood—Me Fuck Owena—which upset Cassius Collymore. He worried that others might suspect he was responsible for things that happened to this Owena, and he didn’t even know a woman with that name, not that he could recall, but who could say for sure, because there were things he was responsible for, bad things, and maybe somehow Owena was on that list so you had to be careful. He was learning about lists, they were very important, and that was a very important plan—being careful—and he erased the words one by one during the five days that he sat there, near the door to Lieutenant Commander Selwyn Walker’s office, methodically plowing the letters with the undipped nail of his index finger, rolling the scraped-up words into tiny gumballs and flicking them across the bullpen at the clock on the wall, but taking his time at this task because there was no hurry.

  He was made to wait four days for Selwyn Walker to come tell him why he had brought him there from Cotton Island and what it was he was supposed to be doing—sell marijuana? collect money? keep an eye out? All those things he did for Sergeant Marcus on Cotton Island, until he couldn’t do them anymore. By Friday of that first week he was still at his desk, immobile, until Walker came again, and explained it all again, and calmed him down, explaining that his would be one of the easiest jobs on the Force, since all it required was to act natural and be ordinary.

  “You cyahn do daht, eh?” Walker had said with a big, phony smile. He hadn’t answered, but Walker took it the right way. The other cops thought he had come to spy on them. He used to but he didn’t do that anymore, that wasn’t his job; that was someone else’s job.

  He sat at the same desk now, notified by one of Walker’s men to come in for special assignment, so here he was, looking natural and ordinary as he had been instructed almost one year ago: pullover shirt, pants and belt, good shoes, aviator sunglasses, haircut, aftershave water, the holes in his teeth fixed. He sat erect in his chair, arms folded on the desk top, making an examination of the office stapler. He wanted the quartermaster to issue his section—Special Action—its own stapler, but the quartermaster said no—they was like that. Every time Ibrahim punched down on the stapler’s arm, the staple fell out on the paper already closed, dead. He chopped it again and again, making a school of pinched staples, trying to see the problem. But it’s broken, man, the secretary had told him. Yeah, Ibrahim had responded, but why? You ever think of that? She was a bitch he would get rid of, if he could, but dey ain as yet give him real power around de place.

  Ibrahim was hungry. He looked at the clock on the wall, then checked the time against his Jamaican wristwatch. He had liberated the watch from a guy who didn’t know how to behave—Jamaican ras-clot. The look on his face, bwoy! The Force had shipped him to Jamaica last year for what was called surveillance training, this playgame action. He went to an office building in Kingstown for school, then a camp in the mountains, then some make-believe business in Negril. There were five instructors—three Jamaicans; two Americans, one white, one black: it didn’t seem to matter because they both acted smart. One day they dressed him up like a busy girl, even though he told them not to do it, and then they made him walk down the street. He went blank and there was some trouble he couldn’t remember. Later on they showed him a telephone with a bug in it. They had binoculars, cameras, very strange weapons. They took his urine and made a study of it. He heard there was a potion they drank to make themselves invisible, but he had never tasted it. They wanted to teach him what waiting was, and being quiet, and hiding, but he already had that information. Their secrets were not always to be believed. For instance, mind reading—they said they had a machine that could do it, but they didn’t prove it to him. They hooked him up to it but they couldn’t read his mind. They had some drugs but he heard a voice saying he shouldn’t take them. They said his rating was Good and awarded him a certificate, very important. Next thing he knew, Selwyn Walker promoted him, Corporal Cassius “Iman Ibrahim” Collymore. He was sent to Panama for another certificate. He went to the States, to Georgia, where they called it that, they could call it whatever they wanted, but that didn’t work out, they said he wasn’t right. The certificates were in Selwyn’s desk where they belonged. He was going to Cuba next, for more training. Classified. Cuba was a very important place, according to Selwyn. Very organized. Selwyn always talked about Cuba.

  The important thing about Jamaica, there were holymen there. He met with them, because he had a religious feeling, and they gave him his true name. There were other holymen, but they were like wild dogs, and he didn’t trust them. The instructors in the school said, “Well, Collymore, you are one step ahead of us, eh?” and thought he was on to something when they found out about his name. The holy-men had cleared Ibrahim’s mind about enemies, which he had information on, but not enough. They gave him Muslim words to use, if he needed them. The Muslim said, Protect yourself from men with ideas. Right-thinking men were your brothers, your sisters. He was beginning to understand. Ideas were such things as imperialism, capitalism, fascism, oppressionism, Zionism. Alcohol and drugs. Maybe sex, but he was confused about that. He had heard Selwyn Walker reject these ideas first, though Walker wasn’t a convert to Islam. Or maybe he was, but had to keep it to himself. White was an idea Ibrahim had no experience with, but he was learning every day. Black wasn’t an idea, it was a way. A way through hell.

  His stomach growled. He liked to eat, as much as he could fit, and maybe get a little bigger. His arms and legs were strong. In seventeen minutes, his lunch would be set out for him at the house where he rented a room in Scuffletown. Mrs. Pi
erce gave him a plate, Monday through Friday, for a Biwi a day—goat stew, bean and rice, sardine, jam sandwich, pilau, hash and boiled cassava, callaloo, pumpkin fritter, biscuit, stick of candy, glass of water with ice, sorrel tea, bottle of Ju-C. He refused fish. He told her not to cook pig anymore, not even for herself since it would foul the pots. Saturday he must find his own food—Mrs. Pierce gone country to visit she old people. Sunday he must find his own food—Mrs. Pierce gone church. So, his plan for that was, to buy rotis from a street vendor and eat them in his room. Or pray—St. Catherine had no right-thinking church, so he had to pray by himself. Mama Smallhorne had been the superior cook and cheaper, but she was sour in personality, like she was doing him a favor, and Mrs. Pierce was lively! She with her housecoats and big ass and five pickaninnies and a faraway husband who sent her a big new refrigerator to stand in the kitchen like America or France or such place. On an ordinary day, Ibrahim would eat, then wash his hands and go to the front room that was his, open the closet and inspect the uniform that hung there—he had Mrs. Pierce wash and iron it every week, regardless of whether he wore it or not—and then sit on his bed and read a Trinidadian comic book. He was a good reader; he had read the Koran too, and Eric Williams, and Louis L’Amour. There was a darkroom at the back of the house—he had built it himself to make pictures. They had trained him how to do it, so in the afternoons he would go there, or walk back to the motorpool at headquarters for a car and take a ride, keeping a lookout for the ones who might be getting ideas, snapping pictures with his Japanese camera. Two months ago, Walker had told him to make a collection of pictures of foreign people who worked on St. Catherine, but he didn’t know who they were so he just took photographs of whites. It was easy.

  The stapler seemed to have ideas too. He gave it one more chance and then threw it out the open window behind his desk, sailing it into a clump of oleander. He saw a black and white cat run away and thought, Fuck me, I miss a shot. He hated animals—there was more to them than met the eye. When he swiveled back around, Selwyn Walker was there in the bullpen, aiming his concentration at Ibrahim, but Walker knew he was not a fellow with a flimsy heart. The corporal shrugged and smirked, acting impertinent about the whole thing—Selwyn doan care fah staple, nuhf Selwyn care fah report. Report, report. Pictures and who-see-who. That was all that was required of Ibrahim most mornings like this Friday morning when he was summoned in: wait for the lieutenant commander to appear, then follow him into his office and make an oral report, show him some pictures, name some names. This mahn fix motor, this mahn wuk in hospital, this one wuk fah Kingsley, this one wuk fah Banks.