Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  The bar had its end-of-the-week mob; he had to stand and wait for a gap in the wall of bodies before he could belly up. Winston had two assistants now on weekends, and two more, a waiter and waitress, both wearing white duckbill caps with Rosehill stenciled on their crowns, freighted drinks to the café tables. Maybe Tillman would be better off, Mitchell thought, if he unloaded the hotel and rode the faster horse. But he wouldn’t; the romance was rooted deep in him. Still, there was always reason to believe that things would get better or, failing that, that the worst wasn’t as bad as you had imagined it would be.

  With a green bottle of beer finally in hand, he shouldered a path out of the barside crush and looked around, optimistically. He chatted with a huddle of Sally’s Peace Corps cronies; some acknowledged him with thin, appraising smiles—they came equipped with a proprietorial air, as if he had trespassed on their turf. The self-righteous ones made a habit of spurning foreign service professionals, contemptuous of their servants and fat salaries, private cars and swimming pools and luxurious houses. And the specialists, many of them, Mitchell knew, stared right through the volunteers, as though they didn’t exist. Pretension and snobbery were their common denominators. He flirted with a woman he had been flirting with for months, with no more success than in the past. She had a boyfriend on another island, she was engaged to someone back home, she was not dating at the moment, she was trying to get over a divorce—she was everything but available. Then you shouldn’t look at me, Mitchell thought he must say to her, the next time he had to listen to one of her excuses, with that merry flash of wildness in your eyes.

  He maneuvered onward, nodding and patting arms; he was an old-timer by now; it seemed he knew or recognized everyone there, the bureaucrats, merchants and teachers, the shopgirls from the more elite boutiques, the students from the technical college and upper forms, acolytes of the ruling class. He couldn’t help but notice the towering, leonine presence of the minister of justice and his court of sycophants—a man as famous for his wholehearted participation in the island’s nightlife as for his idiosyncratic style of jurisprudence. In close orbit to this star were tight knots of barristers, animated with privilege, ringed by fearsomely glamorous women with Valium and dainty pistols in their handbags, as a matter of style. The European tribes were camped at their customary tables: the hermetic French, the innocuous Canadians, the annoying British, their sonorous pomposity in fine pitch with the gentleness of the evening air. Run-of-the-mill Latin types and loud generic Americans. He consciously avoided a visiting group of World Bank economists, here for consultations with the Ministry of Trade and Finance, restructuring the island’s debt. Earlier in the week they had not understood him when he attempted to explain there was no such thing as an American agenda here, unless they had brought it themselves, no contracts issued to stamp out the brushfires of socialism. Not yet, at any rate. There was only himself, endeavoring to help. He was no one’s emissary; he hoped he had made that clear.

  He stepped off the concrete patio onto the beach itself, removed his sandals and walked to the water’s edge, letting the foamy bay cool his feet. The mineral-flavored sea breeze refreshed him. Out there across the dark heaving swells, Johnnie devised her own good time, advancing her role as voluptuary. Being there, he’d want her time, her drifting attention—had he changed that much in three days?—he’d want to sift through what was hidden in her heart, minute by minute, like a buyer at a rummage sale. He could make allowances for her needs, her hungry self. He would.

  He listened to the water lapping against the hulls of the sailboats in the anchorage, a chilly, dense sound, the harbor like a vast, unlit, marbled ballroom, echoing with aqueous rhythms. “This is our last bottle of catsup,” a male voice said, carried across the water. Someone tuned in the BBC. He watched two people on the stern of a ketch lower themselves over the side into an inflatable launch. An outboard motor came to life with a mechanical tongue-roll of Rs. The launch swung in toward shore, an enormous pale turtle, and beached itself nearly on top of him; he, a beacon for arrivals, not the sort of thing that enhanced a résumé. A woman and a man—archetypically blond, and sinewy; Madison Avenue Vikings in crusty shorts and tee shirts—waded through the shin-deep water to stand, shaky and disoriented, on the miracle of dry land. They had timed themselves to be heralded; the band, Monkeyjunk, resumed its vibrant music.

  “Any problem with leaving the boat here?” Mitchell watched them intently, almost in awe—Were sailors the freest people on earth, or the most perversely ritualized and regimented elopers?—before his reverie broke, and he responded automatically, hearing his own voice say, Sure, before he had thought about it.

  The woman marched on ahead while the man hung back, convivial, a new face in a new port, a hero come in from the black and hazardous sea. His was the boat Mitchell had spotted from the veranda, ad-libbing through the cut. Rhode Island was its home; he was delivering from Lauderdale to the Grenadines for the owner. The girl was mate and cook, or cook and mate—depending on your point of view—this was the first they had shipped out together. The weather had been good, then bad, then good again, and finally terrible. Any place nearby, he inquired with a wan grin, to get a shower and a bite to eat, something fried and greasy?

  “Not likely,” Mitchell had to tell him. “Not until morning.” Rosehill was not an option this late in the evening. The fellow had a sunken stomach and scorched forehead; he rubbed the golden bristles over his jaw, clearly not ready to take no for an answer. Mitchell saw in him a more streamlined version of a fellow spirit, someone who didn’t shrink away from unpredictability for the paradoxical reason that it force-fed their journeyman’s faith in logic, the religion of alternatives. Mitchell decided to help him out. “There’s my house, up the road,” he added, “but the shower’s cold.”

  The sailor introduced himself—Captain Pat—and they strolled over to the bar for beers, wedging in alongside the woman, who was drinking a can of Coke, her arms folded across her chest, dour-faced, observing the dancers. Mitchell complimented her on their expertise, bringing the ketch through the badly marked cut at night; she would have been up in the bow, hawk-eyed, spooked, vigilant, superhumanly alert, no different than a warrior, really, all the instincts inflamed. But she frosted him with a look of infinite condescension and, without a word, angled her head away from him so she could continue to scrutinize the dancers. Fucking Christ, Mitchell rasped. He didn’t drop his voice; if she heard him, fine, this Artemis of the Indies. She was just a cook, a pretty can opener, floating around in a sailboat. Big fucking deal.

  “Lucky in love,” Captain Pat spoke under his breath.

  “Why anybody thinks they can act that way is beyond me. I don’t see how it matters who she is or what she’s done.”

  “Don’t blame me,” muttered the captain. “I didn’t hire her and I can’t fire her. Take it from me, you’re not missing anything.”

  “Life on boats,” Mitchell said, his mouth souring, wanting to change the subject. He wasn’t trying to collect women with attitudes, women with pathologies, women who conspired with men in their hatred of females. He didn’t want enemies, especially desirable ones.

  “She’s a sex crime waiting to happen, man,” said Captain Pat.

  They talked of other islands, adventures at sea, anecdotal evidence calculated to gild the vagabond life. Several minutes later, as if on cue, Davidius, troll-like, dressed like a busboy, materialized on the periphery of the jump-up and stalked bow-legged down the line of customers at the bar, informing the ladies he was available. Captain Pat’s shipmate responded inexpressively, simply following after him like a zombie, though her face gradually brightened as she entered the music, moving her body to the raining fusillades of the drums like a shot gazelle. He didn’t get it, he would never get it. She’s adopted a creature, Mitchell thought; Davidius is as deformed as sin. They would have to spray Davidius with DDT to pry him off her, later on.

  “You might want to keep an eye on them.”


  “She’s a big girl, right?” The sailor scowled at his empty bottle and ordered something stronger. “You would think she’d know better. She’s been around. You would think she’d have an instinct, a warning light. She’s just like any other able-bodied I’ve ever known. She belongs in the fucking navy, man.”

  Captain Pat had said enough, in just the right languishing rueful tone, for Mitchell to understand the sailor was in love with the woman. He made a point of losing interest in the conversation and the scene that had stirred it up. It was all too disturbing and insensible and worse: his own problems seemed to be the message, the theme, where the emphasis lay, as though his particular deficiencies—whatever they were, he could not grasp them—were the source of the enigmatic behavior of women. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed George James across the oval of the bar, seated with a pair of Catherinian women at one of the tables in a row fronting the bar’s spatial perimeter, along a tall hedge of flowering jasmine. The editor and publisher of the Crier habitually commenced his marathon weekend binges at Rosehill’s beach bar, before campaigning onward to the more private and elite clubs, the plebeian dance halls, the neighborhood holes-in-the-wall. James looked up and around, caught his eye, it seemed, on Mitchell, and seemed to wave him over.

  The sail down from St. Barts had been taxing, said Captain Pat, four nights and three days walloped by heavy cross seas. To wash the salt off his skin and bite into a hamburger, that was all he could think of at the moment. Mitchell almost blurted out, I don’t want that cunt you’re with in my house, but it wasn’t like him to retract his own largesse, he invested too much of his own virtue in the virtue of trust, he believed he was a better man than that. He couldn’t recall whether or not he had locked the front door, so he explained where the house was and handed over the key—the captain could return it to him back at the bar, or Mitchell would see him up at the house later on. Either way, Mitchell said, there was nothing to worry about, the captain was free to go up when he liked, take his crew if he wanted. Mitchell excused himself then and ambled over to George James’ table, bumping through the crowd as he licked the suds from the mouth of another bottle of beer.

  James had lost one of his companions, but was embroiled in an unpleasant conversation with the woman who remained. Neither one of them appeared to be aware that Mitchell had approached the table. James continued chastising the woman for being a nuisance; she seemed not the least ruffled by the attack. He was married, with several form-age children, but apparently this was not his wife. James had a reputation for being an incorruptible man, and, as a consequence, his journalist’s vanity was immense. He was a caramel-colored mulatto with thin Caucasian features who cheerfully boasted that his mixed blood was not a mixed blessing but in fact a political gift, granting him special license to represent everybody and nobody, as it suited his purpose, and it mostly suited him to be everybody, reflecting whiteness to whites and blackness to blacks; an American to Americans, Brit to the Brits, African to the Africans. What he failed most at, at least by local standards, was being a black Catherinian, but he laughed at this category of criticism. He was well monied and proud—always with an ironic smirk—of his blood ties to the old planter families, was politically astute enough to understand he would always be the beneficiary of change, as long as it reared back from chaos at the last moment, yet he lacked neither courage nor decisiveness, and would not forfeit his principles for the milksoppy, vulgar satisfaction of merely being on the winning side. The Crier was mediocre by default, since it could not leave its audience in the dust. James was contemptuous of the uneducable but not of the uneducated. “Opinionated ignorance,” he was fond of saying at cocktail parties, “is the chief discourse of the world’s undeveloped communities”—pause—“and most of the developed ones as well.” When the coalition had dislodged Pepper (with the Crier’s wheedling support), James had rallied a group of Queenstown businessmen to finance literacy squads, seeding them throughout the rural parishes until funds dried up. Increasingly though, the coalition disappointed him, regardless of his well-known preference for the Banks faction, and his editorials were now being penned with a tearing bite that caused even his closest allies to wince.

  James canted his head two or three times, looking at Mitchell sideways, smiling helplessly, as his companion logged her side of the story in their mutual exchange of faultfinding. Oh, the hell with this, George James mouthed clearly and popped up, effusively courteous, to greet Mitchell and shake his hand. Mitchell noticed that James’ blue jeans had an ironed crease down the length of each leg, which he associated with impostors. The President of the United States. The woman tilted her head only enough to acknowledge him and said nothing.

  “Mitchell,” George James declared cheerily, “you are my Tuesday headline, bwoy.”

  “Shit,” Mitchell sighed. “Why?” He sat down at the table, his quizzical look hardening into consternation.

  “I will recite it for you, eh?” The editor’s hands made chopping gestures to frame the words on the table. “PLDP SLOWDOWN ADVISED.”

  “Come on, don’t get me mixed up in that,” groaned Mitchell.

  “The lead go like this,” George James continued: “‘After consultations the week past with his chief economic advisors, the Honorable Joshua Kingsley, minister of agriculture, announced a course of prudence ...’ You like it?”

  “Keep my name out of it, George, could you?”

  “Mahn, I lookin to you fah quote, Mitch. A piercin insight, nuh?” he said lightheartedly, but challenged Mitchell with an aggressive smile.

  “No,” said Mitchell. “I’m not involved in this.” He felt nauseated by the thick cloying stink of jasmine and gardenias, evil flowers, which he associated with church and wintertime, riding in the family station wagon with his mother, asphyxiated by her perfume.

  “Right, right,” James said, studying Mitchell with a look of mild irritation. “But you are the expert ...” He stressed the word, not outright mockingly, but weighing its accuracy.

  “You have to understand,” Mitchell said, barely able to keep himself from gagging. “Something’s happening. Almost overnight, the land reform program seems to have compressed into a flashpoint.” He hated the imploring tone that seemed to rise out of his lungs, but there it was. He wanted to tell George James—he wanted to tell anybody, but couldn’t—he wasn’t on a crusade: I don’t come wrapped in a flag, I am not a torchbearer for capitalism, my whiteness is incidental, but the responses would be reflexive—Yes you do, Yes you are, No it isn’t—and worse, echoes of his own interior dialogue with himself, and he just didn’t need to hear them again, feel their dead immovable weight.

  “Yes, I agree about the program—how could it be otherwise?” said James, but before he could elaborate further the course and tenor of the evening changed entirely.

  James’ sullen companion suddenly perked up, looking above Mitchell at someone behind him and rolling her eyes, signaling she’d had enough. The journalist’s eyes, too, shifted up. A waft of scent—rosemary or eucalyptus, something with a tang—preceded whoever had approached, then a pair of hands clamped on Mitchell’s shoulders, as if to hold him down. The husky, honeyed, youth-hot voice of a woman whispered into his ear, sealing him into an envelope of audacious sexuality. A mop of skinny braids, interweaved with ribbons and trade beads, swept across his neck and cheek.

  “You de white knight come to my rescue, bwoy? Here now, dese bloody people borin me to fits.”

  He could see her elegantly boned hands, the long whorish nails, their fuchsia-colored polish chipped, the ostentatious hardware of her rings, one a silver ankh, but not her face, though he expected her to be beautiful—the first expectation of any man—because of her voice.

  “Dis mahn cyanht leave, ya know,” she said out loud to the table, and glided into a river of s^ssy, exuberant patois while her fingers kneaded into his shoulders, making him speechless but at the same time oddly balanced—rescued himself. Her facetiousness seemed to tranquiliz
e all three of them, bring them up to speed on their moods.

  “Dis mahd bickerage you two mek—I ain step out to referee lovers’ spat, ya know.”

  Her fingers fluttered up, one hand warm and open, the palm resting against his temple, the other cupping his chin, and then she turned him with a coaxing pressure to see his face.

  “Oh me God,” she said theatrically. “He ain so plain-lookin, true?” She gazed down at him, vamping, then overacting a pout, as if her attempt at seduction had already ended in disappointment, and then she bent herself into him, laughing, her scarlet tongue hopping in her mouth. Her face was longish, narrow—flat and stylized as an African statue’s—lacked the perfection of beauty, at least in Mitchell’s own conception of it, but she was spectacular, a spectacle, an incendiary device. He felt a dangerous surge of attraction. She made him feel expropriated, which seemed to fit a recent pattern of expropriation. Her name, George James said, introducing them, was Josephine. Empress, dancer, and now, he wondered, whore? He must be Gemini, she said. No? Sahgi? Oh ho, she knew it, she said victoriously and kept herself delighted by creating these little coups.

  Mitchell stood to pull out the empty chair next to him. She sat down, but not before she had done something akin to presenting herself, the deliberate physical fantasy of herself, making sure he had taken her in, head to toe, side and front, her girlfriend snickering at her shamelessness. Josephine’s shoulder-length hair had been oiled, painstakingly cornrowed and braided pencil-thin and studded with ornaments—Medusa on her wedding day. It must have taken hours to do, suggesting to Mitchell a rather queenly existence for Josephine. Her dress was an emerald green sheath with a high neckline and a crenulated hem; tinsel had been woven into the fabric, random vertical lines, which caused her movements to gather in ribbed puckers of light, silvery cascades and shimmers accompanied by the clatter of her braids, like a certain type of wind chime made from bamboo. For a Catherinian woman, who tended toward brawniness, she was abnormally svelte and flat-chested, and her stork legs were planted into a pair of spike heels which by themselves were enough to set her apart, for lack of common sense, in a place of broken walks and dark unpaved lanes. It wasn’t her blackness that made her a novelty to Mitchell as much as the particular branch of femininity where she seemed to have established herself. Some women were there to marvel over but not touch without special training, packaging themselves to command the strict attention of men, women opulent and robust, taloned with sensuality, assigned to exclusive venues and readily assumed to be playthings and prizes, ultimate expressions of submissiveness feathered over with artifice and coquetry. Josephine was that, or a close call—what else could she be? By contrast, the other woman, James’ consort, by far the lovelier of the two women, remained opaque in generic beauty, nameless, with a face that translated through culture and race. Josephine’s eyes searched his momentarily, a magnetic fix, no longer teasing but radiant with curiosity.