Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  “So who you is?”

  Mitchell began to tell her, which brought George James back to life, who interrupted to say he was under the impression that Mitchell was an employee of the United States government. Follow the money trail, Mitchell hastened to explain, and that was where you ended up, but in fact his connection with Washington was tenuous, at best. Private consultant was the more apt description, if anyone cared. No one outside of St. Catherine really knew what he was doing until he filed his quarterly reports. A regional director posted in Jamaica exerted only cursory oversight. He was on his own, which was how he preferred it, since he still had a Sixties hangover from his bash with the Establishment. Josephine asked if he had been a hippie, and she wasn’t kidding. He laughed self-deprecatingly, trying to imagine just what it was he had been back then, not long ago. Apathetic anarchist, moderate extremist, sentimental surrealist—all descriptions he had attached to himself in an essay he had written for some shapeless, earnest undergraduate class—Introduction to the Self, or something like that. Johnnie was living with him then, had proofread the paper, pronounced it Far out. So much for Whitmanesque self-knowledge circa 1969.

  “I was a student,” he told Josephine. “Hippies didn’t grow up to be economists.”

  Explain that to me, she said, but he wasn’t about to elaborate upon the instant anachronisms of his own life, although he wondered if she saw herself as a beneficiary of the counterculture, and if she did, was it because America had been bloodied, or blacks nominally empowered, or simply because from this distance it all looked like great fun? But he was more interested in the game she had initiated, and where it might lead. George James caught the attention of a waitress and they were brought another round of drinks. Mitchell made the transition that signaled to himself he was there for the evening by ordering rum, like everybody else. James plunged back into their earlier discussion and for several minutes Mitchell allowed himself the dignity of his own expertise, framing the sugar issue, why market forces made its reintroduction on the island pure folly, and proposed that each estate be devoted to the production of a specialty crop, exotics like saffron, nutmeg, arrowroot, sorrel, christophene, tobacco, each crop spawning its own small agri-industry manufacturing a line of slickly packaged products to be exported to metropolitan centers in the States, Canada, Europe, et cetera. Josephine surprised and pleased him when she showed an insightful interest in the marketing aspects of the scheme, but her attention wandered when the two men returned to the conflicts now rising to the surface out of the stasis of the coalition. James alarmed Mitchell by taking a small notepad from his shirt pocket and jotting on it when Mitchell confided that a Kingsley minion had been spreading a rumor that same afternoon, stirring things up at the ministry: Kingsley was planning to issue certificates for land to the peasants who would soon be rounded up and removed from Jack Dawes Estate without his authorization, the intent being that one day they might reclaim their original plots, under what circumstances Mitchell didn’t dare imagine. The rumor was not credible, he stressed, willing James to put his pen away; the land certificate idea was absolutely antithetical to the reform program, which Kingsley was committed to seeing properly installed, as the Crier itself had consistently reported. James put the pad away, laughing good-naturedly, and told him not to believe everything he read.

  “Why doesn’t the PEP stop bawling and call a new election?”

  “Kingsley would walk back in, mahn. Maybe better off than before. Elections too chancy fah Banks and dem, eh?”

  The ladies are bored, said Josephine. Mitchell asked her to dance, not wanting her to lose the spirit she had brought to the table. She crossed her legs so she could shift her body closer to his, as if now she were the only subject he need occupy himself with. Her eyes glittered and her face was shining. George James and the other woman dropped away into their own world. Josephine said no, this wasn’t her song, it didn’t do anything for her. Her father was PS—Permanent Secretary, career bureaucrat—at the Ministry of Culture, a new portfolio born with the coalition, a campaign promise of Edison Banks. He had been reshuffled into the job from Public Works because he played the saxophone. The ministry still searched for an identity, unsure of its role beyond sponsorship of a few concerts and a disorganized, understocked crafts co-op. Josephine’s mother, appropriately enough, was from the French Antilles—Guadeloupe—where she had returned years ago, unable to adapt to St. Catherine’s backwardness, and since remarried, not once, said Josephine, but four times because no man was ever satisfactory. Her father had remarried too; Josephine didn’t live with him anymore, she was independent, she did what she wanted, men couldn’t handle that. She bridled when Mitchell said something offhandedly, insinuating she didn’t have to work for a living.

  “Kiss me black and beautiful ass, bwoy,” she said. “I am a dressmaker,” and he looked pointedly at her long fingernails to say then she must be a woman good with her hands, and she slapped him in slow motion, playing, so that the gesture was more like an overt caress. “Now, bwoy,” she said, and since he didn’t understand, she feigned exasperation and commanded, Dance! her heels already clicking across the cement by the time he got on his feet. Dancing was important in St. Catherine, a mother language; he had been drinking now for a solid four hours, starting at dinner, and it took him a while to find the beat, standing there absorbing the rays of carnality Josephine generated with so little effort, her body like some loose volume of juice poured lithely from hip to hip, the last word in nubility, every move she made adding up to lovemaking. She made him mindless, and he rejoiced in it, yet his body hadn’t taken up the slack, jumped into the fire of flesh. There he stood, rhythmless, out to lunch, rocking from foot to foot like an elephant when something much more apish was needed, mesmerized by Josephine and her lewd counterthrusts to an imaginary phallus, her pelvis bouncing in the saddle: Is dis you cock? Is this your cock?

  Chapter 21

  A local named Coddy met them at the airstrip with a doorless, rust-consumed pickup truck, its tires without a hint of tread to their name, and took them direct to the Green Turtle, the island’s one bar and gathering hole, down by the ferry dock, for posttransit refreshment. The enterprise was textbook rustic, neo-primitive; the shade of cobalt in the lagoon seemed otherwise unavailable in the world. Across the channel the peaks of St. Catherine formed a diadem on the horizon, and twilight on a tropic atoll had to be the original inspiration for the pastorale, not mountain valleys but this unearthly tranquility of Trade-cooled sheltered water, what greater enchantment could realism aspire to, and it was all undeniably soothing and marvelous, Adrian acknowledged, except for the stars, offstage, and they were a bit much, outside their heaven. Anything could fall. Anyone. Here was a refuge for the type.

  Saconi was up the hill, resting at the Lord Norton compound. Coddy promised to take them there in a while and Sally, content, didn’t object. They were handed rum punches and geared into circulation, she and Sally trailing Johanna, who seemed to be the catalyst for a more ebullient pace. Adrian noticed she deferred to Johanna’s ease in the world—not to be mistaken for worldliness. Not the world, but groups, clusters of animation. She had a charming, effortless superficiality that many people would want to call charismatic. The surface of her life was seduction, its midrange scales, its pastels, its easy wins. Go on to the next oasis of faces, opinions, anecdotes, stay in the loop or perish.

  It was not necessarily objectionable. Adrian had lived it all before; she had virtually existed at Studio 54 last year, orbiting Warhol and his stunning constellation, the decadence benign and waxed and winking, self-parody as a collective effort, and off to the side, always, permanently emplaced, the arrogance of overprivileged boys, the swollen curling lips of snobbery, the candied snarls and stylized scorn, the drug and sex and studio palaver of the globe’s ascendent culture. It titillated her but brought forth her worst side too, tautened her voice with a jaded nasality, made her more ironic than thou, a snoot among snoots, because rudeness was
a form of social efficiency, sort of, and a natural defense, sort of, and everybody was that way, out and out rude, free to do what they wanted, free to get away with it, but clearly this was a different sect of rudeness and its practice here among the sociopaths at the Green Turtle. The difference was their blighted eyes, the impudence drained of youth. Their drawstring pants, flowery silk blouses, famished physiques, and thick sea-breezed hair that any woman would kill for all looked cartoonish, more faggotty than faggots, fops of the bankrupt manor. Evelyn Waugh gone to pot. They were her wicked older brothers, they had ridden a crest of boyish rebellion and they were lodged there, yesterday’s cutting edge, growing old. They weren’t naive, not like the youth of her own city; instead they reeked of the incorporation of innocence and its devaluation. One of them took her hand in his androgynous grip and asked, “When shall we fuck, then?” and then tapped the glass of his Rolex. They were assholes, kinks in the beauty of the nightfall, and yet still they managed some fading puissance, a not-yet-dissipated power to lure her reluctantly forward with a nerve-stretching sense of expectation. They were probably evil. She would probably want to know. The stars.

  There seemed to be a consensus that they mobilize and move out, everybody, up the beach to Coddy’s place. He conferred with Sally—Adrian and Johanna were being given his digs for the weekend, he wanted to take them there now, get them established, rally onward to the mighty Saconi. Coddy, it seemed, because of his light skin and generosity of attitude, had been plucked from the sunny daydream of his life and anointed king gofer for Cotton Island’s glittery invasion of rogues and royal understudies. His place, at the dead-end of a crushed coral track that paralleled the beach, set a high premium on castaway charm, more like a meeting house for beachcombers than a space where a person might actually reside, its single room set on knee-high stilts, a large and open rectangle, the lower half of its walls constructed from bamboo, the upper half green nylon screening, the panels sutured together over structural posts supporting its roof, the roofline tacked with gingerbready trim painted brothel red. It sat in humble privacy a dozen steps back off the empty beach, shaded by a grove of palms, tamarind, and gnarled sea grape trees, its yard pocked by land crab holes. Adrian had never come closer to camping out than this; she was going to think of it as an experiment in dirtiness, testing the unwashed appeal of letting her body go, letting her mind chase after it. It was a right she had never asserted wholeheartedly.

  A stereo played “You Sexy Thing” through homemade speakers. Coddy told them get used to it, it was the only record he owned at the moment. They got their bags out of the back of the truck; a caravan of mini-mokes rattled into the yard, toy cars ferrying an elite corps of freaks, the vulturish Peter Pans of legendary bands. Johanna wasn’t overawed either, but for other reasons; she was already claiming the boyos for her own court. There were people inside, long-termers, smoking ganj, displaying themselves in languid repose, as if they had been there all day, en soirée, slothing through paradise. The interior was a museum of the washed-up and overtraveled, all tropotawdry, seedy and fabulous, conch shells spray-painted Day-Glo colors, starfish mobiles, whalebone ottomans, fishing-lure chandeliers, suggestive contortions of bleached gray driftwood, weird seedpods, a dining table made from hatchcovers, pillow cushions thrown into a rotted-out island rowboat to make a cradlelike couch, the summery pennants of drying swimsuits and damp towels, nautical charts and concert posters, a blowup of Haile Selassie in the year of his downfall, and a refrigerator pasted with centerfolds from Playboy magazine. Coddy took Adrian aside to tell her apologetically that the head was out there. She didn’t understand until he pointed out the screen into the scrub to a pit latrine, roofless, its privacy afforded by half walls of corrugated sheeting, its door impossibly warped. Oh, she said, thanks, but there was no way she was going to enter that thing, let alone shit in it. She looked around the room thinking Here I am in a beautiful nowhere with the idols of no tomorrow. Someone handed her a can of beer, Lord Norton’s private label, picture of a playing card whore stamped on front. Betty at Bedtime. There was a blond assortment of ghoulish bimbos variously attached to the males of note, sweating through their pancake makeup. Johanna seemed delighted, words spilled out of her mouth. It was like Gilligan’s Island, scripted by Shakespeare on PCP. Adrian looked at the one bed, a double at least, inhabiting a corner of the room and wondered how clean its rumpled purple sheets could be. A once-famous bass player began to talk to her as if he were still cock of the rock. He had made a difference, she told him wryly. The world had noticed. We can be in Monte Carlo by Monday, he said, Ischia by Tuesday, then on to the Seychelles.

  Sally rounded them up to ask if they wanted to come along on the Saconi huntdown. The option was to stay where they were and join up later; they could walk to Lord Norton’s, she gave them directions. Coddy opened a cabinet to show Adrian where to find flashlights. The place was theirs, he reaffirmed; kick everybody out when they became a nuisance—implying they would. Adrian and Johanna looked at each other, tacitly agreeing. Go on, Adrian told Sally; go find your man. They’d be up in an hour or two, get a lift or whatever. One of the mini-mokes filled with revelers and followed the truck out.

  What happened next Adrian never regretted, but never wanted to explain or fully rationalize, especially to herself, except that everybody had a stock repertoire of fantasies they play-acted through in the dark theater of their imagination, improbable but not impossible acts that seemed nevertheless beyond one’s scope or courage or sanity, requiring like-minded co-conspirators (sleeping with your father) and a sequence of willed coincidence you weren’t likely to pursue. Still, given the moment, you could never be certain how you might respond, the fantasy suddenly and serendipitously there, clichéd by secret repetition and rehearsal or simply by popular desire, Eve’s apple at your fingertips. Getting comfortable with the pattern, you could get yourself in a lot of trouble, but the opposing attitude, restricting yourself to know only this much about life and no more, was too boring for words. And so was workaholic Tillman, the Quixote of postmodern tourism, married till death do him part to a hotel collapsing flake by paint flake down around him. There was a popsicle’s chance in hell she was going to play chambermaid and bus-girl for overweight suburbanites from Jersey. Or worse, Bavaria—forget it. But she wasn’t the baby everybody assumed at first glance, she wasn’t the hard-to-please little spoiled bitch (though she reserved the right). Tillman was totally occupied, burdened by incipient failure. Or exhilarated by it, she couldn’t tell which. She understood that, she could take care of herself for nine days, then flee back to civilization and culture that wasn’t so damn authentic, as in not mine, didn’t make you choose sides, wasn’t such a latent threat. Had she come all this way to see a man? Guess not, she’d have to say, realistically. It was not a great shock.

  Someone lit a kerosene lamp then switched off the glaring overhead bulb. Weak light jumped restlessly around the room, spreading along its low gold walls, and then relaxed, diffused into buttery haze. The beachy outdoors chirred with insects, the noise combining with the sandy flow of what used to be music and was now a dull, flattened heartbeat, the mechanical pumping of the environment. Another mini-moke loaded up and blasted away into darkness. Adrian went to the refrigerator for a second can of beer, recognizing one of her classmates from Barnard, stuck to the door. This girl, if you were a boy, any boy, you could stand outside the dorm and blow a lifeguard’s whistle and she’d come down. Boobs that size probably convinced her even nature saw her as an object.

  She sat down on a bench at the hatchcover table, thinking somebody should empty the ashtrays. She said hello with her eyebrows to the men sitting there, these two that the whole world knew on sight, the two others, attachés or valets or olés, whatever. Dealers, she figured out. They were engaged in disjointed rapport, unfamiliar slang that seemed to be about drugs, reliability of sources and levels of quality, like wired housewives discussing where they found their baby-sitters. They seemed fairly wo
rthless away from their guitars, disconnected from the amps. Were any of them collectors? she asked. Mumble, mumble, over and out. One collected guns. One collected old lithographs of horses, birds, dogs. One only cared about grossing her out—he collected pubic hair he had shaved off all his conquests. All the cunts I’ve banged, he said in a mock-sensitive voice. Goonish hilarity. They were boors, philistines who had stumbled upon an abdicated throne and sat down. She looked across the room where everyone else was, flopped on cushions opposite the bed, loosely circled around a burning candle, oddly quiet and soft-voiced, doing something—drugs, what else—with a fastidiousness that amounted to reverence, but their energy was definitely lowering, like a paralyzing fog wafting through the room. She heard Johanna chuckle, deep back in her throat, with such rich sensuality that the sound rang with attraction, motivating her. If it was coke they were doing she wanted some, she had somehow gotten herself on a plateau and wanted off, wanted a foot up to the next level, wherever it was, whatever levity or sensa tion, and then they should get out of here, find Sally and her musician, a fresh mix of people, reinforcements with some intelligence or originality or at least brio, my God.