It was a down-the-road topic, it was in the way, he definitely wanted no exploration of Pandora issues tonight, this was the last conversation on earth he expected to be having with Josephine at this juncture. He had not only misjudged her, he was in fact in, as George James would surely take satisfaction in reminding him, over his head. It was feeble to entertain for a second the proposition that he had gained insight into her travails merely by being where he was, it being marginally problematic to be a white man in a black nation, but by no means a cross to bear. But he was flexible on the subject, he could be manipulated to concede things he wasn’t sure were true. Sighing, she accepted his lack of response and they drove on.
Finally he managed to say, “Josephine, I am an unwilling part of this disease,” hoping she’d understand.
There are white boys and there are white boys, just don’t play the fool by trying to apologize to me, she said. Abruptly, she stopped the car in the middle of the abandoned road and gave him a biting kiss, sharp enough to make him wince, the surf of insects roaring in his ears, and then, again, they drove on. Mitchell wasn’t thinking, he didn’t want to think, there was no place happy where thinking would take him.
The spot Josephine had in mind was on the crest of the highest peak that backdropped Queenstown. Its cartographical designation was Mount Archer, but it was called by its folkloric name, Soldier Mountain, indebted for this sobriquet to the British forces withdrawn to the West Indies after the Revolutionary War, ordered south to secure the Crown’s few remaining claims in the Americas. A vanguard detachment was allowed to come ashore unopposed, then set upon by a mob of French-armed and trained Black Carib Indians. The two ships of the expeditionary force were set ablaze in the harbor; the landed troops had little choice but to retreat farther and farther up into the hills, establishing themselves finally atop Archer where they held out for months, slowly dying by attrition in skirmishes and then from starvation, awaiting reinforcements that arrived in time to bury them before dogs and vultures had picked clean the bones. A cemetery was said to be up here, somewhere on the summit, marked by a common headstone, but Mitchell had never seen it though the upper third of the peak had been deforested long ago and was used now as free-range pasture. Only a surviving handful of Catherinian Tories and absentee landowners considered the site consecrated ground. For the majority of the population it was no more than a view, the most magnificent within direct reach of Queenstown, and therefore a natural with sightseers, picnickers, and of course, lovers. At some point in the past, the colonial government had expropriated what was no more than a shepherd’s hut, limed its walls, and christened it a historical shrine, but Kingsley, the first prime minister of the associated territory, had its pitiful collection of artifacts carted down to the new national museum in the botanic gardens, gave the building to a political crony who gave it the appellation Lookout House, added a refrigerator and a record player, the former still in operation after almost twenty years, and promoted it as a bar. Tourists rarely wandered this far off the track, especially after dark; the place was as local as callaloo.
A handmade wooden sign, its lettering flaked and unreadable, marked the turnoff. They parked alongside two other cars, the only ones there, and got out, Josephine kicking off her heels to walk over the corrugated ground, holding Mitchell’s elbow for support. A short path led to the bar, which sat out on a rocky hump, jutting prowlike into space. Reggae thundered from inside its walls, low and heavy on the bass line, sucking booms, in and out and continuous, like the stroke of a mighty piston. The slope dropped away to their left into the sky over the capital; Mitchell had never been here at night, had never experienced this approximation of divine voyeurism, and he thought, Whoever doesn’t love this needs their soul examined. The elevation was twenty-five, twenty-eight hundred, something like that. Capillaries of light spilled down out of the stadium bowl formed by the southern face of the mountains, a symmetry of peaks horseshoed eastward and westward. The scattering of lights fattened into electric arteries that branched into geometric webs, increasing in density toward the glowing heart of the two-chambered city, Queenstown and Scuffletown, built along the harbor, outlining the earthly nothingness that was the nighttime sea. Out to the southeast he could see, with no comments from his conscience, a distant flicker of lonely lights that would have to be Cotton Island, and farther out into the void among the lowest stars, a powdery effluvium that he thought might be the aura of the island of St. Vincent, and were he to see tonight on the farthest horizon the atomic flash that he and his generation had been raised to anticipate, he’d wave good-bye to the world he had come from and keep walking toward the music with the enigmatically glamorous Josephine.
She paused to breathe deeply of the view, tucking herself against his side, remarking on the drop in temperature, the air chilled and aromatic, like a florist’s case. Her sexuality closed in on him like a magnetic field—he certainly wasn’t finding it cool up here. With her index finger she traced his mustache, then his lower lip, its thinness in marked contrast to the beveled fleshiness of her own. He felt her nail like a blunted knife scoring the circle of his hungry mouth. She wanted him to tell her if he had stayed by black women before. Her voice took it for granted that he had.
In his mind they were already fornicating like cats, clamped together, tumbling down the mountainside. He had to draw his consciousness back out of his cock, gorged with blood and pounding like a second wild heart, before he could order his thoughts and answer. Staying by meant sleeping with, and he hadn’t. The answer was no, but he didn’t want to tell her that and thus make his inexperience, which was trifling and irrelevant, suddenly significant. There had been another night, another girl, another booming discotheque, down on the harbor near Scuffletown. Another kiss much like the ones he knew were coming from Josephine standing on the beach in the pitch-black darkness before dawn after the club had closed. She had petted him through the fabric of his pants. Reaching under her tank top, he had touched one of her breasts, she had slapped his hand away, that was that. His impression was that black women had unfortunate breasts: flat, flappy, Tootsie Rolls for paps, sad and overused. On his forays through the countryside, every river had its gang of women, stripped to the waist, bathing. At least along the riverbanks, modesty was not ranked high on the civic code of behavior. Endless nursing might well have been the culprit for the erotic defeat of black breasts but he couldn’t say, and he had wondered that night on the beach if, after her strong come-on, he had not dallied but placed his hand between her legs rather than on her tit, what would have happened. He felt he had triggered her self-consciousness, but she was fickle, that was all he really knew, perhaps there was the trait he should be focusing on, and the arc of thought circled him back to what George James had warned him about Josephine as they were about to strike out on their own from Howard Bay.
“Yeah,” he lied, out of pride, “but I’m no expert.”
“Who is, bwoy?” She put him right back on the hook, asking him to tell her the difference between white girls and black girls, and when he resisted, she accused him of being too serious, and then teased him by saying if he were really so serious a man, then she wanted to hear something negative, tell her the bad things about black women.
“I don’t think I like this game,” he said, the restructuring of desire like a bucket of grimy water dumped on his head. What if he offered an analysis of the difference between North American women and West Indian women, would that pacify her investigative appetite? Josephine said no. She was inexplicably obstinate. Tell her just one thing she wanted to know or walk home. He took one baleful, disbelieving step back away from her before she restrained him. Come on, bwoy, she said, full of seductive taunting, he needn’t worry, but why couldn’t he tell her, tell her to humor a crazy black bitch, tell her as a favor, as a matter of respect. Respect? he thought. What she was asking for was sexual suicide, racial self-immolation. Okay, he said, shaking his head, agitated into compliance—what was this, her ide
a of sadomasochism, did ugliness and conflict turn her on? Here goes: Black women appeared more inclined to style over substance, philosophically they tended to cutesyness, they latched on to the trite, they adored platitudes, they clung to the ankles of a God that clearly couldn’t see or hear them, they solicited chauvinism from males, they conspired with men in the continuation of patriarchy, they had yet to get their attachment to slave love and stable breeding behind them, and despite all that they walked around with a chip on their shoulder the size of a banquet platter. There, he said in bitter resignation, sick that the evening must end like this. There you have it but the truth is not a foolhardy litany of others’ shortcomings or a coerced recitation of stereotype, and what’s with you anyway, was this like some ritual scarring, what did she want to hear next, that her uncle was a monkey and swung from trees? He was beginning to believe this was what Catherinians imported white boys for, to pervert them into some sort of intellectual mercenary, targeted against themselves, solidify a role in the world as professional victims.
“Whew, calm youself now,” she said. “You are too too serious, Wilson.” She was only being mischievous; she knew who she was, she didn’t require chivalry from him, she had too much pluck for that. “Black womahn is in big trouble, I see. And what about we backsides, eh?”
“Yeah, you have big asses. Yours proves to be an exception.”
“Um hmm. Ahll right. What else, de final crime?”
“Fine. Black women are fickle.”
She thought about it. “So you is tekkin a chance with me, nuh?”
He shrugged—everybody took a chance with everybody else, nobody coupled with the slightest assurance of a guarantee.
“White womens ain fickle?”
“White women are. You didn’t demand I eviscerate them in the bargain.”
“Carry you ass, bwoy,” she chided, but her eyes—effulgent, gleeful, bratty—belied the rebuke. “Carry you white skittery ass.” She wanted him to take this black girl inside and get to know her properly, and she gave him a look, trying quite pointedly to read him, to determine what exactly this was that she had captured, and if this was a game, then the time had come for him to be its willing accomplice. She leaned against him to put her heels back on, dropped her head and nipped him in the stomach with enough pressure to make him yelp. Only one impulse registered: more. She straightened up, encircling him, and pushed her long tongue into his mouth, purring; hearing the noise in her throat he thought, more. Everything in his life had a path to follow except passion, which seemed fated always to be stopped at the border, delayed, made to sit by itself in a waiting room while its credentials and itinerary were placed under indefinite review. More. Her blackness shot a bolt of amazement through him; her braids swayed and batted him, the most lenient of flagellations. Her eyes were open with a daring cast—What will you do if I do this? Or this? Incredibly, she popped the top button of his shirt, tore it from its threads, to crab her fingers across the muscles of his chest. Her eyes flashed. His lips felt hers ascend into a smile. He felt lifted out of himself and the mountain no longer proffered a competitive view.
Inside, the air reeked of ganja smoke and incense; Josephine’s skin turned to licorice under the violet lights. They drank and danced, watched by a row of rastamen sitting along a bench in the back, a dog asleep at their feet, each of them as solemn as members of a palace guard, mourning Haile Selassie, their hair bundled into wool caps towering above their heads like sacks of onions. Josephine made telepathic contact with the bartender, who brought her ice water and scotch and roasted groundnuts without being told. Mitchell smoked some of the dope on hand and found himself wandering in a postpsychedelic neverland. The walls crawled with florescent graffiti, glazed with energy, and Josephine bribed him with the silky hydraulic gestures of temptation to decode himself right off the page of propriety and into a protolanguage of lust, rocking on his feet, his hands on the helm of her hips, absorbed in her sluttishness and his, a diva of blackness, a woman from the circus, from a lost city, from the fables of a continent, from Times Square, from cosmopolitan magazines, from an ivory throne and from the chains of his own history and the darkness of the fictions he constructed about the nature of his own desire. She locked one leg over and behind him and rode his thigh with her face buried in his neck, her breathing labored, the voltage dumbfounding, Josephine chuffing with sexual locomotion to the music, and he could feel the slick scorch of her cunt flat against the top of his thigh, her hipbone mauling him, battering his erection in its own painful seep of fluid, and when she unhooked her leg, gasping, he could feel the stick of wetness on his pants where she had left her imprint. At some point they realized they were performing for the public, took their bows and got outside, sweating profusely. The sky fluttered and split with light and they were greeted with the mercy of a gusting wind, which they inhaled like smelling salts, restoring some small portion of their clarity. Another storm was bearing down on the island and Josephine wanted to hurry down off the mountain because the Deux Chevaux was allergic to rain, leaked miserably and hydroplaned out of control. Thunder rolled from several directions at once, arguing. They flew precipitously down the gullies of Mount Archer toward the last remaining brooch of lights in Queenstown, Mitchell sinking back without pretense into the fantasy of sex, contorting himself so that his head lay cradled in Josephine’s lap, his face nuzzling the softness of her stomach with his freest hand jackknifed inside her creamy panties, fingering her while she drove, Josephine murmuring, You’re dangerous—her voice recommending—You’re a dangerous man, until finally her thighs began to twitch and quake and she braked radically to a stop, whimpering, to permit herself to come, and then put the car back in gear and continued on as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, nothing to upset a lady’s composure surely. It began to rain. Instantly his legs were soaked and he wrenched himself out from under her arms to crank his window closed and they rolled blindly through the upper neighborhoods, a bubble of steam, the tires fizzing and slipping underneath them, on their way to wherever lust was taking them, which turned out to be a middle-class clapboard house on a densely built street of similarly anonymous houses.
“Dis my home, Wilson.”
She wanted him to come in, but if he had reservations, he was free to take Shoovie back to Howard Bay and return it tomorrow, that was no problem, this was no problem either. The rain doubled in intensity, drowning out whatever voice of reason might yet prevent their lovemaking. The string of warning lights were far, far back on the road and he had ignored every one of them. Someone could come throw rocks at his craving and it wouldn’t break, not now, not here, not with these horns, not with this black woman named Josephine and her black effluence of heat, the molten dark caramel of her skin, the sensuality of her imperfect beauty, the volcanic wit that made him feel the ground was not entirely safe to walk on. At this deliriously advanced stage of the evening, you’d have to pry him off her with a wrecking bar. They ran through the pelting rain and under the wide eave of the roof. She unlocked the door, they fumbled down a creaky hallway, Josephine said Shhh; Mitchell, alarmed, said Who’s here? Then he was in her room, standing in the dark, inhaling the aphrodisiac of her private life, thinking contrarily that privacy was white as he wondered, since she hadn’t bothered to answer him, who else was there in the house with them. She lit several candles then kissed him with uncharacteristic tenderness, ended it by excusing herself to the bathroom. He couldn’t wait himself but unlatched the shutters of a window and pissed out into the rain, then removed his wet shirt and sandals and made a cursory inspection of her furniture and chattels, the bed with its afghan spread and scrolled headboard, an overstuffed chair pinned with doilies, a washstand with its china bowl and pitcher, a bookshelf stacked with romance and mystery, everything quaint and homey except there were piles and piles of magazines stacked up along the walls—back issues of Glamour, Ebony, Paris Match, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Der Spiegel—and a worktable, half of it taken up by a slanted dra
wing board tacked with curling sketches, sketch after sketch of faceless beauties modeling bold colors, unabashedly predatorial haute couture—jungle elegance, is what someone might name the style—and not a dress pattern in sight. She was indeed good with her hands, not as a seamstress but as a designer, and she’d need an economic revolution and marketing wizardry before her talent ever meant anything on St. Catherine. He had to ask himself again, what was she doing here? The toilet flushed down the hall and a moment later he heard her steps on the floorboards approach the room and then stop, another door creaked open and there was a short hushed conversation between Josephine and a second woman, then she was back in the room, behind him, her face poked over his bare shoulder, her breath smelling of toothpaste, her braids conspicuous by their absence against his skin.
“Come,” she said. “Undress me,” and he did, turning to see she had banded her hair into a tail and scrubbed the whorish makeup from her face, not by any means transformed into the girl next door but the attempt had been made. He found the zipper, tugged the dress down over her hips, there was something unusual about her bra he couldn’t figure out, and it seemed she had left her panties in the bathroom, the thatch of her pubis was a fuzzy ribbon, neat and well trimmed, or, who knows, maybe it grew that way, a goatee ending in the shadowy definition of her labia, and her ass was an absolute plum. A bomb of thunder exploded nearby, making her cringe, and the rain came with torrential force, whipping violently across the roof, the house embroiled in its uproar. The storm aroused Josephine in a peculiar way, animating her with feral urgency, they had to fuck now, she said, quick, the storm was bad, it was too powerful, maybe it would stop, maybe it would stop, she tackled him down onto the bed, tearing at his belt, Mitchell not equal to this acceleration of pace, still fumbling with her complicated bra, a blockhead determined to solve its logistics. She climbed off him to yank his pants away, scrambled back with an anguished, frustrated cry, spraddling him, the house vibrating with the din of the rain. Mitchell licked the astringency of her perfumed skin, trying to slide himself down to kiss the insides of her thighs, she sank her claws into his scalp to keep him topside, hurting him to do it though he didn’t know what she was trying to do, and so he kept edging down, believing she wanted him to feel the pain. The room flared with milky green light. A second later a spear of lightning struck, rattling the windows, the shock wave concussing throughout the house, Josephine cried out and he was wedged between her legs and she was squatting over him, fucking down savagely onto his nose, which snapped him to his senses with a wallop of truly undeniable pain just as the next bolt seemed to hit right on top of them, and in the moment of crackling silence that followed the strike he found himself ejected onto the floor, sprawled out, his chest heaving, finally understanding that the siren gone off in his head was in the house as well and it was a child—her child—screaming. He climbed back on the bed with Josephine, lay facedown next to her, and they waited, confounded, disabled with increasing fatalism, unsexed and thrown out of the garden. They heard footsteps down the hall, someone going into the child’s room, the sympathetic rhythm of an older woman’s voice, unheeded. He tried to touch Josephine with some suggestion of reverence, to keep the engine of their lovemaking idling, but she tensed, groaning, and told him no, wait a little, be sweet. The child screamed into the rain for his mother, answered by more lightning, three thermonuclear booms, the blasts building one into the other with a ferocity that left even Mitchell rigid and afraid. The street outside crackled with noise. The child screeched for Josephine, who whispered feverishly to Mitchell, Mahn, I have been so good, I have waited so long, nature have no business comin against we like dis. He lay coiled and inert, waiting for more explosions, listening to Josephine’s rationalization for not going to the child, but then she sat up, exasperated, went to her dresser for a pair of panties, then pulled a tiger-striped housecoat off the hook on the back of the door, but her aunt was there on the other side with the child, rapping, before she had put it on.
Swimming in the Volcano Page 42
