Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  Doc hated to waste time on romantic dead-ends, so when they showed up at the dock by noon without Johanna, he fixed on Adrian as the next in line for the unrepentant boasting he mistook for charm, and she, a closet islophile who apparently chose this weekend to go public, only encouraged him along with anything else even remotely native. Doc didn’t even have to bother to pretend a sudden lack of interest in Johanna, with whom Sally and Adrian had spent a weepy twenty minutes back at Coddy’s, who had agreed to let her stay on at his place for a few more days. Sally had begun to think of Johanna as one of those aimless, muddled women, the authenticity of her loneliness and need notwithstanding. Johanna’s heartfelt dilemmas always seemed to attenuate into hard-edged clarity, so perhaps her confusion was just another of her ways to manipulate things. What it all boiled down to was silliness—Mitchell had to come get her, she announced. She refused to see other options than this absolute choice, compelling him toward a grand gesture, or irreversible rejection. Poor Mitchell, Sally thought. She couldn’t listen to much more of this, these artless and selfish vacillations.

  “So you want me to tell him ... Come get me or I’ll, what?”

  “Leave. I don’t know what else I can do, Sally, but don’t say it that way, please. Don’t make it sound like an ultimatum.”

  What was it then? Sally didn’t understand. Adrian came to Johanna’s defense to say the rush is she loves him, she knows he loves her but he’s freaked, and she has a visa problem not to mention other complications that have to be worked out ASAP, and just fuck!, I don’t know, she’s an old-fashioned girl, I guess, Adrian continued, her sarcasm meant to tease and not hurt, though Sally couldn’t say for sure. She has a maudlin reality, Adrian said, getting Johanna to finally smile, however nervously. She needs a guy to come running.

  “Who said anything about running?” Johanna shot back, as if she just now realized the impression she had made on them and couldn’t let them leave with it intact. “I wanted him here yesterday,” she joked. “The least he can do is fly.” Mirth, belated commiseration, but no outpouring of compassion for those who relied on emotional bribery.

  “Dis ain much a’tall,” Doc Travis had shouted as they plugged through the cut, their wake scribbled behind them on the sheltered water of the lagoon. “I seen it much worse, you know,” he hollered into the wind, but here in midchannel he kept his observations to himself. Saconi kept him company up there, poker-faced, the two of them in their Speedo swimsuits, one butt red and one navy blue, their knees bent in a crouch to absorb the ceaseless sequence of bucking impacts—boomboomboomboomboom. She knew cowboys and these were cowboys. At random intervals the boat would smash through the rabid, frothing top of a wave higher than the others and launch into space, and their bodies would levitate for the voiceless heart-stopping second it took to come cannonballing down. Sally would close her eyes but she’d have to open them again to the terrifyingly fascinating horrorscape that the sea had made of itself today. The sun speared in and out of the clouds, like a roving spotlight; dozens of broken rainbows swam in the air around them, near enough to touch but as elusive as hummingbirds. Then a wave would shatter into a blizzard of glass and they’d hold on for dear life. Sally figured Saconi’s guitar, still back on Cotton waiting for Johanna to put it on the afternoon flight, was smarter than all of them put together.

  Adrian huddled down next to Sally on the seat cushions in the stern. Every five or ten seconds they were drenched anew, the water fire-hosed straight at them, so that they ducked reflexively. Below her cut-off shorts, there was a darkening bruise on Sally’s thigh from Adrian’s grip on her, her fingers death-locked into Sally’s flesh, but still, Adrian continued to surprise. If anyone could be simultaneously green and sanguine, Adrian was. They were being slammed into each other, thrown into the fiberglass hull, made to sit rigidly in place for fear that if they got up they’d be catapulted right out of the boat, and Sally had to give Adrian credit, she wasn’t whining, like so many other women—and men—would have. A sissy she was not although, granted, maybe she was too sick and traumatized to open her mouth. Appearances being what they are, Sally was quietly astonished that Adrian could be relied upon to endure something this physical, not to mention homicidal. Adrian’s fortitude made Sally gender-proud and she wondered about the hidden reserves of strength in this petite and seemingly overbred woman. Was there a conversion involved?—she had certainly done an about-face in her opinion of the islands. As of yesterday, the islands had become unequivocally fantastic, heavy, gorgeous, replete with unnameable wonders, original personalities, and poignant tableaux.

  Which was entirely unexpected, since Sally had written off the weekend as a failure, reduced to the banality of a deceptively simple question: What was everybody doing here? Everybody being, quote, a farrago of smelly Eurocentric degenerates and Angloslime, third sons, nouveau scruffies and unclaimed daughters, something something trollops in pursuit of sun poisoning, attended by an entire community of chuckleheaded yokels, natural idiots, and obsequious wretches. Who had called it that? Some dreadful ass, someone who fit right in, who wanted her to do a speedball with him. A little fuck-you-up and voilà, Jah loves you.

  That first night, Adrian and Johanna, she thought, were lost baggage, hard-core liabilities, and they had deeply upset her. When she returned for them at Coddy’s place, there they were, a seclusive pair of needle queens. She had felt bamboozled, her generosity betrayed, and had signed off, they could look after themselves in junkie heaven for all she cared, but she had a man to love and be loved by. If they chose to turn themselves inside out like a chewed mango skin, sleep with the first men they laid eyes on, whatever, that was their business because she wasn’t playing mother hen and she was under no further obligation to them. But in the morning, spurred by sisterly guilt and dark curiosity, impulses she could never successfully curb, she left Saconi in bed, where he would sleep till noon, put on her bathing suit under a sundress, and walked down to Coddy’s place to assess what damage the girls had inflicted upon themselves. She suspected her appearance might cause a crisis and couldn’t predict at what expense she’d play the Pollyannish Voice of Reason, the Saving Hand. But when the three of them were back together, all day yesterday and again last night, she had to reassess her case against the two, based on a more liberal interpretation of the rules of social grace. She had discovered them out on the top step, suited up, munching a breakfast of bananas and gnips someone had dropped by, contrite schoolgirls with pouches under their eyes and morning-after resolutions.

  Johanna looked deadly earnest; Adrian had a rash that was probably a reaction to no-see-um bites and said she hadn’t slept well because there was a peeping Tom. Johanna shrugged it off. Sally told Adrian to keep in mind the islands were a place you were never alone, though that never once stopped anybody from behaving as they pleased. The women wanted to impress on her how aware they were that they had overstepped the bounds, committed improprieties, if not necessarily in substance then at least in style and etiquette, that never entirely useless principle. They knew better, but ... et cetera. Whatever had transpired during the night was to be labeled a fluke and consigned to another lifetime. There were no waves of shame, thank God, and Sally was touched by their considerate regret, enough to apologize herself, and then they were all giggling about who ambushed whom, Sally for bringing them to this naked lunch of an island or Johanna and Adrian for taking advantage of the opportunity by eating it.

  They went out on the beach, tanned and swam, read and gossiped and joked, enjoying a morning as ordinary and safe as bottled water. Only when Johanna removed her sunglasses to cool off in the water did Sally get a glimpse of her sadness, the bruised tenderness in her hazel eyes unfocused on something far away, and only then Sally thought with a more measured sense of consequence, They put needles into their arms, didn’t they. What did they foresee in return that was worth the risk, and why did that question echo so uncomfortably in her memory, suggesting the parental caveat against all dangers,
real or imagined? Adrian’s culpability, she presumed, was marginal; she had submitted to a lone temptation, stepped in front of a charging bull. Johanna’s acquiescence to temptation however seemed vastly more profound, seemed to exist symbiotically with guilt itself.

  Addictive personalities—Johanna was, wasn’t she?

  With the others it wasn’t the drug abuse that disturbed Sally as much as their deep and flagrant lack of moral discipline that, in effect, made all reflective surfaces, except for crowds and cameras, transparent. Mirrors didn’t work anymore. But Johanna saw herself, with Johanna it was drugs, self-medicated and self-punished, and Sally could imagine her saying, My kind of pain is not your kind of pain. Even if that were true she’d have to be told she was wrong, told that this long, lost summer of illusion that was the tropics was probably the wrong place for her to be.

  But who had the right and the authority to tell her that, Sally didn’t know. She knew it wasn’t her.

  By late morning the sun had become a heat lamp and chased them off the beach, up a stairway carved through terraced coral paddocks to the Norton compound. Saconi was waiting for them to join him for lunch, sitting at a wrought-iron and glass-topped table under a green-and-white striped umbrella, looking splendid in his cricket ducks and jersey, leafing through a back issue of Rolling Stone. The patio was imported slate, screened for privacy by bougainvillea, allamanda, and passion-fruit vine trained to lattices, the blue of its seaward view mimicked by a swimming pool. The structure that allowed for all this resembled a neo-Georgian wedding cake, the Princess’ very own retreat. Saconi said she called it The Insanatorium. Where was this mythical princess? Adrian asked. Where were the lords and the ladies? Saconi said they rarely visited, their arrivals and departures were liquid and unscheduled, but instead they were represented year-round by their sycophants, who were legion. A servant appeared, pushing a service cart, and they lunched on lobster salad and avocado vinaigrette. Johanna seemed overawed by the milieu of luxury, Adrian critiqued the architecture with scathing wit, Saconi promoted Mitchell and Tillman as honorable men but questionable lovers, since they would permit two such beautiful women to come unescorted to Sodom, and Sally smiled and exclaimed, just plain farm-girl hick-happy with their temporary status in the world. After lunch, Saconi gave them a tour of the house, supplying enough eloquent contempt for the decorating to cover for any effete prince and his eternal absence. While Saconi sauntered off to talk to one of the visiting musicians about recording studios, the women borrowed a mini-moke to circumnavigate the island on its mostly unpaved road, an excursion highlighted by Adrian’s glee when they stopped in a weather-beaten, world-forsaken fishing village named Aberdeen for Cokes and contraband scotch. They passed into the cool interior of a one-room concrete bar to be instantly delighted by the eczemic murals decaying on its walls. The artist was sent for and Adrian pronounced him discovered. Luther Hendricks was a seventy-year-old Cotton Islander who had painted hundreds of pencil-sketched watercolors of grotesque bellicose fish and what Adrian called Dagons—piscean men—cavorting in a shadowy sea blossomed, so she said, with primitive symbolism. Come the Eighties, Adrian predicted, exotic folkloric would be what everyone wanted. She bought three of Luther’s pieces on the spot, promising she was going to arrange a show for him in New York, and Luther committed to the scheme only insofar as to proclaim that a new battery could make an old car go, and that he liked pretty young girls, with or without promises.

  Driving back they raced against the stuporous glare of midday and came to the consensus that, before the goat roast, they should either all take naps or kill themselves. The scotch had left Adrian with a headache and she couldn’t decide, both alternatives being of equal appeal. Sally dropped them at Coddy’s place and then retreated up the coral shelves of land to the Insanatorium, past the volleyball spastics on the lawn and the goat on its spit which looked like a napalmed dog. Saconi anticipated her arrival by keeping bedside, exactly where she wanted him, and then making love to her—the second time that day—with such ardor that their combined output of tangy sweat could be measured in a rain gauge. She plunked immediately into a coma and back up again when she heard Saconi leave at dusk, then showered, dressed in a tangerine shift with orange blossoms like white propellers, and brushed out her hair. Examining herself in the mirror in the guest bathroom, she decided she looked all too healthy and fit to bother with makeup, a private rebuff to the sybarites.

  The goat roast came off in an almost civilized fashion, though she noticed for the first time an insidious hierarchic ordering among the locals, the high ground held by a caste of enforcers charged with keeping everybody else out, which was an outrage and just incredibly awful public relations, seeing as how the compound had swallowed a good sixth of the inhabitable part of the island. She tried to manifest her most agreeable grin, her blond Lutheran face befriending and supportive, talking to anybody who would listen about the school or Saconi. All she remembered was the goat was spicy hot and delicious, there were no napkins, most of the people were world-class snobs, she had gotten addled again on rum punches, had met a German boy who only knew English from rock-and-roll lyrics, and Luther Hendricks had arrived on a donkey, which he had ridden across the hump of the island to be there at Adrian’s bidding. There was an interlude of sorts in the early evening hours that was actually quite tranquil and lovely, composite groupings slouched on lawn furniture under the clouding sky, chatting and breathing the air, doing impersonations of ordinary people. She saw Doc Travis loitering around Johanna, Adrian yakking nonstop with Luther and thought, Fine, though it was not yet the hour for the vampires to be out in force. And when they came, when the bacchanal revved up, they came trailing that question like a barbed tail: What was everybody doing here?

  Living in the tropics, she had let the visual overload gradually alter her perceptive instincts, born on the blank, stripped prairie and mostly dependent on the give and take of language. Her degree of insight into the world now set forth from a base of images, and she stored away two, at least, from the weekend on Cotton Island for further consideration, not counting the look on Adrian’s face when she nearly washed over the side of Doc Travis’ speedboat.

  Not counting the maggot she tried to strangle, either, a skinhead from one of the London self-mutilation bands currently in vogue. Drunk, coked, whacked, pig-eyed, cretinoid, a psychopathic missionary from a postnuclear, fried shell of a future. Terminally sunburned, he wore unlaced engineer boots, soiled boxer shorts, a sleeveless black tee shirt, his ear lobes festooned with ridiculous safety pins and his phlebitic arms tattooed with insipid swastikas, laughable daggers, and fascist buzz words. His uncircumcised penis wagged in and out of the crease in his shorts. He had crawled out from some crabhole, she hadn’t seen him before they had all packed into Lord Norton’s outdoor fete house for Saconi’s performance. Flambeaus licked the thatch of the ramada’s peaked roof with sinister light, light from the voodoo scenes in B movies. It was late, the chemistry in a toxic red zone; worlds split apart into clans and collided in multinational masses simultaneously. Because she identified herself with Saconi she sometimes felt equatorial, a narrow imaginary line of contact between the frictional polarity of hemispheres. (Earlier, she had prevented one set of islanders—security, the chosen ones—from rapping the skulls of another set—the unchosen, harmless goggle-eyed teenagers—who were trying to sneak their way into the festivities. She interceded, they slipped in to stand off to the side, gawking like the tourists they now were.)

  Saconi sat on his stool and shook a tamboo he had told her was filled with the bones of a hundred birds. As an experiment in form, he had modeled one of his newest calypsos on the rhythmic phrasings of a Yoruba chant, and this was it. The skinhead stationed himself at arm’s length in front of him, wobbling on the twin flames of his legs, his gyroscope broken by all manner of self-abuse and juvenile hatreds. He squinted, puffy and cock-eyed, at Saconi, his fish lips pursed in a sphincter of appraisal. Saconi’s voice modulated, lik
e the dipping flight of sparrows, between high and low notes, tenor and baritone.

  Whiteman play brains of the world but blackman must play soul, the calypso argued. The title was “Astro-nots,” and Sally had never heard the song before. Granted, its melody uplifted, but the lyrics made her uneasy, vaguely resentful—which would of course be Saconi’s intention.