Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  Whiteman is the brains, my brother, blackman is the soul, put them all together, my sister, and you still can’t make a whole.

  The skinhead began to bait Saconi, snarling imbecilic taunts: What language was this the boy sang—Schwarzhili, Mau-Mau, Ma-Ma, Jigaboo fookin’ Welsh, is it? Sally narrowed her eyes at him, steaming, knowing something bad was going to happen. He next succumbed to an Englishman’s irrepressible urge for the bestowment of titles. Here he is, gents, Our Lad the Nigger Nightingale. Sir Wog the Africoon Troubadour, he brayed, cocking his head left and right, seeking approbation for his mindless bigotry. The blood jumped in Sally’s heart and she lunged for the guy’s throat, getting her thumbs on his adam’s apple before Adrian restrained her from behind and one of the skinhead’s own entourage, out of decency or perhaps bloodthirstiness, threw an arm around his shoulder and muscled him outside to the lawn for an airing. Saconi was too married to his song to care; his justice he sang. Sally, shaking with rage, watched the two men out on the edge of darkness, the first jabbing his fist onetwothree into the congenitally lurid mouth, the skinhead laughing, spitting blood, cawing with dementia. Those who loved a sensation applauded.

  What was everybody doing there, besides ruining a perfectly good island? There were no princes and princesses, no lords and ladies, only the aptly named Insanatorium. “The global pillage,” she had heard someone say. She had this associative image of Elvis Presley nagging away in her mind—a bloated, unctuous white idol of popular decay raiding the tribes, kidnapping the culture for his self-aggrandizement and replacing it with less than thirty dollars’ worth of tee shirts, stenciled with the iconography of mass marketeers. Oops, let’s not get carried away, girl, but the fact remained, these motherfuckers had ridden their own music into the ground and had come a-slaving. She saw how they hankered after Saconi and she was worried for him, he wasn’t a found object, and unlike everybody else there, he had come to Cotton because Cotton was his to come to.

  It rarely got this out of hand, Saconi assured her, laughing about how swiftly she had clamped down onto the skinhead, fast and fearless, grievous harm intent in her eyes. He had taken a break, would return for three or four more songs. Holding hands, they walked out onto the grounds to be alone. He was so pleased with himself, pleased with her. Saconi satisfied her one unwritten rule about life: Give back. Tend to your karma (thank you, Hindus, for the Judeo-Christian Subversion of the Week). She envisioned high chairs crowned with chubby-cheeked toffee-colored babies with hilarious bows in their hair, and the imaginary snapshot she held in front of her made her hands quiver until it fell away and her delight turned to sadness, the horse back in the barn, because she was afraid to compose their future too precisely. Possibly Saconi was wiser about this than she was.

  The paradox was, her days of feeling stranded, anywhere, were over, because the more secure she felt in this part of the world, in no small part thanks to Saconi, the more she felt herself accepting the part she had left behind. If that then was maturity, adulthood wandering in from the wide open space of adolescence, must she concede the converse implication, that her original point of departure, the impulse she had answered to set herself free, was an arbitrary act of immaturity? Saconi’s strength of identity, something much deeper than male self-esteem, mystified her. Was identity homegrown, or discovered, researched, dug up and glued, like pottery shards, back together; something out there, waiting for you to come gather it? She wasn’t the person to ask. She looked at the children warehoused in her school and told herself, The answer is none of the above.

  The spree seemed to reconfirm her worst suspicions about the broader culture that insisted on taking responsibility for who she was, but she was being negative and knew she had to watch it, at least for Saconi’s sake. He pulled her over to an outcropping of limestone and they sat down, looking out toward the waves turned to lace on the windward barrier reef. Because he knew what she was thinking, he told her that when he was a boy he had a trumpet-playing uncle who one day vanished and then resurfaced playing second horn in a European jazz band, performing on the circuit through all those gray and snowy cities for the next twenty years. Saconi, as he grew up, borrowed the dream. Then the uncle came home. Sally said, I bet I know what happened, and Saconi corrected her. No, the uncle wasn’t bitter, was no more racist than sanity allowed, he didn’t regret spending the prime of his life communicating through his trumpet to people who were reluctant to find him intelligible when he took the instrument away from his lips. On the contrary. When he came back home, he had been blinded to all but St. Catherine’s backwardness, the ignorance of the people, the unsuitability of everything. He left after four months to live permanently in Paris. Saconi took his repudiation personally—he hated his uncle. He thought to himself, Whatever Uncle does have over there, it ain home, you know.

  “Sally, you cy-ahn see me jammin wit dem rock-and-rule bwoys?” he asked her, snickering at the thought. He was going to go back to the fete house and sing to them “Capitalism Gone Mad.”

  But he didn’t. Instead he climbed back on his stool, propped his guitar across his knees and sang a doleful ballad written by Bob Marley. The audience pressed in close, standing around like a pack of show dogs remarking upon the hidden potential of a flea-bitten coyote. The crowd had its second wind; some of the visiting celebrities began to overlay harmonies on top of Saconi’s voice. Sally heard the beauty in their chorus but she preferred them stoned out of their minds, actually—muffled. Suddenly they wanted to reach down into their hardened hearts and croon, and what was she supposed to do, puke or clap? Guitars were fetched, like homely wives heretofore unclaimed. Saconi segued into a reggae variation on what she took to be a pub song, making Sally choke with laughter, and they went on in this vein, amazing her, these profoundly tired men and their scout’s singalong, as if this were all they ever really wanted from the music to begin with, this their transiently pure escape from the inexplicable, exiling, addictive burlesque of fame, which had nowhere to take its prisoners but away.

  When Doc Travis stopped the boat she thought they had broken down but, nope, the Admiral wanted fresh fish for his supper and he ordered Saconi to break out the gear. Everything was slightly unreal to her from lack of sleep plus a queasy gloss of seasickness and a foolhardy decision like this only heightened the effect. The boat tipped and reeled, wave-slapped; the engines gargled and the world fizzled and hissed and water slurped in a steady flow through the scuppers. Adrian sat up erect but tottering like a drunk, her mouth tense but determined to be a good sport. “Is this battle stations?” she asked.

  What this was was frivolous endangerment. Sally thought, Let’s just get out of this madness before someone gets hurt. But the Admiral wanted dolphin and Saconi seemed only too happy to play the naked island boy, toting home his string of fish. He rigged a silver lure the size of a butcher knife onto a leader and started to tie it to a ball of trolling line. The waves shoved up and down around them; their immensity made her think of screens in a movie theater, blue and translucent as gemstone. One screen would slide down and another slide up, and sure enough, now that they weren’t hurtling through them, she could see fish inside, hovering like creatures trapped in amber, drab brownish-green shapes and elongated streaks of electric radiance, but before Saconi had the chance to feed out the lure into the water a rogue sea, like backwash, cascaded with a soft thunderclap down on the stern, compressing the women into their seats and then lifting them in its swell. When it hit, its power stunned Sally, but she had the presence of mind to grab Adrian’s arm and hold on to a cleat. Doc accelerated instantaneously to avoid being swamped but as the boat lurched forward she could feel Adrian’s weight pouring over the transom with the slosh. Sally shrieked for Saconi but he already had Adrian’s free arm and was dragging her away from the props. Doc sped ahead with no choice but to drain the boat. Adrian bounced on the gunwale, in the water from her breasts down, her legs dancing in a churn of foam. There was a brutally invigorating moment of balance. T
hey had both lost their sunglasses and stared into each other’s saucer eyes, Adrian’s blanched face written with the knowledge that in the next second or two she might well slip away from them and be gone. Sally would remember the look, and the remarkable fact of Adrian’s relative composure, Adrian not saying anything, nothing, not a scream or squeal or just help! She never made a sound but just looked at them as if she were prepared to wait all day for a resolution to her fate. Then they succeeded in hauling her back aboard, her clothes nearly torn off by the force of the water.

  Sally ranted at Doc above the roar of the twin outboards. You insane asshole, you silly prick. He ignored her, or didn’t hear. Saconi made the mistake of bending over to tell her to watch her mouth, Doc was sensitive to criticism, so then she was infuriated with Saconi too. Adrian, gasping, looked mauled and overwhelmed but not unhappy, her eyes brilliantly alert, her senses thriving, and certainly she was never more present than this moment, nothing else in the world but this. The water in the boat emptied as they picked up speed, thrusting through the crests, skipping from one to the next like a flat stone flung by a giant until the seas rolled gentle again behind the natural jetty of Pilo Bight, and Doc stopped the boat again so he could pull a pair of water skis and a towline out from their storage hatch and thus enter Howard Bay in heroic fashion, a charioteer slicing through the popular imagination, flying on wings of vanity.

  Saconi took the helm with relish and Sally, scowling at his back, had to will herself not to punish him for his misguided defense of the good doctor’s ego. It would be a shame and inexcusable to end the weekend mad at him, since she couldn’t claim not to know to make herself as little of a target as possible around men like Travis, and more importantly, she had a weekend to preserve, its strange symmetry of fullness and saturation, each sensation captured in that pair of keepsake images, one that glowed, one that disturbed, she was leaving Cotton Island carrying these as yet uncatalogued treasures, and her hope was to one day train herself to get them on record, processed into a form that could express to others what it was like for her to be so far off in the world, and yet never far from meaning. Maybe some day she would learn how to paint or write them, manipulate them onto film, something to say, I was there, very much alive. This is how it was for me.

  When the fete had gone on long enough to achieve a second wave of lunacy and then unraveled, Saconi said if she wasn’t too knackered he wanted to show her something on the northern point of the island, and didn’t know when they’d have another chance. The long arduous effort to enjoy herself among people not of her choosing had left her feeling gorged and dissatisfied, so she told him, “Anything you want that’s just us.” He grabbed a bottle of champagne from a washtub of melted ice and requisitioned one of the mini-mokes. She could feel the change of weather approaching, on her skin and in the invisible closeness of the sky. Even in the inky darkness before dawn, the landscape was capable of communicating to her its terrarium-like quality, the squat, dusty vegetation, the rockiness, the baking heat that still ticked out from the center of things, like an engine cooling down. Terrain made for reptiles, scorpions, haggard goats. Saconi drove over the washboard road with the bottle of champagne between his knees; his right hand rested reassuringly on her left thigh, and for all the best of reasons they didn’t talk but let the night flood away off the land without saying anything to make it human, robbing nature of its pace, as if words had priority over time and a simple exchange of sentences would bring daylight washing down on them.

  Which it did eventually but with inordinate stealth, the atmosphere becoming slightly porous, adding fractions of depth, not enough to bring texture but adequate to etch and ridge the earth with a flat, uninterrupted silhouette of shape, blocks of entities, this or that, island or sky being the only differentiation allowed, a hushed brightening but not yet true first light, champion of specificity, with a democratic interest in all things great and small. She wondered if anyone else knew Saconi could be this quiet, because he never was, especially with so sweet a look of gentle resignation, which she understood had nothing to do with her, and she fought back the sentimental explosion that would make her kiss him and weep and confess how completely she cared what happened to him. She wished he had never tried to compartmentalize racial existence with that now expendable word, soul.

  A pair of wild dogs dashed out from the roadside tangle of palmetto and thorn acacia, a fleeting image of haunted beings. Over the toylike puttering of the motor she began to notice the birds asking for sunrise, then the distant susurration of heavy surf, like a violent whispering. The antisocial wall of bush thinned out to an equally harsh barrenness of wiry growth and spikes—splattered crusts of blackened rock, red clay crackled like raku, coarse tufts of silvery grass, groves of cactus and Spanish bayonet. Three fourths of the way out the scarred headland that formed the northeast terminus of the island, even the sorry excuse for a road ended and they stopped, sending a warlock’s coven of iguanas scrambling for cover.

  “Big Sally, you cy-ahn walk wit me a little ways?”

  “You’d be surprised how far.”

  “Ahll right den, darlin. We walkin.”

  They followed a footpath over the crumbling earth, Saconi in front, carrying the bottle of champagne over his shoulder like a club. A nimbus of seaspray hung over their heads, like dawn itself in colloidal suspension, ready to burst in their faces. The next installment of light showed them the lowness of the paling clouds, the sootiness of their heavenly fabric, loose and ragged, coming unstuffed. Now it was clear they’d be cheated out of a famous sunrise, but if the lighting remained so otherworldly, no one was going to complain. Between the ceiling and the floor, the air swirled with seabirds—gulls, terns, pelicans, boobies, frigates—noisy as parliament, circling in ever-changing patterns. The path disappeared across knuckles of ironrock but Saconi knew where he had to go. They were fifty or sixty feet above sea level, she guessed, the shore itself somewhere out of sight below them though off in the channel between the two islands the ocean was chopped up and frosted with chaos. Shaving a dime of skin off one of her ankles on a burl of ironrock, she tried to step more carefully, taking the precaution of using her hands to steady herself as the rock mounded higher while the path descended. The waves fulminated in sequence, each giving itself a short ovation, and she could feel the tremors under her feet, similar to the inner resonance of her own deferred exhaustion.

  Where the land ended, the coast collapsed into a ruined city of rock, fabulous and severe, a phantasmagoric ghetto turned garden rusting into the sea, the skeletal remains of an industrialized center in final breathtaking transition, smelting away, an excrescent stain on the globe, something for the future to step around. It was beautiful, a death progressing peacefully in the midst of its own disordering consequence. Beautiful in the way destruction and decay could sometimes insist on their own beauty, the aesthetics of the opulence of everything that rotted and the magnificence of everything that burned.

  It was another geology altogether, too radical to have evolved through the slow accretion of civilized corals. Arched, spindled, hollowed out, the rock contained grottoes and tombs, the vandalized insides of factories, amorphous twisting shapes of worship and agony, ecstatic bodies on the verge of grace, hulks and scooped husks of futility. The craftsman sea would never be satisfied with its work here, fizzing into gaps, slurped through a labyrinth of fissures, scrubbing and polishing, scrubbing and polishing, unable to stop, a mother gone mad. Occasionally a single wave would assert itself and disintegrate vertically, breaking heavily apart in the air like a flock of snow geese startled into rising. It seemed like another type of frontier and Sally greeted the place with joy.

  Through sculpted naves and sweeping passages, they climbed down into the liquid gnash and suck of sound, every surface dripping with motion. A plague of tiny crabs the color of charred skin swarmed wherever they looked. They stooped to enter a brief tunnel leading to a chapel that opened again at its far side, a white oculus of
light wide enough for them to hoist themselves onto a seaside ledge to gaze down at their feet into a winking eye reflecting their blurred image in the blue smoke of dawn—a perfectly round, sand-carpeted tidal pool inlaid into the tortured rock.

  Unhh, said Sally, as if she struggled to unload her burden of disbelief. Gaa. God. Yes! the first words spoken. Without discussion Saconi set the bottle down and they removed their clothes, Sally staggered, beguiled, stupefied by the vividness of their bodies in the gloomy light, Saconi so vibrantly black, yet so unlike those first days when his blackness was like a mask she tried to peer behind; she, except for a bikini of alabaster flesh, so healthily golden. They eased themselves into the transparent wine of this rock chalice, revived by its momentary chill, and sat cross-legged on the sugary bottom, heart-deep in the water, Sally’s breasts floating between them, bobbing with the surge that fed the pool. Saconi popped the cork on the champagne—more spray, more foam for the universe. They passed the bottle lazily back and forth, no problem imagining what they drank was the essence of the world they found themselves in. Saconi didn’t talk and she didn’t want him to; he said what he wanted to say and what she needed to know by bringing her here. If she was the latest among other women he had brought, that still didn’t make her naive, or Saconi insincere, or the present less real.

  The sea heaved. Moments later, after each upswelling, a dying ring of energy would sweep the pool, nudging them, then relax backward and be renewed. She considered the contrast they made to be an ineffable wonder, a piano made of skin and bone, a concrescence of keys, together like this. Sitting up, they knotted themselves into one, her stout legs yoked around his slender waist, Saconi inside her, a bell ringing, first far away but now closer. They didn’t move themselves but let the surge lift and lower them on its cushion, the ocean breathing pleasure into them, at first infinitesimal amounts, vaporous, then each increment distinct, each increase warmer and fuller, accepted with gratitude. Given the choice she would stay like this, the sun never rising, the world trapped between night and day, until someone came to tell her she was an old woman, had lived her life and it was over. It took forever, which is what they both seemed to aspire to, but they came in unison and Sally arched her back until her hair spread out across the surface of the water, entwined with the sea anemones that rimmed the basin of the pool, like a wreath of iridescent spider mums, and the wreath became the bowl of a near horizon, her face this other horizon’s rising sun, the air the turbulent onslaught of ocean, the firmament a tundra of unfurling clouds. With her head still back and the world inverted, she shut her eyes tight, calling out, some unintelligible noise to say at this moment, this splintering instant in time, she was never so located in the cosmic circulation; thinking, I don’t have to leave, an involuntary thought, unsolicited, slipping in through the opening the pleasure made and she didn’t know what place she meant by it—Kansas or St. Catherine or Cotton Island or the tidal pool or somewhere else. Anywhere, it seemed, would do; that’s what she meant, she thought. And then, when the preciousness of life was almost too much to bear, the moment passed, and she raised her head to kiss Saconi.