Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  “You don’t need me anymore, do you?” The thought of confronting so depraved a personality as Davidius produced in Mitchell a small cautionary surge of adrenaline.

  No, they didn’t need him anymore, he’d be kept informed. Off went the police, happy to be involved. At the Beach Bar, a new relief bartender explained he was in the dark about white people on a sailboat, but Winston would be back for the evening shift. He walked the long drive up the steepening land to Rosehill, feeling the need for a nap. The gardener was out on the grounds chopping something up, said he’d go down directly to measure for new glass. Mitchell tracked down Tillman catching up on paperwork in his cluttered, airless office behind the registration desk. He was hunched over his desk, bare-chested, wearing a bathing suit and reading glasses, a pot of tea at his elbow. An overhead fan stirred the atmosphere like oatmeal. He knew next to nothing about last night, except that ransack and plunder appeared to be a theme. One of his own guests had been robbed at gunpoint, somebody came at him out of the bushes as he walked down the drive to the bar. Two night watchmen had been added to the payroll this morning to supplement the worthless one who had been thrown into the deal with the original purchase. As for Mitchell’s situation, Tillman said he wasn’t one to lecture but what was he thinking of, giving the key to perfect strangers and then bugging out?

  According to Winston, the boat people returned to the bar sometime shortly after midnight, arguing loudly and insensibly among themselves. The captain had a shiner half closing one of his eyes. He bellowed for a drink, bellowed for Mitchell, cursed black demons, cursed womankind. Winston calmed him down, got the key back, the captain implied there’d been trouble up at the house but he wasn’t in what you’d want to call a coherent state of mind. Heading back out to the anchorage in their Zodiac, he tottered overboard just ten feet out from shore, pulled himself back in and continued on. Later, when Tillman had finished talking with the police about the assault on his guest, he came down the hill to help the staff close and got the story from Winston, decided to drive over to Mitchell’s place for a look, saw what had happened, the breakage popular with juveniles and psychotics. Didn’t look like a robbery as much as a rampage. It seemed like a good idea to have the gardener’s boy sit by until Mitchell returned, get everything sorted out in the morning.

  “They hauled their fucking anchor and cut out,” said Mitchell.

  “Ah, well that explains it. Dragged out to sea on a guilty conscience.”

  “Does it? Maybe they thought that was the best way to protect themselves from more trouble. Maybe they thought they were vulnerable, maybe they thought let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Maybe they thought, Hoist sails, party ho!” Tillman paused, tapping his ballpoint pen on the desk. “Vulnerable to what, exactly?”

  “That son of a bitch Davidius.” Mitchell explained the scenario he believed had occurred, but Tillman was not as persuaded as he would have liked. Davidius offended with style, his transgressions were mas-turbatory, but who knows, conceded Tillman, maybe another screw came loose in the guy.

  Tillman invited Mitchell to stay for lunch, grouper sandwiches, fried plantain, tall cold glasses of lime rickey, which they ate on the front veranda, gazing like crows down on the majesty of Howard Bay and its ocher dollops of reef. Tillman was smitten with his new cook, Vera, she was big, in resolve as much as weight, wore a blue watch cap over her knotty hair and smoked bush cigars and defied anyone, dead or alive, to cross her path.

  “The dead have too much power here.”

  “They just don’t die as fully as they do up north.”

  “Which reminds me, have you heard from Isaac?”

  “I imagine he’ll have quite a headache by the time we track him down.”

  He would do anything for this Vera, she was a master of procurement, had wooed the Augustine fishermen and ordered a cousin to lead a chubby pair of beef cattle up the hill, where yesterday he had slaughtered and butchered them for a fair price, and here was an island miracle for you, the meat was not so rangy it couldn’t be grilled. So he felt good, Tillman declared, there was every reason for optimism, things were going well, he could finally say, and let’s see last night’s crime spree as an aberration, not what’s becoming fashionable, though God knows the gods are hoarse from clamoring for my downfall. It would be better if Davidius weren’t implicated, so he wouldn’t have to crack down on the minority of riffraff that had found a Friday night home at the Beach Bar, but you do, he said cheerily, what you have to do, and playing master was part of it, as long as you recognized when to stop.

  The boy came by—Calvin was his name, Mitchell had been too distracted to ask before at the house, a bad sign, namelessness being next to soullessness. He reported that Abel had been down the road and back, for measurements, but glass won’t reach till Monday day. Meaning Mitchell would have to board up the hole until then. Calvin shambled off, swinging his machete at gnats.

  “I forgot to mention, I owe him a rifle. They took his away from him.”

  “Who did?”

  “The police. They’re confiscating firearms.”

  “That’s the first I’ve heard of it. Why, do you know?”

  “I don’t, I couldn’t even guess. Every farmer keeps a little twenty-two or shotgun to hunt monkeys and manicou. They’re the only ones with guns. They’ll be the ones affected. No more pigeon fricassee for the peasants.”

  “Someone in the government’s paranoid.”

  “Everyone in the government’s paranoid. The coalition can’t survive another six months, no way. Banks will have to call a new election.”

  “There’s an original idea. Then what?”

  “And then there’ll be a new coalition, I guess.”

  “Here an oink, there an oink. They should just hold a fucking Cold War raffle.”

  “That’s flattery. No one’s beating down the door to get in.”

  “You’re going to hurt people’s feelings, talking that way. What about Edison Banks? Doesn’t he know a place like this can’t exist except in the back pocket of a superpower?”

  “No, that’s wrong. I believe in him. He’s the one I think who has the will and the vision. We’ll see.”

  “Crippled imaginations galore. Dark inspirations. It’s what we do now instead of war. Good night, Vietnam.”

  “Just what are you predicting?”

  “Never a dull moment in this world.”

  “Listen to us. We sound like whitemen in control. Smug and self-amusing.”

  “We can’t help it. We’re good at it—the sound, I mean. The confident tonalities, the morally superior inflections. We have a noble tradition to mimic. At least we know better than to take ourselves seriously.”

  “I’m not sure about that. What kind of flowering tree is that you’ve planted over there?”

  “Scarlet datura from Peru. It seems to like it here. As long as you’ve changed the subject, I’m not your mother but where were you last night, and what do you suggest we do to keep our womenfolk happy, now that they’ve tasted of the sins of Cotton Island? Can we compete with aging rock stars? Must we?”

  “And that one over there?”

  “Blood-red trumpet. Mexican. It climbs. What about Adrian and Johnnie? If you want to talk about those who take themselves seriously, what about Josephine?”

  “You know about her? Already? Jesus.”

  “We’re a brotherhood of cocksmen, here at Rosehill. Winston noticed you left the bar with her last night. She’s strictly a no-touch item, all work, no play. She’s obsessed with being the island version of Coco Chanel, if I’m thinking of the right person. Are you now an investor?”

  “I’m now an admirer, that’s all.”

  It was easier to debate the lesser crises, break-ins and politics, than to think about the women. They demanded a deeper understanding, self-knowledge and a high level of emotional acuity, all of which he felt were irregular qualities. The adjustment produced a dullness of mind, incipient depression. />
  “Do you love Adrian?”

  Tillman grinned: the question was queer. “Am I supposed to?” Hotel guests drifted by, complaints replaced with dreamy, sun-drunk smiles, coming and going to the beach.

  “I’m supposed to love Johnnie. That’s what I’ve been made to feel.”

  “Extortion.”

  “No, heartwashing. That should be a word. And a statutory offense.”

  “Wilson, I have to say, you look and act like a man in love.”

  “Maybe I am. But I shouldn’t have to feel obligated, that it’s do or die for her if I’m not. She’s gotten herself into some kind of trouble, needs me, and can’t afford to leave love to chance. Love should be left to chance.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Drugs, I think. She probably got busted and skipped town.”

  “The islands are overrun with America’s drug fugitives.”

  “There’s also the matter of a husband somewhere, whom she doesn’t seem to want anymore. She hasn’t elaborated. In fact, she hasn’t said a thing. I suspect he sees things differently. I can’t trust this girl.”

  “You can only love her?”

  It ruled him in a way that begged understanding. “What type of tree is that?” he said, pointing. They agreed an excursion up one of the coasts was in order, contingent upon Mitchell’s ability to borrow a Rover from the ministry’s motor pool, since Tillman’s wagon and his own Rover couldn’t be relied upon for the distance. They left it at that.

  A trail of sucked-out halves of orange guided him home. He was in a mood, knew he would spend the day inactive and inert. The sun stung like an astringent on the skin of his face, the beer he drank after lunch made him drowsy. In the yard, there was Mr. Quiddley, termite erectus, triumphant in denuding the giant of its limbs, stacking cords of branches in his double pits. Mitchell, implacable, ignored him, unwilling to make peace.

  Inside the cottage, he felt the wantonness of the violation set upon him, heard its war cry, which only unlocked the door of his depression and instead of cleaning up the place first thing, he lay down to a nap in the sweatbox of his shuttered room, waking hours later in the same false night he had fallen into, cloudy-eyed and clueless, thinking he had missed something but what could it be. Johnnie was there, tangible in his napheaded lust but he failed to make the connection and rolled over in the agony of his sweat, the bedsheet tangled between his legs like a coolie’s dhoti, to fall reaching toward erotic chimeras, burying his face in the feverish images of desire that were outside of him but relenting, welcoming him back to the release of sleep. He awoke a second time in Saturday’s true nightfall, breathing a haze of smoky incense, mosquitoes stuck to his cheeks and forearms, realizing he had missed the plane to Cotton but there was nothing he could do about it now. He showered and dressed, then thumbtacked his bath towel over the shattered glass in the kitchen door. Outside, fragrant curls of smoke rose like wraiths from within Mr. Quiddley’s coal pit number one, which resembled a burial mound, its dead smoldering as if hell had found them.

  Down at the beach, there was no salvation in Winston’s account, only a single answer that Mitchell dreaded hearing. The sailor and his woman had made no mention of housebreak, they were spatting between themselves, Winston said, remembering the man was drunk and angry, the woman’s hair and clothes were wet, maybe she hit him, maybe him walk into a tree. Trouble at the house he understood to mean lovers’ quarrel. Captain said tell the owner sorry about the window, which he had to stop cussing the woman to say. And here now, Wilson, that kunkle-face pussy mad bwoy Davidius dance up a frog-storm on the patio, I have to tell you in truth, the whole time the whitepeople up the road in the house, I am not saying so to protect a scamp such as he, right, and when he leave off he follow home a whore from the Bight he does fancy, and this is what I know. Here, mahn. Here. Fire a next rum. The police lock him up in the station, you know.

  There was a moment before him where self-assurance seemed to collapse inward and he was confronted with the speciousness of his own certainty. The music was as dissonant as shopwork, harrying. He declined the rum, rum was not the leap to clarity he must depend on to judge this mistake that did not quite feel like a mistake. He left, goaded by an unclean touch of responsibility back over the hump in the road, and at the Augustine station they told him to go home and come in Monday morning, the inspector was off duty until then, only he could answer Mitchell’s queries, don’t worry yourself, Davidius was staying by them till Monday when an official statement would be required and the magistrate would see to this confusion. To argue otherwise against the villainous mutability of events was futile. He didn’t try.

  At the cottage he finally committed himself to straightening up the mess, taking the broom to the knocked-over plants in their pots and coffee tins, relined his collection of books on the dining room shelves, righted the furniture, wiped the ejaculatory spray of mayonnaise off the kitchen door, washed the frying pan where Captain Pat had cooked and devoured his hospitality and even threw out the panties and gold hoop earrings the seawitch had left behind in the haste of her alleged violence, then he changed the sheets on the bed and returned clothes neatly to their hangers, firm in his opinion that perhaps some but not all of what he repaired was the result of what lovers might dare to call a quarrel. He discovered his briefcase open, its contents—reports and documents—rifled though complete. No blackmarket for statistics? he said out loud to an invisible thief, a lingering presence he couldn’t seem to clean away. When he had done what he could do, he went back to the kitchen to cook himself the fish he had intended for lunch. Watching it brown in the pan, he realized what the thief or thieves had taken, though he checked again throughout the house, because it was too hard to believe that their greed could be so stupidly appeased, that all they wanted out of all they could have had, seeing only what wasn’t there instead of what was, was the daypack he had prepared the night before to carry on his endlessly delayed trip of goodwill to Cotton Island.

  Out on the veranda, he sat on his packing crate eating his dinner, hunkered over the plate, pondering the charmed life he had led, never robbed or assaulted or knocked down, never cornered into bargaining with his own mortality, never doubting the future or his modest place in it. The offense he suffered now was slight, inconsequential, in the scheme of greater wrongs that surrounded him a superfluity but it nevertheless aroused a dormant appetite for reprisal. It sullied the view, stained the canvas of wonder. How many uplifting evenings had he spent mesmerized on this veranda, at rest with the bay, the channel, the running sea and its flaming sunsets, the darkening sky and brightening ensemble of stars, inhaling the garden perfumes of unlimited promise, those essences that seeped from the center of desire that was the inescapable truth of the tropic world?

  He had been wrong about Davidius, and the slander seemed both justified and self-corrupting, which is where he would start in the long narrative of absolution he would compose, throughout the years ahead, for himself. Not with Isaac and Miss Defy on Ooah Mountain, not with Johnnie descending out of the self-perpetuating blue that would always be her life, not with Isaac being swallowed whole by the mythical dragon of change that had awakened on the island nor with the dream-snarled imbroglio of politics and reform but with the swaggering refuse named Davidius, the pathetic cock-brained troll who seemed the very embodiment of an underlying force threading the smell of decay along the inseam of the beauty-struck, sun-blessed egalitarian pleasures of the island; Davidius, who served a nature fundamentally wrong in the island’s ambition for itself. Davidius was the pig-slop garbage piled along the roadside, the buckets of filth from the abattoir swirling in the harbor, the peeling facades of the colonial buildings, the pus-rimmed eyes of the pariah dogs, the rags and rickets and herniated navels of the peasant children, their illiteracy and their hunger, the wasted gonorrheal seed of St. Catherine, and he was innocent.

  Mitchell could not bring himself to hoist the terrible, wearying weight of remorse—that part of him held itsel
f in reserve. Waiting. Ambivalent. Davidius in jail for the weekend was no crime against humanity; what did it matter if one’s punishment was out of sync and off-schedule with one’s offense? It isn’t kosher but it is karma, right? he argued with himself, diluting his already watery guilt. Retrospect would always deal harsh and seemingly unfair blows to men like Davidius, but who would want to say they didn’t have it coming?

  Chapter 26

  The STOL De Havilland remained below the ceiling of clouds, battered along by crosswinds, not hurtling through the space of a Sunday afternoon but slowly advancing, like a bumblebee, in lurching arabesques. He watched the channel as it whipped itself into endless whitecaps, his last obstacle on the unexpectedly straightforward path of his life that was turning out to be a path back to her. To return where you started without circling or retreat was a damn good trick if you could pull it off, seeing as how death was the only commonly accepted solution to that brainteaser. At Christmastime one of the interisland boats put into service for the holidays had gone down somewhere beneath him, overloaded with homeward-bound passengers. There were women on the Queens town quay, waiting for the husbands who had hired on to construction teams, taking advantage of Cotton’s building boom, and when the news came in, the women tore the hair from their scalps, bloody uprooted clumps of it, in unquenchable grief. He couldn’t remember why he had been on the docks then, but now it seemed as if he had been there explicitly to see—he had not known sorrow could be so violent, that loss could be so communal, that anything like the women’s explosion of anguish had existed anywhere on the face of the earth. He had never led a life that had taken him there.

  He stared through and past the image of the women, ordering his thoughts returned from this unwelcome morbidity. In the cockpit the co-pilot balanced a pizza in its flat white box on his lap, special delivery for one of the mucky-mucks on Cotton Island; God knows where it came from, with the nearest pizzeria over the rainbow. His fellow passenger, the only other, was a scrawny old man in a rumpled suit and neck brace—didn’t pay attention where I was going, he explained inadequately—flying home from medical treatment in Barbados.