Mitchell was sure about this: Going for Johnnie was good; accordingly, Johnnie compelling him to act was proper—he wanted to act, make the definitive statement of action, carry her back, get beyond this wringing of hands, his soliloquy to vacillation. Let the fever run its course or kill him—what was so complicated about that? Don’t waver, he coached himself, walking off the plane. Don’t waste time.
Sally, more rubicund than ever when she had stopped by Howard Bay to tell him, not quite knowing how to tell him, where Johnnie was, had worried that she had somehow failed him, by not returning Johnnie back where she had found her. It was not an issue, he had explained, watching her cringe, uncharacteristically. Sally was one of the very few people he could say he knew whom he trusted to improve upon the world. So Johnnie’s still over there, I’m not surprised, he had said, trying to match the famously embracing outwardness of Sally’s smile, and what about Isaac, did he stay too?
“Oh! ... Isaac! Jesus Christ. Isn’t it strange?” Actually, she’d forgotten to ask Saconi but Isaac wasn’t over there or she’d have seen him, Cotton Island wasn’t a place you could vanish into.
And Johnnie, it seemed, wasn’t even going to try, because, well, well, there she was, more less on cue, a responsible woman waiting with Saconi’s guitar among the queue of departing passengers, dutifully installed under the tin roof of the rain shelter that served as the airstrip’s sole facility. When her face tensed, seeing him step off the plane, he had to think she anticipated the worst from him—but went ahead and did it anyway. He felt mildly wronged, nothing he couldn’t wave off but still, he hadn’t rushed here to scale defenses, and how habituated was she to being struck, anyway, since halfway to her across the hard marl of the runway she had yet to rid herself of the expression of a woman prepared to weather an attack.
But what was he smoldering on about? He realized he owed it to her to soften his mouth, finally—Good God—and manage a clarifying though sore-hearted smile. She was getting what she asked for when she first sought him out, he was allowing her back in, welcoming the runaway home; he had reacquired the taste. The result was immediate: she laid down the guitar, jumped to greet him with a slippery kiss, and breathed her breathless thanks into his ear. He sensed her tension in his arms, but when they separated from their embrace, he saw that she had gone so far as to adopt a coyness toward him, as charming as it was disingenuous.
There’s not much time, he said, and they traded practical explanations. He couldn’t spend the night, he had business to attend to on the big island in the morning. The hour was five now and the ferry set sail at half past—the airline left him no choice, able to get him over to Cotton but then he was on his own, all return seats booked solid for the next two days. The party was over, the rats abandoning ship, someone had called in the exterminator, but then who was he to talk. Even the charter pilots were off somewhere in the yonder. The weather’s bad, he said; she should begin to accustom herself to the likelihood of getting wet. She tried to hide her disappointment as they ensured that Saconi’s guitar would be taken high and dry onto the plane, as she had promised him. She liked Cotton, there was a mile-long beach with nobody on it right where she was staying, she had imagined the two of them alone on the sand; earlier that afternoon she had ventured to the windward side and discovered a terrific cove, barred with steep-sided waves, perfect for body-surfing. An aloof batch of the white hiptocracy, famous behind sunglasses and hangovers, loaded up and the De Havilland taxied toward the austere border of the airfield. This place, she tried not to say outright, would be better for them.
Why, he wanted to know, sending dour looks toward a second group of casualties who waited for a charter from the south. They had monopolized the charters too, making themselves beloved by spreading cash like fruit off a tamarind tree. When he had asked if they could possibly squeeze the two of them aboard, they told him they were headed directly for Barbados, which he didn’t think was a legal routing.
“Why?”
“Don’t you think it’s purer here, more innocent?”
Once upon a time, with a big maybe attached. He couldn’t believe she thought that. I want you back on St. Catherine with me, he felt obligated to say; she threw her arms around him again with a degree more passion and told him, Anything, name it, you got it. They walked a short distance to the main road and flagged down a mini-moke driven by Desmond, one of Lord Norton’s retainers—I am de come-talk-wit-me-nobody-get-hurt-mahn, he said with a swell of hubris, taking them to Coddy’s without further utterance, as if it were a regular part of his job, then came in with them to swipe a beer from Coddy, who had swiped them from the compound, but daht’s de style we livin here now, bruddah, and Mitchell couldn’t tell if he meant it was a privilege, or a tragedy easily swallowed. No problem, he announced, watching Johnnie dash around, throwing clothes and cosmetics into her shoulder bag: the ferry had been delayed.
Desmond dropped them at the Green Turtle, among the highborn and the lowborn and the ones born off the map, to have a drink and wait while the stevedores hand-loaded hundreds of cases of empty bottles into the hold of the Carolanne, an interisland workboat, licensed by the government to carry as many passengers as it could issue life jackets to should the occasion require—said to be forty, though no one responsible would care to put that number to a test, and it was not uncommon for the Carolanne to ferry twice or, during holidays and weekends, three times that many citizens between the main island and its Sleeping Beauty little sister, now money-kissed. Alcohol was probably a mistake, in light of the voyage ahead of them, but they ordered rum and tonics from the bar and sat at one of the bench-and-plank tables, shooing off a pair of shameless grackles.
“Even the birds beg.”
She seemed to think of one thing and say another. Not all the doors were open, he cautioned himself; he hadn’t expected this—could he call it a rescue?—to automatically fill every void.
“I’m counting on you.”
“For what?” she asked warily, unrelaxed.
“To be happy now.”
“Oh. Boy. So am I.” She shredded the fibers of a plastic swizzle stick. “Don’t get the wrong idea.” He didn’t listen to her words but watched her, the language of her body, her blushing grammar of doubt and pause, the awkward submissive punctuation of her eyes. She noticed how he read her and, with frantic exclamation, worried that he was picking out messages that weren’t there, but still she had trouble governing her tendency to question her success, his willingness. Stop waiting for the punchline, he wanted to say, but instead placed his hand over hers until she spread open her fingers and his own filled the gaps: I’m here, aren’t I? We’re together—must everything be too little, or too much?
“Tell me about your weekend. Does it bear scrutiny?”
“I didn’t sleep with anybody, if that’s what you mean.”
“No, no,” he smiled. “I’m not asking that.”
She sipped her drink and exhaled laughing, shaking her head. “I keep treating this as a departure from reality,” she confessed. “When I saw you get off the plane I thought, Ohhh, fuck, what have I done, he’s going to kill me.”
He truly didn’t care what she had left behind, he wasn’t going to waste time considering the eventuality of its pursuit, as long as she herself didn’t flirt with the notion of it catching up with her, summoning it forward, as she had him.
“Did you have fun, that’s what I want to know. Get any autographs?”
“Mitch, I missed you. I thought about you.”
He addressed a nonexistent audience. “She’s in love.”
“I dreamed you were with me.”
“I dreamed the same thing.”
“Why didn’t you come? Why did you make me make you?”
“Does it matter, since I’m here now? One standard for you, another for me?”
“Yes it matters. But no, you’re right.”
Accepting her contradictory concession, he talked about the increasingly perplexing demands
of his work, how they had prevented him—he wasn’t lying, only omitting certain things—from coming sooner, and told her about the break-in and its odd act of burglary, which made her freeze.
“What about my map?” she asked. A puzzling moment of anxiety. She closed her eyes. “Did they take it?”
“What map?” he said, screwing up his face at another of Johnnie’s mysteries. “The South American thing?” he continued, remembering. “No, it’s still there. Why?”
He watched her become agitated, then resolved to challenge him.
“There’s twenty thousand dollars taped to the back of it.”
“Oh.” He whistled, low and short—what else were you supposed to do?
“Oh, nothing” she cried, as in That won’t do, opened her mouth and shut it. “Okay,” she said finally. “Mitch, before I get on that ferry, before we really do this, let’s settle things.”
He merely widened his eyes and she went on, asserting his right to know what happened, back in Hawaii.
“It’s not the big deal you think it is, Johnnie,” he said. “I already know.”
At first she fixed him with a dubious stare, as if what he had said was just another way he had found to be combative, but her poise faltered, and panic began to spread in her eyes.
“You’re making me incredibly paranoid.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Please try. You can’t possibly know. It’s impossible. You can’t. What do you know?”
“You’ve suffered the fate of enterprising frat boys and old hippies who haven’t woken up to the fact that these are the Seventies, almost the Eighties, and nobody gives a fuck about drugs anymore. You got busted.” He was conscious of making his voice a mellow stream of neutrality, not because he cared one way or the other about drugs, but she was jumpy enough already, sitting there pop-eyed, and he didn’t want to scare her. “Although, I doubt on mere possession, or you wouldn’t be here.” How many thousands did she say she had pasted to her map? At least she wasn’t insolvent. “Unless we’re talking tons. Are we talking tons? Count on me being impressed by your ambition, if we are.”
Relief, like a weak light, made a pass over her face and was gone, replaced by a look so forlorn, he hesitated.
“Am I wrong? You’re telling me that’s not it?”
She gave a garrulous nod and said, “You’re acting so superior, Mitch.”
A herd of goats burst out of the few blocks of residential shops that composed the town behind the dock, bleating and gamboling, funneled toward the Carolanne by young boys with switches. A bucket brigade of sweaty laborers were passing lumpy burlap sacks of who knows what from dockside wheelbarrows up to the roof of the wheelhouse. Why hadn’t all this been done earlier in the day, Mitchell wondered, as if the delay were an aberration and not business as usual, as he knew it was. Your life could change, its context made foreign, but it took forever to change the basics of the way you thought.
“I find that difficult to believe,” he said. “Some people here in the government seem to know about you. They have a list and you’re on it. High-up people. Like the man I work for, for instance, he thought it worth his while to suggest to me that your presence on his island might be impolitic, if I understood him correctly.”
“Oh my God, Mitch, what are you saying!” Her aggrieved eyes went blank; she became instantly pale, her voice dull. “Oh my God. There’s no point to this anymore. I’m as good as dead.”
“The point,” he said stubbornly, “is the same as before. Isn’t it?”
She snapped back, executing a radical leap away from the edge of whatever doomsday she imagined for herself, actually swallowing hard before reaffirming that yes, the point remained, intact and unaltered, and was, still, love. For Mitchell, the idea of any relationship, and any mistakes that relationship might engender, being high-risk, not emotionally but physically, was surreal, cinematic in the most ludicrous sense. Perhaps his reaction was irrational and self-deceiving, but her apocalyptic rhetoric—the hyperbole of a not-so-unusual life, when you got right down to it, in a generation once teeming with Johnnies—made him feel peculiarly affectionate. From the ferry a deep, bullish vowel of noise reverberated throughout the lagoon. He stood, grinning, took her hand and pulled her to her feet, wanting to cheer her up though all he could offer her at the moment was an hour and a half’s toss across a nine-mile swath of misery. He’d done it before, on the government’s tab, under similar bleakness of conditions, down to deliver an unacceptable verdict to the island’s ever-dwindling community of farmers, that the way to the future was actually a loop road into the past, that the crop—sea island cotton—that was their namesake offered a steady market and net profits that were nothing to sneer at, but sneer they did, opting for their tomatoes and melons, those undemanding mainstays of subsistence, their goats and sheep, the cattle of impoverishment. Daht cotton slave wuk, mahn. Fine. No arguing with that. Toodleloo.
“We’ve got to go. Come on.” She strapped her bag over her shoulder and they fell in among the last glum-faced stragglers, the only other whites in the bunch, three of them, Latin America on five dollars a day types, engaged in a match of gallows humor, their legs wooden with second thoughts, the farther they ventured down the dock toward the confidence-flaunting hulk of the Carolanne. A chill had descended through the late afternoon air, and a purplish, graying autumnal light that seemed to have sagged down the globe from the great north obviously found its equal in Johnnie’s melancholy.
“Say good-bye to the beau monde,” he teased. “It’s back to our hovel among the coal pits. Hey, come on”—he squeezed her waist—“everything will be all right.”
“That’s what you think,” she said. “For one thing, what about my fucking visa. That’s first.”
“They have better things to worry about these days, believe me. No one’s really going to care.”
“Easy for you to say, Mitch. With me they might care.”
“See that drunk man praying, up by the mast. That’s the captain.”
“Get off it.”
“Honest to God. He never sets out sober, and never without asking for a blessing. Damn good policy. Anyone not on the boat when he crosses himself—you know, Father, Son, Holy Ghost—gets left behind. You have to walk faster.”
“Mitchell.” She whined his name, tugging his arm backward. “My visa. I want to stay here.”
“You are paranoid.” A crew member hunkered over a capstan, unwrapping the bowline; the gangway plank was dragged on deck. She tried to stop but he rushed her along. “Okay, look, someone knows about you, but there’s nothing in it for them to give you the boot. That’s all they care about. If someone wants to make an issue out of the visa, we’ll deal with it, we’ll fix it. With the government here, there are two sides to everything; whatever one side does, there’s someone on the other side to undo it. Okay? Okay?”
“Oh brother.”
He hopped the space between the dock and the boat and reached back for her hand. “Jump on.”
“Mitch, you still don’t understand.”
“Great. Fuck it. Jump aboard.”
And here she came, with a look of such woeful, piteous resignation it was if she had agreed to the inevitable ruination of her life.
“By the way,” he said, light of heart, filled with an upsurge of self-renewal; he was going to be the person he was before Johnnie dared to come here to him, that calm and reliable self that knew what to do about her, without withering, without overwrought interpretations, “how do you do on boats?”
“I do fine anywhere,” she said peevishly, answering his question, and, it seemed, more.
The gate in the rail was closed and bolted, the unhitched lines flung aboard to the crew. The exhaust pipe sneezed a ball of black smoke into the Catherinian tricolor—red sandwiched by green and blue—fluttering above the wheelhouse, where below the captain reversed engines into the lagoon and swung the ferry seaward toward the miasmic haze of the channel. Mitchell said hello
to three or four people he knew.
“What, no deck chairs?” Johnnie cracked, it having dawned on her what sort of voyage she had committed herself to, the sloop-rigged Carolanne built on Bequia decades ago by the last of the master shipwrights, when such locally made cargo boats were the proud lifeblood of the Caribbean, not the grease-soaked, worm-eaten, paint-blistered floating junkyards they had become. With any less maintenance than the minimum provided, she’d rot and sink to the bottom in a month. Scarred, splintered, black with crud from the mean freight she carried day in day out, the Carolanne’s deck seemed part flea market, part squatters’ camp, hoard, town dump, and barnyard. Up in the bow, goats and black-bellied sheep shat in a chorus of unanimous fear. Behind the mast, men sprawled on top a loaf-shaped mass of cargo, secured and covered with a ragged tarp. Empty oil drums from the power plant were lashed up and down the gunwale rails. Families crouched in whatever available space they could find, eating their communal dinner from sooty cookpots. Mitchell stood at the rail, looking over the side, seduced by the lagoon’s cerulean perfection, daydreaming of diving and old emotions, watching the reef like tree-tops pass underneath, until Johnnie pressed herself into him, wanting a reply to the reasonable question of where they could sit. Somewhere safe and private, she added, which was not reasonable.
“There’s a passenger cabin behind the wheelhouse, but I don’t think you’ll like it. Not in weather like this.”
They watched together as the crew raised a massive but low-hung sail, blocking the western sky with a lung of rust-stained fabric; a deckhand tied the boom down for a straight shot across.
“Not much glory left in that old sheet, is there?”
“Some,” said Mitchell. The men strained on the lines, the ship heeled obediently and picked up speed. He felt a boyish thrill, hearing the sibilance of the water peeling off the hull in the boat’s steady, brave charge toward the channel and its howl of wind.
Swimming in the Volcano Page 49
