Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  What did you want to happen? they asked, not meaning to antagonize him. They wanted him to be more ingratiating, perhaps, in support of his gullibility. Did he have fantasies of power, was he glory-grubbing, hunting for a place in history? But those were roles given to kings and assassins; the rest of us were the pages history wrote upon. We were the blank pages of history, waiting to be inscribed, invented, only we never were. What happened was he couldn’t forgive, requital had assumed that shape of the lost self, he had interceded on his own behalf. Meaning, this was not an ideology at work. It was only a human heart, fallible and bleeding.

  They were fascinated by his relationship with Johanna Woods Fernandez and thought they could make something out of it. Did you love her? they persisted. Do you love her?

  It was hot in the room where they had talked; the painkillers he was taking had made his head swim. There was always another her popping in and out of the dialogues, her, the one he had forsaken, and he sometimes confused the two, thinking the her they were asking about, the one he might love, was America. They said Johnnie and he thought they meant America.

  Cocktails in hand, they had sat down on the veranda right at sunset: a soapy talc of pinks and plums, a sudden sneeze of scarlet and then gone. Tillman asked to hear the story on Davidius; was it true that Mitchell would be covering the fellow’s bar tab until further notice. Sore subject, not much of a story either, but Mitchell told. They were releasing Davidius by the time he got down to the station, yesterday morning. No hearing had been scheduled before the magistrate after all. Apparently the inspector regarded both apologies and explanations as superfluities, and didn’t bother with them. The attitude was outlandish but what do you do. The incident was a bewildering embarrassment, not to mention accident and mistake of justice. He had hurried back out the door after Davidius, calling his name to no avail. Davidius’ only reaction was to cast a brief, glazed look over his shoulder that even in its brevity erased any claim this white man was making on his affairs. Mitchell had steeled himself for resentment but not apathy. Have it your way, he thought, throwing out his hands in frustration and walking back to the jitney stop to join the queue into town.

  “I don’t think he actually made the connection. He didn’t know who I was.”

  “You’d have to be female, I think.”

  “I feel lousy about it but in a sense we were both victims of the police.”

  “Look at it this way—ultimately it has nothing to do with you.”

  He told Tillman don’t let on at the bar. Let Davidius think, lucky stars. He didn’t know what else to do. False arrest was not a concept in places like St. Catherine.

  Johnnie had called them to the table for appetizers—conch seviche, white marlin fritters with a garlicky cilantro, tomato and onion sauce, a vegetable pâté from a tin with soda crackers that were not stale—unaccustomed joy for stoic palates. In response to praise she protested it was easier than they imagined, once you hunted down ingredients. She’d probably get fat again, she fretted, living here, and Adrian said, Liar, you were never fat and won’t be, the way you burn through things. There was a shine in Johnnie’s butternut eyes, she had ascended the ladder of her happiness. She excused herself and came back carrying the fish, a cookie sheet for a platter layered with a bed of steamed banana leaves, the glistening beast garnished with a halo of hibiscus flowers arranged red white red white, its jaws and tail overhanging the ends. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, Tillman hailed. Johnnie’s face had beamed, this was everybody’s idea of a triumph, and Mitchell deboned the monster with a butter knife and spatula, its fragrance lifting into his face, startlingly familiar, redolent of warming fires. Everyone held out their plates and let the first bite sit revered in their mouths before swallowing.

  Let’s stop for a minute and savor this, Tillman had said, how lovely it all is.

  There were side dishes of blanched chard sprinkled with fruit vinegar and a bowl of black beans. Johnnie was transported, flush, saying Eat the flowers too, they’re good for you. The cottage being without an oven, they had badgered her to reveal her secret—it was simple, so obvious, but undeniably clever. Mr. Quiddley’s coal pits had reminded her of luaus; when she first saw them she told herself, heat source. The old fart grumbled she’d “bust his science” but they put their heads together and figured out how to do it without damaging the draft. They ate like well-behaved hogs, annihilating the fish, then Johnnie knocked them senseless with dessert, pomegranate seeds marinated in orange liqueur, served in teacups swimming in ruby light. A fresh breeze slipped in silkily through the veranda windows; around the room shadows crawled out from shadows and everyone said, God! and Goddamn!, and Mitchell had thought, someone has to be blessed and tonight it looks like us.

  Candlelight and lovelight are the same, aren’t they? said Adrian. She had picked up a horrible rash from something on Cotton Island but was being more than brave about it. Johnnie had placed four votive candles laced with citronella in saucers and their illumination reflected up with a rich brush of sensuality, here in the latitudes of play. Tillman had brought along a joint so not only were they boozy, well advanced through a bottle of French brandy after two of chardonnay, but now they were stoned too, getting cross-eyed, loony, waggishly upping the erotic ante with bawdy teasing, already considerable given who they were and where they were, the Epicurean remains of a massive kingfish, picked over and its bones sucked, centered on the table. The radio was tuned to a Christian superstation in St. Kitts—it was C & W hour, they were playing Marty Robbins’ “Rosa’s Cantina,” and the girls began to sing along.

  The felicitous intimacy heated up, became Rabelaisian, how they got just this far no one could reconstruct, but now the most appropriate brandy-inspired next step seemed to be for Tillman to dare the women to expose their breasts. Up flashed Johnnie’s tee shirt, Adrian’s blouse, oho! now you see ‘em, now you don’t.

  “Would you look at how bloody proud they are.”

  Next Johnnie dared the men to stand up straight like gentlemen and show their rear ends—no moons, no groaty assholes, just prime beef—and the fellows rose solemnly if not soberly, stood paired like brothers, rotated so their backs were turned and thereupon dropped their shorts. Adrian, they found out, could whistle like a doorman for a cab. They reordered themselves, sat down, then Mitchell double-dared, we want to see yours, the doctor here and me, and Adrian said, deadpan, No way, Jasper, the butt stops here, here escaping from her mouth with a soblike shriek of laughter and all four of them howled in unison, falling figuratively out of their chairs but dabbing literal tears from their eyes, and that set a timely brake on one of the evening’s more dangerous trends.

  “You can’t count on the sexual revolution anymore, these days of the MBA.”

  “Hasn’t begun. Just getting started.”

  “It snuck right by.”

  “You should have been on Cotton Island.”

  “We know better than to ask.”

  “We know better than to tell.”

  “Sin is a nutrient. Isn’t there a daily recommended requirement?”

  “Allowance. Recommended allowance.”

  “All revolutions are passé.”

  “The Khmer Rouge?”

  “Africa.”

  “Rhodesia. The so-called Marxist-dominated minority.”

  “But they’re killing everybody.”

  “Right. The shits. Let’s wipe ‘em out.”

  “Exterminate the brutes.”

  “All in favor say aye.”

  “Everybody says time’s speeded up but I think it’s stuck.”

  “I do too. What if our kids—”

  “Who’s having children?”

  “What if the kids ten years from now still smoke ganj and listen to Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger?”

  “Peter, Paul, and Mary.”

  “Revert to Sinatra and martinis.”

  “Marley rules. He’s a living god. Possibly Christ.”

  “Rock and roll will never
die.”

  “Isn’t it time we made the backward leap to Rossini?”

  “It’s dead as a crapaud in the road. White tedium. Somebody bury it please.”

  “Johnnie,” said Tillman, doing something odd with his face in an approximation of sincerity, “why don’t you come up the ancestral hill and work for me?”

  “Now?” she said innocently. Wine sloshed from her jar glass.

  “He needs a new slave since I didn’t work out.”

  “Mitchell?”

  “Great idea. Depends on you.”

  “Pay stinks but there go your visa problems.”

  “When?”

  “Whenever you want. Next week. Start by toadying to my new cook. Then lay your magic fingers on my menu.”

  “Or his throat.”

  “This meal tonight. You must have taken classes.”

  “Mitchell,” said Adrian, “can we decide about the volcano?”

  “We’re back to the weaker sex issue.”

  “You wouldn’t be saying that, Tillman, if you took the time to know me better.”

  Adrian had been scanning her guidebook that morning and discovered Mount Soufrière. She read the paragraph of description and decided a volcano fit her requirement for a last unique adventure before she flew away; also, the location was right to accommodate Sally, who needed a lift up north to a windward village, but Sally wasn’t free until Saturday, and in Mitchell’s view the logistics were problematic.

  “I don’t think you realize what you’re getting yourself into,” he said to her, repeating his earlier objection, to which Johnnie had remarked, Don’t underestimate us girls, and then rhapsodized about a hike she had taken up Mauna Kea. You should never bypass something like this, was her argument—volcanoes providing a climber with such a mighty picture of Planet Earth as unfinished business.

  “The path is rugged and steep and very, very long.” Mitchell tried to make her see. “It’s going to push hard on your limits.”

  From Adrian, a confident, resolute murmur: All the better.

  “We’re not into parasols and picnic baskets,” agreed Johnnie. “That’s not us.”

  Volcanoes shouldn’t be much of a problem for her, Tillman offered tartly, since Adrian had only just encountered poverty too and look how well she was doing with that. Meaning, let’s give her what she wants and see how much she likes it. Adrian silenced him with a battle-ready look and then sighed indulgently. From all appearances tonight they seemed to be getting along fine, but occasionally there were these small flaring tensions, and she had changed her flight reservations, moved them up three days to Sunday. Still, Tillman had relented to a rare social foray off Rosehill property, and the evening had flowed seamlessly forward, more or less perfectly.

  What Adrian wanted wasn’t technically an alteration in plans; neither Mitchell nor Tillman had yet to spell out what they had in mind for their promised excursion, but in fact Mitchell, without telling anybody, had already gone ahead and requisitioned a Land Rover from the ministry’s motor pool—five o’clock Thursday to five o’clock Friday—and then had stood in line at National Police Headquarters to experience the government’s most recent brainstorm of bureaucratic harassment: the issuance of travel passes to all vehicles journeying to North Leeward and North Windward destinations. Noncommercial vehicles, except commuters, required individual permits for each trip, an infuriating and pointless inconvenience, especially as nobody took the stated reason for the passes—to halt the transport of illegal weapons—the least bit seriously. It was harassment, pure and simple, and one more way to strip revenues out of pockets already empty and threadbare.

  Mitchell had heard that Adrian was lending a hand down at Sally’s school; she’d taken slumming to heart, he had thought unkindly, but then kicked himself for his cynicism about someone who, for whatever intent or purpose, seemed to be making an effort. Girls from NYC usually deserved any prejudice you cared to have. He told her okay, he’d see if he could work it out, if she was at school with Sally tomorrow he’d swing by before noon and let them know. Tillman said it was time to go, touching Adrian’s arm as he said it, a gesture of peacemaking. They got up from the table together, the four of them, exchanging kisses between couples. Dinner was fucking fabulous, Adrian told Johnnie; to Mitchell she stage-whispered dryly, with comic hauteur, Whatever you have her on, darling, increase the dosage.

  “That would be Mandrax and Durophet,” cracked Tillman. Slow, fast; the two gears of the merry metabolism. Everybody laughed, and of course he was right.

  “I wish Sally and Saconi could have come,” Johnnie said. She and Mitchell went and stood at the door, waved their guests good-bye. “I wish Adrian wasn’t going away.”

  “By God, we’ve entertained,” Mitchell crowed, finding something new in life to celebrate. “We received company. We treated them well. Nobody got hurt. Our genteel reputation will spread.”

  “We tried.”

  He grabbed her shoulders. “It was a great, great evening.”

  “Don’t act so shocked. I come with a set of wholesome instincts and traditional values.” She stuck her tongue out at him. “Some, anyway.”

  He said Go relax, he’d do the cleaning up. She suggested he leave it till morning but he insisted, the cockroaches relied on him for this, a clarity of relationship, consistency of message. Johnnie, affectionately, said Yack yack yack, sometimes he really got himself going on the silliest things, and took her glass, refilled it with wine, and went out on the veranda.

  Our Lady of the Forage, Mitchell was calling her, in his bliss. Yesterday Johnnie had met him for lunch in town; he had handed her back her passport, its visa stamped with a three-month extension, and it was like, Stand back, I’m nesting. Already she’d found a woman to bring cut flowers to the house, once a week—anthuriums, lilies, stalks of ginger, orchid sprays—two dollars an armload. When he opened the front door this morning, there was a whiskey bottle of fresh milk waiting on the stoop. She’d met this farmer and they’d be getting a bottle every other day for as long as the cow held up, and no charge for delivery. Mitchell was amazed. To his chagrin she had even been able to locate a source for chickens and eggs, and someone who sold rabbits (pre-butchered, or else she wanted nothing to do with them), and someone else who sold ducks, and somewhere in town she had wandered into a shop that stocked, among its illogical array of mundanities, imported Parma cheeses and Swiss chocolates. Her talent for hustling, he was forced to admit, was rather highly developed; here was a firsthand demonstration of her wage-earning skills, and as long as she did nothing more with drugs than place a certain amount of them into her bloodstream, he would have to step out of the life he had led so far, and the culture that had given it to him, to find something to actually, and righteously, complain about.

  She went splashing into this instant, better life, craving its surface of convention, the subtle payback of ordinary pleasures, anxious to wallow in a hurry-up version of domesticity, be a honey bee busily luxuriating in the routine of little chores, a pollen she collected and added up to a golden purpose threaded from one end of the day to the other. She cooked, he was happy to report, like nobody’s business; the cupboards were crowded with jams, fruit preserves, a virtually inedible batch of fiery chutney, all of which she had made that afternoon. She washed laundry, by hand, in a galvanized tub with a bar of lye soap and a washboard, wringing the clothes to drape over the bushes in the yard like the local wives. He hadn’t asked her to do any of this, her motivation was her own. The most enterprising hags at the market suddenly knew Johnnie by name, bent their graying heads to hers, cackling old women, making deals with their prize missy, bargains, special offers. Mitchell would come back to Howard Bay, she’d meet him at the door saying, Look what I got, and he’d want to see. She stated her intention to add aubergine, green beans, capsicums and red bell peppers, lemon grass and a spice rack of other herbs to the kitchen garden, plant the walk up to the road with purple heart, make a wind chime for the veranda if s
he couldn’t find one to buy she liked. She was slowly taming the cat, who now came puling from the bush, twice a day for kibble, answering to the name she gave it, Pelé. For the soccer player, he asked? She said No, the god.

  He blew out her candles and began clearing the table, taking the plates out the kitchen door to scrape into a slops pail for his neighbor Mrs. Fetchalub’s pig. He put the dishes in the sink to soak for a minute while he shook the crumbs off another of Johnnie’s purchases—grass placemats plaited in the shape of angelfish—and wiped up the leavings with a rag. Eternal life sprang forth from the radio again, a low Baptist drawl of a voice meting out salvation to lonely sinners with their ears to the air waves. He spun the dial searching for music, caught a fragment of GIS propaganda regarding activities—like festivities, the announcer’s enthusiasm would have you believe—at unspecified locations in the northern districts. Nonsense, trustworthy people had told him, including Ballantyne, someone who would know. Ananci stories. Bullshit, eh? Drifting down from Martinique came a Creole station, uttering strange and pretty words like incantation, unintelligible, but music all the same, and he stopped the dial there. He rinsed the dishes and silverware, stacked them on a towel, covered the leftovers in foil. Johnnie was saying his name softly, seductively, saying, That’s enough.

  He went out to the veranda, looking beyond at the night, asking, So where’s the moon, was it rising or gone? Johnnie was bent at the waist, a right angle attached to the rail, her skirt fluted around her legs, and he came up from behind and fitted himself naturally against her body, reaching to massage where her shoulders bunched into her neck. No question she broadcast readiness and heat. There was something wrong with the word loins because he had never said it, even to himself. Under her breath she talked to him, a husky passionate grr; he asked her twice, What? and she groped behind her for one of his arms and brought his hand forth to cup it to her breast, ripe with gravity, which was also a way of pulling him down. Her hair curtained her face and when he lowered his ear to it she thrust her pelvis backward into the pressure of him, and behind the shield of her hair she was saying fuck me like this, just like this, words swift and fierce and narcotic, an injection of words, pure thrill of words, and he stifled a nervous, imbecilic urge to laugh, emit a goat’s bleat of laughter, for surely if he opened his mouth even the gentlest sound he chanced would betray him to himself, his greenness and hunger, his need, which he could never accept in the way he accepted hers. The energy-build of lust was like being crushed out of himself. Like this, she said, a burning whisper. Just like you are—words inside a furnace, inside a church. I want to watch the ocean while you fuck me. You fuck me. He stepped away and back into himself to raise the gray stripes of her skirt, she had made it easy, had already removed her underwear, and there, the rictus like an inverted exclamation mark, he was greeted by the dark invitation of her holes, slashed into the flesh between her legs, the one mystery that was not unapproachable, and he thought, despite himself, God did this. Servitude of flesh. He locked his hands on her hips, looking out over her head to the horizon, which offered him a strangely congruent epiphany, a transitory feeling of navigation, steering by stars. He rolled her shirt up to reveal the close-knit chain of islands that formed her spine, gliding his fingers along her skin, wanting his hands, especially his hands, to be loving, to bring solace. Somewhere in the middle he fell forward across her ribs and used the rail to brace himself, placing his hands beside her crooked elbows, and she turned her head in the cradle of her arms and began to bite him, hard, her teeth above his right wrist, grinding the past and future between her jaws, and what his body seemed to want to know was what could make her shove so violently, back against him. He ripped away his arm and straightened up, staring down, mesmerized, at himself, at her, linked by the spike of his erection, the ineffability of this act, this invasion, sticking her, sticking in, the crude enchantment, the ceaseless fascinating beauty of its essential savagery. He became aware of his panting, Johnnie began a stammering cry that sounded like—