sounded like she was being fucked
like she was being fucked or beaten
and he balked, it wasn’t clear if he was hurting her, if he should stop, he didn’t want to hurt anybody, most of all a woman, most of all her, not this way, not with love, he’d stop but her cries were translated by his own flesh into a firmness of motion and made to gallop, her high sharp language not really like an animal’s but somewhere in the range for Mrs. Fetchalub’s dogs to hear the call and respond with a wild, eerie singing, later in their lives they might have laughed, the hair on the back of Mitchell’s neck and arms bristled and he clamped his hand over Johnnie’s mouth so the dogs would stop, but they didn’t stop, they never stopped, they yipped even at the moment he made her leave, so that even then as she walked away he could not tell their cries from hers, his mind let go and the dogs took over and bwoy these dogs goin mek one everlastin racket in you head fah true. I love it, Johnnie gasped, I love it. What’s it like with the ocean, the dogs wanted to know, and he answered by buckling at the knees, poured through a stream of words drowning his brain, the dogs,
Who knows what we might do
There is no telling what we’ll do
In our fierce drive to come together
Under her skin, throughout the plane of muscles along her spine, down into her thighs, the last flicker of whatever it was passion chased through the course of the body.
(When your head is underwater any puddle is a flood.)
He’d never get rid of the dogs; they were going to be a part of this, always, always proposing their midnight coda to the duet:
I wish my soul were larger than it is.
Love you, Johnnie said. In fucking credible. I love you. Te amo. “Tonight’s been an education,” Tillman had said at dinner. He was the oldest of them. Twenty-seven.
Chapter 28
He told the necessary lie to make a weekend sign-out of a Land Rover permissible (a lie he would hear repeated, more than once, in the mouths of his accusers). At National Police Headquarters, someone listened to his request for a new pass and then made him wait a good part of the morning before telling him No problem, those black magic words that never meant the same thing twice, but this time the police wanted a passenger manifest, passport numbers of all non-nationals, destination, time of arrival, time of departure, reason for trip, and in this circumstance he found it politic to tell the truth. I’ve got everything but the passport numbers, he told them. They made him wait another half hour and said okay.
He walked back through town toward Sally’s school, enjoying its bustle, its mix of high and low, buying a snow cone from a bare-chested vendor who shaved the ice from its dripping block, poured on cherry syrup from a bottle swarmed with honey bees, then dribbled sweetened condensed milk over the top from a can of Carnation. Tourists would no sooner lick the streets; still, one day Mitchell had followed a pushcart back to the icehouse, a happy place to work in the tropics. He met the owner, a good businessman who promoted science, hygiene, pragmatism, fifteen percent net profit, and an honorable reputation.
The harbor front bounced with harsh light, sweaty workmen. The arched doors of the warehouses swung open to darkened, cavernous interiors, the economy’s stomach filling with sacks of cement, rice, flour, meal, beans, sugar, fertilizers—all imports, the wealth of other nations, not its own. He had made a good faith effort to climb back into the harness of his work, only to see that the ministry had dropped the reins. Against a sudden and irrational xenophobic rise in rhetoric, pointedly anti-Yank, he felt himself contract and withdraw, become a wallflower. Not you we is fightin, various ministry personalities, like Morrison, assured him. It’s the imperial octopus, it’s the lackeys, but you is behavin youself, Wilson, you will make out okay for a white mahn if you keep your distance from devils like Kingsley. The new CAO called an unscheduled staff meeting: out of the blue Jack Dawes would be converted back to cane production; a new refinery and deep water port would be constructed on the central leeward coast. Which was the same as saying, for nostalgia’s sake, we’ve all decided to be slaves again. Mitchell stated his protests, to no effect. Sugar makes them demented, doesn’t it, one of the foreign service Brits clucked. They can’t seem to get beyond it, psychologically or politically. We should admit they are addicts to how the crop structures societies like St. Catherine’s. Sugar’s communal narrative: master and chattel. All the same, isn’t it.
If the government proved incapable of organizing the estates in any sensible way, then land for the landless had to be where the line was drawn, but Kingsley, refusing to attend a cabinet meeting scheduled on Tuesday, stayed up leeward in his home parish, manipulating his manipulators, he and Banks engaged in a round of musical chairs with the peasants, trucking them on and off the estates, stirring the nest, creating a pervasive mood of belligerence on the island. This then, was Kingsley’s strategy unfolding—allow Banks to alienate the peasantry while he, Kingsley, vowed to restore to them a less oppressive version of the good old days. From Kingsley’s point of view, sugar was economically achromatic, its power symbolic, a source of votes rather than a source of foreign exchange. Something to promise Joe Pittance: we does give you wuk, mahn. Plenty! Kingsley didn’t have to explain it to them. For Mitchell the question became whether to repudiate the land reform program as it was being presently distorted and exploited or hold his peace and wait for the tide to go back out. The ministry rang with a dissonance that made him think, get out of here, go to Johnnie, and he did, hungering for the commerce between bodies and souls.
He crossed the cobbled street, paved with the ballast of a dead empire’s ships, and passed along a high wooden fence, its old boards blackened with weather and exhaust but newly painted with graffiti, many PEPs and PIPs—the People’s Independence Party, Kingsley’s crowd—a dominant (its letters were four feet tall) but heretofore unheard of party, the PRP, easy enough to guess what the acronym stood for, and a solitary NJM—this would be the hand of an exile, someone from Grenada, a New Jewel Movement cadre member—plenty of references to Zion, Yah-weh, Jah, Babylon, The Lion, Marcus Garvey, Michael Manley, Marley, five-spired marijuana leaves, and the latest slogans anthologized, Banks is Bankrupt and Revo, Now prominent among them; U.S. out of ST. C. Meaning, Mitchell reckoned, himself, though he could not make a visceral connection with the demand. Someone would have to come up and tap him on the shoulder and say You.
Where the fence abutted a bricked, windowless wall fronting the street, there was a door that he opened and went through, entering a narrow courtyard fenced on three sides and on the fourth side, Sally’s school. A tin-covered walkway hugged the back of the fence, turning down the face of the onion warehouse to its center doors, thrown open, as were the shutters of its casement windows. Under the rain-proofed walk the school had fashioned a makeshift kitchen and storage area, there were hooks anchored into the wall for umbrellas and caps, vegetable seedlings sprouting in waxed cartons and a concrete planter crammed with traveler’s palm. Behind the sheaf of fronds he found Adrian, presiding over the most marvelous sight, a bright row of dollish children, no more than three and four years old, dresses up or shorts down, each small pair of ankles cuffed in underpants, each cherubic bottom settled upon an enamel chamberpot, like upturned bowler hats, Adrian encouraging them to all make weewee. Their faces, however, so lovely, were universally raised in wonderment, as if in the newness of their minds they had seen Mitchell and said to themselves, Hey. There’s God. Fathers, Sally had told him, steered clear of the school.
“Concentrate,” urged Adrian. “One two three: weewee.”
“This seems like a flawless crop,” said Mitchell. “What’s wrong with them?”
Not a thing—Sally had felt driven to do something about the community’s lack of structured care for preschoolers, so she’d devised a pilot program, and Adrian had volunteered to staff it for a week. Otherwise, the tots were mixed in with the regular students, Sally’s theory being that despite the chronological difference
s between them, developmentally they were all more or less the same age, and the mix helped socialize the weirder kids.
“They are so cute I can’t stand it,” confessed Adrian. “Weewee, ladies. Weewee, guys.” She dropped her voice so that two women making sandwiches in the kitchen wouldn’t hear. “If my father were here he’d say, ‘Right, Adrian, cute as pups, too bad they grow up to be curs.’ And you know what, Mitchell, every year that son of a bitch writes out a check to the NAACP. Here,” she said, slapping a roll of toilet paper in his hands. “Make a contribution. Start at that end, check everybody to see what they did, and, you know, give them a wipe where necessary.”
“I’m untrained,” he said, not the least enthusiastic. “I’m not a member of the union.”
“Go on. It’s easy.”
Because they were boys, the first two were, but the third was a girl, her face smooth as a chestnut, with pigtails like ganglia and no front teeth. She stared at him with the most cheerful expectation, and he made an absurd stab at etiquette by asking her name as he swiped a pad of tissue between her legs. He stood her on her feet and pulled up her drawers, and the next one was a girl too, pretty as Easter morning. She laughed heartily when he lifted her off the pot and saw she had left an unfeminine loaf-sized turd for Mitchell to praise. “Caca,” she chuckled. Jesus. He really wasn’t ready for this and set her back down, leaving the roll of toilet paper in her lap as he went to tell Adrian that it looked as if Saturday was going to work out. Great, she said from where she stooped, wrenching her head up, and he could see the obsession foremost in her eyes.
“You know, he won’t say nigger,” she went on, “he’s too liberal for that so he says cur. That’s the point. You see what I have to overcome?”
“Join the club. Sally’s inside, isn’t she?”
The school, by no means a sane and ordered world despite its effort to manufacture just such an illusion, was nevertheless not the madhouse he had at first anticipated either, but an asylum in the original sense of the word, dedicated to the habits the outside world took for granted but had denied these children, thereby denying their humanity, and it took less getting used to than Mitchell had imagined, once he began seeing the nation itself as an abused, misshapen child. On the back wall Sally had hung a banner, heralding the coalition’s motto in big block letters: We all is one. There was a poster-board listing school rules, devised by a committee of her more competent students:
1. Keep hands and feet to yourself
2. 1 person talks at a time
3. Don’t bite teachers
4. Good manners
5. Listen
6. Walk
A narrative pictureboard explained A Visit to the Zoo; maps illustrated a display showing Here’s Where We Are. Any reader could learn that
The Day is Wednesday, the sixth.
The Month is April.
The Year is 1977.
Today is Mona’s Birthday.
Her Birth Sign is Aries.
Everything was labeled with red letters: chair, window, door, broom, table, cup, books, shelf, clock, light switch, light. The children were divided in three circles on the floor, a fourth group preparing for lunch at a long folding table—these the kids needing to be strapped in their seats in order to sit upright, otherwise they’d topple over, slide out. In one of the circles it was story time, the teacher reading from a book, letting everyone see the pictures. In the second, all girls, they were painting each other’s nails—fingers and toes and anything in the way—and in Sally’s group they were raucously dismantling a box of already mashed up toys, Sally refereeing disputes over property rights. Noticing Mitchell, a boy in her circle stood up with a cold, sparkling smile and shot him, silently and repeatedly, with his hand made into a gun, recoil and all, blowing the smoke from the tip of his index finger when he had finished. Jerome, sit your fanny back down, Sally said in a normal tone, and when he hesitated, testing her, she barked Now! and Sally’s authority sent a shiver down Mitchell’s spine; he had to ignore the impulse to sit himself. Sally got up and came over, happy to see him.
“They’re so into violence,” she said cheerily, as if this were not as bad as it sounded. “Jerome always shoots you with his finger when he doesn’t like something you do.”
“What’d I do?”
“Who knows.” Sally cut her eyes back at Jerome, checking on him, and made an amused grimace and snort. “Usually it’s touch touch touch, hit hit hit. ‘Me goin stick this in you.’ They grab their crotch, boys and girls both. We’re into the great passions here. Violence and sex. Have you had your lunch? We’re on first shift. You’d be crazy to pass up fried corn mush and Spam sandwiches. Come on, sit down with us for a minute, I don’t see that much of you, and Hyacinth could use the help.”
They dragged over two more chairs to the lunch table, Sally positioning hers to keep watch on her circle. Mitchell found himself next to a godling, this folded-in elfin boy of East Indian descent, his bobbing head transformed by a dreamy smile, a miniature Krishna. Mitchell looked down the table at the other children, cow-faced, water-headed, roamy-eyed, their expressions emblazoned with awe, which he could not help but return, confronted by the staggering inscrutability of biology and birth. At Sally’s prodding, Mitchell picked up a spoon and began feeding the boy, who hummed the melody from a toothpaste commercial as he chewed. Sally asked how were things at the ministry, and when he told her, she said the whole fiasco reminded her of this big crisis that took place while she was working toward her teaching certificate in Kansas, a conflict between the university’s lab school and the College of Education, both squabbling about who was responsible for what, with the staff at the lab school vying for a greater measure of autonomy. The dean of arts and science stepped in to arbitrate the imbroglio, ordering the College of Education to back off and sanctioning the two people most intimately involved in the daily operation of the school to co-author new job definitions, top to bottom, for everybody who had a role to play, and whatever the co-authors came up with would be law, the last word, end of crisis. The two women dispatched their assignment with the utmost commitment, fair-mindedness, common sense, sensitivity, and fellowship. By mutual agreement, they clarified the lines of authorities, meticulously defined each staff member’s obligations, reconceptualized the college’s oversight function, and developed a power-sharing arrangement in which they were co-equals. Only, for administrative purposes, co-author A was first among equals, in charge of managing personnel and budget, while responsibility for curriculum, methodology, and vision fell upon the able shoulders of co-author B. They submitted their hard work to the dean, who congratulated them for a superb effort and sent them back to the lab school where, to everyone’s dismay, co-author A’s first official act was ... can you guess?
“She fired co-author B?”
“Exactly.”
Mitchell ventured a moral to the tale: Power corrupts. But Sally made a thoughtful frown and said, No, she didn’t think so, this wasn’t a story about corruption. Spooning fried mush between the boy’s lips he had the sense he was feeding a sacred bird. What’s the story about then? he asked.
“I don’t know. I think it’s just about relationships.”
“I wonder if that’s strictly a female’s perspective. What’s wrong with this kid, by the way?”
“Shiva? I don’t know that either. He has a freakish muscular dysfunction that nobody on this island is qualified to diagnose.”
“What’s going to happen to him?”
Swimming in the Volcano Page 54
