How so? asked Tillman, achieving the vastly undesirable result of being assigned an escort and exiled with Adrian into the clouds.
Mitchell started to protest but thought better of it. This event was wholly artificial, he could feel it. An exercise in power. He calmly sat down on the ledge to wait for Sally and Johnnie and ate one of the tuna sandwiches Johnnie had made for them and drank most of the juice remaining in his thermos. He looked out at the sea which was dressed in light—foxfire and jewels. It did not occur to him this was anything more than harassment. Which leader? he thought, which philosophy today? The two officers were not on friendly terms with one another.
He saw Sally then, entering the maze of lava and grass. Rising to his feet, he waved and shouted her name, wanting her to look up, see whom he was with, figure it out and compose herself for trouble. Turn back, perhaps, though that would be a shame. Eddins told him to stop signaling.
This is the signal for hello, Mitchell said.
When she reached the point where the trail wedged into the wall of the shelf, he said he was going to give her a hand up and nobody made an objection. Her face was flushed and disconcerted, her hair dark and wet on her forehead. She wanted to know what was happening and he told her he wasn’t sure.
Where’s Johnnie? he asked. Sally popped up beside him with a balletic leap.
Were you to meet someone back at the waterfall? Sally said. He shook his head and frowned. She looked puzzled by this and began to say there was a man back there, but then Eddins interrupted, calling her over. I’m too stoned to be dealing with the police, she whispered as she obeyed Eddins, yet the next second she was engaged in a battle of wills over her identification and Mitchell was astounded by her contentiousness, her fearless lack of cooperation.
Eddins wanted to look in her knapsack; Sally made a brazen claim about her rights. For some reason, Eddins backed off from the demand and asked where the other woman was and Sally answered Johanna was not far behind.
Eddins said they would wait for her and he allowed Sally and Mitchell to sit on the ledge to rest their legs after the climb. Sally lowered her voice and said somebody’s going to a lot of trouble here. The jungle riffled below their feet, like choppy water, as the wind came up and they perused the treeline, waiting for their lost fifth to emerge.
Where is she? he asked.
She drank more tea. She gave some to the lunatic who didn’t know what it was. Mitchell, Sally said, look, I can’t get my thoughts to cohere but there’s a problem. Let’s stand up and go, she didn’t think the police would do anything to try to stop them.
This is so stupid, she said loudly for Eddins’ benefit. Really really stupid.
Mitchell was flabbergasted by her behavior. What the fuck is going on? he snapped, grappling with his temper, and Sally whispered as she unknotted her legs to stand that down by the waterfall she had put something into her knapsack that evidently shouldn’t be there. Don’t ask me what it is, she said angrily, ask Johanna and that psychopath she’s with. I can’t think straight, This is some kind of a setup, I think, Mitchell, she said. Let’s go back. Right now, let’s start walking down.
Mitchell had stood up with her and together they confronted the end of Captain Eddins’ patience. We have to go back down and find our friend, Sally told him. She might be in trouble.
Johanna Fernandez, said Eddins, stepping toward Sally, unbuckling the holster on his belt. Mitchell wasn’t certain if he was referring to Johnnie herself, naming her, or if he had come to the conclusion that Sally was not who she claimed to be. This has gone too far, Mitchell said, and he instinctively placed himself between the two of them. Eddins reached to shove him aside, but Mitchell wrenched himself free of his grip. When he heard the first shot, Mitchell thought, And now the bastards are shooting. Eddins himself looked bewildered by the gunfire, scanning down the slope like the rest of them. Mitchell felt a spontaneous detachment from the present danger—what made it easy to kill with a gun also made it easy to stand there while someone far away shot at you. The second shot came, whether from the same direction or not he couldn’t tell. With a sharp intake of breath, Sally stumbled back into his arms. After the third shot he and Eddins both located Collymore at the edge of the trees, his pistol raised straight up into the air. Run, he heard one of the cops say, and thought for sure he was telling this to the men on the ground. Two of them scrambled off into the high grass; the third remained sitting right where he was, peering down the slope and yelling, What the fuck is this nonsense, Eddins? who is down there shooting at we?
He remembered looking at the ocean, its cold sparkle, wisps of precipitation licking out from the clouds and evaporating before they fell to the surface, and then he was engulfed by the devastating task of saving her. It was not a time for revelation, and she said only what she might be expected to say, that she was sorry for the mortal burden she had just become and that what she wanted was to live.
Her unopened pack was left behind, there on the ledge. As far as Mitchell was willing to say, that was the last anybody ever saw of it.
When they found Johnnie on the trail she was hysterical, screaming and sobbing, screaming What happened to Sally? What happened to her? He was trying to protect us! but he passed by without attempting to deal with her, consumed by the totality of his labor. When they passed by Eddins facedown on the trail, the cop who was helping him with Sally put her down, and before Mitchell took her up again, without even thinking he bent over Eddins’ body with its bloody insignia and removed the envelope from the captain’s back pocket, tucking it into his own. Somewhere on the periphery of the terrible rush to the trailhead, Tillman and Adrian tripped and faltered, pale ghosts, clumsy with horror, and then Ballantyne was there like an answered prayer and Mitchell, groaning with hope, was saying, Where have you been? Man, where were you?
He remembered reading Jolene’s note, tied with a rib of frond to the steering wheel, holding it in front of him while he drove. Miss: Him does love dis mash-up child more than me. We gone back. I am sorry for dis trouble.
At the clinic in Scarborough, every breath he took threatened to strangle him with fumes of desperation. There was a pernicious argument whether or not to transfuse Sally. She could speak but couldn’t say what her blood type was. It can go very nicely or it can go very badly, Betancourt explained. If they make it they make it, if they seize up they seize up, but she had lost too much already, he believed, not to risk it, and so he rode along with them, squeezing a plastic container of fresh whole blood into her arm. Almost an hour passed before Betancourt said quietly, There’s a reaction. Sally became combative and then, shivering feverishly, went into shock. Mitchell was only marginally aware of slamming into the long-horned Brahman bull, careening into the ditch, the renewed flow of blood, this time Tillman’s, his forehead shattering the windshield. The cowherd blocked Ballantyne’s Land Rover with his body, demanding compensation, being a silly bastard; under ordinary circumstances killing a cow was a serious affair. Ballantyne wasted time reasoning with the man until Adrian, shrieking at him to go, hitched her leg over the transmission housing and stomped down on the accelerator, sending the cowherd windmilling into the darkness. In his mindlessness, he welcomed the pain in his wrist, which worked on him like a stimulant, a transfixing point of clarity in the void, and on that part of the ride Mitchell was back on the mountain again, Sally over his shoulder, soaking him with warm, slippery blood, the rain pelting them, depth and texture draining out of the jungle until it became two-dimensional, a black on black intaglio; the palpable foreknowledge of death, his muscles quaking under the sad weight of the future she would not attend as he carried her off the mountain. He kept smelling the bay rum smell of Captain Eddins, and Johnnie was tripping, totally freaked, blindly keening in the downpour, what happened? what happened? over and over again, until the violence he felt against her was incommunicable, and an unforgiving mantra ran through his head like a vicious jingle: You are stupid, you’ve been stupid all your life, this s
hould be you, I wish it were you.
As they lifted Sally into the vestibule of the hospital, she grasped his right hand, shooting a blast of flame up through his arm. He drooped to his knees, trying to ease her leverage on his broken wrist, which brought his face down next to hers. Let go, he was forced to beg her, please, please let go. Her eyes were upturned to his, her forehead creased as if she were considering how to refuse him, and he listened to her shallow inhalations, waiting, wondering that after all she’d been through, how Sally found the strength for this, but she wouldn’t release him and he had no choice but to peel back her fingers one by one. He curled up on the wooden floor, spasmed with pain, while the attendants and nurses placed Sally on a gurney and wheeled her away, Adrian by her side, offering Sally a better hand than his.
Tillman and a nurse helped Mitchell to his feet and then he turned on Johnnie, excoriating her, bellowing, a maniac. That she didn’t understand what had happened only further indicted her in his eyes, he had reversed and replayed the mental video of all of them on the volcano, editing her out of the frames, and guess what, he was saying, without you there nothing bad happens. He pointed down the dark corridor where they had taken Sally. That should have been you, he seethed. Not Sally, you, he thundered brutally. Johnnie went blank and he asked Tillman to take her back to Howard Bay and said in parting that he wanted her off the island, tomorrow wouldn’t be soon enough. What he was saying was already inside of him, had been there all along.
Blood had made the fabric of his shirt stiff and waxy; the nurses assumed he’d been shot as well and cut it off him, searching for the wound while he stood sagging in the vestibule, suddenly disoriented after his rage, and then they pulled him into a room, making him lay down on a cot, and banged him with morphine and he remembered thinking as he swirled lovingly away into the drug’s vortex, so this is where she goes.
The remainder of the night he had to reconstruct later. Off-hours emergency service at the National Hospital amounted to a nurse ringing up staff at their homes, rousing them from bed. It took several hours just to get the X-ray technician there. The surgeon arrived, but he was an orthopedic man and, after examining the X-rays, seeing how the bullet had spent itself, fragmenting right against one of Sally’s ribs near her sternum and had caused no respiratory distress, determined that the wound was not life-threatening, ordered more blood, and somehow tracked down Doc Travis on Cotton Island, who said he would come back across the channel within the hour. They had his wrist on ice to take down the swelling; his arm was off away from him, a second self. He watched them entomb it in starchy white plaster and had the feeling he could get up and walk out and leave them to their business, and then a nurse with a moon face and vaguely nunnish dress came in and used the word expired, talking about Sally, and he didn’t register it, he had no idea what she meant. They finished with the cast and left him there. He was conscious of the plaster tightening, growing hard around the core of an immense throb, and he remembered getting up, going to find Adrian and Sally, walking down the creaky wooden hallways in some sort of misty suspension created by the fatiguing light of dawn, calling their names, opening doors, a shirtless white man zombie roaming the hospital. Then he was in a room with them. Adrian was sitting in a chair, unrecognizable, her eyes dead as dead and her face puffed grotesquely with sorrow. She was inconsolable, she didn’t want to be touched or held. I forbid anyone to ever see me dead, she whispered, and that was all she said. She had kept vigil with Sally and now was watching them wash the body. The window was open and birds outside in a mango tree were singing. He had never seen a corpse before and now here was Sally on a rubber sheet, a syrupy knob of blood capping the bullet’s vivid hole, her head and breasts lolling, her arms and legs flopping with unspeakable submission as the nurses rolled her, and he thought, what will ever happen to this ache, when would he ever have a heart again, and if there was one world, if we all is one, if there was a human universal mocking borders and nations, transcending the divisions, it was and only could be grief. It was all that anyone would ever have in common. It wrote the book on love. It put everything in its place.
A minister came in saying Christ has risen. Mitchell had forgotten it was Easter and the pathetic irony sickened him. Attendants came to take Sally over to the morgue and Adrian in a voice that no one dared trifle with said, we’re staying with her, and with supernatural weariness he followed along in the procession.
The bureaucratic horror show began. They laid Sally out on a steel table in the middle of a windowless cinderblock room, not bothering to cover her until Adrian insisted they must. Within minutes there was a crowd of officials and police. An argument ensued about who was supposed to be on duty back at the station on this holiday. They wrote contradictory reports that Mitchell and Adrian refused to sign. Doc Travis finally arrived in a bathing suit and windbreaker. Someone raised the issue of autopsy, which the law demanded in cases of violent death. Grambling, the Peace Corps’ man, concurred. The hospital’s coroner and cutter were sent for. In death, Sally was hypnotic; Mitchell’s disbelieving eyes kept returning to her inert shape; he kept thinking, dead, the most rivetingly exotic of states. She definitely did not look like any moment she’d get up and walk away, nor did she look angelic, beatific, or at rest in peace; she looked horribly, everlastingly lifeless and dead. The coroner couldn’t be found. Doc Travis said shitass and grudgingly agreed to conduct the postmortem examination. The house cutter wanted triple overtime for work on Easter Sunday and a hospital administrator refused to allow it and a Mr. Madlock was sent for instead. Saconi came and got in a tussle with one of the cops when they wouldn’t let him enter. They took him away before Mitchell could get outside to speak to him even though he didn’t know what he would have said. There was too much hubbub, too much yelling and disagreement, too many questions and too many questioners and Mitchell stopped talking, his mind vacant and his emotions battered and anesthetized. His wrist seemed to be the only alive part of him. Doc Travis left, saying he would have his breakfast and be back. Madlock walked in with a cleaver and hacksaw and Adrian lost control with an arm-swinging ferocity that paralyzed the scene. She succeeded in making everybody get out but Grambling, Mitchell, a nurse, and Madlock. Her authority was uncontestable, her voice resonating with near-hysterical command. Madlock went to work. Tell him to stop, she shrieked at Grambling, look at what he’s doing to her, tell him to stop. Her eyes bulged, wild and terrified. Doc Travis returned and said, Christ Almighty, look the fuckin mess this man make. He declared it out of the question to determine cause of death. Adrian finally broke, standing in the corner with her face to the wall, wracked with howling sobs, saying Sally, I’m sorry. I’m sorry sorry sorry they’re doing this to you. There were two women, PCVs, waiting outside, and when Mitchell told Adrian they were waiting for her to go with them to Sally’s house to pick out clothes to dress the body properly, she became calm and lucid again and agreed to go with them after making Mitchell promise he’d stay. He didn’t want to anymore but said he would. Fancy up the corpse, was how Madlock put it, once Adrian was out of range.
Afterward, it was out of their hands; Grambling insisted on offering condolence in the form of alcohol and took them in his car down to a waterfront bar. Mitchell wore a surgeon’s blouse but the rest of him looked as though he had been dragged through carnage and could use a good hosing off. Oblivious to their suffering, Grambling drank two double vodkas while Adrian sat staring insensate out at the street and Mitchell felt that any moment he was going to black out. He mumbled his response to Grambling’s questions about what had happened up north on the mountain, then Grambling turned his attention to Adrian, seeming to make a pass at her, an irrelevant contribution to the larger unreality. Adrian looked right through him, then stood up and left without a word. Mitchell wanted to react but failed to move himself out from underneath the stupefying crush of Sally, and when he finally got to his feet and out the door, Adrian was gone and he didn’t know where. Grambling waddled out after him
on his flat feet, only to say it was time to notify the embassy in Barbados, getting in his car and driving off without offering Mitchell a lift.
He took a taxi out to Howard Bay, floating in a cold-blooded dream. News of this atrocity was now on the radio. He went straight for the shower, past the closed door of Johnnie’s bedroom. Keeping the cast dry proved too much of a task and he didn’t bother. The water failed to grant him a new life and, after toweling off, he opened up the medicine cabinet and swallowed one of Johnnie’s amphetamines. He put on fresh clothes and then went to her room, through the door without knocking, without looking or seeing, took her map down from the wall and made her poorer by a thousand dollars, then left without speaking or hearing but with an image in his head of Johnnie curled on the mattress in a fetal position, her eyes red and bleary, her jaw quivering as she sucked like an infant on her three middle fingers, and by the time he reached the front room the image had lodged in his chest, imitating a heart, which thawed him only enough to double back, find his briefcase, remove the envelope addressed to Johnnie. There’s your mail, he said numbly, placing it on the pillow in front of her face. He gritted his teeth and told her Sally had died, no one knew quite why. The tears rolled but she didn’t move or respond, and he left, unchained his bike and took it up to the road, pounding the pedals all the way up Ooah Mountain and down to the airport, disciplining the rising chorus of Furies in his head to sing in one voice, against her, one shrill song of negation. In the airport bar he found the charter pilot he wanted to see. It was of course only a question of money, in advance. First flight out in the morning, the pilot said. He’d be prepared to leave at daybreak, a flight plan filed for Cotton Island, she could board right where the road crossed the runway, he’d be there waiting, they’d do a stop-and-go on Cotton, then on to Barbados. No problem other than the exit tax, he said winking. Illegal routes were expensive. You look bad, brother, said the pilot, taking the money. I shouldn’t ask, eh?
Swimming in the Volcano Page 60
