Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  He was peppered with bites and stings but the medication inured him to the torture that a clearer mind would know. From the elbow down, his right arm was another life he once led, now dead and decomposing in its awful coffin. At dusk they retired to the shelter, built a fire, sat on logs, and drank strong rum. They sang songs and told tales and Mitchell tried without success to commit what they sang and said to memory. They baked sweet potatoes in the flames and cracked them open like pies and wolfed them down, burning their tongues. He asked where was Isaac and they said, Not here. They didn’t know who he was talking about. Before they all passed out a demon runner stumbled huffing and breathless into camp, a messenger sent by the forest ranger Ballantyne. Get out, Get out, he shouted into the face of Mitchell’s stupefaction. Go, Go. All Mitchell could think was, Where the fuck did he come from, what’s this stunt? The man sat down, his lungs heaving, slugging from the plastic jug of rum, waiting for Mitchell to move, his eyes flickering with the firelight of righteous determination. It seemed that soldiers were coming up the trail and the fellow didn’t want the white man there when they arrived. He stood up and shook Mitchell by the shoulders, with no effect, walked out of the light and then came back with a cutlass and before anyone knew what was happening, whacked him along the collarbone with the flat of the blade, and then again, and then once more, and finally Mitchell grabbed his pack off the dirt and sprang to his feet, bolting in the direction where he hoped he would find the trail onward into roadless, unmapped heart of the north but in a few minutes he was hopelessly ensnared in a shredding tangle of darkness, the only light a form of heat lightning that was his fear, he could not see any part of himself, not even the pale plaster worm slowly consuming him, the night so implacably, intractably black, and he a most integral part of its blackness, its darkest spirit, his eyes opened the same as his eyes closed, and there he remained in the clutch of nonexistence until first light, when he unraveled himself from hell and found the eastward trail and ran, running through the mists of morning, if he hadn’t appreciated the danger why was there the pure dread weight of a pistol clapping the center of his back with every footfall, running like Ballantyne ran from danger though forever monitoring it, running but simultaneously crashing forward toward it, uncertain of the distinction between danger and desire, running and running, and Isaac in his head and heart advising, when danger approaches sing to it, but Kingsley was correct, now he understood, Isaac would be found wherever Mitchell was, not on any map but somewhere within a moral atlas, his very existence had diffused back into the wild land, Mitchell saw the sense of that now and snapped wide awake from his storybook dream of rescue, and then, trudging around a bend in the trail the forest opened up to a grassy clearing where two paths intersected and there was Godfred Ballantyne, sweated through his khaki work clothes, posed on a rock and waiting for him, having dashed up from the windward side to avoid the sudden troublesome increase of traffic on the leeward route.

  “Come,” said Ballantyne, the man who trained for such days as this. He hopped away from his perch, his muscles bulging, and started walking toward the northward branch of the intersecting trail, confident the white man would follow him to the safety he was there to provide, but Mitchell dragged his heavy feet and stopped and, with no other choice, Ballantyne stopped too and turned with a questioning look of impatience, putting his hands on his hips: he would listen, but then they must hurry.

  “Where’s the path go?”

  “It come down beside Retreat.”

  “And this way?” Mitchell wondered, pointing to its steep traverse south.

  “Up Soufrière.”

  He wanted to know how far it was from Retreat to the cone of Soufrière and Ballantyne’s carved lips formed a trace of smile. It came out about the same, he answered cryptically. About the same. Meaning, the same distance as from the trailhead at the windward access with which Mitchell was familiar.

  “So somebody can run up from Retreat in the same time it takes to get up from windward.”

  Ballantyne feigned a look of introspection. “Maybe.”

  “But maybe not, right?”

  “Maybe not,” he agreed, and clapped his hands to end the game. “Come, Wilson, lehwe go.”

  Mitchell shifted his feet indecisively, thinking to himself, Ballantyne is not decent, something he should have figured out before now, and instead of following him he went over to the same rock Ballantyne had vacated and sat down on its lichened cusp, easing his knapsack off his shoulders to hold in his lap. He wasn’t angry, he was only downhearted and solitary, and when he asked Ballantyne to tell him what had been in Sally’s backpack that was so inexcusable it had cost her life, he softened the words with regret, he asked as if he knew he was asking too much, and Ballantyne seemed to accept the legitimacy of the question, but he would not deign to answer it, not, at any rate, forthrightly.

  “You tell me,” he said, planting his legs as if to brace himself for what they were now going to say or do to one another.

  “It would have to be drugs,” said Mitchell. He moved his head slowly, straining, trying to work out a crick in his neck. “It would have to be money. Drugs and money, drugs or money. Right?”

  “Dis drug dem does cy-all cocaine,” Ballantyne agreed, his black eyes expressionless and his face a mask. “Some money as well.”

  “To finance I don’t know who. Ghosts.” He grinned with pain, grievously amused. “I’m supposed to be what, CIA or something? This is pretty fucking wild, Ballantyne, for a guy like me.”

  “Lehwe mek dem fail twice, Wilson. Come, mahn,” he cajoled, his temper shortening. He gestured back over his shoulder. “Down de trail.”

  With a clumsy motion Mitchell unzipped his pack, offering Ballantyne an orange but Ballantyne refused to respond, and Mitchell kept his left hand inside the pack, wrapped around the worthless gun, feeling the adrenaline jet through his veins. His thoughts raced out of control—what was this trick with the orange? what was he trying to pull?—and he trembled, watching Ballantyne watch him change, Ballantyne narrowing his eyes, swelling alert. The sun broke out momentarily, causing Mitchell to blink white flashes, crimson and crystal birds, depositing a kind of flat pain in his head, eroding down through his arms.

  “Get up, mahn.”

  “Did you kill her?” He heard himself grunt the unreal words between his teeth, his jaw clenched to prevent their chattering. He heard a peal of artificial laughter escaping his throat.

  Ballantyne turned supercilious, he stood there sizing Mitchell up, saying he was going to tell him the truth, “If I shoot somebody, nuh? it is you—you, Wilson—I shoot,” people like that woman get killed, he said, because of people like you.

  “All right. All right. I get it.” His voice was panicky but he was shouting, he had been shivering but now he had the gun out and it was steady in his hand, he had at least the satisfaction of Ballantyne’s dumbstruck look, at least he knew he could take it this far if there was no other recourse. He wanted Ballantyne to drop his haversack on the ground and step away from it and when Ballantyne hesitated Mitchell said he was sorry but do it now or he would shoot him in the fucking face. Ballantyne shrugged with scorn and did it. Mitchell squatted and picked up the frayed leather case by its strap, he had gotten this far and he was not afraid but he still could not span the psychic distance between his empty pistol and the loaded one Ballantyne never was without in his haversack, he wasn’t prepared to go that far, to be honest he wasn’t even prepared to go as far as he had already, and he didn’t know where it would end but it was not going to end here, with one of them on the ground, dying.

  “How good of a shot are you anyway? Pretty good, huh?”

  “Not so band,” Ballantyne said. He made a mean smile and shook his head with disbelief.

  “You wouldn’t miss, would you?” he asked, and when Ballantyne would not admit this, Mitchell asked again, who killed the woman.

  “Daht mahd bwoy.” That mad boy. The mad boy. Mad.

  Mitch
ell looked down at his gun, turning it side to side, marveling, it could have been a fish, something absurd, any alien object in its strangeness, and he wondered how in the world he was ever going to get it out of his hand.

  “I think this guy Ibrahim only fired once ...” he said, but without conviction and his voice trailed, his memory not helping him out on this. “I don’t know. The sound was different, man. Something was different.”

  “Once is enough,” said Ballantyne.

  He had more questions, he would always have more questions, but the world spun in both directions, here on the island of contradiction, both directions at once, backward and forward, self-opposed and irreconcilable and, finally, irrecoverable. Gunfire crackled in a businesslike volley through the distance from the camp he had left behind and he said to Ballantyne, Those are your men, aren’t they? but Ballantyne sucked his teeth and answered, No, mahn, no no no, Wilson, how you so foolish, bwoy, those men are yours, and with that he spun away, he would have nothing more to do with Mitchell Wilson, he could do as he pleased, he could go stand beside the bodies of the Rastamen, festooned with belts of ammunition, and have his picture taken, he could go sit in a cell in Fort Gregory and tell any story that came to mind but he, Ballantyne, was moving off down the trail to Retreat, he was getting in his Rover and going home and firing back a strong rum, he’d listen to the story of Mitchell’s capture on the radio but this would not be the end of it for either of them, he vowed, and though Mitchell took a step to follow Godfred Ballantyne, he stopped to consider where he was, which was also as far as he could ever go, a jack spanier flew into his mouth and stung its way out, laying a lava-hot track of pain on his tongue, he lowered the gun and watched the forest ranger swallowed up in the bush, and then he pitched it deep into the jungle, and went back, to finally rendezvous with his missing friend Isaac, but Isaac wasn’t there, and Mitchell Wilson was.

  The course of fate runs strong and straight through most of history. At the beginning of every tragedy, the elements are all in place; they only need time to combine into disaster or chaos or stalemate, or all three. But add good intentions, and fate gets more imaginative.

  JULIAN EVANS

  Tomorrow, the new government assured him, and this time they meant it. He had been given clemency, he would be their first official act of mercy, bestowed in the aura of their triumph. Something worked out back channel; his story wasn’t even reported in the Herald.

  The beleaguered Kingsley and the PIP had appealed to both the hemispheric and traditional guardians of democracy, citing certain obvious and hair-raising threats to liberty, and the guardians successfully pressured the coalition government of St. Catherine, led by Edison Banks, to call for new elections. Even Fidel Castro thought it was a good idea, convinced that, in this historic instance, a popular vote would validate the wave of revolution washing over the island, as it recently had, though less conclusively, in Jamaica. After vehement resistance to the idea, Banks and his People’s Revolutionary Party, nearsighted with hubris and perhaps, it could be argued, myopic with ideals, agreed. The ensuing campaigns were lively, impassioned, both sides unrestrained in their public displays of nationalism, blood was shed, but not excessively. Thanks to the ill-considered gerrymandering conducted during the spring by the former PEP, which dispersed their opponents’ seed in a wider radius than seemed possible at the time, the PIP won, the Honorable Joshua Kingsley was named, for a second time, prime minister; the formerly discredited Pepper was recalled from New York and given the agricultural portfolio, Castro learned a memorable lesson about encouraging elections in the region, and Maurice Bishop and the New Jewel Movement of Grenada issued a statement declaring they had closely followed the downturn of events in St. Catherine and were forced to conclude that the PEAS was a failed experiment at sensible governance, and as such the NJM would forgo coalition-building—this two-headed beast—in favor of one-party rule, to be installed commensurate with the overthrow of the madman Sir Eric Gairy.

  Not exactly front-page headlines in the United States or Britain, but news nevertheless. Of Edison Banks, it would always be said that he had meant well.

  Throughout the months it took for Kingsley and the PIP to orchestrate its victory, Mitchell Wilson would wake in his cell, asking himself where he was, asking himself, had he been a child all this time, out there? They refused to allow him visitors until they discovered him crippled with dysentery, spraying blood out of his rectum into the bucket in his cell. After that, it was Josephine who brought him food, who kept him connected (although once he entertained a local group called the Volunteers for Human Rights, who hinted at an immediate end to his misfortune if he would sign, not a confession, but an apology).

  Josephine was the most loyal and objective of messengers, bearing the news she knew would most inform him.

  Your friend Tillman tried to see you, ya know, before he left, she said. Rosehill close down. He say, find him in Cambridge. He is there studying an MBA.

  Josephine told him, Saconi gone to England.

  She arrived flustered one day, set down her basket of bread and fried fish, and told him, Adrian does tell me to tell you something.

  Adrian tell me tell you, this woman Johnnie you living with? she in Panama, nuh? Well, Mitch, she is pregnant, Adrian does hear from a letter that reach, I believe she having an abortion.

  From Josephine he learned the news that Ballantyne had been murdered, in his own bed, but first his testicles had been cut off and shoved down the throat of his wife, whose mouth was held shut by her husband’s assassins, until she swallowed them.

  One day, before Adrian had been replaced by a Cuban volunteer and sent home, Josephine said, Adrian tell me not to forget: a girl named Jolene stop by the school, saying her husband gone away, she carrying a sick sick child in she arms and she leave him by Adrian, bawling, Take him, help him. She take him, nuh? Mitch, one more child to save.

  That was one thing about expats, he remembered a friend of golf telling him, the journalists, the volunteers, the specialists, the careerists, the opportunists, even the wandering jews: Everybody found a kid they wanted to help. This had been Ben talking, an inference he was making about decency, the complications thereof. Ben, the poet.

  That, said Ben, was how it started.

  Acknowledgments

  The act of writing a novel, no matter how solitary the process seems, is simultaneously the act of creating communities—one fictional, of course, but another quite real. The act of finishing a book, this book, is also a long-awaited opportunity to say thanks to the leading citizens of that vital, blessedly real group, the extended family of Swimming in the Volcano:

  First, always, to Miss F.

  To Gail Hochman and Barbara Grossman.

  To Alice Turner, Theresa Grosch, Bruce Weber, Tom Jenks, Diane Roberts, Nan Graham.

  To Jack Leggett, Tay Maltsberger, Dave Smith, Brian Dyson, Gary and Cindy Rich, Carol Ann Koch-Weser, Bob, Brian, Lynette, and Robert Antoni, Barbara Davis, Joy Smith, Marianne Merola, John and Cheryl Andrews, Helen and Shack, Michael Malone, Don Hendrie, Jr., Maxine and Jerry Stern, Connie Nelson, John Parker, Kathy Bradt, Pete Ripley, Bill Vinyard, Ross Anderson, Pat Mitchell, Bill Armstrong, Barry Hannah, Bill Peden, Charlie and Tammy Oberbeck, and Steve Brumfield.

  To two of the language’s finest poets, Andrew Hudgins and Heather McHugh, of whose work a half-dozen lines appear in this text. And to Richard Powers, one of the best novelists of my generation, who coined the phrase global pillage.

  To Maurice Bishop, a man of good intentions.

 

 

 
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