Swimming in the Volcano (12 page)

No
, Peters was determined to make them admit,
we are who we dreamed we are, we are the revo, and we have come
.

Like shaking a box of bees, Lloyd Peters had encouraged Basil Hamilton, the minister of public works, to propose; had himself put those words into the man's mouth so that he could weigh them, as if for the first time, when Basil spoke. Hamilton sat now between the prime minister and Foreign Minister Archibol, sharing the couch with them; it was Basil's infatuation with naive grassroots reform that
excited him, and he was already positioned in the shadows to assume Joshua Kingsley's important portfolio, should the coalition ever dissolve—
when
it dissolved—in order to remake itself into the lean, firm, and efficient industry of truth in action they always meant it to be.

But in the stagecraft of dethronement, Kingsley had not taken the bait, had not even blinked. Trapped into administering a reform program he did not wholly advocate and could not as a politician survive, he neither protested the unauthorized relocations nor acknowledged their existence and thereby admit that the process was out of his control, the power and influence of his office stolen. Why didn't he resist, why didn't he resign, why didn't he have the sense to remove his fat sow self from the road so the future could pass around? This wasn't like Kingsley, and they didn't know what to think. Perhaps they were missing something. Perhaps they were wrong to wait for a response, since they knew it would come, the bees would sting, sooner or later, the way they were pressing the old man.
Joshua throwin old womens out they house and home
, people were saying, and not a peep heard from the old bastard.

Lloyd Peters licked his purple lips. “Troublesome rumors, nuh?” he said enticingly, and the council began. It became for him a matter of momentum, to preserve the endgame from the dilution of indecision. The issue of dismissal was raised again, and again rejected: Joshua must be finessed into a position of impotency, said Banks, not martyred only to be resurrected by a reactionary opposition.

Peters looked toward Selwyn Walker, hoping he would speak. Walker had been a less than average student at St. John's, the captain of the soccer team, cocky and popular, fearless. He had attended the study group simply because, in Peters' opinion, he had a keen nose for winning—he had smelled conflict in the group's makeshift kitchen, and it had whetted his appetite. Now it so happened he was the only one of four lieutenant commanders on the National Police Force indoctrinated into PEP objectives from the beginning, the one officer of significant rank who had been cruelly beaten by his fellow members of the force during the days of opposition to Pepper, and you do not question the loyalty of such a man, you simply destroy him if he turns on you. What he lacked, Peters believed, in intellectual capacity he compensated for in hubris and bravery, and in the less glamorous skills of logistics, but Peters was convinced the man was not sophisticated to the degree that he would relish a theory, hold the structure of it in his mind like an architect his building, a surgeon his anatomical branchings; not interested in the immaterial skeletons of
theory on which all creation hung, yet he was deft—or at least not clumsy—with strategy, and his tactical instincts were of real value, here at the vanguard of a new St. Catherine. If there was a problem with Walker, Peters had to concede, it was that the man, like Banks, but from an opposite pole, was tempted by disillusionment, counting the endless moments it sometimes seemed to take for the gears of change to spin. Unknown to everybody but the men in the room, Selwyn Walker was, in the coming months, to inaugurate the formation of a national defense guard, to counteract the imbalance of the national police, whose commandant remained strapped by corruption and blood to Kingsley and the conservative members of the coalition, Pepper's old cohorts, who had betrayed him but not yet and never would be satisfied with Edison Banks and his club of supercilious schoolboys.

Selwyn Walker's steel-rimmed spectacles magnified the flickering energy in his eyes, eyes gone prematurely weak after his beatings by Pepper's men; they scouted his superiors' nuances like a radar imager, mused Peters, watching the light spark in diamonds on the lenses. Walker looked a bit like a towering black Gandhi, the ascetic severity of his face mocked by an unfortunate pair of jug ears. Walker's head was shaved, in military fashion, and Peters focused on its dark, icy gleam, wondering if the shaving, the deliberate baldness, represented some sort of ... what? Again the word immaturity came to mind. Archibol spoke, making some damn speech clouded by righteousness and vanity, and Peters said to himself,
Save it for them damn fools in New York
. “We are not afraid, we are confident,” Archibol was saying.

Last Friday, the Agricultural Credit Union in Comfort, a town in the interior, below the wilds of Soufrière, had been robbed, and that same night, Peters had seen Selwyn Walker at the bar of the Admiralty Club in Churchill Bay, and they had spoken, only briefly, about the robbery, and what some people perceived as increasing lawlessness in certain parts of the island associated with the oppostion.

Suppose, Selwyn
, Peters had said in a casual voice,
there was a force up north
.

Force?

Suppose, for the sake of argument, man, the true perpetrators of this crime are our enemies. That these crimes are political crimes. This banditry. This lawlessness
.

Just hooligans and rastas, eh?

All crimes are political crimes when they are committed within the context of the economic violence of imperialism, true?

True, true
.

Suppose there is a force, and that force is against us
.

Walker had exhaled air out of his nose—a disdainful snort.
That would not be smart
.

Imagine Delwyn Pepper, up so in New York, washing his hands of our business. Eh? He would ever do that? Ever? Eh?

Not smart
.

Imagine Kingsley, Pepper's right hand, telling the man, “Don't come to me with your money and tricks
.”
Eh? Kingsley?

Not smart at all
.

All I am saying is, we could not stand by, or we would be lost, eh?

Selwyn Walker said nothing more on the subject, but he met Peters' eyes, and his look was thoughtful.

I believe I know how to make you say what it is you must say, Lloyd Peters told Walker in his mind, then as now, studying him across the room where he sat in his straight-backed chair, facing the prime minister's Queen Anne sofa and boxed in a sunbeam, having no aversion to the broiling morning light of the tropics. Kingsley is not merely a master of our own trickery, but a
force
within us, a necessary side of our own personality, not to be uprooted by games, nor withered by our posturing and improvisation. You will say it, Selwyn, and we will send Archibol back to New York, believing it,
defending
us with the credibility of an outraged heart, and Hamilton out into the streets, believing it, sowing that belief among the masses, and you and they will make it true.

“You are spoilin for a fight, eh, Selwyn?” Peters said, half jokingly, and then immediately changed his manner, reciting in all seriousness what Banks had made clear, time after time, that nonviolence was the signature of the noblest cause, and of the men dedicated to that cause.

“And Archibol is right,” Banks added, unsmiling. “We have nothing to fear.”

“But that is not natural,” complained Selwyn Walker, closing his eyes and slowly opening them, as if he would sigh. “That is not positive. That is cowardly, under the circumstances.”

“True and not true,” declared Banks. “Nonviolence is an act of supreme faith, and supreme intelligence. You will see. The masses will see. Only God would know otherwise.”

Lloyd Peters wanted to know. “What circumstances, Selwyn?”

The lieutenant commander tightened his lips and appeared agitated, grim.
Joshua Kingsley is wiser than all God-foolishness
, Selwyn Walker said to himself, bursting with an anger he would not permit himself to express out loud.
I can say this, because Joshua Kingsley is
the rot and filth that ignorant men name the devil. I am the man who does know. Because I am the man who must stand in front of him and take his bullet, I am the man who does know. Because I am the man you will ask to cut out his tongue, and slay his bad children, I am the man who does know. Because, Eddy, I am your emissary to Hell and its horrors, I know
.

“Tell us,” said Lloyd Peters. “
What
circumstances?”

Banks shifted his gaze to Peters as if he finally realized where all this murky talk was leading. “Tell us, Selwyn,” he said.

Selwyn Walker glanced at Edison Banks with impenetrable composure, rejecting his own misgivings, the qualms he felt in answering—the answer or the lie he had just heard the prime minister solicit, to legitimize their hard business. But once he opened his mouth, there would be no falsehood, now or ever, only a revelation gathered from something not unlike a time capsule, but sent backward from the near future to its point of conception in reality. He was not a liar, he was a visionary, a priest of the seen and the unseen.

He told them he had received reports that had caused him grave concern. Reports that alleged that Joshua Kingsley had men up north—agents, traitors—in the mountains, in the forests behind La Soufrière. They were organizing, they were ... up to no good. He was unprepared for their skepticism, especially Lloyd Peters', but then he felt that their doubts comforted him, minimizing his anxiety.

“But, dis a fahntasy, mahn,” guffawed Peters.

“Folks talkin shit,” said Archibol.

Walker conceded he could offer only circumstantial, inconclusive evidence, at the moment, but that he would fail in his duty to them if he did not express his suspicion. A reliable source had eluded him, although certain other prospects had yet to be properly investigated. He paused to gauge the impact of these qualifications, but rather than an air of foreboding descending into the room there was satisfaction, glad relief; his message was welcomed.
You see, I was right
, Selwyn Walker told himself. He had not been summoned here today to be cheated, to condone girlish intrigues, but to be anointed and sent forth. He took his hands from the armrests of his chair and placed them atop his knees, since his legs jittered, betraying his excitement.

Lloyd Peters advised him to check and double check the information, before reporting back to them, or initiating a response. We must remember, he cautioned, the virtue of our cause.

Within the depths of Edison Banks' eyes there seemed to be an intellect in danger of being exhausted by its own singular abilities, yet unhurried and clinically objective nonetheless. His elbow was on the
sofa's arm, his neatly bearded chin in the palm of his slender hand, as he listened and agreed and voiced his reservations.

“But patiently, no? Don't be bloody, Selwyn.”

Because if you are bloody you will lure Pepper back into it, from the North, and he will bring the North with him. Don't be bloody, Selwyn, or our children will starve. Don't be bloody, Selwyn, or we must live with Americans or Cubans or Russians in our homes. Don't be artless, Selwyn—the rise of one art and the fall of another takes time. Every procedure has its art; every art has its careful science. Collect the evidence, detain the guilty, let the people judge for themselves, and the coalition will split apart without unseemly artifice, and the world itself will smile because we are not savages, and no one will be against us, even if they are not with us, and there will be no guns to put away, because what is most difficult is to resist the temptation not to put away the lightning of democracy which is the justice of the gun, but this is a storm we cannot live with, and that is why we have worn our masks of coalition for so long, and dissimulated ourselves, and brought this unwholesome pressure gradually to bear upon our people, and exposed them to these confusions, so that finally a small discretion—and not wrath, and not vengeance, and not chaos—could make us free. Don't be bloody, Selwyn. It is a game of blood and history—
true and not true
. But I will not look upon the blood of my people, and you will not show it to me, because you will be loving—however you have loved your people and your nation, you must now show them both a greater love, a love transcendent and pure—and you will be clever, I trust you will be clever, Selwyn. We are not clowns, our country is not a comedy, although many wish to see it that way; we are not Hamlets, our country is not a tragedy, although many people want to see it that way too.

Lloyd Peters marveled at Selwyn Walker as he rose and saluted, loose on his feet, as though he had drunk from the bottle of Pinch—which no one had bothered with except Archibol—on the marble-topped table between the sofa and chairs. He seemed inspirited, this man, this
chrysalis
. What a beauty he might come to be, a steel-winged insect, a deadly ornament of the night. And into that same night, he would eventually disappear.

“Don't be bloody, Selwyn,” Banks urged a last time, as if to thwart such an outcome he must say it over and over again. “We are not savages.”

We are not yet men
, Walker thought, and blithely reassured the room.
Have faith in the unseen: It need not be God, to be powerful
.

They stood up with him, relaxed, moving on to small talk.

Archibol complained about some stupid business with his wife and car involving one of the sons of Crissy Knowles.

The trouble with us
, Selwyn Walker thought, thinking of his colleagues as he left Government House to return to downtown headquarters—Edison Banks and his old schoolmates from form days at St. John's Apostolic—
we moving too slowly. Developing too slowly. As if we had no cause at all. As if class still in session
. He had studied with them at St. John's, and studied
of
them, and learned that
schooltalk cheap, bwoy
, learned that all philosophy was school dress-up and never dirtied itself in the world, until someone fed up with this nonsense came along and stripped it of its shoes and fancy pants and threw it out onto the streets to fight and shit and bleed. That was the true test for ideas, the application, when they forfeited the day-dreamy security that gave them license in the schoolhouse. Then philosophy risked becoming something less than ideology, and something greater, something factual and historic for the school-books and the schoolboys to feast on, and that is why he, Selwyn Walker, did not follow Eddy Banks and Archibol and Lloyd Peters to schools in London and Toronto and Boston, but took his higher education among the masses, wearing the royal colonial uniform of authority, a tool of power, because he knew he was destined to be the flesh of their schoolboys' daydream, the muscle and arm of their theories and here, now, finally, in this day and time, the mask would be lifted for all to see that his face was not the
booj
face of the monkey.