Swimming in the Volcano (19 page)

Like everybody else on St. Catherine, Mitchell tried to remember to dial in Kingsley's Sunday night radio speeches—monologues
about bizarre phenomena, seasoned with religious metaphor and mysticism, cunningly pierced with one-line directives concerning the most current legislation, and innuendos about unnamed enemies. He had heard Kingsley give a speech on sunglasses and hats, the effects these items produced in their wearers—the minister did not like caps or tinted glasses that obscured the face; he considered them styles of the criminal class. The hour-long analysis ended in an exhortation to plant seven more tons of carrots in the northern co-ops. Mitchell had heard a speech about Savannah, Georgia, which Kingsley had apparently visited in the wintertime as a young cook's mate aboard a freighter. This particular and peculiar soliloquy focused on grilled meats, the inhumanity of racism compounded by cold weather, and finally the efficacy of the Monroe Doctrine, which Kingsley was all for, he vowed, though he lambasted its inconsistent interpretation by American presidents. There were speeches about telekinetic force and herbal cures for cancer, one about how Moses and Joshua divided the land beyond the Jordan River for the men of Israel, one which ended citing a new charter for the Marketing Board but which began with a tribute to Lord Mountbatten, a strange thirdhand account of episodes with the earl in India during the world war. The plagues of communism, Arab control of the planet's oil, muckraking journalism, and insupportable tariffs were noted at random throughout most; of Kingsley's presentations. His broadcasts were, in fact, sort of a folk hit, a screwy evening's entertainment in the shops and shanties burning their lanterns throughout the isolated countryside, like boats at sea dependent on the air waves to assure them they were part of the black, larger world beyond the light.

Why had Kingsley sought him out this morning, far out here in the bush? Mitchell couldn't say, but the minister's appearance, so unlikely, disturbed him, providing notice that attention had somehow gathered around him, and Mitchell wasn't a person who appreciated unsolicited attention. Instead of returning to the ministry offices to do the paperwork he had planned, Mitchell stayed on that flat rock throughout the afternoon, staring at the land below like a hawk, like a lone wolf, secure in the knowledge of being far removed from the necessary pursuits of bureaucratic survival.

He sat, perched in the sun, knowing this was the last frontier for the convertive passions. The tropics. Impure and trodden though it may be, the world between Cancer and Capricorn was remote enough to still have its hinterland attraction, that psychic glint and sparkle in the smoky rags of its wilderness for pioneers born belatedly into the Aquarian Age. For what passed in the twentieth century as
frontiersmen: would-be individualists rebelling against the vague brutalities of middle-class lives; centurions from the suburbs, the offshore mavericks, the missionaries of industry and guardians of the endangered thing; the mall culture fugitives, the explorers of psy-choactivity; the Marco Polos of consumerism and the Magellans of avarice; the cinema bwanas, the pilgrims of strangeness, the glory dreamers—all the restless souls who were going to jump right out of their skin unless they moved out in the direction of the equator, latitude zero, a band of the world that offered opportunities of the absolute—absolute success, absolute failure, absolute depravity. They came to it not as they would have in the past, as men encountering an enslaved virgin who would acquiesce to rough treatment, but as courtiers trying to win the attention of a harridan widow, a mauled-over bitch who had inherited the broken kingdoms of her ancestors. Either way, you could hardly call it romance.

When Mitchell was growing up back in the Sixties, it was supposed that the Western nations had launched a war of money against the world's weaklings, paving the filthy streets of their cities with gold, but whoever believed that was conveniently deluded. The cash boomeranged back home into the accounts of all the players, or fattened the waistlines of baby-faced potentates by another twelve inches. Sometimes the money never existed at all, except as an imaginary understanding, like Peter Pan, or the tooth fairy. It was a magic act, the foreign aid biz. One hundred percent overhead. He had never heard it discussed in terms of changing some poor fellow's hard life for the better except in classrooms or on television. Almost every economist he knew at the university behaved like a demagogic oracle from the Middle Ages. They found more ways to explain things then there were things to explain. Out in the field, the only programs that ever got off the ground played as a quick fix for junked-out clients.

Mitchell believed he understood most of the underlying falsehoods of the business before coming down to St. Catherine but he was blinded, or chose to be blinded, by the magnificent prospects of Edison Banks' reform movement. What exactly was the relationship, he wondered, between the need for reform and the desire for revolution? No one doubted that everything on the island had to change, and maybe it was time, maybe Mitchell could shoulder some of the work and learn what he really didn't know—the secret to accomplishing something good and just on this earth, like rescuing a child-nation that had fallen, and was floundering, in a pigpen of greed.

He added up the odds, though, and wasn't moony about his chance for enlightenment. He was aware of the scale of the hustle,
the grand imperial benign vastness of it, the unaccountability of its nature. He even knew some of the dirt about Kingsley, the Great Manipulator, whose career could be identified by the reek of burnt cane, and knew that Edison Banks was not much appreciated by the overseers in Washington. And suppose a rebellious nephew like myself sympathized with a leader like Banks, Mitchell wondered, and practiced his own small subversion against the family back home. From Uncle Sam's point of view it didn't much matter, that boy's game. It didn't even warrant a dressing down. The nephews took their paychecks, and they were very plump ones indeed, whether issued by Texas A&M, as was the case with Mitchell, or the USDA, or AID, or a phalanx of other acronyms acting as brokers in these arrangements. It didn't matter because the wealth eventually came back to its origins, even if nephew stayed out there in the jungle to eat shit and bark at the moon. In the meantime the boys were afield guilelessly disseminating the doctrines of rationalism as if they were bread itself, charming the rustics with technocratic voodoo. Eventually all the boys came home to reminisce in old age over their fling with the exotic. And for meaning, nephew, if the spell had not washed off in the Jacuzzis of retirement, had the mystery of his own altruism to ponder, to weigh on the scale of what had not been achieved, and to measure what had failed in his soul against what was never going to change anyway as long as we were men and not gods.

At the end all there was was the knowledge that you took the job to not be cuckolded by opportunity. You let it happen, you let yourself live. You were not afraid to look. You were not afraid to act.

Mitchell put notebooks, topographical maps, camera, and tripod back into the Land Rover and called it a day once the sun entered its fourth quadrant and blasted straight into his line of vision. Back at the ministry, he returned the vehicle to the motor pool and bounded up the wooden steps to the second floor of administrative offices to retrieve his bike. The secretaries in the front bullpen were consistently titillated by the sight of him, their damp mint-eyed white man. Most of them were too shy to talk to Mitchell but not shy enough to be amused among themselves every morning when he appeared. We are black beauties, he imagined they said to him with their eyes. We are lost queens—isn't that amusing? He nodded their way and walked past into the narrow corridor that led to his section.

There was irrefutable proof that words and numbers were the perfect commodities for export. Not money, and not technology, unless it was as fundamental as safety pins. Thus the proliferation of fellows
who did what Mitchell did—the statisticians, the language wizards, the analysts, overeducated people born with a passion for ratiocination, who had a feeling for land—any land, all land, the vitality of it, in it, under it—land, the one issue that was eternal. They were the sturdy facade, the ulterior design for a very canny flow of resources. The pearls of research were meticulously logged and stowed until their time of political expedience, which might never come. What is your view on the banana, Mistah Wilson? How best to ensure the policy of our little coconut oil cartel? If not sugar than perhaps you can suggest an intensification of tobacco? Yams? Nutmeg? Cocoa? Lemons? Arrowroot? Pigeon peas? Sorrel blossoms? A cannery for hearts of palm? What are the prospects on the Caricom market for another quadrillion metric tons of sweet potatoes, eh? Our farmers are excellent cultivators of the sweet potato.

Near the end of the hallway, Mitchell opened the door to his office and strapped his briefcase to the carrier on the rear fender of the bicycle. He had left the two windows unshuttered and now latched them, closing out the noise from the schoolyard at St. Mark's Secondary, and a shifting light which penetrated through the banyan tree outside the windows and polished the fine old hardwoods of the room. Johnnie tried to slip back into his thoughts but he shut her out too, and sat down behind his desk, rummaging through the backpack he had left there that morning.

Through no fault of his own, what Mitchell had to offer to the ministry's success was marginal, but he was equally sure that even a little was enough to make a difference, despite perpetual reinvention. Mistah Wilson, the Blackburn study is inactive, we now rely on the Bedford study. No, no, the Bedford study no longer reliable, mahn. The PM has asked us to heed the recommendations of the Vertell Group. Faces turn quizzical—
de what group you say? Vertell?
Look dem Vertell numbahs, mahn. Dey find a nice setta numbahs, true? Look how click-click-click. All of those expensive reports, the reports before the reports, and the reports after the reports, say, said, and would reiterate only one message far into the next century, the one truth that was so true it mocked the legions of lesser truths that flourished in its light—we fuck around while people go hungry. Excellent truth. Everybody loved it. Nothing produced a crop of bullshit like the Green Revolution.

Cassava, Mistah Wilson? But what you think of rice, with proper irrigation, eh? Soil's so rich, mahn, so giving, on St. Kate. Oranges? Dairy production? Carrots? We can grow anything here, you know, just throw seed on the ground and get out of the way, but
dese people,
dem lazy. Dese people, dem chupid as frog. Fuckin baboons, nuh?
The second week Mitchell was here he had made the blunder of opening the files kept in the office by his predecessors, a tag-team of foreign experts passing through St. Catherine during the past sixty years. It seemed that every pebble, puddle, and pismire on the island had been evaluated ad infinitum by this distinguished procession of developmental solipsists. They revealed, as a group, an extraordinary penchant for repetition and simultaneous contradiction. One would say, Dig a ditch right here. A second would arrive afterward to say, Clearly this ditch belongs over there, not here. A third pundit would follow and say, Oh Christ, we don't think ditches are the thing anymore; you should fill them in. These absurd, disembodied dialogues had been going on in the present vein for ten, fifteen, twenty years.

So, white bwoy, tell me. You come to mek some big experiments? Mek some studies on dem poor peoples? Dem slavery mentalities?

Mitchell straightened up from binding his pant legs with rubber bands, considering the risky business of going unarmored and unengined into foreign traffic.

Mister Wilson. Up in the bush, you did see my bad children?

He thought about it again, this riddle, and decided it was nothing more than primitive, cagey humor, a joke from a trickster, a politician of trivial intrigues. Again, he lingered in his office longer than he should have, considering the guest alone in the house at Howard Bay. Certainly he stayed longer than was necessary, afraid of Johnnie—Mrs. What's Her Name—yawning, putting in an extra hour for a workaholic's merit badge. He reviewed the maps of the former copra estates, weeded productivity assessments, examined market trends and commodities stats until he hated it all but at least he was forming a comprehensive, lucid picture of change in this no-account nation, changes that were simple and elegant and precise in his notes and made him feel light-headed with a premonition of their impact. Once, the Eisenhower-era phone on his desk gave an abrupt chime and then dribbled a stream of gummy bell-notes. Mitchell picked up the receiver and a woman squawked, “Ministry's on fire, baby,” or so he thought. When he went down to the reception area, there were no flames, no smoke, and the secretary nodded to an old man sitting on a folding chair, watch cap in hand. “Dere he is,” the woman told Mitchell.

“Who?” Mitchell asked.

“What I juss tell you,” she said officiously. “De mahn is here who need to know about de tree you hire him to chop down.”

Mitchell didn't have a tree to chop down, and when he spoke to the old man, he couldn't understand his answer, and sent him away.

Finally Mitchell took his Gitane out on the cobbled streets of the old careenage where he became a fluid thread of speed through the early evening traffic, the noisy mix of people queuing up for jitneys, the pods of cattle and goats, the lorries that wanted to skin him. The gears of the bicycle clicked incrementally to adjust to the difficulty of the slope as Mitchell passed out of town into its alternately ramshackle and wealthy outskirts. The southeastern face of the mountain rose off his left shoulder, channeled with darkness, and the sea ahead gathered a soft woolen shadow far out on its rim. He pumped the pedals hard until he was gasping, which made him exuberant, thinking this was what it meant and how it felt when it was good, the breeze in his face carrying the smells and conversations of the open shops, the people and the architecture jolted into impressionistic messages, scrolled ironwork, flowered dresses, a girl toting a calf's head by its bloody ear, a many-gabled boarded-over house, a line of women jogging like Masai warriors, single file on the path flanking the road, shallow baskets of plantains and passionfruit balanced on their erect heads. Mitchell pumped for more speed as he crested Zion Hill, crossed Brandon Vale, labored up Ooah Mountain, and began to coast downward toward Howard Bay, purple land crabs scuttling out of their sandy holes and jigging on the black road in front of him. He was flying, free and unburdened, wishing he had no place to go.