Swimming in the Volcano (20 page)

A cat was in the kitchen sink eating a plucked, half-frozen chicken. Straddled around the carcass, it was stripping the bird to the bone, with all four sets of claws sunk into the meat for leverage, finishing off a drumstick when Mitchell entered the room. The cat's mantis-shaped head held sideways, she emitted a vicious rumble from deep in her mean bush soul, pressing a cheek into the bird so she could go on chewing and growling while she kept a fierce yellow eye locked on Mitchell. As he came closer the cat ate faster, choking down bites.

“What is this?” Mitchell yelled. “That's
my
chicken!” He had roamed Queenstown during his lunch hour at the beginning of the week before he could find a roaster for sale. Mitchell picked up the flyswatter and slapped the cat's face with it but she retaliated, lashing out to strike her own blow, carving three beaded red lines, perfectly parallel, across the top of his wrist.

Mitchell thought all animals understood certain tones in the human voice, especially the one that threatened punishment and death—but not an island cat. He changed tactics and quickly turned on the faucet. The cat moaned, yet her resolve was no less for the drenching she underwent. The drain clogged and the basin began to fill. The chicken bobbed, careened in the rising flood, the cat astride it like a werewolf afloat, its fangs still gnawing away. Mitchell adjusted the spigot so that the stream splashed directly into her mouth, and though she held out as long as she could, he seized her by the scruff of the neck at the moment she abandoned ship. Into the air she went, loose skin and soggy fur bunched in his fist, as Mitchell gripped her in a manner temporarily paralyzing to feline criminals, hind legs and tail folded into her white belly, front paws extended as if she suffered a stroke while playing a piano, eyes stricken with desperation, decerebrated and utterly at Mitchell's mercy, which had run out.

“We'll see about those nine lives.”

The prisoner was hauled out to the veranda. To the left the drop was about twenty feet. A cropping of gray boulders turtled the ground, any one of them a substantial target. He suspended the cat over the railing so she could appreciate the severity of her predicament before he launched her. The cat flexed, squirmed ineffectually, and desisted.

Then Johnnie was in the doorway between the kitchen and the veranda, wiping her eyes and calling his name with concern. Her hair was snarled and her face girlishly sleep-ridden. Her uncovered breasts pointed at Mitchell like twin judges, blindly accusatory. “What are you doing?” she asked, coming awake.

“I'm talking to this cat.”

“What's wrong?”

“This is private.”

The cat cashed in one of her remaining lives to express an appeal for clemency. The body of the animal became resonant, like the soundbox of a viola, an invisible bow of repentance drawn across its strings. The plaint was almost supernatural, a forlorn otherworld yowling. Mitchell was impressed.

“Awww,” Johnnie commiserated. She crossed her arms, perhaps realizing how absurd it would seem to scold a man while she stood before him bare-breasted. “What did the poor cat do to deserve this treatment?”

It dawned on Mitchell that the only way the chicken could have traveled from the freezer in the refrigerator to the basin of the sink was if Johnnie had removed it to thaw for dinner, and she wouldn't have known to take precautions, to make the bird catproof. He brought the animal back over the rail and shouted into its face,
BAD CAT!
Her mouth twisted into a little pink gremlin's grin, her cat tongue panting fast as a hummingbird's heart, and Mitchell wished Johnnie wasn't around so he could wallop this hardened feline ruffian on the nose. He released her and she took off across the veranda and down into the bush like a skyrocket.

“Why do you abuse that creature?” Johnnie asked. “Is this a habit of yours?”

“Stop looking at me like I'm a barbarian and instead go look in the sink.”

She whooped and put a hand to her mouth, then propped both hands on her hips. “Oh no! She didn't, did she?”

“You can make bone soup.”

“That sneaky little bitch.”

“That's the spirit,” Mitchell said, vindicated.

There were no backup provisions for dinner. Mitchell rarely kept more than a throw-together stock in the house—an onion, a tin of Australian corned beef, a wedge of moldy unidentifiable cheese that came in large round red cans, eggs of varying sizes including a goose egg that he was frightened of, mangoes, guavas, and rotting bananas, a huge hairy dasheen and other popular island roots that he didn't know how to use, a cucumber, a carrot—somehow okay for one but glaringly inadequate for two. Johnnie apologized for the loss of the chicken and volunteered to go get another. “I'm afraid you can't,” he told her. “Chickens top the endangered grocery list on this island,” alongside beef, pork, fish, and mutton. They were sold to restaurants or exported; in consolation you could get all the necks, backs, wings, heads, and feet, locally known as scratches, that money could buy. To locate an entire bird or its nobler parts for sale you had to see a guy who knew a guy who had a friend, et cetera.

“I've never heard of a place with no chickens,” Johnnie said. After all, chickens were so trivial and she wasn't prepared to accept anything that magnified the trivial into a national shortcoming. He assumed she had never been out of the States before so her naïveté, however incomprehensible, wasn't as vulgar as it might have been in another person who might tend to judge a place by what was missing, the cancellation of entitlements. “Something's wrong here.”

While she talked she had slipped both index fingers into the waistband of her panties, ran them in sync off the opposite crowns of pelvis and met below her navel, pointing into her pubic hair. Back and forth, back and forth she did it, and Mitchell wanted to tell her to stop doing that, her hands like a gate opening and closing. Johnnie moved over beside Mitchell on the railing and since he wasn't looking at her face, and couldn't look at her hands, he found himself staring, abstractly, at her wonderful breasts, thinking God, tits can really rule a field of vision. Johnnie tapped her foot against his, detouring his attention down the length of her battered dancer's legs.

“So what do people eat around here?” she asked innocently.

“Well ...” Mitchell glanced up—her hair was on fire, her head bonneted by the sunset. “There's some excellent recipes for shit in this part of the world.” The parched way Mitchell said this made Johnnie laugh, and Johnnie's laugh was a cool wetness wrapped gently around his stubbornness.

“I hope you're doing something about that,” she half teased.

“Right,” he said. “That's the heart of my job—conceptualizing menus.”

She nudged against him, enjoying this game of conversation, and Mitchell thought in the unworldliness she had exposed he recognized an element of flirtation more conscious than the fingers in the band of her panties: the lure of vulnerability, the invitation to provide protection against the unknown. Now they had succeeded in doing what lovers do—make the world less serious so romance could have the greater power; catch flashes of substance in nets too fine to hold their weight beyond a moment, but in that moment to know from the feel that something of meaning had been there in the mesh and broken through, returning to the immensity of the distance between them. She bent forward as if to see him better, her arms slowly outstretched, clearly wanting a hug, the kindness that he had not yet expressed, and Mitchell wished she'd put some clothes on.

“Another woman hooked by the glamor of economics,” he said sardonically.

“Will you hold me for a second, Mitchell?”

He decided that, as she was, he couldn't be alone with her a minute more and so he stood away, telling Johnnie he was going for a quick twilight swim. When he came back they would go to Rosehill Plantation for dinner.

“Okay,” she managed to whisper, visibly hurt by his escape.

At the cliff Mitchell hung a towel on a sea-grape branch and scaled barefoot down the rocks to the colorless water. With a momentary ebb in the tidal surge, he left shore like a crocodile, slipping forward on his stomach, crawling to deeper water where he didn't have to be as mindful of the black urchins that clotted the bottom like military defense-works. As he breaststroked out from the jagged shoreline without splashing, the ripples rolled ahead of him, tremors through the silvery illusion of ice the crash of sun coated on the bay at this hour. Froglike he kept shooting himself onward until he had passed the red buoy that marked the boat channel. The bottom was thirty feet down here and he submerged, a firm sleek angling outward that twirled him down into the chilled density of blueness, spinning on his head inside a pleasure like no other, a dream pleasure because it required submersion within an altered state, a willful plunge where no earthly metaphor could possibly follow. Mitchell sank until his ears ached with the pressure, then reversed direction by tucking and uncoiling, which made him spring back toward the surface, breaking through the skin of mirror, and then floated on his back, only the darkening sky in sight, his eardrums rubbed by the static that issued from the depths, only the fresh night sky in sight as though he had been tossed out in space like a satellite and suspended in oceanic nothingness.

What a world, Mitchell thought, and whose idea was it anyway? Being in the water, safely lost throughout the time when everything has become bound to darkness, was like being saturated in a divine aphrodisiac. His feet slowly descended on their own once he forgot to keep them afloat, and his head thrust out of the water. The shore blackened solid; the sky and sea merged densities into one thick vapor with no visible definition. Occasionally zephyrs of sound were released from the land: the burr of a motor, the homeward lowing of cattle, a steel band that practiced somewhere in the village of Augustine, spurting brief celestial phrases of melody. The falsetto laugh of a woman suddenly delighted, her voice filling the entire bay for an instant. Rafts of sound out there in the darkness on the water with him.

A star signaled overhead and he saw it. Good evening, Mitchell said. Here's a wish if you're still in the business. Let's not let lust interfere with this bad arrangement, let's listen and wait and see what's what or else Johnnie and I are in trouble again, we'll never really meet a second time, the first in this tattered new world we've been brought to.

He snorted water out of his face and gave a vigorous kick toward shore, racing down the path of a thin wire of light cast from his own kitchen above the cliff, an idle meditation about wishing and stars occupying his swim back in. Were stars still taking orders for wishes or were they boycotting the twentieth century? Did other folks still wish upon stars—mailmen, lawyers, carpenters, politicians, mechanics, academics, IBM executives—or was the tradition reserved for children? What was the going rate, his professional self asked, and was it adjusted to a sliding scale? Was it still considered de rigueur that wishes were meant to be secrets, and did stars ever make book on the odds of a wish coming true, or reveal to other stars what they were up to? Were wishes treated with moral impartiality; that is, did a wish to harm someone have the same chance to come true as a wish to preserve? Was the wish of a bad person given the same attention as the wish of a good person? Were birthday cakes, wishbones, wells and fountains, or churches better than or equal to stars? Animal sacrifices? Did stars take retractions after you wished your enemy would get hit by a truck? Did a person's wishes exist forever, notched on his soul and on display in the afterlife, all those secrets that would never be erased, the wishes of greed, of frivolity, of malice, of prurience side by side with more honorable requests, the only honest record of who you had been in your own eyes?

But then that would mean the end of wishing, Mitchell thought, wouldn't it.

Johanna Woods, veteran of another timeworn paradise, took the walk along Howard Bay for granted. For all her nonchalance the beach they descended to from the house could have been the street she grew up on in the suburbs of northern Virginia instead of a mother-lode source of all those generic logos—the powdery golden shore, the overweight apricot moon, the silhouettes of palm trees—that advertisers used like flybait to entice the northern swarms. She scuffed across the sand next to Mitchell, sandals dangling from her hand. Her loose cotton skirt and peasant blouse, both white and unpressed, softened with friendly wrinkles, were a warm luminescence, like an antishadow, hovering on his left. Every so often she whistled sad, contented notes.

“You know, I haven't slept so long in years,” she said. “I feel brand new.”

She wanted to know how his job was going but Mitchell was in no mood to attempt a translation of that madness. He felt sulky, a rash of rude ambivalence inside him, and without thinking about what he was saying, he told her that he had been down here by the water on Christmas Eve when the villagers from Augustine brought their cows and pigs to be slaughtered on the beach. Blood puddles, fat flies, and stacks of bowels were everywhere, and the next morning the bay was full of swaying gore. A week later, out on the reef skin diving, he saw what he thought was a large eagle ray patrolling the bottom and dove down to it. It was the flayed hide to a bull, winging on the tide out to sea.

Johnnie interrupted the rhythm of her step. “What an awful thing to tell me on such a pretty night,” she said.

Readily exchanged worlds, confused times, spontaneous cynicism and intransigence—those were the benefits of easy travel for you. Her indifference to the surroundings had deprived Mitchell of the opportunity to give, to introduce and present, to dole out the exquisite beauties, to remark upon the specialness of things. And on the other side of that impulse was the relief he felt in not being able to exploit the natural glories as he might with another woman, claiming a right to a reward for details that he could not account for. The bay, the flora, the people, the fragrances were not props, but often it was hard not to think of them in exactly that way.