Swimming in the Volcano (23 page)

“Well ... she's teed off at me.” Tillman compressed his lips and, with a butter knife, dug at a smudge of paste stuck to his tee shirt. At that moment Adrian's backside bumped open the door, filling the kitchen with a surge of cackling and bass-heavy music. Muscling a plastic tub of dirty dishes, she wheeled around and glared at the two men as though they were a pair of worthless sloths. The tub crashed down on the sinkboard; straining theatrically, she hoisted the tray Tillman had newly set and was gone without a word, pounding open the door with a thrust of her boyish hips.

“You don't say,” Mitchell said.

“Yep, but I don't see what I can do about it,” Tillman admitted, going to wash his hands with a lump of soap resembling processed yam.

Mitchell probed the leftover debris on the plates Adrian had bussed. Flecks of gravied rice, morsels of fish attached to gray rubberish skin, french fries with bites taken out, gum wrappers, cigarette butts and cigar ash, dirtied napkins, toothpicks with bloodied points.
He ate whatever appeared digestible. “You're a cruel bastard, I hear,” he said with his mouth filled with waste.

“Oh? You've heard reports?”

It was a masticated fray of gristle that finally woke up Mitchell's self-disgust. “Yes,” he answered Tillman, straightening up. “You are accused of exploiting affluent white women, luring them to this tropic sweatshop with lies about sunbathing, sailing, and other deceptions.”

“I'm afraid what you say is true.” He ran hot water into a square aluminum sink. Mitchell handed him grease-smeared tableware. “As long as you don't let them unpack their luggage and settle in, you can get a lot of work out of them. Once they set foot on the beach though, Wilson, that's it, they're not good for anything.”

Mitchell had his eye on a dusty can of black olives, high up on a shelf. “I approve of your policy,” he said. “In fact, why don't you just take Johnnie and keep her, put her to work.”

“Now there's a helpful woman,” Tillman noted, his arms submerged under a film of ugly suds.

“Can I have those olives up there?”

“Help yourself. Whatever you can find in the refrigerator too.” Tillman explained that they could have handled the evening's crowd but his local girl bailed out right as the restaurant opened. She and Adrian had a disagreement over how the tables should be set and who would waitress which stations. Adrian scolded her; she took a hike.

Mitchell opened the can of olives and inspected them. They looked like small pickled testicles, and tasted rotten. He threw them in with the trash and went over to the ancient Kelvinator, its surface hammered with rusty dents, splashed with grime. He clucked at Adrian's New York temper. She had taken a lesson in what an islander's feet were for—to retreat from shit and into misery.

“Didn't you tell me you had hired an entire new staff?”

“Two sets of them in the past month. They won't stay.” The former cook threw in the apron when Tillman's mother died, deciding to go home to her village on the leeward side where she was born. Now she was raising grandchildren while her daughters froze in Boston and Montreal. He had hired several cooks since then, same with the maids. After a day or two they complained of headaches, cramps, shivers. They believed there was a spell cast on Rosehill and claimed to see the duppy of Tillman's mother swimming around the corridors of the manor house, enticing them with a fruit slice on a spoon. With the next group of people he hired, Tillman said he would bring in an
exorcist, or fake an exorcism, something to soothe the native imaginations of the labor pool.

In the refrigerator, there was some unlikely aborted thing squashed into a stainless-steel bowl. Mitchell suggested the exorcist start here. “What is this creature,” he asked, poking its plastic-white surface. “And is it edible?”

It happened to be an octopus a fisherman had brought Tillman two or three days ago. He had removed its skin and parboiled it and there it sat, chilled and bald and dead, a snack of weird marine life. Mitchell ruminated on the hideous milky flesh, thinking, I am going to eat that octopus. He lifted the animal by a flaccid, slippery tentacle and bit off about four inches, the tasteless meat expanding in his mouth as he chewed, the sucker nodules like hard silicone jujubes, and his jaw soon hurt from grinding on it. He tried to swallow but gagged. Johnnie came out of breath into the kitchen while he stood there choking, holding the octopus like Medusa's head.

“Fucking Christ!” She did a double take. “What in the world are you trying to eat?” She set her tub of dishes down and fanned herself with a saucer, her face flushed. Mitchell slipped the octopus into the slops bucket where it would be delivered as breakfast to an island pig, and tried to recover his dignity.

“You look as if you've been dancing,” he said.

“I have. Your rum punch has made people stinko. I've been goosed and hugged I don't know how many times.”

“Where's Adrian?” Tillman wondered, drying his hands on the curtain above the sink.

Johnnie rolled her eyes and said Adrian had been captured by an obnoxious German and made to sit in his lap.

“That may be merely justice at work.”

“All right,” said Tillman as he switched to a clean shirt. “Let's all escape.” They had prevailed with great courage in the trenches of tourism, but enough was enough.

On the other side of the door, the restaurant was experiencing a communal release of inhibition. A foursome of silver-haired diners were on their feet interpreting the loud reggae music through geriatric experiments in body language, their dancing a quasi-erotic hybrid of the polka and the twist. A young man and a young woman who had dined separately had discovered they were both from the Midwest and were introducing themselves with vigorous kisses and bottom squeezing. A man Mitchell had last seen sullen, dressed in a polyester suit like a television deacon, sang the chorus of the island's
most current hit, “You Sexy Thing,” to his pudding-faced wife, who reacted with a fierce broadcast of contempt. A trio of marmish women, red as radishes from the sun, hooked their arms around each other and sought to make a respectable exit but entangled their six feet and crumbled, in slow motion, down. Another pair of women with bleached hair and big red mouths slandered one another, their Long Island accents like dentist drills whining through the general turbulence while their husbands slumped in their chairs, puffing cigars. Other ladies cooled themselves off with napkin fans, tugged their skirts up past midthigh, loosened the top buttons of their blouses. Half the diners seemed to be sharing wanton jokes and coarse anecdotes with the other half who, trying to be receptive, fought to keep their eyes from crossing.

They rescued Adrian from her Aryan kidnapper just as he began to fold with sentimentality. Tillman locked the kitchen and the bar cabinets and put another record on the stereo, a Sinatra album to sedate his guests, nudge them toward the maudlin stage of intoxication that the German had pioneered. In a short speech Tillman bid the customers good evening, told them they were on their own, encouraged them to feel at home—which meant they should not destroy anything on the premises.

“Douse the lights,” a celebrant yelled as the Sinatra came over the sound system, and his call was approved by consensus.

Out in the breezeway Tillman confronted Adrian. “Did you make that man cry?”

“No! That ass told me he cried all the time because he had missed the war.”

Inside the foyer the night desk clerk, a slim young black woman with a dandelion puff of hair, was asleep on her stool, slumped onto her arms, a pencil planted in one fist, a neat stack of schoolbooks off to the side. Adrian snorted. “Why couldn't she help out in the restaurant when that other bitch quit?”

“That person's doing exactly what I pay her to do,” Tillman said, unaffected by Adrian's tone.

“She seems absolutely useless to me,” Adrian replied as they walked past the unconscious girl and out the front door. “I don't see how you can run a business this way.”

Tillman said he thought getting accepted premed at Harvard hardly struck him as useless, that the girl had no peace at home, and no money, and so on the contrary her presence was useful because it made him feel useful, able to provide her with a small amount of both. Tillman put his arm around Adrian's shoulder.

“I didn't mind that much, really,” Adrian cooed.
Oh, brother
, Mitchell thought; Johnnie suppressed a snort. “But my feet are killing me.”

“Shhh.” Tillman made everyone stop. “Listen ... hear it?”

Quietly they huddled together on the cobbles of the drive. Artificial embers of colored light were suspended in a fragrant moist hush of darkness pinholed high above by brighter than ever stars. The ubiquitous flora gushed in waves around them, soft, curling, ticklish. They listened with progressive expectations—What do you want the world to be? the night asked, and could this be it? There was a big noise. Invisible insects and frogs transmitted a fuzzy radio hum of startling magnitude. A breeze fluffed the topmost branches of a mass of mango trees so that the leaves reflected scratches of light and looked like a school of bait fish changing direction, turning toward the attraction of a rising half moon.

“Hear it?” Tillman repeated.

Smooth pebbles plunked into different volumes of water—music. Round notes effervesced up the hill from the beach, were lost in eddies and dead pockets and then recovered, fading but heard again as if they rode a tidal flux in the atmosphere. Pan music, the latent harmony in metal, resurrected from debris on the wharves and refineries of Trinidad by illiterate laborers. Those men had taught themselves how to seize what was empty and refill it with desire. For any magic, emptiness was the first criterion—a space, an object, a human soul or a steel petrol drum drained of its former content and then reconstituted to carry the flow of something vital, like these sounds in the night.

The spell of listening was broken by Grampa Hell the gardener materializing out of the darkness, greeting them with a grunt and a flash from the blade of his machete before he disappeared again into a tunnel of his own making. Tillman led them onward to his estate runabout, a battered but rebuilt Mahari Citroen, roofless and windowless with lawn chairs for seats and a body of shellacked plywood. Underdog, Rosehill's mutt, was asleep in it and they chased him out, climbed in themselves.

“Are we ready?” Tillman asked, picking through his ring of keys. Mitchell wasn't but failed to say so. He wanted to remain as they were for eternity, in the dark and ready to go, Rosehill all lit up with pointless celebration and the liquid music from below heard and not heard, spindrift melody so delicate you could believe if you wanted that it came from inside yourself.

“Fire her up,” Johnnie said. Adrian bounced in her seat.

“Ready, steady, go.”

Inserting the key, Tillman demolished every illusion of peace born by the night air, for the Mahari without a muffler had the vocal chords of heavy machinery. Mitchell, who had lost faith in modern forms of transportation on Ooah Mountain, was nervous in his flimsy seat, expecting the worst, a part of him even welcoming it. “Into the sea,” he shouted over the noise. Tillman wiggled the shifter into first gear and they chugged forward down the ravine of the drive, the volume of the puny two-cylinder motor reaching a warlike howl, each cobblestone registered rudely through worn-out shocks, steering around crapauds illuminated like petty thieves in the sweep of headlights. Next to Mitchell Johnnie did something mildly exaggerated and rambunctious—she stood up for the thrill of the wind, though they couldn't have been more exposed to it as they were—and even though at first Mitchell tried to restrain her he stopped himself and simply held on to her knees and watched her above him, anonymous in the rush through the dark, and continued on a train of reasoning he had boarded since seeing her at the airport, hearing her inadequate justification for her return. He was forced to recognize that, for the sake of love itself, every statement of love must be judged harshly, that the planet was inflated with unwarranted statements of love, swollen with the prayers and invocations of love in books, on television, in advertisements as well as on gravestones, a frightful escalation in the volume of love's voice that was slowly scarring his inner ear, rendering unfit his ability to hear what others truly felt, and if it kept on, one day he would likely find himself tone deaf to humanity, which is a way of saying he would mistake every human sound as the plea of men and women he could not possibly help.

Rosehill's beach bar had a personality that made it ideologically separate from the hotel on the hill. If the Plantation was, in a manner of speaking, a tomb or theme park or museum for the march of European sensibilities through the West Indies, then the beach bar was one of the island's stewpots for tomorrow's national picnic, the
we-ahll-is-one
picnic promised by the calypso singers, the trade unions, the ministers, the churchmen, by men as opposed in their vision as Joshua Kingsley and Edison Banks. So the beach bar complemented the mother operation with a life of its own, the offspring of a parent who found it necessary to draw a line between who could be brought home and who could not. A hotel overrun by local characters whose profession seemed to be overrunning places was not colorful and authentic, merely volatile. The bar therefore existed as a
buffer, a free-market zone serving anyone who bellied forward into it with no apparent mischief in mind. The concrete dance patio was available to every kid courageous enough to come out of the bushes, any teenager with enough aplomb and pluck to approach the young women of another country, another class, a different race; any coconut higgler or hand-line fisherman who secretly believed there was a playboy prince inside of him, waiting for an invitation to rule a corner of the world. And for tourists the aura of the beach bar was in fact an exotic authenticity, and though it wasn't as raw as they eagerly perceived, it was a legitimate Third World medium for them to stir themselves into, a genuine
black
experience of the type they feared and avoided at home.