Swimming in the Volcano (29 page)

Nighttime; a school parking lot; in the near distance, the dome of artificial light over the football field, the off-key halftime sounds of the marching band oompahed into the frosty air. Johnnie's red Volkswagen, the door open, the radio on loud. Johnnie, wearing a Villager blouse, a white sweater tied over her hips, a Scottish tartan wraparound skirt fastened with a large gold safety pin. Black stockings
that made a girl's legs transcend flesh and blood and become art, a dangerous incitement. She held a bottle of white wine to her mouth like a crystal trumpet, and she danced by herself, waltzing steps meant for the late September moon, a white eyelash caught on the screen of heaven. That was it, scant evidence for all that followed. A sentimental snapshot of the wholesome past, encoded with painful contests of will and future abdications from reality. He watched her, holding his breath, riveted by her boldness, her unilateral claim on the night, the thrilling aura of confidence that surrounded her which he mistook for self-knowledge, he watched her until she sat back down in her car, singing, and then he backed off into the shadows and retraced his steps back to the much diminished glory of the game, knowing enough not to disturb her, not yet, not until he could match the tenor of her optimism, the autonomy with which she guided herself into the world. One way or the other, he had been watching her ever since, mesmerized. He couldn't stop watching her; it wasn't possible.

The head of the household prodded his guests to join him in a drink. On an enameled tray he brought out a pitty of strong rum and three teacups, the porcelain stained and crackled like the mesh in the skin of a snake. He quartered a lime with his pocketknife and poured out an extreme dose into each of the cups, emptying his own down his gullet to set a manly example of style. Mitchell sipped the homemade rum tasting of jet fuel, looking over the rim of the cup at the man who monitored his progress with unabashed scrutiny. There was a devious air to the farmer's hospitality that made Mitchell uneasy and he frowned back at him, thinking, What is it that
you
want? Ballantyne took a refill, as content as a plant being watered, disregarding Mitchell's restlessness. Without his help, the two black men finished off the pitty and a second one was brought from the kitchen by a chubby hippo-faced teenage girl, her skull bound with a red bandanna, her teeth oversized and square as dice. The backs of her shoes were crushed down by her heels and she did not pick up her feet when she walked. Her dress, a brown polyester shift, was unzipped in the back, her bra visible across the darkness of her flesh like a plaster bandage.

This is my daughter—
Dis me dottah
—the farmer declared, after she had slogged back to the kitchen. His pride in her was distorted by his anxious, lopsided grin. Ballantyne grunted indifferently. Mitchell put his cup to his mouth. The man divvied the second pint of rum.

“Priscilla,” he said, naming the girl for them.

“Yes, Poppi,” she answered from back within the house, thinking she was being called.

“Blasted gy-url,” the farmer said to himself out loud, then shouted back for her to hush. Mitchell was shocked to see the man signaling him with sly winks. He thrust out his lower lip and jerked his chin toward the kitchen doorway. “Want to mek a baby wit she?” he asked in a conspiratorial voice.

Ballantyne sniggered and Mitchell chuckled too. With an awkward smile he gulped what remained of his moonshine and set the cup on the table. It took so little to get fucked up on a hot day, you were already halfway along the second you stepped into it.

“Yes,” the father of the girl continued with unyielding enthusiasm. “Mek a baby wit she.” Priscilla came to stand on the threshold of the room, her eyes downcast, her hands straight at her sides. Mitchell couldn't believe he was giving her a second look. Thoroughly unable to perceive her sexuality he turned away, mortified. He looked at Ballantyne, hunched over and bug-eyed, ready to die laughing. “No thanks,” Mitchell blurted out. “Really.” His cheeks felt feverish from the blood rising into them.

“A baby,” the farmer persisted. He gestured with his head for Mitchell to turn around to inspect the scene behind him at the end of a short hallway. A door opened to a bed with rumpled white sheeting, a wrought-iron headboard with two graceful arches dovetailing at the center, like a boldline drawing of buttocks. A beam of sharp light cut the mattress in half. Mitchell was struck by the absence of pillows. He looked back at the eager, expectant farmer, his face expanded with a lurid grin, and allowed his repugnance to show, though that was the extent of his failure of etiquette.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I have to get back to the ministry. She seems like a perfectly lovely girl.”

Ballantyne smothered his laughter. Mitchell, incredulous, listened to the girl's father's jovial reassurances. “It ain goin tek a full day to give she de medicine, bwoy. You jus mek it. We tek charge of de after-wahds.”

The man's sincerity was so outlandish Mitchell panicked. He stood up suddenly and made for the door, getting knifed by sunshine as he hopped down into the dirt yard and marched to the Rover and sprawled across the seat. Jesus! he thought. Unwillingly he pictured himself screwing the girl zombie on the sagging mattress, mommi and poppi standing by, murmuring approval. The notion came to him
again that he was some current brand of freak centurion of an overrated empire, wandering into these out-of-the-way villages to be heralded as the arbiter of freedom.

“She clean, mahn,” he heard the man propose loudly from inside the house, a final attempt to negotiate a profit that was beyond Mitchell's ability to calculate. Was there anyone in the world for whom the girl could offer a soul, a heart, be anything more than meat, subhuman. The images of intercourse with the girl made Mitchell feel blasphemous, then indignant. He toyed with the truth that the man inside the house didn't deserve to live. Ballantyne stuck his head in the window, snorting, and Mitchell sat up to let him in.

“Fuck you,” Mitchell snapped. “Go ahead and laugh. You probably get a commission.”

Ballantyne was so amused that tears rolled from his eyes and he thumped the steering wheel with his fist.

“Why didn't he ask you to fuck her? Tell me I'm a bigot, I don't give a shit.”

Ballantyne finally controlled himself enough to say you wouldn't catch him poking his thing into such a homely cow of a girl. As Ballantyne fit the key into the ignition, Mitchell noticed the man come out on his stoop, holding his jaw, blood running from his mouth through his fingers as he stood watching them drive away.

“What happened to him?”

“He decide to sell.”

“You have a daughter, don't you?”

“Two. He give a very good price, you know.”

They rode back to Queenstown in a silence made steamy by the aftermath of heavy rains.

Walking from the Rover to the stairs up to the main floor of the ministry, Mitchell noticed the veterinarian's assistant Morrison lurking in the mouth of the cave that was the supply room which doubled as his office and decided to stop in. Morrison was incapable of concealing his hostility and Mitchell realized he found the vet assistant's displays bracing, cathartic, mildly addictive, and he naturally assumed that his own skeptical attitudes made them comrades in subversion. He had nicknamed Morrison The Prophet.

“What's up, Morrison?” asked Mitchell as they gripped each other's hands.

“Mahn, I ain goin vaccinate no more sheeps. Dey does piss all over me pants and shoes. A fella cy-ahn only tek so much piss before he
move on. Wilson, you hear de big news?” He drew his finger across his throat from ear to ear. “Dey unload Samuels dis mornin.”

“I heard. What do you think it means?”

“It means Kingsley is next, mahn. Banks goin string him up.” Morrison had a gleam in his eyes that Mitchell described to himself as the end of charity.

“I don't know,” Mitchell worried. “This crusade might be a little hasty, at least in its method of enforcement.” He mentioned the trucks he had seen on the road north of Peru, ferrying off the peasants who had settled on the common lands of Plaissance to a relocation site that as far as Mitchell knew was unspecified, and likely unprepared.

“Banks ain move dem people. Look to Kingsley, Wilson.”

“Why would Kingsley do that? He's the one hollering they should stay put.” Morrison glared at him and scoffed. “You tell me, mahn. You tell me. What you is doin anyway, lickin Kingsley's arse?”

“Me!” Mitchell protested.

“Puppetshow,” said Morrison, and made himself busy.

Mitchell went upstairs, wanting to hide out in his office and ruminate on Kingsley and his latest chicanery. But his office wasn't isolated from the world, everyone from old women hucksters to muddy farmers in from the countryside, town drunks and curious children, once even a black-bellied sheep, had materialized at his door, and as he walked down the hall he knew someone was in there now, waiting for him, telegraphing his presence by slapping out a syncopated rhythm on the surface of his desk. At first he didn't recognize the kid, but then he looked closer and identified him as one of Isaac's younger brothers. Without a word he sprung to his feet and handed Mitchell a note, folded carefully into quarters. Mitchell opened it.

Dear Mr. Wilson—

We are missing Isaac. He has not come back.

Signed, Mrs. Clara Knowles.

“Where does she think he is?” he asked the boy.

“Me no know.”

He told the boy to tell his mother not to worry, he'd find Isaac—either in bed with a woman or in a bar with a bottle, taking consolation for his loss of
Miss Defy
—and encourage him to check in at home. “Cool,” said the boy, full of high nervous energy, and left.

Mitchell put his briefcase down, closed the door, removed his
bookpack from his shoulders, and changed into the fresh oxford shirt he always carried in it for times when he'd return to the ministry, drenched in sweat from being out in the field. On his desk was another note, this one from Johnnie, telling him she had come into town to have lunch with him but no one knew where he was. Next to it was a mimeographed memorandum signed by the deputy minister, announcing Hudson's appointment as CAO. Mitchell crumpled both and pitched them into the wastebasket.

He went to the window and watched the cars, beat-up minis and dusty sedans, entering and leaving the compound. The late afternoon sun faded all the bright tropical colors, emptied streets, made the Friday tailings of commerce and labor ugly. All the myriad annoyances of island life that only yesterday seemed so inclined toward comedy today produced in him a latent rage of incapacitation. Without success Mitchell tried telephoning Tillman at Rosehill, to learn if he knew of Isaac's whereabouts. Twice the phone was picked up at the other end by people who seemed part of a practical joke. His third attempt was even more farcical. Somehow the operator connected him with Radio 805. It was the daily “Bob Marley Hour,” call in your dedication. He could hear the music and its pile-driving thump in the background. The deejay asked if Mitchell wanted to request a tune. A cleansing breeze puffed through the window; the papers on his desk vibrated and floated and then landed. To prevent documents from blowing around, there were small round beach stones throughout the ministry, as though they had been issued by General Services.

“No thanks,” said Mitchell. “I think I'm getting the Marley thing all mixed up.”

He asked the switchboard to try to put him through again, weighing down his papers with the stones as he waited. The phone rang. A lorry hammered along the street below the open windows, its load of cement bags bouncing up a gray dust that wafted through the leaves of a colossal ficus tree. Somewhere in the whitewashed recesses of the building a secretary tapped in indecisive spurts on a manual typewriter. At the other end of the line, Tillman answered the phone.

“Hey, buddy,” he said jauntily. “We're bachelors again.” Adrian, Johnnie, and Big Sally had talked their way aboard one of the charter planes and were down on Cotton Island. Saconi was having a party

They discussed Isaac's disappearance and Tillman, speculating on the various possibilities, confirmed Mitchell's own sense of what had happened to their friend, and his mind was eased.

“Did you know that Kingsley is Isaac's godfather?”

“No kidding?” said Tillman, but he wasn't surprised. “These are all one people, one family here. That's the problem. Hurt one and you hurt them all, but you can only help them out one person at a time.”

“I'm not ready to believe that.”

“Yet.”

Gleaming puddles, clean black windows into nowhere, lay in a sheet of patches across the uneven stones of the floor—if they gave him no water, is that what he must do, lap them up like a dog; now it has come to this:
dogness?
—and it was from within the puddles that the depth and cold smell of silence seemed to emanate. High up on one of the walls, out of reach, was the joke of a bare light bulb, its topside crusted with filth, its socket combed with mud dauber's nests, and higher still a white lance of daylight shot through a hole no larger than a loaf of bread where the rock wall intersected with the mossy bricks of the vaulting. The casement was splattered with bat lime, the wall covered with a long beard of it, almost to the floor. Up there was ground level, where the world began. He knew exactly where he was—in
the hands of the Allambys
, that family of moneylenders and debt collectors who had spread throughout the islands in the nineteenth century and were the source of the popular expression which meant to be in a hole with nobody to throw you a rope, to be in a bad way without the chance for a reprieve.
In the hands of the Allambys
, which meant don't fret yourself with being saved because nobody listening.

The under-the-earth air, its uncirculated sadness, was not unfamiliar to him; was, even, reminiscent of childhood games, crawling into dark spaces and beneath floorboards and under porches, hiding from his brothers, escaping punishment, which ultimately could not be escaped but only deferred, and bwoy he take some good whippings in his day, but here the odors of concealment were institutionally poisoned with carbolic acid and lye, and it was frightening for a space this size, which could sleep a dozen men, all lying on their own pallets, to be without people, to be without enterprise, and to be without noise except for the batbirds and rats and ghost lizards and such.