Swimming in the Volcano (37 page)

By summer, Rupert Quashie's injuries had healed as well as they would. He asked to be returned to duty; was offered—and accepted—a promotion and minor administrative posting on the island of Montserrat. Two months had passed since Emma had exiled Cassius with only the clothes on his back. Even now, she refused to think of him, and as she packed what she could of her house into cardboard boxes and baskets and a rusty footlocker, when she came across the boy's few things she began to throw them out, and would have, if Rupert had not noticed what she was doing. How the boy get by with no clothes? he wondered, but restrained himself from asking why she hadn't sent them. Since his recovery, she had been high-strung and testy; his transfer seemed to rejuvenate her, and so he was more inclined to let her be, and simply picked the clothes out of the trash pile himself, while she was at a neighbor's, folded them, inserted an envelope and a gift into the center of the stack, and tied the bundle with cord. He knew the boy had been schooled long enough to read and write, so he had written a short note:
Cassius: Here is clothes you leave behind. Miss Emma and I and girls going to Montserrat
—
2 days. You was a good boy and we miss your many smiles. Love, Rupt. Quashie P.S. Why Colly more not come to collect the clothes? Tell him I say he must treat you right
.

The gift he sent along was his brass-plated police badge. In Montserrat he would say it was lost, and be issued another.

He enlisted one of the girls to deliver the bundle to Norman's Cove where she set it down in the sand in front of Collymore's door and left in a hurry, ravaged by the clouds of mosquitoes that hung in the stifling air. When he returned that evening from the sea, as mindless and unseeing as a zombie, his knuckles scraped and his hands cut and swollen from a day of line-fishing that would have exhausted
most grown men, Cassius walked straight past the package and into the shack, to his car seat, and lay down, his flesh throbbing and vibrating, the hallucinatory nature of his fatigue already shifting beyond consciousness, into rapid-fire dreams. By now his school clothes were as odious and torn as slaughterhouse rags, with fish scales permanently affixed to their threads, never completely dry, and starchy with an accumulation of salt and crud. Gone-to-the-devil, Collymore had remarked, not with concern, for he himself was proud to fly the stained flags of a fisherman's rugged life. Still, returning home from his rum shop meal, it satisfied him to find the bundle of clothes at the door. He picked it up and set it inside the front room, and left a bag of blood sausage and bread for the boy's breakfast on the small table, the room's only other furnishing, against the wall.

Not until the weekend did Collymore remember the bundle and tell the boy—he had to be told—to untie it. There were three pairs of pants, three long-sleeved shirts, three undershirts and underpants, and a handkerchief—his rightful inheritance, and no more. He read the letter from Rupert without expression; its message came like a stale breath that had somehow been exhaled from a corpse. The page was undated, but the boy had lost track of the days anyway. As far as he knew, the Quashies had not yet departed Cotton Island, but the implied invitation to come say his good-bye was unintelligible to him: it rang once against the shield of his heart and echoed away into a fog. There was a constant gravity to the boy now that did not allow for human affairs that existed outside the sphere of Collymore.

The badge, however, attracted him, with the same ravenous and inexorable appetite of a fish committed to a lure. Immediately, the badge became an emotional horizon for the boy, reduced to seductive flashes but in proximity, bearing the illusion of attainment. He pinned it to his fresh shirt, the fabric retaining a trace of the garlic smells of his childhood, and wore it continuously, despite the teasing it earned him from the fishermen, and the apt nickname, Private. The weight of the badge became a timepiece, measuring a basic cycle. Only when a shirt became so threadbare it would no longer hold the formidable brass pin would Cassius throw the garment away, and wear another from his scanty wardrobe. As if his own needs were at best equal to the requirements of a piece of metal. It was a primitive's love, a sensation, and nothing more, so completely had he been severed from his past and its symbols, and as a pretty thing that suggested unidentified powers he wore it daily for two years, until he lost it, capsized in the water, on a day when Collymore was reckless enough to flaunt a squall, attempting to outrun it in a catboat overloaded
with a bounty of conch. The wind filled the sail like uncontrollable anger. With no freeboard to counterbalance, the leeward rail pressed down, admitting the flood, and the boy bailed furiously. Collymore, exalted by their speed, the bravado of their furrowing wake, refused to release the sheetline until it was too late. A severe gust blasted into them, standing the boat on its beam so that it swallowed enough water to plunge to the bottom, thirty feet below. For hours, Collymore and the boy swam toward shore through a tempest of gale-driven rain, the surface a gyrating hive of transparent liquid bees. The boy dog-paddled with closed eyes and followed the sound of Collymore, not having learned how to swim properly, and since his mouth stayed mostly in the water, he whimpered through his nose, expecting any second to be pulled under and drowned by an inhuman hand wrapping like a thick noose around his ankle. When they finally made the coast, Cassius discovered the badge was gone, and no search would bring it back.

The catboat though was another matter. Cassius spent what was for him a pleasure-filled night of restlessness, imagining the storm had saved him from this slavery he had been cast into. He squirmed on his car seat until morning, trying to see the outline of freedom that had been restored to his life, and was never more dejected than when Collymore marched him to the beach and they set out with two other fishing crews and resurfaced the boat. The salvagers even dove up the sluggish conch. Collymore and the boy returned to shore with it; they cleaned the meat from the shells until midday, and Cassius was given the rare reward of a fair-weather afternoon to himself, to squander as he pleased.

As he pleased!—but this was the anxious, haunted liberty of an amnesiac, a cheerless interlude from the drudgery and torpor of the boat; its eternal Present, expanding without change. He felt embalmed in salt and foreignness, walking the road to town, and soon turned back, preferring to stay near Collymore's shanty, craving nothing as much as his bed. He stared at goats and cattle as if trying to determine the secret of superiority. There had been other days too when Collymore had set him loose, but he spent them no differently, without joy or purpose. Because he had no money, he had no business in town, with its memories of Saturday morning sweets, or the cool magical darkness of the flim shows. Nostalgia was the same for him as starvation, and he could not endure its deep, inner pressures. And he avoided what was, in his mind, the great human commerce and communion of the public dock, because even on an impoverished island where rags and clothes were too often synonymous, his were
the most offensive, his body itself was an obscenity of neglect, and he was rebuffed for his crudity and for being the simpleton that the brilliance of the sun out on the water had made of him, framing his thoughts and feelings in a perpetual stupor. Truly, he became accustomed to this state, recognized it as his nature, inescapable, and so was able to provide himself with life's most austere comfort and permitted himself to believe that he deserved his downfall. Most of all, on these miscarried excursions beyond the wilderness of his new world, he could not stand the sight or company of his former schoolmates and their tenacious silence, looking him over, he thought, as if he had become disfigured or deformed. As if they were frightened of him. It was left to him then to bank away his penny allowances of freedom, as if they were given to him in a currency that was not exchangeable, and this is what he did, lingering in the shade of the sea grapes, sitting on a wooden fish box and snapping twigs between his growing fists, smoking cigarette butts he had scavenged off the road, killing mosquitoes and lizards and listening to birds, sitting and waiting beneath the monolithic shadow of his father, a gray soul in a limitless purgatory, waiting for the shadow to be thrown aside, or down.

In the third year of Cassius' servitude, a princess, he heard, came and restored an old plantation house on Cotton Island, a place where she could hide away from the world, and enjoy her holidays. The following year, on the perimeter of her compound, a small but exclusive hotel had opened, inaugurating the island's entry into the age of tourism, and the hotel prided itself on serving its guests enormous lobsters, brought fresh from the sea. To help fill this new and lucrative demand, Collymore had purchased a speargun and skin-diving gear. Though he was in poor shape for diving, and his debaucheries frequently modified his greed, even being bad at spearing crawfish, as he called them, was, for a time, profitable, especially after the ferry service improved, and the restaurant owners from St. Catherine came down to make deals with the fishermen.

One day, before the shallows had been hunted bare, the boy sat in the boat, manning its homemade oars, trailing after Collymore, who was up and down in the water like a seal. On one of his dives, the fisherman poked his head under a ledge of coral, sighting down into a narrow canyon of blue light flurried with motes of plankton, and saw two things that caused him excitement. The first, and first to be dealt with before he could slide deeper under the canopy of the ledge where it cracked and chambered, was an olive-hued conger eel, surely as long as his own leg but with ten times the power in its sleek, flat
muscle; and beyond, just the wavering tips visible past the serpentine roll of the eel's body, the antennae of a lobster that he guessed to be as long and round as his thigh. Though he couldn't see the crawfish, back in its hole, Collymore took several blind shots at it, firing beneath the eel, without success. He tried jabbing at the eel with the gun to prompt it out of its sanctuary, but the creature only made threatening feints, brainless and territorial, and Collymore made the unhappy decision that he would have to shoot it. Given such a large and unmoving target, though, he aimed too casually—the shot was poor, not a kill shot—and the eel vanished before his eyes, wedging itself within the rocks, the shaft of the steel spear clanking like the bell of a sunken ship.

Dozens of times, Collymore dove, struggled and ascended, back and forth between the fluid mirror of the surface and the twilight of the coral crevice, without retrieving his gun. Finally, he had the boy hand him the iron-tipped pole he carried in the boat, designed for such occasions as this. Its weight raced him to the ocean floor where he set about splitting and prying apart the coralheads where the eel had receded, fleeing to the surface as his air ran out, then back down again, as Cassius hovered the boat in the current. This was exhausting work—when the eel eventually materialized out of a cloud of pulverized coral, impaled and writhing, a tendon ripped from the flank of a giant, Collymore barely had time to grab the gun; barely the energy to haul this monstrous nuisance to the surface, a greenish smoke of blood trailing from its wound.

Cassius heard the fisherman blow the water from his snorkel. Nothing seemed amiss—Collymore had not even bothered to describe the problem to him, saying only that the spear had gotten jammed in the rocks. The boy hadn't volunteered to anchor off and help. As much as Cassius hated being in the boat, it was nothing compared to the panic he felt being in the water itself, far from shore. He pictured himself drowning, or being eaten—the two most inconceivably desolate and hellish fates that were the flirtations of every sailor and fisherman who ever left land. From this obsession he had only one remedy, a release, one rite of exorcism, however temporary and futile, and he found it in the customary violence of his occupation—the gratification he received from hammering to death a big, bloated fish was immense—and he became his most articulate in the expression of this violence. Each fish became an emissary from the chimeric wilds of his imagination; each blow he delivered to its bony plate of skull was accompanied by a monologue of childish condemnation.

It seemed to him right now that Collymore was resting, catching his breath. If Cassius had suspected otherwise, he would have been prepared and braced, the lead-weighted bludgeon in his hand, for the battle ahead of him. Instead, he was half lost in lassitude, managing a slow-motion tug of the oars to keep the boat near Collymore, who was somewhere close in front of him, off the bow.

“
Come! Come! Come!
”

Collymore had something for him. The urgency in his voice was not unfamiliar. The boy pulled ahead.

“
Kill it! Kill it!
”

Without further warning, into the stern of the boat dropped a monster of Sinbad proportions, whirling itself into multiple forms. In the eel's fury, it bent the shaft of the spear shot through its flesh into a right angle against the hull. The boy immediately let go of the oars and stood up in his seat, mortified, breathless, watching the beast smash and toss, strain, all neck, the Sinbad thing, an incarnation of utter virulence, wanting him, wanting at the boy, popping into the air as if it danced on a red-hot griddle. Motion that was pure wickedness, thoughtless and crazy—just to look at it made Cassius feel he was floating. He knew it was going to get him and it did. He knew, because, “
Look
—
It got me!
” he screamed. Astonishing, how he screamed. “
It got me! It eat me
!”—there it was, a lightning bolt clapped onto his leg. He wasn't even sure what it was, had never seen such a thing, and here it was stuck on his leg, its terrible beaked jaws snapped shut around his shin bone, sinking down into the meat of his calf. He was still a small boy, his youth blistered and festering, but he knew what to say as he grabbed for the pipe and battered it and battered it and battered it, all movement a target, anything a target, holding the pipe in both hands and chopping it down with surprising force, pulping the beast's flesh, his eyes held in shuddering enchantment by the aqueous snake eyes of the eel, and each blow no different than if it had struck himself simultaneously, so said his pain, beating and beating and blood spurting everywhere—
Cunt! You cunt! You muddah cunt! Clot cunt! Cunt hole! Cunt!