Swimming in the Volcano (38 page)

Nothing alive in the world closes with such finality as the jaws of a conger eel. Even after he had clubbed it to death it was part of him, his ball and chain.

Collymore heaved himself into the boat and slapped the boy until his senses returned, prying the club from his mortal grip. He severed the eel from its head, but wasn't strong enough—or cruel enough,
even him
—to unlock the jaws and set the child free.

*     *     *

Collymore had long since been fed up with the boy, his weakness and fears, the exaggerated gestures of persecution; the numb, averted eyes, stagnant pools of hostility; his ears that heard nothing—
nothing
—but the distant amorous sighs of land; least of all the ulcerous hate, which wouldn't have been so bad if it provoked the boy, lit a fire beneath his scrawny arse, challenged him, as it had long ago with the parrot fish, made him rise up erect with the vital energies of vengeance—but it didn't: the boy was too slow, buried within himself in an envelope of malaise, to employ even one of the many chastening advantages of hatred. He had no pride in a good day's work, no blood that natural wonder could put a fever into, no home in his heart for stories, not a part in him that Collymore could see that ever warmed up to the world, and this was not what the fisherman had bargained for when he bargained for a son. Collymore's love for the boy blew in and blew out, in their first months together, like a rogue south wind; now he only expected to get whatever labor he could wring out of the boy's body, harden him up for the day when he would not be there in the morning, tucked on the car seat, when he would just wander off and disappear like a wary dog, to fend for himself.

Sometimes when Cassius shut his eyes the sun was brighter than ever; the spell-binding labor of the boat and its intervals of boredom as unrestful as illness. There was no remedy for it, and time slid off its shell unnoticed; no parole except for the unforgettable ache of Sundays with their strange church-echo, mother-echo—the psalm-singing of feral lovemaking from the back room, the radio's melodies a sour harmony, as Collymore jooked the island girls on his mattress pad.

On stormy days Collymore took refuge in Mamma Smallhorne's rumshop and the boy submerged as far as he could take himself into the badness of the weather. At their worst, these days were his only ally, preventing the boat from being launched, sometimes days in a row. On most nights he slept consumed by dreams of fright, something scaring the breath out of him, he didn't know what, dreams as bottomless as the blue water.

Despite his own sense of doom, and the more visceral feeling that Collymore would work him until he was dead, the boy survived, growing into a wiry adolescence. Though he was still and always would be short, with bandy legs (the right one ornamented with a spectacular braid of scar tissue from the eel, like the stitching on a baseball), his leanness concealed the true capacity of his young strength. He had become a tireless spartan worker who never seemed to register ordinary pain or fatigue. He could haul fish twice his
weight into the boat with ease, row cheerlessly from dawn to dusk without faltering rhythm. He was morose, and because Collymore both cursed and bragged about him to the other fishermen, he had a contradictory reputation for courage—some swore he had it, some said the boy was the most gutless runt that ever put off from shore in a catboat. No one in the community of Norman's Cove knew him well, no one wanted to, no one saw any benefit to it, and so he remained a constant to all whose lives he drifted past, and especially to Collymore—a vacant, impassive, stony, difficult youth, notable only for his spinelessness. Only a few looked close enough to see in him a silence as fatal as a viper's.

He premeditated nothing. No dreams, no fantasies, visions or revelations showed him a course of action. He was living the Sinbad thing. He just knew. There was nothing he could do to make himself ready for trouble, except to know it was coming.

Came his last summering with Collymore, a day they sailed outside the reef to turtle during the time when the hawksbills and loggerheads and greens completed their solitary migrations to mate in island waters. The breeze was mild, the swells lulling. They appeared to sail forward into an olympian theater or coliseum of sluggish cumuli—to Cassius a basket of smoke; to Collymore, only lazy clouds—spread with an awning of colorless overcast. With the surface so obliquely illuminated, the water was at its richest sapphire, the intimacy of its depths opening upward, magnified, shifting and smeared, then transparent and miragelike. Often they saw birds resting on the slicks, and the seascape itself was a stage-set drama that lacked the energy to gather its elements together and begin.

The first turtle had sounded and Collymore had furled the sail, lowered the mast across the boat's three seats, and ordered the boy to the oars. When his father had first made him do it, years before, Cassius had suffered as an oarsman, fighting the clumsy sticks in their rope locks, but by now he preferred it, the fully occupied mindlessness of the synchronized strokes, the backward-facing position of the rower, the moving ahead without looking ahead, proceeding into a future that required nothing more than infrequent, over-the-shoulder glances. There were calluses on his hands hard enough to stop a thorn. Sometimes he rowed naked, took off his rags and stowed them in a piece of oilcloth until they were coming ashore, but today he wore a pair of tattered swim trunks and a gray-colored shirt, buttonless and with the sleeves removed, like a vest. He stretched, dipped, pulled, released; stretched, dipped, pulled, released and thought about the mongrel bitch that had bellied under Collymore's shanty a month
back and given birth to a litter of worms that had now turned into puppies. Yesterday was Sunday, and he had decided to take one of the puppies for a walk. He tied a piece of twine around its neck for a leash. Its legs weren't used to walking. He dragged the puppy around Norman's Cove for an hour and then threw it away, because it was dead, choked by the twine. He rowed on, thinking to himself,
There are one two three four five more puppies. No, six. No, seven. No, five
.

Collymore was on his stomach in the bow, peering into a water-glass, a window into the ocean, trying to spot the turtle which he knew would be suspended below them like a hummingbird as it fed on the reef.
Come in!
he would call to the boy, or
Go out! Slow it! Wait up! Pull!
—
de boat, de boat, eh? me no say pull you peeny sparrow cock
—
me say de boat! Pull!

He located the turtle—turtles! a pair of greens. A slyness tempered his voice at such moments of discovery; Cassius heard it and smirked to himself as he was ordered to rest the oars. It used to be that Collymore hunted turtles with a ring net, as some of the old-timers still did, but Cotton Island had changed over the past five years, and all the able fishermen had grown addicted to the excitement of the gun. Collymore removed his tee shirt, strapped on mask and fins, and eased himself noiselessly over the side so as not to alarm the prey. Cassius handed out the long gun to him; Collymore armed it, stretching its rubber sling to where its metal clasp fit into its notch in the spear shaft. He filled his lungs and dove.

A minute passed. The boy, hearing water clear from Collymore's snorkel, sculled the boat ahead. Glancing sideways, he saw Collymore veer off, roll and gracefully arch like a porpoise, and go down again. Cassius idly repositioned the boat and daydreamed of riding the ferry to St. Catherine, where he imagined it was possible to attend something much like the chariot races in
Ben Hur
; then he dreamed of asking the man he still believed was his real father, Rupert Quashie, if he could have a bicycle. He recited the rote exercises he had learned in school. Naught and one is one. Britain—b-r-i-t-a-i-n. Majesty—m-a-g-
no
, m-a-j—Collymore was back on the surface, his face in the water, a sound like muffled whoops piping from his snorkel, alerting the boy. Cassius rowed, knowing there would be a turtle to load. When the boat was alongside the diver, Collymore handed him the gun; the boy stood up and retrieved its tether until it brought him the butt of the spear. He prepared for resistance, but felt only cold weight, and then he could see that Collymore had done something oafish and ignoble, had shot two turtles at once, and had shot them through the shell, which was considered an amateurish method, and
problematic, since the idea was to hit the turtle in one of its fins. Such a shot demanded expert marksmanship but meant the boat took a live turtle. No one would pay money for dead turtles that had ridden in the sun all day, so these were turtles they would have to eat themselves, or give away. Worse, they were small greens, their shells of no value—the male no more than fifteen pounds, the female less. The boy jerked them in over the gunwale, his father giving an unnecessary push from underneath. Collymore slid the mask up to his forehead. He spit out the mouthpiece of the snorkel, his eyes cunning and merry.

“Two fah one,” he boasted. “I strike dem while dey was jookin, bwoy.” For a moment, he wanted the boy to share his amusement, to applaud his marksmanship. Then he remembered it was an empty cause. The boy had never laughed, smiled, never
appreciated
. If you wanted so little as to hear his mumbly voice, you had to make him speak, prod him to open his mouth. “Who you see as yet get two fah one?” he continued with diminished enthusiasm. “Trevor? Robertson?” He named his two closest rivals in the fishing fleet from Cotton Island, men married to the sea as he was. Uncharacteristically, the boy answered.

“Dem dead up.”

Neither in tone nor expression had the boy altered his basic remoteness with this observation, but to Collymore, having starved on the youth's scant responses for six years, having just made what he knew himself to be an infelicitous, shameful kill shot, these three words burned in his ears. The boy would never respect him, never have confidence, never be a worthy companion, never be but an anchor on the few simple glories Collymore labored to raise from the world. He heard
dem dead up
as the first note on a scale of challenges, tantamount to a declaration of forthcoming independence. This meant Cassius had entered into his age of rebellion; the time when they would war against each other for dominance had arrived, sooner than he had reckoned, and this knowledge infuriated Collymore. He reared straight up out of the water to his waist, grabbing the nap of the boy's hair, uncut for more than a year, frizzed and orangish from its bleach of salt, and yanked him flapping into the water.

“Eh, eh,” Collymore snarled, replacing Cassius at the oars. “Lehwe see you put two turtle in dis boat, Geronimo.”

With the advent of lobstering on the island, Collymore had told the boy he must rotate with him in the water, share the load with his virgin lungs—Here, you ain no garden boy, peewee—but on hearing this news, Cassius had lowered his head, wouldn't go so far as to
shake it, and held tight to his seat. Collymore said he would count to five. Cassius closed his eyes and waited, then Collymore had him, was stripping him down to his sad underpants. He fought and twisted and bit like a mongoose, to no avail. Collymore picked him up and flung him overboard and rowed off a hundred feet, watching with spiteful satisfaction, the boy sputtering and treading water and trying not to panic. Cassius had no experience with the mask and snorkel, other than for hurried moments bottom fishing out in blue water when nature itself hurled him overboard, since no matter how much he desired to, he found it impossible to lean backside out over the bucking boat and evacuate his bowels the way his father could. He couldn't do it, ended up shitting on himself and then had to get in anyway. Collymore enjoyed telling him that those deep and wilder waters were dangerous
in truth
, just the place where a mako shark the size of a politician's car might mistake the boy for a duck, swallow him whole, eh? and so the boy donned the mask willingly to keep guard on himself, slide quietly in, spinning in terror, his underpants around his knees, the turds torpedoing out behind him into the blue atmosphere while he stared and stared into the dense infinity of the underworld until his vision blurred with the strain of never sighting anything but the waste of his own solitude.

Throughout the weeks he rotated with Collymore, Cassius brought little to the boat, most of his shots hurried and desperate, thunking into rock, puffing sand into the lobster's insect eyes, and Collymore, disgusted, had rescinded the order and allowed the boy his oars.

He knew how much the boy wanted the mask. He had rowed up current and let the boat drift slowly back to where the boy could hang off. Collymore couldn't see his head, only his fingers curled over the gunwale, the split, chewed nails, and he could hear the boy's teeth chattering. Piece by piece, Collymore dropped the gear over the side, making the boy swim to catch it before it sank.

Reluctantly, Cassius kicked into the current; his shaking arms cradled the gun. His skin constricted from the chill of the water, heightening his awareness of the tension of his own muscles, their taut power. He had never hunted where it was so deep; instinctively, he angled toward the waves on the barrier reef in the distance. Below, a canyon wall dropped off abruptly into blue space, its crown ridged by mushroom clusters of brain coral that in their shape and stillness resembled the weather above the surface. Along the edge of the deepness, Cassius was sure he saw something leviathan; it hovered on the
periphery of visibility, threatening to manifest itself, collecting itself particle by particle, but then evaporating with the same dreamlike uncertainty. What was there, what was not there—you never knew until too late. On the ghost-white sand between two stands of staghorn, a school of small sharks swirled like a cloud of gnats. In forty feet of water, out of a thousand shapes of fear, Cassius watched a hawksbill emerge with utmost innocence from a pink sway of soft coral. He had no choice but to inflate his lungs and dive into the clear hissing shadows.