Swimming in the Volcano (39 page)

What's there? Cassius chanted to himself, his inner voice as mechanical as the movements of his body. The deepening ticked pain, sharper and sharper, into his ears. What's there?
What's there?
He frog-kicked desperately, down toward a thicket of gleaming antlers, but then his lungs gave out, and he had to return. He clawed through the resistance of the atmosphere, the perilous living blueness that would just as soon keep him, racing his silver bubbles to the surface. Refilling his lungs, he dove a second time.

He was a being who had learned to live with the furtive noiseless stealth of a reef creature, and he felt a strange and inexplicable comfort—something euphoric was happening—this time as he descended, the pressure like a frozen explosion in his skull, and he turned and looked in wonder back at the boat, which had become an insignificant beetle scratching at the surface of a mirror. A nurse shark passed over him like an unmoored blimp. The boy had the distinct impression he was about to meet someone who would welcome his arrival. He coughed giddy laughter into his snorkel, hollow balls of glass. He began to suffocate and then burst through a plane of white anger to the surface. Wherever the turtle was, he had lost sight of it, but he gulped as much air as he could fit into himself and dove again, almost nimble now that his fear had been smothered and extinguished. He felt the spirit of the person or thing pass through him with a pleasure as crushing as if he had ejaculated. Cassius thought,
Sweet!
and was overwhelmed. There was the turtle, directly underneath him.

He ceased kicking and sank. Like a small black angel, he floated downward through the evening-blue realm that had before always been a desolation to him. Now, everything was different. He knew the answer to What's there?
He, Cassius, was there!
He floated alongside the feeding turtle, amazed by its beauty and delicacy, like a breed of angel itself. He thought,
Angel
.

He thought, You're there!
You dere!

The turtle flared its fins, making itself vertical to face Cassius, its scaled gold neck outstretched in curiosity. The two of them hung in
suspended animation as Cassius stared into the turtle's beatific eyes and recognized, there in their lambent gaze, the sheltering acceptance that had at some lost time been a secret source of mercy in the world, his last chance for refuge. They were the eyes of a woman—he almost said her name, but didn't quite know it soundly enough to speak it—and they beckoned to him, filled with the tender honey-glow of amber, as he extended the gun.

They hung in the liquid turquoise air as if they had been painted into its center. Then, from behind the boy, simultaneously surrounding the two of them, a violence splintered the atmosphere of gently refracted light into a whirling current of hundreds, and then thousands, of luminescent pieces, a radiant blizzard that pulsed and swelled like an undersea storm of electricity, light of creation and light of the soul, as the boy and turtle were suddenly absorbed into a large school of bait fish passing over and above and between them at high, convulsive speed. The water seemed to effervesce from their agitation; the boy's own skin tingled with their charge. He leaned forward, straining to see, into this rushing river of light fragments, the cascade of sparks and blades, the intelligence of the whole like a single blast of fire, leaned forward and thus shaped a void in the flow, a perfect seamed resistance, and there, once more, was the turtle, waiting for him, a lover in a grotto.

The pattern of the lights shredded and dispersed. His vision was spotting as he came closer to blacking out. He hurt. Everything hurt. Everything had always hurt like this, when he wasn't careful. He no longer needed to breathe if he didn't want to. That's what the turtle was waiting for, the choice he would make. There was no time left. There was time to speak her name—the name of the woman within the eyes of the beast—but then he got mixed up, and didn't want to. There was one woman, there were many women—???

None of them was his friend.

The spear was aimed at the turtle's fluorescent throat. He pulled the trigger. He saw a bouquet of crystal flowers, blooming upward, up and up, chased and smashed by the ice cobblestones which were his own expiring breath.

Cassius thought: Collymore cy-ahnt grip me hair so. Him have no right.

Collymore took the turtle from the boy and speeded him into the boat. Luck had chosen to run with him today, bwoy—he had sighted a large loggerhead, riding the surface current to the southwest, and had already stepped the mast in order to head off in pursuit. Cassius
took his seat, bent over, gasping. Two years ago, Collymore had been jubilant about the boy's unsteady achievements, squandering his praise on ingratitude, like talking to a dy-amn stone bobo; then he began telling what he cared to tell to the seabirds—and then, nothing at all, nothing, never, he had no more to say to encourage the boy. Cassius unscrewed the spear point and withdrew the shaft from the bloody turtle at his feet. The boat sliced into its tack. The boy felt exalted, and spoke unconsciously, his eyes still burned by the incandescence of this, his first kill, the death of an intelligence he had recognized.

“She sit dere and ... and ... and let me shoot. I aim like so—
pozv!
”

Collymore's eyes were fixed on an invisible point in the distance. He answered out of the side of his mouth, “Eh, so why you not stick him in de fin, nuh?” and the deserved chastisement, so familiar, awoke the boy from his hallucination of happiness and power. But the immobility that had lasted half his life, the glaciation of his spirit, had been ruptured and he could not return to it.

Collymore sprang from his helmsman's seat and, without bothering to furl the sail, deftly lowered the mast, no noise, no effort to his movement. They were in the spot where the loggerhead had last sounded, and now they waited for it to sound again. A dull glare had appeared on the water. Goose bumps rose on the boy's flesh, his arms and legs jittered, but he sat erect and alert, focused on Collymore, and studied his father as if he had never seen him before. The turtle sounded, making its manlike suck for air, thirty feet from the boat; its blunt wedge of head probed nightmarishly through the silvered shine. Cassius thought:
I know dem creature
. Collymore edged over the side and was gone, his shadow fragmenting and then absorbed by the underworld. The bilge was soupy with gore and Cassius bailed with the calabash, letting it trickle out into the sea, which for some reason gave him satisfaction, as though he had discovered a ritual that had been available to him all along. The carnage stained the water, spreading like a cloud of smoke, the blood greenish, the particles of flesh whitening like flakes of ash. He became so preoccupied that Collymore slipped from his mind, so that now he believed he was only imagining his own name being called out in the ocean air, at the brink of the world. Finally, he looked up and acknowledged it, and out on the smoothly rolled aluminum of the swells he saw a violence—frantic convulsive splashing—and though he said to himself,
Cassius is ready, he ready
, he didn't move but stared at the filth swirling around his ankles until his name became the ocean's curse, and then he remembered Collymore, and took his station at the oars.
He pulled obediently in the direction of his father, his muscles not registering the effort, saying to himself, over and over, as if to count the strokes,
Dem magic, I know dem, dem magic. Magic creature. Sinbad creature. Angel. Devil-dog
.

And if saying so made it true, he made it true. There was a harrowing urgency to Collymore's shouting; the watery cries made an electric current flutter up the boy's spine, telegraphing resentment and fear. A weariness too was in Collymore's voice, an unprecedented heavy tone of doubt, as if he were not equal to the struggle.
Good
, Cassius heard himself mutter, but knew he had meant
Bad
. Along the seam of this contradiction, reality divided: he would have to fight, the fight would be terrible, the fight would be heroic. The boat was no more than a few pulls away from the diver. He stowed the oars and let it glide forward, turning himself sideways to look at the Sinbad thing, his eyes glazed. With failing effort, Collymore held the huge sled of shell upright, its top out of the water, the loggerhead's powerful front flippers useless in the air, as long as an osprey's wings but slapping ineffectually, like a drunken man swinging his arms at dup-pies, unable to run to safety. It looked to Cassius as though Collymore were offering him the turtle, making a gift of this horror trying to swim away into the sky. The head of the animal was the size of a year-old cow's; the boy watched it crane and dip like an imbecile's, its yellowish lizard throat gulping. Now the pair writhed together in a slow, circling dance, Collymore pulled down with it, then bobbing back up, his strength sapped. Cassius could only see his father in pieces, lost behind the barnacled shell, and hear his hoarse, threatening voice.

“Tek up de fin! Now, bwoy! Tek it up, tek it up! If he break away, is you ass to pay!”

He had killed an angel, and its spirit had sent this darkness to swallow him.

“You devil beast,” he whispered, and reached out to take hold of its scaly flipper.

Collymore was getting dunked repeatedly, but once the boy had an advantage on the fin, he released the loggerhead and submerged under his own will, grabbing the gun that dangled beneath his feet, attached by a line to the spear that impaled the turtle's backfin. He was safe, now that the turtle couldn't dive. For a moment Collymore was underneath it, could measure its size against the boat—a fourth the length of the hull, at least—the sky blocked out, the uninjured fin raking his shoulder and back. The sudden weight in the boy's hands almost somersaulted him into the water, but he braced his knees
against the planks, and hooked his feet onto the ribbing. Then the turtle was going to tear his arms off, and he let go. His father was back aboard, screaming at him, and the turtle was towing the boat through the water like a plodding ox. The gun was braced against the thwart, held in place by Collymore, but he made the boy come put his feet against it, then hung his forearms over the gunwale, vomiting seawater as he tried to catch his breath. Lured by the drama, sharks flew up from below in the deep—Cassius watched their vague streaking shapes forming and unforming beneath the surface, thoughts in a disturbed mind. His father noticed them too but regarded them with disdain. He wanted the turtle boated, now, before the sharks took a greater interest in it—a turtle so big it would be a victory, a legend, back on shore. He began hauling the spearline hand over hand, bringing the loggerhead and its retinue of shadows ever closer to the hull. The harpooned fin emerged. Collymore hollered instructions at the boy, who grabbed the shaft on each side of the fin and pulled. Collymore returned to the water and pushed from below, and they managed to lift the carapace half up on the gunwale, tottering, about to come in, when Cassius lost his strength, the turtle too immense, like a plucked dinosaur bird, and splashed back into the sea. His father swore at him, uncoiled up out of the water to swat at him but missed and plunged away. They tried again but failed, and now the sharks were growing bolder, bumping against Collymore's legs and the boat, so he climbed back in, took the shaft of the spear himself, the bones inside the limb broken now and angled cruelly, and made the boy dip over and grab the forefin, madly kicking, but he could not bring it more than a few inches out of the water before he was stopped by the full stone weight of the colossus. Collymore drove his foot into the boy's hip, to spur him, but the weight was too much for Cassius. He sent the boy to the bow, then, to take the machete and cut two lengths from the anchor line, to use as slings, and two short pieces to lash the left-side fins of the turtle to the boat. Cassius obeyed, but in a wild tantrum, nonsense spilling out of his mouth in a rage. Collymore took the rope from the boy and cleated off the destroyed flipper, made the boy noose the second short piece on its counterpart, dunking into the water past his rib cage, the catboat heeling radically to starboard from the imbalance of weight. Cassius clutched for the fin but it eluded him. Sharks flicked past, everywhere, swooping and turning like buzzards, banging against the turtle to identify it. He was past endurance and blind, but his fingers found the elbow of the fin and sunk into the plastic flesh, the rope somehow cinching itself, then all existence quickened, and to see what was
happening, Cassius opened his eyes in time to see a dove fly out of the pale, open beak of the turtle, then came a tug and he was in the water upside down to his hips, and his father had the rope and was raising him up, the turtle's head reared backward on its elastic palm trunk of a neck, the steel-hard mandibles of its jaws clamped on his forearm. His scream exploded like a shattered window into his face. Collymore hauled with all his might and the boy tore his arm away, pouring blood, and flipped back into the boat. Collymore strained and hauled, the mountain of shell rising up over the gunwale, the head stretching outward and away, as if it might disembody itself, the neck extending impossibly far toward an impossible freedom, but even as Collymore saw it and marveled at its resistance, the boy struck with the machete, and the head canted crazily and then collapsed, the neck broken by its own weight, once the muscles had been severed. Astounded, Collymore let loose of the rope with one hand and swatted the boy. The boy swatted back without hesitation, still brandishing the machete, the blade taking Collymore's hand off, right above the wrist that still held the rope. Collymore had sharpened the edge himself so that it would no more than stutter as it passed through green bone, given the proper amount of determination. From his throat came a gobbling sound, which amazed him as much as the loss of his hand. Gushing blood, the turtle swung back down and disappeared underneath the leaden glass of the water, except for the tortured limb still pinned to the rail. The sharks came in like a pack of dogs, ripping apart a rabbit, and the boat bucked and tipped in the storm of their feeding. Collymore lurched to take the machete from the boy's hand, but Cassius chopped him again on the cheek. There were sparkling rainbows of blood. After several lost minutes, not timelessness at all but an exact reckoning of time—
his
time, that had been taken from him—the boy was suddenly aware that Collymore was no longer in the boat, that he was alone, and with inscrutable calm he sat down on the thwart, crossing his arms over his chest, his own blood a silken scarf running into his shorts, his head held high and his wild eyes taking possession of the glorious coliseum of emptiness, the boat jerking and twitching from its center like an exposed nerve. Before sliding the oars into their locks, he held the waterglass over the side and scanned the blue caldron of infinity until he saw the ribboned ball of his father, tossed back and forth between the mad huddle.