Swimming in the Volcano (42 page)

“Well, here we are,” she said, much more solemn than she intended. Finally, they were bound together, as they might always be.

There's all this space
, she had said, spreading her hands and extending them into the distance they could no longer see,
and all of it pressing in
.

“Do you know what I mean, or at least do you know what I feel?”

She had felt her blood heating up with something other than springtime, as if she were being prodded by an unseen force toward inexplicable acts, obscure desires, but the real point was that more and more she felt unafraid, almost reckless, prepared to take a chance, and that could mean marrying him, or maybe she was understanding that she wasn't settler stock after all. To be born into it was not to be given a choice.

“I wouldn't have stopped here, a hundred years ago,” she said, perhaps too fiercely, with an implicit contempt that she didn't feel. She could see she had hurt him.

“I can't see how it matters where you stop,” he said, a reproach for denying him the rightness of his own choices, “just so you do. Some day, before you burn yourself out.”

I hope it wasn't girls like me you were fighting for, she apologized to him, far inside herself.

“This is a morale problem,” he said, combing her hair back from her face with his red hand. “Trust me. I understand.”

She exposed more and more of her thoughts, stripping herself, surprised by her brazenness because she had never said these things before, not even in her own head, because they were until now only sensations of hunger and need, bereft of voice, and no telling how trustworthy. I feel isolated, she confessed, almost pleading. I feel forced into place. I feel passed by and forgotten. He grunted and drank his schnapps and let her reveal herself. She asked him, leaning
toward him in earnest concentration to receive his response, what he thought he would be doing anyway, fifteen years down the road.

“What you see,” he answered, and tucked a pinch of snuff under his lip, and he tipped his head at the coming darkness.

With his bare hand he cleared a circle through the frost on the windshield and squinted out at the colorless twilight spreading through space, even the fence line gone, and no lights on shore. For him it was only a visitation of unexpected weather, and just as it sifted down on them it would lift away. Nothing could prevent its passing and the idea was to hold on. But for Sally the quiet life she had been enduring, what was yesterday only a persistent nagging mood, had bumped against something deeper, something immovable that was not temporary, and she wondered, How did I arrive at this boldness, where did juvenile fantasies end, and an imagination you could work with begin? Was it as simple as loving life
too
much? If that was so, loving life this way was madness, it swept you out on the edge of propriety, it drove you wild. And if you resisted, it poisoned you.

She felt a tremor of real fear—was she wise and strong enough for this, her own imagination—her own
illusions?
—parenting her into another life? But how could anyone possibly know? What she knew was that for the first time she was wide awake to what she would become if she stayed, and the first casualty would be her momentum, that motion or energy that was hers because she was young and unimpeded. Out here—with Jerry or without him—it would unravel into complacency, and there she would sit, a Mother Goose in Kansas, and never knowing otherwise. She wanted to give this expanded idea of freedom a run for its money. It was her birthright, she saw that now. It explained everything.

The window within the window Jerry had made had iced over again, and he pawed at it, smearing out an opening. Outside, with nightfall, a luminous hush had transformed the snow into something peaceful and welcoming, Christmasy. But the feeling only lasted for an instant, receding into the distant lowing of cattle, which sounded like the misery of ghosts being blown across the plains.

“I think I'm going to have to leave,” she said and, looking at his reaction, pushed her back against the door, recoiling from his misshapen expression, the way he peered at her, as if she were a serious problem he better find a solution to,
now
. He was drunk enough by then and misunderstood her, imagining she had determined to get out of the truck, defy both his decency and the deadly weather and hike back to the farmhouse. He seemed to fall across the seat onto her,
grabbing her roughly to stop her from opening the door, inadvertently tugged her hair and hurt her neck, and she was almost grateful for this, the physical dimension of his anger.

“You're insane, fucking insane,” he spit, the words thick and minty. “You'll kill yourself.” He looked away to say in disgust,
stupid fucking bitch
, and then snorted, relaxing his hold on her, and then turned back, shoving his red face into hers. “You won't make it. You'll die. You're not getting out of here, understand?”

Instinctively, she brushed his cheek with a kiss. “I love you,” she answered apologetically, but she didn't, she said it only to console him, as she imagined she would have to say to him or somebody else, and for the same reason, if she remained out here on the prairies.

She had no money saved, no friends in places distinct from where she was now. Any ticket out was the right ticket. The news made her mother sit by herself in the living room and cry, somehow hurt and then exasperated; it made her father take a second, probing and unfriendly look at her. “For God's sake, where in the world is St. Catherine?” her mother asked in distress. “It doesn't matter, Mom,” Sally told her with a smile she regretted. “I don't really care where it is.” Her father went to the bookcase and pulled out a volume of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, one of the few times she ever saw him with a book in his hand that was not a manual. He scanned the entry for the island and shook his head. “You might as well be in Africa,” he said.

“Thank God it
isn't
Africa,” her mother responded, thinking only of her daughter's welfare.

After school Sally's time was her own, on those days free of administrative loose ends, and she spent it with a sense of unrestricted wealth, heading for the scarcely populated beaches or the fragrant carnival-like crush of the market. Or she would walk back to the house to write ebullient, almost boastful letters to Kansas, or read her weekly novel snatched from the shelves of the expats; wash laundry by hand and foot in the shower, which turned out to be quite good exercise, or practice the harmonica she had promised to teach herself to play (the irony of “Home on the Range” didn't faze her), or trek to the Botanic Gardens and sketch flowers. On Tuesday afternoons she would brief sponsors at the Ministry of Education, lest they disremember her crusade, and on Wednesday evenings she would go to the club where Saconi rehearsed with his band. And though she wasn't immune to the camaraderie to be enjoyed in the volunteer community, she found that her old reasons for seeking them out—to
compare strategies and tell interminable war stories—were moot, once the school was operative, and she felt less and less compelled to spend time among people whose experiences seemed so suffocatingly close to her own. She knew too that some of them, despite their talk about compassion and justice and the other pet ideals that flew like banners in their rhetoric, disapproved of her relationship with Saconi, a few accused her of being a camp follower, groupie, whatever, a plain Jane promenading with her handsome black stud, something naughty to write in her journal, she was exploiting him, he was exploiting her,
blah blah blah
, endlessly and unkindly, until she made a point of keeping separate these two facets of her life in St. Catherine, as much as that was possible in such a dab of a country.

Today, however, she walked along the length of the busy quay toward the center of Queenstown and Government House, past glistening stevedores stripped to the waist, their heads cooled with wet rags, the impoverished fleet of workboats hugging the wharf, their eczemic hulls flaking chips of blue and white paint into the harbor, solitary sails patched and soiled with age; past the herb-heads squatting on the edge of the dock, perched on the huge capstans, lined up like pelicans facing the sea as they brazenly shared a cone of ganja; through a mob of older schoolgirls, forms five and six, in white knee socks and bursting white blouses, their style to leave the blouse untucked over the pleats of their blue skirts, the younger girls from the middle schools in plain jumpers, hair braided with ribbons; past the makeshift stalls of the weary hucksters unable to afford the fee at the government's new covered market, the women with their egglike skulls wrapped in bright-colored cloth, hovering over pyramids of avocado pears, oranges and limes and hideous soursop, papayas, and just-ripe mangoes, first of the season, garlic bulbs and pigeon peas and bundles of coriander and basil and thyme tied with thread, the more competitive of the women barking for Sally's attention but only receiving the briefest fragment of smile. But she returned the long incredulous look of a girl in flowered cotton underpants, her mother beside her in a sack shift, the muscles veined and lumped in the wood of the woman's legs, their feet powdered with white dust, each carrying a rank basket of ballyhoo on her head with the most erect posture imaginable. As if they had not yet been permitted to play in the twentieth century, children too young for school rolled hoops salvaged from old bicycle wheels, guiding the rims with flat sticks, or sat in the packed dirt and shot marbles. A man roasted a breadfruit on a brazier of coals until its skin was as black as a bowling ball. A knot of scampy, tattered boys surrounded the movie advertisements pasted to
a cinderblock wall, goggling at the posters:
Hell Up in Harlem
and
Bogard: Beat Him to Win
, plus the latest kung fu neck-busters from Taiwan. The proprietors of the rum sheds nodded amiably as she passed, their sideburns like scimitars, and Sally saw the policeman with the close-cropped mustache who had once humiliated Saconi in front of her by asking him to produce identification, the rotten shit, and up ahead was the crazy man called Long Time who had helped dig the Panama Canal, sailors in straw cowboy hats, fishermen down on the water cleaning a mossy mound of conch, ugly-footed beggars with rheumy eyes, ships' pursers with clipboards and gold-framed sunglasses, a group of idle taxi drivers having a smoke-and-joke, basket weavers, fishmongers, bloody butchers in their filthy stalls, boys pushing wheelbarrows of ice, vendors of hawksbill combs and black coral jewelry, waternut men like artillery captains standing by their mound of shells, curry-makers and roti-rollers, sidewalk preachers, staggering drunks and hefty, handsome women and mutant dogs lapping at jade green puddles and a leper with no nose and a crusty, suppurating mouth-hole, riding a donkey; an osprey ascending into the sky with a dead rat in its talons. And who could say she was not entitled to all she saw, that this world too was hers, a part of the human dowry, that the big-shouldered woman with the hockey player's legs, the white lady dressed in the pink sunshift batiked with frangipani blossoms, the girl bare to the golden upper rise of her breasts and sweating like a man, her inner hair plastered along her neck, a few slick brown tendrils curling across her throat, who could say she wasn't herself part of the life of the city? No one could tell her she didn't belong there because she could no longer say it to herself, not since she had become married to the island's sorrows and frustrations, its threats and wonders, so that what was normal in a normal life had been redefined, transformed, its seams loosened to accommodate her, and not since she had resolved during the days in bed spent grieving for her shattered purity, frightened by her own bullheadedness, that St. Catherine could defeat her if it chose but she was staying, she was willing to assume the costs, whatever the asking price was for this dazzling enthrallment of human energy.

And here, she even frowned at the cruise ship anchored in the harbor for a half-day stopover—God, was there anything worse than a tourist? At least she had found her own way around that problem.
My, my, Miss Sally
, she chided herself,
what's gotten into you?

She turned landward up Drake Street with its lemon-washed, cream-trimmed colonial facades. The block she was on thundered with music, a calypso from Saconi's new album,
Free Costs Dear
,
pumped out for public consumption by the stereo system at Calvin Da Silva's Disc Den. Calvin, in a tiger-striped dashiki and stocking cap, saluted with his raised fist from behind the shop's counter as she passed his open door. Sally waved back.
Are you deaf yet?
she mouthed. She pointed at her ears and shook her head, watching Calvin's lips move, a sentence destroyed by the hurricane of sound. He stood serenely in the calm eye of fanaticism while walls fissured and foundations cracked in the buildings on the street.

She couldn't fathom the point of such loudness, less a gift than a nuisance. In Sally's opinion, Calvin was too shrewd for his own good in his appreciation of Saconi and his music. He emceed the local concerts and was more than a little responsible for the management and promotion that had popularized the musician throughout the Antilles. In return Saconi proudly—and foolishly, she would say—displayed the lack of business sense attributed to artists. The record merchant controlled the books—to his own advantage, Sally suspected, but Saconi refused to discuss such a bourgeois matter. Less than a year ago Calvin, proselytizing brotherhood, persuaded Saconi to break with the distributorship that handled his label because it was run by light-skinned East Indians—
coolies
—in Trinidad. What about double standards? she had protested privately to Saconi, but he assured her his only motive was to assert control over his own future. They screw you for pennies same as dollars, Calvin told Saconi—virile black boys were too ignorant to be anything but what history and nature and foreign entrepreneurs said they were: slaves. Next Da Silva formed his own recording company to shape the range of Saconi's creative and financial affairs, but Saconi seemed no better off than before. Watch out for Calvin, Sally had warned. Try to understand brotherhood, he had told her. But he's not black, Sally had argued, he's rich—there's a difference. Afterward, Saconi composed “Rise to White” in response to the conversation, the number-one single in the Caribbean for three consecutive weeks last fall. Calvin had no inkling he was the subject of the hit.