Swimming in the Volcano (50 page)

James canted his head two or three times, looking at Mitchell sideways, smiling helplessly, as his companion logged her side of the story in their mutual exchange of faultfinding.
Oh, the hell with this
, George James mouthed clearly and popped up, effusively courteous, to greet Mitchell and shake his hand. Mitchell noticed that James' blue jeans had an ironed crease down the length of each leg, which he associated with impostors. The President of the United States. The woman tilted her head only enough to acknowledge him and said nothing.

“Mitchell,” George James declared cheerily, “you are my Tuesday headline, bwoy.”

“
Shit
,” Mitchell sighed. “Why?” He sat down at the table, his quizzical look hardening into consternation.

“I will recite it for you, eh?” The editor's hands made chopping gestures to frame the words on the table. “PLDP SLOWDOWN ADVISED.”

“Come on, don't get me mixed up in that,” groaned Mitchell.

“The lead go like this,” George James continued: “‘
After consultations the week past with his chief economic advisors, the Honorable Joshua Kingsley, minister of agriculture, announced a course of prudence
...' You like it?”

“Keep my name out of it, George, could you?”

“Mahn, I lookin to you fah quote, Mitch. A piercin insight, nuh?” he said lightheartedly, but challenged Mitchell with an aggressive smile.

“No,” said Mitchell. “I'm not involved in this.” He felt nauseated by the thick cloying stink of jasmine and gardenias, evil flowers, which he associated with church and wintertime, riding in the family station wagon with his mother, asphyxiated by her perfume.

“Right, right,” James said, studying Mitchell with a look of mild irritation. “But you are the
expert
...” He stressed the word, not outright mockingly, but weighing its accuracy.

“You have to understand,” Mitchell said, barely able to keep himself from gagging. “Something's happening. Almost overnight, the land reform program seems to have compressed into a flashpoint.” He hated the imploring tone that seemed to rise out of his lungs, but there it was. He wanted to tell George James—he wanted to tell anybody, but couldn't—he wasn't on a crusade: I don't come wrapped in a flag, I am not a torchbearer for capitalism, my whiteness is incidental, but the responses would be reflexive—Yes you do, Yes you are, No it isn't—and worse, echoes of his own interior dialogue with himself, and he just didn't need to hear them again, feel their dead immovable weight.

“Yes, I agree about the program—how could it be otherwise?” said James, but before he could elaborate further the course and tenor of the evening changed entirely.

James' sullen companion suddenly perked up, looking above Mitchell at someone behind him and rolling her eyes, signaling she'd had enough. The journalist's eyes, too, shifted up. A waft of scent—rosemary or eucalyptus, something with a tang—preceded whoever had approached, then a pair of hands clamped on Mitchell's shoulders, as if to hold him down. The husky, honeyed, youth-hot voice of a woman whispered into his ear, sealing him into an envelope of audacious sexuality. A mop of skinny braids, interweaved with ribbons and trade beads, swept across his neck and cheek.

“You de white knight come to my rescue, bwoy? Here now, dese bloody people borin me to fits.”

He could see her elegantly boned hands, the long whorish nails, their fuchsia-colored polish chipped, the ostentatious hardware of her rings, one a silver ankh, but not her face, though he expected her to be beautiful—the first expectation of any man—because of her voice.

“Dis mahn cyanht leave, ya know,” she said out loud to the table, and glided into a river of
s^ssy
, exuberant patois while her fingers kneaded into his shoulders, making him speechless but at the same
time oddly balanced—rescued himself. Her facetiousness seemed to tranquilize all three of them, bring them up to speed on their moods.

“Dis mahd bickerage you two mek—I ain step out to referee lovers' spat, ya know.”

Her fingers fluttered up, one hand warm and open, the palm resting against his temple, the other cupping his chin, and then she turned him with a coaxing pressure to see his face.

“Oh me God,” she said theatrically. “He ain so plain-lookin, true?” She gazed down at him, vamping, then overacting a pout, as if her attempt at seduction had already ended in disappointment, and then she bent herself into him, laughing, her scarlet tongue hopping in her mouth. Her face was longish, narrow—flat and stylized as an African statue's—lacked the perfection of beauty, at least in Mitchell's own conception of it, but she was spectacular, a spectacle, an incendiary device. He felt a dangerous surge of attraction. She made him feel expropriated, which seemed to fit a recent pattern of expropriation. Her name, George James said, introducing them, was Josephine. Empress, dancer, and now, he wondered, whore? He must be Gemini, she said. No?
Sahgi?
Oh ho, she knew it, she said victoriously and kept herself delighted by creating these little coups.

Mitchell stood to pull out the empty chair next to him. She sat down, but not before she had done something akin to presenting herself, the deliberate physical fantasy of herself, making sure he had taken her in, head to toe, side and front, her girlfriend snickering at her shamelessness. Josephine's shoulder-length hair had been oiled, painstakingly cornrowed and braided pencil-thin and studded with ornaments—Medusa on her wedding day. It must have taken hours to do, suggesting to Mitchell a rather queenly existence for Josephine. Her dress was an emerald green sheath with a high neckline and a crenulated hem; tinsel had been woven into the fabric, random vertical lines, which caused her movements to gather in ribbed puckers of light, silvery cascades and shimmers accompanied by the clatter of her braids, like a certain type of wind chime made from bamboo. For a Catherinian woman, who tended toward brawniness, she was abnormally svelte and flat-chested, and her stork legs were planted into a pair of spike heels which by themselves were enough to set her apart, for lack of common sense, in a place of broken walks and dark unpaved lanes. It wasn't her blackness that made her a novelty to Mitchell as much as the particular branch of femininity where she seemed to have established herself. Some women were there to marvel over but not touch without special training, packaging themselves to command the strict attention of men, women opulent and robust,
taloned with sensuality, assigned to exclusive venues and readily assumed to be playthings and prizes, ultimate expressions of submissiveness feathered over with artifice and coquetry. Josephine was that, or a close call—what else
could
she be? By contrast, the other woman, James' consort, by far the lovelier of the two women, remained opaque in generic beauty, nameless, with a face that translated through culture and race. Josephine's eyes searched his momentarily, a magnetic fix, no longer teasing but radiant with curiosity.

“So who you is?”

Mitchell began to tell her, which brought George James back to life, who interrupted to say he was under the impression that Mitchell was an employee of the United States government. Follow the money trail, Mitchell hastened to explain, and that was where you ended up, but in fact his connection with Washington was tenuous, at best. Private consultant was the more apt description, if anyone cared. No one outside of St. Catherine really knew what he was doing until he filed his quarterly reports. A regional director posted in Jamaica exerted only cursory oversight. He was on his own, which was how he preferred it, since he still had a Sixties hangover from his bash with the Establishment. Josephine asked if he had been a hippie, and she wasn't kidding. He laughed self-deprecatingly, trying to imagine just what it was he had been back then, not long ago. Apathetic anarchist, moderate extremist, sentimental surrealist—all descriptions he had attached to himself in an essay he had written for some shapeless, earnest undergraduate class—Introduction to the Self, or something like that. Johnnie was living with him then, had proofread the paper, pronounced it
Far out
. So much for Whitmanesque self-knowledge circa 1969.

“I was a student,” he told Josephine. “Hippies didn't grow up to be economists.”

Explain that to me, she said, but he wasn't about to elaborate upon the instant anachronisms of his own life, although he wondered if she saw herself as a beneficiary of the counterculture, and if she did, was it because America had been bloodied, or blacks nominally empowered, or simply because from this distance it all looked like great fun? But he was more interested in the game she had initiated, and where it might lead. George James caught the attention of a waitress and they were brought another round of drinks. Mitchell made the transition that signaled to himself he was there for the evening by ordering rum, like everybody else. James plunged back into their earlier discussion and for several minutes Mitchell allowed himself the dignity of his own expertise, framing the sugar issue, why market forces made
its reintroduction on the island pure folly, and proposed that each estate be devoted to the production of a specialty crop, exotics like saffron, nutmeg, arrowroot, sorrel, christophene, tobacco, each crop spawning its own small agri-industry manufacturing a line of slickly packaged products to be exported to metropolitan centers in the States, Canada, Europe, et cetera. Josephine surprised and pleased him when she showed an insightful interest in the marketing aspects of the scheme, but her attention wandered when the two men returned to the conflicts now rising to the surface out of the stasis of the coalition. James alarmed Mitchell by taking a small notepad from his shirt pocket and jotting on it when Mitchell confided that a Kingsley minion had been spreading a rumor that same afternoon, stirring things up at the ministry: Kingsley was planning to issue certificates for land to the peasants who would soon be rounded up and removed from Jack Dawes Estate without his authorization, the intent being that one day they might reclaim their original plots, under what circumstances Mitchell didn't dare imagine. The rumor was not credible, he stressed, willing James to put his pen away; the land certificate idea was absolutely antithetical to the reform program, which Kingsley was committed to seeing properly installed, as the
Crier
itself had consistently reported. James put the pad away, laughing good-naturedly, and told him not to believe everything he read.

“Why doesn't the PEP stop bawling and call a new election?”

“Kingsley would walk back in, mahn. Maybe better off than before.
Elections too chancy fah Banks and dem, eh?
”

The ladies are bored, said Josephine. Mitchell asked her to dance, not wanting her to lose the spirit she had brought to the table. She crossed her legs so she could shift her body closer to his, as if now she were the only subject he need occupy himself with. Her eyes glittered and her face was shining. George James and the other woman dropped away into their own world. Josephine said no, this wasn't her song, it didn't do anything for her. Her father was PS—Permanent Secretary, career bureaucrat—at the Ministry of Culture, a new portfolio born with the coalition, a campaign promise of Edison Banks. He had been reshuffled into the job from Public Works because he played the saxophone. The ministry still searched for an identity, unsure of its role beyond sponsorship of a few concerts and a disorganized, understocked crafts co-op. Josephine's mother, appropriately enough, was from the French Antilles—Guadeloupe—where she had returned years ago, unable to adapt to St. Catherine's backwardness, and since remarried, not once, said Josephine, but four
times because no man was ever satisfactory. Her father had remarried too; Josephine didn't live with him anymore, she was independent, she did what she wanted, men couldn't handle that. She bridled when Mitchell said something offhandedly, insinuating she didn't have to work for a living.

“Kiss me black and beautiful ass, bwoy,” she said. “I am a dressmaker,” and he looked pointedly at her long fingernails to say then she must be a woman good with her hands, and she slapped him in slow motion, playing, so that the gesture was more like an overt caress. “
Now
, bwoy,” she said, and since he didn't understand, she feigned exasperation and commanded,
Dance!
her heels already clicking across the cement by the time he got on his feet. Dancing was important in St. Catherine, a mother language; he had been drinking now for a solid four hours, starting at dinner, and it took him a while to find the beat, standing there absorbing the rays of carnality Josephine generated with so little effort, her body like some loose volume of juice poured lithely from hip to hip, the last word in nubility, every move she made adding up to lovemaking. She made him mindless, and he rejoiced in it, yet his body hadn't taken up the slack, jumped into the fire of flesh. There he stood, rhythmless, out to lunch, rocking from foot to foot like an elephant when something much more apish was needed, mesmerized by Josephine and her lewd counterthrusts to an imaginary phallus, her pelvis bouncing in the saddle:
Is dis you cock? Is this your cock?

A local named Coddy met them at the airstrip with a doorless, rust-consumed pickup truck, its tires without a hint of tread to their name, and took them direct to the Green Turtle, the island's one bar and gathering hole, down by the ferry dock, for posttransit refreshment. The enterprise was textbook rustic, neo-primitive; the shade of cobalt in the lagoon seemed otherwise unavailable in the world. Across the channel the peaks of St. Catherine formed a diadem on the horizon, and twilight on a tropic atoll had to be the original inspiration for the pastorale, not mountain valleys but this unearthly tranquility of Trade-cooled sheltered water, what greater enchantment could realism aspire to, and it was all undeniably soothing and marvelous, Adrian acknowledged, except for the
stars
, offstage, and they were a bit much, outside their heaven. Anything could fall. Anyone. Here was a refuge for the type.