Swimming in the Volcano (59 page)

Which it did eventually but with inordinate stealth, the atmosphere becoming slightly porous, adding fractions of depth, not enough to bring texture but adequate to etch and ridge the earth with a flat, uninterrupted silhouette of shape, blocks of entities, this or that, island or sky being the only differentiation allowed, a hushed brightening but not yet true first light, champion of specificity, with a democratic interest in all things great and small. She wondered if anyone else knew Saconi could be this quiet, because he never was, especially with so sweet a look of gentle resignation, which she understood had nothing to do with her, and she fought back the sentimental explosion that would make her kiss him and weep and confess how completely she cared what happened to him. She wished he had never tried to compartmentalize racial existence with that now expendable word,
soul
.

A pair of wild dogs dashed out from the roadside tangle of palmetto and thorn acacia, a fleeting image of haunted beings. Over the toylike puttering of the motor she began to notice the birds asking for sunrise, then the distant susurration of heavy surf, like a violent whispering.
The antisocial wall of bush thinned out to an equally harsh barrenness of wiry growth and spikes—splattered crusts of blackened rock, red clay crackled like raku, coarse tufts of silvery grass, groves of cactus and Spanish bayonet. Three fourths of the way out the scarred headland that formed the northeast terminus of the island, even the sorry excuse for a road ended and they stopped, sending a warlock's coven of iguanas scrambling for cover.

“Big Sally, you cy-ahn walk wit me a little ways?”

“You'd be surprised how far.”

“Ahll right den, darlin. We walkin.”

They followed a footpath over the crumbling earth, Saconi in front, carrying the bottle of champagne over his shoulder like a club. A nimbus of seaspray hung over their heads, like dawn itself in colloidal suspension, ready to burst in their faces. The next installment of light showed them the lowness of the paling clouds, the sootiness of their heavenly fabric, loose and ragged, coming unstuffed. Now it was clear they'd be cheated out of a famous sunrise, but if the lighting remained so otherworldly, no one was going to complain. Between the ceiling and the floor, the air swirled with seabirds—gulls, terns, pelicans, boobies, frigates—noisy as parliament, circling in ever-changing patterns. The path disappeared across knuckles of ironrock but Saconi knew where he had to go. They were fifty or sixty feet above sea level, she guessed, the shore itself somewhere out of sight below them though off in the channel between the two islands the ocean was chopped up and frosted with chaos. Shaving a dime of skin off one of her ankles on a burl of ironrock, she tried to step more carefully, taking the precaution of using her hands to steady herself as the rock mounded higher while the path descended. The waves fulminated in sequence, each giving itself a short ovation, and she could feel the tremors under her feet, similar to the inner resonance of her own deferred exhaustion.

Where the land ended, the coast collapsed into a ruined city of rock, fabulous and severe, a phantasmagoric ghetto turned garden rusting into the sea, the skeletal remains of an industrialized center in final breathtaking transition, smelting away, an excrescent stain on the globe, something for the future to step around. It was beautiful, a death progressing peacefully in the midst of its own disordering consequence. Beautiful in the way destruction and decay could sometimes insist on their own beauty, the aesthetics of the opulence of everything that rotted and the magnificence of everything that burned.

It was another geology altogether, too radical to have evolved
through the slow accretion of civilized corals. Arched, spindled, hollowed out, the rock contained grottoes and tombs, the vandalized insides of factories, amorphous twisting shapes of worship and agony, ecstatic bodies on the verge of grace, hulks and scooped husks of futility. The craftsman sea would never be satisfied with its work here, fizzing into gaps, slurped through a labyrinth of fissures, scrubbing and polishing, scrubbing and polishing, unable to stop, a mother gone mad. Occasionally a single wave would assert itself and disintegrate vertically, breaking heavily apart in the air like a flock of snow geese startled into rising. It seemed like another type of frontier and Sally greeted the place with joy.

Through sculpted naves and sweeping passages, they climbed down into the liquid gnash and suck of sound, every surface dripping with motion. A plague of tiny crabs the color of charred skin swarmed wherever they looked. They stooped to enter a brief tunnel leading to a chapel that opened again at its far side, a white oculus of light wide enough for them to hoist themselves onto a seaside ledge to gaze down at their feet into a winking eye reflecting their blurred image in the blue smoke of dawn—a perfectly round, sand-carpeted tidal pool inlaid into the tortured rock.

Unhh
, said Sally, as if she struggled to unload her burden of disbelief.
Gaa. God. Yes!
the first words spoken. Without discussion Saconi set the bottle down and they removed their clothes, Sally staggered, beguiled, stupefied by the vividness of their bodies in the gloomy light, Saconi so vibrantly black, yet so unlike those first days when his blackness was like a mask she tried to peer behind; she, except for a bikini of alabaster flesh, so healthily golden. They eased themselves into the transparent wine of this rock chalice, revived by its momentary chill, and sat cross-legged on the sugary bottom, heart-deep in the water, Sally's breasts floating between them, bobbing with the surge that fed the pool. Saconi popped the cork on the champagne—more spray, more foam for the universe. They passed the bottle lazily back and forth, no problem imagining what they drank was the essence of the world they found themselves in. Saconi didn't talk and she didn't want him to; he said what he wanted to say and what she needed to know by bringing her here. If she was the latest among other women he had brought, that still didn't make her naive, or Saconi insincere, or the present less real.

The sea heaved. Moments later, after each upswelling, a dying ring of energy would sweep the pool, nudging them, then relax backward and be renewed. She considered the contrast they made to be an ineffable wonder, a piano made of skin and bone, a concrescence of keys,
together like this. Sitting up, they knotted themselves into one, her stout legs yoked around his slender waist, Saconi inside her, a bell ringing, first far away but now closer. They didn't move themselves but let the surge lift and lower them on its cushion, the ocean breathing pleasure into them, at first infinitesimal amounts, vaporous, then each increment distinct, each increase warmer and fuller, accepted with gratitude. Given the choice she would stay like this, the sun never rising, the world trapped between night and day, until someone came to tell her she was an old woman, had lived her life and it was over. It took forever, which is what they both seemed to aspire to, but they came in unison and Sally arched her back until her hair spread out across the surface of the water, entwined with the sea anemones that rimmed the basin of the pool, like a wreath of iridescent spider mums, and the wreath became the bowl of a near horizon, her face this other horizon's rising sun, the air the turbulent onslaught of ocean, the firmament a tundra of unfurling clouds. With her head still back and the world inverted, she shut her eyes tight, calling out, some unintelligible noise to say at this moment, this splintering instant in time, she was never so located in the cosmic circulation; thinking,
I don't have to leave
, an involuntary thought, unsolicited, slipping in through the opening the pleasure made and she didn't know what place she meant by it—Kansas or St. Catherine or Cotton Island or the tidal pool or somewhere else. Anywhere, it seemed, would do; that's what she meant, she thought. And then, when the preciousness of life was almost too much to bear, the moment passed, and she raised her head to kiss Saconi.

I don't have to leave. This. Any of it. All.

Did he mind?—she was going to cheer.

Within the hour the image had its counterweight, as if she must be rebuked for wanting too much, and getting it. That she wasn't in the habit of thinking this way seemed moot. There was a woman in the garbage when they returned to the enclave, still early enough for everyone to be asleep but this person on her hands and knees, pawing through a mound of trash the early-rising caretaker had raked to the side of a row of guest cottages. In the grayish, misted light, Sally mistook her at first glance for a dog, and in fact there were three to model herself after, competing with her, scrapping for goat bones. Saconi swerved across the lawn and parked nearby but she didn't look up from her rooting. Her flaxen hair hid her face; she wore a strap tee shirt and silk panties. Sally got out of the mini-moke, mute with horror, to see what could be done to help her. The woman raised herself into a kneeling position. She was young, green-eyed; pretty—but not
this morning—and she covered her mouth to hide it, speaking into the cup of her hand to answer Sally's questions. She was semihysterical, speeding, maybe, the words spewing with a mush of consonants into her hand. What happened, she said in a rush, was this: A year ago, more than a year ago, a man raped her, this was in California, and she bit him so hard on the arm she broke her own jaw, then a few months later her teeth began to fall out on the upper left side of her mouth, she had to have a dental plate made but the dentist at the clinic never got the fit right, and her boyfriend still had shrapnel in his back from a land mine in Vietnam and was crazy, and so last night before going to bed she had removed the plate because it hurt, and she put it in an empty cigarette pack on the table, and when her boyfriend came in later he wanted a cigarette, but when he found the empty pack he got mad and threw it outside, at least that's what he thought he did, and somebody had raked up all the trash from the goat roast and fete into this pile and she was praying her teeth were in it.

It began to drizzle. She let her hand fall, sick with embarrassment. One side of her mouth was sunken with damage, withered like a hag's mouth. She was young, but not this morning, and maybe, Sally thought, never again.

She wanted her teeth back. She wanted painkillers. Sally wished she had never seen her, and afterward she told Saconi they couldn't get off Cotton Island fast enough to suit her. She stooped down and tried to help the woman find her teeth in the garbage, already beginning to smell. She picked gingerly through the beer cans and paper plates, the festering fruit skins and greasy remains of goat, thinking this lost and burnt-out child had most likely misplaced the teeth somewhere in her cottage, but then there were the three 5s on the logo of the cigarette pack, and the miracle was, when the woman in the trash had her teeth back in she was beautiful, she was the princess that none of them had believed in, restored to the island of interlopers.

The life was the imagery was the life.

Perhaps it would not have occurred to Emma Quashie that the boy had paid her such absolute attention, listening and watching, that he would absorb his pair of mothers' sinking universe intact, and drag it behind him into adulthood on a strangulating leash of memory, so that the first time he set foot on Cotton Island, after his resurrection from purgatory by Selwyn Walker, he would come face to face with Erzulie's latest incarnation—Erzulie, the patron saint of the mutilation of his boyhood. Perhaps she would have found it possible to explain her son's bizarre and lethal association with this white woman he saw swimming in the waves at Sandy Bay, when the connection came to light, to destroy him as it had destroyed his mother. But Cotton Island had lost its Emma Quashies and Miss Diedras and even its ability to identify one set of gods from another.

There was no one left to explain such intervention. A place that had not changed in three hundred years had changed overnight.

There was no one left to explain, but Cassius Collymore saw the change and dismissed it for what it was. What could be new in the loa-infested, angel-swarmed, beast-haunted world, of which he had firsthand knowledge? Pure forces and ancient patterns are what they are, eternal, no matter what shape they fancied, year to year. What could be new to a boy chained to the oars of the past, rowing a bloody sea of fables and false hopes and commonplace terrors. What could be new in a life where, regardless of its clumsy trips and stumbles and blank strips of yearning, justice was a measured pace, but so was injustice.

Friday evening, past suppertime, Ibrahim found himself on the Queenstown quay, scuffing his feet along the oil-stained cement, carrying his change of clothes in a canvas handbag, searching for a boat
going over. The police launch had been in dry dock for months, busted up, someone had driven it top speed into a reef, so he couldn't just go to them and say,
Tek me down Cotton fah Selwyn
, but had to beg his own way. It was late, but time wasn't bad wind or high seas, and didn't matter to a captain, who sailed when his ship was ready, middle of the night or not.

Who going down?
he saluted the men aboard the tied-up boats, and they waved him farther along the quay to the
Lady Luck
, a rusty World War II LST, its open hold stacked with paper bags of cement like neatly packaged troops, its engines hammering the stillness of the lower harbor. The captain was a Vincentian and said,
We ain tek passenger, bwoy
, but shrugged contemptuously and told him,
Come
, the only word he would speak to him, when Ibrahim dug into the pocket of his pants to show the captain his badge, declaring,
NPF business, nuh?
—
what you goin do now?

When they arrived at Cotton Island minutes before midnight, Ibrahim felt sluggish, unseeing, slothful—the water could do that to him with its swirling blackness, its dragon's hiss. Underfoot, the pier was funny, not solid, as if it had a sleeping life hidden inside it, causing a gentle shift and roll as he walked down it, half-afraid, to the shore of his hatred. The Green Turtle was closing up for the night but he walked like a man unsure of his step and stopped, there among the tables and the milling, laughing customers, the white people who formed the vaguest, most inarticulate part of his pain. He stood, swaying, as though he were drunk and invisible and where he stood was no place in particular. He closed his eyes and listened to the hum of voices, gnawing at the trance that was his homecoming. He opened his eyes again and no one was looking at him because he was invisible and they were invisible and now he was in control of the situation, and all he must do was pass through. He heard this and heard that but he stopped listening because he knew what to do, where to go, and found himself walking in the center of the blue-white coral road behind the bar, up the rise of the hill, a car crawling by, steering around him: a small boy sucking on a mango pip, on his way to school with his sisters.