Swimming in the Volcano (63 page)

Out on the veranda, he sat on his packing crate eating his dinner, hunkered over the plate, pondering the charmed life he had led, never
robbed or assaulted or knocked down, never cornered into bargaining with his own mortality, never doubting the future or his modest place in it. The offense he suffered now was slight, inconsequential, in the scheme of greater wrongs that surrounded him a superfluity but it nevertheless aroused a dormant appetite for reprisal. It sullied the view, stained the canvas of wonder. How many uplifting evenings had he spent mesmerized on this veranda, at rest with the bay, the channel, the running sea and its flaming sunsets, the darkening sky and brightening ensemble of stars, inhaling the garden perfumes of unlimited promise, those essences that seeped from the center of desire that was the inescapable truth of the tropic world?

He had been wrong about Davidius, and the slander seemed both justified and self-corrupting, which is where he would start in the long narrative of absolution he would compose, throughout the years ahead, for himself. Not with Isaac and
Miss Defy
on Ooah Mountain, not with Johnnie descending out of the self-perpetuating blue that would always be her life, not with Isaac being swallowed whole by the mythical dragon of change that had awakened on the island nor with the dream-snarled imbroglio of politics and reform but with the swaggering refuse named Davidius, the pathetic cock-brained troll who seemed the very embodiment of an underlying force threading the smell of decay along the inseam of the beauty-struck, sun-blessed egalitarian pleasures of the island; Davidius, who served a nature fundamentally wrong in the island's ambition for itself. Davidius was the pig-slop garbage piled along the roadside, the buckets of filth from the abattoir swirling in the harbor, the peeling facades of the colonial buildings, the pus-rimmed eyes of the pariah dogs, the rags and rickets and herniated navels of the peasant children, their illiteracy and their hunger, the wasted gonorrheal seed of St. Catherine, and
he was innocent
.

Mitchell could not bring himself to hoist the terrible, wearying weight of remorse—that part of him held itself in reserve. Waiting. Ambivalent. Davidius in jail for the weekend was no crime against humanity; what did it matter if one's punishment was out of sync and off-schedule with one's offense? It isn't kosher but it
is
karma, right? he argued with himself, diluting his already watery guilt. Retrospect would always deal harsh and seemingly unfair blows to men like Davidius, but who would want to say they didn't have it coming?

The STOL De Havilland remained below the ceiling of clouds, battered along by crosswinds, not hurtling through the space of a Sunday afternoon but slowly advancing, like a bumblebee, in lurching arabesques. He watched the channel as it whipped itself into endless whitecaps, his last obstacle on the unexpectedly straightforward path of his life that was turning out to be a path back to her. To return where you started without circling or retreat was a damn good trick if you could pull it off, seeing as how death was the only commonly accepted solution to that brainteaser. At Christmastime one of the interisland boats put into service for the holidays had gone down somewhere beneath him, overloaded with homeward-bound passengers. There were women on the Queens town quay, waiting for the husbands who had hired on to construction teams, taking advantage of Cotton's building boom, and when the news came in, the women tore the hair from their scalps, bloody uprooted clumps of it, in unquenchable grief. He couldn't remember why he had been on the docks then, but now it seemed as if he had been there explicitly
to see
—he had not known sorrow could be so violent, that loss could be so communal, that anything like the women's explosion of anguish had existed anywhere on the face of the earth. He had never led a life that had taken him there.

He stared through and past the image of the women, ordering his thoughts returned from this unwelcome morbidity. In the cockpit the co-pilot balanced a pizza in its flat white box on his lap, special delivery for one of the mucky-mucks on Cotton Island; God knows where it came from, with the nearest pizzeria over the rainbow. His fellow passenger, the only other, was a scrawny old man in a rumpled suit and neck brace—didn't pay attention where I was going, he
explained inadequately—flying home from medical treatment in Barbados.

Mitchell was sure about this: Going for Johnnie was good; accordingly, Johnnie compelling him to act was proper—he wanted to act, make the definitive statement of action, carry her back, get beyond this wringing of hands, his soliloquy to vacillation. Let the fever run its course or kill him—what was so complicated about that? Don't waver, he coached himself, walking off the plane. Don't waste time.

Sally, more rubicund than ever when she had stopped by Howard Bay to tell him, not quite knowing how to tell him, where Johnnie was, had worried that she had somehow failed him, by not returning Johnnie back where she had found her. It was not an issue, he had explained, watching her cringe, uncharacteristically. Sally was one of the very few people he could say he knew whom he trusted to improve upon the world. So Johnnie's still over there, I'm not surprised, he had said, trying to match the famously embracing outwardness of Sally's smile, and what about Isaac, did he stay too?

“Oh! ... Isaac! Jesus Christ. Isn't it strange?” Actually, she'd forgotten to ask Saconi but Isaac wasn't over there or she'd have seen him, Cotton Island wasn't a place you could vanish into.

And Johnnie, it seemed, wasn't even going to try, because, well, well, there she was, more less on cue, a responsible woman waiting with Saconi's guitar among the queue of departing passengers, dutifully installed under the tin roof of the rain shelter that served as the airstrip's sole facility. When her face tensed, seeing him step off the plane, he had to think she anticipated the worst from him—but went ahead and did it anyway. He felt mildly wronged, nothing he couldn't wave off but still, he hadn't rushed here to scale defenses, and how habituated was she to being struck, anyway, since halfway to her across the hard marl of the runway she had yet to rid herself of the expression of a woman prepared to weather an attack.

But what was he smoldering on about? He realized he owed it to her to soften his mouth,
finally
—Good God—and manage a clarifying though sore-hearted smile. She was getting what she asked for when she first sought him out, he was allowing her back in, welcoming the runaway home; he had reacquired the taste. The result was immediate: she laid down the guitar, jumped to greet him with a slippery kiss, and breathed her breathless thanks into his ear. He sensed her tension in his arms, but when they separated from their embrace, he saw that she had gone so far as to adopt a coyness toward him, as charming as it was disingenuous.

There's not much time, he said, and they traded practical explanations. He couldn't spend the night, he had business to attend to on the big island in the morning. The hour was five now and the ferry set sail at half past—the airline left him no choice, able to get him over to Cotton but then he was on his own, all return seats booked solid for the next two days. The party was over, the rats abandoning ship, someone had called in the exterminator, but then who was he to talk. Even the charter pilots were off somewhere in the yonder. The weather's bad, he said; she should begin to accustom herself to the likelihood of getting wet. She tried to hide her disappointment as they ensured that Saconi's guitar would be taken high and dry onto the plane, as she had promised him. She liked Cotton, there was a mile-long beach with nobody on it right where she was staying, she had imagined the two of them alone on the sand; earlier that afternoon she had ventured to the windward side and discovered a terrific cove, barred with steep-sided waves, perfect for body-surfing. An aloof batch of the white hiptocracy, famous behind sunglasses and hangovers, loaded up and the De Havilland taxied toward the austere border of the airfield. This place, she tried not to say outright, would be better for them.

Why, he wanted to know, sending dour looks toward a second group of casualties who waited for a charter from the south. They had monopolized the charters too, making themselves beloved by spreading cash like fruit off a tamarind tree. When he had asked if they could possibly squeeze the two of them aboard, they told him they were headed directly for Barbados, which he didn't think was a legal routing.

“Why?”

“Don't you think it's purer here, more innocent?”

Once upon a time, with a big
maybe
attached. He couldn't believe she thought that. I want you back on St. Catherine with me, he felt obligated to say; she threw her arms around him again with a degree more passion and told him, Anything, name it, you got it. They walked a short distance to the main road and flagged down a mini-moke driven by Desmond, one of Lord Norton's retainers—I am de come-talk-wit-me-nobody-get-hurt-mahn, he said with a swell of hubris, taking them to Coddy's without further utterance, as if it were a regular part of his job, then came in with them to swipe a beer from Coddy, who had swiped them from the compound, but daht's de style we livin here now, bruddah, and Mitchell couldn't tell if he meant it was a privilege, or a tragedy easily swallowed. No problem,
he announced, watching Johnnie dash around, throwing clothes and cosmetics into her shoulder bag: the ferry had been delayed.

Desmond dropped them at the Green Turtle, among the highborn and the lowborn and the ones born off the map, to have a drink and wait while the stevedores hand-loaded hundreds of cases of empty bottles into the hold of the
Carolanne
, an interisland workboat, licensed by the government to carry as many passengers as it could issue life jackets to should the occasion require—said to be forty, though no one responsible would care to put that number to a test, and it was not uncommon for the
Carolanne
to ferry twice or, during holidays and weekends, three times that many citizens between the main island and its Sleeping Beauty little sister, now money-kissed. Alcohol was probably a mistake, in light of the voyage ahead of them, but they ordered rum and tonics from the bar and sat at one of the bench-and-plank tables, shooing off a pair of shameless grackles.

“Even the birds beg.”

She seemed to think of one thing and say another. Not all the doors were open, he cautioned himself; he hadn't expected this—could he call it a rescue?—to automatically fill every void.

“I'm counting on you.”

“For what?” she asked warily, unrelaxed.

“To be happy now.”

“Oh. Boy. So am I.” She shredded the fibers of a plastic swizzle stick. “Don't get the wrong idea.” He didn't listen to her words but watched her, the language of her body, her blushing grammar of doubt and pause, the awkward submissive punctuation of her eyes. She noticed how he read her and, with frantic exclamation, worried that he was picking out messages that weren't there, but still she had trouble governing her tendency to question her success, his willingness. Stop waiting for the punchline, he wanted to say, but instead placed his hand over hers until she spread open her fingers and his own filled the gaps: I'm here, aren't I? We're together—must everything be too little, or too much?

“Tell me about your weekend. Does it bear scrutiny?”

“I didn't sleep with anybody, if that's what you mean.”

“No, no,” he smiled. “I'm not asking that.”

She sipped her drink and exhaled laughing, shaking her head. “I keep treating this as a departure from reality,” she confessed. “When I saw you get off the plane I thought, Ohhh,
fuck
, what have I done, he's going to kill me.”

He truly didn't care what she had left behind, he wasn't going to
waste time considering the eventuality of its pursuit, as long as she herself didn't flirt with the notion of it catching up with her, summoning it forward, as she had him.

“Did you have fun, that's what I want to know. Get any autographs?”

“Mitch, I missed you. I thought about you.”

He addressed a nonexistent audience. “She's in love.”

“I dreamed you were with me.”

“I dreamed the same thing.”

“Why didn't you come? Why did you make me make you?”

“Does it matter, since I'm here now? One standard for you, another for me?”

“Yes it matters. But no, you're right.”

Accepting her contradictory concession, he talked about the increasingly perplexing demands of his work, how they had prevented him—he wasn't lying, only omitting certain things—from coming sooner, and told her about the break-in and its odd act of burglary, which made her freeze.

“What about my map?” she asked. A puzzling moment of anxiety. She closed her eyes. “Did they take it?”

“What map?” he said, screwing up his face at another of Johnnie's mysteries. “The South American thing?” he continued, remembering. “No, it's still there. Why?”

He watched her become agitated, then resolved to challenge him.

“There's twenty thousand dollars taped to the back of it.”

“Oh.” He whistled, low and short—what else were you supposed to do?

“Oh,
nothing”
she cried, as in
That won't do
, opened her mouth and shut it. “Okay,” she said finally. “Mitch, before I get on that ferry, before we really do this, let's settle things.”

He merely widened his eyes and she went on, asserting his right to know what happened, back in Hawaii.

“It's not the big deal you think it is, Johnnie,” he said. “I already know.”

At first she fixed him with a dubious stare, as if what he had said was just another way he had found to be combative, but her poise faltered, and panic began to spread in her eyes.

“You're making me incredibly paranoid.”