Swimming in the Volcano (64 page)

“I don't understand.”

“Please try. You can't possibly know. It's impossible. You can't. What do you know?”

“You've suffered the fate of enterprising frat boys and old hippies
who haven't woken up to the fact that these are the Seventies, almost the Eighties, and nobody gives a fuck about drugs anymore. You got busted.” He was conscious of making his voice a mellow stream of neutrality, not because he cared one way or the other about drugs, but she was jumpy enough already, sitting there pop-eyed, and he didn't want to scare her. “Although, I doubt on mere possession, or you wouldn't be here.” How many thousands did she say she had pasted to her map? At least she wasn't insolvent. “Unless we're talking tons. Are we talking tons? Count on me being impressed by your ambition, if we are.”

Relief, like a weak light, made a pass over her face and was gone, replaced by a look so forlorn, he hesitated.

“Am I wrong? You're telling me that's not it?”

She gave a garrulous nod and said, “You're acting so superior, Mitch.”

A herd of goats burst out of the few blocks of residential shops that composed the town behind the dock, bleating and gamboling, funneled toward the
Carolanne
by young boys with switches. A bucket brigade of sweaty laborers were passing lumpy burlap sacks of who knows what from dockside wheelbarrows up to the roof of the wheelhouse. Why hadn't all this been done earlier in the day, Mitchell wondered, as if the delay were an aberration and not business as usual, as he knew it was. Your life could change, its context made foreign, but it took forever to change the basics of the way you thought.

“I find that difficult to believe,” he said. “Some people here in the government seem to know about you. They have a list and you're on it. High-up people. Like the man I work for, for instance, he thought it worth his while to suggest to me that your presence on his island might be impolitic, if I understood him correctly.”

“Oh my God, Mitch, what are you saying!” Her aggrieved eyes went blank; she became instantly pale, her voice dull. “Oh my God. There's no point to this anymore. I'm as good as dead.”

“The point,” he said stubbornly, “is the same as before. Isn't it?”

She snapped back, executing a radical leap away from the edge of whatever doomsday she imagined for herself, actually swallowing hard before reaffirming that yes, the point remained, intact and unaltered, and was, still, love. For Mitchell, the idea of any relationship, and any mistakes that relationship might engender, being high-risk, not emotionally but physically, was surreal, cinematic in the most ludicrous sense. Perhaps his reaction was irrational and self-deceiving, but her apocalyptic rhetoric—the hyperbole of a not-so-unusual life, when you got right down to it, in a generation once teeming with
Johnnies—made him feel peculiarly affectionate. From the ferry a deep, bullish vowel of noise reverberated throughout the lagoon. He stood, grinning, took her hand and pulled her to her feet, wanting to cheer her up though all he could offer her at the moment was an hour and a half's toss across a nine-mile swath of misery. He'd done it before, on the government's tab, under similar bleakness of conditions, down to deliver an unacceptable verdict to the island's ever-dwindling community of farmers, that the way to the future was actually a loop road into the past, that the crop—sea island cotton—that was their namesake offered a steady market and net profits that were nothing to sneer at, but sneer they did, opting for their tomatoes and melons, those undemanding mainstays of subsistence, their goats and sheep, the cattle of impoverishment.
Daht cotton slave wuk, mahn
. Fine. No arguing with that. Toodleloo.

“We've got to go. Come on.” She strapped her bag over her shoulder and they fell in among the last glum-faced stragglers, the only other whites in the bunch, three of them, Latin America on five dollars a day types, engaged in a match of gallows humor, their legs wooden with second thoughts, the farther they ventured down the dock toward the confidence-flaunting hulk of the
Carolanne
. A chill had descended through the late afternoon air, and a purplish, graying autumnal light that seemed to have sagged down the globe from the great north obviously found its equal in Johnnie's melancholy.

“Say good-bye to the beau monde,” he teased. “It's back to our hovel among the coal pits. Hey, come on”—he squeezed her waist—“everything will be all right.”

“That's what you think,” she said. “For one thing, what about my fucking visa. That's first.”

“They have better things to worry about these days, believe me. No one's really going to care.”

“Easy for you to say, Mitch. With me they might care.”

“See that drunk man praying, up by the mast. That's the captain.”

“Get off it.”

“Honest to God. He never sets out sober, and never without asking for a blessing. Damn good policy. Anyone not on the boat when he crosses himself—you know, Father, Son, Holy Ghost—gets left behind. You have to walk faster.”

“Mitchell.”
She whined his name, tugging his arm backward. “My visa. I want to stay here.”

“You
are
paranoid.” A crew member hunkered over a capstan, unwrapping the bowline; the gangway plank was dragged on deck. She tried to stop but he rushed her along. “Okay, look, someone
knows about you, but there's nothing in it for them to give you the boot. That's all they care about. If someone wants to make an issue out of the visa, we'll deal with it, we'll fix it. With the government here, there are two sides to everything; whatever one side does, there's someone on the other side to undo it. Okay?
Okay?”

“Oh brother.”

He hopped the space between the dock and the boat and reached back for her hand. “Jump on.”

“Mitch, you still don't understand.”

“Great. Fuck it. Jump aboard.”

And here she came, with a look of such woeful, piteous resignation it was if she had agreed to the inevitable ruination of her life.

“By the way,” he said, light of heart, filled with an upsurge of self-renewal; he was going to be the person he was before Johnnie dared to come here to him, that calm and reliable self that knew what to do about her, without withering, without overwrought interpretations, “how do you do on boats?”

“I do fine anywhere,” she said peevishly, answering his question, and, it seemed, more.

The gate in the rail was closed and bolted, the unhitched lines flung aboard to the crew. The exhaust pipe sneezed a ball of black smoke into the Catherinian tricolor—red sandwiched by green and blue—fluttering above the wheelhouse, where below the captain reversed engines into the lagoon and swung the ferry seaward toward the miasmic haze of the channel. Mitchell said hello to three or four people he knew.

“What, no deck chairs?” Johnnie cracked, it having dawned on her what sort of voyage she had committed herself to, the sloop-rigged
Carolanne
built on Bequia decades ago by the last of the master shipwrights, when such locally made cargo boats were the proud lifeblood of the Caribbean, not the grease-soaked, worm-eaten, paint-blistered floating junkyards they had become. With any less maintenance than the minimum provided, she'd rot and sink to the bottom in a month. Scarred, splintered, black with crud from the mean freight she carried day in day out, the
Carolanne's
deck seemed part flea market, part squatters' camp, hoard, town dump, and barnyard. Up in the bow, goats and black-bellied sheep shat in a chorus of unanimous fear. Behind the mast, men sprawled on top a loaf-shaped mass of cargo, secured and covered with a ragged tarp. Empty oil drums from the power plant were lashed up and down the gunwale rails. Families crouched in whatever available space they could find, eating their
communal dinner from sooty cookpots. Mitchell stood at the rail, looking over the side, seduced by the lagoon's cerulean perfection, daydreaming of diving and old emotions, watching the reef like tree-tops pass underneath, until Johnnie pressed herself into him, wanting a reply to the reasonable question of where they could sit. Somewhere safe and private, she added, which was
not
reasonable.

“There's a passenger cabin behind the wheelhouse, but I don't think you'll like it. Not in weather like this.”

They watched together as the crew raised a massive but low-hung sail, blocking the western sky with a lung of rust-stained fabric; a deckhand tied the boom down for a straight shot across.

“Not much glory left in that old sheet, is there?”

“Some,” said Mitchell. The men strained on the lines, the ship heeled obediently and picked up speed. He felt a boyish thrill, hearing the sibilance of the water peeling off the hull in the boat's steady, brave charge toward the channel and its howl of wind.

She needed a bathroom (he corrected her jargon:
head; Oh, I know
, she said) and he led her to the ship's one toilet, in a closet in the passageway between wheelhouse and cabin, and left her there to scout what sort of seating he could arrange on the stern. Just to be sure, first he poked his head inside what he once overheard a matronly commonwealth tourist refer to as
the lounge
—the pestilential cabin to where invariably the majority of the
Carolanne's
passengers removed themselves, fair weather or foul, as if it were not only demanded of them but a rule of civilized travel, undissuaded by its formidable stench and its claustrophobic crush of humanity, partying, puking, and praying. With the channel as bad as it was today, riding on the benches of the airless cabin would be not unlike flipping through a picture book of pandemonium, page one of which he now observed, glancing around at the bodies huddled on the floor and jammed on the benches, reeking humiliation as well as dread, the first trombone groans of seasickness rehearsing in the baby-wailing, radio-blasted din, and this trip even the rare assault of malice as one of the passengers, a young islander with vaguely oriental eyes, fixed him with a silent, murderous snarl, as if Mitchell were about to trespass on property the fellow had sworn to defend to death.
Hey, it's all yours, every last godforsaken cubic inch of it
, Mitchell telegraphed as he withdrew, shambling back toward the stern, the deck beginning to roll and shove, out of rhythm, with hydraulic force and counterforce. On the aft deck, horseshoe-shaped like a bandstand or orchestra pit, there were four benches, spaced by scuppers, stapled into the planking in a
half circle along the rail, all but one of them empty, a white couple, husband and wife, whom he recognized from the devo community (as in development or develoflict), fully prepared to tough it out in their exposed position, dressed in hooded slickers and drinking from a cooler of Heinekin on ice at their feet. “Cheers,” they toasted, and handed him a beer.

He twisted around, surveying the deck, at a loss. They could sit for a while at one of the other benches, but once they were out from behind Cotton Island and in open water, they'd be creamed. There was a three-tiered stack of crates of some sort, tarped and secured with a webbing of line, against the rear wall of the passenger cabin which, upon closer inspection, could be heard emitting a frantic percolation—
buck?buck?buck?
—and he lifted a corner of the oilcloth.

Chickens.

Crammed like balled-up Kleenex into lath coops. On the port end of the stack the third tier was missing, forming a high seat out of the bottom two rows, and he sat down gingerly, testing the strength of the slating, and decided it might hold one but two was pushing their luck, and he scoured around up in the bow until he found a length of one-by-six to lay atop the frame in order to distribute their combined weight more evenly, and thought with this improvement they could give it a try.

Happily nursing his bottle of beer, he sat on the chickens as if he had cooped his conflicting selves and there they would stay, clucking harmlessly in their cages. Who had a chicken project going on Cotton, he wondered? The particulars tripped a switch and off went his mind: co-op or private? underwritten by? profit margin? overhead? return on investment over five years? free range or? Were these leghorns? Where were they going, and how soon could he eat one? The wind started to blow like it meant business, snaring Johnnie and bringing her to him,
there you are, I've been looking all over
. She had, evidently, doctored herself, tied a white scarf kerchief-style around her head, put on her sunglasses; arms, legs, and cheeks sleek with spray, her movement tense with coiled energy from having dipped into her glassine envelope of fearlessness.

“I see what you mean about the cabin,” she said.

“I know that expressionless mouth from somewhere, the facial structure, those perfect lobes.” He patted the nook between his body and the wall, inviting her to sit. “You're that actress in that Fifties movie, what's her name? what's its name?” He was terrible with Hollywood trivia.

“To begin with, I'm married.”

“Well ... right.” So much for levity. “I know. Mrs. Fernandez, sit down.”

Pinched eyebrows. Parted mouth. Speechlessness. Then,
YOU ABSOLUTE BASTARD
, she shrieked, nailing a spike of frustration into his chest with the side of her clenched fist, enraged at Mitchell for having thwarted the sublime pleasure of confessing one's greatest secrets and sins. She flung herself down next to him, creating a bow in their loveseat above the chickens, speaking through clenched teeth, the muscles in her lovely jaw twitching.

“Damnit
. You! You think you know everything.”

“Come on, I looked at your passport.”

She folded her arms across her chest, nodding angrily,
I should have known
. They swayed together like co-stars in a Broadway musical to the rock of the ever-more-real boat. Straight out in front of them, at eye level on the western horizon, a tangerine disk of sun fell from the ash of clouds and a road of hammered bronze appeared on the surface of the sea. Mitchell thought, thanks but no thanks, we're not taking omens today, and, in seconds, both the sun and the road to it disappeared.