Swimming in the Volcano (66 page)

Doubling over, she convulsed, straining, a dry silent scream; I hope to God that's it, he thought, dizzied by her exorcism, the sea's turbulent collaboration. She had developed an outrageously high threshold for mortification, hadn't she? Johnnie reeled back up, a thread of spittle icicled from her lower lip, and he wiped it off, sorrowed by her cadaverous, embalmed look, the sunken shadows of her eyes and cheeks. There was more, she murmured weakly, she had to tell him the worst of it, about Katherine, but he put a finger to her waxy lips,
shhh
, returning the compassion she had showed him that night on the beach below Rosehill, saying lay your head in my lap and take it easy, think of solid ground, the worst is almost over and we'll be across sooner than you know, and in another minute he felt her weight deaden as she skated out of consciousness into shallow, whimpering sleep. In this other silence she left him with, for the first time he was aware of the caterwauling of the passengers, garbled through the cabin wall.

Throughout this manic autobiography of Johnnie's he had not let slip his mask of imperturbability but it was, after all, much more than he had ever asked for or needed to hear, and now he wondered how, exactly, to grasp what she had told him. As a shell in his palm, to sail back into the deep? He wasn't jealous of the past per se but of the absences it contained, the persisting shapes of what he had missed; Bobby Fernandez was of no more significance to him than a finished bottle of wine, left on a table in an empty banquet hall. The only question of any value, the only answer he was interested in, was where do we go from here. Johnnie had a story, one of millions, and nothing new. Better to leave it where it was, open-ended, out here in the roaring serpent hisses of the sea, and make room for a newer story, for lost time, for better lives to come, for a denouement that would allow a finer sense of things. There was a fallibility to the two of them that was perhaps permanent, but they had given themselves fair warning. If he required a more perfect and noble Johnnie than this one who had come to him, then now was the time to let go—but he didn't. If he was to stand accused, let it be for callowness, not callousness.

A lesser but no less determined force of nature disengaged them: he had to free himself from her to use the head; he took her shoulder bag from behind her legs and slipped it under her head and, despite her groggy protests, let him bind her firmly in place with his belt and one of the loose ends of rope from the tarping. Out on deck, he kneed his way through a multiplication of goats, lunging from handhold to handhold forward up the portside passageway to the WC. Its door yawned open and shut, beckoning the damned to come see its unenterable filth, and he simply braced himself at its threshold, since no one else was about or likely to be, and urinated down at his feet. Whites, he thought gratuitously; it was they who had stumbled this far, the only ones who cared to hide their messes. Vomit in a bag, die in a hospital, appear as if you deserve the world since, no matter what anybody said, it was yours anyway. He should have known just to
piss off the stern, spare himself the infernal vision of this, and the writhing specters in the ghoulish green light of the cabin. Like a guillotine, a window on the side of the wheelhouse clanged down in its metal frame. A crew member stuck his grizzled head out into the driving wind.

“How many goat we lose bahck dere, skip?”

“None, far as I could tell.” He didn't know, had no idea.

“Oh ho!” He relayed the news inside to the echo of shouts and victorious whoops. Mitchell approached, peering in through the lowered window for a look at these foolhardy pirates—captain, helmsman and mates—the bulge of forearms, the blazing eyes, how they swaggered in place, the bottle making its rounds, the sea flying up like bombs off the bow, the island appearing and disappearing in front of them as if its very existence had yet to be fully resolved, and they were loving it, they were living like men, skip, and he realized that however much she contrived her story and however much was true, Johnnie had enjoyed its telling, Johnnie liked her life and the story it made, the dangers it skirted,
this much
.

They were, he judged, about a mile out from the harbor mouth and rebirth. He could see the pole below the navigational beacon atop Fort Gregory, car lights snaking along the headlands road, the land taking on dimension, landmarks materializing out of the hostile ether. The
Carolanne
wallowed across a visible line of current, bordered by flotsam and a floating salad of orangish sargasso weed, an instantaneous transition, salvation happening always with a suddenness. The seas sat down, dropping their edges and then their height, carrying them along on a roll of friendly shoulders. On the stern he threw back the tarp to uncover Johnnie flailing against the restraints he had fashioned for her safety, tears in her eyes, struggling to free herself. Her blind effort had only tightened the knots and it took him a while to untie her. “Why did you leave me?” she asked without a hint of irony. She was afraid, he had frightened her, she thought he wasn't coming back. He sat her up, consoling her; she recomposed herself out of her bag, momentarily barebreasted while she rid herself of her channel-ruined peasant blouse and shimmied a wheat-colored shift over her head, rising to step out of her shorts, sitting back down to fish for her compact case, fumbling it open for no other reason than to hypnotize herself with its mirror, Mitchell observing her behold herself, a goddess learning to accept the fact that her immortality had begun to rust, and this too, perhaps this alone, made it possible to love her again. He told her they'd be docking soon, they
should move up front, and as they moved past the doorless entrance to the passenger cabin, she seemed confused and made to go in and then recoiled, pulling back, shuddering.

“My God, it's like a slave ship in there.”

Deckhands rounded up the wandering goats and made token attempts to drag loose cargo out from underfoot. Passengers began to emerge from their quarters like zombies out of a grave. The sail crumpled and dropped down the mast; for some reason the sight of it collapsing resembled, in Mitchell's video bank of images, a man in front of a firing squad, life cut away from its support. Hawsers whipped through the air, the engines reversed, and they were firmly attached to the world again, filing ashore, pressing through a swarm of men and boys, a sinister gleam of faces under the solitary cone of light, daunted by the shouts and grabbing, unsure of their legs, empty of stomach and head, the travelers shoving to escape the stink and leavings of their misery.

Beyond the waterfront, Queenstown seemed unusually deserted, shabbily lit and advanced in age. Christian curfew—city streets could be depressing, he thought, on Sunday nights, the feeling that everybody cowered behind locked doors. He liked it like this though, having it all to themselves; Johnnie was still woozy but growing chipper with every step. On a side street near the post office they found an open kitchen, a workingman's restaurant no wider than a hallway wedged into a row of merchants, without customers until they sat down at one of the tables along the stone wall. The cook was in the back on a stool, reading out loud a verse from a Bible in her hands, the words mixing in with Kingsley on the radio, ranting about Edison Banks, what else was new, good children and bad children, madmen running Jamaica, stirring it all together in one associative mess. The cook finished her page and came to tell them curried conch and rice, no fish, the men couldn't get out. She was stocky and had calm eyes.

Johnnie was reanimated, transformed, the dread gone from her eyes, the anxiety off her face, nothing quite like a harrowing experience to make the old tensions paltry and tedious, quick with mirthful smiles now that the rules had changed, the probation over with and done. If he was stealing her, if that's what they were leaving unspoken, fine; that kind of larceny seemed entirely justified and had its own inner logic, bittersweet: he was stealing her
back
. Love wanted to mitigate every damn thing, let nothing obstruct. She had the sense not to attempt again to bring him up to speed on her vita; stories like
the one she had told him on the boat he wanted left behind with jungle warfare, peace signs, Nixon. No borrowing this sort of toxic glamor from their own cloying past.

She put her bag in her lap and began taking things out with ceremonial enthusiasm, covering the table with a potpourri of talismanic scavengings.

“Hey, look what you found.”

Enough feathers for a headdress, delicate variegated blades, and shells of course—a mingling of cowries, augers, limpets, tiny peppermint-colored wafers and angel wings, a spidery fighting whelk, transparent gold bangles that he had forgotten the name of. There was an anchor-embossed brass button filmed in verdigris, an edgeless medallion of violet glass frosted by the surf, an assortment of odd seeds and pods and finally, the last to be shown, the pièce de résistance, the burgundy-colored clay head of a tiny animal, a bat-faced adorno with pointy ears, upturned snout, and slightly grinning diabolic triangular mouth, undoubtedly off the rim of a pre-Columbian pot or bowl.

Johnnie rhapsodized. “Isn't it wonderful?”

He turned it over in his hand, noticing the two holes drilled through the snout, these, he had read, for snorting jimsonweed and other hallucinogens during religious rituals. “The Indians thought bats were spirits,” he said.

“It gives off vibrations, doesn't it. Whenever I hold it in my hand, there's something there.”

The cook brought their food on a tray, two bottles of beer, waited for them to clear a space.

“Where did you find it? Wherever there's a freshwater source along the coasts, you're going to find artifacts.”

“Mmm!” Johnnie's eyes said
wait
. Her mouth was full and the conch seemed to require a rigorous chew. She had something important to say. Impatience showed on her face from the delay in swallowing.

“I just remembered. I have a message for you. From your missing friend, Isaac.”

“What?” His fork stopped in midair. “Do you really?”

“Oh, yeah,” she nodded, gulping. “God, that's tough. He says to tell you he's been cooling out. That there's a good reason he hasn't been around lately but can't say what it is right now. Also, to tell you he'll be in contact soon, and not to worry. Do you think they serve salad here?”

“Isaac told you that? You talked to him?”

“No, not to him. He's supposed to be up north, in the mountains,
I think. One of his friends over there. What happened was”—but she was off and running again, bursting with words, too fast for any lingering wiles to keep apace, she wasn't crazy about being in seawater that gave you the same experience you could get from a bathtub or swimming pool, Makapuu Point, east of Honolulu, on the other side of Diamond Head, was her favorite beach, two or three times a week she'd take her swim fins and head down there, one of the premier body-surfing spots
in the world
, right, she was a powerful swimmer, did he remember from their weekends at Virginia Beach and Rehoboth, Makapuu's waves were long blue chutes of pure joyous ecstasy, they centered your existence, sectioning off behind you like a giant white fist slamming down, she became addicted to the sliding weightless free-fall during which you gradually mastered control, the sudden elevation and the hurling down through seamless crystal tunnels alive with curling energy, the single-minded triumph of escaping disaster, the gripping force rippling over her breasts and stomach, down through her legs and out the soles of her feet, exploding. The ultimate convergence of motions. She became expert at it and could hotdog, do tricks, rolls and tucks, windmills, backward entries, a maneuver called Scream in the Cathedral, it all became so effortless she began to look for the wrong places, make deliberate mistakes, it was something she had profound thoughts about, late takeoffs on waves too big to finesse, edging closer to the known danger zones, the shallow or rocky spots, she felt bare, stripped down to her finest essence, Here I am and I'm strong enough to risk this, rather than a fear of flying an unqualified devotion to it in its liquid form. I wanted to see how much there was to learn, she said, what it felt like to be at the very core of a toppling universe, push and push the limits because, I don't know, that's the way we grew up, isn't it, everybody let us go farther and farther, as if their warnings were not sincere, as if they couldn't wait to see just what we'd do next.

He was amazed by what she was telling him, how much, the dance of truth in her sentences. Her excitement got the better of her and she had to stop to light a cigarette.

“Then,” she went on,
“bang!”
She got what she asked for, not just a muscle sprain or sand burns but an honest to God fight for her life, claimed by a mammoth swell that she tried to back out of but got sucked over the falls, the devastating contraction, the inescapability of it, the only way out something of a paradox, submit without surrendering, here was a power that didn't look kindly upon flirtation, it was an avalanche and she was only another one of its boiling molecules, down in its depths, somersaulting along the bottom, registering
blows, seeing stars, black flames, when she began to lose consciousness she thought, Now it will release me and let me go, but it didn't, not before she had swallowed gallons, was missing a chunk out of her leg, and had to be rescued by two of the guys in the water and helped to shore. Her eyes bulged, the recollection ended. She stubbed out her cigarette and looked at him apologetically.

“I completely forgot what I was going to tell you. Where was I?”

“Isaac's friend.”

“Oh, right. Sorry. You know me, when I get going. Anyway, the lesson was not lost on me, that's why I'm here, but I'll never see the point of getting in the water to just sit there, as if the ocean were a lake and you're three years old. It's boring, it's for fat girls, lazy-minded people. The beach in front of Coddy's place was no good if you got restless.” On Saturday, she had taken a drive with Adrian and Sally. Not far along the windward coast she spotted a cove that made her think of Makapuu and wanted to stop but the others didn't. After everybody left she had the urge to do something invigorating, not just stick around the bungalow feeling sorry for herself while people lacquered in happiness traipsed in and out, wanting to get high. Her mood did not match. She put her suit back on under her shorts and shirt and walked up to the paved road, started hitchhiking, on Cotton Island everybody pulls over for you, it seemed, and she was there before she knew it, the waves all to herself, perfect and regular as clockwork, like they were being pumped out of a machine, ghosts of milky sand rising halfway up within the blue walls, the bottom visible in the flat light so there'd be no surprises, the swells just big enough to be head-clearing, make her blood race. After a while she felt a strange feeling, a premonition she guessed he could call it, and she emerged from inside a wave to see someone sitting on the beach, a local guy, watching her, he came out of nowhere. She didn't think much of it though she decided to stay in the water until he left, just to be on the safe side, but he didn't move and she was worried about the time, keeping her promise to Saconi to put his guitar on the plane. Finally she pointed herself straight ahead and went the distance, the wave expiring underneath her in the shallows, she on her stomach in a deposit of foam. The cove was absolutely secluded, the coast dropped off about ten feet from land to sea level, so that you couldn't see most of the beach from the road. She realized then that he was waiting for her, he wanted something, and she had to stand up. When she came closer, she started feeling afraid, he had what seemed a bright-eyed menace to his features and she wasn't about to do anything to encourage him, not even say hello, just get her towel
and clothes and go, but the thing was, he gave her a shock—he knew her name, he knew Mitchell's. She was nonplussed, something was wrong with him, it was hard to describe, the menace she thought she had identified was really more like a trance, he didn't move his head right when he spoke, and when she responded she felt she had to speak to him as if to a small child. He seemed so absorbed by her, so pathetic, and yet so latent with threat, she found herself feeling a sort of reflexive sympathy and wanted him to see it. He was horrifically scarred on an arm and leg.