Swimming in the Volcano (69 page)

“The path is rugged and steep and very, very long.” Mitchell tried to make her see. “It's going to push hard on your limits.”

From Adrian, a confident, resolute murmur: All the better.

“We're not into parasols and picnic baskets,” agreed Johnnie. “That's not us.”

Volcanoes shouldn't be much of a problem for her, Tillman offered tartly, since Adrian had only just encountered poverty too and look how well she was doing with that. Meaning, let's give her what she wants and see how much she likes it. Adrian silenced him with a battle-ready look and then sighed indulgently. From all appearances tonight they seemed to be getting along fine, but occasionally there were these small flaring tensions, and she had changed her flight reservations, moved them up three days to Sunday. Still, Tillman had relented to a rare social foray off Rosehill property, and the evening had flowed seamlessly forward, more or less perfectly.

What Adrian wanted wasn't technically an alteration in plans; neither Mitchell nor Tillman had yet to spell out what they had in mind for their promised excursion, but in fact Mitchell, without telling anybody, had already gone ahead and requisitioned a Land Rover from the ministry's motor pool—five o'clock Thursday to five o'clock Friday—and then had stood in line at National Police Headquarters to experience the government's most recent brainstorm of bureaucratic harassment: the issuance of travel passes to all vehicles journeying to North Leeward and North Windward destinations. Noncommercial vehicles, except commuters, required individual permits for each trip, an infuriating and pointless inconvenience, especially as nobody took the stated reason for the passes—to halt the transport of illegal weapons—the least bit seriously. It was harassment, pure and simple, and one more way to strip revenues out of pockets already empty and threadbare.

Mitchell had heard that Adrian was lending a hand down at Sally's school; she'd taken slumming to heart, he had thought unkindly, but then kicked himself for his cynicism about someone who, for whatever intent or purpose, seemed to be making an effort. Girls from NYC usually deserved any prejudice you cared to have. He told her okay, he'd see if he could work it out, if she was at school with Sally tomorrow he'd swing by before noon and let them know. Tillman said it was time to go, touching Adrian's arm as he said it, a gesture of peacemaking. They got up from the table together, the four of them, exchanging kisses between couples. Dinner was fucking fabulous, Adrian told Johnnie; to Mitchell she stage-whispered dryly, with comic hauteur, Whatever you have her on, darling, increase the dosage.

“That would be Mandrax and Durophet,” cracked Tillman. Slow, fast; the two gears of the merry metabolism. Everybody laughed, and of course he was right.

“I wish Sally and Saconi could have come,” Johnnie said. She and
Mitchell went and stood at the door, waved their guests good-bye. “I wish Adrian wasn't going away.”

“By God, we've entertained,” Mitchell crowed, finding something new in life to celebrate. “We received company. We treated them well. Nobody got hurt. Our genteel reputation will spread.”

“We tried.”

He grabbed her shoulders. “It was a great, great evening.”

“Don't act so shocked. I come with a set of wholesome instincts and traditional values.” She stuck her tongue out at him. “Some, anyway.”

He said Go relax, he'd do the cleaning up. She suggested he leave it till morning but he insisted, the cockroaches relied on him for this, a clarity of relationship, consistency of message. Johnnie, affectionately, said Yack yack yack, sometimes he really got himself going on the silliest things, and took her glass, refilled it with wine, and went out on the veranda.

Our Lady of the Forage, Mitchell was calling her, in his bliss. Yesterday Johnnie had met him for lunch in town; he had handed her back her passport, its visa stamped with a three-month extension, and it was like, Stand back, I'm nesting. Already she'd found a woman to bring cut flowers to the house, once a week—anthuriums, lilies, stalks of ginger, orchid sprays—two dollars an armload. When he opened the front door this morning, there was a whiskey bottle of fresh milk waiting on the stoop. She'd met this farmer and they'd be getting a bottle every other day for as long as the cow held up, and no charge for delivery. Mitchell was amazed. To his chagrin she had even been able to locate a source for chickens and eggs, and someone who sold rabbits (pre-butchered, or else she wanted nothing to do with them), and someone else who sold ducks, and somewhere in town she had wandered into a shop that stocked, among its illogical array of mundanities, imported Parma cheeses and Swiss chocolates. Her talent for hustling, he was forced to admit, was rather highly developed; here was a firsthand demonstration of her wage-earning skills, and as long as she did nothing more with drugs than place a certain amount of them into her bloodstream, he would have to step out of the life he had led so far, and the culture that had given it to him, to find something to actually, and righteously, complain about.

She went splashing into this instant, better life, craving its surface of convention, the subtle payback of ordinary pleasures, anxious to wallow in a hurry-up version of domesticity, be a honey bee busily luxuriating in the routine of little chores, a pollen she collected and added up to a golden purpose threaded from one end of the day to
the other. She cooked, he was happy to report, like nobody's business; the cupboards were crowded with jams, fruit preserves, a virtually inedible batch of fiery chutney, all of which she had made that afternoon. She washed laundry, by hand, in a galvanized tub with a bar of lye soap and a washboard, wringing the clothes to drape over the bushes in the yard like the local wives. He hadn't asked her to do any of this, her motivation was her own. The most enterprising hags at the market suddenly knew Johnnie by name, bent their graying heads to hers, cackling old women, making deals with their prize missy, bargains, special offers. Mitchell would come back to Howard Bay, she'd meet him at the door saying, Look what I got, and he'd want to see. She stated her intention to add aubergine, green beans, capsicums and red bell peppers, lemon grass and a spice rack of other herbs to the kitchen garden, plant the walk up to the road with purple heart, make a wind chime for the veranda if she couldn't find one to buy she liked. She was slowly taming the cat, who now came puling from the bush, twice a day for kibble, answering to the name she gave it, Pelé. For the soccer player, he asked? She said No, the god.

He blew out her candles and began clearing the table, taking the plates out the kitchen door to scrape into a slops pail for his neighbor Mrs. Fetchalub's pig. He put the dishes in the sink to soak for a minute while he shook the crumbs off another of Johnnie's purchases—grass placemats plaited in the shape of angelfish—and wiped up the leavings with a rag. Eternal life sprang forth from the radio again, a low Baptist drawl of a voice meting out salvation to lonely sinners with their ears to the air waves. He spun the dial searching for music, caught a fragment of GIS propaganda regarding
activities
—like
festivities
, the announcer's enthusiasm would have you believe—at unspecified locations in the northern districts. Nonsense, trustworthy people had told him, including Ballantyne, someone who would know. Ananci stories. Bullshit, eh? Drifting down from Martinique came a Creole station, uttering strange and pretty words like incantation, unintelligible, but music all the same, and he stopped the dial there. He rinsed the dishes and silverware, stacked them on a towel, covered the leftovers in foil. Johnnie was saying his name softly, seductively, saying, That's enough.

He went out to the veranda, looking beyond at the night, asking, So where's the moon, was it rising or gone? Johnnie was bent at the waist, a right angle attached to the rail, her skirt fluted around her legs, and he came up from behind and fitted himself naturally against her body, reaching to massage where her shoulders bunched into her neck. No question she broadcast readiness and heat. There was something
wrong with the word
loins
because he had never said it, even to himself. Under her breath she talked to him, a husky passionate
grr;
he asked her twice, What? and she groped behind her for one of his arms and brought his hand forth to cup it to her breast, ripe with gravity, which was also a way of pulling him down. Her hair curtained her face and when he lowered his ear to it she thrust her pelvis backward into the pressure of him, and behind the shield of her hair she was saying fuck me like this, just like this, words swift and fierce and narcotic, an injection of words, pure thrill of words, and he stifled a nervous, imbecilic urge to laugh, emit a goat's bleat of laughter, for surely if he opened his mouth even the gentlest sound he chanced would betray him to himself, his greenness and hunger, his need, which he could never accept in the way he accepted hers. The energy-build of lust was like being crushed out of himself. Like this, she said, a burning whisper. Just like you are—words inside a furnace, inside a church. I want to watch the ocean while you fuck me. You fuck me. He stepped away and back into himself to raise the gray stripes of her skirt, she had made it easy, had already removed her underwear, and there, the rictus like an inverted exclamation mark, he was greeted by the dark invitation of her holes, slashed into the flesh between her legs, the one mystery that was not unapproachable, and he thought, despite himself, God did this. Servitude of flesh. He locked his hands on her hips, looking out over her head to the horizon, which offered him a strangely congruent epiphany, a transitory feeling of navigation, steering by stars. He rolled her shirt up to reveal the close-knit chain of islands that formed her spine, gliding his fingers along her skin, wanting his hands, especially his hands, to be loving, to bring solace. Somewhere in the middle he fell forward across her ribs and used the rail to brace himself, placing his hands beside her crooked elbows, and she turned her head in the cradle of her arms and began to bite him, hard, her teeth above his right wrist, grinding the past and future between her jaws, and what his body seemed to want to know was what could make her shove so violently, back against him. He ripped away his arm and straightened up, staring down, mesmerized, at himself, at her, linked by the spike of his erection, the ineffability of this act, this invasion, sticking her, sticking in, the crude enchantment, the ceaseless fascinating beauty of its essential savagery. He became aware of his panting, Johnnie began a stammering cry that sounded like—

sounded like she was being fucked
like she was being fucked or beaten

and he balked, it wasn't clear if he was hurting her, if he should stop, he didn't want to hurt anybody, most of all a woman, most of all her, not this way, not with love, he'd stop but her cries were translated by his own flesh into a firmness of motion and made to gallop, her high sharp language not really like an animal's but somewhere in the range for Mrs. Fetchalub's dogs to hear the call and respond with a wild, eerie singing, later in their lives they might have laughed, the hair on the back of Mitchell's neck and arms bristled and he clamped his hand over Johnnie's mouth so the dogs would stop, but they didn't stop, they never stopped, they yipped even at the moment he made her leave, so that even then as she walked away he could not tell their cries from hers, his mind let go and the dogs took over and bwoy these dogs goin mek one everlastin racket in you head fah true. I love it, Johnnie gasped, I love it. What's it like with the ocean, the dogs wanted to know, and he answered by buckling at the knees, poured through a stream of words drowning his brain, the dogs,

Who knows what we might do

There is no telling what we'll do

In our fierce drive to come together

Under her skin, throughout the plane of muscles along her spine, down into her thighs, the last flicker of whatever it was passion chased through the course of the body.

(When your head is underwater any puddle is a flood.)

He'd never get rid of the dogs; they were going to be a part of this, always, always proposing their midnight coda to the duet:

I wish my soul were larger than it is
.

Love you, Johnnie said. In fucking credible. I love you.
Te amo
. “Tonight's been an education,” Tillman had said at dinner. He was the oldest of them. Twenty-seven.

He told the necessary lie to make a weekend sign-out of a Land Rover permissible (a lie he would hear repeated, more than once, in the mouths of his accusers). At National Police Headquarters, someone listened to his request for a new pass and then made him wait a good part of the morning before telling him
No problem
, those black magic words that never meant the same thing twice, but this time the police wanted a passenger manifest, passport numbers of all non-nationals, destination, time of arrival, time of departure, reason for trip, and in this circumstance he found it politic to tell the truth. I've got everything but the passport numbers, he told them. They made him wait another half hour and said okay.

He walked back through town toward Sally's school, enjoying its bustle, its mix of high and low, buying a snow cone from a bare-chested vendor who shaved the ice from its dripping block, poured on cherry syrup from a bottle swarmed with honey bees, then dribbled sweetened condensed milk over the top from a can of Carnation. Tourists would no sooner lick the streets; still, one day Mitchell had followed a pushcart back to the icehouse, a happy place to work in the tropics. He met the owner, a good businessman who promoted science, hygiene, pragmatism, fifteen percent net profit, and an honorable reputation.

The harbor front bounced with harsh light, sweaty workmen. The arched doors of the warehouses swung open to darkened, cavernous interiors, the economy's stomach filling with sacks of cement, rice, flour, meal, beans, sugar, fertilizers—all imports, the wealth of other nations, not its own. He had made a good faith effort to climb back into the harness of his work, only to see that the ministry had dropped the reins. Against a sudden and irrational xenophobic rise in rhetoric, pointedly anti-Yank, he felt himself contract and withdraw,
become a wallflower. Not
you
we is fightin, various ministry personalities, like Morrison, assured him. It's the imperial octopus, it's the lackeys, but you is behavin youself, Wilson, you will make out okay for a white mahn if you keep your distance from devils like Kingsley. The new CAO called an unscheduled staff meeting: out of the blue Jack Dawes would be converted back to cane production; a new refinery and deep water port would be constructed on the central leeward coast. Which was the same as saying, for nostalgia's sake, we've all decided to be slaves again. Mitchell stated his protests, to no effect. Sugar makes them demented, doesn't it, one of the foreign service Brits clucked. They can't seem to get beyond it, psychologically or politically. We should admit they are addicts to how the crop structures societies like St. Catherine's. Sugar's communal narrative: master and chattel. All the same, isn't it.