Swimming in the Volcano (7 page)

The plane banked east to north into its landing pattern and glided onto the runway, raising an assembly of cattle egrets from the guinea grass as it touched. The birds scattered and flapped like snow-white handkerchiefs thrown into the air, fluttering in the propwash. The machine shimmered through watery heat waves the length of the pale concrete, losing its shape, melting and re-forming, not entirely real to Mitchell, given its alleged cargo of one old girlfriend well educated in betrayal. The roar from the engines faded, crescendoed, diminished,
the pilot taxiing down from the end of the strip, the biggest noise on the island and Johnnie embedded therein, closing her magazine, checking her makeup, if she ever ended her pretense against the stuff, replacing the gum in her mouth with a new stick to clear the taste of tobacco if she still smoked—the woman he had once loved flying back into his life for a reason he could not say, and did not want to think about. The plane inched up to the terminal, scaring him.

Mitchell knew they must look predatory on the spread of the low roof. The sound of the propellers whining increased his agitation, but when the noise stopped so did his courage, a hasty resolve to grant reconciliation only as a diplomatic favor. Maybe if he just cut his heart out and tossed it down to her she'd get back on the plane and leave, he thought. A ground crew idled over to chopblock the landing gear and manhandle the luggage. The hatch in the cabin was lowered, folding stairs released from inside, and a stewardess in a lime-green pantsuit descended like the Queen of Sheba, patting her blown hair back into its cone. She was professionally discreet in her acknowledgment of the smoldering fire truck, the charcoaled entrance to the airline's ops room only thirty yards away, offering her attendant's aloof vision of a world in good order, a world safe and sane.

“Long time since I jook daht gy-url,” said Saconi, and Mitchell, who had been ruminating in his own language over an identical fact in regard to Johnnie, felt enlisted into a larger conspiracy. “She know how to play special,” Saconi concluded, “but she doan know how to
be
special.”

In the hatchway behind the stewardess stood a man dressed like a dentist in white knit trousers and a powder-blue shirt-jac, the clinical style of the modern West Indian man of affairs. His name was Vincent Archibol, and he was mesmerizingly handsome, to the degree of glamor. He clambered down the steps as if he were hurrying to take ownership of the island, swinging a briefcase in his hand, his neck encircled by a braid of gold.

“Hail de conquerin hero,” Saconi said.

Vincent Archibol was one of Edison Banks' oldest friends and followers, another architect of the coalition, the beneficiary of PEP's successful maneuvering to combine the foreign and diplomatic portfolios, thus depriving Kingsley of a voice abroad. Archibol now served St. Catherine as her ambassador to the United Nations, where he enjoyed firsthand the courtship of the continents, and ranted selectively against their hegemony. Mitchell had not been introduced to him as he had the other bulls of state, though he had encountered his reputation for progressive action often enough. Archibol and
Banks were the darlings of the new generation of patriots on the island.

There was a sudden renewal of Isaac's distress. “Oh yeeiii yi yiii,” he whimpered miserably. “Look de shitty luck God givin me today. Look, look,” he instructed, covering his eyes with one hand and pointing with the other at a woman advancing out onto the tarmac to embrace the homecoming ambassador. Archibol was shoved backward from the thrust of her bosom. They gave each other a brisk and publicly conscious dose of affection. Mitchell didn't recognize her face, but he remembered the square-shouldered heft of the woman, the nightmarish breasts, and the yellow blouse from the roadside of Ooah Mountain.

“Why you cryin so?” Saconi challenged Isaac. “You lucky, bwoy, she ain marry you.”

“Isaac ran into her car this morning up on the mountain.”

“Isaac smash Archibo's wife?” Saconi asked, his eyes signaling mischief. “Hey,” he hollered crudely down at the couple as they were passing into the building through the Customs gate, “Am-bahssa-mahn, you muss keep daht womahn from behavin so reckless when you away, nuh?”

Archibol disappeared with ministerial imperiousness through the entrance, but his wife paused a step, craning her neck to look up, her hand in a salute to shade her eyes, her heavy slick red lips pursed in an expression of such censorship that her very essence seemed to be intolerance, and the capacity to make that intolerance effective against all violations, real or imagined. Isaac, horrified, ducked behind the ornamental wall and slugged Saconi in the thigh. Mitchell watched Archibol's wife march after her husband.

“Why you do daht? Why you play de fool, Saconi?” Isaac railed. “Why you behave so bumby-head? Why you so smahtass, eh? Why you want to fuck me up?”

Saconi threw up his hands. “What she cy-ahn do, mahn? She ain see us, besides. Juss have a bit of fun, ya know.”

“She ain have to see us, she juss smell we, like tiger,” Isaac said, back on his feet and shaking with anger. Mitchell had never seen him lose his temper before, and Isaac was different as a shouter, more like one of the crowd, alien and potent. “You set me on de run,” Isaac said, stabbing the musician's chest with his finger. “I ain limin about fah she to kick me ass when Customs finish.”

“Tek it easy,” said Saconi, making a grudging effort to calm him down. “Tek it easy.”

Isaac snickered; his face glazed with woodenness. “Easy ain de way
it come.” Saconi's insolence had reminded the former owner of
Miss Defy
how little of anything he could afford, including protection from power. “Sorry, Mitchie,” he said, close to defeat, “I goin go. I gone now,” and though Mitchell reached out to pacify him, to do or say something to stop his fugitivisim before it got started, Isaac was, as he said, gone.

Saconi was not inclined to acts of contrition. “Craziness get in him,” Saconi said. “Him hit'n run and he worry? Hah, you jokin, mahn. Hit'n run, daht's de fuckin national anthem here, in dis place, in dis time. Ain no one give a shit.”

Passengers continued to disembark, the majority of them Catherinians rebounding home, sharing the same bright countenance, relief or triumph—ain no place like dis sweet island, they were saying, or, I only comin back to let you see I mek sometin of meself, eh? Look de Rolex, mahn. Check it out. A few white faces like china masks bobbed in the flow, come to conduct odd business, seek expensive pleasures, practice Edwardian statecraft, force a broadening of the democratic horizon. Mitchell wished them all good and speedy purchase as he searched for Johnnie in the herd. Maybe she wasn't coming after all, maybe in the midst of some induced state this was her idea of a memorable prank, her cracked sense of humor reaching out to Mitchell to arouse the vestige of romance that shadowed his heart, gathering a line of data for future use: obsession plus love decreases at such and such a rate per year of separation, squared by distance, until even the strongest of previous attachments have achieved a certain entropic quantity, a formulaic numbness, a death. Tilled soil erodes, doesn't it? she had asked him one day, smoking a joint and thumbing through one of his sourcebooks. Today's gardens are tomorrow's deserts. He could picture her back in Hawaii, giggling as only a girl who refused to be serious could giggle, as she tried to guess whether or not he took her telegram at face value. He was sorrier than he should have been that she was not on the flight, but then there she was, incredibly there she was, and he gazed upon her with all the unstudied intensity of a fellow who had just been shipped a mail-order bride, a tingling in his heels, ready to leave, to bolt. Now it was beginning, he thought, the sequel to the original production: Kids Fucking Up. This was the new show—no rehearsals, no script, only old times and unacquainted adults in an extemporaneous staging, amateurs' manqué with a fragile morale, everything handicapped by the blunt disaster of their last co-starring performance. A role like this, a role that returned ex-lovers and secret sorrows into the lights,
could only punish its players, and punishment would be its only merit.

There she was, maneuvering through the dim background into the open hatch, enormous straw bags looped over each slender arm. Mitchell asked himself why he should believe the sight of her and answered, believe, believe, in the grasp of an undisciplined reality, believe whatever you see. He asked himself without joy, what does this mean? what does this mean? what does this mean? until his throat constricted and he repulsed what felt like a chemical release of sentimentality. Is this anybody I know? he wondered: the same woman who jilted a beau from the Naval Academy to take up with him during their senior year in high school, burning the cadet's photograph, like an effigy of a boring future, in front of him in the ashtray of her Volkswagen and, to underscore her change of heart, slipping her panties off from under her skirt without being asked; the same one who skipped thirty-one days of class with him throughout the autumn and early winter in favor of a mutual curriculum of sensual studies, first dry-humping in the basement of her parents' split-level, cocooned in cheap incense and the music of a new San Francisco, her pelvis drubbing his crotch with such fury that he suspected her passion was abnormal, that most girls weren't like this or they'd all be locked away; the same woman who once fretted about if other girls got as wet as she did, the same one who asked him to masturbate for her so she could inspect this male novelty at close range, the same person who one afternoon announced, This is the day I want you to make love to me for real but first you have to stop looking like you're about to take an exam, and when he entered her she hid her face in his shoulder and sobbed, with pain, he supposed, although he heard something else that he had never heard before, and when he tried to withdraw out of confusion she said, No, it's all right, leave it there, I've got to get used to it inside me. Then afterward she cried with strained happiness about what-it-meant while he lay beside her with her pillow over his head, the pillow she slept on each night alone in her room, the queen of his imagination, and he trembled like a bad dog because he had gotten so deep into her world, as if he had been issued a temporary visa into a forbidden country, and the pleasure of being admitted into that foreign place astounded him, and he said to her what everybody says, and meant it with gratitude and great conviction, and she said what anybody would say who thought they had fallen in love forever—completing the first stage of a process that now seemed like the biggest prank in all creation, for how could the sacred and precious and sublime collapse so inevitably
into the sophomoric, with such a premonition, a prescience that lit the darkness like a flare, that it would do it again and again throughout the course of a life, until complacency ruled.

Sure, I knew her, Mitchell thought, you bet, but she had gone away. She had dropped out of her second year at Sweet Briar to come live with him in Charlottesville while he studied for a degree that tried to absurdly navigate the crosscurrents of his father's bureaucratic expectations and his own generation's retreat to the land. She left seventeen months later. When her letters started to arrive in the mail, he answered back like a dutiful brother, keeping in touch, wishing her happiness on her birthdays, peace with each new year she welcomed without him, finally comfortable with a ritual of civility, and here she was again, back before him, not an answered prayer, coming down the stairs with big straw bags filled with the objects that were necessary to her on her journey, her sandaled feet reading each step carefully under the obstruction of her load, her legs concealed to the middle of her calves by a loose skirt made from blue jeans. She lagged to hitch the bigger bag over her shoulder, her breasts outlined perfectly during this readjustment under her sleeveless olive jersey. Before she continued she looked quickly around, smiling with unwarranted reciprocity as if she were aware of someone she had not yet identified paying her attention. Wave, Mitchell told himself, but his hand stayed where it was. They were nothing more than two people about to meet for the first time after years of hearing anecdotes of each other from friends in common. Any other view was pointless, since she had not traveled this far, had she, to resurrect old pain or start new fires.

“Which one yours?” Saconi asked.

Mitchell did not want to debate the issue of possession with Saconi. The one that was his was the one neither of them could see, a girl with a Raphaelite luxuriance of hair, on her back in a Virginia pasture, shouting out at the October sky that the world was changing just about as fast as she could ask it to. But her caramel hair was lighter than Mitchell recalled, and drastically shorter, banded into a cool ponytail. She wore a white sun visor, a red lightning bolt emblazoned on the bill, and aviator sunglasses, so that there really wasn't much visible of her face except her mouth, set with lines of determination, the scrolled upper lip and the fat, pouty lower one closed tight over a tongue he heard rehearsing lines and lies that he wished she would swallow.

“Come, Wilson. We goin serenade dis gy-url.”

Saconi exploded into performance, wildly strumming the guitar strings with a beat only roosters could dance to, yapping a frantic
calypso in the whiny Methedrine voice some of the island talent had copied from the mainland to the south. It was so ridiculous Mitchell shook his head and reluctantly smiled.

“Come on, Wilson. Come, come.”

“She's not worth it.”

“Come, mahn. Come.”

Saconi accelerated the tempo; the music earned its right to obedience through sheer aggression. Mitchell's feet, aided by a lingering alcoholic freedom, moved on their own into a shortened two-step, and he was married to the cadence before he knew it. St. Catherine, he thought, you are wicked, wicked, to deny a man his self-pity. Johnnie saw them and waved excitedly, her hand restricted though by the bag on her arm. She stopped to appreciate the scene on the roof. Her mouth cracked open and she nodded her head as if she had foreseen just such a reception: spreeing, singing, fine-looking men and a bath of sunlight to herald the wonder of entry into a different kingdom, these fetching arrangements on the other side of leavetaking.