Swimming in the Volcano (74 page)

Corporal Gonsalves ordered him to run ahead to assist Captain Eddins
.

We hurried on and entered the forest
.

A few minutes later we heard a shot in the distance below us and then around a bend we found Johanna sitting a few yards off the trail in some rocks
.

She was upset because she hadn't been able to keep up and thought she had lost us and then she had heard the shots
.

She said she hadn't seen anybody but a policeman running down the path, and then another policeman, shortly before we had found her
.

She became hysterical when she saw Sally had been hurt
.

She seemed to go into shock and wouldn't move and I had to leave her behind
.

I continued down with the two policemen who were helping me with Sally, who had lost consciousness
.

I heard Tillman calling to us far back up the trail but we kept going
.

Sometime later we saw Captain Eddins lying down in the path below us
.

When we got up to him I saw that he too had been shot and I checked his breathing and pulse and determined he was dead
.

The fourth policeman was nowhere in sight
.

The two policemen with me called for him and then became frightened and ran away down the mountain
.

I put Sally over my shoulder and carried her but this was very difficult
.

A while later I heard people above me on the trail
.

This was Tillman and the two women
.

Tillman had a blanket in his backpack and we used it like a sling to carry Sally between us
.

It began to rain and the path became slippery and slowed us down
.

Just before we reached the waterfall I heard someone running down the trail behind us and this was the forest ranger Ballantyne who said he had been up at the crater collecting scientific data
.

With him helping us carry Sally we were able to move faster and we reached the trailhead as it was turning dark
.

One of the vehicles with police tags was gone but the other one was still there
.

Our own vehicle had bullet holes in the doors and windscreen
.

Sally was conscious again but in much pain
.

We laid her on the back seat of our Rover and followed Ballantyne back out to the road and south to St. Andrews where he said there was a doctor
.

The clinic was closed but Dr. Betancourt was at his house next door
.

He told us that only the hospital in Queenstown was equipped to deal with a gunshot wound such as Sally's and that he thought the bullet might have entered her lung though I doubted this because there was no blood coming from her mouth or nose and her breathing was not noticeably labored
.

He gave her a shot of morphine and agreed to come along with us to administer a blood transfusion. We drove immediately back to the main road with Ballantyne following us in his vehicle
.

It was still raining though not very hard and the road was dark and slick
.

I drove at top speed
.

About a mile south of Ashton Park there were cattle in the road and one swung out unexpectedly in front of me and when I hit it I was unable to stop the Land Rover from going off the road into the drainage ditch
.

This was when my wrist was broken
.

During the accident, Adrian and Tillman who were crouched on the floor between the back and front seats were able to prevent Sally from being tossed around
.

It was necessary to transfer ourselves to Ballantyne's vehicle
.

There was no room for Dr. Betancourt so we left him there
.

I don't know how much later it was we arrived at the National Hospital and took Sally inside
.

The pain and fear and the wrenching, riveting horror seemed so expendable when all was said and done. He was awed by how sanitary everything had become, how quick it happened. The statement was like reading a newspaper, it had its own recognizable air of fantasy that seemed perfectly adapted to the way he saw the present moment. This was a new reality and he didn't know where it would lead or what might stop it. He felt a tightness in his chest, his throat and hands; his wrist throbbed within its decaying shell as if it were being baked with radiation. Archibol's brother-in-law, the Peace Corps County Director for St. Catherine, looked vexed and anxious to speak but nobody else so much as batted an eye at this bonanza of mayhem, catastrophe, ill-fate, cursed luck and cursed lives. The Bajan lawyer was scribbling on a legal pad. What Wilson had told them must happen every day and for them stories like this were like blood to doctors. This would never be a mystery for them, no matter what went unanswered. Nothing was primitive, all events could be institutionalized, violence wasn't even legendary anymore, not after two world wars and the indelible surrealism of the last war. What the government did, Mitchell realized belatedly, he could not prevent himself from also doing, which was to objectify suffering, to place a higher value on the concept of truth rather than truth itself.

The friends pursed their lips, waiting in ambiguous silence, the token respect you might give to a competitor up on the tee. He had the childish and self-destructive impulse to keep going, I should just keep going, he said to himself, but when he opened his mouth it was to say, Yes, the statement was correct, to the best of his knowledge.

“Mister Wilson, now I'd like—” began the legal counsel the
embassy had sent but he was interrupted by Archibol's brother-in-law.

“Perhaps you will now put to rest these ugly rumors, mahn, these shameless rumors—”

“Why don't you tell us where these goddamn rumors are coming from, okay?”

It was Mitchell's turn to interrupt, rising to his feet to fling his acid-bottle of words at the man who was there to represent Sally and protect her interests, out of control, wound up tight and let go, losing it for the first time since the torment of the ordeal with Sally. “Why don't you just tell Edison Banks and your brother-in-law and Lloyd Peters and everybody else to shut their fucking mouths and stop spreading lies about Sally and assassinating her character after all the good work she did for the children of this fucking country, and while you're at it why don't you leave Adrian Roberts alone and stop trying to screw her and why don't you just tell us what you know that we're not supposed to about all this bullshit, all this entrapment, and why don't you tell me why I'm here locked up in this fucking place, and what I'm guilty of, and I'm tired of this, I'm tired of men like you, I'm tired of opportunists, I'm tired of people who use the rhetoric of justice and then act like savages, I'm tired of this eternal fucking shit where innocent people pay the cost, this fucking shit, this shit.”

He had been banging the cadence of his voice on the table with his plaster wrist and didn't even know it, Archibol's brother-in-law looked on smugly, off the hook, because clearly here was a loose cannon, a man whose emotions got the better of him, and Mitchell contracted back into his seat, trying to stay outraged for as long as he could to fight off the deep, deep lethargy that threatened to swell up from his stomach and absorb him.

The legal counsel cleared his throat to attract Mitchell's attention.

“As long as the issue has been raised by Mister Grambling, can you tell us what Miss Jorgensen was carrying in her knapsack that day on the mountain. If you know.”

“Sandwiches, fruit, a water bottle, a camera, a rain poncho.”

“And you know this, how?”

“I looked in it, trying to find something, I don't know what, to stop the bleeding.”

“And there was nothing inside to compromise Miss Jorgensen, if you understand me?”

“Absolutely not,” he had lied.

Archibol's brother-in-law was nodding, deeply satisfied by the line of questioning and the crispness of the response.

“And did you throw the knapsack into the bushes or try to hide it in anyway?”

“Absolutely not. It was left on the trail. Let the soldiers who were up there on Soufrière come forward and testify otherwise.”

“The police.”

“I stand corrected.”

He noticed one of the friends of golf giving him a roguish smile and he wanted to rip it off his face, he didn't want that sort of camaraderie with these men, he only wanted to make them know that there is no secret to who Sally was, you know the Sallys finally and always by their goodness alone, by the luminous simplicity of their gift.

He didn't think he was going to get past his problem with Grambling, the veneer of competence that was going to keep him in his job, his vindication in front of men important to him. He wanted Archibol's brother-in-law disgraced—let the taxpayers pay for
that
. The Bajan lawyer started back up the mountain, step by step, sifting for details, and Mitchell felt himself losing it again.

I have mean thoughts, he said to himself. I have hot thoughts.

“If you want atrocity, let's talk about the butcher.” His left eye flinched in spasms and his jaw was grinding madly. “Let's talk about Grambling just standing by and letting them do it. They bring this guy up from the fucking abattoir with his fucking hacksaw. Let's talk about that.”

Instead they broke for lunch.

Mitchell requested he be allowed to remain in the conference room and the friends spoke to his keepers on his behalf. One of the guards went to talk to his superior and the deal was, okay, but no food. Which he had no appetite for anyway but then for whatever reason one of the mess hall cooks noticed he was missing and took up his cause, personally bringing him a bowl of stew and a glass of lemonade, and he ate after all, because it wasn't half bad. When the lawyer and foursome of friends returned, without Archibol's brother-in-law, he was standing at the windows, smoking one of Sam's or Jack's cigarettes, his eyes roaming the slums of Scuffletown, trying to identify the house, seriously wondering if there had ever really been anyone named Isaac Knowles. Now he existed in the newspapers, on the radio, in PRP briefings, strategy sessions. The phantom raider of the north. The invisible force set against the legitimate government of St.
Catherine. Jack Nasty and his bad children. Isaac. The dream of aggression come true.

He was given a present—a carton of Marlboros.
See?
... friends. They all sweated copiously and smelled like garlic and remarked how the restaurants were ridiculously cheap and good. Everyone sat in the same arrangement as before, minus Grambling.

“Mister Wilson, we've got to nail this guy and want you to know how much we appreciate your help.” This was Arnold and he meant Collymore. Arnold was name-brand synthetic knit sportswear and the deceptively boyish smile of a Southern Baptist. His concern for Sally was disingenuous.

“They want to make you happy with Collymore,” Mitchell said. “Believe me. This is very important to them.”

They went back up the mountain again, like Calvary, like the stations of the cross, then back down again, Sally bleeding all over him, and then they jumped ahead to the morning he identified Iman Ibrahim who was Cassius Collymore in a police lineup in the village of Scarborough, and got that over with and done. The room was hot and they kept asking for water. He had an insomniac's need for an afternoon nap and a tingling in his neck and back. There was a mood shift that he just barely caught, and then they were asking if he was a Marxist, or a Marxist-Leninist, or had leanings. The police were in possession of some texts, his name appeared on the flyleaves and his handwriting on the page margins.

Which police? he asked. Which side? The police up there or the police down here? PIP or PRP? If they would tell him he could figure out what this meant. And if this was a deposition why wasn't counsel taking it down? He had not committed himself to Utopia, all right? Paradise frightened him, the concept had that lockjaw feel. With reasoned disclaimers and certain reservations and bearing in mind a world of helpless lives, he believed in common markets, he believed in producing, in orderly production and orderly consumption. Ideology, he was beginning to think, was the source of excess. Excessive loss or excessive gain. Perhaps he was just another of your average bourgeois individualists, although that seemed oxymoronic. Whatever revolutionary sentimentality he had carried out of the Sixties had been replaced with a flat pain. Nationality was not useful in a religion of markets. Rather, not especially relevant, not like culture or even race. St. Catherine had everything it needed for a cultural exhibition but otherwise it was just camping out, it had very little of what it needed to be a modern nation. Any type of nation.

He no longer believed in self-sufficiency but interdependence and
self-efficiency. He believed that the individual impulse to exploit must be balanced with the collective impulse to share. He believed in the tension between the two.

He didn't know what the world would look like ten years into the future, or who would win the Cold War, but suspected that for orphans like St. Catherine it couldn't possibly matter.

Did he have a mission? Yes. To possibly save one person. A friend or a stranger, it didn't matter.

Had he failed? he asked rhetorically, and answered himself.

Unequivocally.

They should tell him which police—here at the fort or down at headquarters. The national force had divided and was growing into two separate and opposing militias. Hang around, he said, and see for yourself. The friends' indulgence gave them amiable, relaxed smiles. Why were they asking about communism if what they wanted to know about was Sally and Collymore? Right.

They gently changed the subject to Johnnie and he blew it big time by automatically reversing direction, exposing his one genuine weakness by rambling on about Roberto Fernandez. They danced around Fernandez for a few minutes and then of course the door was wide open on Johanna Fernandez née Woods.