Swimming in the Volcano (75 page)

Talking about Johnnie made him sore and defensive. He wanted to emphasize she didn't represent the answers they seemed to think she did, not in the context they were working with here, trying to establish a scaffolding of facts around a monolith of as yet unveiled truth and so on, he blundered, at least that was his opinion. Johnnie was a red herring. She was a drug dealer. Like, who the fuck cares? Their interest in her was misplaced. She was sidelines, bleacher seats, pure audience, and this was a discussion about actors, or about victimizers and victims was another way to see it, but whatever Johnnie did she did to herself. Used drugs and sold drugs and so what, where's the angle? Drug dealers are sensitive people, if they're smart and no more greedy than your standard-issue Wall Street vampire. They get out of the way fast. She got out of the way. Came for a vacation, shit happened, and she hightailed out of here. What more was there to talk about. She enjoyed herself the last week she was here and one thing about happiness is that it's not often that it's memorable. Ask the people who publish newspapers. Maybe in your old age.

That was enough, a good day's work, they thought he did well. One of the major aspects of this, they said, was that they could see him in his own right as a hero, the thing no one's supposed to try to be. The word cut, as much an insult—
more
—as accolade.

Back in his cell for the night he learned how energy was his real enemy. Out in the interior courtyard he could hear the ticking heels and practiced laughter of the whores being let in for the night. One of the guards sold him a soda bottle of homemade rum and its taste and effect were unsparing, slamming his head into a soft flaming wall of grief. Rustling sounds came out of the spaces where the light didn't fall. The butcher's name was Mr. Madlock. He was very fat and wore a woman's style of sunglasses. What was so terrible was that he had on a yellow tee shirt from a casino in Antigua, there was an image of a white woman stenciled on the front, a cartoon, her mouth was saying
wow
and she was waving a fistful of money, and beneath the image was the slogan
We make the night better
. This alone could never be forgiven. His pants drooped, showing red nylon underwear and the crack in his ass. He was the postmortem “cutter,” kept on retainer by the hospital for weekend emergencies, when the coroner was off duty. He smoked constantly and the ash kept tumbling off into Sally's chest cavity. This is what brought his heart to its knees, this was why he had decided to hate when everything froze up in the jungle when he was with the woodcutters, because at least the hatred presented itself as a way out.

Every morning it was the same, biscuits and tea, prayerlessness. Noise, a debilitating cultural noise factor. Everybody shouting. Guards having conversations in shouts to be able to hear each other at opposite ends of the galleries. Inmates shouting for the same reason, hands like a row of snakes extended through the barred windows in the wooden doors, and the radios like electronic Babylon. Prisoners in military formation in the yard, sweating through their rags, calling off exercises, push-ups, knee-bends, slogging in place. Occasionally a lovely baritone voice climbed up and up in song and he remembered an old proverb he had heard somewhere:
When danger approaches, sing to it
. A trip to the sewer of a washroom for a supervised shower and shave. He was not a prisoner but a detainee, though the difference was hard to appreciate. When he came back from the washroom someone had pinched his carton of Marlboros and he realized that was bound to happen when you had too much of something.

As he had been trained by Ballantyne, he went up and up and up, single-mindedly and with angry exhilaration, leaving the world below. He set a brisk pace going up, rising through a sea of cellulose and chlorophyll toward a brilliant surface, a phototropic entity, brushing through a stand of dripping fern trees, light streaming down through the canopy overhead. The others were somewhere behind him. He wasn't teacher, wasn't going to be. Soufrière was.

The journey to the mountain had been strange, unpleasant, subdued with tension, and, eventually, almost disastrous, certainly nothing to laugh about. It had been a late night for everyone; no one had much to say, except Johnnie. She awoke grouchy, then on the road she was manic, affectated; she babbled. Just like on the ferry, her Pacific escapades,
we had to get up and back before dark too, flick your Bic every two feet if the sun set before you were down, by then your pickup was probably sitting at a bar in Lahaina, I'm talking about Maui, now, we'd be dropped off at dawn with backpacks full of keikis
—
you know, starts, young plants
—
keikis means children in Hawaiian, also we'd carry fifteen pounds of powdered Angelica root and fertilizer, the Angelica minimized plant shock, once you transplanted you sprinkled it around the keikis, we'd run way the fuck up Kipuhulu Gap, where Charles Lindbergh is buried, you know, down at the bottom, and we'd go way up, past Seven Sacred Pools, you have to get down on your hands and knees and crawl through the hau tree roots, and the staghorn ferns were as big as houses, it was like we were hobbits or something, we'd stamp them down in the center and plant the keikis, our world-famous keikis
.

Tillman dozed. Mitchell felt like telling her to pipe down but took a mental step backward, away from her, instead, and concentrated on
driving. Adrian finally complained about Johnnie's cigarettes and she put them away in Mitchell's daypack and became quiet and edgy. It was just too damn early for good sense and grace.

The road north was twisty and potholed, abundant with hazard; after an hour they felt carsick and stopped in Missionary for sodas to settle their stomachs. Johnnie and Adrian had been nipping on her water bottle of black tea, which only made it worse for them. The two women had a stop-go relationship that he realized he wasn't understanding. Only Sally seemed cleanly awake and pleased to be doing this, and even the good-naturedness of her mood was subject to the influence of Saconi, his last-minute decision, made the night before, not to come along. She relayed his list of negatives: wrong season; the jungle was a shitty place; the northern peasants depressed him with their fierce, subhuman backwardness. He was weary of counting their afflictions, their patriarchal clamoring. A peasant is someone who likes to salute, he had said, which sounded too much like a change of heart, coming from Saconi. Worst of all, from Sally's point of view, he disapproved of what she was going to do, made an accusation of meddling and took the side of the child's father. Sally blew up at him, said aren't you being a hypocrite, heard what came from his mouth as an anathema, and his words weighed heavily on her now, as well they might, considering she had almost gotten herself killed.

It was too much to deal with, too much sadness and too much fear and too much ignorance, the poor son of a bitch and his kid. The father was handsome as a Belafonte too, straight-backed with virility and the will to endure, but his son lay crumpled on a pile of crocus sacking, fluttering with spasticity, face rimed with mucous and his limbs neurologically havocked, like a burnt insect's, and however hopeless this was, Sally was right, because the boy's eyes telegraphed a desperate intelligence, the eyes were alive within his cage of flesh.

Mitchell didn't know why he wasn't afraid entering the shack, backed by Tillman. Adrian said sangfroid, which was at least better than having to hear this stuff about macho. He simply thought reason would prevail, face to face, in the light of day. The fellow had the rifle leveled at Sally, the barrel inches from her abdomen; Jolene and her mother-in-law were in a corner, blubbering; the little boy's eyes darted from adult to adult and his father raved—
M'pé, nap boulé
—his English boiling with Creole, virtually unintelligible but Mitchell had interviewed enough northerners to catch the gist of it: God created the monkey and then the white man came and took away the monkey
and put him in the zoo (
behind the fence
, was how the man expressed it in Creole).

There
was the dilemma.

It reminded Mitchell of a folk proverb one of the politicians—Banks or Kingsley, he couldn't remember which one—was fond of using: When the black man takes, he take one; when the white man takes, he take all. Something along those lines. They must have been about the same age, he and the father. He began talking to him as he might without the rifle there, in a conversational tone, not pacing his words, he didn't think the wretch was deaf or stupid, saying to him, This is my wife. The barrel of the gun swung on him then. The words came automatically—survival had its muse. She's a doctor, he said calmly.
Oh God no!
Jolene shrieked.
Is a doctor he blame!

This is my wife, Mitchell repeated, meeting the man's inchoate eyes. You know like me there are good doctors and bad doctors. This is my wife, she loves children, she helps children get well, she would sooner hurt herself than hurt your son or take him away from you. I swear she doesn't want to take him away. He put his arm around Sally's shoulder and began to slowly sidestep toward the door. This is my wife. She helps sick children. Do you want us to leave? I think it would be better if we left.

The barrel of the gun divined Tillman in utmost circumspection, then circled away to the far side of the humble room, coming to rest on the child. Shuddering, the child's father began to weep. Mitchell, believing the father was going to settle the child's fate this way and kill him, pulled Sally toward the door, Tillman slipping out ahead of them into the dirt yard with its spindly crotons. Any second he expected the boom.

“
Mitchell!
”

“There's not a thing you can do, Sally. What do you think you can do?”

The distinction between mercy-killing and murder was not a discussion she was going to have with him. They went on a scavenger hunt for a cop, anybody with authority would do, if he came with a gun.

Given the choice between phototropic and psychotropic, he was going up, not in, unable to reconcile his two selves and their separate cures. Of the many things love could not provide, one was such a thing as a mountain. He passed through an abandoned cocoa grove, the fruit pods stunted, its wood rusty with molds. The heat was like
something inside a steam lodge. He removed his long-sleeved outer shirt, so helpful in protecting a climber's arms from the incessant cat-scratchings of the jungle. He wiped a spiderweb from his face and kept on going. His body cleansed itself, reeking a skunky stench not unlike the jungle's own smell, though not as rich and not as curious.

Only Johnnie would take a tenuous morning like the one they had and turn it around into a referendum on the counterculture of cow-shit. Was this a penchant being expressed for trivialization or enhancement, was the question, and he couldn't decide. The question was new—suggesting that raising it was part of the answer. Everyone went along because everyone went along. He fretted that they weren't taking the mountain seriously, that he hadn't convinced them. Or that he had, and made them lazy with the challenge. There had seemed to be, however, a collective need to switch gears, throw themselves forward into a fantastic day, away from the day they were so far having. He had certainly felt it, the strong desire to put some distance between himself and the Jolenes of the world, the central characters of pathos. The world blamed good wombs that bore bad children, or so it often seemed. Between mother and child and the mountain stood Sally, torn, agonizing whether they should get back down to Queenstown before something else happened, but Jolene was adamant, she would walk out to the coast road and home if Miss Big Sally sacrificed for her. Miss Sally's “holiday” was all-important, something Jolene wanted to believe in. What Jolene was doing was pretty blatant and finally Mitchell told Sally, Leave them and come on, they'd be all right. Sally wasn't being given the choice of remaining behind. She must have known, because she wrenched a promise to wait out of Jolene, and Jolene promised, halfheartedly, her head bent over the palm frond doll she was weaving for the child.

Ten yards up the trail, Sally stopped and pleaded with them. “What do you think, you all? Tell me to go back and stay with her.”

“I think she's going to bolt for the guy,” said Mitchell.

Johnnie kept her own counsel, but both Tillman and Adrian agreed. I think you're going to have to let it be, Tillman told her, until she comes to you. Use the mountain to get used to the fact that at this juncture you're the problem not the solution. The phrase “use the mountain” stuck in Mitchell's thoughts.

Mitchell had become very insistent, saying we have
got
to move. He was also giving Johnnie a hard time about her zorries again. She said come on, just relax. She didn't have a knapsack of her own and wanted to transfer her bottle of tea and sneakers from Mitchell's pack
to Sally's. Johnnie and Adrian were already round-eyed from the mushrooms. The bottle was passed around, Sally taking a good slug like it was bourbon. Don't drink too much or you'll just want to sit down and let the mountain come to you, which it won't, Mitchell said.

“Which it just might,” Johnnie countered, with a bogus air of enlightenment, squandering spirituality. Mitchell thought the less he communicated with her today the better. All morning he had felt out of rhythm with her, her capriciousness. Selfish and pious, he wanted to say. As if there was her way and his way and neither was wrong because all ways were equal and one shouldn't seek to dominate or oppress the other. This exasperating stubbornness of hers about shoes. These are native feet, she kept asserting, wanting him to run his hand over her calluses, but he knew perfectly well how thick they were. Mitch, you don't know, she kept telling him. She knew how to walk in the goddamn jungle. Why was this an issue? He should remove his own boots and feel the mud as it was meant to be felt. Look, she knew what she was doing. It was time for him to shut up and let her do it her way. She weeded the kitchen garden by yanking off the tops and leaving the roots and he couldn't talk with her about that either. He supposed he should be grateful they weren't in an airplane, co-pilots, quibbling over how to fly, or by now they would have crashed and burned. Like flight, the mountain came with its own rules. If they still wanted to swim in the crater's lake, it was imperative they stop dicking around, they had to go, haul ass; Let's haul ass, he told them. Otherwise, have a nice day. That's fine, said Johnnie, stop acting like we can't take care of ourselves. Go ahead, said Tillman. We're right behind you. They'd save him a mouthful of tea for the summit. They would make of the mountain what they would. No problem.