Swimming in the Volcano (76 page)

Man, look at this, he heard Johnnie say, before he had taken three steps. Who knows what it was she was nickering about. A child's enchantment. He didn't stop, he didn't turn around. He was now a guide to somewhere else, not well marked on the map.

His body was cleansing itself and so was his mind. The Indians had called the mushrooms flesh of the gods. Ascend clearheaded. They should have waited till they reached the top, taken a look at the fiery red pupil of the crater, make an informed decision about how close they wanted to get to such things with sulfurous eyes.

The ferns gave way to a forest of hardwoods. The density opened and closed like a fist. His boots sucked obscenely in the skin of black mud. Ahead he heard what sounded like a laugh track, weird peals of
artificial hilarity, which he mistook for monkeys but on up the trail was a cluster of calabash trees, heavy with globular fruit, gourds like great green tits suspended from the branches populated by a flock of crows, maybe a dozen of them, eerie with mirth. Haw haw haw—real comedians. When he did finally see monkeys, feeding high up in a sapodilla tree, he wouldn't have known they were there if not for the sound of fruit scraps raining down through the leaves. They were vervets, he was pretty sure; at maturity about three feet tall. Catherinians called them apes and ate them.

The thing about the mushrooms was, he had done them before, and now was afraid of them, didn't want to lose control. The monkeys were fine, just the way they were, and what could be more surreal than the jungle, just as it was, slapping into your face. He trotted through an immense echoing hush of exalted space, like the interiors of cathedrals, here composed by towering colonnades of silk cotton trees. The path steepened and when it leveled off again he was in an airless thicket of huge bamboo, its girth about the same as his upper thigh. The dead trunks interspersed among the live stalks had a glow like goldenrod, precise stripes of light that punctured deep into the shadows. The room of the jungle darkened and he listened to a rain shower farther up the mountainside, scraping through the canopy. It clattered southward and away from him like a flight of locusts. He had purposely shortened his stride, checking the reflexive leaps and stretches he would have made under other circumstances to enjoy the precarious dance of footing.

As he crossed a shallow stream, he heard, faint at first, what was easily imagined as an electric razor—then on the opposite bank was a dead black snake, its head crushed, swarmed with horseflies. The first sign of their human company, today on Soufrière, since the trailhead. Here the foliage became so thick it was impossible to step off the path, even to urinate, without being slashed and swallowed.

Tillman was making an effort to keep Adrian moving; she was beginning to feel the punishing rate in her legs. Sally and Johnnie were on their own schedule, which he acquiesced to more than he thought he should, because of Sally, whom today he regarded as The Innocent. Meaning, she really hadn't expected to be spending her day on the volcano, tripping. By default, he was the one responsible, had to hold himself back, not run for the sheer joyous punishment of the challenge, and he resented that, and resented that he had been sucked into the drama back in Retreat, which had preempted his intention to ask around about Isaac. The ugliness of his voice bludgeoned the peace of the mountainside, trespassed on its integrity, and so he gave
up hollering back down the trail for his companions, and at the waterfall he removed his pack, deciding he had better wait for everybody, stop using the mountain this way, against Johnnie, as though it were proof the time had arrived for her to tone up. Objective evidence—something's wrong with your life, something in the way you see things is slowing me down. He'd deliver one last pep talk and then push on, every man for himself. Private parties.

The waterfall, more accurately a short cascade of small waterfalls, spilled over humps of gray boulders into a pool of cool clear water distilled from the slopes of the volcano, a mercy to parched throats and safer to drink than what sputtered out of the tap in Howard Bay. He lay on his stomach on a flat rock baking in a circle of sun and lowered his whole face into the pool, feeling its wonderful sting of cold. With his eyes closed, he drank until he felt rehydrated and then lifted out his head refreshed, watching a crayfish angling along the gravel of the bottom, but when he saw where it headed he jumped up, revolted, wanting to spit the water back out. The crayfish joined a ring of other crayfish, feeding on the white threads of flesh at the severed wrist of a puny black hand, its long fingers curled toward the surface.

He found a dead branch and raked the thing out, saw its fur and realized what it was, a monkey's paw. With the stick he flung it back into the bush, where it was meant to be and made a better secret of itself. A wave of nausea passed through him and then everything was back to normal. He stood up on a point of rock to sight back down the trail, visible in three framed openings before it hooked deep and vanished into the plush green mass. From this new vantage he saw what he hadn't noticed before, a tent pitched on the perimeter of the glade behind the boulders, two surplus canvas half shelters, buttoned together ineffectively at the peak. He called out but no one responded or seemed to be around, so he went over to explore. There was a fire ring containing a meal's worth of blackened bones, the hideously fanged skull of an infant devil, its cranium smashed open to get at its delicacy of brains. That was enough to put him off but there was something more, another monkey's paw, this one dangling from a low branch above the tent, a strip of sisal cord threaded through its palm, the paw shriveled and glossy, apparently smoke-cured, dried out as a fetish or grisly trophy. The tent was empty, not even a ground cover inside to sleep on, and Mitchell stood up from its entrance, saying
Fucking defects
.

He went back to where he had dropped his pack and sat down in
the sun, removed his rank tee shirt and spread it out for a few minutes to dry while he ate a banana and took a swig of iced passion-fruit juice from his thermos. Before long, here came Tillman and Adrian, emerging into the clearing, the first two of his bad children, sweat-drenched, each with a wet triangle down the front of their shirts and half-moons under their arms, puffing with adulation for the sleeping beast Soufrière. Elation fixed on their dumbstruck faces. Tillman's mouth gasped like a fish's but words were not forthcoming through the flux of stimuli. Adrian broke the silence, testifying never did she think she would see and feel what she was seeing and feeling. Don't ask her to name it, please, she said. Everybody knew the name and it was the name of something, a place, that wasn't real. Back in the city, she had deluded herself into believing the half was a whole. Tillman set his pack down and found his voice.

“
Fantastic!
” He repeated the superlative several times. “I'd forgotten what I was doing here, living on this island. It's all right here.”

You have to love them, Mitchell told himself. Don't grumble. “It's, like,
pulsating
,” Adrian said. “The beauty.” It was so visceral and potent she said she could feel the volcano vibrating under her feet like the subway or something.

You ain't seen nothing yet, Mitchell told them. Save your amazement. Adrian asked where was the top and he explained they were less than halfway.

“It changes,” Mitchell said. “It becomes a wasteland. Unless the weather changes we'll be going into the clouds.” And then ... well, they'd see for themselves. They'd connect.

“I'm so fucking connected already,” Adrian laughed, “I'm the one who's going to erupt.” She looked around in slow delight.

“We have it all to ourselves, that's what I can't get over. I'm not used to that. It's spooky, in a way.”

Not exactly to ourselves, cautioned Mitchell, lifting his chin in the direction of the tent. There was a hunter's camp. Also, somewhere up ahead was a forest ranger. And either a youth group or possibly a family.

“Don't be surprised to see other people on top.”

“Extraordinary,” said Tillman, his hands outstretched, as if he were blessing the pool. Without saying why, Mitchell warned him not to drink the water. They saw Sally's yellow hair bobbing below them on the trail.

“Are you two all right?” Mitchell called down to her.

“The parrot,” she yelled up ecstatically. “Did you see the parrot?”

“That's good luck,” he shouted back. The indigenous parrots were virtually extinct. It was rare to spot one. Where was Johnnie? “She's right behind me. Hear her singing? Whew!”

“Tell her to put on her shoes,” he hollered.

“She has them on. Did you see the begonias? God!”

“You have to keep up better. It's almost noon.”

“Go on,” Sally said. “We're doing fine. Don't worry about us. We'll catch up. Go on.”

“We'll wait for you where the lava starts.”

“All right. Go on.”

Johnnie's head appeared in the lowest frame. “Don't drink the water up here,” he called down to Sally, and then they were climbing again, going up.

Sally soaked her feet in the pool below the largest cascade, massaging the cramp in her calf muscle, which didn't hurt the way she knew a cramp was supposed to hurt. She was aware of the lump in the muscle and the tugging, inside, but her body wasn't there in the regular sense, her head and her body weren't properly engaged, her head seemed to have taken over, all the body's energy and sensation channeled into it. There was a fascinating but also scary feeling of overload. Blisters had erupted on the backs of her heels too, big whitish domes, ready to burst, but she hadn't even known they were there until she took off her boots and socks.

“I don't feel it,” said Johnnie with a lopsided grin and a lopsided look. Sally didn't know if she was talking about the pain or the thorn itself in the ball of her left foot, slivered into the callus, which she was trying to tweeze out with her fingernails. There was blood in Johnnie's shoe. “I just looked at my foot, not doing what it was supposed to, and knew something was wrong.”

Sally was just about to say let me do it when Johnnie raised her head with a strange expression of alertness, as if she had heard an unusual noise.

“There's something here,” she said meaningfully.

“What?”

“Like in Hawaii. The forbidden places. Spirits.”

They both saw him simultaneously and stared. Someone had appeared on the rocks at the top of the waterfall and was looking down at them. A small man with slanted eyes, deformed by intensity.

It's him, Johnnie whispered. I know who he is.

Sally thought, forest ogre? volcano goblin? loup-garou? what? Is that a real person? she asked Johnnie. Neither of them could take their eyes off the creature; his own were welded to Johnnie. He is so
ugly, Sally said to herself.
Ugly
. Something made him heinous and ugly. She was amazed.

Where is Wilson? the man said. He had a mumbly voice. Johnnie seemed mesmerized by him. Sally tried to pull herself away from the mushrooms to answer.

He went up.

Him say to meet here, by de hole.

Who?

To give de bundle.

I don't know what you're talking about.

Where is Wilson? the man asked again.

Sally said if he ran he could catch him. Or wait for him to come back down in a couple hours. The guy was looking at Johnnie like, There she is, girl of my dreams. We're rape bait, Sally thought, feeling the threat of him tingle in her fingers. He definitely was making her nervous.

Him say to meet here.

Who are you talking about? Mitchell?

She couldn't tell you how many conversations she'd had like this on the island, as though a segment of the population had learned their verbal patterns off broken records. Is this guy really real? she hissed at Johnnie. This was going to be the last time she ever took psilocybin. The day was fated to be spoiled, the mushrooms were telling her now, one way or another, and now here was a visit, if she could trust what she saw written on his face, from madness. Everything had become difficult to understand. She started putting her boots back on, thinking, almost as if it were a riddle: The only way down is up.

Let's keep going, she said to Johnnie, who finally spoke herself, saying to the man on the rocks, Come down.

Don't encourage him, Sally protested.

It's all right, said Johnnie. He knows something. He's a messenger.

Johanna is so goddamn weird sometimes, Sally told herself. So deliberate.

Johnnie was saying, Do you feel it? Something's here.

Maybe he knows about the Indians, Johnnie said.

He's some kind of priest I think, said Johnnie. He might have magical powers.

On the trail Johnnie had put orchids in their hair, behind their ears. Sally took hers out now, tossing it into the pool, so as not to seem invitingly foolish.

He disappeared from the rocks above and then reappeared almost
instantaneously, next to them, squatting on his heels, holding a parcel about the size of a shoebox, wrapped in newspaper and tied with a cross of cord.

Iman Ibrahim climbed down the rocks to where Erzulie was, telling himself he was no jungle bwoy, telling himself there were ape beasts, there were spirits he had knowledge of, there was an old language that echoed back to the incantatory songs of his earliest boyhood. Also, a type of serpent man, and a type of dog man, out in the darkness, watching him, last night while he hugged the campfire, waiting for first light, then waiting for Captain Eddins and his men to pass on the trail. He had not slept, had not come up against the desire to sleep. One thing he didn't like about the jungle was you could not see very far, you always had to listen carefully. He had posted signs, one in a tree and one in the water, warning
Stay back
. Telling himself, there were men and anti-men, spirits good and bad together—tricksters. Everything had a dense, heavy, perilous, glutinous presence, which he knew was the mountain. He shot an ape beast with Sergeant's pistol and ate it, trying to get close to the power. You are eating a boy, he had said out loud, after the fire had burned the hair off the beast.