Swimming in the Volcano (78 page)

As they lifted Sally into the vestibule of the hospital, she grasped his right hand, shooting a blast of flame up through his arm. He drooped to his knees, trying to ease her leverage on his broken wrist,
which brought his face down next to hers.
Let go
, he was forced to beg her,
please, please let go
. Her eyes were upturned to his, her forehead creased as if she were considering how to refuse him, and he listened to her shallow inhalations, waiting, wondering that after all she'd been through, how Sally found the strength for this, but she wouldn't release him and he had no choice but to peel back her fingers one by one. He curled up on the wooden floor, spasmed with pain, while the attendants and nurses placed Sally on a gurney and wheeled her away, Adrian by her side, offering Sally a better hand than his.

Tillman and a nurse helped Mitchell to his feet and then he turned on Johnnie, excoriating her, bellowing, a maniac. That she didn't understand what had happened only further indicted her in his eyes, he had reversed and replayed the mental video of all of them on the volcano, editing her out of the frames,
and guess what
, he was saying,
without you there nothing bad happens
. He pointed down the dark corridor where they had taken Sally.
That should have been you
, he seethed.
Not Sally, you
, he thundered brutally. Johnnie went blank and he asked Tillman to take her back to Howard Bay and said in parting that he wanted her off the island, tomorrow wouldn't be soon enough. What he was saying was already inside of him, had been there all along.

Blood had made the fabric of his shirt stiff and waxy; the nurses assumed he'd been shot as well and cut it off him, searching for the wound while he stood sagging in the vestibule, suddenly disoriented after his rage, and then they pulled him into a room, making him lay down on a cot, and banged him with morphine and he remembered thinking as he swirled lovingly away into the drug's vortex,
so this is where she goes
.

The remainder of the night he had to reconstruct later. Off-hours emergency service at the National Hospital amounted to a nurse ringing up staff at their homes, rousing them from bed. It took several hours just to get the X-ray technician there. The surgeon arrived, but he was an orthopedic man and, after examining the X-rays, seeing how the bullet had spent itself, fragmenting right against one of Sally's ribs near her sternum and had caused no respiratory distress, determined that the wound was not life-threatening, ordered more blood, and somehow tracked down Doc Travis on Cotton Island, who said he would come back across the channel within the hour. They had his wrist on ice to take down the swelling; his arm was off away from him, a second self. He watched them entomb it in starchy white plaster and had the feeling he could get up and walk out and
leave them to their business, and then a nurse with a moon face and vaguely nunnish dress came in and used the word expired, talking about Sally, and he didn't register it, he had no idea what she meant. They finished with the cast and left him there. He was conscious of the plaster tightening, growing hard around the core of an immense throb, and he remembered getting up, going to find Adrian and Sally, walking down the creaky wooden hallways in some sort of misty suspension created by the fatiguing light of dawn, calling their names, opening doors, a shirtless white man zombie roaming the hospital. Then he was in a room with them. Adrian was sitting in a chair, unrecognizable, her eyes dead as dead and her face puffed grotesquely with sorrow. She was inconsolable, she didn't want to be touched or held. I forbid anyone to ever see me dead, she whispered, and that was all she said. She had kept vigil with Sally and now was watching them wash the body. The window was open and birds outside in a mango tree were singing. He had never seen a corpse before and now here was Sally on a rubber sheet, a syrupy knob of blood capping the bullet's vivid hole, her head and breasts lolling, her arms and legs flopping with unspeakable submission as the nurses rolled her, and he thought, what will ever happen to this ache, when would he ever have a heart again, and if there was one world, if we all is one, if there was a human universal mocking borders and nations, transcending the divisions, it was and only could be grief. It was all that anyone would ever have in common. It wrote the book on love. It put everything in its place.

A minister came in saying Christ has risen. Mitchell had forgotten it was Easter and the pathetic irony sickened him. Attendants came to take Sally over to the morgue and Adrian in a voice that no one dared trifle with said, we're staying with her, and with supernatural weariness he followed along in the procession.

The bureaucratic horror show began. They laid Sally out on a steel table in the middle of a windowless cinderblock room, not bothering to cover her until Adrian insisted they must. Within minutes there was a crowd of officials and police. An argument ensued about who was supposed to be on duty back at the station on this holiday. They wrote contradictory reports that Mitchell and Adrian refused to sign. Doc Travis finally arrived in a bathing suit and windbreaker. Someone raised the issue of autopsy, which the law demanded in cases of violent death. Grambling, the Peace Corps' man, concurred. The hospital's coroner and cutter were sent for. In death, Sally was hypnotic; Mitchell's disbelieving eyes kept returning to her inert shape; he kept thinking,
dead
, the most rivetingly exotic of states. She definitely did
not look like any moment she'd get up and walk away, nor did she look angelic, beatific, or at rest in peace; she looked horribly, everlastingly lifeless and dead. The coroner couldn't be found. Doc Travis said
shitass
and grudgingly agreed to conduct the postmortem examination. The house cutter wanted triple overtime for work on Easter Sunday and a hospital administrator refused to allow it and a Mr. Madlock was sent for instead. Saconi came and got in a tussle with one of the cops when they wouldn't let him enter. They took him away before Mitchell could get outside to speak to him even though he didn't know what he would have said. There was too much hubbub, too much yelling and disagreement, too many questions and too many questioners and Mitchell stopped talking, his mind vacant and his emotions battered and anesthetized. His wrist seemed to be the only alive part of him. Doc Travis left, saying he would have his breakfast and be back. Madlock walked in with a cleaver and hacksaw and Adrian lost control with an arm-swinging ferocity that paralyzed the scene. She succeeded in making everybody get out but Grambling, Mitchell, a nurse, and Madlock. Her authority was uncontestable, her voice resonating with near-hysterical command. Madlock went to work. Tell him to stop, she shrieked at Grambling, look at what he's doing to her, tell him to stop. Her eyes bulged, wild and terrified. Doc Travis returned and said, Christ Almighty, look the fuckin mess this man make. He declared it out of the question to determine cause of death. Adrian finally broke, standing in the corner with her face to the wall, wracked with howling sobs, saying Sally, I'm sorry. I'm sorry sorry sorry they're doing this to you. There were two women, PCVs, waiting outside, and when Mitchell told Adrian they were waiting for her to go with them to Sally's house to pick out clothes to dress the body properly, she became calm and lucid again and agreed to go with them after making Mitchell promise he'd stay. He didn't want to anymore but said he would. Fancy up the corpse, was how Madlock put it, once Adrian was out of range.

Afterward, it was out of their hands; Grambling insisted on offering condolence in the form of alcohol and took them in his car down to a waterfront bar. Mitchell wore a surgeon's blouse but the rest of him looked as though he had been dragged through carnage and could use a good hosing off. Oblivious to their suffering, Grambling drank two double vodkas while Adrian sat staring insensate out at the street and Mitchell felt that any moment he was going to black out. He mumbled his response to Grambling's questions about what had happened up north on the mountain, then Grambling turned his attention to Adrian, seeming to make a pass at her, an irrelevant contribution
to the larger unreality. Adrian looked right through him, then stood up and left without a word. Mitchell wanted to react but failed to move himself out from underneath the stupefying crush of Sally, and when he finally got to his feet and out the door, Adrian was gone and he didn't know where. Grambling waddled out after him on his flat feet, only to say it was time to notify the embassy in Barbados, getting in his car and driving off without offering Mitchell a lift.

He took a taxi out to Howard Bay, floating in a cold-blooded dream. News of this atrocity was now on the radio. He went straight for the shower, past the closed door of Johnnie's bedroom. Keeping the cast dry proved too much of a task and he didn't bother. The water failed to grant him a new life and, after toweling off, he opened up the medicine cabinet and swallowed one of Johnnie's amphetamines. He put on fresh clothes and then went to her room, through the door without knocking, without looking or seeing, took her map down from the wall and made her poorer by a thousand dollars, then left without speaking or hearing but with an image in his head of Johnnie curled on the mattress in a fetal position, her eyes red and bleary, her jaw quivering as she sucked like an infant on her three middle fingers, and by the time he reached the front room the image had lodged in his chest, imitating a heart, which thawed him only enough to double back, find his briefcase, remove the envelope addressed to Johnnie. There's your mail, he said numbly, placing it on the pillow in front of her face. He gritted his teeth and told her Sally had died, no one knew quite why. The tears rolled but she didn't move or respond, and he left, unchained his bike and took it up to the road, pounding the pedals all the way up Ooah Mountain and down to the airport, disciplining the rising chorus of Furies in his head to sing in one voice, against her, one shrill song of negation. In the airport bar he found the charter pilot he wanted to see. It was of course only a question of money, in advance. First flight out in the morning, the pilot said. He'd be prepared to leave at daybreak, a flight plan filed for Cotton Island, she could board right where the road crossed the runway, he'd be there waiting, they'd do a stop-and-go on Cotton, then on to Barbados. No problem other than the exit tax, he said winking. Illegal routes were expensive. You look bad, brother, said the pilot, taking the money. I shouldn't ask, eh?

Then he was standing out in front of the terminal, straddling his bike, lost in the glare of midafternoon, his blood thumping explosively. What he didn't want was to start second-guessing himself, reflecting upon the myriad implications of what had taken place on
Soufrière, because he didn't understand the implications, he didn't understand how the island had become a beast that had turned on him, that ever since he had come into this house his destiny had been bound to the beast, and that one day the beast would rear up on its hind legs and serpent's tail and have them all dancing in flames, until their flesh circled their bones in a swirl of flakes, and their hearts cooked into bricks of charcoal. He didn't even know the name of this beast but he knew this: that Johnnie had betrayed him. That there was nothing complicated, clandestine, or conspiratorial about her betrayal; that its consequence was coincidental. That she had betrayed him by being who she was: it was as simple as shoes; it was as simple as—not drugs, but what the drugs meant to her, a way to make the world more than it was. Drugs were Johnnie's democracy. Drugs were her good intentions, her foreign policy, the happy face she wanted to paint on the world.

An Avro took off behind him and he suddenly realized Adrian had a seat booked on the flight. He turned the bike toward Queenstown and rode to Sally's house on Ballycieux Lane, he didn't know quite why until he got there and found Sally's stoop deep in flowers, the yard filled with neighborhood women bawling, and when he went inside it was crowded with volunteers, teachers from the school, the minister of education was there, and so were Saconi and Adrian, packing up Sally's things, Mitchell and Saconi sat down at the kitchen table with a bottle of rum between them and by the time it was empty it was dark outside and Tillman was there and the three of them had told Saconi all they knew, and Saconi told him, what the hell is wrong with you, Mitchell, you ain't so savvy, you know, you can't see this is a police state now and we gunning the people down, that boy Iman Ibrahim is police. We can't go to massa so is weself we try to kill.

What massa? Who massa? said Mitchell, wired, on the precipice of self-exit, some sort of out-of-bodyness.

You massa, said Saconi, himself drunk.

You mean Sally?

No, mahn, you know what the fuck I am saying, said Saconi. He gripped Mitchell's left hand in his, put his head on the table, and wept.

Adrian was steely and composed. How is it possible to fly away from this? she said. What sort of person would I be when I got off the plane at Kennedy? She was staying overnight in Sally's house, going down to the school in the morning; she wanted Tillman to bring her bags there and wouldn't hear his soft-spoken objections to
remain at Rosehill, at least for another day or two. Sometime after midnight, they put Mitchell's bicycle in the back of Tillman's station wagon and the two of them went back out to Howard Bay. They stopped at Mitchell's cottage; Tillman remained in the car while Mitchell staggered in, pawing his way through the darkness to the bathroom to take another Durophet to keep him on his feet, finally turning on the light in the hallway to go into Johnnie's room to stand over her mattress, gathering into himself all the malignant ugliness he could summon, everything he would have seen in the bathroom mirror if he had turned the light on and stood for a long time looking. Johnnie hadn't moved, hadn't taken her fingers out of her mouth, hadn't stopped whimpering. He hovered over her for a moment before he realized she was talking to him, whispering to him in a broken, adolescent voice, and he had to squat down to be able to hear.
Bobby did this
, she kept repeating.
Bobby did this
. What does
bollo
mean? he asked gruffly. He had to ask several times before she told him, in a voice so low he had to put his ear close to her lips.
Cunt
, she said. It means
cunt
. I see, he said, giddy, taunting her. You are Bobby's cunt. He was pleased to hear the damning power of the word. I'll be back for you, he said. You're on a flight at six.