Swimming in the Volcano (84 page)

He inhaled the luxuriant sweet fetidness of the humid bush, like smelling one's private attars of putrefaction, an unwholesomely pleasurable question mark here extrapolated into the ecosystem, magnified into realm, the not so missing and not so secret ingredient of the nothing-is-replaceable side of life. Time that had been so clumsy and listless now whistled, he forgot about its torturous second hand implanted in his wrist, he quickly passed the last traces and signs of cultivation, the last cassava patch, the last tannia clump and cocoa tree, thinking now here we have an island that's free, no pretension of
progress necessary, give me a fucking frontier, however paltry, and a hand-drawn map and watch me go. There was a network of paths and at each junction he chose whatever branch seemed less traveled, saying
at your service
though he had no idea what he meant by that and the land itself was clearly superior to whatever thoughts loped inanely into his head. Within the hour he was smeared in pungent sweat and mud of his own making, he stopped to eat an orange, took another codeine tablet just to be sure he wouldn't have to start talking to his pain, and removed most of his clothes, changing from his chinos into the pair of gym shorts. The path turned straight up, where he thought for some reason it was too soon to go, but in the absence of turnoffs he had no choice and out of the increased difficulty came exhilaration like a fever breaking. Shortly before sundown he walked into a corona of light that was a clearing. A blue wraith of smoke danced above a small cookfire. At your service, he said out loud, now that he had someone to say it to, not that it had any more meaning than before. Three Rastafarians, the local version, were homesteading the meadowy patch, doing what Rastamen do in the wild mountains of their vision, tend a garden of squash and beans and husband a straight-rowed micro-forest of sensamilla, bushy as Christmas trees. All they wore was jockey briefs and looked like bogeymen, like African warriors, like lion men, like personifications of trees, and the piercing sagacity of their bleary unblinking eyes fell one volt short of blessed delusion. They fingered the juju strung around his neck and said welcome, gave him a rusted tin can containing a sharp-smelling herbal grease to rub on his face and body to keep off mosquitoes and jiggers. Darkness herded them together around the campfire, they fed it more fuel and it blazed up beautifully around their cookpot and he sat with them on footstools that were concave blocks of Catherinian mahogany and smoked their ganj with them until the black jungle began to flash with rips and tears and sudden renderings of energy and his brain resonated with the same dynamo throbbing hum of all the countless insects in the world. They shared a bag of coco plums with him and he ate stewed vegetables from a clay bowl, staring at them while they stared back in some telepathic exchange of poor human striving for expansion or dilation into the godly purities. Mitchell felt himself receding back into a cave of disembodiment and far up at the cave's entrance he heard himself say in a low voice, I'm looking for my brother Isaac, and received the answer, He is not among we people, and after that he was vaguely aware of crawling off like a feral dog to one of their thatched lean-tos where he fell asleep to a universe of buck-dancing and saw-boning, drumming and song.

In the morning he awoke to the tympanic thundering of a storm somewhere over the mountains and a headache of such crushing intensity it bowed him with nausea, the pain jetting right out of his wrist into his eyes, he wanted to chew off his odiferous cast, he could feel the break in the metacarpal bone suspended in its egg of fire, see his hand flap lifelessly, something that wasn't his anymore. He took two Darvon and a codeine, choked them down with a swig of water from his bottle, ate a banana to buffer his stomach, and then lay back on his bed of burlap sacking until the torment eased its prohibition against moving on, downgraded to a dull insistent warning addressed to the madness of his resolve. When he rolled out finally under the sky it was misty and gray, early, though he couldn't tell if the sun was up or not, the three Rastas each lay stretched facedown under their lean-tos, their hair in great animal mounds, as if they were big game trophies, beasts taken on safari, waiting to be dressed and mounted. With his left hand he cupped cool water into his face from a galvanized pail, hoisted his pack back onto his shoulders, and continued walking. More than ever he wondered now if he was all right, mentally, if he was still among the sane. Only a few hundred yards ahead was the summit of the mountain and when he stood on it, the wet wind chilling his skin, it was possible to see Soufrière, the verdant trapezoid of her hips dominating the southern vista, her peak hidden in a wrath of purpled scouring clouds, and out before him from the ship's prow of the rock where he was, the view of the interior had a deceptive magnitude, the surrounding mountains of the north stacked undulant one after another, higher and higher until they disappeared, like runaway slaves, into an ancestral homeland of clouds. He began his descent, the jungle more welcoming then ever, puckered and pleated with refracted light, like a descent toward the bottom of a suffocatingly green, green sea. He talked to himself, nothing he ever would have wanted anyone to overhear, asking himself where had the strength come from, the earth-moving force at his center that made it possible to carry Sally down off the mountain, the transforming blast of lucidity that mastered his panic, silencing the sudden writhing ball of gibberish that choked his throat—this was the miserable consolation of Sally's dying—he had known exactly what he had to do, in a split second he had known everything of significance about himself, the world ruptured and then by his own act of will sealed back together again in perfect order, Here is your trial, here is what you do, this is how you save her, carry her, talk to her, tell her it's all right because it is all right, tell her when she says she doesn't want to die that she isn't dying, because she isn't dying, he had focused with such
fine and determined precision on life and living, he had performed with all possible expediency, everything he had done had made profound sense, and she shouldn't have died, as long as they remained connected by such clarity of purpose, clarity all but divine for the strength it gave him, she was the only one in the world and he was carrying her to safety until he wrecked the Land Rover which splintered his concentration into a thousand hopeless pieces and it was like dropping her, she was vulnerable then and he could not pick her back up and then it was out of his hands, the clarity went from positive to negative, and its new subject was Johnnie, within whom danger and desire were inseparable.

He lost his footing on a slick moss-covered rock and somersaulted into the soft dirt of the trail, his cast landing in a reddish sludge.

He asked himself, How many times did this Collymore fire?

He asked himself, What was he wearing? Okay then, what colors, name a color. You don't know the first thing about it, he told himself, and then he told himself, The hell you don't.

He took the opportunity to eat more painkillers and then picked himself up and continued on, almost down, the land bottoming out into a clotted valley, he came to a stream running fast with milky water, took off his shorts and socks and boots and lay down in the flesh-gripping shock of the flow, his right arm in the air like a salute to folly, making up a melody to sing something Johnnie had read him from the Richard Hughes book, something about the bouncing limerick jazz of the lines attracting him so that he committed them to memory the following morning as he drank his basil tea:

Now he knew a song.

Keep going, he told himself, and put what little he was wearing back on, no point in waiting around to dry off. The trees here ran a carnival of monkeys and birds, once he saw a manicou waddling into the underbrush ahead of him, there were wild boars back in this part of the island, hound-slashing tusks and a blood-curdling charge, or so he had heard; he wanted to see one, he wanted to see something big and awe-inspiring, an elephant would be asking too much but something at least the size of a horse.

He thought, I am here up the bumhole of nowhere because I think if I was anywhere else what I'd want to do to feel better is to kill somebody, he could see how that can come to be the one and only right thing to do, and that was the current rationale for being here and not there. Try as he might—and he was giving up on it—he could not make Sally's death meaningful or transcendent, couldn't offer it anything but pointlessness or deliver it unto a place of rest, so,
goodbye, Sally. Sally, good-bye
, but if ghosts were this facilely excisable from the emotional vocabulary and identity of the living then a forgotten ex-colony of drifting wretches like St. Catherine would be a fucking St. Tropez, and either you were a tinderbox of murderous rages or a clutter of empty flesh grazing complacently upon the resources or you were submerged in sorrow and mourning and bereavement and too bad for you. Whatever it was he was leaving out he had lost hold of, maybe only temporarily, maybe forever, but he had not lost a sense of its importance.

The steamy heat and subsurface closeness of air and his own sick blood were making him weak in the knees but the trail here through level terrain was embanked with dense and matted vegetation, doorless, you could cut a niche into it but to what purpose, he could sit down in the middle of the path with his butt in the muck or just take five on his feet, but he kept on going, some minutes later he thought or imagined he heard drumming in the distance and the animating force of its rhythm cheered him, it brought hope, he remembered the bloodstained map and expected to come upon a camp meeting, a ceremony, he wanted to dance and beat the drums himself, be baptized into any religion that would encourage him to lose control, have a clan of elders assign him the procreative duty of a wife, he wanted to be initiated into the mysteries of manhood, paint his body with the colors of virtue and bravery, and live proudly among human beings.

Because the smell of the jungle was one thing, a single sluggish atmosphere, it readily communicated all adulteration—he smelled wood smoke long before he arrived at its source but not before the drums, real or otherwise, muffled into silence, as if they were being carried off into the spongy distance, and he began hearing instead a sound like a bat hitting a ball, a solid authoritative recurring slap—
thock
...
thock ... thock ... thock
—and he kept walking toward the sharp, familiar beat of these home runs through the sinking green darkness until the jungle towered again and gave the illusion of opening up, an organic cathedral, many-chambered, the mosaic of its ceilings excessively pillared, hailed with expansive naves and pocketed with alcoves, echoless chapels, a maze of overgrown aisles. Then he
heard a second, fuller, more complete rhythm, a soft wheezing respiration, lulling, lispy with succulence, the forest itself breathing out its life, and he followed the sibilant rise and fall of this unexpected engine, the pungency of incense increasing as he tramped ahead, through one bower after another, until under a soaring dome of foliation he found himself among the woodcutters.

They were a crew of six, divided into teams of two; one team alternating strokes, bringing down a column; the second team straddling a fallen giant, their torsos rocking over its girth, a lyre-shaped handsaw between them, their synchronized motion like a swaying prayer. The last team was housed in a bamboo construction, like a sketched diagram of a cube, the joints lashed with hemp, one man atop the scaffolding, one man down within its box, up to his waist in a pit, and on a diagonal between them, hoisted and secured, a massive log, one side sliced flat to reveal a pink face, and each man held with both hands the wooden pin of a handle at opposite ends of a long rusty blade of saw, the fangs of its crosscut teeth wheezing out another rough-cut board as one man's limbs extended while the other's contracted, heave and ho, see and saw. The clearing was flaked and powdered with fresh wood, coconut husks burned like smoldering bombs to ward off mosquitoes, and at the back end of the grove the crew had fashioned themselves a makeshift open-sided quarters with bamboo, their hand-hewn planks, and a squalid wrap of plastic sheeting. As if someone had pulled the plug on the scene, they froze in concert and in position when they became aware of the fact that Mitchell had penetrated the immense and isolated sufficiency of their world.

You're Ballantyne's men, he said with a strange smile of enthusiasm. They nodded, grunted, daht's right, yes sah, this was all the protocol they required to justify a white man's appearance among them. For a moment more they watched him to see what needs he might present them with, and with none forthcoming, each pair of men reanimated, back to work, solemn and methodic and with the graceful dignity of men who labor honestly and skillfully against the hardships brought by life. He was no imposition, his requirements were not an issue, he thought he had never in his life heard a sound more soothing and intimate than the snoring push and pull of their saws. No one objected when he sat down on a stump to overtly admire their industry. The stalwartness of their bodies and their strength made him glad. Veins wrapped around the muscles in their arms like garter snakes. He applauded the flex and nimble accuracy of their strokes. The greenness darkened further and it began to rain, or so their ears told them, but it did not rain like it rained in the outside
world, instead it leaked and seeped and dripped, silvery globules rolled, caromed, zigzagged leaf to leaf, down through the foliage, fattening themselves. The worst of downpours seemed like water Assuring down through the decks, catastrophic squirts and sprays, into the bilge of a mighty vessel, but this was not such a rain and the woodcutters kept on working. Mitchell groaned and a man responded Sah? and that was the end of the exchange, but he took the last of the Darvon and with loving but near-hallucinatory conviction addressed the economic integrity of their efforts and how they might best achieve the maximum benefits from their enterprise. Ballantyne does see to it, one of the choppers answered, and for some reason that soured him on further consultation. He gave them a chain saw and then took it away before they mashed it up. He gave them a chain saw and watched them reduce the forest to Death Valley. He made them wealthy men and—he censored himself, which for the moment seemed to be the one defining difference between himself and God.