Swimming in the Volcano (13 page)

The booj world! Babylon, eh, as it is known to warriors, the filthy, spewing, white-hot engine of destruction, the petit bourgeoisie. White people—free market slavemarket. The States, eh?, hegemony like cancer. Booj TV and booj music and booj film—we are the stinking black and rich crude oil of booj culture and booj economy, and these were the days,
now
, of uprising and naked freedom and throwing off the curse. Because look to our warrior brothers, look to Cuba, look to Vietnam, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Angola; look to Guyana, look to Trinidad and Jamaica, and look to us. Because if you win an election in a puddle like St. Catherine, all you can hope to become is a booj pet, and still must beg for scraps, and the booj massa say democracy is a fine mess, everybody come to its table, but this was a lie that sent men to their graves, and St. Catherine cry to move ahead, and democracy ain no help and ain hold we together no more, mahn.

Archibol told him, and Banks and Peters told him,
Dem booj fellas ain concerned by we
, and he wanted them to care, because you can't fight an enemy who doesn't care. So you must show your face at their
door, bloody and bloodthirsty and raving. Then they will care.
Then
. Then they will size you up. Then they will confront the truth of nature and of the world as it has become, which is the truth of the atom—the smallest of the small, where the greatest power lay coiled. That was the lesson of David, true?, that strength is a matter of perfect proportions, and with this knowledge David was well armed to challenge the Goliath, who was an aberration of form, and a perversity of growth. A cancer. Then they will see that the world that once was, but had become dead and remote, will pass this way again alive and beautiful, like a bird of light. Then they will understand, there is no feud that is not ancient, and holy. Then they will learn, there is no greater booj sin than to love us only like a father. We, who are not children, have conceived a future inside the darkness, and thus were our own fathers, fathering a new life forth from nightfall and shadow, like the sun, and made ourselves complete, like a cycle, like an atom. Because that is what complete means, to be the father of oneself. To know that the booj world cannot swallow what is complete without choking, that the booj world cannot rule completeness, only that which is open and unformed and split, like the sex of women.

The trouble with us
, Selwyn Walker pondered.
The trouble with us
.

He went through the arched gate, across the courtyard, into the public entrance, and there on a bench against the wall, his elbows on his knees and his head hung low, was a youth, who caught his eye, and he passed through the room throwing knifelike glances at the fellow, trying to recall how he might know him, and when he reached the hall entrance that led to the administrative offices of the national police force, he stopped and went back to the duty officer and asked why that boy was here. Then he remembered, and then he went and shook the fellow by the shoulder.

“Here now, you Crissy Knowles' bwoy, eh?” The fellow answered by saying it wasn't his fault, what had happened, let him make his report and leave, why must he wait so, and Selwyn Walker said, “Come with me.” He put a hand on the boy's shoulder blade and steered him toward the hall, whistling fragments of a calypso, which to those who knew him meant Selwyn Walker was having a good day. St. Catherine would crawl out of the ditch of forgottenness where it had lain stunned and suffering for centuries, and begin anew, and because of this, he had been called upon to reveal his true self to the world, and nothing less could gratify him.

“I had to get away.” Johnnie snapped her fingers. “You know, like that. Fast. There was a problem.”

There was always a problem, Mitchell thought. He pictured her this way: Looking over her bare shoulder for a pair of murderous oriental eyes as she flagged a taxi on King Kamehameha Boulevard. She tosses a large bill at the hack—from a purse bloated with gems, bank notes—when they reach the airport and doesn't wait for change. Inside the terminal the ticket agent informs her sternly that her flight is now boarding. She rips into the sky for six hours of first-class coddling, served Dom Pérignon and sashimi, a preview of the life awaiting her when she hits the mainland. Real lurkabout idiocy. Surfers in over their heads. Come on, he wanted to say, who are you trying to bamboozle.

Her eyes canvassed the tiny bathroom she had stepped in to inspect on her tour of the house Isaac had helped Mitchell locate. It was the first suitable place he had been shown after two weeks of Isaac's benign attempts to hustle him into one-window rooms in the homes of people so drastically different from Mitchell they might as well have been extraterrestrial, folks Isaac claimed were his aunts or uncles or cousins, their quick servility and outsized hope at once uncomfortable and taxing, llama eyes begging Isaac in his role as agent for the windfall of a boarder. Half-finished neighborhoods piled with rubbish and grazed by scrawny livestock, biblical provincialism amid the urban sprawl on the hills above the government houses and harbor. The houses and compounds were brushed ineffectively with watery paints, their lots defined by a guesswork of decrepit fencing—branches, broken lumber, upended bicycle frames and metal sheeting and chicken wire all tied together. Unpaved streets waited for the tar promised them, breadfruit trees grew from
ground as bare as a parking lot, fruit dropped rotten and fly-blown. Sullen girls walked barefoot from the public spigot with water buckets balanced on their heads. Somewhere nearby a child was always bawling, and boys played soccer with a wounded ball, their arguments like birds rioting over scraps of bread. Roosters crowed, transistor radios were turned full volume to occupy the minutes of the unemployed. It was initially hard to make Isaac understand that the environment was too negative and psychologically remote to hang his hat on without making big changes in what he, Mitchell, was. It required cellular adaptations in thought and nerve fiber. Forget it, he told Isaac. This won't work. It was beyond Mitchell's power to assimilate that deep, that far into a cultural and racial antipode. He desired a modest house outside the city in proximity to the spectacular fascinations of the water, private enough to forget that the people of St. Catherine had trouble tending to their own domestic affairs though they had a handy expertise for the affairs of others. When Isaac eventually admitted he could not wear down Mitchell's resolve nor convince him how well attended a bwana he'd be, how any one of Isaac's relatives would make it a point of personal honor to ensure that Mitchell's stay on the island be gilded with security and service and lovely cooking, the two of them drove out to this cottage overlooking the blue ear of Howard Bay. Isaac reluctantly recalled the place had been vacant for almost a year. Mitchell rented it from the half-sister of the owner, a schoolteacher gone to Toronto with her three children.

Mitchell reclined against the doorframe, swallowing a Percodan, and then buttoned the khaki workshirt he had substituted for his souvenir of the Agri-Exposition. Johnnie made an ugly face.

“These are disgusting. What do you do, reuse your Q-tips?” She pointed at the cotton swabs in the ceramic mug on the tank of the toilet, their tips a yellowish sprout of mold, the spores of another tropical ubiquity flourishing in the air.

He wondered how long he could survive her presence until the state of unease within him broke, before the abnormality and strange novelty of her reappearance dissolved into the commonplace, the quotidian and habitual. What were your options when an erstwhile love returned? Was she to be regarded as a ghost, a courtesan, lost lamb, misunderstood goddess? Was she an alien, a close friend, a person to be treated as a bad business partner, with mistrust and the tacit entente that compensation was expected? Someone you thanked heaven for sending back? Let her deflect him away from what he most wanted to know, it didn't matter. She had arrived, closing the
door in on herself, not slamming it behind as she bounded out, killing the clock, and he had her at his leisure. She picked up one of the swabs and examined it in the channel of light from the window above her head.

“You shouldn't leave them exposed in this climate.” She dumped the contents of the mug into the wastebasket on the wooden floor.

“Have you come to clean me up?”

“Just the opposite,” she answered, and grinned like the teenage flirt she once was, taking satisfaction in the ambiguity of her reply.

“Things were a mess, everything got so shitty,” she went on, elaborating without any cue from him. She stood on her tiptoes to open the high window that ventilated the room. With a finger she probed the dirt in the pot of philodendron on the sill, its cordate leaves drooping down the wall, green valentines with brown edges.

“What went wrong?”

“A to Z, you name it.”

She reached for the water glass on the rim of the basin, filled it with a sputtery gush from the faucet and saturated the roots of the plant. Mitchell read an extreme significance in each move she made. It was not unlike being colonized by an equal or even a greater power, this business of coming back.

“You know how everything can get. You just have to leave.”

“You're right,” he smirked, “I know,” curious at how frail she sometimes seemed to him, as if there were a disease within her she did not yet know about even as it consumed her strength. She dissociated herself from her own events, from the ruin of events, and went on without a fare-thee-well. Johnnie had been an example of a pervasive counterculture phenomenon, a rebellious student but by accident a great educator. She had taught him about evasion, flight, the strategy of escape, those radical cures, about the bitter medicine of goodbye, she, the refugee from her own perpetrations, a woman who practiced self-exile as naturally as other women mastered attachment.

She replaced the glass, enquiring with a sidelong glance. “It's really bugging you that I'm here, isn't it? Should I leave, Mitch?”

He looked at the floor. “Of course not.”

“Well,” she taunted, and lapsed into a pantomime of pulling her hair out, “all your silence is getting on my nerves. Would you like to bat me around a little bit to warm up? Do you keep a two-by-four in the house?”

“Tell me what's happening. Are you in trouble?”

She sighed, flapped her arms as though she were giving up. “You
know me—a sucker for fast moves. A girl who likes a good race, even when there's nothing there at the finish line.”

“You're in trouble.”

“I was, but not anymore.”

“Want to talk about it?”

She made her
no
clear without saying a thing, then averted her eyes. “Not until I'm ready, okay? Until I know you're ready too. It's just one of those things, you know what I mean? I want to get it over with, tell you everything, Mitch, but every time I go to open my mouth I run empty on courage.”

Saying this much made her brighten, seemed to make her feel that she had earned a temporary reprieve. An oily forelock kept lolling down into Mitchell's face like a slow tic. It made him realize how filthy he felt, and it made him angry. “You descend out of nowhere,” he said, fingers assaulting the buttons of the shirt he had just put on. “I'm unprepared, you understand, so you're going to have to coach me on what it is you want me to pretend—don't look at me like that, I'm not cute when I'm pissed. What do you want to talk about until you're sure we're both ready? Cost-benefit analysis? Start-up capital?”

Her lips concealed a smile, deferring to his irritation. “More or less,” she said.

Mitchell hung his shirt over the doorknob and opened the tap, maneuvering his scalp down into the grimy oval of porcelain, water shooting all over, hawking to find out if his nose was still draining blood. He asked for the shampoo in the shower stall and she handed it to him. He lathered up and heard familiar noises that were still one more premonition of the madness his life and its bachelor rituals would have to face in the days ahead. Mitchell opened his eyes to slits and groaned.

“Wait a minute, what do you think you're doing?”

Johnnie had bunched her heavy skirt around her waist, lowered the toilet seat and settled on it, the sheen of navy blue panties binding her knees together, a section of white tissue clutched absently in her fist like a ticket she waited for someone to take. A burst splashed into the bowl. Her behavior made him stiffen, aghast, not that she proceeded with casual disregard, wiping herself, exhibiting no trace of modesty, but because of what she took for granted. (I'm just a girl she once told him. I don't know what else you want me to be.)

“You can't just come in here and hike up your skirt. As if we were some ma and pa show.”

She careened forward and laughed privately into the space between her knees. “La la la,” she said, cocking her head to look up at him. She stood and her skirt parachuted back into position. Bathroom democracy, domestic peace itself.
La la la
.

He cooked breakfast while she unpacked her belongings, apportioned to the spare bedroom in the shady front of the cottage. The interior walls were built in the style of the colonial period, late Victorian in fashion if not in content, a sensible adaptation to the swelling heat of the latitude, designed to exploit the persistent and welcomed flannel breezes called the Trades that blew across the Atlantic from the northeast and made European contact with the Americas inevitable, an intercontinental highway of wind and current to ride to the west. Under a steep-pitched tetrazoidal roof lathed and sheeted with rusty tin, the board walls went up only so far and then stopped, like tall office partitions, allowing the air to circulate room to room from outside to inside through a bank of louvered windows installed the entire seaward length of the house. The construction favored openness before privacy and Mitchell was acutely aware that Johnnie was breathing down his back from the first moment he went alone into his room to change clothes. Her feet resounded on the old wood floors, her comments about the local batiks tacked to the walls seemed to carry the pressure of her breath right to his ear. The intimacy grated, and he could only take comfort in that the two bedrooms were separated by an entranceway, without a common membrane to amplify the indiscretions that were better left unheard. How priggish, Johnnie would say if she could read his mind. You're acting as if I never had access to every piece of you, every mortal sloppiness.