Swimming in the Volcano (14 page)

The hallway led straight ahead to a boxcar-sized kitchen which shared its half of the house with an empty dining or living room to its opposite side, and still ahead through a back door was a veranda that ran from one end of the house to the other, its deck ten feet off the ground on stilts, the land underneath sloping off to low cliffs rimming the water with ironrock, and beyond that the fantasy of Howard Bay, its blue ear resting against the land in an act of docility. In the near distance you could see the eastern jaw of Pilo Bight, its brown humps like knuckles worn through a green yarn glove. Beyond that was the haze where the coast turned north to be scoured by the brute waves of the Atlantic. To the south the Los Muertos Channel cut a wide river between St. Catherine and her cays to the east, fragments and atolls known to sailors as The Necklace, and below that
the cloud-shadowed slab of Cotton, a dwarf sister island and recently a sandbox for the rich. It was a millionaire's view. Each evening, home from his office at the ministry, Mitchell would come out on the veranda to sit and jab the sunset with a rum and tonic.

The owner's furniture, a few fine cedar and mahogany pieces handed down through the family until they were antiques, remained behind like ghosts, unable to disappear with the bodies to which they belonged. Even so, the guest room was without a bed, and Mitchell borrowed a lumpy object Tillman called a mattress from Rosehill's storeroom and put it on the floor under a gauzy envelope of mosquito netting. No pillow. There was a pillow shortage on the island, and he couldn't hunt one down. And with its double windows shuttered for the night, the room had the bleak look of incarceration, so yesterday he had made the time to get to a dry goods shop where he bought yellow material printed with bright red hibiscus blossoms, then to a seamstress to have her cut and hem the fabric into curtains. There was a wardrobe in the room, and a small primitive chest of drawers, and a Colombian moa nailed on the molasses varnish of the wall planking. Also, Mitchell had dug an elephant's ear on the edge of the lot and potted it in a five-gallon bucket. It brooded in confinement along with a young jacaranda stoically celebrating with a single lavender bloom, a fertility plant dropping its babies in a circle, and a mayonnaise jar crammed with flowering fragrant ginger stalks he had cut fresh prior to waking Isaac for their disastrous ride to the airport. These duties of his hostmanship Mitchell performed without thinking beyond the desire that the sincerity of his hospitality not be held in doubt. Shelter from the storm was a basic rule of humanity and yet not to be misunderstood as an invitation.

And breakfast was being served on a while-it-lasts basis.

Opening the brown skin with his fingernail, Mitchell peeled a plantain and sliced the dry-smelling fruit lengthwise into strips. The oil in the pan on the hotplate heated up, spitting when he crushed a garlic clove and threw it in, followed by the plantain.

“Beautiful smells,” Johnnie crowed from across the house. “Coconut oil and garlic.”

Mitchell looked up toward the network of roofbeams as though she might materialize there.

A pot of milk bubbled. Into it he crumbled a waxy plug of cocoa, stirred in ground bay leaf, salt, and sugar. The plantain strips turned the color of old teeth. The countertop refrigerator periodically contributed its own scat riffs to the music of the cooking, a three-beat gurgle, a two-four chug. In his better moods Mitchell would drum on
it with fork and spoon. From its sweating interior he took a mixing bowl of day-old batter.

“I'm cooking tree-tree fritters,” he announced. He speared the plantain to one side of the pan and ladled in four globs of batter. There was a loud sound, the wardrobe being shoved across the floor. Johnnie rearranging her new hideout.

“Were you talking to me?”

“Tree-tree.”

“Ye-eah?” A scrape and rumble, and then a bang.

“Tiny little fish that swim from the ocean into the river mouths, the same time every year. Millions of them, no bigger than pins. You didn't know that you timed your visit for tree-tree season, did you?” Hammering vibrated through the house. “What are you doing back there?”

“Just livening up this dark space ... did you say we're having fish?”

She came to the kitchen singing, a cappella, a capriccio, notes released from her mouth like sonorous bubbles, sort of a parody of a torch song that she sang, it was clear from her face, because she was happy. In her hand she wielded the blunt instrument of a wooden-soled sandal. Mitchell stood by flipping through the
Crier
, St. Catherine's one independent newspaper, printed twice weekly and distributed on Tuesdays and Fridays, Saturdays at the latest, having chartered itself with the imperative of entering a few facts into the national dialogue.

“It says here,” he said, reading, “‘A man the people of Plaisance call Booty, or some call Sneak, though that is not the fellow's name for he is in truth named Cyril Balcombe, was apprehended Monday last for the crime of praedial larceny, whereupon, in accordance with recent legislation sponsored by the Honorable Joshua Kingsley and the PEAS coalition, the said legislation designed to halt such piratical acts, Mr. Balcombe was taken before the steps of the Town Station the following day by order of the Magistrate, removed of his trousers, and caned on the buttocks by the Corporal there on duty in full view of the public and children, who loudly counted out the entire sentence of strokes, twenty in all. Mr. Balcombe was then required to pay a fine and permitted to return home on probation, where he was later that same day seen at rest in his yard hammock in a position favoring his recent injuries. Mr. Balcombe occupied his recovery by dictating to his son, who loyally recorded the father's words in his grammar school composition book. When asked by a neighbor what it was his son copied for him, Mr. Balcombe stated that the beating he had just received at the hands of the authorities
had inspired in him a calypso, which he hoped to sell to an unnamed performer at some future date to advertise his innocence in the affair. Mr. Balcombe added that the name of the calypso that “had been lashed from me” was “I Tek a Whippin, Jack Nasty Tek De Pig.”'”

“My goodness”—Johnnie rolled her eyes—“did you just make that up?”

Mitchell glibly told her that in St. Catherine all the old thrills were making a comeback. The minister of agriculture had reinstated classical punishment by delivering the first hot stroke of justice to the first guilty arse the government could lay its hands on. The countryfolks loved it. “Teef a cow, tek a bow,” the schoolchildren rhymed. Mitchell had been there—it was at an agricultural fair in Kingsley's home parish—and the audience cheered: “Lash him, poppi, strike him straight on, mahn.” You could call it Bligh's legacy—breadfruit, the bull pizzle, the cat-o'-nine-tails. Food and discipline as the base ingredients of civilization.

“Hawaii could use a system like that,” was all Johnnie said on the subject.

Oil foamed around the islands of fritters, heat escaped through their centers to the pimpled surface. Johnnie took up the spatula in her free hand and poked at them, bending closer to look. “What are these?” she asked.

“I'm doing that.” Mitchell folded the newspaper closed and blocked Johnnie out of his way, grabbing the turner.

“Jehovah cooks breakfast. Oh yes,” she said, playfully waving at his head with the sandal. “I have not forgotten Mitchell's house rules. Thou shalt not interfere with thy cook. Thou shalt not leave illegal things lying around in plain sight. Thou shalt tidy up thine own mess, wherever it comes from. Thou shalt not covet the rewards of thy lover's ambition. What have I missed?”

He flipped the fritters, thanked by a small ovation of grease. “Stop threatening me with a Dr. Scholl's,” he advised. “Are you ready to eat?”

“Almost,” she said. “Do you have any tacks? It'll only take a second.”

“What is it you're doing?”

“Hanging up a map of South America.
National Geographic
—big.”

He gestured toward a column of drawers in the row of cabinets set underneath the counter. “Look around in there,” he told her, and kept busy cutting ripe guavas in half. She pulled open several, dug through them, closed all but one back.

“Mitch?”

“Yeah?”

Her tone was incredulous. “What are you doing with so many rubbers?” she asked. “There must be two hundred of them.” She scooped a fistful and let them trickle.

“I'm a very popular guy on this island.”

“I guess so.”

Embarrassed, he went to the cupboard for the enamel plates and silverware. Johnnie found the tacks in the bottom drawer and, whirling on her heels, marched out of the kitchen. Mitchell turned around just in time to see her stick her tongue out at him. Seconds later, a rapping fired through the cottage, a house now inhabited with echoes from another place they would call their own. A house where a woman's words could drift freely from corner to corner and gather in the cobwebs under the roof to form with his, as if their business together would be best conducted, like comic strip characters, in the neutral space above their heads.

In the fullness of the morning, the air on the veranda where Mitchell had carried their breakfast smelled much like baked grass, a lulling scent with an arid sweetness to it that passed across the house from east to west stowed on the Trades, a caravan of fragrance, interrupted at intervals by the effervescence of a thousand buds and oils and essences of the warming land itself, their syrupy heaviness levitating in the heat, thronging the atmosphere like an aromatic muster of souls. He filled his lungs a few times because it was impossible to resist the intense intimacy of the land, not just to smell, but to breathe as if it were an act of drinking, to respire and absorb. A maverick whiff of crotchy odor from the forests would sometimes stray into the stream, from off the inland hills, and eddies of saltiness, like the smell of damp saltine crackers, as the lobe of Howard Bay twitched against the open jaws of the shoreline. He drew hard, but this style of breathing also made him wince, reminding him of the fatness of his clobbered nose.

“Doesn't it hurt?” Johnnie asked, breaking open a tree-tree fritter and with a chary look inspecting its countless white threads, pinpoint beads of black eyeballs attached to each strand. She looked over at him, her brow pinched. “It looks swollen. Maybe you'd better see a doctor.”

“No. Don't need to.”

He drank from a cup of oily cocoa tea, put it back on the packing crate they were using for a table, opened his mouth but thought better of it and said nothing more. She raised her eyes expectantly but
hesitated herself. The flatness that was suddenly upon them appalled Mitchell and he wondered what to do. Johnnie finally took a prim bite of a fritter and chewed experimentally.

“What is this I'm eating?”

“I told you before but you weren't listening. Those are worms. A breakfast special.”

She looked, appropriately, nicked by the sarcasm of his tone. It was clear he wasn't trying to get her to laugh. She returned the fritter solemnly to her plate and spooned a purple-pink hemisphere of guava instead, her mouth purse-lipped from its tartness. Mitchell was bored with his seriousness, bewildered and alarmed—even though he had figured it would happen this way—by the chip that rose on his shoulder at the first sight of Johnnie. This weary business of memory, wholly errant. The brain briefing the glands from dog-eared files. Sniffing sniffing sniffing at her passage through the house, an enraged fascination with the intoxicating trail. Goddamn it, he said to himself, enough, enough—this wasn't his life, this wasn't what was important. What he truly needed was an opening in his perception of her, a way to appreciate a new Johnnie, even if he couldn't persuade himself that that was what she was.

It was not a miracle, her return, nor was it a curse. Don't be stupid about this, Mitchell warned himself. Don't make it such a big deal.

Johnnie took a slow deep breath, pressed her knees together to reinforce her composure, and looked at Mitchell with more earnestness than he ever thought possible. Academy Awards, he thought.

“Talk to me, Mitch, okay? Please? Do you want me on my knees?”

Mitchell fidgeted on the crate he sat on. “I don't have any control here,” he protested.

“Well, that's not true,” she responded immediately. “You can make this into anything you want.”

“Oh?”

His mouth remained in the sulk that the vowel had sponsored. He could feel his eyebrows declare independence—they saluted, they chopped down, they came together like two fuzzy magnets. He was trying to see into her through a kaleidoscope of minced feelings, the composition altering with each degree of rotation of the Johnnie being revealed, splitting and shifting and merging from one instant to the next. Well, brother, what do you say to a girl not seen or heard from for five years. Who, what, when, why, and how, the reportorial motif?
Oh, it's you
, as though the time apart was of no more consequence than a nap, an errand in town. Oh, it's you, where the hell have you been? Without a working hypothesis, the gulf between
them widened and shrank, drained and filled on a confounding schedule. If his mute resistance was getting to her, it was also affecting Mitchell in an even worse way, tipping the rocker.

Whatever Johnnie was thinking, she appeared to surrender to it. She screwed a cigarette into the groove of her lips and sent a beam of smoke down toward the piebald waters where the reef scalloped the bay. The sea was a peacock blue beyond the fields of turtle grass until coral spotted and ridged the bottom, and roved by gasps of wind printing blurred foil tracks on the clean surface. The friction between air and water, these hot patches of light, leaped randomly throughout the harbor on their inevitable course to land to where Johnnie and Mitchell sat in resigned meditation. Everything that had happened between two people, Mitchell saw, could be remembered if you just kept focused on the sea, and everything could be dismissed and forgotten with the future always forcing its pulse, wave after wave rolling out from the great silence. Johnnie seemed mesmerized by a frigate bird set free in endless space. He stole a glance at her profile, saw her eyelids lowering, the lashes knobbed with heavy bits of mascara. She was about to fall asleep. The silence was conspiring with an intolerable sorrow.