Swimming in the Volcano (16 page)

“I'm sorry, I have to go to work.”

“Stay. Take the day off. Celebrate me. I need to be celebrated. I really need it, Mitch.”

“I can't. I'll be home in a few hours.”

He took the guava skins from the plates and flung them into the trees and vines where the side yard ended—just for the relief of throwing, the response of muscles, the useless power. A path led through the underbrush to the shanty of a woman named Mrs. Fetchalub, his closest neighbor. Her weedy children would scamper up to practice karate in the clearing of his property. The playing inevitably ended when one of the kids whirl-kicked another and the victim would crawl off into the bush, yelping like a puppy.

“Mitchell?”

On the floor of the veranda, Johnnie appeared expired, undone, physically rebuked, her toes and fingers and eyes swollen, her hair spread in limp swirls, the blue skirt wrinkled and misshapen. She wasn't looking at him; in fact, her eyes were closed.

“I'm not a bad person,” she said. “I don't want you to think that.”

Too weary to ride his bike the three miles into town, Mitchell walked up to the road and took a jitney, grateful for its rank overload of passengers, as anonymous and without expectation as detainees being delivered to a labor camp. He stayed on the transport all the way to Scuffletown, the endlessly propagating pocket of coastal slum on the far side of Queen's Drop. He could think of nothing else outside of the travesty of Johnnie's preposterous and damningly provocative justification for being there, until the driver got involved in a race with another jitney around the loop of Belmont Park as they entered the capital, and the sudden violence of speed jolted his concern for Isaac, and Isaac's troubles restored some perspective to his own.

Scuffletown was what the world would be—what the world was, actually, in a great many places—without technology, or without a respect for craftsmen and a simple communal standard of caring. It was an overpopulated sprawl of throw-together, condemned by a process greater than any single man's lack of ambition or resource. It smoked and smoldered and festered like the waterfront encampment of a shipwrecked army, without the heart to live in anything but temporary quarters. Latent removal, kinetic transience, those were the essences of Scuffletown. Everyone who lived there believed they would walk away from it tomorrow and never return. Its crowded haphazardness, so offensively threatening to Mitchell's sensibilities, was inherent in this disavowal of permanence, and so the community depended not on the government or populist campaigns or even a modest self-reliance for general housekeeping and renewal but on such catastrophes as hurricanes and fires. Scuffletown, ultimately, was the civil service's pet metaphor for its own ineptness: you'd sooner find a property title in S-town, the hackneyed joke went, than modernize
the national hospital, or make sense out of a ministry's bookkeeping system.

Mitchell knew he didn't belong here on its sea-damp unpaved lanes, carefully stretching his legs across sewage trenches, deaf to anyone who approached him for any reason. Scuffletown was semiferal, a bit of behavioral wilderness sometimes dangerous because you could never tell what would be found inciting by the short-fused people you encountered there. One time a man powdered head to toe in sulfur-colored dust had demanded Mitchell give him his tennis shoes. He blocked Mitchell's way but then the condition for passage was abruptly dropped and Mitchell walked on. On another trip to Isaac's, when Mitchell stumbled over the point of a rock embedded in the road, a teenage boy came hurtling out of a yard to curse like a psychopath in his face, as if he were a dog asserting its territorial domain, its instinct engaged at the moment Mitchell's gait faltered. But all in all Scuffletown was not as it appeared. Behind the hellishness there were often extraordinary humans going about their daily business, carrying on a struggle for sanity, grasping at middle-class straws. Such was Isaac's mother, who had been raised by her grandparents in the country, where she had learned about the island's wild herbs and bushes. Now, when she wasn't cooking meals for the Jesuits at St. Mark's Secondary, she practiced folk medicine out of the three-room house in Scuffletown where she lived with her four sons, Isaac being the eldest, and for her service she collected a trickle of coins still called shillings by the poor.

That area of tamped and oil-stained sandy dirt in front of the shingled house, previously reserved for
Miss Defy:
its emptiness filled Mitchell with regret as he came past an untrimmed hedge of ixora into the Knowles' family compound. The yard was spared the neighborhood's general desolation by a giant cutlass-scarred hulk of an almond tree and its green chapel of limbs, a bench and a seat from an old schoolbus near its base to accommodate the men and women there to consult with Scuffletown's bush doctress and receive her herbs and tonics. Mitchell had never been to the house without seeing the seating fully occupied, S-town's seniors arthritically husking nuts until Mrs. Knowles walked down the hill from St. Mark's twice a day between breakfast and lunch and again in the afternoon, when the top half of the dutch door would fling open and she would call her patients up to the stoop. For any condition dire and unmanageable they had to drag themselves to the government doctor at Public Health, but for treatment of everyday maladies—the rheumatics and gizzard ache, swamp chill and numerous varieties of rash—Mrs. Knowles'
cures were just the thing, and the price never compounded the ailment.

Mitchell nodded at the almond pickers camped in the shade, a quartet of uniformly skinny turkey-necked old men, outgrown by their trousers and fiercely bleached shirts buttoned to the throat. To escape astronomical tides, the unpainted house was lifted off the ground on short posts, and he climbed a set of uneven steps, stopping at the threshold, to present himself to Isaac's mother. Mrs. Knowles sat just inside out of the sun, her feet on the floor and her bottom resting on the edge of a stool drawn up to a sewing table with the undercarriage stripped of its machine. She was emptying the contents of a stone mortar, a tobacco-colored crush of leaves, onto a scrap of coarse paper. A pestle lay nearby next to a modest pile of assorted coins, a pocketknife, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a ball of string, a juice glass full of powder-blue berries. She twisted the corners of the paper together into a wick, and, raising her voice but not her head, summoned her customer from the yard.

“Mistah Chubbs,” she commanded.
“Come
.”

Mitchell stepped aside to make room on the stoop for feeble Mr. Chubbs, who pocketed his remedy in the tent of his pants, counted out his pennies, and left. Mrs. Knowles reached behind her for a ledger on a shelf, opened it, and recorded the transaction with a ballpoint pen tied with rubber bands to the belt of her housedress.

“Good day, Mistah Wilson,” she said finally, bringing Mitchell to attention with her oblique courtesy. She closed the book and peered up at him over the frame of her reading glasses. There was an unaccountable authority to Isaac's mother, as if she knew very well the habits and manners of a life different than the one she had settled for, in circumstances where dignity was more than just a refusal to be common. She studied Mitchell with her customary expression of controlled distaste, as though she had a privileged knowledge of him, given access to a dossier he himself had never seen, the contents of which were apparently not flattering.

“Good day, Mrs. Knowles,” he chimed in response to her own reedy voice. Her presence was like the law. He felt an intractable obligation to be on his best behavior in her vicinity.

“I've come to check on Isaac.”

She said he hadn't been home for two days. Mitchell cringed inwardly, dreading the report he must now make. She listened to the bad news without any noticeable reaction.

“Yes, someone come tell me he see Isaac's vehicle in de field cane.”

Her steely motherhood enervated him. Of course she would have
gotten wind of the mishap through the island's network of eager witnesses. “Well,” Mitchell uttered with downcast eyes, chastened by his exposure to Mrs. Knowles, “I only wanted to make sure Isaac was all right. He got bumped around ... nothing serious though.”

“Be it so, Mistah Wilson. I shall tell Isaac you stop in when he reach home.” She clasped her hands in a prayerful attitude, the gesture of a headmistress or a nun dismissing a mischief-maker. He started down the steps but turned back. Mrs. Knowles remained immobile.

“I was wondering, do you have anything to make me sleep better?”

Wordlessly, she stood up from the stool, aging and diminutive but by no means frail, and swept to the rear of the room, behind a vinyl-covered sofa to a pressed tin cupboard, a plaster Christ, garishly painted, hammered above on a cross, blessing her secrets. She returned in a minute to hand Mitchell a twine-bound bundle of green sprigs that smelled like musty basil. “Boil de leaf and drink de liquor,” she instructed. She gave him something else inside a twist of brown paper. “And dis,” she added, “if de nose continue to bleed, nuh?” She looked beyond him out the door. “Hallo, Mistah Atkin,” she called. “Come straight up, please. What is it you wish, mahn?”

In all his life Mitchell couldn't recall a day being so queered by what fell unprecedented into it out of the blue, and on his walk back to Queen's Drop and the esplanade he ended up with a dollar haircut, another of fate's small extortions that he hadn't planned on and definitely didn't want, unless it was going to advance his sense of a world brimmed with queer opportunity. Instead, he was being used as an example for the other side of the debate, set out in a pond where chance and coincidence circled like sharks. As Mitchell hiked through Scuffletown on the nameless harbor street that was little more than a widened ditch, clogged with motor scooters and foot traffic and an occasional rogue flatbed truck hauling sand away from the dirty beach, and donkeys with swollen panniers of charcoal or yams or stockgrass, he began to feel pressed and soon enough he was certain that someone inhabited his shadow—in the S-town idiom, a dog-dance, someone keeping cadence with his own determined pace. He was always a push-ahead walker through the stony looks and silent mendication of the streets, past the burlap-shuttered windows of the dismal shanties, the morose self-absorption of rum shop clientele, the vagrant hostility of youth gangs lounging against broken-down walls, clustered in garbage-sown lots. There was much to see but frankly Mitchell didn't care to see it. It was out of character for him to slow
up so he changed his line of direction instead of his swift step, hoping the hound would move ahead and be gone, but all this accomplished was to provoke a hissing campaign. Terrific, Mitchell cursed without turning around. He was being dogged by one of the militantly useless.

“Ssssssst ...
blaireau
.”

A blaireau was not much of a beast, but the anachronistic Creole slur tweaked Mitchell's curiosity. If he was to be identified as a carrier of geopolitical virus and racial infection, he would have chosen to be represented by a varmint with a more noxious reputation than the blond island raccoon. What kind of a world was this anyway where raccoons had to take the blame for rats. For the most part, Mitchell didn't care any longer who fucked who, when, how, or why, because there was no doubt in his mind that he was not the oppressor or his direct descendent or his surrogate, and he knew that guys like the one probably on his heels were revolutionary fantasts, prodded by demons which for lack of a better name Mitchell called the Barbeques, since these particular malefactors were great advocates of arson, enraptured by the vision of persons, institutions, countries, and even systems of thought bursting into fire.

When Mitchell stagger-stepped, his shadow, thrown out of dog-dance rhythm, walked smack into his back. Mitchell pivoted reluctantly to get the confrontation over with. Dressed in surplus camouflage pants and a pale blue tee shirt advertising Disney World, his ridiculously large paratrooper boots worn with no better reason than as weapons, he shifted his weight from leg to leg, a surprisingly puny but lithe youth with brimstone eyes fixed unwaveringly on Mitchell's own. In proper acolyte fashion, the guy's head was shaved right down to his nicked, morocco scalp. His sour lips were encircled by a devilish mustache and goatee, or rather a goatee that would have been truly evil-looking on a less boyish mug. Born to be a fucking nuisance, Mitchell thought, perhaps giving himself too much credit for upstandingness. Mitchell took his cue from the Latter Day Saints, smiling.

“Are you going where I'm going, brother?”

The youth was momentarily stumped, but recovered enough to extract a handgun from the baggy pockets of his fatigues, and although he didn't exactly aim it at Mitchell, the way he enjoyed testing the weight in his palm suggested the aim would follow the splendid thrill of having a gun in his hand, in daylight and on a crowded street. Here we go, Mitchell thought, still smiling with sham crusading fellowship of the heaven-bound yet unable to speak. The
Barbeques were really mixing it up in this rookie's brain. It was no use trying to pacify him, and no good trying to explain, if Mitchell could, that he was more or less on his side, that Mitchell too believed in the folk remedies of change and justice—and Mitchell sure as hell knew they didn't look like this. Here was what happened when the Barbeques got excited and lifted one of St. Catherine's assholes out of the slumber of Pavlovian drool and snarl, promoting them to
assholes with a vital agenda
. Mitchell squinted at the pistol—he had seen so few handguns in his life he couldn't even be positive this one was real.

“Where you belong, eh?” It was an ambiguous challenge, almost a repartee to his own inquiry, and the guy scowled, shocking Mitchell further by slipping the gun back into his pants. He wasn't going to be shot—immediately, anyway—for being smug.