Swimming in the Volcano (28 page)

“I'm not sure. Three to six months. Perhaps longer.”

“Six months,” Kingsley repeated, ignoring the shorter estimate.

“Maybe,” Mitchell said. Maybe by then Kingsley would be househunting in Brooklyn. This was out of his league, he couldn't make it
his business, he wouldn't, he practiced science, its quotidian concerns distinct from its secular sponsor, his messianic vagaries. No matter what, the science would endure long after the childish scheming and elbowing had been forgotten. Such was the age, and even if he didn't know who he was beyond his surveys and analysis and his good intentions, and didn't know who they wanted him to be, it didn't matter, there was a momentum in place, and they were caught in it and carried forward.

“It's probably a good idea to have the CAO verify this time frame. I'm just guessing.”

“Samuels been reassigned,” said Kingsley, his eyes measuring Wilson's reaction. He became visibly agitated, his chair singing the strain, his gaze scorching from underneath his brow, this manner familiar to Mitchell from the freewheeling insubordination of the staff meetings. “Some fellas too ego-ed up for God's plan. Move ahead, you see. Or move out. Hudson, from the Marketing Board, take his place.”

Well, thought Mitchell, taken off guard, I
do
see, at least Kingsley's announcement explained part, if not all, of why he was here. The Marketing Board chairman was one of the minister's trusted few. Kingsley was circling his wagons, under seige by the members of the coalition who wanted him gone.

“Excuse me, Mr. Minister,” Mitchell said, feeling bold. “I have no loyalties here on St. Catherine either way. I only care about doing my job.”

Kingsley seemed deeply perplexed by this statement, as it if were the pretext of still more elaborate pretexts. “But, what is it you believe, mahn?” he asked softly, with priestly concern. “You believe in doin right, true?”

Indeed, he did. He believed that the old plantations would become, slowly but certainly, showcases of modern production, new bootstraps for a penniless nation, that they could finally coordinate the organic mysteries of demand and supply, that he would leave here after another six months knowing something morally right had been achieved. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out so he nodded.

“Good, good,” said the minister. “But you aren't a Colonel Hillendale, are you, Mistah Wilson?”

Mitchell had not heard of a Colonel Hillendale.

“No, I see that you aren't,” Kingsley answered his own question. “Truth is a process, Mistah Wilson. Do you wish to pursue the process?
Santayana was wrong. Too much attention is paid to the past, and it means so little. By rememberin our past we are condemned, nuh? Look straight ahead, not behind, at all that dirty business.”

Truth, Mitchell whispered to himself—
troot
, in the minister's raspy dialect—and he recalled something Johnnie had said years ago. What good is truth, she had asked him, if it can't provide at least some small happiness? Then she had lied to him later that same night, making promises about love. Proving perhaps that falsehood could bring its own joy however temporarily into the world. All that dirty business—Kingsley could be alluding to his own reputation as much as anything else. As a young man he had been flogged for using his cutlass to strike off a policeman's ear, and during the Sugar War he had beaten a turncoat into a lifelong state of insensibility, with his own hands, and had masterminded a campaign of terror against the family of a recalcitrant estate owner whom he wanted to make an example of. It was said these were, for men of his generation, forgivable acts, and must not be judged with sentimentality. But Kingsley had thrashed his first wife, busted her teeth and ribs in a rage of jealousy and sent her fleeing for her life to exile in Trinidad. With the butt of a pistol he had knocked out the eye of the captain of the harbor launch for a petty disagreement, and he had once sprained the neck of a typist in his office when he was prime minister, backhanding her for granting a member of the opposition access to his files, and at a nightspot in Queenstown he had slapped a French tourist when she ridiculed his sexual advances. The stories about Kingsley were abundant—Mitchell's favorite was the one that purported that during Kingsley's first campaign for prime minister, he swallowed gold coins and then shit them out in front of cheering crowds of peasant supporters. Some of the tales were the apocrypha of his enemies, others Mitchell never doubted to be true.

The minister was silent, he had paused for reflection, drawing with his water glass in the ring of condensation that had dripped onto the table. He looked bedazed, his eyes filmy with the uninvested, measureless drift of a deteriorating mind. The upper-class citizens of Queenstown, the old merchant and banking families, liked to say that Kingsley was tainted, he had Carib blood in him from his mother's side, manifest in his rounded hook of nose, the pendulous lobes of his ears, the lateral cheekbones like bands of armor below his eyes. Kingsley rolled phlegm in his throat but remained with his head bowed. Mitchell had never met a politician of high rank before coming to St. Catherine so he had no idea what to expect. Anything but
this. The Shakespearean illusions, the pose of madness and threat unraveling in chilling circumlocution. He felt the urge to applaud. It was all incredible. The innate scandal of leadership. Mitchell was on the edge of his chair, seduced.

Kingsley began to massage his forehead with his meaty, veal-colored fingers, and when he took his hand away, his eyes were once again clear and alert, absolving, condemning, ordaining. Small lenses of moisture percolated to the surface of his shiny brow. The white floss of hair that circled his pate had uncombed itself. He sighed grimly. “Let us speak of some private situations, Wilson. Isaac Knowles is my godson, you know?”

Mitchell's lips parted silently and Kingsley registered this reaction. He was a bad friend, guilty—with the advent of Johnnie, Isaac had slipped far from the forefront of his thoughts. And now this—Isaac's symbolic guardian was Kingsley.

“I see you don't know that. Isaac never say, eh? Well, he slow to claim me.” Kingsley said he needed to know what his economist and his godchild had been up to. Mitchell didn't understand the question; Kingsley repeated it.

Mitchell was utterly puzzled by the minister's implication that he and Isaac were “up to something.” They were friends, they ran into each other regularly. Mitchell was stumped and said so, unable to imagine the basis for Kingsley's concern, its ominous, patriarchal overtone.

“Nothin then?”

Mitchell replied with an inquisitive, baffled smile. “Nothing.”.

Kingsley sat immobilized, only the muscles of his jaw pulsing. He seem bored now, and he blinked at Mitchell with imperious indifference. “Don't you cause me some trouble, Mistah Wilson,” he said. “Watch what you do.”

“I don't know what you mean. Really.”

“You're an American, nuh? Americans cause trouble.”

“Not me.” Mitchell stumbled in his response, losing his composure. “I wouldn't know where to begin.”

It got worse. Kingsley made Mitchell's blood jump and left him speechless by telling him to send away the woman who had come to visit him, that she was a fugitive, though from what he wouldn't say, that she had the wrong friends, people it would be very unwise for him to be associated with. He was put in the awkward position of defending Johnnie, which he did with feeble conviction, his instincts telling him whatever Kingsley knew about her, and however he knew
it, was likely to be right. Still, he resented it, this intrusion into his private affairs, he was a free man, not a bootblack, but it made him feel as if he were spiraling down a hole.

“Somebody's telling you lies, Mr. Minister.”

“Everybody's tellin me lies, Mistah Wilson. How sweet they sound.” He looked at his wristwatch and sat straight. “But suit yourself, mahn. The girl leavin in twelve days regardless, Immigration tell me.” His face contorted in loose ripples of effort as he stood up energetically to take his leave. The lower buttons of his shirt had come unfastened and his stomach ripened outward like an enormous eggplant. Their eyes connected for a moment and he looked at his economist as if Mitchell had conducted himself shrewdly, yet he had no glimmer of what manner of infidelity Kingsley imagined of him. He pressed Mitchell to visit him again, anytime, he enjoyed visitors and their views.

“Ballantyne say you run fast,” Kingsley said as an afterthought. “Very fast.”

They took the leeward coastal route south, crossing the Waterloo Range and down onto open but haphazardly cultivated land along the placid littoral, driving right through the middle of Plaissance, a former cocoa plantation, the trees now old and unproductive, a spare harvest of beans spread out on mats to dry along the roadside. Mitchell had been here a month before with two PLDP interviewers. They registered farmers hoeing their fields by hand, clearing bush, farmers coming out of the jungle shouldering gunny sacks of cassava, farmers in trees, farmers in mud, farmers in the rivers washing carrots. They talked with farmers stretched out on rough-hewn palettes roofed with banana leaves, sleeping off their midday meal, farmers in their wattle huts, the more industrious in their board or block houses. There were no landlords and many of the tenants couldn't afford the token annual rent exacted by the government. What do you grow? they asked them. How much do you grow? How much do you sell? Do you keep livestock? Do you need help, do you share the harvest, do you do it all by yourself? Can you feed your family? Do you have work elsewhere? Where? they asked, to a man. Hope flickered. With lowered heads and timid voices the farmers would answer the interviewers, Mitchell uncertain if it were possible they were ashamed of themselves, their meager livelihood, or if they were only shy, introverting themselves as a defense, because these men who were asking the questions were the government, and it was the law to answer. But in between questions they directed themselves at Mitchell, imploring him with bleary chestnut eyes.

On the outskirts of the town of Peru, Ballantyne ignored a police checkpoint, downshifting but not stopping, acknowledging the uniformed trio with a cavalier wave of his hand.

“They know you around here,” Mitchell remarked, but Ballantyne
ignored this, too. Farther down the road, he swung out into the oncoming lane to pass a convoy of three trucks, of the type used to transport livestock, open-topped, the bed enclosed with high slatted walls, only these were filled with people, peasants, about a hundred packed into the back of each truck with their belongings, flour sacks of clothing, kerosene lamps, garden tools, wedding photographs, cook pots. They looked as if they were being detained. They looked like refugees. Mitchell asked Ballantyne who they were. The forest ranger craned his neck to inspect them as they went by.

“Dem from Plaissance, I believe. Bein moved off to Windward.”

“They don't seem happy about it, do they?”

“I doan believe so. Dis business gettin out of hand, bwoy.”

It disturbed him, it made him discouraged, the land program was meant to be an occasion of opportunity and celebration, but now it seemed increasingly infected by cross-purposes, souring by the day. Where that put him he couldn't yet see but he had a contribution to make here, nobody could refute that.

Ballantyne took a left at the intersection in the center of Peru, then turned again onto a dirt lane that brought them to a concrete house, painted pink and shaded by a grove of avocado pears. They would only be a minute, Ballantyne said, tooting the horn and parking. A man trotted out of the house, in shorts scissored off from a pair of workpants, and a soiled undershirt. The shape of his face was a bit pushed in and he had frantic eyes, but he greeted them with a wave of cheerfulness and embracing hospitality, insisting they come inside, they would talk inside the house, they would have a little drink, Mitchell too, this was an honor.

In the main room—Mitchell could hardly call it a living room—they sat on upturned banana packing crates, low to the floor around a primitive table. The shutters had been thrown open to receive the listless breeze left behind by the rain; a green parrot preened itself on one of the windowsills. It seemed the man had cut down some timber and wanted Ballantyne to purchase it; Ballantyne, on the other hand, was trying to harden his bargaining position by explaining to the man he had cut the wood illegally, since he couldn't produce a permit, and Ballantyne had seen the wood, it was on government land, it wasn't even top quality, it wasn't worth the trouble to him and so on. They negotiated, firing away at each other in patois so deep and quick Mitchell could barely understand it, let alone develop an interest in the topic, and his thoughts wandered off in a direction of their own. He had to track down Isaac for an insight into Kingsley's reprimand, bizarre paranoid nonsense, if that's what it was. And yet the minister's
stage managing and duplicity had no peculiar effect on him, now that he thought about it, except for giving him a vaguely imperiled sense that he had been discovered, he was no more an outsider, invisible, untouchable. The situation wasn't bad though, it was just screwy, and there was no compelling reason to walk away.

Johnnie, however, was another story altogether. He was being haunted by Johnnie, and it horrified him that Kingsley and God knows who else had found her worthy of their attentions. Apparently she was a Telex celebrity, had found her way onto lists. The escalating nightmare of the drug business, the old college crowd being withered by more serious players, would be the context for such notoriety. She had tacked a map of South America to her wall. She had the wrong friends, according to Kingsley, which didn't bode well for her independence, but he wasn't going to ask her, she would have to tell him. Or not. He dared himself to turn off the lights, deny her haven. He talked to himself, conjuring up the circumstances under which he had fallen for Johnnie:
Could you run that back in slow motion; I must have overlooked what was there, just plain missed it
. The phrase
in love
needled him. He grounded there as if it were a shoal surrounding a harbor where he planned to anchor. Lean hard enough on those words and they swung open like a trapdoor. You were evicted from one country and fated to dwell in another where everything you once knew would be useless, where all the sensory images a lover collected—the way her fingers lodged in the hair on the back of your head, the smell of her wardrobe, her makeup arrayed on the bathroom counter, the flavor of her mouth, the sounds she made when she cried or when she came, her look when she disagreed with an opinion, the luxurious or scatterbrained way she dressed herself in the morning—where all the echoing intensity of emotions and the arcane catalogue of memory with its obscure dates and locations and fragmented events never aggregated into an answer you could rely on, except in desperation, a last-ditch act of faith. In love perhaps was another way to describe being lost, without the impulse to remember where you came from. He excised the words from his vocabulary until further notice and received in return the scene he wanted, the one that begged review: