Swimming in the Volcano (3 page)

Come take de swell from me lil boy's belly

Take de cruel hand from me lil gy-url's skirt

Lift de sufferin, strike ol' massa

Save me heart from dis hurt,

farty, stuttering horns and rapid patois distorted by volume into a palpable electronic throb, a continuous threat of audio-aneurism, blending somewhere under his chin with the awful sound of tires losing traction. A wave of centrifugal thrust rose and rose and receded the length of his prone body as they made the curve and swung out onto the next short straightaway. Mitchell raised his head above the seat and remarked that this was it, that they were dead, that these were their last quick moments on earth, and would Isaac please turn off the radio so God could hear their prayers. Isaac swabbed perspiration from above his haunted eyes with a rag he kept handy for cleaning the windshield.

Mitchell pounded his shoulder, yelling at him to downshift.

“I know, I know,” Isaac said, becoming annoyed. “Sit back, Wilson.”

The car speeded toward a full stop against a red rectangle of cut
rock, the severe curve to the left dipping and dropping out of sight like a river spilling over a waterfall, the bottom third of the curve horseshoeing a lethal distance directly below them. Isaac squeezed the emergency brake and they smelled it melt away. He tried to steer, both of them awed by the velocity with which the Comet was entering the turn.

“Downshift,” Mitchell whispered, leaning across the seat to Isaac's ear. “Downshift, downshift.”

Isaac chopped the transmission out of gear but couldn't force it back in, jamming the shifter forward until third gear began to stink like industrial fire and reproduce the noise of a crosscut saw chewing into sheet metal. Mitchell heard teeth fly off inside the housing, hot bullets ricocheting deep inside the Comet's gut. Finally the gear nudged into place and Isaac, loathe to do anything without his customary smoothness, had to let the clutch spring back before it was too late. Mitchell shot forward across the seat and into the dashboard, his nose squashed. Blood gushed down onto the white cotton shirt he had yesterday paid a matronly neighbor the going rate of fifty cents to wash and iron in preparation for his unsolicited reunion with Johnnie. The drive train reduced revolutions with a siren's whine while the body of the car pitched onward, obeying the laws of nature. Isaac negotiated the curve with increasing expertise, downshifting again to twenty miles an hour, and flowed the Comet cleanly through a slalom of S-turns, but as the car regained momentum, it became necessary to climb back through the gears.

“Sorry, Mitchie bwoy. You okay, nuh?”

Mitchell slumped back behind the seat, licking warm blood from the fountain in his nose, wanting to wreck right now and get it over with, arrive at the airport in an ambulance (though he had never seen one on the island), collect Johnnie, plead her onto the gurney next to him, commence the nursing process without delay, submit to the truce of medical crisis under which old animosities could be justifiably ignored. The force of still another radical hook in the road packed him into a smaller and smaller space against the base of the car door. Again Isaac was grinding the transmission into third gear, a hellish racket that did not result in the anticipated roar of rpms. The clutch engaged, the engine idled in a terrible calm. What was once third gear Mitchell supposed had been lathed down to a sprocketless hub. Isaac bullied his way into second, a gear not made for the speed they had accumulated. The Comet bucked as though it were launching missiles, the cylinders howled with abuse, smoke filtered through under the dashboard, and the machinery, now a field experiment in
the process of fission, blew up. The exhaust manifold gave an explosive belch and went silent. Mitchell looked up and saw Isaac with his jaw clenched. Angry tears appeared in his eyes, and he shouted.

“
Miss Defy! Miss Defy!
You weak obsocky bitch, how you mash up so!”

With half the mountain to go they were freewheeling and bitterly terrified. The radio continued to play, however; the music and its partisan melodies gave Isaac a poor reason to hope for the best. They rolled faster and faster, a steel trap of locomotion and churning rhythms, down the hill. The Crab Hole Bar flashed by: a smear of pastels, gray planking supporting a rusted zinc roof, a line of disinterested fellows on broken chairs in a dirt yard, laundry draped over pigeon pea bushes, a little boy in a tee shirt but no pants having a handless pee, the thick flora again, more pedestrians as the mountain was frequently residential at this lesser elevation. People hopped off the road into the homicidal gutters of the Crown agents, shooed by Isaac's hornblowing.
Miss Defy
screeched around a blind bend into the path of an oncoming sedan; Isaac fought heroically to regain his legal portion of the thoroughfare. Crouching back onto the floor in an unheroic position himself, Mitchell discovered that the trash he had been tossing around on, one of the plastic shopping bags, had ripped open to dispense hundreds of individually wrapped, multicolored prophylactics. At the sight of them he felt extremely sorry for himself, thinking, God, they're going to pluck these out of my mangled corpse after we smash. Sister Vera will come and nag over my body about family planning and wastefulness.

Every male in St. Catherine beyond the age of eleven had been accosted by Sister Vera from the Ministry of Health and People's Welfare. Some foreign-aid deal, annotated by many strange complexities, had stuck her with an entire freighterload of rubbers which she personally distributed by the bucketful. In this way she was herself the recipient of a variety of insults and slander—cradle robber, barren puppet, “whore of the empire's executioner,” one left-wing mimeograph called her—and the government didn't concern itself with her mission as long as she got rid of the condoms before the time came to renegotiate this particular aid package into something more appealing, like video equipment or an armored personnel carrier.

It was no mystery then that Isaac had been induced to carry a year's supply of rubbers in the backseat of the Comet. Sister Vera was assiduous, arguing that his fares could help themselves from the bag even though Isaac swore to her over and over that he would never wear such a smothering device himself, that he was spiritually
opposed to the practice. He held a peculiar scientific belief relating to this matter. Isaac believed that the actual spirits—he called them angels—of his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and so on, resided in the realm of his penis. It was understood by him that his ancestors were down there, every last one of them but too many to know by name, reduced to something approximating molecular waterbugs in the pool of his seed, yet whole and autonomous and accessible. Mitchell had even seen Isaac mumbling to his dick as if it were a microphone into the netherworld. To Isaac, this was science—an old old old one, true, but recently confirmed in his opinion by what he had read of the study of genetics. He loved newspapers from the States and considered tabloids the highest source of encouraging information. In fact, in a Florida sheet he had read that his special ability to talk with the deceased was a common and legitimate exercise, now studied inside machines and under microscopes at major universities.

Mitchell had met both Isaac and Sister Vera within minutes of his arrival on the island eight months previously. The nondenominational Sister, dressed like a meter maid, advanced on him as he waited for his gear to be lugged out of Customs by a mafia of porters. Perhaps the sight of his footlocker had provoked her—a white man moving in to bombard the local ovaries with blue-eyed imperial genes. She swooped down on him, lecturing with the fierce rhetoric of a victim, as though he were to be held accountable for every birth on the island in the past year, and urged him to accept her handout. Infrequent weeks of whirlwind missions—a deficit symposium in Rome, a consultation with the Export Office in Kathmandu—were the extent of his travel abroad; Mitchell did not yet know how to say no (and mean it) in a foreign country without excessive anxiety and a scarlet rash of guilt. Sister Vera's only clear affiliation seemed to be the cult of contraception, but she had a deft talent for intimidation, her success at it rivaling the most orthodox harangues of the greater religions. She gave him the usual, shoved it into his arms, a shopping bag containing one gross of loose condoms, and when she left he opened the mouth of the sack and stared at them wistfully. They were little time bombs of copulation, in such quantity they could only be of use to the tireless libertines that undoubtedly roamed Sister Vera's dreams.

Isaac too had been alerted by the footlocker and wandered over to offer
Miss Defy
for hire. Mitchell's first impression was that he was too chummy, too upbeat, a potential nuisance, and he dismissed him regardless, because someone from the Ministry of Agriculture was supposed to meet the flight, to be there with Mitchell's official welcome.
Isaac grinned as if he knew better and strolled off in the direction of the airport bar, greeting everyone as his brother and sister. He was wearing the ugliest shirt Mitchell had ever seen, a synthetic made from petroleum, splashes of gray, yellow, and bright red, like smeared viscera. Parked on his trunk, Mitchell finished reading the
Miami Herald;
both the crowd and his optimism began to thin out. Where's my official welcome and my official driver, Mitchell complained to that part of himself that he also considered official.

After refreshing himself at the bar, Isaac came back for him, prescient to the altered expectations of official white men. Mitchell looked at his slick pointed sideburns and his half-cocked grin, saying to himself this better work out, and stood up. Isaac took him to Rosehill Plantation, a hotel and guesthouse where Mitchell checked in until he found quarters of his own. Isaac took half his payment that day in the form of several rounds of Guiness stout at Rosehill's beach bar, a strategic spot to examine the rise and fall of quality in female tourists. Women in bikinis would walk by and he would nudge Mitchell and say,
Oh oh, look de bubbies!
or
Cheese on!
, and tug at the knees of his khaki trousers. Down at the tideline an island boy and his younger brother played with a handful of their own certified prophylactics. The older boy filled one long green sheath with sand until it bulged obscenely and used it as a weapon to club the other boy in the head. Mutual entertainment developed into a one-sided beating. The casing finally burst, showering the little one with the powdered coral of the beach. The victim cried like a professional, a virtuoso crier. Their huge mother fired admonitions at them from where she floated in the lagoon, a battleship in a hot-pink leotard, and Mitchell thought, surveying the mountains and the sea, what a magnificent land I have come to.

In the months Mitchell had lived and worked on St. Catherine, he mailed two postcards, inscribing them with typical postcard language, to Johnnie in Hawaii. He had kept in random touch with her over the years since they had separated, the nature of the touch sometimes forlorn, sometimes smart-alecky, sometimes lonely, and the most prevalent tone was that of friendship, a seasoned song of tacit forgiveness and never, he hoped, anything but realistic. She had telegrammed back a shocking message just days ago:
I want to see you. Will arrive in St. Catherine a.m., 3/30/77. Surprised? Your friend, Johanna
.

He hissed those words under his breath,
your friend
, his fingers digging mindlessly into the clear plastic packets of prophylactics. His
sinuses felt as though Styrofoam cubes had been brutally inserted into their cavities. When did she start calling herself Johanna anyway?
My fucking friend
, he cursed on the floor of the Comet. My friend, my private merchant of love and treachery, a southern belle with a slow white fire thrumming in her veins the last he saw her.

Isaac's prelude of honking ended with a sharp bang into something distressingly solid. There was a nauseating sensation of uncontrolled coupling and then a swaying release. He lay on the horn again; there was another, more violent bang. Mitchell emerged from behind the seat only high enough to see what had happened and was disheartened. The Comet was boxed in by a steady flow of traffic chugging up Ooah Mountain and a frightened lady driver ahead of them going down too slow for the Comet's independent rate of descent. They had rammed her, she had defensively and stupidly applied the brakes after they had disengaged, and
Miss Defy
struck her a second time, losing a few miles per hour from the impact and a moderate rise in the road, and the woman ahead, panicking, accelerated out of sight.

At twenty miles per hour they approached a curve requesting ten. Rummy sweat dribbled off Isaac's forehead and obscured his vision. Entering the turn, Isaac cranked the wheel, his elbows flapping, and the Comet responded as if the asphalt had turned to ice. The traction gone,
Miss Defy
rotated gracefully around the bend of the parabola and whipped full circle back into the straightaway, steady again, just like you see in the movies, Mitchell gasping and shrunken but Isaac far in rapture over his accomplishment.

“I nevah see such as daht before, mahn,” he said, marveling at the stunt.

In the abbreviated distance ahead, the driver of the car they had crumped swerved half off the road, perpendicular into the entrance of a dirt drive. She exited her vehicle, a late-model Morris, shiny black, with imposing fury. She was a sizable woman and burly, her bosom swinging underneath a yellow blouse, and she charged into the road to flag them down and give Isaac a thrashing. The bumper on the rear of her Morris had an experimental shape to it, the taillights ceased to exist—small damage all told. Isaac was helpless to obey her directions. He took his hands off the wheel and raised them level with his ears as
Miss Defy
rolled past, not merely to advertise his innocence, but to express his exasperation at being the object of this person's wrath. Since he had knocked into her without malice or intent, he seemed to be saying with his shrugging gesture, she herself might take a moment to consider that he was only a poor man about to be crushed by a destiny he could no longer persuade.