Swimming in the Volcano (36 page)

“Peewee, duck you head—we's tackin, nuh?”

Cassius remained immobile, his eyes on the near distance where the land shrank away in the feathers of their wake, as if he had not heard or understood. Collymore brought the boat slowly around,
until the patchcloth sail luffed, and the boom tapped, lightly and unheeded, against the boy's shoulder. “Drop you head, bwoy. Drop it.” Eh, but the damn boy plug up his ears! “Suit youself, toonkins,” he said, surprising even himself with this term of endearment, “but ahead lie plenty to-do-ment, so on we go.”

Collymore showed no anger, only determination that the boy learn. The boat swung around to its new heading. He had changed course delicately, but a gust whipped the boom smartly across to the opposite beam, slapping the boy hard enough on the side of his head to drop him where he sat, dazed, a welt rising near his temple, his face contorted with betrayal. Why had he been abandoned? He could not understand this—
could not!
Why was he being taken out on the treacherous ocean—yes, yes, the
Sinbad
thing—by the one person he hated? He could not understand. Why had his mother said this man who caused him so much dread was his father? He could not understand, and he was powerless, no one could help him, and he wished he were dead.

Collymore got no answer when he asked the boy if he were all right. This business going take time, he thought to himself, but here he was in his element, a fisherman, and had no problem with time as such. He unraveled a troll line, put a lure off the stern. They sailed on over the friendly shallows toward the sun, levitating behind the waves on the reef. Cassius felt the warmth of the first ray play on his back but he still shivered uncontrollably, in the position he had been knocked into, head cradled in his arms, his legs dangling awkwardly over the boards of the seat. The tips of his school shoes dipped in and out of the water that collected imperceptibly in the bottom of the boat.

“Breeze sweet dis mornin, peewee. You will come to love a breeze dis sweet.” Collymore laughed—he was happy. The boy was small, too young, without experience and afraid—Quashie bring him down unripe, eh?—but Collymore looked forward to teaching him, being the expert, the authority—and sure the boy have capacity, nuh? since them already take him to the schoolhouse. But—
tch!
—him mule-headed.

Halfway across the flats, the troll line sprang so taut the peg in the gunwale it was tied to creaked and hummed with tension. Collymore yoked the steering harness around his legs, clasped the sheetline in the gap between his big toe and the others. Bending over the side, he began to haul in the fish, stiff dripping loops of heavy nylon balling haywire at his feet.

“Flats always bring a nice barra at sunrise, ya know.”

The boy heard angry, powerful splashes. Heard the fisherman grunt and curse admiringly.

“Watch youself, peewee. Mistah Barra is a mahd, mahd fellow.”

Cassius didn't care. He lived on a small island, ate fish regularly, but never had to bother with a live one. He didn't care about the barra—
why should he!
—or Collymore, or the boat, or his wet shoes. Even the pain in his head and the dizziness in his stomach were things not to care about.
Go
to hell,
go to
hell,
go to hell
, he prayed to himself.
Mahn
, you go to hell.

Then the barracuda, huge and enraged, was in the boat between them, flashing like the blade of a cutlass in the heat of battle. Almost immediately, both the boy's legs were slashed and bleeding and he was somehow up in the bow, holding on to the mast for his life, watching in horror as Collymore crushed the murderous head of the fish with a lead-weighted pipe, and blood sprayed.

“Oh ho, what I say, bwoy? Cy-ahnt be dreamin when barra reach de boat.”

Cassius hyperventilated, his nostrils dilated and his eyes bulging. Bright blood was splattered across the chest of his starched white shirt as though it had been shaken out of a mop. His fear made him wild inside, made tongues of flame spin behind his eyes, he fell: an incomprehensible impulse to jump out of the boat, dive underwater to find—
what?
—at least to get away from what was now perfectly clear to him, because his father Rupert Quashie had taken him to see
The Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor
, so his nightmares were no different than this moment, and his life was now no different than the film, out here so far from land with Collymore, and the sea ruled by monsters who lived within the night below the surface. He bawled inconsolably. He chattered nonsense. He trembled and clawed the mast as if he meant to scale it.

Collymore pointed the catboat into the wind. After tearing the spoon from the ferocious jaws of the barracuda, shoving the fish under the center seat to protect it from the sun, he stood up and walked the length of the boat, a master of balance. The boy panicked and tried more desperately to shinny up the mast. The delirious noise of a small animal came from his throat.

“You ain no pussy cyaht, peewee,” Collymore said with firmness in his voice. He peeled the boy's fingers from the wood and swung him over and down, replacing him on the seat. “You ain no monkey, mast ain monkey tree. Here now, hold steady so I cy-ahn speck how Mistah Barra nasty up dese legs!”

With the calabash bailer, he scooped seawater and washed the boy's cuts. They were many, as if a comb of needles had been dragged across both shins, but only superficially, and there was no cause for concern, at least no cause that Collymore could recognize. The saltwater stung and the boy winced through his tears, not knowing it was saltwater that had woken him up to the world. Although he felt the barracuda inside of him, alive, shredding him to pieces, each minute he drifted farther down into a strange calm, as though he'd been drugged, and a blankness settled across his face, masking his anguish.

Collymore returned aft, trimmed the sail, and the boat speeded ahead. “So now you introduce to Mistah Barra,” he chuckled, feeling for the first time a great bond of intimacy with the boy, now that he'd been bloodied. “Dey ain teach you about Mistah Barra in school? What! True negligence! Me Gawd, daht was de ABC of barra, peewee. A-B-C!”

The fisherman brayed laughter, pleased with his joke, and delighted to see the boy had composed himself. A tenderness passed through Collymore like a bird, and he wanted the boy to come to love the sea as he did, because it was beautiful and honest in its indifference, it gave a man the only freedom that tasted pure, and because there was nothing else in life to love. But Cassius—whatever he would have been otherwise without this fate, his soul—was an uprooted seedling.

The sea grew agitated as they approached the lee of the barrier reefs that sheltered Cotton Island from the unchecked force of the Atlantic, the eternal sweep of currents from an Africa submerged far off in their lives. The concussion of surf began to thicken the air; an arcade of fragmented rainbows shifted brilliantly along the spine of collapsed breakers. Coming so near, like this, it was a great spectacle, both exhilarating and of a consummate threat, like stepping aside as a herd of wild horses galloped past, and it left all men speechless—the immeasurable upswelling of the universe of ocean against the fragile coral defense of an island so small that even now, this close, it was no more than a mere smudge on the horizon. Collymore bid the boy to look, for it was a sight as irresistible to the eyes as a city ablaze with flames in the night, but Cassius remained hunched and dull-eyed and removed, far back into himself. Yet when the fisherman piloted the boat through the turbulent cut in the reef and into the high swells beyond, which surrounded them, tossed them high and low like a door perpetually opening and closing upon a boundless field of towering indigo cusps, the change of movement commanded the boy to awareness. He lifted his head and looked fully around, stricken, finally looking at Collymore in frozen, silent appeal until, with a roll of
his eyes and a resignation that overcame even horror, he vomited the thin contents of his stomach into his lap. Like an invisible boxer, the jar and rock of the boat pummeled him, even as the puking spasms made it impossible to support himself upright. He tumbled backward, throwing himself yet being thrown, to crawl along the bottom of the boat like a beaten dog and lay propped against the ribs of the bow when he could go no further, moaning and heaving, foamy bile hanging off his chin, then pissing too into his blue schoolboy shorts, knowing that this was the worst—that he was nothing; that nothing could be altered; that nothing could be forgiven.

For a good ways more, Collymore sailed onward to the offshore banks and then anchored. He fished into the middle of the day for red snapper and was lucky. Occasionally he spoke to the boy, but only to hear his own voice; he pitied the child, understanding there was no comfort for him on earth but land itself. Beyond this, he had no other insight into the boy's misery; nor, on his terms, required one. By the time Collymore restepped the mast and hauled his lump of heavy scrap iron from the deep, the boat was carpeted with gold-orange fish, and six inches of bilge water lapped against the boy, soaking him with blood and slime. As they sailed, Collymore bailed with the calabash shell, his arm dipping mechanically and his face serene, and he sang a Jim Reeves ballad popular among the fisherman—

Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone
,

And let's pretend we're together, all alone
.

Collymore had never spoken into a telephone, but he knew plenty of women with sweet lips, and the goal of his life was to be alone with them all.

Inside the reef, on calmer waters, the boy gratefully nodded off to sleep, exhausted by his ordeal. He lay mostly on his stomach, hugging the angle of the hull, his underside drenched with filth, a reddish hue to his exposed skin where the sun had cooked him. Collymore steered off his heading to the islet called Palm Cay and sailed the boat aground on the sands of its isolation. He lifted the groggy Cassius in his arms and perched him on the bow and removed his shoes, pouring a pink syrupy bilge out of their interior, stripped the listless boy and lay him mercifully on his back in the clear, tame water where the child bobbed, half submerged, eyes closed like a shipwreck victim. Collymore rinsed out the soiled clothes and spread them on basalt rocks, farther up the tidal slope of the beach, to dry.

“You will find it come easier, peewee,” he said as he slapped the
first of the fish down on planks of the bow, and opened it with his machete. “Tomorrow and de next time and de next, it will come easy, come nice, and you will say, ‘Mahn, here is a life I does like/” The boy gave no response but only floated, still listless, feeling as hollow and light as a balloon while his clothes dried and Collymore cleaned the catch, throwing guts to the pelicans that suddenly appeared, and he listened, whenever his ears broke out of the water, to the wild, Sinbad wind of their wings.

That night, put to bed on an old car seat in the front room of his father's shanty, Cassius rose with the late moon and ran away, back to the only place his running could take him, home to the Quashies. He was dressed in an oversized white tee shirt, yellowed from wear and containing the sulfuric smell of its owner, that Collymore had given him, so that passing through the bush on Paley's Hill Cassius reproduced the image of his own mother in years past, immaculate in her white smock, leaving her stepmother's house to join the Holy Rollers on the beach. He moved fast along the path, as much in dread of having his liberty aborted by Collymore as of the baka things that were out there too, roaming the darkness with him, and he was out of breath by the time he reached the Quashies' stoop; tears had painted two silvery lunar channels of reflected light down the length of his cheeks.

He threw himself hard against the dutch door, beat it with the heels of his hands and kicked, crying for his mother and father to take him in. The hamlet dogs erupted, formed a pack and dashed into the yard, barking madly, and the boy's own wails were absorbed by this invasion of noise. Only he could hear himself, and what he heard was only another voice in the general blow-up—the weakest, the one that no one heeded—and yet his place in the dogs' chorus made him stronger, as if they had come to be his allies, as if they understood what he wanted, and how to make it happen. From inside, he heard Rupert's weak voice interrupt the darkness:
Emma, wha happen? Cashy outside. Let him in. Emma? Emma?
Footsteps from within, identical to his own heart in sound and rhythm, but they remained clear of the door. Then he could hear the susurration of his mother's whispers, explaining to his father, but he didn't know what she was saying. Emma had in fact experienced misgivings about handing the boy over to his true father, and had not found the courage to mention the act to her husband. Kneeling now at his bedside, in her guilt, she lied and found relief, seeing her husband believe her tale, that Collymore himself had come unexpectedly that morning to reclaim the boy, and she dared not deny the fisherman's right to his own
flesh. In the darkness, she sensed her husband's sad acceptance of the act, and when his hand searched out hers in comfort for this loss of their adopted son, she herself was half convinced that her story was true, and nothing could be done to change its consequence; nothing would ever make it different. She resolved, patting Rupert's hand and replacing it on his chest, to let the child bawl himself out and then, with no attention paid him, he would readily find his way back to where he belonged. But, eh! what a scene he make, screaming so, walloping the door, and them dogs like baka brothers to him, joining in.

Meanwhile, the side shutters had burst open, and Cassius raced to them, roaring with hope, his sobbing intensified by the flare of hope through his body. There he stood below the sill, transfixed in anticipation, tongues of flame darting at the edge of his vision as he stared up at the pigtailed heads of his sisters, gazing down at him with interest. “Cashy,” the oldest whispered conspiratorially, “
bwoy
, you mek a row! Is you ahll right? What is fishenin like? Did you reach St. Kate-side? Mommi does say—” They were sucked back into the darkness, vanished, replaced by his mother's plump forearms, drawing the shutters closed and, with them, his heart. He had not seen her face, and never would again. The dogs seemed to find significance in the latching of the shutters; they grew bold and chased the boy down the road, where the baka things waited, to harry him up Paley's Hill and—but he would not say or think it—home.