Swimming in the Volcano (54 page)

Here is Shoovie, Josephine said.

Mitchell had veered in the direction of the taxis up along the road but she nudged him toward the carpark to a crumpled Deux Chevaux, Cinderella's pumpkin. She took note of his amusement and told him in no uncertain terms not to bore her with commiseration or jokes—Shoovie was her transport, purchased with her own hard-earned money. She didn't have to defend herself to him, and he told her so. “Ain no limit to me a-tall, darlin,” she said, feisty, snapping open her clutch for the keys. All right then, he said appeasingly. So she was an ambitious girl, she was going places, even if she arrived there in a battered old workboot of a car. Wrong on that, she retorted, challenging him with a face. She
had
gone places. She was back.

Who would drive wasn't an issue—he'd rather pay attention to her than the road anyway. They edged up the sandy lane, onto the paved road toward Augustine, then at the crossroads turned inland on a serpentine route that led up into the hills, the road swinging under dark canopies of vegetation. Josephine lobbied him to tell her what George James had said when she had gone off to the ladies' room with her friend. She suspected something, said her tone. They had discussed this land reform business and the newspaper; she interrupted him to say,
No, about me
. She cajoled him, going so far as to take one hand off the wheel and put it on his knee, and Mitchell acquiesced, at least to euphemism, telling her that James had said something to the effect that she was all talk and no action. Cockteaser, is what James really said. Mitchell was glad he told her, since it seemed a way to make clear his own honorable intentions, that he had signed on with no particular goal in mind, other than having a type of adventure, an escapade, an interlude, but then he had to wonder how dishonest that sounded, if not to her, to himself. Josephine became
subdued, and Mitchell thought she was hurt by James' accusation, though he couldn't make sense of it himself, given the image she projected, and regretted being so disingenuous as to actually tell her the truth. Punished by her silence, he fixated on the air freshener card shaped like a Christmas tree that tossed like a hanged man from the stem of the rearview mirror. The card flung out a noxious smell of disinfectant, and he ruminated about just what it was in the black world view that was symbolized by these things.

Gaining altitude, they drove out along a treeless ridge, meandering south to cross over the coastal range that shielded Oueenstown from view. When he felt ample time had passed for her to lay aside her brooding, he asked where they were headed. Once more she told him,
a spot
, shyly, as though she had embarrassed herself, but she took her eyes off the road, her braids rattling, to beam at him as her enthusiasm for her lark returned.

“You will like it, bwoy, because it is a beautiful spot, a people's spot.”

Spot, he had to assume, meant trysting ground, and people meant country, rural, basic. I thought you were an uptown girl, he said, and she answered No, what he saw in her was business, she had business to see after, but she was behind it all a simple girl.
Hardly
, thought Mitchell, cynical about the business she claimed without identifying. Still, she was not remote, only elusive. He wanted to know where she had been and she recited cities in the States, Canada, Europe, semesters at McGill and CCNY, she had been everywhere in the Western world, it seemed, until her father cut the purse strings at the insistence of his second wife, and even then she trouped on as a member of a small repertory group—costume design—until that too became unfunded. Now, no complaints—she was on her own. Dressmaker, costumes—Mitchell was getting part of a picture. The Deux Chevaux farted down a ravine and back up a steep incline, the night air less and less muggy.

“Why did you come back, Josephine?” he asked. How could she endure St. Catherine after she'd been to Rome? It wasn't the pattern. You rented a tenement in Brooklyn, worked yourself to the bone, didn't know the names of the few trees dying on the street, froze in the winter, suffocated in the summer, spending the rest of your life in a nostalgic coma, but you didn't come back. Maybe he didn't wish to hear why, she suggested, but he encouraged her to speak her mind and she did, focused on the dim illumination of the headlights, her voice lilting with bright high-spirited irony.

“Well, so listen den, Wilson, I come back because it wear me down,
nuh? It is bein a nigger I am talkin about, nuh? I was never nigger until I go away, I born too late fah daht in St. Catherine. Here I was womahn, true, but de shit womahn eat taste much de same dis place or daht place. But nigger—no, I was not daht. Catherinians are proud and it shamed me and I will not speak of it with my own people but I will speak of it with you. You muss not believe I only givin white people hell, Wilson, it's not so, because even black people in de States treat me third-class. Here is where I think de name Third World come from—we people everyone else in dem better-off places decide to treat third-class.” She shot a glance at him to see how he might be reacting to all this. “You asked, you know, you poke you nose in. Doan be vexed wit me, darlin.”

It was a down-the-road topic, it was in the way, he definitely wanted no exploration of Pandora issues tonight, this was the last conversation on earth he expected to be having with Josephine at this juncture. He had not only misjudged her, he was in fact in, as George James would surely take satisfaction in reminding him, over his head. It was feeble to entertain for a second the proposition that he had gained insight into her travails merely by being where he was, it being marginally problematic to be a white man in a black nation, but by no means a cross to bear. But he was flexible on the subject, he could be manipulated to concede things he wasn't sure were true. Sighing, she accepted his lack of response and they drove on.

Finally he managed to say, “Josephine, I am an unwilling part of this disease,” hoping she'd understand.

There are white boys and there are white boys, just don't play the fool by trying to apologize to me, she said. Abruptly, she stopped the car in the middle of the abandoned road and gave him a biting kiss, sharp enough to make him wince, the surf of insects roaring in his ears, and then, again, they drove on. Mitchell wasn't thinking, he didn't want to think, there was no place happy where thinking would take him.

The spot Josephine had in mind was on the crest of the highest peak that backdropped Queenstown. Its cartographical designation was Mount Archer, but it was called by its folkloric name, Soldier Mountain, indebted for this sobriquet to the British forces withdrawn to the West Indies after the Revolutionary War, ordered south to secure the Crown's few remaining claims in the Americas. A vanguard detachment was allowed to come ashore unopposed, then set upon by a mob of French-armed and trained Black Carib Indians. The two ships of the expeditionary force were set ablaze in the harbor;
the landed troops had little choice but to retreat farther and farther up into the hills, establishing themselves finally atop Archer where they held out for months, slowly dying by attrition in skirmishes and then from starvation, awaiting reinforcements that arrived in time to bury them before dogs and vultures had picked clean the bones. A cemetery was said to be up here, somewhere on the summit, marked by a common headstone, but Mitchell had never seen it though the upper third of the peak had been deforested long ago and was used now as free-range pasture. Only a surviving handful of Catherinian Tories and absentee landowners considered the site consecrated ground. For the majority of the population it was no more than a view, the most magnificent within direct reach of Queenstown, and therefore a natural with sightseers, picnickers, and of course, lovers. At some point in the past, the colonial government had expropriated what was no more than a shepherd's hut, limed its walls, and christened it a historical shrine, but Kingsley, the first prime minister of the associated territory, had its pitiful collection of artifacts carted down to the new national museum in the botanic gardens, gave the building to a political crony who gave it the appellation Lookout House, added a refrigerator and a record player, the former still in operation after almost twenty years, and promoted it as a bar. Tourists rarely wandered this far off the track, especially after dark; the place was as local as callaloo.

A handmade wooden sign, its lettering flaked and unreadable, marked the turnoff. They parked alongside two other cars, the only ones there, and got out, Josephine kicking off her heels to walk over the corrugated ground, holding Mitchell's elbow for support. A short path led to the bar, which sat out on a rocky hump, jutting prowlike into space. Reggae thundered from inside its walls, low and heavy on the bass line, sucking booms, in and out and continuous, like the stroke of a mighty piston. The slope dropped away to their left into the sky over the capital; Mitchell had never been here at night, had never experienced this approximation of divine voyeurism, and he thought, Whoever doesn't love this needs their soul examined. The elevation was twenty-five, twenty-eight hundred, something like that. Capillaries of light spilled down out of the stadium bowl formed by the southern face of the mountains, a symmetry of peaks horseshoed eastward and westward. The scattering of lights fattened into electric arteries that branched into geometric webs, increasing in density toward the glowing heart of the two-chambered city, Queenstown and Scuffletown, built along the harbor, outlining the earthly nothingness that was the nighttime sea. Out to the southeast he could see,
with no comments from his conscience, a distant flicker of lonely lights that would have to be Cotton Island, and farther out into the void among the lowest stars, a powdery effluvium that he thought might be the aura of the island of St. Vincent, and were he to see tonight on the farthest horizon the atomic flash that he and his generation had been raised to anticipate, he'd wave good-bye to the world he had come from and keep walking toward the music with the enigmatically glamorous Josephine.

She paused to breathe deeply of the view, tucking herself against his side, remarking on the drop in temperature, the air chilled and aromatic, like a florist's case. Her sexuality closed in on him like a magnetic field—he certainly wasn't finding it cool up here. With her index finger she traced his mustache, then his lower lip, its thinness in marked contrast to the beveled fleshiness of her own. He felt her nail like a blunted knife scoring the circle of his hungry mouth. She wanted him to tell her if he had stayed by black women before. Her voice took it for granted that he had.

In his mind they were already fornicating like cats, clamped together, tumbling down the mountainside. He had to draw his consciousness back out of his cock, gorged with blood and pounding like a second wild heart, before he could order his thoughts and answer.
Staying by
meant
sleeping with
, and he hadn't. The answer was no, but he didn't want to tell her that and thus make his inexperience, which was trifling and irrelevant, suddenly significant. There had been another night, another girl, another booming discotheque, down on the harbor near Scuffletown. Another kiss much like the ones he knew were coming from Josephine standing on the beach in the pitch-black darkness before dawn after the club had closed. She had petted him through the fabric of his pants. Reaching under her tank top, he had touched one of her breasts, she had slapped his hand away, that was that. His impression was that black women had unfortunate breasts: flat, flappy, Tootsie Rolls for paps, sad and overused. On his forays through the countryside, every river had its gang of women, stripped to the waist, bathing. At least along the riverbanks, modesty was not ranked high on the civic code of behavior. Endless nursing might well have been the culprit for the erotic defeat of black breasts but he couldn't say, and he had wondered that night on the beach if, after her strong come-on, he had not dallied but placed his hand between her legs rather than on her tit, what would have happened. He felt he had triggered her self-consciousness, but she was fickle, that was all he really knew, perhaps
there
was the trait he should be focusing on, and the arc of thought circled him back to
what George James had warned him about Josephine as they were about to strike out on their own from Howard Bay.

“Yeah,” he lied, out of pride, “but I'm no expert.”

“Who is, bwoy?” She put him right back on the hook, asking him to tell her the difference between white girls and black girls, and when he resisted, she accused him of being too serious, and then teased him by saying if he were really so serious a man, then she wanted to hear something negative, tell her the bad things about black women.

“I don't think I like this game,” he said, the restructuring of desire like a bucket of grimy water dumped on his head. What if he offered an analysis of the difference between North American women and West Indian women, would that pacify her investigative appetite? Josephine said no. She was inexplicably obstinate. Tell her just one thing she wanted to know or walk home. He took one baleful, disbelieving step back away from her before she restrained him. Come on,
bwoy
, she said, full of seductive taunting, he needn't worry, but why couldn't he tell her, tell her to humor a crazy black bitch, tell her as a favor, as a matter of respect.
Respect?
he thought. What she was asking for was sexual suicide, racial self-immolation. Okay, he said, shaking his head, agitated into compliance—what was this, her idea of sadomasochism, did ugliness and conflict turn her on? Here goes: Black women appeared more inclined to style over substance, philosophically they tended to cutesyness, they latched on to the trite, they adored platitudes, they clung to the ankles of a God that clearly couldn't see or hear them, they solicited chauvinism from males, they conspired with men in the continuation of patriarchy, they had yet to get their attachment to slave love and stable breeding behind them, and despite all that they walked around with a chip on their shoulder the size of a banquet platter.
There
, he said in bitter resignation, sick that the evening must end like this. There you have it but the truth is not a foolhardy litany of others' shortcomings or a coerced recitation of stereotype, and what's with you anyway, was this like some ritual scarring, what did she want to hear next, that her uncle was a monkey and swung from trees? He was beginning to believe this was what Catherinians imported white boys for, to pervert them into some sort of intellectual mercenary, targeted against themselves, solidify a role in the world as professional victims.