Swimming in the Volcano (6 page)

According to Isaac, someone was cooking blackfish in the terminal. Blackfish was what the islanders had named pilot whales. The fishermen from the leeward side succeeded in wrestling to shore about two
dozen of the whales every season. Mitchell had seen some hauled up on the beach at Kensington, resembling the burned fuselages of DC-3s. The aroma punched into you from miles away when the fishermen heated the flesh to collect one of the world's superior oils, used to lubricate aeronautical instruments. It wasn't blackfish frying though. Somewhere nearby plastic or chemicals had caught fire, the fumes stirring the bumblebees that inhabited Mitchell's broken nose. A creeping haze had entered the air, irritating their eyes and depositing a metallic taste on Mitchell's tongue. The plane should have been down by now.

Saconi came out from the bar, strolling along with guitar and case, bottle of scotch and glass of it, a smile held just short of arrogance. He could advertise easygoing better than most. Here's the juice, he seemed to say, cakewalking now that he had spotted the two of them. Here's the tune and the juice, the light and the sound, the music and its maker,
me
, the only guy around this duncey place with the means to an intelligent end. He halted in midstep as he encountered the gathering bank of smoke, surveyed the atmosphere and continued toward them, an expression on his face that said, I will rescue you ... if I must.

“You fellas on a rahm-
page
,” he snorted. “Wha de hell you mash up now to get dis stink?”

Outside the wide rows of windows facing the airfield, a fire engine rolled out of a machine shed down the runway toward the terminal, overloaded with a crew of saviors in street clothes or yellow slickers, clinging tenuously to the running boards. The truck stopped opposite the exterior entrance of the LIAT station. The men hopped to the tarmac and unraveled a rust-stained intestine of hose. Within the terminal, the door behind the ticket counter slammed open and employees scuttled out under a billow of marbled smoke that exited as they did, choking and tugging at their nicely knotted blue neckties. Within seconds water squirted everywhere. A crowd materialized, coming in off the roads, to make commentary and observe the firemen break up equipment in a frenzy of service, and before long the airline's operational center was hammered, axed, foamed, and otherwise destroyed. Three stories were quick to circulate, embellished at will with as much creativity as news releases from the Government Information Office. Conservatives advocated number one: technology being the serpent that it was, the hardware in the ops room mysteriously burst into flame, a sign from the very guts of the island that St. Catherine was bounding pell-mell into the mistakes of the nuclear
age. Old gods and new gods were jostling each other in the corridors that led to the future. A second version was supported by more progressive witnesses to the event: obeying the logic of a civil visionary, a disgruntled employee, fearing that the island's aviation systems lagged far below contemporary standards, exploded the antiquated equipment with a bomb manufactured from components smuggled ashore from Cuba-Florida-Israel-Argentina-Bulgaria, confident that what he had ruined in the ensuing conflagration would be replaced, expeditiously and with a clamor of pledges for more to come, with the most up-to-date do-flicky and gittimas, a flock of foreign agencies competing for this right.

The less dramatic rumor in consideration was the more plausible (though Mitchell didn't wish to diminish the credibility of the former two). For months, they heard from one of the kids who lifted luggage on and off planes, the radio operator had been tossing the greasy paper wrappers from his lunchtime roti behind the short-wave unit where they had collected between the wall and the radio housing. The trash had achieved a high enough level finally to settle against exposed tubes, and as the operator switched on the set and talked to the plane en route, the paper had combusted with a
woof
, the flames disposing of the link between ground and sky as if it were a fantasy anyway. The wiring at the airport was centralized and the entire circuit, a jam of hot veins and copper branchings that ended in question marks, sizzled and blew, causing an outage in the tower as well. Before he lost contact with the pilot, the radioman was able to relay a temporary instruction: Maintain altitude and position until further notice. No one could be bothered by an arrival at the moment.

Mitchell didn't look for sense in that rationale. On his cheeks were tears steamed out of their ducts by the toxic atmosphere. Hot and cold tears, drops of luckless outrage and the smooth beads of the melancholy he fought, and behind them pooling up, tears of desperate laughter. What wretchedness was this of a morning, to be borne down the slopes of Ooah Mountain in a brakeless vehicle, to have his nose accordianed into a plump oozing throb, to helplessly watch a bum spirit away his shirt, to have his old sweetheart pinwheeling above the ocean while the pilot read the newspaper and a team of controllers and kibitzers couldn't start their backup generator, or find replacements for their battery-pacs? Why was Johnnie coming here anyway? She had not given him time to say no to the idea, which is what, given the chance, he would have said.

*     *     *

“Mistah Foreign Fuckin Aid,” Saconi said, hearing how Mitchell came by the slime-haloed steer on his front, “give de shurt off he back to a needy mahn. Real grahss root movement, bwoy.”

“It wasn't like that,” Mitchell replied, wishing he weren't so ginger around Saconi's clever mouth.

They sat along a concrete bench on the deck of the terminal's roof. Isaac wanted to stay below and view the fiasco to its finish, but they had coaxed him away from the unwholesome black clouds and an abundance of deputized firemen who had taken advantage of the situation to be pushy. A society that did not plug its culture into television preserved in its citizens a fresh and invigorating appreciation of catastrophe down to the crudest detail, for catastrophe, if it didn't include you, was a windfall of entertainment. Isaac had to admit that the inferno of the LIAT office was a dull event after all, though an appreciated diversion from his own troubles. So they retreated to the bar for plastic cups of ice, then to the rooftop for the visceral sense of being above mundane concerns, Isaac weak on the stairs with further loss. Saconi had left the car stereo and speakers unattended. Now they were gone, thieved (naturally, compulsively, instinctively), and the musician made no attempt to assume responsibility.

The view from the roof had all of geography's headlines—the possessive, sheltering sea; the mountains with their illusion of a spectacular land mass—and, abstracted as Mitchell stared at the blank strip of possibility that was the runway, he measured the vicissitudes of this strange way of life on St. Catherine, a communal life that was definitely predisposed to fakery and magic-in-the-night, to blood-drawing sight gags and all seductive forms of low comedy, this against the reliability of the land, rich and giving and embracing after centuries of abuse. Nothing formed as strong a bond for the people discarded here by empires—not history, not politics, not religion—as the intimate resource of the land on which they were once no more than two-legged oxen. He looked at the houses built on Ooah Mountain and Zion Hill, like cotton patches of color sewn into the human poverty of the lush slopes, banana and cocoa plantations threading the hollows and crests, the blue-green range of peaks to the north, their jungles a thick sponge for the nurturing radiance of the early sun, and told himself that all you had to do was get a little leverage on your troubles and woes and paradise could almost happen.

Then he thought,
this stupid island
.

Saconi uncased his instrument and picked a sequence of notes, snapped and then sustained on the metal strings, boingy sounds that suggested flying fish careening over the waves in Los Muertos
Channel. Isaac fretted and sucked whiskey, the bottle slanted into his mouth. The scotch sparkled and flashed in its chamber, a liquid anodyne. He took a long therapeutic swallow and put ice cubes in his mouth, crushing them between large molars. Mitchell filled his cup halfway and then passed the bottle to Saconi, who topped off his own cup and routed the bottle back to Isaac. Saconi started playing again, strangling a country-and-western tune, oleaginous and distantly familiar, out of the guitar. They passed the bottle a fourth and fifth time, an eighth and ninth time, and Isaac finished it off, scowling at the bottom.

Then Isaac jerked up from the bench and wobbled until he found his equilibrium, his muscles operating on the faintest neural messages. In front of them, a parapet of arabesque cinderblocks laid waist-high along the roof's edge prevented drunks and children from stepping off into space. Isaac went to it to spit down on the world and purge his nostrils, which he did with a fair amount of wet noises. Afterward he cocked his skinny hips and rested on his elbows, reviewing what he could see of his nation.

“Look aht daht foolishness, bwoy,” he said after a while. There was no encouragement to the words so Mitchell didn't consider it a recommendation. Saconi glanced up absently, involved with music. The alcohol began to soften Mitchell's physical perspective, made him feel loose as water, drifting, and the effort to keep himself awake culminated in the idea of standing up. He braced himself on invisible supports until he thought it wise to go forward, and once alongside Isaac, peered beyond the line of the roof with a dimwitted fascination. He asked what was going on, but it was plain to see. On the tarmac below the fire truck had caught fire, its hood raised like a shout and its engine undergoing a shower from its own hose.

“Is this a special day or something?”

“Nah.”

“Day of Judgment?”

“Same as ahlways, mahn.”

“Murphy's Day?”

“Moiphy?”

“Yeah, you know. Murphy's Law—everything goes wrong.”

Isaac corrected him, stone-eyed and somber. “We is Pollimen Tree.”

“Oh,” Mitchell said, nodding his head uncertainly. “What kind of tree?”

“Pollimen Tree. Daht's de best we mahnage as yet.”

Mitchell pondered this insight, baffled; perhaps it contained a
truth or ideology he had missed. Pollimen Tree, he said over and over to himself, until it evolved into
parliamentary
and he expected it to reveal some cornerpiece of knowledge, but its syllables grew meaningless and reverted back to nonsense.

“This place is the shits,” Mitchell announced vacantly.

Saconi stopped playing, his hand muffling the strings, and lifted his head. “I'll write daht song,” he said, giving Mitchell an unfriendly wink. “It will be about you, Mistah Good Guy.”

“Hey, why don't you fuck off.” The scotch went toxic in his veins. “You're always riding my ass, Saconi. What the hell do you want from me anyway?”

“Yeah, yeah, Wilson. Want some of daht yankee humor, bruddah.”

“Today it's being tested.”

“Oh ho. I see, I see. Wilson, hear now, what you believe a good humor fah in de fust place?”

Regret made Saconi's weak grin sadly honest. He pivoted around so he could lie down on the bench, hugging his guitar—this is how he would look when they laid him to rest in his coffin. He pumped his groin into the soundbox and smacked a sharp cord, singing like a cowboy in a mournful tremolo. ‘“A-we ahll issa slapstick, enna you-ahll issa big stick'—how de next line go, Mitch?”

“Oh me,” Saconi sighed when Mitchell shunned his invitation to sport along. He put aside his instrument and sat straight up. “Doan be vexed, Mitchie, eh?” To press his appeal he joined them at the wall, creating a mopey trio, three dogs in the pound.

“Your wisecracks—” Mitchell said, and clamped his mouth tight before he could say
are unfair
.

“Look, tek no offense, mahn. Rudeness have a big mahket in dis place. Is my life, ya know, to twist straight and straighten twist.”

“Rudeness, teefin, devilment, mash up,” Isaac added, graduating his misfortune to general conditions.

Their collective mood had found its cellar, a malaise like a ladder they had descended rung by rung. Mitchell wished to make some definitive statement on his own behalf, explain why he had come to St. Catherine, how he should be treated during his tenure. Justification whirled down toward his lips like an insect that flew too randomly to anticipate and capture. “Uh, uh,” he heard himself grunt. The danger was to say anything trite but he lacked the facility to say anything more complex than a footman's proclamations. He was too high, his brain too hazed. He felt like cartoon footage, the Saturday-night evolution of Kurtz ... go ashore, get ripped and hazardous with the locals.

“I am a guest,” he proclaimed, “of the frigging queen.”

“True,” Isaac said, intent on studying the sky to the south for sight of the incoming plane. In his concentration he resembled a black tomcat willing a sparrow out of a tree. “We ahll in de same leaky boat.”

“Queen finish up, mahn. You too late. People runnin queenless now.”

“Same boat,” Isaac affirmed. He nodded out to sea, a plane there sinking out of the blue through blades of sunlight, a bright angel of glass.

“Is the plane on fire too?”

“Nah.”

Mitchell felt queasy. The plane's wings flared violent white, twin furnaces in the tropic heat.

“You happy now?”

“No.”

The last time he had seen Johnnie, five years ago in the mountains of Virginia, she wore a navy blue pea coat which she kept on all day as she lay on the couch in his apartment, a used syringe thrown down on the carpet, recovering from an abortion—her second, to the best of his knowledge. He remained on campus, in the arts and sciences library, until late at night, reading the same three or four sentences in a botany textbook again and again, but they guarded a meaning that was indecipherable. He was home for half an hour, hadn't opened his mouth and neither had Johnnie, when she got up from the couch where she had been picking at imaginary blemishes and said, I think I'll just leave, all right?, and she did. But he had never answered her, had never said all right, go. The day before he had told her, “I spend three bucks a week on Trojans because the pill makes you waterlogged and puffy. How'd you get pregnant?” She said she didn't know, and kept saying it until she had convinced herself it was true. He wouldn't have even known about it if he hadn't answered the phone, the clinic wanting to confirm her appointment.