Swimming in the Volcano (83 page)

Edison Banks asked permission from the women to speak with Mister Wilson alone, and when Josephine had scooped up the child and they had withdrawn from the room, he asked permission of Mitchell to speak informally as well as frankly and with confidentiality, and then he turned his attention full upon him, his eyes seemed suddenly hounded, the cinnamon hue of his skin bleached by the light of the television. There was no exchange of pleasantries, no attempt to explain how it was he had come to be there, other than the fact that he had expected to see Mitchell at the memorial service for the teacher, where he had hoped to take him aside and ask him what he was asking now, without any other consideration but a respect for the truth, was there anything that had happened on Mount Soufrière that he thought it best not to entrust to the police, for political or personal reasons?

Mitchell received the question as his first and perhaps only opportunity to tell the truth, as he knew it, and it was the only time he ever did, unburdening himself to Edison Banks, whose expression hardened as he listened to the story, the tulip-shaped scar disfiguring one of his eyebrows glowed white on his high forehead, and he leaned out on the edge of the settee to prop his elbows on his knees, his elegant hands cupped over his meticulous beard, and asked for a brief moment of clarification.

“What was in the woman's pack?”

Mitchell didn't know and he refused to speculate.

“Is it possible that she lied to you? Is it possible that she and the other woman, your friend—”

Mitchell cut him off. “Absolutely not.”

Looking slighted by the curt tone of the denial, Banks held up a hand in concession to the point, sighing heavily with regret, sorry he had found it necessary to even suggest such a possibility, he was after all an apostle of infinite faith, the woman's death was a mystery that
perhaps would remain a mystery, or perhaps it was not so big a mystery at all, but Wilson, Banks said emphatically, do you understand, we forgive each other our sins, we act with this future of forgiveness in our hearts, in order to move on. We have no days of real glory here, no heroic structures, no history of dignity. We have only fools and forgiveness and the rest, the balance, we must invent.

You have lived among us, Banks said, you have been a student of our souls, you know this is how we let our histories pass, unrecorded except in the ruin of hearts, in the dust and bones of our ancestors, in the violent spilling of their blood, in the changeless faces of children who wrap themselves in newspaper and fall asleep on the street ... Edison Banks paused, his eyes locked upon Mitchell's, his lips bending in irony and he shook his head, self-amused, ridiculed by the television and then he continued, less fervently, saying he did not come to make a speech, he had come to make a request. Few people understood the powerlessness of being powerful. He was powerless, for instance, to interfere in the filing of a criminal charge, powerless to interfere in the jurisdiction of the courts, he was powerless to prevent political opponents from manufacturing lies and fabricating illusions and so he was asking Mitchell Wilson to reconsider his accusation against Corporal Cassius Collymore of the PDF.

“Why?”

Because, Banks said with resignation in his voice, a confessional sag to his frame, it could only bring disruption and harm to his nation and his nation's struggle. Because, Banks said, raising his head and tilting it backward away from Mitchell, his eyes imperious, finishing with him, because the whole sense of the act of the woman's murder suggested another murderer than Cassius Collymore, truth to tell, mahn, I don't know who killed the woman, it has yet to be determined, but perhaps this man was innocent, examine your memory and examine your conscience, and if you say so then it is so but then that will be an occasion when you will need my help and I will be powerless to help, and the dead woman will need
your
help, Wilson, and
you
will be powerless to help her, you see.

Both men nodded bitterly at one another. Mitchell made a cold demand to be told about Isaac Knowles and was flabbergasted by what he heard.

“I am not convinced of this,” said Edison Banks. “I know much less about all this than you might suspect. These tales of this fellow Isaac, perhaps they are only another ananci story”—he paused, diverting his gaze toward the television which anointed their discussion with laughter—“but you know, Wilson, whatever you might say
about the other woman, the woman who has left the island, eh? the woman who might know more than either of us about this affair, perhaps that would be ananci story too.”

“Isaac Knowles is my friend.”

“But you are serious?” said Banks, taken aback. “But this the first I hear of it.”

“This bandit stuff,” Mitchell said, frustrated, impulsively pointing at the program. “Where are you getting this from, the TV? This is horseshit.”

“But you are serious, really?” Banks repeated, incredulous, coming to his feet, saying, in that case, as a personal favor, he would ask Wilson to leave this island, he would ask him to stay away until they straightened these matters out among themselves.

Mitchell remained slumped in his chair, listening to the driver of the prime minister's car start its engine at the same moment that Banks opened the front door to go out of the house. He was too pent up, the encounter had left him overcharged with useless energy and he went back through the dimness of the house to the kitchen to fire back another rum, desperate to tame his aimless urge to action, pouring a second one when Josephine came to collect what was left of him.

“
Wha happen, bwoy?
”

She was in her nightgown, sleepy-eyed. It was as if he had come home blasted in the middle of the night to tell his wife he had just been laid off, cut from the payroll that made it possible for them to be together.

“I think I've just been deported.”

She brought him by his good hand to bed, saying only this,
you cy-ahn trust Eddy, Mitchell, he out of all dem fellas is de only one
, and then she harbored him within the flesh of her compassion, this night she made her love wordless and melting for him, a tender respite from his impotence, and in the early light of morning when he dressed and left her house, fearing her remonstrations he didn't tell her where he was going, only that he was coming back to her. Don't wait on him, he said, hoisting his daypack over his shoulders, but he'd most likely be home for supper.

Again he walked down to the esplanade, again the light was blinding and seemed to shine right down on his nerves and witlessness, and he queued up a second time with a workforce of laborers at a line of lorries ferrying men to leeward, wondering when he had done this before, he couldn't remember, and he climbed onto the back of a slatbedded
truck, crowding in with the rest of them when they were told to hop aboard, someone making room for him to sit down on one of the benches, saying Sah, we is very very deep-sad about the girl Big Sally. Along the road he saw the familiar posting of old billboards, erected by the coalition during the final days of the campaign against the tyrant Pepper, political relics, the didactic murals—heroic peasants with uplifted eyes and hoes slung over their shoulders; children thankfully learning their ABC's—were beginning to flake and peel and their identical slogans—
Stop the Oppression; We All is One
—fade, but someone with a bucket of red paint had altered their attribution, the formula for change and unity—
PEP
+
PIP = PEAS
—had lost all but its first three letters, and its
E
had scaled the alphabet to become a crude, splattered
R
, as if to suggest to the population that the PEP had never quite been able to switch gears away from its former function and was still capable of rebelling against the status quo, regardless of their role in its construction. The
R
of course expressed evolutionary logic, survival of the fittest, and stood for Revolution, though he knew of no announcement from the party to this effect. Farther up the road, past a brown swamp of mangrove and near the junction with the leeward highway, they slowed and moved as far to the left as the asphalt allowed, to let pass a caravan of twelve lorries, similar to their own, transporting hundreds of peasants south to the capital where, it was said among the men on the truck, they were to demonstrate against the PLDP (Mitchell later heard that during the rally, three dispossessed squatters, to dramatize their plight, allowed themselves to be symbolically crucified on makeshift crosses and paraded through the streets by several thousand outraged supporters; in the process, shop windows were broken and tear gas, making its debut on the island, was fired, and it could reasonably be said that this was the day the nebulous slow burn of opposition on the island combusted into bright blue flames).

In the hour of barnyard jostling and sweat and black tobacco smoke it took to reach the police checkpoint, they were entertained by a PEP man and a PIP man engaged in an argument remarkable for the beauty of its oratory applied to the ridiculous nonsense of their mirror-image demands, each of them wanting their workers' union to strike against different halves of the same government. Is like de mahn refuse to bring home food, said one of the onlookers, and de womahn say she ain goin cook, and so who goin sit hungry but we children, nuh? Tell me Catherinians is not lunatics, bwoy. It seemed Kingsley supporters among the police commanded the leeward checkpoint, and there the PIP fellow loudly denounced his PEP
counterpart, who was then ordered down off the truck and left standing in the middle of the road, no one paying him the least attention, his arms flung out from his sides and saying, JesusfuckinChrist, what I do? what I do? And then, when the lorry was almost but not yet out of sight and anyone who looked could see, one of the officers stepped over and struck the man with his ferule, the driver downshifted up the mountainside and the scene closed with the dry-mouthed aftertaste of brutality. Mitchell hopped off himself when the truck turned inland toward one of the cocoa estates and continued on up the glorious coast, its ridges cradling fertile savannas dotted with idyllic farms and groves, hitchhiking to Kingsley's home village and then walking the last quarter mile to Poppi's house. The yard was filled with peasants, standing around, not much given to talk, as if they were waiting to be hired, or addressed. Mitchell said his good mornings and they nodded back expressionlessly. When he knocked on the door the maid answered and grunted, Wait. His wrist, which had been quiet all morning, started to pulse again, like a small engine, and he wasn't thinking properly about what it was he was doing here, come to see the ancient parasitic hulk of a vampire, but here was Kingsley at the door, just who he was, a pea-hearted cunning maniac, frog-eyed and corpulent but still the man he once was, a man of lean and youthful lusts, who had once swallowed three gold coins and then pulled down his pants to shit them out in front of a crowd of cheering workers at a rally of the Mental and Manual Worker's Union, back in the old days, when he was their leader, a flea up the skirts of Britannia and Her Majesty the Queen. Rumors sifted down and filled Kingsley's mad and venal world, and now they had him dabbling in obeah, offering blood sacrifices to monkey gods and holding séances and all manner of foolishness. They made him out to be larger than life when really all he was was a dangerous infant, empowered with urgent infant needs, a full-bodied human shape with unformed, ungerminated but voraciously needy interiors squalling
me, me, me
, not a dreamer like Edison Banks but a burning bottomless hole in a people's culture of existence. He was wearing the same glossy black suit he favored, his collar unbuttoned and his necktie loosened, his swollen feet poked into bedroom slippers, and he was drunk, at least that was the impression he gave.

“You are of no use to me, Mistah Wilson.” Mitchell turned his face down and to the side, embarrassed for himself and intimidated by the inhuman authority, the terrorizing force of it, Kingsley so effortlessly communicated with his gaze, and Mitchell's own eyes came to rest on the row of vehicles parked down behind the kitchen, quite a collection
of them meaning the house must be full, he had interrupted what didn't take much imagination to think of as a war council, and of the three Rovers on the lot Ballantyne's was among them, he knew its plate numbers by now, but now the numbers clicked in defining revelation and he realized what he should have known all along, that it could only be Ballantyne who picked up and disposed of Sally's daypack off the slopes of Mount Soufrière. Tillman hadn't, Adrian hadn't, nor had he seen it being carried off by any of the cops.

“I have lost patience with you, you see, Mistah Wilson. What I tell you to heed me about de womahn, eh, to get she gone? The bitch fuck you up, bwoy.”

Mitchell found the courage to speak, he thought he was going to ask what's happening around here, why are these things happening, what is the fucking point, why is the price so high with the stakes so low, but what came out of his mouth was a question he doubted Kingsley could answer, who had killed the Peace Corps girl?

“That is fah you to say, and you have said, true?”

“Then one last question. Where's your godson, Isaac Knowles?”

“We is a young nation, Mistah Wilson. We are finding our way through darkness.”

“Isaac.”

“Why you come so long a ways to ask such questions as you you-self must answer?
Isaac is wherever you are
. Now, go home to you house and stay,” and so he walked back to the coastal road, having now learned that power had its lethal metaphysics, and its treacherous poetry, inviting bloody explication.

He kept on to the north, following the enigma of his instincts. They rumbled through the village of Petit Santé, the village of Coragill, last and least the hamlet of Youlou, end of the road, where the pickup truck he had flagged a ride with backed down to the stony shore and its crew jumped out and began filling the cargo bed with round, wave-polished paving stones. He walked ahead to the cluster of clapboard shanties raised on stilts, built around a packed-dirt common ground centered with a statue of the Virgin Mary to keep off hurricanes, this prevention her local specialty. After Kingsley, he went quickly back to the Darvon-codeine mix, because the pain was greedy, would take the day for itself, and was unique in the way that it boasted its own clear cause, which he knew to be seductive. Behind the houses was a real beach, or the photographic negative of one, with black sand and colorless water, six or seven catboats hauled up beyond the reach of the tide and salt-burnished fishermen cleaning
and selling their catch. The glare off the water made him queasy, he walked and felt as though he were bundled up in many layers of clothes. A man stood crotch-deep in the ocean, a style of cap like Robin Hood's on his head, and he wore trousers and a white perma-press shirt in fair shape, as if up here high on the leeward coast people took to the sea whenever the whim so moved them. Mitchell stared amiably at two naked grave-faced boys, one a mulatto with straight hair and an incipient swarthiness there in his Latin or probably mestizo blood, both of them had bung navels like grotesque joke penises sticking out from their round bellies, this was the first time in months and months that he wished he had a camera with him to capture this, the boys each supporting one end of reedlike stick and between them, suspended like storybook creatures, a flat-nosed clown-faced parrot fish too blue to be real, and a red hogfish with its cowlick crimson plume arched in gorgeous extravagance from its dorsal spine. The grace of it nagged him—boys with their fish. Women laughed and moved their hips unconsciously, there were children wanting gum and men at work. There was beauty and peace and way of life and Mitchell found himself experiencing a weird and helpless sense of belonging, he slipped in among the women with their baskets and the men with their machetes and began talking to the fishermen, collecting their data, saying, If we could get you a Honda generator and a freezer box, how many cubic centimeters do you think? suppose a refrigerated truck came once every week? why have none of you taken advantage of the loan program for outboard motors? and he stopped just as abruptly as he had started, turned on his heels and went back to the hamlet's sweetdrink shop and drank a Ju-C, and then another one, and still a third, unable to stop his sudden thirst, and the proprietor came out from behind the rough-hewn counter of his livelihood to point his visiting dignitary of a white man up into the surrounding peaks and their gravitational pull. Off he marched, sanguine, heedless, across the threshold of the outside world, authoring his own transgressions.