Swimming in the Volcano (86 page)

One day, before Adrian had been replaced by a Cuban volunteer and sent home, Josephine said, Adrian tell me not to forget: a girl named Jolene stop by the school, saying her husband gone away, she carrying a sick sick child in she arms and she leave him by Adrian, bawling, Take him, help him. She take him, nuh? Mitch, one more child to save.

That was one thing about expats
, he remembered a friend of golf telling him,
the journalists, the volunteers, the specialists, the careerists, the opportunists, even the wandering jews: Everybody found a kid they wanted to help
. This had been Ben talking, an inference he was making about decency, the complications thereof. Ben, the poet.

That
, said Ben,
was how it started
.

The act of writing a novel, no matter how solitary the process seems, is simultaneously the act of creating communities—one fictional, of course, but another quite real. The act of finishing a book, this book, is also a long-awaited opportunity to say thanks to the leading citizens of that vital, blessedly real group, the extended family of
Swimming in the Volcano:

First, always, to Miss F.

To Gail Hochman and Barbara Grossman.

To Alice Turner, Theresa Grosch, Bruce Weber, Tom Jenks, Diane Roberts, Nan Graham.

To Jack Leggett, Tay Maltsberger, Dave Smith, Brian Dyson, Gary and Cindy Rich, Carol Ann Koch-Weser, Bob, Brian, Lynette, and Robert Antoni, Barbara Davis, Joy Smith, Marianne Merola, John and Cheryl Andrews, Helen and Shack, Michael Malone, Don Hendrie, Jr., Maxine and Jerry Stern, Connie Nelson, John Parker, Kathy Bradt, Pete Ripley, Bill Vinyard, Ross Anderson, Pat Mitchell, Bill Armstrong, Barry Hannah, Bill Peden, Charlie and Tammy Oberbeck, and Steve Brumfield.

To two of the language's finest poets, Andrew Hudgins and Heather McHugh, of whose work a half-dozen lines appear in this text. And to Richard Powers, one of the best novelists of my generation, who coined the phrase
global pillage
.

To Maurice Bishop, a man of good intentions.