Mitchell believed he understood most of the underlying falsehoods of the business before coming down to St. Catherine but he was blinded, or chose to be blinded, by the magnificent prospects of Edison Banks’ reform movement. What exactly was the relationship, he wondered, between the need for reform and the desire for revolution? No one doubted that everything on the island had to change, and maybe it was time, maybe Mitchell could shoulder some of the work and learn what he really didn’t know—the secret to accomplishing something good and just on this earth, like rescuing a child-nation that had fallen, and was floundering, in a pigpen of greed.
He added up the odds, though, and wasn’t moony about his chance for enlightenment. He was aware of the scale of the hustle, the grand imperial benign vastness of it, the unaccountability of its nature. He even knew some of the dirt about Kingsley, the Great Manipulator, whose career could be identified by the reek of burnt cane, and knew that Edison Banks was not much appreciated by the overseers in Washington. And suppose a rebellious nephew like myself sympathized with a leader like Banks, Mitchell wondered, and practiced his own small subversion against the family back home. From Uncle Sam’s point of view it didn’t much matter, that boy’s game. It didn’t even warrant a dressing down. The nephews took their paychecks, and they were very plump ones indeed, whether issued by Texas A&M, as was the case with Mitchell, or the USDA, or AID, or a phalanx of other acronyms acting as brokers in these arrangements. It didn’t matter because the wealth eventually came back to its origins, even if nephew stayed out there in the jungle to eat shit and bark at the moon. In the meantime the boys were afield guilelessly disseminating the doctrines of rationalism as if they were bread itself, charming the rustics with technocratic voodoo. Eventually all the boys came home to reminisce in old age over their fling with the exotic. And for meaning, nephew, if the spell had not washed off in the Jacuzzis of retirement, had the mystery of his own altruism to ponder, to weigh on the scale of what had not been achieved, and to measure what had failed in his soul against what was never going to change anyway as long as we were men and not gods.
At the end all there was was the knowledge that you took the job to not be cuckolded by opportunity. You let it happen, you let yourself live. You were not afraid to look. You were not afraid to act.
Mitchell put notebooks, topographical maps, camera, and tripod back into the Land Rover and called it a day once the sun entered its fourth quadrant and blasted straight into his line of vision. Back at the ministry, he returned the vehicle to the motor pool and bounded up the wooden steps to the second floor of administrative offices to retrieve his bike. The secretaries in the front bullpen were consistently titillated by the sight of him, their damp mint-eyed white man. Most of them were too shy to talk to Mitchell but not shy enough to be amused among themselves every morning when he appeared. We are black beauties, he imagined they said to him with their eyes. We are lost queens—isn’t that amusing? He nodded their way and walked past into the narrow corridor that led to his section.
There was irrefutable proof that words and numbers were the perfect commodities for export. Not money, and not technology, unless it was as fundamental as safety pins. Thus the proliferation of fellows who did what Mitchell did—the statisticians, the language wizards, the analysts, overeducated people born with a passion for ratiocination, who had a feeling for land—any land, all land, the vitality of it, in it, under it—land, the one issue that was eternal. They were the sturdy facade, the ulterior design for a very canny flow of resources. The pearls of research were meticulously logged and stowed until their time of political expedience, which might never come. What is your view on the banana, Mistah Wilson? How best to ensure the policy of our little coconut oil cartel? If not sugar than perhaps you can suggest an intensification of tobacco? Yams? Nutmeg? Cocoa? Lemons? Arrowroot? Pigeon peas? Sorrel blossoms? A cannery for hearts of palm? What are the prospects on the Caricom market for another quadrillion metric tons of sweet potatoes, eh? Our farmers are excellent cultivators of the sweet potato.
Near the end of the hallway, Mitchell opened the door to his office and strapped his briefcase to the carrier on the rear fender of the bicycle. He had left the two windows unshuttered and now latched them, closing out the noise from the schoolyard at St. Mark’s Secondary, and a shifting light which penetrated through the banyan tree outside the windows and polished the fine old hardwoods of the room. Johnnie tried to slip back into his thoughts but he shut her out too, and sat down behind his desk, rummaging through the backpack he had left there that morning.
Through no fault of his own, what Mitchell had to offer to the ministry’s success was marginal, but he was equally sure that even a little was enough to make a difference, despite perpetual reinvention. Mistah Wilson, the Blackburn study is inactive, we now rely on the Bedford study. No, no, the Bedford study no longer reliable, mahn. The PM has asked us to heed the recommendations of the Vertell Group. Faces turn quizzical—de what group you say? Vertell? Look dem Vertell numbahs, mahn. Dey find a nice setta numbahs, true? Look how click-click-click. All of those expensive reports, the reports before the reports, and the reports after the reports, say, said, and would reiterate only one message far into the next century, the one truth that was so true it mocked the legions of lesser truths that flourished in its light—we fuck around while people go hungry. Excellent truth. Everybody loved it. Nothing produced a crop of bullshit like the Green Revolution.
Cassava, Mistah Wilson? But what you think of rice, with proper irrigation, eh? Soil’s so rich, mahn, so giving, on St. Kate. Oranges? Dairy production? Carrots? We can grow anything here, you know, just throw seed on the ground and get out of the way, but dese people, dem lazy. Dese people, dem chupid as frog. Fuckin baboons, nuh? The second week Mitchell was here he had made the blunder of opening the files kept in the office by his predecessors, a tag-team of foreign experts passing through St. Catherine during the past sixty years. It seemed that every pebble, puddle, and pismire on the island had been evaluated ad infinitum by this distinguished procession of developmental solipsists. They revealed, as a group, an extraordinary penchant for repetition and simultaneous contradiction. One would say, Dig a ditch right here. A second would arrive afterward to say, Clearly this ditch belongs over there, not here. A third pundit would follow and say, Oh Christ, we don’t think ditches are the thing anymore; you should fill them in. These absurd, disembodied dialogues had been going on in the present vein for ten, fifteen, twenty years.
So, white bwoy, tell me. You come to mek some big experiments? Mek some studies on dem poor peoples? Dem slavery mentalities?
Mitchell straightened up from binding his pant legs with rubber bands, considering the risky business of going unarmored and unengined into foreign traffic.
Mister Wilson. Up in the bush, you did see my bad children?
He thought about it again, this riddle, and decided it was nothing more than primitive, cagey humor, a joke from a trickster, a politician of trivial intrigues. Again, he lingered in his office longer than he should have, considering the guest alone in the house at Howard Bay. Certainly he stayed longer than was necessary, afraid of Johnnie—Mrs. What’s Her Name—yawning, putting in an extra hour for a workaholic’s merit badge. He reviewed the maps of the former copra estates, weeded productivity assessments, examined market trends and commodities stats until he hated it all but at least he was forming a comprehensive, lucid picture of change in this no-account nation, changes that were simple and elegant and precise in his notes and made him feel light-headed with a premonition of their impact. Once, the Eisenhower-era phone on his desk gave an abrupt chime and then dribbled a stream of gummy bell-notes. Mitchell picked up the receiver and a woman squawked, “Ministry’s on fire, baby,” or so he thought. When he went down to the reception area, there were no flames, no smoke, and the secretary nodded to an old man sitting on a folding chair, watch cap in hand. “Dere he is,” the woman told Mitchell.
“Who?” Mitchell ask
ed.
“What I juss tell you,” she said officiously. “De mahn is here who need to know about de tree you hire him to chop down.”
Mitchell didn’t have a tree to chop down, and when he spoke to the old man, he couldn’t understand his answer, and sent him away.
Finally Mitchell took his Gitane out on the cobbled streets of the old careenage where he became a fluid thread of speed through the early evening traffic, the noisy mix of people queuing up for jitneys, the pods of cattle and goats, the lorries that wanted to skin him. The gears of the bicycle clicked incrementally to adjust to the difficulty of the slope as Mitchell passed out of town into its alternately ramshackle and wealthy outskirts. The southeastern face of the mountain rose off his left shoulder, channeled with darkness, and the sea ahead gathered a soft woolen shadow far out on its rim. He pumped the pedals hard until he was gasping, which made him exuberant, thinking this was what it meant and how it felt when it was good, the breeze in his face carrying the smells and conversations of the open shops, the people and the architecture jolted into impressionistic messages, scrolled ironwork, flowered dresses, a girl toting a calf’s head by its bloody ear, a many-gabled boarded-over house, a line of women jogging like Masai warriors, single file on the path flanking the road, shallow baskets of plantains and passionfruit balanced on their erect heads. Mitchell pumped for more speed as he crested Zion Hill, crossed Brandon Vale, labored up Ooah Mountain, and began to coast downward toward Howard Bay, purple land crabs scuttling out of their sandy holes and jigging on the black road in front of him. He was flying, free and unburdened, wishing he had no place to go.
Chapter 9
A cat was in the kitchen sink eating a plucked, half-frozen chicken. Straddled around the carcass, it was stripping the bird to the bone, with all four sets of claws sunk into the meat for leverage, finishing off a drumstick when Mitchell entered the room. The cat’s mantis-shaped head held sideways, she emitted a vicious rumble from deep in her mean bush soul, pressing a cheek into the bird so she could go on chewing and growling while she kept a fierce yellow eye locked on Mitchell. As he came closer the cat ate faster, choking down bites.
“What is this?” Mitchell yelled. “That’s my chicken!” He had roamed Queenstown during his lunch hour at the beginning of the week before he could find a roaster for sale. Mitchell picked up the flyswatter and slapped the cat’s face with it but she retaliated, lashing out to strike her own blow, carving three beaded red lines, perfectly parallel, across the top of his wrist.
Mitchell thought all animals understood certain tones in the human voice, especially the one that threatened punishment and death—but not an island cat. He changed tactics and quickly turned on the faucet. The cat moaned, yet her resolve was no less for the drenching she underwent. The drain clogged and the basin began to fill. The chicken bobbed, careened in the rising flood, the cat astride it like a werewolf afloat, its fangs still gnawing away. Mitchell adjusted the spigot so that the stream splashed directly into her mouth, and though she held out as long as she could, he seized her by the scruff of the neck at the moment she abandoned ship. Into the air she went, loose skin and soggy fur bunched in his fist, as Mitchell gripped her in a manner temporarily paralyzing to feline criminals, hind legs and tail folded into her white belly, front paws extended as if she suffered a stroke while playing a piano, eyes stricken with desperation, decerebrated and utterly at Mitchell’s mercy, which had run out.
“We’ll see about those nine lives.”
The prisoner was hauled out to the veranda. To the left the drop was about twenty feet. A cropping of gray boulders turtled the ground, any one of them a substantial target. He suspended the cat over the railing so she could appreciate the severity of her predicament before he launched her. The cat flexed, squirmed ineffectually, and desisted.
Then Johnnie was in the doorway between the kitchen and the veranda, wiping her eyes and calling his name with concern. Her hair was snarled and her face girlishly sleep-ridden. Her uncovered breasts pointed at Mitchell like twin judges, blindly accusatory. “What are you doing?” she asked, coming awake.
“I’m talking to this cat.”
“What’s wrong?”
“This is private.”
The cat cashed in one of her remaining lives to express an appeal for clemency. The body of the animal became resonant, like the soundbox of a viola, an invisible bow of repentance drawn across its strings. The plaint was almost supernatural, a forlorn otherworld yowling. Mitchell was impressed.
“Awww,” Johnnie commiserated. She crossed her arms, perhaps realizing how absurd it would seem to scold a man while she stood before him bare-breasted. “What did the poor cat do to deserve this treatment?”
It dawned on Mitchell that the only way the chicken could have traveled from the freezer in the refrigerator to the basin of the sink was if Johnnie had removed it to thaw for dinner, and she wouldn’t have known to take precautions, to make the bird catproof. He brought the animal back over the rail and shouted into its face, BAD CAT! Her mouth twisted into a little pink gremlin’s grin, her cat tongue panting fast as a hummingbird’s heart, and Mitchell wished Johnnie wasn’t around so he could wallop this hardened feline ruffian on the nose. He released her and she took off across the veranda and down into the bush like a skyrocket.
“Why do you abuse that creature?” Johnnie asked. “Is this a habit of yours?”
“Stop looking at me like I’m a barbarian and instead go look in the sink.”
She whooped and put a hand to her mouth, then propped both hands on her hips. “Oh no! She didn’t, did she?”
“You can make bone soup.”
“That sneaky little bitch.”
“That’s the spirit,” Mitchell said, vindicated.
There were no backup provisions for dinner. Mitchell rarely kept more than a throw-together stock in the house—an onion, a tin of Australian corned beef, a wedge of moldy unidentifiable cheese that came in large round red cans, eggs of varying sizes including a goose egg that he was frightened of, mangoes, guavas, and rotting bananas, a huge hairy dasheen and other popular island roots that he didn’t know how to use, a cucumber, a carrot—somehow okay for one but glaringly inadequate for two. Johnnie apologized for the loss of the chicken and volunteered to go get another. “I’m afraid you can’t,” he told her. “Chickens top the endangered grocery list on this island,” alongside beef, pork, fish, and mutton. They were sold to restaurants or exported; in consolation you could get all the necks, backs, wings, heads, and feet, locally known as scratches, that money could buy. To locate an entire bird or its nobler parts for sale you had to see a guy who knew a guy who had a friend, et cetera.
“I’ve never heard of a place with no chickens,” Johnnie said. After all, chickens were so trivial and she wasn’t prepared to accept anything that magnified the trivial into a national shortcoming. He assumed she had never been out of the States before so her naïveté, however incomprehensible, wasn’t as vulgar as it might have been in another person who might tend to judge a place by what was missing, the cancellation of entitlements. “Something’s wrong here.”
While she talked she had slipped both index fingers into the waistband of her panties, ran them in sync off the opposite crowns of pelvis and met below her navel, pointing into her pubic hair. Back and forth, back and forth she did it, and Mitchell wanted to tell her to stop doing that, her hands like a gate opening and closing. Johnnie moved over beside Mitchell on the railing and since he wasn’t looking at her face, and couldn’t look at her hands, he found himself staring, abstractly, at her wonderful breasts, thinking God, tits can really rule a field of vision. Johnnie tapped her foot against his, detouring his attention down the length of her battered dancer’s legs.
“So what do people eat around here?” she asked innocently.
“Well ...” Mitchell glanced up—her hair was on fire, her head bonneted by the sunset. “There’s some excellent recipes for shit in this part of the world.” Th
e parched way Mitchell said this made Johnnie laugh, and Johnnie’s laugh was a cool wetness wrapped gently around his stubbornness.
“I hope you’re doing something about that,” she half teased.
“Right,” he said. “That’s the heart of my job—conceptualizing menus.”
She nudged against him, enjoying this game of conversation, and Mitchell thought in the unworldliness she had exposed he recognized an element of flirtation more conscious than the fingers in the band of her panties: the lure of vulnerability, the invitation to provide protection against the unknown. Now they had succeeded in doing what lovers do—make the world less serious so romance could have the greater power; catch flashes of substance in nets too fine to hold their weight beyond a moment, but in that moment to know from the feel that something of meaning had been there in the mesh and broken through, returning to the immensity of the distance between them. She bent forward as if to see him better, her arms slowly outstretched, clearly wanting a hug, the kindness that he had not yet expressed, and Mitchell wished she’d put some clothes on.
“Another woman hooked by the glamor of economics,” he said sardonically.
“Will you hold me for a second, Mitchell?”
He decided that, as she was, he couldn’t be alone with her a minute more and so he stood away, telling Johnnie he was going for a quick twilight swim. When he came back they would go to Rosehill Plantation for dinner.
“Okay,” she managed to whisper, visibly hurt by his escape.
At the cliff Mitchell hung a towel on a sea-grape branch and scaled barefoot down the rocks to the colorless water. With a momentary ebb in the tidal surge, he left shore like a crocodile, slipping forward on his stomach, crawling to deeper water where he didn’t have to be as mindful of the black urchins that clotted the bottom like military defense-works. As he breaststroked out from the jagged shoreline without splashing, the ripples rolled ahead of him, tremors through the silvery illusion of ice the crash of sun coated on the bay at this hour. Froglike he kept shooting himself onward until he had passed the red buoy that marked the boat channel. The bottom was thirty feet down here and he submerged, a firm sleek angling outward that twirled him down into the chilled density of blueness, spinning on his head inside a pleasure like no other, a dream pleasure because it required submersion within an altered state, a willful plunge where no earthly metaphor could possibly follow. Mitchell sank until his ears ached with the pressure, then reversed direction by tucking and uncoiling, which made him spring back toward the surface, breaking through the skin of mirror, and then floated on his back, only the darkening sky in sight, his eardrums rubbed by the static that issued from the depths, only the fresh night sky in sight as though he had been tossed out in space like a satellite and suspended in oceanic nothingness.
Swimming in the Volcano Page 15