Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  Everybody’s got a dream, Mitchell said, and was pleased and relieved he had made Ballantyne smile.

  That’s right, the forest ranger said, everybody’s got a dream. Just watch out for the other guy’s.

  The table was set and out came food; lunch, or so it appeared—two steaming bowls of ocher-colored callaloo, a communal bowl of rice, from the smell of it, Guyanese and inferior; plates with a strip of dark gravied meat and avocado halves. It was almost midday. He watched the rain ease, and waited. It made him feel very strange—he was going to have lunch with an important man.

  He didn’t expect to see Kingsley’s white Impala drive up, he hadn’t noticed its absence from the yard, he had assumed the minister was home, upstairs, on the second floor, but here was the Impala, splashing into the yard, throwing mud. Kingsley’s personal secretary, a slight jaundiced man with a Hindu’s melancholic features and droopy eyes, got out from the driver’s side, opened an umbrella, and sloshed around to open Kingsley’s door. They looked like nurse and patient, managing the slippery steps. The minister wore galoshes. He wore a black suit cut twenty years out of style, a shiny green necktie poorly knotted under the dewlaps that hung from his throat. His steps began with a drag of his shoes before he lifted his rheumatic feet off the ground and set them down again, victims of the rainy season that had begun prematurely. He might have been a pathetic, comic figure if not for the raw mystique, the undisciplined charisma, an envelope of sparking frictions, that accompanied his elephantine presence—that, and his power. With a dismissive gesture, he shook his attendant off his elbow and waved him away, toward the kitchen, as if he were aging only as a consequence of his secretary’s ineptitude and shallow faith.

  As Kingsley padded down the length of the room he kept his head cocked toward Mitchell Wilson, watching himself being watched, disavowing the obvious discomfort of his steps, as though he were challenging Mitchell to feel sympathy for him, or mistake his strength. His labored breathing, faint wet snores and whistles, somehow manufactured a connotation of excitement, a slightly mad pleasure, as if age and obesity and inflammations were small matters solved by the lust of the spirit. As he neared the head of the table and the food set out for him his long face became illuminated with anticipation, and down he settled into his chair, the frame creaking with the strain of his weight, his head rotating on the hills of his shoulders, an amphibious puff to the flesh as though he could survive anywhere, even underwater if he had to, with gills as well as lungs. Watching Kingsley out of the corner of his eye, the gross performance of his body and the shadow of senility behind his movements, Mitchell was alarmed by the contradictory impression that here was a man whose self-possession was absolute, someone who had made a successful career out of tempting fate—a patrician sitting down to his lunch.

  “If you wonderin what the protocol is, Mistah Wilson, the protocol is, Come eat. Very simple, here up leeward. Please, join me, mahn.”

  He came and sat at the second setting, to Kingsley’s left. The minister poured himself half a glass of scotch, tilted the bottled toward his guest.

  “Yes,” Mitchell nodded. “Thank you.”

  Kingsley toasted him, a sober Cheers, and closed his tarpaper eyelids while he drank. The servant woman stepped out of the kitchen to see if everything was all right. She smelled of horse sweat and the greasy shit smell of canned butter heating on a kerosene stove. Kingsley asked for bread, then told Mitchell the callaloo was getting cold, and so they began to eat. Mitchell watched Kingsley stab his spoon between bloated jowls, his throat stretched and swelled. So much like a fat toad, a bad impersonation of Buddha. There were too many strong odors in the room—foremost among them, the decaying breath of Guyanese rice, spoiled in the holds of ships. Incredibly, the minister was redolent with baby powder. His personality was inseparable from the rain’s. He was best of friends with his erstwhile counterpart the prime minister of Grenada, Sir Eric Gairy, who had recently warned his enemies, “He who opposes me opposes God.”

  Kingsley rubbed his jaw neurotically, plucking at the white wisps of his billy-goat beard, wiping away imaginary dribbles of soup. “I believe you follow the picture better than some fellas who been here all their lives, Mistah Wilson,” he said. The prime minister had informed him yet again that he was anxious to implement the Public Lands Development Programme.

  “Banks worryin that we draggin we ass. Should the prime minister concern himself, Mistah Wilson?”

  He shrugged and faced Kingsley, declining any pretext of accountability. “Hell, I don’t know,” he said. It rankled him to be coerced into this game.

  It was Kingsley’s former government that had inherited the estates when the owners had had enough, Kingsley who made it impossible for the old gentry to survive. And then—nothing. Squatters and neglect and ruination. But the properties were clustered along the fertile northwestern coastal plains, its foothills and valleys, in the minister’s home district, and were a primary source of his power. Fifteen years ago Kingsley had encouraged the peasants to move onto the land; now he had been commissioned to get them off, to plow under their plots and gardens, level their shacks, and oversee their removal to other sites.

  For progress. For the good of the nation.

  A schedule of operation was painstakingly abstracted and colored in, but was not adhered to, because it was too ambitious, its timing too compressed. The staff meetings had factionalized; Kingsley proselytized about the merits of Christianity, how he was going to do unto others, et cetera. The younger men were cynically attentive, petting their carefully trimmed beards inspired by Edison Banks. The more tenured civil servants doodled on coarse notepads; the senior staff dozed. The meetings had become an abomination of sense and reasoning, a forum for incriminations, they were an embarrassment, people sniggered out loud, they were openly scornful, they were mistrustful, they shouted Rubbish! and left the room in protest. They had no other recourse, Mitchell allowed; they were justified, they were men of science being made a mockery. They were the people who knew how to get things done. Things were not getting done—but for the wrong reasons.

  “My involvement has been limited to one third of the term of the program,” said Wilson, being diplomatic. “That question would be more properly directed at CAO Mr. Samuels, who’s more qualified to answer it.”

  The minister pursed his lips and squinted, wry and half menacing. “I am not askin Samuels, Mistah Wilson, I am askin you. We draggin we ass—yes or no?”

  “No, sir. Not the people I’m working with on the team.”

  “You gettin impatient, Mistah Wilson? Change comin too slow to St. Kate to suit you, mahn?”

  “No, not really, Minister,” Mitchell said, sick of the thousand tastes of Kingsley’s make-believe. It was ridiculous, to have been brought here.

  “Who speed things up? You? Who is responsible for this—you?”

  “No, sir,” Mitchell protested. “There’s a political nature to the program which I don’t fully comprehend at this time, Mr. Minister.”

  Kingsley laughed, dry asthmatic squeezes of air. He plumbed beneath his collar with a finger, then loosened his necktie with a tug from behind the knot. He leaned forward, cupping his glass of scotch as if it were a votive candle, he the protector of its delicate flame.

  “They stealin my people from me, eh? Mistah Wilson?”

  “Honestly, Minister, I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “They movin them out too quick, movin them too far away, onto worthless land. That is not right, eh?”

  “In a larger sense, I think you’re right,” Mitchell said.

  “Yes, yes,” agreed Kingsley, contemplating him with amphibian serenity. “I believe you understand.” A fly settled on his knuckle and he waved it off. “I see how this goin and I don’t like it, Mistah Wilson, but let me tell you something, mahn, this plan goin backfire, this plan goin blow up in they face. I am glad you understand and agree.”

  “That’s not actually what I meant,” Mitchell worried
.

  “Please, Mistah Wilson. Eat.”

  “I meant ...” but he wasn’t sure what he had meant, in a larger sense, and fell silent, cutting into the meat on his plate, not realizing until he had put a forkful into his mouth that it was liver, pork liver, and it sickened him. He swallowed without chewing, trying not to puke, laid his fork and knife down, washed his mouth out with water and sat there, listening to Kingsley’s fleshy, licking sounds, staring at his plate. Kingsley baited him, asked if he was a vegetarian. He said he would call for the girl to bring Mitchell something more to his liking. Mitchell explained he had no appetite, the callaloo had been sufficient. Kingsley talked with food in his mouth.

  “You workin hard, Mistah Wilson? You lookin fagged out, mahn. White people does work very hard to help us keep the wolf from the door of St. Catherine, not so?”

  Thanks for the irony, Mitchell would have answered, on a day he was feeling brave.

  “Here,” Kingsley said, holding out his empty plate, “slide it off to mine, I will take it, Miss Rebecca get testy if she food sent back to the kitchen.”

  The minister continued eating. Mitchell’s mind wandered. On the ground level of the ministry, where the warehousing rooms were unbearably odorous, stinking of nitrate fertilizers, formaldehyde, sulfates, and fresh manure, was the veterinary section, where you could always find Morrison, the vet’s assistant, a guy about Mitchell’s age who seemed to spend his time creating boyish scenes of revolutionary executions, swatting off the minister’s head with a cricket bat, playing soccer with Kingsley’s leering skull on the streets of Queenstown, renamed the city of Jamona. It was sort of fun to go down into the stench and listen to him. Morrison loved an audience.

  Kingsley was speaking again. “I ask if you ever been baptized.”

  “What?” The rain had finished, leaving in its wake a vast, permeating leakage, the river noise of runoff. If the sun came out now it would be murderous. Mitchell met his host’s eyes, Kingsley watching him, rummaging through his interior, this idle biopsy, assessing the fancies and ambitions and limits of his imported American. Mitchell looked away, chafing against this infiltration, of being led by Kingsley to recognize himself, the meaninglessness of his position. Follow me into the darkness, Kingsley’s look said, and I will show you who you are, who we are. It wasn’t ridiculous to be here, it was surreal.

  “Sorry, I didn’t hear what you asked, sir.”

  “Why is it taking so long, the prime minister wish to know?”

  “Mr. Minister,” Wilson calmed himself and reported, “I can’t tell you why some of the projects we designed haven’t been initiated. Both funding and material are available, on paper, at least. We’re prepared to move ahead, right now, on Jack Dawes Estate.”

  Kingsley was studying him intently—Kingsley was always studying him, observing his white mouse probe the maze of his nation.

  “To a degree,” he continued, “I feel the hesitation is valid. Some of the proposed relocation sites seem to me to be unsuitable, though that can be worked around.”

  Apparently his answer was unexpected good news for the minister, the Holy Ghost had descended into his soul, from the expression on his face, and he beamed and pressed on with his interview, Mitchell immediately suspicious, he was making the toad of power too happy and satisfied, telling himself to use his wits but he had lost the capacity, he was without guile, of all the people on the staff he had been shoved out front, alone. Kingsley queried him about the final PLDP report, why it was taking so long. Banks was upset about that too.

  “From my point of view, I think it’s because we’re trying to do a good job. Because what we are trying to accomplish is complex, and not easily attained. It’s no more than that.”

  “Ah, yes.” The old man peered over at him, showing his pine-yellow teeth through a disarming smile. His pleasure radiated into the room, he extended his swollen hands, palms up, imploring an invisible witness to appreciate the conversation. “I say so myself to Mistah Banks—‘We doin the best we can.’”

  “That’s my view.”

  A recurring frustration troubled him, the trapped feeling that he was really nothing more than a formal presence mailed to the ministry to be used like an official stamp on certain pro forma documents, a stamp that guaranteed the money would spill in from the international agencies, all the acronyms like an alphabet soup cooked up to nourish the world’s dispossessed. His strongest desire had been to overcome, to transcend the awkward formality of his presence. Now it had happened and somehow the personalization was worse, almost an act of corruption. Why did he have to be manipulated to admit what he genuinely believed, regardless of the political smokescreens. He felt gullible, patronized, bamboozled. It was the system. The disease was in there, metastasizing.

  “And how much time you say it take, Mistah Wilson?”

  “I’m not sure. Three to six months. Perhaps longer.”

  “Six months,” Kingsley repeated, ignoring the shorter estimate.

  “Maybe,” Mitchell said. Maybe by then Kingsley would be househunting in Brooklyn. This was out of his league, he couldn’t make it his business, he wouldn’t, he practiced science, its quotidian concerns distinct from its secular sponsor, his messianic vagaries. No matter what, the science would endure long after the childish scheming and elbowing had been forgotten. Such was the age, and even if he didn’t know who he was beyond his surveys and analysis and his good intentions, and didn’t know who they wanted him to be, it didn’t matter, there was a momentum in place, and they were caught in it and carried forward.

  “It’s probably a good idea to have the CAO verify this time frame. I’m just guessing.”

  “Samuels been reassigned,” said Kingsley, his eyes measuring Wilson’s reaction. He became visibly agitated, his chair singing the strain, his gaze scorching from underneath his brow, this manner familiar to Mitchell from the freewheeling insubordination of the staff meetings. “Some fellas too ego-ed up for God’s plan. Move ahead, you see. Or move out. Hudson, from the Marketing Board, take his place.”

  Well, thought Mitchell, taken off guard, I do see, at least Kingsley’s announcement explained part, if not all, of why he was here. The Marketing Board chairman was one of the minister’s trusted few. Kingsley was circling his wagons, under seige by the members of the coalition who wanted him gone.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Minister,” Mitchell said, feeling bold. “I have no loyalties here on St. Catherine either way. I only care about doing my job.”

  Kingsley seemed deeply perplexed by this statement, as it if were the pretext of still more elaborate pretexts. “But, what is it you believe, mahn?” he asked softly, with priestly concern. “You believe in doin right, true?”

  Indeed, he did. He believed that the old plantations would become, slowly but certainly, showcases of modern production, new bootstraps for a penniless nation, that they could finally coordinate the organic mysteries of demand and supply, that he would leave here after another six months knowing something morally right had been achieved. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out so he nodded.

  “Good, good,” said the minister. “But you aren’t a Colonel Hillendale, are you, Mistah Wilson?”

  Mitchell had not heard of a Colonel Hillendale.

  “No, I see that you aren’t,” Kingsley answered his own question. “Truth is a process, Mistah Wilson. Do you wish to pursue the process? Santayana was wrong. Too much attention is paid to the past, and it means so little. By rememberin our past we are condemned, nuh? Look straight ahead, not behind, at all that dirty business.”

  Truth, Mitchell whispered to himself—troot, in the minister’s raspy dialect—and he recalled something Johnnie had said years ago. What good is truth, she had asked him, if it can’t provide at least some small happiness? Then she had lied to him later that same night, making promises about love. Proving perhaps that falsehood could bring its own joy however temporarily into the world. All that dirty business—Kingsley could be alluding to
his own reputation as much as anything else. As a young man he had been flogged for using his cutlass to strike off a policeman’s ear, and during the Sugar War he had beaten a turncoat into a lifelong state of insensibility, with his own hands, and had masterminded a campaign of terror against the family of a recalcitrant estate owner whom he wanted to make an example of. It was said these were, for men of his generation, forgivable acts, and must not be judged with sentimentality. But Kingsley had thrashed his first wife, busted her teeth and ribs in a rage of jealousy and sent her fleeing for her life to exile in Trinidad. With the butt of a pistol he had knocked out the eye of the captain of the harbor launch for a petty disagreement, and he had once sprained the neck of a typist in his office when he was prime minister, backhanding her for granting a member of the opposition access to his files, and at a nightspot in Queenstown he had slapped a French tourist when she ridiculed his sexual advances. The stories about Kingsley were abundant—Mitchell’s favorite was the one that purported that during Kingsley’s first campaign for prime minister, he swallowed gold coins and then shit them out in front of cheering crowds of peasant supporters. Some of the tales were the apocrypha of his enemies, others Mitchell never doubted to be true.

  The minister was silent, he had paused for reflection, drawing with his water glass in the ring of condensation that had dripped onto the table. He looked bedazed, his eyes filmy with the uninvested, measureless drift of a deteriorating mind. The upper-class citizens of Queenstown, the old merchant and banking families, liked to say that Kingsley was tainted, he had Carib blood in him from his mother’s side, manifest in his rounded hook of nose, the pendulous lobes of his ears, the lateral cheekbones like bands of armor below his eyes. Kingsley rolled phlegm in his throat but remained with his head bowed. Mitchell had never met a politician of high rank before coming to St. Catherine so he had no idea what to expect. Anything but this. The Shakespearean illusions, the pose of madness and threat unraveling in chilling circumlocution. He felt the urge to applaud. It was all incredible. The innate scandal of leadership. Mitchell was on the edge of his chair, seduced.