Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  “I don’t know. Also he’s blind. Eat your sandwich too, Shiva. Mitchell, give him his sandwich.”

  “Fuck all. Is he really?”

  “Don’t bring pity into here. This isn’t Calcutta. We’re doing just fine here, although, Mitchell, look, I want milk for these kids.”

  The ministry ran a small dairy farm, its purpose to provide milk exclusively to Queenstown schools, though that in fact was a story about corruption. Sally said there hadn’t been a delivery in weeks and he promised to look into it. Then she told him about Jolene, who had gone up north to her home village for a weekend visit and hadn’t returned to her uncle’s in Scuffletown, where she was employed in his upholstery shop. Into the story came an ill child and the child’s angry, ashamed father—both, Sally suspected, belonging to Jolene. The uncle had described the child’s symptoms and Sally figured it was cerebral palsy. Four years old and had never been outside his paternal grandmother’s shanty. There’s a real person trapped inside the disease, she told Mitchell. Someone has to reach in there and pull him out. He asked did she want to be dropped off or would she come up the mountain with them, he had to know because of timing, and she said it depends, let’s wait and see, if it was no trouble.

  “Juice,” said Shiva, and Sally was all over him with praise, because he never talked.

  Adrian began herding her pygmies in for lunch, and Mitchell asked what was with her anyway, what was this Mother Teresa act, and he wished he hadn’t asked it quite that way because Sally became prickly, defending her, saying Adrian was one of those people waiting all their lives to help, but need to be asked, and no one ever asked before, she’d only been asked to make money, look out for herself, be a success. So now she was spending mornings at the school and afternoons scouring Queenstown and environs for local Michelangelos, the latest being a guy who was into a ceremonial sacrifice motif, obeah, working with house paint on pieces of Masonite. She was wild about him, Sally said.

  Children monkeyed up to climb into his lap, touch his face, his mustache, poking their greasy fingers into his mouth. Hey, open this, said a kid with a groggy voice, and threw a juice box at him. The surface of the table was pooled with spillage and scrap; the teacher’s assistant, Hyacinth, was untying children from their chairs and setting them along the wall like statues of Buddha, brushing mush from laps, out of Brillo pads of hair. I knew it was too good to be true, Sally muttered, when a fight broke out in her untended circle. A girl battered the skull of a bigger but seemingly helpless boy with a plastic car. Jerusha, stop that right now, Sally thundered. The girl named Jerusha obeyed by redirecting her violence back upon herself, slamming the toy into her own face, something religious in the image she made, the mechanical dimension of the act, holding the toy in both hands, something frighteningly holy in her masochism, how she bowed her forehead into the blows. When Sally grabbed her she went berserk. Sally had to fight back and Mitchell had to help.

  He would always wonder afterward about Sally’s prescience, enlisting Adrian into the school. If you knew Adrian better, Sally had assured him, you wouldn’t be surprised she’s here.

  “Guilt?”

  “Maybe a little of that,” Sally had conceded, “but I would say heart. She’s looking for it,” and Mitchell had replied, Aren’t we all.

  This was the week that didn’t exist because he had given it to Johnnie and when she left, he closed his eyes and ears, sheathed his heart in ashes, and made sure she took these days of respite with her too, days of what he would not afterward say, which was happiness. He surfaced randomly in his other life, observing his participation in everything outside of Johnnie swiftly erode. He felt his awareness of the sea broaden, wherever he happened to be he was conscious of its ceaseless calling forth, and thought, for an island to open up it need only be a mirror to its audience, if not of paradise then perhaps of love, if not of love then perhaps of imagination, if not of imagination then perhaps of history and if not of history then perhaps only of the blinding, narcissistic reflection of the present, an environment secured and isolated between looking forward and remembering, somewhere at last where stars shine unencumbered by longing which is not paradise, not love, not imagination, not history, not here and not now but all of them together which is, Mitchell believed he learned, self, and its paradox, which he supposed must be called fusion. But in five days you can learn everything, and then lose it in an instant.

  Important things happened but he didn’t know it, he would have to wait for time to awake and point its finger—Look there, see what you missed. The rain held off or stalled respectfully until the middle of the night to rouse them with its rich significance of drumming, and an unchanging pattern of imperial white cumulus frescoed the brilliant blue canopy of the daytime skies. Mitchell felt the island undergoing a charmed resurgence of vitality and light that had everything to do with his purpose there; some bedrock-deep antidote, tropic and marvelously real, in the works against the proliferation of tension and controversy. The trade winds lofted flowers into the roads, always evocative of falling embers. He and Johnnie took twilight swims together, nosing out side by side into the vastness of the darkening sea. They took postprandial walks, tromping off toward Augustine or the Bight, raiding Rosehill’s dusty library, making love and then reading to each other in bed at night.

  Johnnie, from the classic A High Wind in Jamaica: “Emily was still so saturated in earthquake as to be dumb. She ate earthquake and slept earthquake: her fingers and legs were earthquake.”

  Mitchell, from A Historie of Barbadoes, penned in 1650: “They [the skins of women] are so sweaty and clammy, as the hand cannot passe over, without being glued or cemented in the passage or motion; and by that means, little pleasure is given to, or received, by the agent or patient,” and they both snickered, Johnnie saying what the author needed was an Emily, someone to cement him into sultriness as a concept, as a state of being.

  Oldest story in the world.

  He observed Johnnie’s quotidian relationship with drugs and wondered about the nature of its competition with him. The question wasn’t settled, and perhaps never would be, since the genie was out of the bottle, there was no such thing as a drug-free America, or a drug-free world, and wouldn’t be, ever again. The chance for that was zero, and he shared America’s ambivalence for its endowment of narcotics, recognizing in the background of his coming of age, and hers, that drugs had underlined every rite of passage, drugs were a best-selling way of knowledge, drugs stopped war, beckoned the divine sentience out from a tree, a mountain, a field of flashing corn, pointing to a secret life concealed within the inanimate; brought the inner travel of music into the space age, fed the culture’s growing need for anti-heroes, did everything that love could never do; or do, but not sustain. And yet drugs could not sustain it either. He had been there; saw and did. Put the ups in your left pocket, put the downs in your right pocket. Don’t get them confused. Every kid knows that. This one you take at breakfast in the morning, this one you take when you come home at night. There was never a dark pull; always and inevitably, he had been brought back to his point of departure, leaving not so much as a scruff mark on society, though he knew others who did: from a distance he had known friends to die and had thought there’s going to be winners and losers, no matter what, but he could not look at Johnnie and see, as others might, a wreck in process, despite whatever trouble she had gotten herself into in Hawaii. Did he love her? Yes, but with the knowledge that it’s dangerous to measure an element as unstable and volatile as love, and so he chose to give their coupling every benefit of the doubt. Which is why he lied, and then only spoke of it obliquely, when they were frightened awake in the middle of the night by Johnnie’s past, nailed gruesomely to the front door. It happened Friday morning around four, four-thirty, he and Johnnie asleep in his bed. Like all ghost stories and tales of horror, they were awakened by three rapid, hammering strokes on the front door, the sort of archetypical pounding events have conditioned us to associate with facism, ter
ror, death squads. What you never wanted to hear in the middle of the night without the following voice of a friend behind it; what only the parts of you that are most interior and unknown imagine opening up to.

  He told Johnnie to stay where she was and grabbed the machete he kept behind the headboard, flicking on lights, hitting the switch to the outside bulb above the stoop, peering through the cracks in the shutters, calling out in a voice disquieting in its bearishness, who is it? He placed his ear to the door as if it were a sternum, to listen for breathing on the other side. In a high-pitched voice Johnnie asked what it was from the bedroom. Just someone’s idea of a prank, nothing, he told her to go back to sleep. He unlocked the door and stepped back, crouching, hating this moment with heart and soul, prepared to defend himself. The door swung open into the room, the dead cat pinned there on it with a sixteen-penny nail driven through its throat. The damn cat, he heard himself whisper. He braced for a charge, for someone to say boo. No one though was there and after a minute he stood up, looked outside for a good long time. He wrenched the nail back and forth until it came out of the wood, telling himself he told her not to feed the fucking cat, then walked to the side yard and heaved Johnnie’s newly adopted Pelé far into the bushes, where it had always belonged. Not everything had a home or needed one.

  He urinated on one of Quiddley’s coal pits, fed up with being wrapped in their smoke, and then went back to bed. Johnnie was wide awake, staring straight up at the roof beams, her body rigid. Her voice was barely audible. What was it? she asked. Nothing I could find, he told her. Probably some drunk. He wanted to think about it before he told her. He didn’t want to ruin things.

  For the first time he had experienced true panic, a wild animal leashed to the most remote part of one’s humanity, breaking its restraint and clawing its way out, and he struggled to master it, hearing his own response echo so many others he had read in newspapers and books, without a glimmer of the horror behind the words: Who could do such a thing? But he knew the answer and the answer was, anyone. Thinking back on it, he would gag with angst at the fiction that had become his life, rot people read on airplanes, the trash ever in demand by lives untouched by evil. There was nothing highbrow about violence except of course its most successful instigators, throughout the centuries, and guns, however beautifully they were manufactured, were the ultimate vulgarity, which is not what he thought, crouching to the side of the opened door that night, a machete trembling in his hand, his short, gulping breaths ragged with fright, one eye on the impaled cat crucified to the door, one eye outside on the threatening darkness, willing himself to stop shaking, willing himself to calm down, cursing the rise of panic in his throat. What he thought then about guns was that he wanted one, not because he wanted to shoot somebody, his desire had nothing whatsoever to do with the destructive power of guns, but now he had been twice violated, tasted the indignity of his own terror, and this alone suggested the validity of firearms, to protect him from this poisonous taste. Because he hated this vision of himself, crouched in panic, more than he hated the invisible malefactor. Because these violations clarified some sense of his own Americanness, because to be helpless was not American, that was something he saw now was in his grain.

  It was then for the most personal and deeply private, almost shameful reason that he went to Scuffletown Friday morning in search of a gun, looking for the youth who had come too close with his hissing the week before, the boy with the Barbeques dancing in his head. By the time he was on the road Mitchell wasn’t talking to himself anymore about why he was doing this, and in the light of clay guns were again the abstractions to him they always had been. Guns were pistols—he knew a few legendary names but couldn’t type on sight and in fact had never even held one in his hand, though he had shot a friend’s .22 rifle at cans and bottles, growing up. He knew what a shotgun was, knew the names AK-47 and Uzi because he read newspapers. Caliber he assumed meant bullet size but he wouldn’t swear to it. Violence was mythic, historical, and he was mere flesh, made of the suburbs, not even drawn to it as a fiction, making love and not war in his fantasies, shunning the blood sports, bored by firepower’s lethal technology; he had always perceived in the function of guns an innate cowardice, which now struck him as ironic since he was aware that behind this ostensible quest for protection, his truest motive for owning a gun was it would inoculate him against just that—cowardice. More than anything else it was a state of mind that he went looking for, there in Scuffletown.

  Given how the government was behaving recently, there were no longer legitimate options for anyone wishing to purchase a gun. He stopped off at the ministry first, to see if Ballantyne was around, because earlier in the week the forest ranger had agreed to sell him a bird rifle, to replace the one the police in Augustine had confiscated from Calvin, the gardener’s assistant at Rosehill. There, he heard a piece of disturbing news from one of the front-office secretaries, which only seemed to underscore the rightness of his decision about going to Scuffletown: during the night someone had broken into the home of Morrison, from the veterinary department, and beaten him badly; he was in the hospital. No one had any idea what it was all about.

  Ballantyne was out in the field, he was told, and so instead he went by the motor pool, to see if it was possible to sign out the Land Rover early, and the supervisor said come back in two hours, at noon, and it would be okay. Then he took a slow, hot walk down into Scuffletown, avoiding the Knowles’ house, because when he had gone to see Isaac’s mother and brothers on Monday, to pass along the word about Isaac being up north, they had acted oddly, seeming to know more than they were willing to say, which only reinforced Mitchell’s sense that Isaac was around and all right but for reasons he was keeping to himself had withdrawn, didn’t want to see anybody and didn’t want to talk.

  Everyone in Scuffletown was burning coconut husks, to keep off mosquitoes that had come with the rains. He stepped around scummy puddles in the rutted lane, headed for the open-air barbershop out on the beach, and from there tracking down the fellow he was looking for was less trouble than he had expected. He paid the asking price—one hundred U.S.—without further discussion, zipped the pistol inside his new daypack, and left. That was that—no etiquette required. Bullets were not included, the guy simply didn’t have any, but Mitchell shrugged off this detail, unless something else happened ammunition wasn’t critical, wasn’t nearly as important as the look and feel of the gun, the weight of it in his hand, the threat it so unmistakably carried when raised—which more often than not, he reasoned, seemed to do the job—and when the time came, Ballantyne would know about bullets, would even be able to tell him what the seller could not. What the gun was; its name, what it was called.

  He walked back up to the ministry imagining he had taken the right step to clarify himself and preserve his nerves from paralysis. That someone might actually seek to hurt him didn’t have the impact on his thoughts or emotions as did the image of himself succumbing to hysteria, squealing like an animal, quaking with fear, and now he knew that would not happen, he would never let it, he had passed over that abyss in the soul, vaccinated by the first prick of terror.

  Checking his mail, he found two envelopes—one letter-sized, the other the size of an unfolded page, set on his desk. The smaller one was addressed to Mrs. J. Fernandez and he opened it first. The note inside was typewritten on government stationary. It said, Te amo, bollo. Two of its three words reverberated. He knew what te amo meant, had heard it before.

  Okay, okay, okay, he said to himself. The guy knew where she was. So, apparently, did everyone else, anyone interested. This meant ... no telling what this meant. This meant be glad you own a gun.

  He slit open the second envelope and removed its contents. There was a cover letter from George James down at the Crier, attached to a second and third envelope, both sealed: You fellows at the ministry frightening us, you know, Wilson. Stop over re: an interview, when you have the time. Josephine asked that I pass this note along to you
. Also, someone (never seen the fellow before) stop by to say he heard you were headed up north windward and asked that you pass a message along to a fellow up there by the name of Isaac Knowles. I don’t know why he come to me with it, you know, he can’t seem to say, but here it is (enclosed).

  He read the note from Josephine: Dear Mitchell, I hear you have a woman staying by you but you know that is not important to me, please don’t forget me because you are a nice man and I am your friend. Love, Jo, crumpled it, threw it in his wastebasket, put everything else in his backpack, and left.

  He was given the keys to the Rover and off he went, back to Howard Bay, where he found Johnnie on her knees in the front yard, busting out of her cut-off shorts, her face hidden underneath a haystack of hair. Mr. Quiddley was standing over her and the two of them were chattering away like parrots while Johnnie planted a scalloped border of pink and white impatiens on each side of the stoop. When he saw Mitchell, the old man began to back away, instinctively, after a lifetime of backing away only to come round again from another direction, saying he’d just stopped by to check on the coal pits, dem finish coalin up, and he planned to crack them open in the morning. Good, said Mitchell, not trying to be unfriendly, but he missed the tree, its flamboyant springtime blaze of flowers, missed it each and every time he walked out the door. I’ve eaten just about all the smoke I can take, he said, and Johnnie got up, brushing off dirt, and asked if he’d like a grilled cheese sandwich. Inside the house, he put the daypack with the gun and letters in the bottom of his armoire and forgot about it, went into the kitchen where Johnnie was washing her hands at the sink, became curious about what was boiling in a soup kettle on the back burner, a black unappetizing mess. What was it, he asked, but, asking, knew, as soon as the words were out of his mouth, that she was making psilocybin tea.

  “Hey,” she said excitedly, drying her hands, waltzing over to him. “You didn’t tell me about the mushrooms.”