Swimming in the Volcano (2 page)

The wind began to blow again, throwing a sandy ash into their faces. They jogged along the rock-strewn edge of the cavity to the southwest rim where a small concrete blockhouse contained sensor instruments. Wilson felt exhilarated. The earth had become grotesquely exaggerated, and although there was no danger, it seemed that if by chance he were to lose his footing on this crest above the green jungles and the smoky hole, only the most extreme of fates awaited his fall, glory or perdition, lightness or darkness. There would be nothing halfway about the consequence.

Ballantyne continued running past the turnoff trail that cut across a rough knoll to the monitoring station. Eighteen months ago someone had mashed up the instruments soon after they were installed by a group of scientists from four nations, but no one outside the ministry was supposed to know this, though, of course, everyone did. The vandalism, pointless as it was, was easy for Wilson to imagine. The islanders seemed to have an unlimited capacity for petty rage as well as ecstasy, the schizophrenic fevers of the tropics.

Ballantyne's job, readjusted to this circumstance, was to measure the height of the water in the lake and record its temperature. Wilson didn't see how anybody could get down to the floor of the crater without rapelling gear. But there was a vague path stepped into the wall where the rim dipped and flattened in the southwest quadrant. It was very steep, yet passable, the ranger said, so down they went.

Soufrière
was the name given to the mountain by the French when they came ashore three centuries ago. The word meant sulfur and Wilson inhaled strong sour puffs of it. The trail plunged, tightly traversing unsettled rock and crumbling soil, jagging around brittle igneous fingers of stone, and it demanded more strength and concentration than the running had. From their new vantage point Wilson
saw that underneath a fractured crust, the top of the island was a furnace of orange cinders. They reached bottom, standing on a shelf of piled ellipsoidal rock that was younger than they were.
Ground zero
. Wilson tried to visualize the mountain shuddering and dancing, heaving up in one convulsion that would deafen everything of lesser existence and shake the island to its prehistoric foundation. Its single thunderous message would be delivered in supernatural fires, a heat that was both the end and the beginning, the destruction, as much the creation, of the world—but it was impossible to imagine such an event. The problem again was one of proportion, and of elemental propensity. Human beings controlled their own affairs. Mountains did not explode. No other logic led to the future.

Ballantyne checked the water level. Despite a constant replenishment by storms, the level had been receding at the rate of two inches per week for several months, which Ballantyne took for a sign that the core was heating up. That such a phenomenon was being understood in simple schoolroom fashion impressed Wilson. The forestry ranger stooped on the incline of the shore with what looked like a meat thermometer to take a reading. Ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit. He sat down in the coarse, spurlike gravel, unlaced and removed his dusty boots, peeled his socks, and then stripped completely, finally pulling off his wristwatch and setting it atop his shirt. Ballantyne was going out to the base of the inner island for another reading, its nearest point about a hundred-yard swim from where they were. He approached the water cautiously but then threw himself in, executing a dive that placed the impact fully on his chest, his head remaining doglike above the surface. Wilson removed his own clothes and went with him.

The water, the color of murky old tea, smelled foul and felt oily and dense, hard to stay afloat in, currentless but not calm. Wilson had not realized he was exerting himself beyond his limits. Water came into his mouth, a bitter mustard taste, and he gagged and spit it back out. Breaststroking through the spa of the lake's warmth, he began to experience vertigo, his muscles growing weightless. He frightened himself into clawing ahead the last few yards to where Ballantyne rested belly-deep on the black tailings of the island. The rocks were all small; none appeared too heavy to lift, and each had precise edges, as if it had been broken by prisoners with sledgehammers, a tableau still seen in St. Catherine's quarries. The rubble rose in an abrupt bank twenty-five feet above them.

“Should we be out here?” Wilson gasped, trying to control his breathing. It was apparent to him that there must be some risk in
swimming out to the island, for Ballantyne's movements, slow and careful and alert, were the physical clichés of impending trouble.

Ballantyne wagged a finger, dismissing any breach of faith in his judgment. “Only watch you doan slip into La Soufrière's arse,” he said, holding the thermometer underwater with his other hand. He told Wilson not to try to climb on the island, to move with eyes in his feet along the pitch of the slanting bottom so he wouldn't start a slide that would bury them together, poaching their bodies like fish in a kettle. The right side of his body was submerged up to his shoulder, invisible directly below the surface. Ballantyne suggested to Wilson that he stick his hand down into the rocks as he was doing, and Wilson wiggled his fingers into a cleft until the tips were scalded.

Cookin nice, no?

They paddled back, worked themselves into the discomfort of their wet clothes, and started out of the crater after Ballantyne had made notations in his logbook. The forest ranger hopped ahead of him from foothold to foothold like a young ram. Using his hands with almost every step, his boots searching for traction through the surface layer of lapilli, Wilson crawled tenuously up the side, thinking this must be what it feels like to be stuck halfway up a skyscraper. His last energy shivered out of him with each fresh gust of wind. Ballantyne was waiting for him at the top but began to run again as Wilson pulled himself out of the hole. After several feeble strides Wilson halted, his exhaustion absolute, without even the desire to go on. Ballantyne saw him lie down in the cinders and trotted back.

“What the hell are you running for? I can't do it.”

Ballantyne hovered over him, a flat silhouette against the blue wash, as laconic as a god. “I'm in trainin,” he said. “You see?”

Wilson stared up, trying to comprehend this notion through his light-headedness. He felt out in space, claustrophobic as a lost diver from the lack of oxygen. He closed his eyes, willing the dizziness to subside.

“For what?” he finally asked.

“What you mean
fah what?
Fah de day when she blow. When La Soufrière blow.”

Start here, on Mount Windsor, locally known as Ooah Mountain, where the brakes went out on
Miss Defy
, Isaac's taxi, on the way to pick up Johnnie at the airport. Isaac stomped the floor pedal at that bleak moment of discovery as if it were attached to a bass drum, and he turned to look at Mitchell for solace, his eyes glazed with a fear that was altogether theological in depth.

“Serious mahl-function takin place, Wilson.”

They had just crested the mountain in the old Comet and there was no going back. The Comet, a mostly red vehicle, had survived more than a half-dozen owners known to Isaac, and, having been imported from Newark long ago, a variety of climates and the traffic of two distinct worlds and automotive practices. If there was a limit to the Comet's tenacity, an inevitable challenge to its lifespan, this seemed to be it. They had only begun the two-mile descent toward Brandon Vale and the airport when the brake pedal squirted fluid down onto Isaac's ankle the first time he tapped it—a viscous, chocolaty coconut oil which a mechanic friend of Isaac's assured him had the correct hydraulic properties and could be substituted for the real stuff, no longer available on the island for a reason nobody even bothered to analyze. Section by section, level by level, the two-lane road turned to admire itself as it somersaulted down the mountain, a crooked series of highway acrobatics, dodges, and loops, uncoiling from the jungled chute at the summit, downward along unforgiving cliffs that dropped into the sea and, at a lesser height, into the muck of mangrove swamps.

It was immediately clear to Mitchell that Isaac was determined to take the Comet all the way to the bottom, race death down Ooah Mountain and live for years off the legend safe on the bar stools of St. Catherine. As the car picked up speed toward the first unfriendly
curve, Mitchell vaulted into the backseat and crouched on the floor, throwing empty Ju-C bottles out the window so they wouldn't crystallize in his face as they did in his imagination, salting his flesh during the impending crash. From his position behind the seat he coached Isaac, warning him to downshift.

“No no, mahn. De engine buhn right up.”

“This won't do,” Mitchell complained. “This won't do.” He thought Isaac should put the car into the mountainside, the sooner the better. Isaac gave him a quick look of scorn over his shoulder.

“You pay fah repair? Eh?” Isaac sadly shook his head as they began to enter the turn. “I ain goin do it,” he said.

Isaac loved the Comet dearly and it would have been pointless to hold this refusal against him. Besides, the roadway was lined with concreted drainage ditches, three feet across and two deep, which meant the Comet would have to sacrifice at least an axle and an oil pan before it could plow into the hard cushion of the embankment. Running off the road was a dire option, and yet, somewhere ahead, it was their fate, waiting for them to appear on the scene.

Then too, the car had been manufactured in the United States and there was a magic in that fact that Isaac clung to and believed in. By owning the Comet outright after a year of humping bananas off other people's land, Isaac owned a part of the optimisms of the north, the guarantees of competency, the possibility that if he treated the car with responsible care, one day he'd find himself summoned to the Comet's homeland, no point in fretting over the details of how this would happen, except maybe with a few expenses paid, and there he would be introduced to the opportunity for the unlimited advancement he had mentally prepared himself for. This Isaac believed in absolutely. This was credo, this was gospel, prophecy, everything, and he would not fail in its pursuit. This was manifest destiny trickling south. It had happened to his cousin Robbie, the weaver, and to his brother-in-law Larris, the musician. It had happened to Mr. McPherson, the boat captain, and to countless others. If you behaved yourself and kept ready, it would happen the same to you. People who didn't behave had lost faith, committing the blasphemy of despair. They had excommunicated themselves from this ladder of salvation and were condemned to circling the island forever, circling, circling—big wheels on a small track.

So Isaac had puttied in the galaxy of rust holes on the fenders, sanded the blemishes day after day until they were as smooth as the inner lip of a conch shell. The original paint job had faded into a chalky brick color, unmatchable, and the Comet's northern prudence
relinquished itself to an island style. The fenders and hubcaps were brushstroked with housepaint, a yellow enamel, glossy as buttercups. Glued to the upper trim of the front and rear windows, a fringe of red and green pompons produced a peculiar bedroom effect within the otherwise businesslike interior of the car, which doubled as a taxi only when Isaac was in the mood. Cracks in the vinyl seats were duct-taped together. On each door the Scuffletown sign painter calligraphed the name, all capital letters in flowing script, that Isaac had chosen for the car in honor of some oblique but universal political sentiment.
Miss Defy
. Her maintenance was as near to perfect as Isaac had a right to insist upon, given his low resources, and the collection of spare and spent parts he kept in the trunk rose or fell like an economic indicator for the entire island.

Mounted up front, a fourthhand radio-cassette player broadcasted continuous pulsation into the atmosphere. As crucial to the operation of Isaac's Comet as the hand-cut gaskets on the engine block and the sparks in the cylinders, the unit had been mailed down from Brooklyn by the émigré cousin Robbie, said to now be rich enough to petition for generosity. Isaac had installed it directly after retrieving the package from the Customshouse—labeled
Broken! Don't Work!
for a reduction on the duty tax. He had an arrangement with an eight-year-old nephew, who in exchange for driving lessons slept nightly in
Miss Defy
so that the music and everything else that was the Comet's identity would stay put, his own for the time being, protected from the sticky and ravenous fingers of Scuffletown.

Only two hours earlier they had ended a long night of rum sweetened with Isaac's ananci stories, island fairy tales and convoluted nonsensical narratives about an ancient feud between a donkey and a monkey. Mitchell had ridden the bed like a carnival horror, spinning and bumping through the remaining minutes of the night while Johnnie, it seemed, gazed down upon his agony with the beatific face of a Madonna. Isaac had wobbled out to the Comet parked up the slope on the roadside, rejecting the spare room, fallen unconscious on the front seat with the driver's door open, the shoes on his feet only inches away from any traffic that passed. When the alarm clock sounded on the stage of Mitchell's nightmares, he showered and dressed and went to rouse Isaac, cradled in
Miss Defy
, his hands tucked securely into the top of his pants, his head hanging off the seat, his mouth frozen open and his remarkably pink tongue sagging out like a thick slice of bologna. Mitchell woke him by clicking on the radio: one station, one brave volume, and more and more for the
past week, an old song, the “Edison Banks Calypso,” pleading with young Mr. Banks to return from his studies at Gray's Inn, to finish his lawyering degree and come home and pick up the torch of justice once more. The song playfully warned of the danger of becoming a student-for-life, and urged him to come back to the throne of his love on the island of St. Catherine, calling across the sea, penetrating his self-exile, asking for him to recognize the ripeness of the time, the early hours of a new day, an age for poets, heroes, patriots. He had indeed harkened to the song and come home to have his life rattled and his head beaten for two years of mobilizing the opposition against Delwyn Pepper, who had sodomized the nation for almost a decade, and in the end Banks had won an election that everyone predicted would be bloody but was not, at the price of an unsavory coalition of factions. The song debuted four years ago and was earning a lot of replay on the government station to celebrate the first anniversary of Banks' tenure as prime minister, and the invisible successes of the new ruling party, the People's Evolutionary Alliance of St. Catherine. Now, rolling down the mountain in
Miss Defy
, the song was requested again, the jockey announced with transparent enthusiasm, and its chorus blared into Mitchell's skull from out of the door speaker,