Swimming in the Volcano (21 page)

“I wish you'd just relax, Mitch,” she urged, taking his hand and
giving it a squeeze. “You're being so moody and nervous, I don't know what to expect. What's wrong with you?”

Stones in his mouth.

She slowed up and spoke crossly. “Look, give it a couple of days, okay? If it still doesn't feel right for you then I'll leave. Deal?”

He made her start walking again.

“Mitchell,” Johnnie called out, hurrying to keep up with him. “You're on the march. Slow down.”

She stumbled as she returned to his side and he grabbed her to keep her from falling, and she turned in his arms, looking up at him, still about to drop if he let her go, and he couldn't help but pause before he forced her to support herself on her own legs. Her voice turned husky.

“I thought you were getting ready to kiss me.”

“No, I wasn't,” Mitchell lied. How quickly he was able to lie, how baldly, quick and bald, and it lifted his spirit.

No longer were guests comforted by the approach to Rosehill Plantation, as they might have been, as they surely would have considering where else they might end up on the island, when civilization first landscaped its wild gardens. The ride up the hill from the beach disoriented their sensibilities, and they wondered what in the devil they had gotten themselves into, because the closer they came to the manor house, the more it appeared they had crossed the border of their brochure-fed images into a Botswana of the imagination, which would, soon enough, test their overall fitness with an array of Darwinian challenges. Disciplined royal palms flanked the drive, the lines they produced as solemn as sentries. Their original intention was still oppressively clear, to welcome Rosehill's visitors to a bastion of privilege and moral standard among savages, that a little higher up they might enjoy the rewards of society and culture if only they had the fortitude to mount the hill. But in modern times this sobering effect had been substantially reduced by the untended proliferation of hedges long since ballooned and bubbled out of any geometry they had been set to. Now all the old campaign soldiers hidden within the gray trunks and panache of fronds of the royal palms wore hoop skirts of oleander and hibiscus, ixora, bougainvillea and poinsettia. Impenetrable and unbroken, the species clumped together in bright primary splashes and prospered, like the islanders themselves, as one incestuous mass, two flowering and fragrant seams that opened ahead and closed behind as you moved along the drive.

It was pitch dark there at the cobbled entrance, the sort of darkness
with a hallucinatory texture to it, a fizzing flickering nonlight, antilight. Mitchell could hear bats swoop down into the tunnel of vegetation, licking the insects out of the currents of the night.

They walked for several minutes under tall reeds with crisscrossed stalks and tops like mutilated umbrellas. The slope flattened out but did not yet suggest a destination. The vegetation heaped up again, swatches and feathers, thunderheads and inky lace, opaque on the screen of night sky. The drive followed a bend, widened, opened, and presented, not in fragments but at once, fantastically, the hotel, defined in a grottolike aura by hundreds of tiny Christmas tree lights strung along its balustrades, rigged in the frangipani, draped over bushes, sprinkled in an almond tree, dripping down through layers of a Norfolk pine, an immense twinkling spiderweb, the radiance contained, ensnared, an interior glow to every dab of light, like jewels.

Johnnie stopped abruptly. Her face was blue bleeding to red as the strand of bulbs nearest them blinked. The hotel, built by two eighteenth-century decadents run out of New Orleans, looked like a beached riverboat. “Well, it's certainly gay, isn't it,” Johnnie said, pinching Mitchell's side, charmed.

Mostly the second sons of British aristocracy had made their residence on the estate, dismissed to the New World to stop their petulance and reform their London habits. Some were gentlemen farmers, or tried to be; others were distraught by the fate of being superfluous progeny and succumbed, at the first opportunity, to the lowest pleasures from which they emerged in coffins, murdered men, or gilded carriages, indomitable bastards with one unquenchable desire—to defecate on this new world and everyone in it.

The old brick walls had endured a cannon volley from a French warship, two gutting fires and countless hurricanes, a volcanic eruption and subsequent earthquake in 1902, vandals and the descendents of vandals, intermittent years of neglect, and unimaginative conversion into a hotel by a corporation of alcoholic realtors from Florida. Once upon a time the house reigned over two thousand acres of sea island cotton, sugarcane, and nutmeg groves, a salt yard down along the bay, pastures of oxen and prize-winning bulls, a stable full of champion horses raced on the beach for handsome purses. Peacocks, guinea hens, even an ostrich (said to have kicked a slave to death for teasing it) had strolled the grounds. String quartets were hired from as far away as Trinidad and Jamaica to perform for ladies' birthdays and Boxing Day festivities. The old masters had triumphed over so much that was against them, man and nation and nature if not God Himself, that the first and last belief they took as divine ordinance
was their own superiority. They warehoused great fortunes and when the time came failed quietly and went who knows where, or descended into the rich soil themselves to poison it with their humors. The cycle would spin, the estate would fall into new hands for another generation. The taking-from would proceed. The giving-back—Well, they asked themselves, what in the world was there to give back
to?
Niggers? Jungle? The fireball sun, the treacherous sea?

During the Sugar War in the Fifties, a year when the past was chased the length and breadth of St. Catherine, caught, hammered into a strongbox and pitched into La Soufrière, Rosehill's last secular owner looked into the future and decided he was sickened by its prospect, that it provided too many disappointments and betrayals for nostalgia to survive in peace. The realtors from Boca Raton prescribed to the unusual opinion for the time that in the coming years people would travel in droves to places like St. Catherine, paying through the nose to search for fun and relaxation. The owner thought the realtors were crackpots but sold out to them anyway, even shaving a quarter of his asking price off the deal. They hired a Canadian architect, a genius of insensitivity and budget, and he Balkanized the inside of the manor house with partitions, fractioning rooms that were once airy and naturally lit—qualities that Tillman Hyde was slowly redeeming. Only the ballroom outlasted the architect's reductive frenzy and served now as a restaurant. Tillman, who inherited the establishment after his father died, thought of his job as a private war, an attitude consistent with the stewardship of the plantation throughout the centuries. The difference was that Tillman loved Rosehill, whereas from all accounts his predecessors had not.

The driveway circled a lily pond which Johnnie and Mitchell, deadlocked in the negotiation of their togetherness, padded around in silence toward the haven of Rosehill's restaurant. Rental cars and mini-mokes were parked haphazardly on skinny strips of lawn—those remaining patches of Bermuda grass yet to be consumed by the gardener Abel's—aka Grampa Hell—rejunglefication program. Adrian met them as they entered the restaurant. Their arrival seemed to exasperate her; she guided them to a table in a huff. “Can you believe this?” she said. “I come for a vacation and the guy puts me to work like a Chinaman.”

She skated off abruptly, called to service by customers who had caught the virus of her mood and were equally annoyed. A distinguished-looking sunburned gentleman, speaking in a voice with no ability to withhold condescension, asked if it were at all possible to
see a menu, since where he was sitting was reported to be a restaurant serving the general public of which he was unwillingly a member, he was here to pay for that service, he and his dear wife were exceedingly hungry, and what did it take to be fed in this goddamn boonie place anyway.

Adrian visibly simmered. “Where do you get off talking to me in that tone, you horse's ass?” she snapped back. She did a first-rate job of sneering at him, returning his airs in force. “The menus no longer apply,” she said icily. “We have a beef dish and some kind of fish. Think about it. I'll be back.”

She spun away, refusing to notice other diners who sought her attention, and flew intemperately through the swinging door that led to the kitchen. A minute later she battered back through it; at her waist she lugged a round aluminum serving tray crammed with orders, too big and too heavy for an untrained person of Adrian's build to carry successfully. She staggered toward an empty table, landed the tray just as it seemed about to tip and drop, and, after a deep breath, curled her shoulders, hefted the load, staggered forward to another table, crashed it down, picked it up again and in this fashion made her way across the floor to a family of six who became more and more distressed as they realized Adrian was headed for them.

Adrian, the tyrannical waitress in a foreign country, had them all spellbound. Johnnie asked Mitchell what he thought was happening. “Rosehill has been going through an ordeal with its help,” he told her as she lit her second cigarette since they had taken their seats. Carelessly she blew smoke in his face and he waved his hand. “Don't blow your smoke my way as if you were some kind of moll.”

She apologized. Her eyes crinkled, filled with rueful luster, and she reached across the table to touch his cheek, once, lightly, with the tips of her middle fingers. “So much has happened,” she said wistfully. “Forgive me.” The golden hair above her jaws was a swirl of lighted fibers.

“Suppose I told you you're too late?”

“Okay, say it.”

“Don't think I can't.”

“Fine. So tell me.”

“I don't think I can.”

“Fine. So jolly up.”

Put a woman in a manor house and she'd find these Anglo-Saxon phrases to paddle you with, Mitchell thought. He related to her the tragedy of Tillman's mother, who had died on the premises two
months ago while on an unexpected and rare visit to her son. For a while, the local police had suspected Tillman of poisoning her. There was no truth to that—every misfortune on St. Catherine was initially explored by authorities sniffing its possibilities for game or profit. Tillman had stored the corpse in the kitchen's walk-in freezer until it could be buried, which gave the cook and her staff the willies, causing them to quit on the spot, and at the same time the bartender down at the beach bar had an unrelated fit of insubordination and came after Tillman. There was an exchange of animosity involving gunfire. Many of the registered guests had not tolerated the resulting decline in service, a decline that proved less temporary than Tillman had foreseen, and he was still campaigning to restore the image of Rosehill as a peaceful and predictable destination.

Johnnie stubbed out her cigarette. “Adrian's terrorizing people with that tray, isn't she?” she said, seeing Adrian shoulder open the kitchen door again. Apparently the new staff Tillman had hired hadn't lasted very long.

Adrian wobbled desperately between tables and stopped. “Can somebody grab this from me?” she demanded. She seemed determined not to budge. No one moved. “Come on,” she pleaded shrilly, “it's breaking my back. Can't you see I'm being taken advantage of.”

“I better give her a hand,” Johnnie said, sliding out of her chair, “before she drives everyone off.”

“Terrific,” Mitchell called after her. “I want the beef dinner.”

Mitchell touched the silverware in front of him, rubbed his thumb in the hollow feminine side of the teaspoon. He regarded his sun-browned hand, the traditional table setting, the rightness of the contact—convex to concave, these shapes that lure fish to a hook, attract signals from outer space—of his finger to the shallow cavity of the spoon. In no time at all Johnnie had achieved a truce among the diners, who really had no easy alternative to their plight for food at this time of night on St. Catherine, nor to their predicament with Adrian, who also seemed without recourse. Johnnie's voice worked the hall, mellifluous, seductive, flattering, repairing the climate. There was always a power of inevitability generated by a self-confidence that made things fit together well. Some of the older customers responded to her as if she reminded them of a favorite daughter, or rather the fair ideal of a daughter they had once hoped to sponsor through the world. And yet if she were that cherished offspring, if they had to claim her as their own flesh and blood, soon enough they would not know how to speak to her, the words would grow thorns of disillusionment
and become lodged at the bottom of their throats. Her own father, on the other hand, never conceded the surprises and upheavals his daughter had in store for him, not even when he found out she was jabbing a needle in her arm. Instead, he pumped away on her in a deductive rape, not abusing her body but her mind in the most perversely clinical manner, his intellect as cold as any speculum inserted into her subconsciousness.

Johnnie had showed Mitchell how to use a knife and its accompaniment of forks when they were properly set—an etiquette she rejected with a vengeance before she had the opportunity to take it, independently, anywhere special. That was ... some time ago, when she was a girl, a clean fresh laundered correct and bright package of girlhood with a craving and exuberance in her, a hot pulse and a heart ready to catch fire. Mitchell once imagined he was the match set against her fuse but it was a bigger flame by far that set her off. She self-combusted with the nation, an immaculate conflagration, an electric guitar searing the “Star-Spangled Banner” like a laser knife. Our brilliant generation, Mitchell thought—we made music and we made war in the jungle, and sometimes it wasn't easy to tell the difference. Kids are better killers than they are lovers. One takes practice, the other doesn't. One looks at the world and believes it is as simple to change as a television channel.