Swimming in the Volcano (24 page)

For a time the popularity of the bar had declined along with the hotel's due to the former bartender, the spiteful Jevanee, who favored local thugs and took forever to attend to paying customers. Now Jevanee was gone, jailed for assaulting a police officer who tried to prevent him from hacking Tillman to pieces with a machete. A man of notoriety in the islands, Winston Peabody, once known for his devastating arm as a cricket bowler until disabled in a car accident, replaced Jevanee behind the bar, and was given full authority to manage the establishment as he saw fit. He fired the Mind Invaders, the steel band that had been a fixture at the bar for years, and replaced them with Monkeyjunk, a band of pansmen Winston was promoting for carnival's Road March competition. The combination of Winston's solicitude and the unorthodox tunes of Monkeyjunk—an eclectic repertoire of original compositions they called tropoblues, well-known calypsos, Hollywood show tunes, and baroque concertos—revitalized the failing beach bar. It was hot again with action, busy on week nights, pulsating on weekends.

The palm grove that horseshoed around the bar and opened up to the water of Howard Bay was pegged with onlookers, villagers from Augustine, a line of stoic hucksters, old women or girls with wooden trays of cigarettes, homemade sweets and roasted peanuts, Chiclets, fruits and cakes, roti and small plastic baggies of moonshine rum. Children, some only toddlers, played half dressed in the sand at their feet. A gang of self-conscious boys who hadn't yet found the backbone to step from the trees to the dance patio, to come out in their tattered clothes and uneducated minds and parrot what they had been taught to say—
We ahll is one
—to learn if it were true or not, evaluated and processed every detail of the spectacle before them as if it were a heavenly apparition in their eyes, without precedent in their pubescent lives. As the four of them walked from the parking area
along a fieldstone path, Adrian was made uncomfortable by the presence of the boys in the shadows. “What are they looking at?” she said, making a hostile face at the shapes standing among the trees.

Tillman suggested they were looking at a way of life, nothing more ominous than that. But that was ominous enough for Adrian. “My way of life doesn't translate to foreign black boys,” she said, raising her voice so it could be heard by the shadows. “I wish they'd look somewhere else and not at me.”

Mitchell laughed unkindly. “That's exactly what everybody in the government says.”

Tillman, mollifying her, told Adrian not to take the attention personally, and led them into the crowd, past the crush of the dance floor to an empty oceanside café table under a shelter of rustling palm thatch resembling a hairy mushroom cap. Johnnie lit a cigarette and leaned back, a visiting queen of the night. What made her beautiful was the way she responded to all signs of mobilization with a conspiratorial nod, affirming whatever was buoyant and fast and prodigious, as if she had a private arrangement to be welcomed as a member of any group seeking pleasure. She could thrive in a place like this, and more than once Mitchell had looked at her and felt she might do or be anything at all, that she was a woman on the fringe of a glittering potential, moving closer and closer toward its center, It was Mitchell's most generous thought of Johnnie.

Tillman and Mitchell collected round after round of drinks from the bar, and for a while they talked, inhaling deep luxurious breaths of the moist air off Howard Bay—Tillman's attention wandering to the two resident misfits who lurked among the customers, one named Davidius and the other dubbed by the locals The Missing Link, for his apish appearance and retarded intelligence, two defective roosters prospecting the henhouse, operating on the not unheard of theory that white tourist girls would fuck a black man for the asking. Adrian shuddered as Tillman pointed them out, the small and twisted Davidius, broadcasting animal rut and violation; the hulk of the Link, with an idiot's fascination for the female gender, animated baby dolls which he bumbled behind and groped after with the clumsy love of a nursling.

“You shouldn't allow them on the premises.”

“Who ... the tourists?”

“Of course not,” Adrian said.
“Those
two. They're not even human.”

Mitchell drawled that exclusion was the rule of the past that led to
the excesses of the present. Democracy must be an open door, and so on.

“Oh, don't go on with that,” Adrian said. Adrian saw Mitchell studying her with soft menace and asked, “What is it you do on this island? What brought you here, if you don't mind my asking?”

“Agricultural adventurism.” Mitchell suddenly felt very short-tempered. “And you?” he asked, leaping right into an answer. “You've come to stain yourself a little before going off on a real vacation somewhere where the prices on the wine list exceed the per capita income of a country like this one.”

To his great surprise, Adrian burst into laughter. “That's such clichéd thinking, you know. Not to mention sanctimonious.”

But clichés get superior mileage in the Third World, Mitchell wanted to say, thinking, Why bother? She was twenty-four years old, pretty, and successful for her age. Europe was her model, her reference, for the world outside of the States. “Look, I don't want to be a bitch,” Adrian said, starting to raise her chin and then catching herself. “I've been running nonstop in the city for months. I was ready for a time-out, I wanted to sit on the beach and read and get a tan—and look what I got. I mean, there are just certain things you'll never get me to accept.” But she was focused on Tillman now, showing him a pouting smile. And Mitchell wasn't listening. Johnnie, looking away out over the water at the semaphore of a thunderhead signaling from the south, had reached under the table to take his hand.

“Let's dance,” Johnnie whispered in his ear.

Mitchell made excuses, but she ignored his inertia, made him get on his feet, walk, hold her. He felt drenched in warm soft pellets of musical rain. What notes were these anyway, banged out on a pan, petrol drums forged into spinets and harpsichords? In their plumage of tie-dyed tee shirts and red drawstring pants, Monkeyjunk was beating its wings upward, their drums yielding breath after sorrowful breath of continental sentiment. He had a weakness for the lament of a keyboard and the pansmen were reinventing something very sad, something that venerated beauty and sadness. The music sifted down upon them, and Mitchell felt astonished by the unreality of the woman he held in his arms, tortured by the substance of her.

Bach? he wondered, amazed.

“Mitch, are you okay?”

Though he knew he looked strangulated, contradicted, he nodded.

“You were just looking so down.”

They revolved under the stars. Her forehead was pearled with
moisture, her arms glistening and her body so hot he could feel the change of temperature she caused in the air. He saw The Missing Link pass by, shambling like a bear, everybody's partner, craning and witless, his steam-shovel jaw slack on its hinges. The music clattered like a piano left out in the rain. This was their togetherness, she facing the mountains, he facing the sea; when he saw land, she saw water; this chaining, a troublesome irresolution, a troublesome certainty; her, her. Whatever direction they slid and balanced, the world was this timeless cruel harmony of yoked opposition, a pattern difficult to follow gracefully outside the steps of the dancing. The heat and careful pressure at the base of his spine came from Johnnie's hand, and she whispered to him about the fulcrum of his own hand on her, how nice it was—five years of not-knowing reduced by their hands held just this way to one knowing touch. The moment of gliding touch across the contour of a hip, the oiled texture of skin, network of muscles; the discovery that years could be preserved or lost in fingertips, could be inventoried and warehoused in the most delicate conduits of flesh.

To Mitchell's relief, the music faded into cottony vibrations and then stopped. The liquor on an empty stomach, the thick cloying fumes of jasmine, Johnnie—he had become dizzy in spurts. Dropping their hands away from each other, she froze under his scrutiny, averting her eyes.

“Oh, Jesus,” she said, daring to look at him again, seeing his confusion, the inertia, the twitches of, what? Revulsion? Self-revulsion? “You really hate me, don't you?”

It was terrible to think she could again be his—more terrible to think he could be hers, that she could swing down the blue arc of the atmosphere with a receipt for five years' payment on this whatever it was between them, held in escrow. What, after all, would their lives have been had she stayed? He felt the immediate futility of thinking that way.

The music ignited again—raving, ferocious, police truncheons playing the skulls of the mob like blacksmithing. Johnnie and Mitchell were jostled by the dancers; tears condensed in her eyes. He tried to lead her off the patio but with sobering force she pulled his hand back to her waist. Her face contorted; she fought against being overwhelmed but her arms hung limp at her sides, tremors jerked her shoulders, black ribbons unfurled from her eyes. He hated the sight of her alone in the world, the agony of her, her homelessness, yet he still could not comfort her.

“I'm so sorry,” she said, gasping for air. “Mitchell, I'm so sorry.”

“Don't be sorry. Find something else to be. We just met, right?”

Johnnie stepped into him, her fist clenched and unclenched against his shoulder blades, the basket of her ribs so lively, a wetness on his shirt, smeary with mascara, where she pressed her face. He could barely hear her. Something about how she had hurt him, how she didn't understand how much until—He resented this diagnosis and unlocked himself from her arms, walking away, leaving her there in the mayhem of the dancing. There were empty stools at the bar and he sat down, queasy from the whorehouse perfume of the jasmine banking the patio. “I seem to be getting drunk again,” he told Winston, and then added petulantly, “I deserve to.”

“Who don't?” nodded Winston. “Daht a very Catherinian declaration.”

“The fucking pledge of allegiance.”

He marked this trespass into the private clubhouse of cynicism and reproached himself for it. There were better ways to disgrace himself than a descent to some sort of glum spiritual unification with a chorus of derelict expatriates slurring dirges to a bottle. The self-exiles, their rotting hearts and negligent remembrance of what they had left behind, this deluded out of the frying pan into the fire reflex, back issues of
Punch
and
The New Yorker
growing musty in their parlors.

“Give me something to finish me off,” he said, and Winston brought a coconut mug with the last potent dregs of the night's batch of toxic waste, tasting of green rum and Kool-Aid. Mitchell asked for a regular glass, just put it in something regular, would you?—“Winston, you drink out of a fucking coconut shell at home?” Winston snorted and massaged his metal knee, hovered nearby funneling a half-empty bottle of scotch into one half-full, disregarding the difference in labels. Mitchell brooded, slipping back into the tide, the sexual undertow, the currents that took him nowhere but down, feeling railroaded, in the midst of a grand entrapment. Winston hobbled down the length of the bar, pocketing tips before the urchins could steal the coins.

Then Johnnie stood beside him, glazed, recomposed, refusing to sit down when Mitchell asked her to. Her capacity for new beginnings, for pouring out yesterday's wine, was in effect. She had been in the bathroom stabbing cosmetics across her features with sluttish extravagance. Underneath it all the fragility and fatigue were highlighted like never before. She asked in a controlled voice if he were mad at her. No, he wasn't mad, he wasn't anything, just high, very high, indecently high ... shouldn't be this high, he muttered. She
wanted to go back to the house. Her period had started, spewing with such quantity into her underpants that she had to remove them in the restroom and throw them away. Mitchell had trouble connecting with her urgency.

“I'm leaving,” she said.

“Wait, wait. Have another drink with me. You can't walk home by yourself. The boogieman will get you.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“You don't even know where the fuck you are.”

“Look, damn you.” Her hand went up under her skirt. Mitchell leered at this indiscretion. “I'm bleeding all over myself.”

The hand withdrew, three middle fingers slathered. His vision switched between two or more separate channels as he watched, stupefied, the hand track in segments and stamp his forehead with its pungent brand. She picked up a cocktail napkin to clean her fingers. “Can we go?”

It took Mitchell a second to understand what she had done, this inconceivable act; that she had fouled him. He became infuriated, at his humiliation. In a daze he ran for the sea, his rage spottily illuminating areas of his blurred vision like flashbulbs, and splashed into the bay to scour the debasement that was an acid in every cell of his skin. Galactic fields of phosphorus sparks opened and spread just below the surface, green swirling chips of submerged light that seemed to pour out of his fury and diffuse through the ocean. Johnnie stood at the tideline, a virginal apparition begging him to come out. He had not invented her after all, as he had often wished, and so there she was, and time alone could not evict her from his life. He thrashed in the water, the foxfire blooming brighter with each swipe, until he exhausted everything, all the sorrow and condemnation and acrimony, all gone and even forgiven, expelled with the salty-sweet bile, the rum and brine evacuation of all the emotional troops he had marshaled against her. Finally he crawled out onto the sand, emptied but still gagging weakly, and lay down at Johnnie's feet. She knelt down and cradled his head.

“Come out of that dark place, Mitchell. Let it go, let it go.”

Didn't the entire world dream this same dream, the reinstatement of love? They could lie about it, they could deceive themselves until all the endings fused like barrier islands around their lives, but he couldn't anymore. He wanted to, fought for it, but couldn't. And in that toppling moment he believed that all hearts had been issued a general amnesty, that the exiled, the banished, the deposed, the
deported and the excommunicated, all the expatriates and émigrés of love, could now return to the countries they once inhabited, and even the totalitarianism of families had been at long last overthrown, children and parents reunited in an original state of grace, and old friends who had quarreled divisively were getting back in touch, brothers were mending their civil wars, dogs that ran away were coming home, and everywhere people were excavating the cemeteries of albums and scrapbooks and box cartons of photographs, raising their beloved dead.