Swimming in the Volcano (49 page)

He wasn't hungry; there were no dishes in the sink or he would have washed them. She kept house apparently; she wasn't disinterested in domestic routine and ritual. He went to the bedroom he had given her and, without second thoughts, poked through her things, not hunting for anything specific, but with a sense of getting to know her, this strangely familiar woman, better. He held a pink pair of her underwear and meditated on its crotch, its washed-out stain, faint but absolutely unreadable, nothing but a poor trace of mundane humanity to stare upon. He decided he liked her clothes, their subdued colors, their implicit rejection of flamboyance. Straight lines, comfort, no use for pretense. No socks or sweaters—she had made herself into an authentic fair-weather girl. No photographs either, no outdated credit cards, no cute mementos, no package of letters fastened with a rubber band, no sentimental trinkets, a teenager's modest hoard of jewelry and not much more, no nostalgic detritus from a life walked away from, admittedly in haste; nothing to circumvent or deny a message of ordinariness. Variety of girl: ordinary. Well, that was bullshit. She deserved nothing, he argued, that she failed to earn, day by day.

In one of the pockets of her knapsack, he discovered a small black chamois pouch, which he unzipped; inside was a rosary, its crucifix silver—it mystified him as much as anything about Johnnie ever had. Had she, a lapsed Episcopalian, a woman as theologically oriented as the commodities exchange, converted to Catholicism? Found God? Found a use for God? Bewildered, he replaced the rosary and left the room, as if rebuked: Say what you like but remember she has a soul.

He shaved haphazardly, nicking himself, eyeing his crooked nose in the bathroom mirror, dabbing the blood with toilet paper. Along the windowsill, a row of Johnnie's creams and cosmetics and shampoos seemed unnatural, like props. Through the opened window, music whispered to him, emanations of happiness, tugging and prodding. He was wound too tight to stay at home on a Friday night, in a house that had never before felt empty.

Instead of shortcutting down to the beach, he stayed on the road where it was easier to walk. Up ahead in the darkness, the music came to a stop and he could hear loud drunken voices and laughter. The roadside flowed with pedestrians, many of them singing—their own songs, church hymns, radio tunes, TV jingles, greetings. Good evening, good night, taking a walk, eh? St. Catherine island was a friendly place, he was willing to say, safe as childhood in Nebraska; provincial, ornamented with crimes of passion and crimes of finance but not made ugly and unbearable with malice. Sometimes he even forgot to lock the door to his house; it didn't strike him as necessary, and the common people were more trustworthy than their leaders.

The bar had its end-of-the-week mob; he had to stand and wait for a gap in the wall of bodies before he could belly up. Winston had two assistants now on weekends, and two more, a waiter and waitress, both wearing white duckbill caps with
Rosehill
stenciled on their crowns, freighted drinks to the café tables. Maybe Tillman would be better off, Mitchell thought, if he unloaded the hotel and rode the faster horse. But he wouldn't; the romance was rooted deep in him. Still, there was always reason to believe that things would get better or, failing that, that the worst wasn't as bad as you had imagined it would be.

With a green bottle of beer finally in hand, he shouldered a path out of the barside crush and looked around, optimistically. He chatted with a huddle of Sally's Peace Corps cronies; some acknowledged him with thin, appraising smiles—they came equipped with a proprietorial air, as if he had trespassed on their turf. The self-righteous
ones made a habit of spurning foreign service professionals, contemptuous of their servants and fat salaries, private cars and swimming pools and luxurious houses. And the specialists, many of them, Mitchell knew, stared right through the volunteers, as though they didn't exist. Pretension and snobbery were their common denominators. He flirted with a woman he had been flirting with for months, with no more success than in the past. She had a boyfriend on another island, she was engaged to someone back home, she was not dating at the moment, she was trying to get over a divorce—she was everything but available. Then you shouldn't look at me, Mitchell thought he must say to her, the next time he had to listen to one of her excuses, with that merry flash of wildness in your eyes.

He maneuvered onward, nodding and patting arms; he was an old-timer by now; it seemed he knew or recognized everyone there, the bureaucrats, merchants and teachers, the shopgirls from the more elite boutiques, the students from the technical college and upper forms, acolytes of the ruling class. He couldn't help but notice the towering, leonine presence of the minister of justice and his court of sycophants—a man as famous for his wholehearted participation in the island's nightlife as for his idiosyncratic style of jurisprudence. In close orbit to this star were tight knots of barristers, animated with privilege, ringed by fearsomely glamorous women with Valium and dainty pistols in their handbags, as a matter of style. The European tribes were camped at their customary tables: the hermetic French, the innocuous Canadians, the annoying British, their sonorous pomposity in fine pitch with the gentleness of the evening air. Run-of-the-mill Latin types and loud generic Americans. He consciously avoided a visiting group of World Bank economists, here for consultations with the Ministry of Trade and Finance, restructuring the island's debt. Earlier in the week they had not understood him when he attempted to explain there was no such thing as an American agenda here, unless they had brought it themselves, no contracts issued to stamp out the brushfires of socialism. Not yet, at any rate. There was only himself, endeavoring to help. He was no one's emissary; he hoped he had made that clear.

He stepped off the concrete patio onto the beach itself, removed his sandals and walked to the water's edge, letting the foamy bay cool his feet. The mineral-flavored sea breeze refreshed him. Out there across the dark heaving swells, Johnnie devised her own good time, advancing her role as voluptuary. Being there, he'd want her time, her drifting attention—had he changed that much in three days?—he'd
want to sift through what was hidden in her heart, minute by minute, like a buyer at a rummage sale. He could make allowances for her needs, her hungry self. He would.

He listened to the water lapping against the hulls of the sailboats in the anchorage, a chilly, dense sound, the harbor like a vast, unlit, marbled ballroom, echoing with aqueous rhythms. “This is our last bottle of catsup,” a male voice said, carried across the water. Someone tuned in the BBC. He watched two people on the stern of a ketch lower themselves over the side into an inflatable launch. An outboard motor came to life with a mechanical tongue-roll of Rs. The launch swung in toward shore, an enormous pale turtle, and beached itself nearly on top of him; he, a beacon for arrivals, not the sort of thing that enhanced a résumé. A woman and a man—archetypically blond, and sinewy; Madison Avenue Vikings in crusty shorts and tee shirts—waded through the shin-deep water to stand, shaky and disoriented, on the miracle of dry land. They had timed themselves to be heralded; the band, Monkeyjunk, resumed its vibrant music.

“Any problem with leaving the boat here?” Mitchell watched them intently, almost in awe—Were sailors the freest people on earth, or the most perversely ritualized and regimented elopers?—before his reverie broke, and he responded automatically, hearing his own voice say, Sure, before he had thought about it.

The woman marched on ahead while the man hung back, convivial, a new face in a new port, a hero come in from the black and hazardous sea. His was the boat Mitchell had spotted from the veranda, ad-libbing through the cut. Rhode Island was its home; he was delivering from Lauderdale to the Grenadines for the owner. The girl was mate and cook, or cook and mate—depending on your point of view—this was the first they had shipped out together. The weather had been good, then bad, then good again, and finally terrible. Any place nearby, he inquired with a wan grin, to get a shower and a bite to eat, something fried and greasy?

“Not likely,” Mitchell had to tell him. “Not until morning.” Rosehill was not an option this late in the evening. The fellow had a sunken stomach and scorched forehead; he rubbed the golden bristles over his jaw, clearly not ready to take no for an answer. Mitchell saw in him a more streamlined version of a fellow spirit, someone who didn't shrink away from unpredictability for the paradoxical reason that it force-fed their journeyman's faith in logic, the religion of alternatives. Mitchell decided to help him out. “There's my house, up the road,” he added, “but the shower's cold.”

The sailor introduced himself—Captain Pat—and they strolled
over to the bar for beers, wedging in alongside the woman, who was drinking a can of Coke, her arms folded across her chest, dour-faced, observing the dancers. Mitchell complimented her on their expertise, bringing the ketch through the badly marked cut at night; she would have been up in the bow, hawk-eyed, spooked, vigilant, superhumanly alert, no different than a warrior, really, all the instincts inflamed. But she frosted him with a look of infinite condescension and, without a word, angled her head away from him so she could continue to scrutinize the dancers. Fucking Christ, Mitchell rasped. He didn't drop his voice; if she heard him, fine, this Artemis of the Indies. She was just a cook, a pretty can opener, floating around in a sailboat. Big fucking deal.

“Lucky in love,” Captain Pat spoke under his breath.

“Why anybody thinks they can act that way is beyond me. I don't see how it matters who she is or what she's done.”

“Don't blame me,” muttered the captain. “I didn't hire her and I can't fire her. Take it from me, you're not missing anything.”

“Life on boats,” Mitchell said, his mouth souring, wanting to change the subject. He wasn't trying to collect women with attitudes, women with pathologies, women who conspired with men in their hatred of females. He didn't want enemies, especially desirable ones.

“She's a sex crime waiting to happen, man,” said Captain Pat.

They talked of other islands, adventures at sea, anecdotal evidence calculated to gild the vagabond life. Several minutes later, as if on cue, Davidius, troll-like, dressed like a busboy, materialized on the periphery of the jump-up and stalked bow-legged down the line of customers at the bar, informing the ladies he was available. Captain Pat's shipmate responded inexpressively, simply following after him like a zombie, though her face gradually brightened as she entered the music, moving her body to the raining fusillades of the drums like a shot gazelle. He didn't get it, he would never get it. She's adopted a creature, Mitchell thought; Davidius is as deformed as sin. They would have to spray Davidius with DDT to pry him off her, later on.

“You might want to keep an eye on them.”

“She's a big girl, right?” The sailor scowled at his empty bottle and ordered something stronger. “You would think she'd know better. She's been around. You would think she'd have an instinct, a warning light. She's just like any other able-bodied I've ever known. She belongs in the fucking navy, man.”

Captain Pat had said enough, in just the right languishing rueful tone, for Mitchell to understand the sailor was in love with the woman. He made a point of losing interest in the conversation and
the scene that had stirred it up. It was all too disturbing and insensible and worse: his own problems seemed to be the message, the theme, where the emphasis lay, as though his particular deficiencies—whatever they were, he could not grasp them—were the source of the enigmatic behavior of women. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed George James across the oval of the bar, seated with a pair of Catherinian women at one of the tables in a row fronting the bar's spatial perimeter, along a tall hedge of flowering jasmine. The editor and publisher of the
Crier
habitually commenced his marathon weekend binges at Rosehill's beach bar, before campaigning onward to the more private and elite clubs, the plebeian dance halls, the neighborhood holes-in-the-wall. James looked up and around, caught his eye, it seemed, on Mitchell, and seemed to wave him over.

The sail down from St. Barts had been taxing, said Captain Pat, four nights and three days walloped by heavy cross seas. To wash the salt off his skin and bite into a hamburger, that was all he could think of at the moment. Mitchell almost blurted out, I don't want that cunt you're with in my house, but it wasn't like him to retract his own largesse, he invested too much of his own virtue in the virtue of trust, he believed he was a better man than that. He couldn't recall whether or not he had locked the front door, so he explained where the house was and handed over the key—the captain could return it to him back at the bar, or Mitchell would see him up at the house later on. Either way, Mitchell said, there was nothing to worry about, the captain was free to go up when he liked, take his crew if he wanted. Mitchell excused himself then and ambled over to George James' table, bumping through the crowd as he licked the suds from the mouth of another bottle of beer.

James had lost one of his companions, but was embroiled in an unpleasant conversation with the woman who remained. Neither one of them appeared to be aware that Mitchell had approached the table. James continued chastising the woman for being a nuisance; she seemed not the least ruffled by the attack. He was married, with several form-age children, but apparently this was not his wife. James had a reputation for being an incorruptible man, and, as a consequence, his journalist's vanity was immense. He was a caramel-colored mulatto with thin Caucasian features who cheerfully boasted that his mixed blood was not a mixed blessing but in fact a political gift, granting him special license to represent everybody and nobody, as it suited his purpose, and it mostly suited him to be everybody, reflecting whiteness to whites and blackness to blacks; an American to Americans, Brit to the Brits, African to the Africans. What he
failed most at, at least by local standards, was being a black Catherinian, but he laughed at this category of criticism. He was well monied and proud—always with an ironic smirk—of his blood ties to the old planter families, was politically astute enough to understand he would always be the beneficiary of change, as long as it reared back from chaos at the last moment, yet he lacked neither courage nor decisiveness, and would not forfeit his principles for the milksoppy, vulgar satisfaction of merely being on the winning side. The
Crier
was mediocre by default, since it could not leave its audience in the dust. James was contemptuous of the uneducable but not of the uneducated. “Opinionated ignorance,” he was fond of saying at cocktail parties, “is the chief discourse of the world's undeveloped communities”—pause—“and most of the developed ones as well.” When the coalition had dislodged Pepper (with the
Crier'
s wheedling support), James had rallied a group of Queenstown businessmen to finance literacy squads, seeding them throughout the rural parishes until funds dried up. Increasingly though, the coalition disappointed him, regardless of his well-known preference for the Banks faction, and his editorials were now being penned with a tearing bite that caused even his closest allies to wince.