Swimming in the Volcano (55 page)

“Whew, calm youself now,” she said. “You are too too serious, Wilson.” She was only being mischievous; she knew who she was, she didn't require chivalry from him, she had too much pluck for that.
“Black womahn is in big trouble, I see. And what about we backsides, eh?”

“Yeah, you have big asses. Yours proves to be an exception.”

“Um hmm. Ahll right. What else, de final crime?”

“Fine. Black women are fickle.”

She thought about it. “So you is tekkin a chance with me, nuh?”

He shrugged—everybody took a chance with everybody else, nobody coupled with the slightest assurance of a guarantee.

“White womens ain fickle?”

“White women are. You didn't demand I eviscerate them in the bargain.”

“Carry you ass, bwoy,” she chided, but her eyes—effulgent, gleeful, bratty—belied the rebuke. “Carry you white skittery ass.” She wanted him to take this black girl inside and get to know her properly, and she gave him a look, trying quite pointedly to read him, to determine what exactly this was that she had captured, and if this was a game, then the time had come for him to be its willing accomplice. She leaned against him to put her heels back on, dropped her head and nipped him in the stomach with enough pressure to make him yelp. Only one impulse registered:
more
. She straightened up, encircling him, and pushed her long tongue into his mouth, purring; hearing the noise in her throat he thought,
more
. Everything in his life had a path to follow except passion, which seemed fated always to be stopped at the border, delayed, made to sit by itself in a waiting room while its credentials and itinerary were placed under indefinite review.
More
. Her blackness shot a bolt of amazement through him; her braids swayed and batted him, the most lenient of flagellations. Her eyes were open with a daring cast—
What will you do if I do this? Or this?
Incredibly, she popped the top button of his shirt, tore it from its threads, to crab her fingers across the muscles of his chest. Her eyes flashed. His lips felt hers ascend into a smile. He felt lifted out of himself and the mountain no longer proffered a competitive view.

Inside, the air reeked of ganja smoke and incense; Josephine's skin turned to licorice under the violet lights. They drank and danced, watched by a row of rastamen sitting along a bench in the back, a dog asleep at their feet, each of them as solemn as members of a palace guard, mourning Haile Selassie, their hair bundled into wool caps towering above their heads like sacks of onions. Josephine made telepathic contact with the bartender, who brought her ice water and scotch and roasted groundnuts without being told. Mitchell smoked some of the dope on hand and found himself wandering in a postpsychedelic
neverland. The walls crawled with florescent graffiti, glazed with energy, and Josephine bribed him with the silky hydraulic gestures of temptation to decode himself right off the page of propriety and into a protolanguage of lust, rocking on his feet, his hands on the helm of her hips, absorbed in her sluttishness and his, a diva of blackness, a woman from the circus, from a lost city, from the fables of a continent, from Times Square, from cosmopolitan magazines, from an ivory throne and from the chains of his own history and the darkness of the fictions he constructed about the nature of his own desire. She locked one leg over and behind him and rode his thigh with her face buried in his neck, her breathing labored, the voltage dumbfounding, Josephine chuffing with sexual locomotion to the music, and he could feel the slick scorch of her cunt flat against the top of his thigh, her hipbone mauling him, battering his erection in its own painful seep of fluid, and when she unhooked her leg, gasping, he could feel the stick of wetness on his pants where she had left her imprint. At some point they realized they were performing for the public, took their bows and got outside, sweating profusely. The sky fluttered and split with light and they were greeted with the mercy of a gusting wind, which they inhaled like smelling salts, restoring some small portion of their clarity. Another storm was bearing down on the island and Josephine wanted to hurry down off the mountain because the Deux Chevaux was allergic to rain, leaked miserably and hydroplaned out of control. Thunder rolled from several directions at once, arguing. They flew precipitously down the gullies of Mount Archer toward the last remaining brooch of lights in Queenstown, Mitchell sinking back without pretense into the fantasy of sex, contorting himself so that his head lay cradled in Josephine's lap, his face nuzzling the softness of her stomach with his freest hand jackknifed inside her creamy panties, fingering her while she drove, Josephine murmuring,
You're dangerous
—her voice recommending—
You're a dangerous man
, until finally her thighs began to twitch and quake and she braked radically to a stop, whimpering, to permit herself to come, and then put the car back in gear and continued on as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, nothing to upset a lady's composure surely. It began to rain. Instantly his legs were soaked and he wrenched himself out from under her arms to crank his window closed and they rolled blindly through the upper neighborhoods, a bubble of steam, the tires fizzing and slipping underneath them, on their way to wherever lust was taking them, which turned out to be a middle-class clapboard house on a densely built street of similarly anonymous houses.

“Dis my home, Wilson.”

She wanted him to come in, but if he had reservations, he was free to take Shoovie back to Howard Bay and return it tomorrow, that was no problem, this was no problem either. The rain doubled in intensity, drowning out whatever voice of reason might yet prevent their lovemaking. The string of warning lights were far, far back on the road and he had ignored every one of them. Someone could come throw rocks at his craving and it wouldn't break, not now, not here, not with these horns, not with this black woman named Josephine and her black effluence of heat, the molten dark caramel of her skin, the sensuality of her imperfect beauty, the volcanic wit that made him feel the ground was not entirely safe to walk on. At this deliriously advanced stage of the evening, you'd have to pry him off her with a wrecking bar. They ran through the pelting rain and under the wide eave of the roof. She unlocked the door, they fumbled down a creaky hallway, Josephine said
Shhh
; Mitchell, alarmed, said
Who's here?
Then he was in her room, standing in the dark, inhaling the aphrodisiac of her private life, thinking contrarily that privacy was white as he wondered, since she hadn't bothered to answer him, who else was there in the house with them. She lit several candles then kissed him with uncharacteristic tenderness, ended it by excusing herself to the bathroom. He couldn't wait himself but unlatched the shutters of a window and pissed out into the rain, then removed his wet shirt and sandals and made a cursory inspection of her furniture and chattels, the bed with its afghan spread and scrolled headboard, an overstuffed chair pinned with doilies, a washstand with its china bowl and pitcher, a bookshelf stacked with romance and mystery, everything quaint and homey except there were piles and piles of magazines stacked up along the walls—back issues of
Glamour, Ebony, Paris Match, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Der Spiegel
—and a worktable, half of it taken up by a slanted drawing board tacked with curling sketches, sketch after sketch of faceless beauties modeling bold colors, unabashedly predatorial haute couture—jungle elegance, is what someone might name the style—and not a dress pattern in sight. She was indeed good with her hands, not as a seamstress but as a designer, and she'd need an economic revolution and marketing wizardry before her talent ever meant anything on St. Catherine. He had to ask himself again, what was she doing here? The toilet flushed down the hall and a moment later he heard her steps on the floorboards approach the room and then stop, another door creaked open and there was a short hushed conversation between Josephine and a second woman, then she was back in the room, behind him, her face poked over his bare
shoulder, her breath smelling of toothpaste, her braids conspicuous by their absence against his skin.

“Come,” she said. “Undress me,” and he did, turning to see she had banded her hair into a tail and scrubbed the whorish makeup from her face, not by any means transformed into the girl next door but the attempt had been made. He found the zipper, tugged the dress down over her hips, there was something unusual about her bra he couldn't figure out, and it seemed she had left her panties in the bathroom, the thatch of her pubis was a fuzzy ribbon, neat and well trimmed, or, who knows, maybe it grew that way, a goatee ending in the shadowy definition of her labia, and her ass was an absolute plum. A bomb of thunder exploded nearby, making her cringe, and the rain came with torrential force, whipping violently across the roof, the house embroiled in its uproar. The storm aroused Josephine in a peculiar way, animating her with feral urgency, they had to fuck
now
, she said,
quick
, the storm was bad, it was too powerful, maybe it would stop, maybe it would stop, she tackled him down onto the bed, tearing at his belt, Mitchell not equal to this acceleration of pace, still fumbling with her complicated bra, a blockhead determined to solve its logistics. She climbed off him to yank his pants away, scrambled back with an anguished, frustrated cry, spraddling him, the house vibrating with the din of the rain. Mitchell licked the astringency of her perfumed skin, trying to slide himself down to kiss the insides of her thighs, she sank her claws into his scalp to keep him topside, hurting him to do it though he didn't know what she was trying to do, and so he kept edging down, believing she wanted him to feel the pain. The room flared with milky green light. A second later a spear of lightning struck, rattling the windows, the shock wave concussing throughout the house, Josephine cried out and he was wedged between her legs and she was squatting over him, fucking down savagely onto his nose, which snapped him to his senses with a wallop of truly undeniable pain just as the next bolt seemed to hit right on top of them, and in the moment of crackling silence that followed the strike he found himself ejected onto the floor, sprawled out, his chest heaving, finally understanding that the siren gone off in his head was in the house as well and it was a child—her child—screaming. He climbed back on the bed with Josephine, lay facedown next to her, and they waited, confounded, disabled with increasing fatalism, unsexed and thrown out of the garden. They heard footsteps down the hall, someone going into the child's room, the sympathetic rhythm of an older woman's voice, unheeded. He tried to touch Josephine with some suggestion of reverence, to keep the engine of
their lovemaking idling, but she tensed, groaning, and told him no, wait a little, be sweet. The child screamed into the rain for his mother, answered by more lightning, three thermonuclear booms, the blasts building one into the other with a ferocity that left even Mitchell rigid and afraid. The street outside crackled with noise. The child screeched for Josephine, who whispered feverishly to Mitchell, Mahn, I have been so good, I have waited so long, nature have no business comin against we like dis. He lay coiled and inert, waiting for more explosions, listening to Josephine's rationalization for not going to the child, but then she sat up, exasperated, went to her dresser for a pair of panties, then pulled a tiger-striped housecoat off the hook on the back of the door, but her aunt was there on the other side with the child, rapping, before she had put it on.

“Comin, Auntie. Comin, comin.”

She opened the door only enough for the naked child to be passed through into her arms, shouldered the door closed and turned back into the room, the little boy clinging to her neck, hysterical, bawling his lungs out. You must love this, Wilson, she said with great unhappiness, pacing back and forth, trying to comfort her baby and having no success, secreta bubbling out of his miniature nose and pinched eyes, his spidery body convulsed with misery, his mouth so wide open with yowling you could stuff an orange into it. Josephine wiped the snot from his face with her sleeve and provided a summary answer to the riddle of her brassiere by unfastening one of its cups like a lid and offering her eggplant breast to the boy, who wrenched his head wildly away, wanting nothing to do with it. What now? she groaned. What de hell, mahn, what now? The child hyperventilated.

Good question.
Christ is this weird
, thought Mitchell, an expedition into the domestic wilderness of weirdness here, because he didn't know where he was, or quite how he got there, now that he tried to recall the specifics, and he couldn't exactly pin down whom he was with except that she was some variety of Catherinian Cinderella and abruptly real, having just taken a plunge back into a life in which he was not automatically eager to express an involvement. Propped up with pillows against the headboard, he watched the drama of mother and child with bleary, lidded eyes, but from outside its realm, miles away and high as Franklin's kite in another storm that was also diminishing, his senses overindulged and in a state of mindlessness for which there was no better word than cuntstruck. He hadn't the faintest idea what was expected of him but there he was anyway, established in her bed, following along, not a prince but a mutt, the vapors of her sex still searingly present in each of his
inhalations. He closed his eyes and advised himself to snap out of it, yet when he opened them again he had a case of the hiccups and so did the boy, only his, Mitchell's, were infiltrated with distressed giggles, at first mortifying, then irksome, then mortifyingly euphoric as he lost control.

“Wilson, here now, listen, what is so fuckin funny—
hushbaby,”
said Josephine, mellowing her tone for the child, as if she were beginning a lullaby, “you mahd, bwoy,
hush cocobum, storm gone now
, Wilson, if you is laughin at me, suck cock, mahn,
hush pretty, hush sweet
.”