Swimming in the Volcano (58 page)

Living in the tropics, she had let the visual overload gradually alter her perceptive instincts, born on the blank, stripped prairie and mostly dependent on the give and take of language. Her degree of insight into the world now set forth from a base of images, and she stored away two, at least, from the weekend on Cotton Island for further
consideration, not counting the look on Adrian's face when she nearly washed over the side of Doc Travis' speedboat.

Not counting the maggot she tried to strangle, either, a skinhead from one of the London self-mutilation bands currently in vogue. Drunk, coked, whacked, pig-eyed, cretinoid, a psychopathic missionary from a postnuclear, fried shell of a future. Terminally sunburned, he wore unlaced engineer boots, soiled boxer shorts, a sleeveless black tee shirt, his ear lobes festooned with ridiculous safety pins and his phlebitic arms tattooed with insipid swastikas, laughable daggers, and fascist buzz words. His uncircumcised penis wagged in and out of the crease in his shorts. He had crawled out from some crabhole, she hadn't seen him before they had all packed into Lord Norton's outdoor fete house for Saconi's performance. Flambeaus licked the thatch of the ramada's peaked roof with sinister light, light from the voodoo scenes in B movies. It was late, the chemistry in a toxic red zone; worlds split apart into clans and collided in multinational masses simultaneously. Because she identified herself with Saconi she sometimes felt equatorial, a narrow imaginary line of contact between the frictional polarity of hemispheres. (Earlier, she had prevented one set of islanders—security, the chosen ones—from rapping the skulls of another set—the unchosen, harmless goggle-eyed teenagers—who were trying to sneak their way into the festivities. She interceded, they slipped in to stand off to the side, gawking like the tourists they now were.)

Saconi sat on his stool and shook a tamboo he had told her was filled with the bones of a hundred birds. As an experiment in form, he had modeled one of his newest calypsos on the rhythmic phrasings of a Yoruba chant, and this was it. The skinhead stationed himself at arm's length in front of him, wobbling on the twin flames of his legs, his gyroscope broken by all manner of self-abuse and juvenile hatreds. He squinted, puffy and cock-eyed, at Saconi, his fish lips pursed in a sphincter of appraisal. Saconi's voice modulated, like the dipping flight of sparrows, between high and low notes, tenor and baritone.

Whiteman play brains of the world but blackman must play soul
, the calypso argued. The title was “Astro-nots,” and Sally had never heard the song before. Granted, its melody uplifted, but the lyrics made her uneasy, vaguely resentful—which would of course be Saconi's intention.

Whiteman is the brains, my brother, blackman is the soul, put them all together, my sister, and you still can't make a whole
.

The skinhead began to bait Saconi, snarling imbecilic taunts: What
language was this the boy sang—Schwarzhili, Mau-Mau, Ma-Ma, Jigaboo fookin' Welsh, is it? Sally narrowed her eyes at him, steaming, knowing something bad was going to happen. He next succumbed to an Englishman's irrepressible urge for the bestowment of titles. Here he is, gents, Our Lad the Nigger Nightingale. Sir Wog the Africoon Troubadour, he brayed, cocking his head left and right, seeking approbation for his mindless bigotry. The blood jumped in Sally's heart and she lunged for the guy's throat, getting her thumbs on his adam's apple before Adrian restrained her from behind and one of the skinhead's own entourage, out of decency or perhaps bloodthirstiness, threw an arm around his shoulder and muscled him outside to the lawn for an airing. Saconi was too married to his song to care; his justice he sang. Sally, shaking with rage, watched the two men out on the edge of darkness, the first jabbing his fist onetwothree into the congenitally lurid mouth, the skinhead laughing, spitting blood, cawing with dementia. Those who loved a sensation applauded.

What was everybody doing there, besides ruining a perfectly good island? There were no princes and princesses, no lords and ladies, only the aptly named Insanatorium. “The global pillage,” she had heard someone say. She had this associative image of Elvis Presley nagging away in her mind—a bloated, unctuous white idol of popular decay raiding the tribes, kidnapping the culture for his self-aggrandizement and replacing it with less than thirty dollars' worth of tee shirts, stenciled with the iconography of mass marketeers.
Oops, let's not get carried away, girl
, but the fact remained, these motherfuckers had ridden their own music into the ground and had come a-slaving. She saw how they hankered after Saconi and she was worried for him, he wasn't a found object, and unlike everybody else there, he had come to Cotton because Cotton was his to come to.

It rarely got this out of hand, Saconi assured her, laughing about how swiftly she had clamped down onto the skinhead, fast and fearless, grievous harm intent in her eyes. He had taken a break, would return for three or four more songs. Holding hands, they walked out onto the grounds to be alone. He was so pleased with himself, pleased with her. Saconi satisfied her one unwritten rule about life: Give back. Tend to your karma (thank you, Hindus, for the Judeo-Christian Subversion of the Week). She envisioned high chairs crowned with chubby-cheeked toffee-colored babies with hilarious bows in their hair, and the imaginary snapshot she held in front of her made her hands quiver until it fell away and her delight turned to sadness, the
horse back in the barn, because she was afraid to compose their future too precisely. Possibly Saconi was wiser about this than she was.

The paradox was, her days of feeling stranded, anywhere, were over, because the more secure she felt in this part of the world, in no small part thanks to Saconi, the more she felt herself accepting the part she had left behind. If that then was maturity, adulthood wandering in from the wide open space of adolescence, must she concede the converse implication, that her original point of departure, the impulse she had answered to set herself free, was an arbitrary act of immaturity? Saconi's strength of identity, something much deeper than male self-esteem, mystified her. Was identity homegrown, or discovered, researched, dug up and glued, like pottery shards, back together; something
out there
, waiting for you to come gather it? She wasn't the person to ask. She looked at the children warehoused in her school and told herself, The answer is none of the above.

The spree seemed to reconfirm her worst suspicions about the broader culture that insisted on taking responsibility for who she was, but she was being negative and knew she had to watch it, at least for Saconi's sake. He pulled her over to an outcropping of limestone and they sat down, looking out toward the waves turned to lace on the windward barrier reef. Because he knew what she was thinking, he told her that when he was a boy he had a trumpet-playing uncle who one day vanished and then resurfaced playing second horn in a European jazz band, performing on the circuit through all those gray and snowy cities for the next twenty years. Saconi, as he grew up, borrowed the dream. Then the uncle came home. Sally said, I bet I know what happened, and Saconi corrected her. No, the uncle wasn't bitter, was no more racist than sanity allowed, he didn't regret spending the prime of his life communicating through his trumpet to people who were reluctant to find him intelligible when he took the instrument away from his lips. On the contrary. When he came back home, he had been blinded to all but St. Catherine's backwardness, the ignorance of the people, the unsuitability of everything. He left after four months to live permanently in Paris. Saconi took his repudiation personally—he hated his uncle. He thought to himself, Whatever Uncle does have over there, it ain home, you know.

“Sally, you cy-ahn see me jammin wit dem
rock-and-rule
bwoys?” he asked her, snickering at the thought. He was going to go back to the fete house and sing to them “Capitalism Gone Mad.”

But he didn't. Instead he climbed back on his stool, propped his guitar across his knees and sang a doleful ballad written by Bob
Marley. The audience pressed in close, standing around like a pack of show dogs remarking upon the hidden potential of a flea-bitten coyote. The crowd had its second wind; some of the visiting celebrities began to overlay harmonies on top of Saconi's voice. Sally heard the beauty in their chorus but she preferred them stoned out of their minds, actually—muffled. Suddenly they wanted to reach down into their hardened hearts and croon, and what was she supposed to do, puke or clap? Guitars were fetched, like homely wives heretofore unclaimed. Saconi segued into a reggae variation on what she took to be a pub song, making Sally choke with laughter, and they went on in this vein, amazing her, these profoundly
tired
men and their scout's singalong, as if this were all they ever really wanted from the music to begin with, this their transiently pure escape from the inexplicable, exiling, addictive burlesque of fame, which had nowhere to take its prisoners but away.

When Doc Travis stopped the boat she thought they had broken down but, nope, the Admiral wanted fresh fish for his supper and he ordered Saconi to break out the gear. Everything was slightly unreal to her from lack of sleep plus a queasy gloss of seasickness and a foolhardy decision like this only heightened the effect. The boat tipped and reeled, wave-slapped; the engines gargled and the world fizzled and hissed and water slurped in a steady flow through the scuppers. Adrian sat up erect but tottering like a drunk, her mouth tense but determined to be a good sport. “Is this battle stations?” she asked.

What this was was frivolous endangerment. Sally thought, Let's just get out of this madness before someone gets hurt. But the Admiral wanted dolphin and Saconi seemed only too happy to play the naked island boy, toting home his string of fish. He rigged a silver lure the size of a butcher knife onto a leader and started to tie it to a ball of trolling line. The waves shoved up and down around them; their immensity made her think of screens in a movie theater, blue and translucent as gemstone. One screen would slide down and another slide up, and sure enough, now that they weren't hurtling through them, she could see fish inside, hovering like creatures trapped in amber, drab brownish-green shapes and elongated streaks of electric radiance, but before Saconi had the chance to feed out the lure into the water a rogue sea, like backwash, cascaded with a soft thunderclap down on the stern, compressing the women into their seats and then lifting them in its swell. When it hit, its power stunned Sally, but she had the presence of mind to grab Adrian's arm and hold on to a cleat. Doc accelerated instantaneously to avoid being
swamped but as the boat lurched forward she could feel Adrian's weight pouring over the transom with the slosh. Sally shrieked for Saconi but he already had Adrian's free arm and was dragging her away from the props. Doc sped ahead with no choice but to drain the boat. Adrian bounced on the gunwale, in the water from her breasts down, her legs dancing in a churn of foam. There was a brutally invigorating moment of balance. They had both lost their sunglasses and stared into each other's saucer eyes, Adrian's blanched face written with the knowledge that in the next second or two she might well slip away from them and be gone. Sally would remember the look, and the remarkable fact of Adrian's relative composure, Adrian not saying anything, nothing, not a scream or squeal or just
help!
She never made a sound but just looked at them as if she were prepared to wait all day for a resolution to her fate. Then they succeeded in hauling her back aboard, her clothes nearly torn off by the force of the water.

Sally ranted at Doc above the roar of the twin outboards.
You insane asshole, you silly prick
. He ignored her, or didn't hear. Saconi made the mistake of bending over to tell her to watch her mouth, Doc was sensitive to criticism, so then she was infuriated with Saconi too. Adrian, gasping, looked mauled and overwhelmed but not unhappy, her eyes brilliantly alert, her senses thriving, and certainly she was never more present than this moment, nothing else in the world but this. The water in the boat emptied as they picked up speed, thrusting through the crests, skipping from one to the next like a flat stone flung by a giant until the seas rolled gentle again behind the natural jetty of Pilo Bight, and Doc stopped the boat again so he could pull a pair of water skis and a towline out from their storage hatch and thus enter Howard Bay in heroic fashion, a charioteer slicing through the popular imagination, flying on wings of vanity.

Saconi took the helm with relish and Sally, scowling at his back, had to will herself not to punish him for his misguided defense of the good doctor's ego. It would be a shame and inexcusable to end the weekend mad at him, since she couldn't claim not to know to make herself as little of a target as possible around men like Travis, and more importantly, she had a weekend to preserve, its strange symmetry of fullness and saturation, each sensation captured in that pair of keepsake images, one that glowed, one that disturbed, she was leaving Cotton Island carrying these as yet uncatalogued treasures, and her hope was to one day train herself to get them on record, processed into a form that could express to others what it was like for her to be so far off in the world, and yet never far from meaning. Maybe some
day she would learn how to paint or write them, manipulate them onto film, something to say, I was there, very much alive. This is how it was for me.

When the fete had gone on long enough to achieve a second wave of lunacy and then unraveled, Saconi said if she wasn't too knackered he wanted to show her something on the northern point of the island, and didn't know when they'd have another chance. The long arduous effort to enjoy herself among people not of her choosing had left her feeling gorged and dissatisfied, so she told him, “Anything you want that's just us.” He grabbed a bottle of champagne from a washtub of melted ice and requisitioned one of the mini-mokes. She could feel the change of weather approaching, on her skin and in the invisible closeness of the sky. Even in the inky darkness before dawn, the landscape was capable of communicating to her its terrarium-like quality, the squat, dusty vegetation, the rockiness, the baking heat that still ticked out from the center of things, like an engine cooling down. Terrain made for reptiles, scorpions, haggard goats. Saconi drove over the washboard road with the bottle of champagne between his knees; his right hand rested reassuringly on her left thigh, and for all the best of reasons they didn't talk but let the night flood away off the land without saying anything to make it human, robbing nature of its pace, as if words had priority over time and a simple exchange of sentences would bring daylight washing down on them.