Swimming in the Volcano (61 page)

It was so much easier to identify an effect, recognize closure,
arrive
, than to ever single out a cause, conception, the subtle or clumsy collisions that composed beginnings. Which meant, he thought, that understanding had no frame to contain it, it multiplied backward through the infinity between one and zero, reversing out of the picture, it diffused responsibility throughout all of history, and that meant when tragedy happened along, guilt could be distributed piecemeal but blame had an altogether different story to tell. Blame had an alibi.

Start ... where? Throw a dart at the board of existence, however many times, but there was no bull's-eye, no hard red center.

Civilization meant wake up in the morning and go about your business, submerge in the systems. It had always seemed a thick enough surface to hold his weight together with the accumulative weight of society, but somehow it fissured, opening beneath him and he dropped through, not into an abyss but into an unambiguous world that is as it was, where men sat grouped around a campfire, suspended in the wilderness and galvanized by fear, where facts would always be the stunted left hand of myths, the fingers held in a permanent cramp, where truth was not a process, not a song that never finished but simply the singer, the instrument of many songs in a universe of language, so that when it was all over—and it was never over, not for him—it hardly seemed to matter where he started in his attempt to construct a dialectic from the events, he could start on any chord or counterpoint of the sequence of happenstance and complicity, the indifferent countenance of double-faced fate, because wherever he sought the answers it was starting, never at one point but everywhere and nowhere at once, which he thought might mean, contrary to the facts, that in this world there were only middles, never
quite extending from a beginning, never fully tapering to an end. A middle, revolving, recycling, interchanging its harmonics; joy, sorrow, beauty, pain; sharp, flat, natural, you could call birth and death whatever you wanted, they were notations of form that had been erased on the score, you didn't need them, you were there regardless, a voice, improvising. Intermezzo, you walked into the middle of things.

It didn't take long for those who wanted answers from him to get irritated with the luxury of his perspective. Where do you get this shit? they wondered, quite literally. Whom did he think he was kidding? He had a lot of explaining to do. For instance, everybody was keen on finding out just who the fuck he was, and they weren't buying bubble-headed musings. They thought he was faking it, someone was kind to suggest post-traumatic stress syndrome. Ultimately, he was made to start somewhere, but again, where? It was a problem. He wasn't trying to dupe anyone, only every beginning seemed freighted with equal significance, which meant perhaps he still hadn't found the one he was looking for.

He could start there on the northern end of the Caribbean island of St. Catherine, where there was an active volcano, Mount Soufrière, dormant since its last eruption in 1902, its massive crater collecting a brown hot lake of tropical rains, though magma had formed the fiery red eye of an island within the lake in a gradual reawakening, not many years before Mitchell Wilson had arrived from the United States, a novitiate in the art of development, to begin his professional career outside of the university. He could start there, certainly, retracing his second and ill-fated climb up the volcano's eastern flank, or he could give in to his greater impulse to understand
forces
, enlarge the aperture and start with St. Catherine, the island itself, the paltry trickle of blood it had contributed to the genocidal enterprise known as the New World, the island named and renamed, owned and disowned many many times before history dumped it into the hands of Edison Banks and his choir of fallen angels, intoning hymns of reformation, men who would eventually engineer a social machine not unlike an internal combustion engine, mounting it over an axle of senseless change, measured in meaningless revolutions per minute.

No, he told himself. In the beginning was neglect, it all starts with neglect, the ruin of a rag-draped old man shuffling toward you with his hand outstretched.

No, not that either. In the beginning was love—but they would only let him take this thought so far, and then laughed ruefully, as if that would have made them happy, cleared things up.

Starting with Johnnie of course was a disaster. He could blame everything on Johnnie or he could ex her out of each scenario entirely, and both ways the result was the same. What happened was, for the most part, with a few Johnniesque flourishes, going to happen anyway, with or without her, she was born to the periphery, though it would be years before he would ever concede, however partially, to this truth. He couldn't start with Johnnie because he had loved her, and that skewed the methodology.

Preoccupation was the end of life. He had stopped living, began to think of where he was as a welcome refuge from life. He stood in a cell below the battlements of Fort Gregory, his face in the barred window opening onto the courtyard where they had hanged Iman Ibrahim. The exposure was northern; he didn't appreciate the irony, or the lack of sunlight, but he would stare at the courtyard—it was usually empty, it had its rush hours—until a panic came over him, stare and stare, repeating his mistakes, carrying them back and forth in his memory, the terrible seductive comfort of repetition, the deadness of it, he could go all day and night like this, the panic would only come when he stopped, when in his nowhereness he could feel the outward punch of life within, and that would terrorize him, then he'd be right in the middle of the sloppy work they did with Ibrahim, Collymore, who refused to march across the courtyard to his death, who kicked and screamed and flailed in the grip of his escort like a fish in a net. Even with his wrists bound behind him he was beyond control. The guards beat the daylight out of him with their bootoos, they beat on him stupidly, without expertise, and they knocked him unconscious, which enabled them to drag his limp body up the scaffolding and loop the noose around his neck but prevented them from hanging him, because it was not cricket to execute a man unless he was alive and aware, in the fullness of his blood and breath, standing on his own doomed feet, in the shoes that would point him, momentarily, toward the grave. There was a policy, a protocol, to follow, very colonial. They had been required to wait while the medical officer in attendance went in search of smelling salts.

Here was what you could call an end.

Once it started it was always starting, and once it finished it was always finishing but in fact he knew it was only a story about a short time in his life and the lives of some people he knew, set far off on an island in the middle of the sea, a small place of little apparent consequence to the world, inhabited by a people no one ever thought about except, with a covetous twinge of yearning, as the smiling images
beneath the palm trees in travel brochures, and in fact he always started with the day he returned to Howard Bay, having spent a strangely prefatory night in the house of a black woman named Josephine. He remembered a hot, happy walk. He thought of weeding his kitchen garden, which the rains had made mad with growth. He thought of a swim and then a shower, afterward he would fry his fish and eat it reading on the veranda and by then it would be time to find a ride to the airport. After the night with Josephine, he felt well rehearsed for Johnnie: now he had an image restored of how it could be.

Quiddley had brought down the tree. It was wrong, it broke his heart, but it was done. Quiddley rushed to explain the second he saw him at the top of the drive, nodding convincingly, wanting to be believed—he didn't do it, he had found it this way; a rapid stream of language—not about the poinciana but about the house. There was a boy inside, Quiddley revealed, ask him. Whatever anger he might have felt about the loss of the tree rode on the coattails of a greater dismay, finding the cottage trashed. The boy sat sprawled and asleep in one of the plastic-cushioned chairs in the front room, a toylike birdgun leveled across his knees, his hands clutching the barrel and stock. It started this way because Mitchell was one hundred percent sure Davidius had gotten into his house and gone berserk. Robbery was not the point, from what he could tell. Things were smashed and thrown down and scatterkicked and pulled from drawers and half busted, but the little there that had any value still remained. The radio, his bicycle, the liquor, Johnnie's jewelry, cheap as it was, and most tellingly, the small amount of cash, about twenty dollars' worth, on his dresser and in the pocket of the pants he had worn to work on Thursday, flung out of his wardrobe with everything else. Like someone couldn't take it a second longer, the way his life looked from outside. Perhaps going mad needed no more motive than that. In the bathroom the shower gurgled, drooling, and he turned it all the way off. His wristwatch was where he had left it, on the back of the sink, and when he turned around he saw that the metal eye of the hook had been torn from the wood frame of the door.

The boy didn't know anything about it. Sometime in the middle of the night before the storm hit Tillman came to his pallet in the gardener's shed, shook him awake and told him, Go guard the white man's house down on the road to Augustine. He didn't see or hear a soul until Mr. Quiddley arrived early to take down the tree and scrape his coal pits. The evidence in the kitchen was that Captain Pat had indeed fried and eaten his hamburger. A fan of bread slices lay on the floor like playing cards. A jar of mayonnaise had been chucked
through the window of the door leading from the kitchen to an outside set of steps on the side of the house, but the door itself remained deadbolted. Nobody in Augustine was outfitted for glass repair, but the boy thought Grampa Hell the gardener could handle the job. Wilson gave him some money for his trouble and sent him off, first to the Augustine police station. He went outside and sat on the stoop, watching Mr. Quiddley reducing the enormity of the tree into bundles, and waited. Everything had become a shade worse than bothersome. His private world was in the process of being dismantled, rearranged off center. Even the beautiful trees weren't immune to whatever nameless, nibbling force was at play against him. Its agents however were not anonymous. Johnnie was certainly part of it, the general tendency toward subversiveness, but could be turned. Out or in.
In
meaning what? he thought. Mr. Quiddley, loyal servant of faraway voices. Creeps like Davidius. It was up to him to assert himself, be clear and firm, fight wrong with right. The cops contradicted their standard reputation by not taking all day to move their ass. There were two of them, an inspector and a private, big shot and flunky. They arrived not in a police car but something civilian, a Japanese compact dripping wet, as though it had just been washed, and their innocuous amateurity bumped Mitchell forward into a minor epiphany, realizing that in all the time he had lived on St. Catherine he had never once heard a siren, seen an ambulance. Any crisis was disguised in the normal flow of things. Even the two police checkpoints midpoint on the windward and leeward highways were unremarkably routine, details in the landscape, if you chose to see them clearly.

The inspector carried a composition notebook and pencil and proceeded to take Mitchell's statement, crafting his script at an excruciating pace, three or four words to a measure. However many sentences gushed from Wilson's mouth, the inspector made him stop and repeat himself, over and over, nodding his receptivity with the unhurried concentration of a woodcarver. As an authority figure he was comic, tall and lanky, his regulation-issue shorts so baggy they looked like culottes ballooned over the poles of his legs. The private inhabited a planet of his own, staring dully inside the house, screwing a blunt finger into his enlarged nose.

Mitchell felt gratified when the inspector seemed to agree with him about Davidius. The fellow who skulk in the bush around discotheque and such, making a damn nuisance of heself with the women. That's the guy, said Mitchell. We does call him Bushwhacker, the inspector said, permitting himself a thin smile.

That's him, said Mitchell. You know him. Great.

They stepped inside and toured the disarray and when they came out again into the sunshine, the boy was up along the road, kicking a soccer ball of paper trash ahead of him, just now passing back on his way from Augustine. The cops being cops wouldn't have thought to give him a lift up the hill. Mitchell called out to him, offering him a ride. “Okay?” he said, looking at the inspector, who grunted unfavorably, but with the police anything less than outright no was consent.

The boy slowed, his shoulders sinking, as if he were being made to obey. They were all up on the road now, standing by the car, waiting for him. “Come on,” Mitchell said. “We'll drop you down by the Beach Bar.” He walked back reluctantly, sullen; he had a problem with this. His head hung and he seemed to be studying the length of his feet. Evidently something had happened to him—he was rifleless for one thing. Mitchell asked him about the gun.
Dem tek it
, he mumbled, careful not to look at the police who, ignoring him, got into the car. Mitchell opened the rear door and motioned for the boy to get in first. “Who took it?” he asked. “These guys?” The boy began to answer but thought better of it, cops and white men equals keep your mouth closed almost anywhere in the world.

“We confiscatin firearms,” said the inspector to the windscreen.

“Since when?”

“Since—I believe it come de way of some emergency decree.”

Mitchell asked what was the emergency and the inspector said he didn't know. Some damn thing. He'd buy him a new one, Mitchell told the boy, feeling responsible for sending the boy to the station.

“Sah, best not,” the inspector warned, friendly advice. He stopped to let the boy out at RosehilPs entrance, taking his servant's pay in the form of a gratuitous reprimand.