Swimming in the Volcano (77 page)

Telling himself, Here is the woman in the waves and she welcomes me. That is something.

Selwyn had said tell the white man the fellow by the name of Isaac waited for him, up Soufrière; tell the white man pass the bundle to Isaac, it was important, then go down to the road, take a jitney to Queenstown, never say what happened—that was the plan but now he knew he didn't like this plan, he wasn't telling himself why.

She said, Do you know about the Indians?

He said, Yes.

She said, Are they the people who live here?

He said, Yes.

She said, Do you know their name?

He said, Yes. Jumbies.

Jumbies?

Yes. Loas.

The big woman said, Put on your shoe and let's go.

Wait, he said. Wait.

The big woman said, No, we have to go now.

She said, Come with us and tell me about the Indians.

The big woman said, No, you stay here. We're going.

Wait, he said. He tried to think of a good reason to tell her.

Why?

The bundle. It must go to the white man.

Why?

It is his.

Do you want some of our mushroom tea? she said.

He said, Yes.

The big woman said, Don't give him any of that. Are you crazy?

She said, Do you know what it is?

He didn't but he said, Yes.

She said, Do you want to see the Indians?

He didn't but he said, Yes.

When she took the plastic bottle out of the big woman's pack, the big woman said, This is really stupid, you know. I'm going ahead. You can put the bundle in my pack and I'll take it to Mitchell. Iman looked at her, puzzling over this, knowing she shouldn't have it, but then he gave it to her and she left.

In the bottle was black shit turned liquid. She drank from it and he drank from it and then it was empty. Don't worry, she called up the path, we are right behind you.

She started walking and he followed after her saying, Wait, wait, wait, wait.

She said, Tell me if you can see them.

He said, Yes, I see them.

The face of his mother blinked into his mind.

He said, Wait. He said, It is not safe for us. I am here to protect you, he said. There was a plan and they were in it but it was not the same plan as before. Then he could move but he couldn't speak. The jungle swarmed with moths of light and began to fly apart.

It was less sunny and Mitchell began to worry about the clouds, congealed in a tissuey mass around the summit. The jungle was opening up, broken more frequently by sky. They passed a rank of spiky gru-gru palms, sylvan terrorists, the bayonet-like thorns hung with a gauzy lace of webs.

The deciduous highlands were trimly grassed, the landscaped order of its trees and sun-dappled hollows reminiscent of a city park. Here at its interface of green and gold, the mountain began to tease the climbers with its true identity. Catspaws of cooler breeze evaporated the sweat on their faces. Mitchell's pace was unrelenting: Tillman and Adrian fell behind.

The ground became crusty and porous and he came to the labyrinthine gouge of trails, the main branch clearly evident, entering the girdle of tall brown grasses that thrived below the upper cone. He could hear the sweep of the wind, the crystal tinkle and patter of cinders loosened by his advance, the interrogatory piping of an unfamiliar bird. He looked down the island's backbone at the surrounding peaks, wonderfully Euclidian, the classical proportion of their spatial properties like a textbook illustration.

Ten or twelve stories above him, there was a fault in the plane of the slope, as if the land had sighed, creating a long rampart of rock which from Mitchell's position made a false horizon, obstructing the view of the summit. At places, the trail cut deep into the surface, as if he were tunneling his way up. There were notches and footholds in the rock ledge. He climbed to the top, pausing to fill his lungs with bracing air.

When he saw the police patrol he thought, This cannot be right. One of the officers wore an olive-colored kepi; the other a beret. They waved but he surmised they were waving him away, so he kept
going, and they yelled for him to come back. They had prisoners, or so it appeared, three riffraff hunkered in the dirt. He was breathing hard from the deliberateness of the ascent he had made, thinking this was how he liked his blood to feel, pounding in circulation, fat with oxygen.

What's up? he asked. The officer who spoke to him wore a pair of field binoculars around his neck; there were captain's chevrons on the sleeve of his blouse. All four had shaved heads, muddied boots. Their countenance was unconcerned but their intention was obscure.

The questions came with a sobering and fatalistic, familiar rhythm. Captain Eddins told him to remove his pack and open it for inspection. For no apparent reason, Eddins withdrew the envelope George James had given him to forward to Isaac, and slid it into his back pocket. Why are you taking my letter? Mitchell demanded. Evidence, said Captain Eddins, without further explanation. His heart rate leveled off to its routine. Eddins ordered one of the privates to frisk him and he thought, Oh shit. The breeze was cold and he clamped his jaws shut to prevent his teeth from chattering.

Tillman and Adrian came up, their faces rapt with discovery. What's wrong? Adrian said, unable to do anything about her grin. She had a photocopy of her passport folded in her back pocket. Tillman mentioned all the right names, invoking the Tourist Board and the Chamber of Commerce. Bandits, said Eddins. Ruffians. He cocked his eyebrows and smiled, as if they were sharing a practical joke. With apologies, their haversacks were searched. Eddins jutted his chin toward the men on the ground. You see? he said. Bad men. This was for their own protection.

How so? asked Tillman, achieving the vastly undesirable result of being assigned an escort and exiled with Adrian into the clouds.

Mitchell started to protest but thought better of it. This event was wholly artificial, he could feel it. An exercise in power. He calmly sat down on the ledge to wait for Sally and Johnnie and ate one of the tuna sandwiches Johnnie had made for them and drank most of the juice remaining in his thermos. He looked out at the sea which was dressed in light—foxfire and jewels. It did not occur to him this was anything more than harassment. Which leader? he thought, which philosophy today? The two officers were not on friendly terms with one another.

He saw Sally then, entering the maze of lava and grass. Rising to his feet, he waved and shouted her name, wanting her to look up, see whom he was with, figure it out and compose herself for trouble.
Turn back, perhaps, though that would be a shame. Eddins told him to stop signaling.

This is the signal for hello, Mitchell said.

When she reached the point where the trail wedged into the wall of the shelf, he said he was going to give her a hand up and nobody made an objection. Her face was flushed and disconcerted, her hair dark and wet on her forehead. She wanted to know what was happening and he told her he wasn't sure.

Where's Johnnie? he asked. Sally popped up beside him with a balletic leap.

Were you to meet someone back at the waterfall? Sally said. He shook his head and frowned. She looked puzzled by this and began to say there was a man back there, but then Eddins interrupted, calling her over. I'm too stoned to be dealing with the police, she whispered as she obeyed Eddins, yet the next second she was engaged in a battle of wills over her identification and Mitchell was astounded by her contentiousness, her fearless lack of cooperation.

Eddins wanted to look in her knapsack; Sally made a brazen claim about her rights. For some reason, Eddins backed off from the demand and asked where the other woman was and Sally answered Johanna was not far behind.

Eddins said they would wait for her and he allowed Sally and Mitchell to sit on the ledge to rest their legs after the climb. Sally lowered her voice and said somebody's going to a lot of trouble here. The jungle riffled below their feet, like choppy water, as the wind came up and they perused the treeline, waiting for their lost fifth to emerge.

Where is she? he asked.

She drank more tea. She gave some to the lunatic who didn't know what it was. Mitchell, Sally said, look, I can't get my thoughts to cohere but there's a problem. Let's stand up and go, she didn't think the police would do anything to try to stop them.

This is so stupid, she said loudly for Eddins' benefit. Really really stupid.

Mitchell was flabbergasted by her behavior. What the fuck is going on? he snapped, grappling with his temper, and Sally whispered as she unknotted her legs to stand that down by the waterfall she had put something into her knapsack that evidently shouldn't be there. Don't ask me what it is, she said angrily, ask Johanna and that psychopath she's with. I can't think straight, This is some kind of a setup, I think, Mitchell, she said. Let's go back. Right now, let's start walking down.

Mitchell had stood up with her and together they confronted the end of Captain Eddins' patience. We have to go back down and find our friend, Sally told him. She might be in trouble.

Johanna Fernandez, said Eddins, stepping toward Sally, unbuckling the holster on his belt. Mitchell wasn't certain if he was referring to Johnnie herself, naming her, or if he had come to the conclusion that Sally was not who she claimed to be. This has gone too far, Mitchell said, and he instinctively placed himself between the two of them. Eddins reached to shove him aside, but Mitchell wrenched himself free of his grip. When he heard the first shot, Mitchell thought,
And now the bastards are shooting
. Eddins himself looked bewildered by the gunfire, scanning down the slope like the rest of them. Mitchell felt a spontaneous detachment from the present danger—what made it easy to kill with a gun also made it easy to stand there while someone far away shot at you. The second shot came, whether from the same direction or not he couldn't tell. With a sharp intake of breath, Sally stumbled back into his arms. After the third shot he and Eddins both located Collymore at the edge of the trees, his pistol raised straight up into the air. Run, he heard one of the cops say, and thought for sure he was telling this to the men on the ground. Two of them scrambled off into the high grass; the third remained sitting right where he was, peering down the slope and yelling, What the fuck is this nonsense, Eddins? who is down there shooting at we?

He remembered looking at the ocean, its cold sparkle, wisps of precipitation licking out from the clouds and evaporating before they fell to the surface, and then he was engulfed by the devastating task of saving her. It was not a time for revelation, and she said only what she might be expected to say, that she was sorry for the mortal burden she had just become and that what she wanted was to live.

Her unopened pack was left behind, there on the ledge. As far as Mitchell was willing to say, that was the last anybody ever saw of it.

When they found Johnnie on the trail she was hysterical, screaming and sobbing, screaming
What happened to Sally? What happened to her? He was trying to protect us!
but he passed by without attempting to deal with her, consumed by the totality of his labor. When they passed by Eddins facedown on the trail, the cop who was helping him with Sally put her down, and before Mitchell took her up again, without even thinking he bent over Eddins' body with its bloody insignia and removed the envelope from the captain's back pocket, tucking it into his own. Somewhere on the periphery of the terrible rush to the trailhead, Tillman and Adrian tripped and faltered, pale ghosts, clumsy with horror, and then Ballantyne was there like an answered prayer
and Mitchell, groaning with hope, was saying, Where have you been? Man, where were you?

He remembered reading Jolene's note, tied with a rib of frond to the steering wheel, holding it in front of him while he drove.
Miss: Him does love dis mash-up child more than me. We gone back. I am sorry for dis trouble
.

At the clinic in Scarborough, every breath he took threatened to strangle him with fumes of desperation. There was a pernicious argument whether or not to transfuse Sally. She could speak but couldn't say what her blood type was. It can go very nicely or it can go very badly, Betancourt explained. If they make it they make it, if they seize up they seize up, but she had lost too much already, he believed, not to risk it, and so he rode along with them, squeezing a plastic container of fresh whole blood into her arm. Almost an hour passed before Betancourt said quietly, There's a reaction. Sally became combative and then, shivering feverishly, went into shock. Mitchell was only marginally aware of slamming into the long-horned Brahman bull, careening into the ditch, the renewed flow of blood, this time Tillman's, his forehead shattering the windshield. The cowherd blocked Ballantyne's Land Rover with his body, demanding compensation, being a silly bastard; under ordinary circumstances killing a cow was a serious affair. Ballantyne wasted time reasoning with the man until Adrian, shrieking at him to go, hitched her leg over the transmission housing and stomped down on the accelerator, sending the cowherd windmilling into the darkness. In his mindlessness, he welcomed the pain in his wrist, which worked on him like a stimulant, a transfixing point of clarity in the void, and on that part of the ride Mitchell was back on the mountain again, Sally over his shoulder, soaking him with warm, slippery blood, the rain pelting them, depth and texture draining out of the jungle until it became two-dimensional, a black on black intaglio; the palpable foreknowledge of death, his muscles quaking under the sad weight of the future she would not attend as he carried her off the mountain. He kept smelling the bay rum smell of Captain Eddins, and Johnnie was tripping, totally freaked, blindly keening in the downpour, what happened? what happened? over and over again, until the violence he felt against her was incommunicable, and an unforgiving mantra ran through his head like a vicious jingle: You are stupid, you've been stupid all your life, this should be you,
I wish it were you
.