Swimming in the Volcano (79 page)

Then he left her again and went with Tillman up to Rosehill. They sat in the kitchen for a while. Tillman opened two cans of beef consommé and they drank them down. The second hit of speed roared through his veins, bringing a ragged, jerky, resurrective surge and no hint whatsoever of redemption. Tillman surrendered to bed, leaving Mitchell the keys to the station wagon and access to the bar. His mind was a static, wordless hum and he preferred it that way, nursing a bottle of beer until five when he got in the car and went down the road for Johnnie. She was sitting in darkness in the front room, smoking a cigarette, dressed in the clothes she had first arrived in, wearing sunglasses, her hair pulled back in a ponytail and her sun visor on, her bags at her feet. “This isn't right,” she said. “I didn't do anything to deserve this.”

“What did you give Sally on the mountain?”

“I didn't give her anything, Mitch. This guy who came out of the jungle did. He had a package. He said it was for you.”

“What was in it?”

“I don't know,” she said coolly. “He wouldn't let me come up with her. He was paranoid, he was seeing things. I shouldn't have let him drink the tea.”

“We're not going to discuss this.”

“Just tell me this. What am I guilty of?”

“Of being here.”

He carried her things out to the car, not to help her but to force her to move, and the two of them climbed in. Another dawn was breaking as they crested Ooah Mountain. The silence in the car was hellish and evil and he accepted that this hell was his own, it came from him, it was him. She asked him to stop at the top of the last foothill overlooking Brandon Vale and the airport. The De Havilland was out on the airstrip already, waiting for her, glistening in the pale blue advent of dawn. She lit a final cigarette and whipped the match down on the floormat, stamping on it, changed her mind about her anger and turned to look at him with a matter-of-fact expression.

“Mitch, what are you doing in this fucking place? You don't belong here either, especially now.” She put a hand carefully atop his trembling knee. “Come with me,” she said. “I know how to make money.”

“What are you saying to me? What?” He started to cry, push her. “Get the fuck out.
Get the fuck out!
”

“You're sending me back to him,” she said with urgency, pleading. “Don't, please, God, please don't.”

“I know exactly where I'm sending you,” he rasped, and that was all he needed to say.

She wouldn't let him take her any further but sprang open the door and jumped out, leaving behind everything but one of her straw bags. He turned off the engine and watched her walk away under the streetlamps of the village, through splashes of light and shadow, down the hill past a cluster of houses where the dogs came out into the street to harry her, the sounds he heard drifting up the slope came from her as well, an anguished chorus of sobs and yelps, and she continued trudging onward to the bottom of the mountain, passing by the stripped hulk of
Miss Defy
in the cane field, to the plane.

“We're here to talk freely,” the friends of golf said, after the original foursome became a threesome then finally a twosome, teeing up on Johnnie as if she were a particularly problematic par five. “Why did she leave? If you know.”

She didn't simply leave, Mitchell told them. She didn't leave. He had sent her away.

“Oh,” they said, flashing one another looks—here was something new; you didn't get anything from this guy except Hamlet, if you didn't ask the right questions. “That doesn't look good, does it?”

“No,” he had to agree. “It probably doesn't.”

*     *     *

He slept for a day and a half, and would have slept more, but they made such a noise at his door that he had no choice but to get up before they broke it down. He opened up to an NPF team, six of them altogether, traveling in two vehicles, three to a faction. Get dressed, they said. Although the police who had been on Soufrière had said they were unable to corroborate Mitchell's statement, that same Saturday, early in the morning, a forest ranger had spotted someone whom he knew as Iman Ibrahim camped at a waterfall on the path up the volcano, and this fellow fit Mitchell Wilson's description. What description? Mitchell thought. His brain was foggy. All he remembered telling them was a guy in a khaki tee shirt and blue jeans.

Come, the police at his door said. They were taking him up north to Scarborough, where they were holding Iman Ibrahim, after capturing him in the mountains.

The villagers had assembled themselves around the small station that still bore the seal of the queen above its door. The banana plantations stretched up the mountainsides and out of sight into a dust of clouds, where the Rastamen lived off mangoes thieved from government-owned trees. Beautiful children, naked or in hand-me-down rags, ran forward laughing and yelling as the cars stopped and Mitchell and the policemen climbed out. He put on his sunglasses to close his eyes off to the crowd.

The sounds of excitement faded. The children slowed their wild dance and backed away, wide-eyed and suddenly shy from the wonder of a man so different so near.
Ahll dis wickedness, bwoy
. He looked around at the subdued young women making babies and fat matrons in bright-colored dresses, the schoolgirls in spotless blue and white uniforms, country girls with hard new breasts pushing out blouses hand-sewn from flour sacks, all pressed in for a view of him as the afternoon gathered the golden accents of twilight. A mongrel dog ran through the lot and a boy whacked it,
tek daht!
, with the broad side of the cutlass he carried to open waternuts. He felt cold, disjoined, elevated out of his own humanity, knowing his color was still the color of their fate and hope for mercy. Where are all the men? he wondered.

The police escorted him into the station, lifting their knees high in their black cotton pants or leopard fatigues. The officer at the desk in the unpainted front room swung his arm out and back revealing a sweat-soaked armpit and they followed his direction down a passageway of gray concrete to a rear exit and stepped out into the sunlight again.

The inspector in charge of the case, known to be a Kingsley loyalist, was waiting, dressed in street clothes and black leather shoes without socks. Mitchell remained on the doorstep, looking at the white dust in the creases of the man's ankle, thinking the same dirt would show up black on his own skin. The collar of the inspector's blue-striped shirt was open, the top buttons unfastened to exhibit the gum-pink shine of a starburst scar on his chest, no clearer badge of authority necessary. Strong, arrogant, and he would not die. The small dirt square smelled of urine and decay and the musky fertility of the lowlands. An occasional ribbon of breeze carried the sweet rotting odor of bitte into the village from an arrowroot-processing factory farther up the small river that flowed alongside the road. The private who had escorted Mitchell snapped his heels together in response to a nod from the inspector and took one step back away from him.

“Yes, well, come down, mahn,” said the inspector. He turned to survey his arrangement and Mitchell continued looking at the back of the inspector's head rather than the line of men awaiting him.

“Here now,” said the inspector, swinging his arm toward the twelve, their hard and scornful faces waiting for Mitchell to acknowledge their presence. The inspector's arm remained in the air and he spoke to the space between Mitchell and the men. Look closely at these men here, the inspector was saying, and if you see the man who fired upon you on Mount Soufrière, identify the fellow by walking up and touching him.

The cast on Mitchell's hand and forearm was unbearably hot and sticky, nightmarishly tight, as though his arm was half stuck in the bone-ringed gullet of a large and powerful snake. He showed no intention of moving. He felt a whimsical desire to live on horseback, to walk home to his family's house in Virginia like a Confederate parolee. The inspector bent his knees slightly, impatient, and pressed his body up to its full height, imploring his cooperation.

“Yes, please. Step up, mahn. Walk down the line and tap the fella if you see him.”

He glanced briefly at the row of faces but could not overcome the inertia holding him fast in place. Some of the men watched the ground, some looked straight ahead with more apathy than interest and some eyed him disdainfully, anticipating judgment. Who are these men and are they being paid for their time? he thought; then their faces blurred but still he stared ahead as if reviewing them, not comprehending how he was to fulfill his purpose here. Saturday remained fragmented, shattered into pieces, moments so slow as to
be endless, but the whole eluded him and the danger never had a face to it.

A man grabbed a running child by the shoulder and set him down roughly at his feet. It was nearing suppertime. The inspector spoke again, his voice harsh, intimidating.

“Come, mahn, come. Step up to the men.”

He didn't want to touch anyone, that was the problem. It would be an obscene and juvenile gesture, resonant with vindictiveness. There would be no need. He knew from the general movement in the crowd behind him people were beginning to feel cheated by his inability to act, and he wanted to scatter them back to their own affairs.

“Go on, please. Positive identification is the law.”

He took a step closer and stopped, scrutinizing them for the first time. First man too young. Second man looked vaguely like someone he knew. Third man too big. Fourth man too ugly to say even, yes, you are part of this. Fifth man dressed too rich and stylish. Six the same as the first five, black men with no reason to tolerate the humiliation of his indecision. Seven was a smiling student he recognized, enrolled at the Teacher's College. He raised his eyebrows and nodded:
Hey
. The eighth man lodged his face into his shoulder and Mitchell stared, empty-headed, and continued on to those remaining. The third man in line called for the inspector to dismiss them, but instead the policeman took Mitchell by the arm and drew him forward, walking him down the line.

They came back to the eighth man, the fellow shaking like a cold, wet dog, his head still buried tight in his shoulder in a posture of such classical guilt Mitchell thought, Get me away from him. Bits of grass and leaves adhered to his natty hair, as though he had spent a night in the bush, and he rocked from foot to foot, bent in shame. Mitchell noted the high cheekbones and long shallow cheeks, the darting set of slanting eyes and crest of hair on his forehead, asking himself could he identify this man they meant for him to identify. He looked so much like nobody. Then he was doing it, he lifted his broken hand, touching the arm of the fellow with his swollen fingers, thinking Here is the death you gave my friend. Vicious. Violent. Unworthy of us all. A man he didn't know whom he could perhaps kill without remorse and he told himself, You don't know who he is and you must not feel this way.

The inspector exhaled satisfaction, digging into his pocket to pay the men who had volunteered their innocence.

“Wilson,” said the inspector, “why you hesitate so?”

But even before they deposited him back at Howard Bay, the car radio was broadcasting a contradictory allegation, the Government Information Service reporting that the American woman Sally Jorgensen had been murdered by a pro-PIP bandit at large in the mountains, the ringleader of a counterrevolutionary movement, a former Scuffletown youth, son of the infamous henchman and dirty-worker Crissy Knowles.

On the second day there was Ben, Jack, Sam. The barrister was gone and so was Arnold, who seemed flabby and off his game anyway. Three was a number he could actually see. Jack had a chiseled, military crudeness to him, like he was out of uniform, like there was a time in his life when he had been redeemed by a uniform. Ben had the classic imperturbable self-regard of money and Yale. And Sam, who now seemed to be the designated giver of cigarettes, was black and couldn't be but a few years older than he was. He felt the least animosity toward Sam and thought about why. Sam held himself well, he was no nigger-for-hire like Grambling nor overly concerned that he
do
white, like the Bajan lawyer. He was secure in his negritude and Wilson defined this aspect of his character as Isaacness. Sam was thoughtful, the one you'd have to say was the theoretician, though he lacked the bad eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles to complete the picture. Hearing the slight lilt in Sam's voice, he had asked him where he was born and he said Jamaica but his parents moved to the States the same year. The other two seemed to acknowledge that if he was going to let anybody in it was going to be Sam.

But Sam wore a thousand-dollar watch on his wrist, so there was that too. It wasn't like he was kidding himself about Sam.

They began with easy questions and right away Mitchell felt himself backsliding into his obsession with Bobby Fernandez. Jack started to respond with surprising candor—
what were you doing with Fernandez's wife, Mister Wilson? why was Fernandez in Mexico City?
—but Ben and Sam held up their hands and said wait a minute, we should have gotten this straight before we started. They went over to the windows and whispered out. Mitchell thought
Aha!
they know, someone did their homework. This appeared to be an organizational problem, compartmentalization, the right hand not aware what the
left hand, et cetera. They settled the issue and sat back down. Fernandez, overnight, became taboo. Which meant they went round and round and round until Mitchell was addled and ranting about the filth-strewn floor of the morgue, the mop full of blood, flies and cockroaches and dogs, and they quit for lunch.

Sam wondered if Mitchell minded if he kept him company. He said okay but he wanted to look out the windows. There was a big white Cunard ocean liner in the harbor, and something that looked like a tiny battleship. He asked Sam if he knew what it was and he said Venezuelan navy out on maneuvers. The Cubans will be next, Mitchell muttered, an afterthought. Why do you say that? Sam asked but he didn't answer, he was trying to find Isaac's house again, down in the scrap heap of Scuffletown.