Swimming in the Volcano Read Online Free PDF Page A

his vision. Entering the turn, Isaac cranked the wheel, his elbows flapping, and the Comet responded as if the asphalt had turned to ice. The traction gone,
Miss Defy
rotated gracefully around the bend of the parabola and whipped full circle back into the straightaway, steady again, just like you see in the movies, Mitchell gasping and shrunken but Isaac far in rapture over his accomplishment.
    â€œI nevah see such as daht before, mahn,” he said, marveling at the stunt.
    In the abbreviated distance ahead, the driver of the car they had crumped swerved half off the road, perpendicular into the entrance of a dirt drive. She exited her vehicle, a late-model Morris, shiny black, with imposing fury. She was a sizable woman and burly, her bosom swinging underneath a yellow blouse, and she charged into the road to flag them down and give Isaac a thrashing. The bumper on the rear of her Morris had an experimental shape to it, the taillights ceased to exist—small damage all told. Isaac was helpless to obey her directions. He took his hands off the wheel and raised them level with his ears as
Miss Defy
rolled past, not merely to advertise his innocence, but to express his exasperation at being the object of this person’s wrath. Since he had knocked into her without malice or intent, he seemed to be saying with his shrugging gesture, she herself might take a moment to consider that he was only a poor man about to be crushed by a destiny he could no longer persuade.
    The gesture was sincere but ill-timed. Like a horse with a plan of its own, the Comet veered radically to the left, pulled by wheels last aligned in another era. There were no drainage ditches here, the shoulders too abrupt, the slope too precipitous, to collect water.
Miss Defy
catapulted off the surface of the earth, nothing in sight for a brief eternity but a blue horizon scratched with clouds. They completed their arc and nosed downward, hopping back onto rough ground, their jaws slamming shut, the tops of their heads denting the inside of the roof, making stars explode behind their eyes. Isaac hung courageously to the wheel as they plunged.
Mercy, mercy, mercy
, he croaked, his first surrender to fatalism. They rumbled through dry brush, the Comet an ocher dust storm lashed by branches and spiky shoots. There were noises to fear—something substantial ripped from the undercarriage and the thumping of a tire burst into shreds. Scrub hens bounced off the windshield and iguanas skated across the plane of the hood. Isaac resembled a captain at the helm in high seas. They regained the pavement by dozing through a low rock wall, circumventing two impossible curves above in the road by the grace of this route. Through a final turn,
Miss Defy
boomeranged sloppily and was expelled off the black tongue of the mountain onto the flat shorn vale of the airstrip, leaking an inauspicious trail of prophylactics from a gash in the floorboard. Isaac guided the car into a newly planted cane field and they rolled peacefully for fifty feet until it died in the dirt. The whole episode had seemed unreal in a gross, cheap way.
    Mitchell asked Isaac if he was okay. He looked sleepyheaded, overcome with lassitude, as if he wanted to dream backward through the catastrophe and nullify it. He closed his eyes and held the side of his skull; lazy blood seeped through the spaces between his fingers.
    â€œWha?” Isaac said, rocking with pain. “Me ear bust in twos.”
    Without much conviction, he affirmed his well-being and then complained further of a sprained ankle, a wrenched knee, and a sore chest from being hammered into the steering column. With sighing despondency he turned off the radio and dismantled it, even yanking the speakers from their door mounts, the silence as sad as taps played at a memorial service. A lot of noise remained in Mitchell’s own ears, a high-volume residue of calypso, brain-shaking, accompanied by the distant rasp of waves on the