Swimming in the Volcano Read Online Free PDF Page B

worldliness was tolerated the same way illiterates will tolerate a friend who reads books. Because of his lover, a doughnut-hipped Peace Corps volunteer known as Big Sally, Saconi was familiar with the tribe of expatriates on the island, and chronically skeptical of the more transitory community of foreign professionals—the consultants, bankers, multinational representatives, mafiosi, political sightseers, aid administrators and pirates, the army of surrogate invaders who believed they could float St. Catherine into some nirvanic backwater of their own influence.
    When they shambled in, Saconi looked them up and down and snorted. Isaac limped and carried his radio equipment, stiff wires dangling from its housing like chicken feet. One of his ears was split and raw. Mitchell had a bib of drying blood on the front of his shirt.
    â€œWho strike de fust blow?”
    Saconi’s speaking voice itself was laden with cushiony music. He had a marimba for vocal chords, producing syllables lubricated with a range of tonal inflections governed by West African rhythms. Mitchell loved to listen to him, despite his attitude which was often ironic, curried enough to divide the meek from the sportsmen.
    â€œSatan,” Isaac answered miserably. Saconi pointed his finger at Mitchell.
    â€œDon’t look at me,” Mitchell protested.
    â€œWhat, you not Satan? I hear some talk Satan is a backra mahn, you know. God, Lucifer—all dem big shots is backra, white like you.”
    Mitchell was never certain, on the several occasions they had been together, how much racial conviction lay behind the musician’s wit. Saconi expressed himself with a tooth-hidden smile, a mock severity to the intelligence of his eyes, and a taunting posture that could turn willowy and fettled without notice.
    â€œAdmit it, Wilson. Somehow you twistin up dis poor fella Isaac’s life. You born into it, eh?”
    â€œOffer us a seat,” Mitchell said. “All we expect is a small act of decency and a drink to calm us down.”
    They could skip wisecracks across the opaque depths of their histories, ridicule the swirl of centuries at their backs, but the other hand was perpetually occupied with more serious work, dismissing the fence of distance between races and cultures that made any searchfor brotherhood too arduous for pastime. Most attempts of this sort were charades, performances in masquerade. Mitchell was by nature cautious with people although the island seemed to contradict this tendency in him. Isaac he knew was trustworthy on all accounts, as a friend without an agenda of need or expectation. Saconi he wasn’t sure about.
    â€œA blameless white guy,” the musician said to Isaac. “Imagine daht.”
    Isaac’s spirit was overburdened and he couldn’t be enticed to play.
“Miss Defy
finish up,” he reported sadly. “Ooah Mountain mash she.” He told the story of what had occurred as if it were a natural phenomenon, not mechanical failing or human error. Saconi let him moon a little longer over the bottle of scotch before he waved him on it with a grousing air of obligation.
    â€œTake heart, bruddah,” said the composer Saconi.
“Miss Defy
nevah finish so. Calypso redeem she to you.”
    â€œCy-ahnt drive a fuckin song,” Isaac said. Restitution in any form was a rarity on St. Catherine though its promise was as common as sunrise. He grimaced with the bottle to his mouth, drank, and gave it back with a smack of appreciation.
    â€œMitchell,” Saconi said, “you must import womahn? De shelves not stocked to suit you, bruddah?” He poured himself another inch of whiskey, the gold rings on his fingers tapping the glass, restless percussion.
    Johnnie’s coming burned Mitchell’s stomach and crowded his thoughts. He had no idea of the implications of her visit; he couldn’t have been more nonplussed if Jacqueline Onassis had sent him a note on