Swimming in the Volcano Read Online Free

turn.
    â€œDownshift,” Mitchell whispered, leaning across the seat to Isaac’s ear. “Downshift, downshift.”
    Isaac chopped the transmission out of gear but couldn’t force it back in, jamming the shifter forward until third gear began to stink like industrial fire and reproduce the noise of a crosscut saw chewing into sheet metal. Mitchell heard teeth fly off inside the housing, hot bullets ricocheting deep inside the Comet’s gut. Finally the gear nudged into place and Isaac, loathe to do anything without his customary smoothness, had to let the clutch spring back before it was too late. Mitchell shot forward across the seat and into the dashboard, his nose squashed. Blood gushed down onto the white cotton shirt he had yesterday paid a matronly neighbor the going rate of fifty cents to wash and iron in preparation for his unsolicited reunion with Johnnie. The drive train reduced revolutions with a siren’s whine while the body of the car pitched onward, obeying the laws of nature. Isaac negotiated the curve with increasing expertise, downshifting again to twenty miles an hour, and flowed the Comet cleanly through a slalom of S-turns, but as the car regained momentum, it became necessary to climb back through the gears.
    â€œSorry, Mitchie bwoy. You okay, nuh?”
    Mitchell slumped back behind the seat, licking warm blood from the fountain in his nose, wanting to wreck right now and get it over with, arrive at the airport in an ambulance (though he had never seen one on the island), collect Johnnie, plead her onto the gurney next to him, commence the nursing process without delay, submit to the truce of medical crisis under which old animosities could be justifiably ignored. The force of still another radical hook in the road packed him into a smaller and smaller space against the base of the car door. Again Isaac was grinding the transmission into third gear, a hellish racket that did not result in the anticipated roar of rpms. The clutch engaged, the engine idled in a terrible calm. What was once third gear Mitchell supposed had been lathed down to a sprocketless hub. Isaac bullied his way into second, a gear not made for the speed they had accumulated. The Comet bucked as though it were launching missiles, the cylinders howled with abuse, smoke filtered through under the dashboard, and the machinery, now a field experiment inthe process of fission, blew up. The exhaust manifold gave an explosive belch and went silent. Mitchell looked up and saw Isaac with his jaw clenched. Angry tears appeared in his eyes, and he shouted.
    â€œ
Miss Defy! Miss Defy!
You weak obsocky bitch, how you mash up so!”
    With half the mountain to go they were freewheeling and bitterly terrified. The radio continued to play, however; the music and its partisan melodies gave Isaac a poor reason to hope for the best. They rolled faster and faster, a steel trap of locomotion and churning rhythms, down the hill. The Crab Hole Bar flashed by: a smear of pastels, gray planking supporting a rusted zinc roof, a line of disinterested fellows on broken chairs in a dirt yard, laundry draped over pigeon pea bushes, a little boy in a tee shirt but no pants having a handless pee, the thick flora again, more pedestrians as the mountain was frequently residential at this lesser elevation. People hopped off the road into the homicidal gutters of the Crown agents, shooed by Isaac’s hornblowing.
Miss Defy
screeched around a blind bend into the path of an oncoming sedan; Isaac fought heroically to regain his legal portion of the thoroughfare. Crouching back onto the floor in an unheroic position himself, Mitchell discovered that the trash he had been tossing around on, one of the plastic shopping bags, had ripped open to dispense hundreds of individually wrapped, multicolored prophylactics. At the sight of them he felt extremely sorry for himself, thinking, God, they’re going to pluck these out of my mangled corpse