Swimming in the Volcano Read Online Free Page B

to be there with Mitchell’s official welcome.Isaac grinned as if he knew better and strolled off in the direction of the airport bar, greeting everyone as his brother and sister. He was wearing the ugliest shirt Mitchell had ever seen, a synthetic made from petroleum, splashes of gray, yellow, and bright red, like smeared viscera. Parked on his trunk, Mitchell finished reading the
Miami Herald;
both the crowd and his optimism began to thin out. Where’s my official welcome and my official driver, Mitchell complained to that part of himself that he also considered official.
    After refreshing himself at the bar, Isaac came back for him, prescient to the altered expectations of official white men. Mitchell looked at his slick pointed sideburns and his half-cocked grin, saying to himself this better work out, and stood up. Isaac took him to Rosehill Plantation, a hotel and guesthouse where Mitchell checked in until he found quarters of his own. Isaac took half his payment that day in the form of several rounds of Guiness stout at Rosehill’s beach bar, a strategic spot to examine the rise and fall of quality in female tourists. Women in bikinis would walk by and he would nudge Mitchell and say,
Oh oh, look de bubbies!
or
Cheese on!
, and tug at the knees of his khaki trousers. Down at the tideline an island boy and his younger brother played with a handful of their own certified prophylactics. The older boy filled one long green sheath with sand until it bulged obscenely and used it as a weapon to club the other boy in the head. Mutual entertainment developed into a one-sided beating. The casing finally burst, showering the little one with the powdered coral of the beach. The victim cried like a professional, a virtuoso crier. Their huge mother fired admonitions at them from where she floated in the lagoon, a battleship in a hot-pink leotard, and Mitchell thought, surveying the mountains and the sea, what a magnificent land I have come to.
    In the months Mitchell had lived and worked on St. Catherine, he mailed two postcards, inscribing them with typical postcard language, to Johnnie in Hawaii. He had kept in random touch with her over the years since they had separated, the nature of the touch sometimes forlorn, sometimes smart-alecky, sometimes lonely, and the most prevalent tone was that of friendship, a seasoned song of tacit forgiveness and never, he hoped, anything but realistic. She had telegrammed back a shocking message just days ago:
I want to see you. Will arrive in St. Catherine a.m., 3/30/77. Surprised? Your friend, Johanna
.
    He hissed those words under his breath,
your friend
, his fingers digging mindlessly into the clear plastic packets of prophylactics. Hissinuses felt as though Styrofoam cubes had been brutally inserted into their cavities. When did she start calling herself Johanna anyway?
My fucking friend
, he cursed on the floor of the Comet. My friend, my private merchant of love and treachery, a southern belle with a slow white fire thrumming in her veins the last he saw her.
    Isaac’s prelude of honking ended with a sharp bang into something distressingly solid. There was a nauseating sensation of uncontrolled coupling and then a swaying release. He lay on the horn again; there was another, more violent bang. Mitchell emerged from behind the seat only high enough to see what had happened and was disheartened. The Comet was boxed in by a steady flow of traffic chugging up Ooah Mountain and a frightened lady driver ahead of them going down too slow for the Comet’s independent rate of descent. They had rammed her, she had defensively and stupidly applied the brakes after they had disengaged, and
Miss Defy
struck her a second time, losing a few miles per hour from the impact and a moderate rise in the road, and the woman ahead, panicking, accelerated out of sight.
    At twenty miles per hour they approached a curve requesting ten. Rummy sweat dribbled off Isaac’s forehead and obscured