Swimming in the Volcano by Bob Shacochis

backpack with sharp jabs, ramming her clothes into its mouth, hoisted her straw bags to the crooks of her elbows and reared up, tempestuous, her lips still moving and not likely in thanks. The exit door kicked open.
    â€œWhat a complete bastard,” she said with reckless disregard that he might hear her. Her hip blocked the door’s return swing and she muscled through unassisted, hung with possessions. “I’ve had it with men like that. They can go screw themselves because they’re not screwing me.” She turned her head toward Mitchell, her mouth exasperated. “Can’t you help,” she said, a demanding boldness in her voice that didn’t match the picture he had of her, the private composition, the image that had nothing to do with other people, or the chess game of social issues, or the public performances. In private, the Johnnie that Mitchell knew had been trapped in the flux ofambivalence for who was right and what was wrong. That Johnnie never learned to scream, never participated in confrontation, walked away from fire as if she were doused in gasoline.
    A bag slipped off her arm and pooched to the floor. She stayed where she was and tried to come to some conclusion about Mitchell’s immobility, the few yards of one kind of distance that remained between them. “That other cocksucker only gave me two weeks,” she said. “The guidebook says I’m entitled to three months.” Implicit in the way she stood there, in the agitated way she spoke, in the matter-of-fact manner she was trying to uphold, was the expanding reality of her decision to come this way, back to Mitchell. Maybe she realized how tough she was playing it because she untensed, dropped the aggression of her shoulders, and reversed the lines of her mouth into a shy smile. “Hello,” she said and laughed self-consciously, shaking her head. “Are you ready for me?”
    â€œIt can be changed,” Mitchell croaked, breaking out from his severe daze. She gave him a puzzled look and he said, “Your visa, I’ll take it to the Immigration Office later on today,” but when he reached for her passport she inserted it back into the handbag. Mitchell grabbed the other tote but wouldn’t let himself touch her, sure something would go spontaneously wrong if he touched her so readily. And wasn’t two weeks enough anyway? Three months took the form of cruel and unusual punishment, and what about the Sierra backpack and the two piddly grassmat handbags? What was she, a gypsy? Three months on an aspirin and a change of underwear?
    â€œImproper border behavior,” Mitchell advised coldly. “You don’t grab things out of a customs officer’s hand.”
    â€œPerhaps,” she said. She smiled in a way he knew too well—a suck on the lemon of irony. She raised her arms and flopped them against her sides. “I didn’t know what else to do. I have five grams of coke taped to my diaphragm.”
    He stood staring at her, stunned by her audacity.
    She knew all the admonishments, all the sermons. She threw herself at him to cut short any scolding, kissing him on the cheek, her lips a sticky press, her arms around him, her hands remembering his back.
    â€œLook at you,” she said, “you look so good, and so-o serious.” Her head tilted back to really take him in for the first time. Her sunglasses disturb me, was all Mitchell could think. “So how have you been, Mitch?” The hug he traded with her was feeble. I can’t see you, he thought. You can be anybody. Maybe there was no Johnnie anymore, maybe nobody lasted unless you stayed glued to their side.
    â€œSo what have you been up to?” Her voice sped nervously along. “You have dirt in your hair, in case you didn’t know. And what’s with this shirt?” Her fingernails grazed the exposed inch of his stomach. “Your banjo here looks pretty. A little skinny