Swimming in the Volcano by Bob Shacochis Page B

you all right? You’re shaking.”
    â€œLet’s just go.”
    He hoisted the inciteful backpack by its straps and carried it that way. Walking through the terminal by his side she rotated her attention this way and that, perplexed by the unusual aspects of the Brandon Vale International Airport, a facility decorated in calamity and breakdown.
    â€œWhat happened here? We saw the smoke from the air and thought you were all murdering each other.” She surveyed the black pools, the stone-faced locals, filth tracked all over the tiles, the soot on the walls, the chopped-up LIAT station wetly smoldering.
    â€œThis is how we do things here,” Mitchell said. “Welcome to the muddle.”
    *      *      *
    In the taxi she took her sandals off, the skin on her ankles branded with red stripes, her toes puffy from the heat. She gave him little room on the seat, hogging the middle. Mitchell leaned forward both to feel less confined and to ask the driver if he had seen Isaac.
    â€œYeah, I see him. He mek a quick skip up Zion Hill. Look like he chasin a fella.”
    â€œDrive up that way, would you.”
    Johnnie coaxed Mitchell back next to her and held his arm as though she thought he might run away. “Don’t get mad,” she said. “I actually thought you were trying to punish me there for a while.”
    â€œI don’t know,” he answered wearily. “Maybe I was.”
    She brought her knees up flat onto the seat and turned at the waist, facing him with her body, using its confident language. Her anxiety was no longer there, she had made a decision to be calm. “I thought you had forgiven me,” she said, and although it was a dramatic line to say she said it quietly, plainly.
    He watched the roadside, the vendors caged in their booths with a stock of beer and weird West Indian soda. “I thought I had too,” he said, and wondered if he would have to do it again, or could, now that it must be true.
    Up Zion Hill and at the crest, Isaac was nowhere to be seen. The driver doubled back and headed for Howard Bay. The escapade had come to an end; Isaac would be home in Scuffletown by now, crawling in his bed like a refugee to be saved by sleep, hurrying to lose consciousness.
    They motored back down the hill across the cane-green meadows of Brandon Vale. Mitchell didn’t care to look in the direction of
Miss Defy
foundered and lamed forever in the fields that would be harvested to sweeten wealthier parts of the world. The driver shifted into a lower gear as they began to climb Ooah Mountain, the engine a wounded wheeze. Johnnie stared thoughtfully out the window, the sun visor on her lap, the scented breeze fragmenting the strands of hair that had loosened from her ponytail. A gangly man pedaled up the grade on a thirdhand bicycle, a load of cassava root netted to his back, his heaving grunts briefly audible to them over the grind of the car.
    Johnnie sat away from the window, retaking the center of the seat. Mitchell reached up and put her sunglasses on the crown of her head. Here she was then, complete, more of her than he ever had the chance to know. The unhealthiness of her eyes was another shock, the token repair of eyeliner and mascara, the red mist of exhaustionthat travel alone could not account for. Her eyes didn’t look young anymore, they were years ahead of her, waiting for the rest to catch up. There was still a power in their green and hazel depths though, its source not so much a feminine quality as it once was, the innocence or freshness they had once expressed, but something else, something greater that had been severely challenged without breaking, and something fractured and sadly resigned, an inner life in which Mitchell did not want to be enrolled. She had rubbed blush on her cheekbones but it was wearing thin in the heat. Underneath, her color was faintly jaundiced, not right for a woman just arrived