Swimming in the Volcano by Bob Shacochis Read Free Book Online Page A

Almighty’s benevolence and those who could not be considered chosen except by the heel of the Almighty’s boot. The code was in fact a colonial vestige, which is why Mitchell found it so easily recognizable in St. Catherine, and obeyed its arcane formalities. In the puddle of island society, he had a professional reputation to sponsor, no matter how young and green he was, and without his consent or conscious complicity, a racial illusion to uphold. Despite his desire to subvert this mentality, he was made to understand that white men, who supposedly had the world in their pocket, were expected to look as if they deserved it. Bad packaging just upset needlessly; it was interpreted as flaunting, or mockery, or parody, and oppressed peoples had a volatile sensitivity in its presence, as if any sign of slackness or weakness were an incitement. Who could say how much law and order had been eroded by soup stains, a careless buttoning, an inept shave. It reminded him of nothing so much as the social diplomacies and trivial appraisals of family reunions, and of schooldays.
    The demands of his office were not as staggering to the spirit, though he was still assigned an image to pantomime through: to perform as the answer man, the specialist from the North, rattle off statslike baseball esoterica, confirm the intelligence of people already in place so they could get some respect, perhaps, from their own. Finally, not to dishonor the managerial class by looking like anybody could crash its party. At least at the ministry you accomplished something, if only an honest intention; the womb that expelled you and the soil you landed on were no longer considered trump, as everyone tried their very best to be modern.
    Violation or not, he wasn’t going to make Johnnie edgy walking around like Tarzan. The clerk inside the cramped souvenir shop, a woman with black harlequin spectacles, her hair tortured straight and shellacked into a rain-forest look, made no attempt to conceal the affront of his nakedness upon the harmony of her morning. She suffered such a low class of customer unwillingly, offering not service but an arctic freeze. The tee shirts Mitchell fingered through were all size Small and he was afraid to ask her if there were any others in stock. She thrust her hips in aggravation against the counter behind which she ruled, making cowrie shell necklaces and black coral jewelry hop in their displays. He took a shirt, threw money on the glass of the countertop, and hurried for the door.
    â€œOh my my my,” the saleslady bawled. “You come back, eh?”
    The sight of dollars transformed her into a calm ally of commerce. Harpooned by the sharpness of her command, he stood by as she licked a pencil point with her tongue and painstakingly added and subtracted figures on a tiny gray pad, boxing her scratches into one corner of the paper. Mitchell reclothed himself. The arms of the tee shirt barely rounded the curve of his shoulders, the hem hung an inch above his navel. He was made inflated, musclebound and awkward by the shirt, a burlesque act. A bizarre logo expanded across his pectorals, a yellow and brownish Brahman bull, the colors blended along their borders into a rancid green so that the animal, stretched into a lethargic dragon, looked as though it had been dredged from a slime pond.
Without the farmer the world can’t spin
, read the slogan ballooning underneath the beast.
St. Catherine Agricultural Exposition 1977
. The shoplady conquered the mathematics of the sales tax. He was due small change, which she counted twice and shoved at him, and provided a receipt without his asking:
Mr. White. Porchis one shurt. $9.35EC
. The virtue of financial transaction was its power to rocket above other failures to communicate.
    According to Isaac, someone was cooking blackfish in the terminal. Blackfish was what the islanders had named pilot whales. The fishermen from the leeward side succeeded in wrestling to