Free Swimming in the Volcano by Bob Shacochis

She lagged to hitch the bigger bag over her shoulder, her breasts outlined perfectly during this readjustment under her sleeveless olive jersey. Before she continued she looked quickly around, smiling with unwarranted reciprocity as if she were aware of someone she had not yet identified paying her attention. Wave, Mitchell told himself, but his hand stayed where it was. They were nothing more than two people about to meet for the first time after years of hearing anecdotes of each other from friends in common. Any other view was pointless, since she had not traveled this far, had she, to resurrect old pain or start new fires.
    â€œWhich one yours?” Saconi asked.
    Mitchell did not want to debate the issue of possession with Saconi. The one that was his was the one neither of them could see, a girl with a Raphaelite luxuriance of hair, on her back in a Virginia pasture, shouting out at the October sky that the world was changing just about as fast as she could ask it to. But her caramel hair was lighter than Mitchell recalled, and drastically shorter, banded into a cool ponytail. She wore a white sun visor, a red lightning bolt emblazoned on the bill, and aviator sunglasses, so that there really wasn’t much visible of her face except her mouth, set with lines of determination, the scrolled upper lip and the fat, pouty lower one closed tight over a tongue he heard rehearsing lines and lies that he wished she would swallow.
    â€œCome, Wilson. We goin serenade dis gy-url.”
    Saconi exploded into performance, wildly strumming the guitar strings with a beat only roosters could dance to, yapping a franticcalypso in the whiny Methedrine voice some of the island talent had copied from the mainland to the south. It was so ridiculous Mitchell shook his head and reluctantly smiled.
    â€œCome on, Wilson. Come, come.”
    â€œShe’s not worth it.”
    â€œCome, mahn. Come.”
    Saconi accelerated the tempo; the music earned its right to obedience through sheer aggression. Mitchell’s feet, aided by a lingering alcoholic freedom, moved on their own into a shortened two-step, and he was married to the cadence before he knew it. St. Catherine, he thought, you are wicked, wicked, to deny a man his self-pity. Johnnie saw them and waved excitedly, her hand restricted though by the bag on her arm. She stopped to appreciate the scene on the roof. Her mouth cracked open and she nodded her head as if she had foreseen just such a reception: spreeing, singing, fine-looking men and a bath of sunlight to herald the wonder of entry into a different kingdom, these fetching arrangements on the other side of leavetaking.
    â€œGod,” Mitchell had to admit, “I love airports.”

Chapter 3
    They went back down into the charry murk of the terminal, the floor spotted with puddles and tracked grime. In the happy crowd assembled outside the glassed-in Customs area, Mitchell found Tillman Hyde, the proprietor of Rosehill Plantation. Tillman had inherited the tourist resort from his late father, an advertising executive turned addict of exotic speculations, and Tillman, in the absence of any other commitment besides late nights and unproductive days as a club-hound in Manhattan, had decided to manage the place himself hands-on against the advice of family lawyers and bankers, who had a constitutional aversion to the idea of one loser operating another. They did not foresee that Tillman’s personality, a tranquility they had judged vagrant, would conform so successfully with the requirements of the job, the obstacles to conducting ordinary business that no reasonable person should have to tolerate.
    â€œI don’t suppose you hire out, do you?” Tillman said, his eyes running over Mitchell. “St. Catherine must be getting to you. You look very local this morning.”
    Tillman had current information on the airport vaudeville. The tower crew, mad at everybody, had insisted on hot-wiring their backup