Swimming in the Volcano by Bob Shacochis

Author:Bob Shacochis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 1993-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

Cassius Collymore had a uniform. It was precious to him, he had paid dearly for it in ways no one could imagine, but even still he wasn’t supposed to be seen in the uniform except on special occasions, in the presence of special people, and never out on the streets.

He had a new name too—Corporal Iman Ibrahim—but he didn’t have a desk. Not everyone did, although Selwyn had let him sit at one, off in the corner of the small bullpen adjacent to the inner offices of the headquarters of the National Police, five days straight throughout the course of his first week in Queenstown. During the entire week the desk was home, the center of a homeless universe.

Whoever had lived there at the desk before him had carved into its top, gouging through the layers of ancient varnish into the yellow wood—Me Fuck Owena—which upset Cassius Collymore. He worried that others might suspect he was responsible for things that happened to this Owena, and he didn’t even know a woman with that name, not that he could recall, but who could say for sure, because there were things he was responsible for, bad things, and maybe somehow Owena was on that list so you had to be careful. He was learning about lists, they were very important, and that was a very important plan—being careful—and he erased the words one by one during the five days that he sat there, near the door to Lieutenant Commander Selwyn Walker’s office, methodically plowing the letters with the undipped nail of his index finger, rolling the scraped-up words into tiny gumballs and flicking them across the bullpen at the clock on the wall, but taking his time at this task because there was no hurry.

He was made to wait four days for Selwyn Walker to come tell him why he had brought him there from Cotton Island and what it was he was supposed to be doing—sell marijuana? collect money? keep an eye out? All those things he did for Sergeant Marcus on Cotton Island, until he couldn’t do them anymore. By Friday of that first week he was still at his desk, immobile, until Walker came again, and explained it all again, and calmed him down, explaining that his would be one of the easiest jobs on the Force, since all it required was to act natural and be ordinary.

“You cyahn do daht, eh?” Walker had said with a big, phony smile. He hadn’t answered, but Walker took it the right way. The other cops thought he had come to spy on them. He used to but he didn’t do that anymore, that wasn’t his job; that was someone else’s job.

He sat at the same desk now, notified by one of Walker’s men to come in for special assignment, so here he was, looking natural and ordinary as he had been instructed almost one year ago: pullover shirt, pants and belt, good shoes, aviator sunglasses, haircut, aftershave water, the holes in his teeth fixed.

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