The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories

by Eugen Bacon

  The house is under my rule, but subconsciously I follow yours—the order, the cleanliness.

  I ponder this in my immersion, knees up in the water.

  Something in the air today, it’s like someone has opened the cap off a bottle of nice booze . . . I feel heady. You’re in the living room.

  You used to massage my shoulders, best big hands ever. Far gone are those days, not since I peaked, arrived at an age when a father gets cautious with his woman-child.

  The tub is wide as a coffin, more height from the bathroom’s high ceiling, else I’d suffocate. I remember panic when I first learned to swim, face down in the water, it felt like a shroud over my head.

  Clothed, I open the fridge, consider egg pasta veal tortellini.

  You peer across my shoulder. There’s something magnetic about you now, your physicality. You’re a head and a half taller than me. Robust—not stocky, big bones. Look good in those wide shoulders.

  What new thing have I brought from the supermarket off Queen Market?

  I move aside so your eyes, those personal eyes that look at a soul, can take in the sparkling ice tea—four mini cans 250 milligrams each, the dairy-free yogurt—deliciously creamy, the tub says (1 liter), the horse radish cream (190 grams), the savory smoked tomato jam—made in Australia (300 milligrams), the apple cider vinegar in a bottle shaped like the neck of a giraffe (300 milligrams) . . .

  “All this. How much?”

  I estimate.

  How so with ease we fall into our conversations!

  “Don’t throw your name,” you say.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “The West is infectious.”

  “How?”

  “Just saying. There’s protein in rain termites, in green locusts . . . free and organic.”

  “Snatched from the air.”

  You prop yourself on the kitchen counter as I fill a saucepan with water to boil the tortellini. You smile at the splash of water into metal. You love sounds, like the distant clap of thunder when it rains, a symbol of transformation you say. After dinner you listen with a cocked head to the sound of the dishwasher on a cycle, swirr, swirr, swirr, then it gurgles.

  Gurgle. Gurgle. Like how you did when you were sick.

  Bitter, bitter cold in my marrow now. I remember Mother’s ash-streaked face. She sat on red-brown earth surrounded by mourners. She looked ancient. Her going wasn’t long after.

  I cry sometimes, a little each year. Tendrils of grief, they bud and burrow.

  “People die to continue the cycle of living,” you say.

  “No they don’t.”

  “You’re stronger than you think.”

  “I’m not. I keep myself busy. Haven’t had time to scratch my bum since you . . . you—”

  “I’m here now.”

  “Yes.”

  “Stop existing. Live.”

  “Does grief take a holiday?”

  “Your grief is the swim-on-it kind. It heals with water. Your animal spirit is the river shark. You have soul memory. In your swim you roam free.”

  “Will you? Swim with me?”

  “Tomorrow I will,” you say.

  A NURSERY RHYME

  Venus and Magellan Thalassa sit on a patio of silvery sandstone overlooking derelict gardens in 17 Nautical Miles, East Tharsis. They are each enshrouded in a little world, buying time, catching up with time, toying with the notion of it.

  To Venus it is safe being like this, not talking about things.

  Unspeakable things have happened in their lives, clawing at normality. Now, the urge to speak is unmanageable. It hovers, it taunts.

  Silently, they share a smoking pipe.

  Her eyes are flat, his fretful.

  A billow of smoke rises from her nostrils with her words. “It’s been a long time since—”

  “Sorry, my child,” he says gruffly.

  Time has dusted a bucket of ash into his hair, pulled at his face, added more wrinkles than before.

  Before what? she wonders.

  When he speaks, his chin dances.

  “Should have come to Tharsis sooner,” he says.

  “Glad you made it at short notice.” Something prickles her eyelid, invites her panic. No time for tears.

  “Not every day one comes home to find a sitter floating head down in a bath,” he says. “Lawmen ripping the residence. Shamen knee-deep beneath floorboards, all looking for clues.”

  Carrying no words for him, she broods.

  His mobilis is slovenly parked at an angle, his haste to be here. Viking TJ Plates mark the new idea of him, her father. The years have added to his persona, easing the weight of ashy grays on his head, making them seem normal. Seeing him, she can almost be grateful he didn’t go cranky with the loss of Maamy, chasing women half Venus’s age.

  That would suck, seeing him in such disarray.

  Always an adrenaline junkie, going off like he did after Maamy died was no surprise. Settled somewhere in the hinterland, a place with fireflies so big they tapped you on the shoulder.

  A meter out choked in weeds, lisianthus, cream chrysanthemums, adrasteas, Peruvian violets and rare cyclamens sway to a sluicing breeze. Further out, canopies of gnarled pines ghostly bend.

  A patter of little feet, of a child racing on land solid as ice, lifts the silence. She leaps, humming softly. Words of her rhyme carry above outdoor filters of wind, leaf rustle and a swing of boughs.

  “Maamy duck said Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack! but only four little ducks came back.”

  Venus and Mage fret, entrapped by silence despite Dee’s song. Their lips fill with useless words that cannot undo the past or rouse the dead.

  Each struggles to maintain it, the silence. Mage fails.

  “Know what happened?” he asks.

  She shrugs. “The lawman thought it was the phosphorous bleach. The cleaning agent. How the woman could have confused peach hair spa with toilet cleaner . . . She was practically cooked.”

  “How’s Dee coping?” he asks, almost reluctantly.

  Venus shakes her head, a gesture of near hopelessness.

  “She liked Cora very much . . . But now look at her.” She nods at her daughter. “Playing as though nothing happened.” Venus had found Dee seated in the bathroom doorway humming, as skin fell off the sitter’s bones.

  Mage stares with near fascination at the child’s strange eyes.

  White arms of a late evening sun toss a backlight on her flaming hair as she glides a red-billed duckling across an invisible loch in the air. Opal eyes lift inside long lashes, past Mage to Venus. She gives a toothy grin, waves chubby hands.

  Venus waves back.

  The look on Mage’s face perturbs her. She stares unseeingly at her hands.

  “You don’t like her,” she says, matter-of-fact. “Dee.” Pause. “But what about her? Playing now. She is your granddaughter! Do you think she is unmarked by seeing death?”

  He lifts his head, taken aback.

  “When Triton died,” she says. “Guilt came, knowledge that I could not bring her daddy back. Maybe I spoil her some—”

  “You’ve raised her in great vein,” he says. “After Triton . . . I wanted you to come live with us. But your maamy, she was, she was—”

  “It’s fine, Mage.”

  She speaks consoling words, but her mind is set on night.

  A strong, restless streak drives her to the brink of insanity, pressure of a different kind. Something happened years ago, something that forces imbalance into her life. Same something took Triton and now that thing, hell, whatever it is, brings a faceless male to her bed at dusk.

  She looks at the sky, almost impatient. Night transports her to another world. Reluctantly, she waits out the sun.

  “Better head off,” he says, as if reading her skyward glan
ce.

  “Stay. Mage. Please.”

  He is already up. “I’ll check out at the motel. Tomorrow. I promise.” Rifles through his robe for his key.

  Venus doesn’t rise with him.

  He ruffles her sandy hair. “All right, then, buster.”

  “May the goddess of Tharsis watch over you, Pappita,” she repays his endearment.

  He walks proud and upright, despite his age. Age. He wears it well. He points the key at the mobilis. The vessel hums.

  Dee blinks unevenly, runs up to Venus and tucks a little hand into her maamy’s larger one. Together, they eyeball the reverse of his vessel.

  A whistle of combustibles on air, then a softer sigh.

  “Well then, Dee,” Venus says, cupping little fingers firmly in her palm. “Just you and me, skipper.”

  The child’s glowing eyes nudge a smile.

  Time chips away at Venus’s fatigue.

  As long as those carefree, ocean eyes hold.

  ***

  Dusk.

  Venus’s nipples are tender and frank, the rest of her maturity discreet.

  He takes her masterfully, firmly.

  Later, much later, she remembers the grain of his skin, the texture of callused hands on her breasts. The diffusion of her senses.

  The clarity of pleasure.

  And when the shadows on his face, the strength in his hands, the grace of his touch broker common ground, they seal mystery into her flesh.

  She wafts in and out of sleep, as a giant ant crawls the length of her arm. Suddenly, she feels freedom. Clear, persuasive freedom.

  Breakfast is an egg, a weeping yolk. A barbecue of stuffed innards and half a bowl of grain bubbles do for Dee.

  ***

  Mage has checked out of the motel. Now, he dines with them. But forty minutes at the table with Dee gets him jittery and stupid; things he says, questions he asks. Like: Aren’t her eyes sure green?

  When Venus serves beet pie as a side, crisp and ripe with drippy juices, he pales as though he has seen blood. His gestures are wooden, the hold on his fork rigid. He holds cutlery as a weapon. Looking at her father silly like this, awkward and trying to be amiable around his grandchild, she wonders about his staying, whether it is a good idea.

  Suddenly it seems ages since her husband died, since her maamy died, since the last time she saw Mage. It disturbs her that she recollects very thinly. Even circumstances surrounding Triton’s suicide are hazy.

  How did he manage to kill himself two ways?

  He was dangling on a curtain, they said. Inward pulled pupils in his eyes bulging off the socket. A thin trail of blood edged along the whites, finding refuge down his cheek from burst vessels inside his head. And baby Dee, innocent soul, tickled pink at her father’s death spasms and mouth froth, thinking it another game. Toddled freely at his feet, looked adorable.

  The shaman broke Triton’s fingers to ease the rigor mortis grip on a small brown cross dripping blood. Same cross that pierced his heart. Cause of death: strangulation. Or a sharp instrument through the heart.

  ***

  Only visible things in the family album linger Triton’s memory. Curls, dimples, burgundy eyes. If pictures are worth more than a thousand words, why don’t they reveal Triton to her? Venus can’t understand it, especially when her dreams are filled with a male whose silhouette makes delicate shadows on a white wall, whose body is a salsa sensation, whose breath is warm as a rotisserie, whose hands are cool as a fresh spring, whose face is not Triton’s.

  She has a few days off, a power executive role in a publishing company inside a small settlement. The hours are insane. Basically, a graveyard shift. Tharsis is no metropolis, but the quarterly high gloss magazine builds a metropolis of Tharsis. A surreal world that gives meaning to people with mediocre lives.

  And that sells.

  But Dee, unlike the magazine world, is real. She needs a real nanny. The magazine doesn’t sort that.

  Venus hopes time gives enough cushion for the child to bond with another sitter. Yet she senses the Nanny Agency is wary. No one is available. Behind her back, the town talks—only to fall into hushed silence at Venus’s approach.

  She can almost understand it, their looks. It’s as though they expect a pair of live bats to flutter out of her ears. Despite her wealth, a clouded air sits above the strange deaths of people around her.

  Something happened.

  Something leading up to Triton’s death.

  At the back of her mind is a quarrel or a shame. Perhaps a sadness. She doesn’t know what or why.

  All she knows is its significance in her life.

  Sometimes, in her dreams, she sees a huge breaking sheet of water bursting on dark rock. Sometimes she makes out a sign and, on very candid nights, a name.

  ***

  “The spare den has old smiteguns. Triton’s,” she says, lifting Mage’s bags from his boot. “He was always into rifles, spearheads, deformers. Smiteguns were his best.” She can almost smell the shine that gleams sun off the mobilis’s new surface. She smiles. “Other than that, room’s all yours.”

  She makes twice-cooked pheasant with berries for lunch in a granite kitchen of polished oak, straight from the land of Ananke, luminous bench tops and natural light.

  Mage is at home with this effort.

  ***

  Dinner.

  Dee is upstairs in her den. She ran up two steps at a time, trailing fingers along the forged iron balustrade, this one from the land of Thebe. A wedding gift from Mage. Venus kissed her cool brow rested on a braided pillow as Ananke blinds lightly swayed.

  “Mage?” Venus now says gently. “Who’s Molten?”

  He starts. “What?”

  She has broken a silence of many years.

  He swallows a great gulp of air. Shock in his eyes.

  Though he sits straight on a high-back suede chair, she feels his knees knocking against hers under the table. He lowers his eyes before her gaze, perturbed by the vein of her talk.

  In silence, she studies a spray of pimples on his age-furrowed face. Spots lift off his skin, unidentical yet evenly distributed. Two unobtrusive hooks on the lilac wall behind his head perfectly frame him.

  Her gaze returns to the table where dancing light skips across and around their empty plates, spreading a warm glow. Layers of age on the teak wood form unique contours.

  “Remember the night Maamy died?” she says slowly. “After she came from a walk in the forest?”

  Gauze covers his eyes.

  “Dee was kicking chubby legs inside a fleecy blanket sprigged with yellow daisies, waving pink arms,” she says. “Going Da da da. Maamy looked ashen, clutching at her abdomen. Before she died, as she muttered incoherent things, in that sudden fever, she said something about Molten.”

  They sit in semidarkness. One barely breathing, the other making short, swift breaths.

  Fire crackles in the hearth. Light catches the wood, trying but failing to warm the freeze of the chamber.

  Palms lift to his face, as though flushing it with air. It needs no predicting. Mage is about to embark into the distressing terrain she has opened.

  He begins lightly, as though it is of no consequence.

  “What you ask me. About Molten. Something happened those many years ago. In Molten Rock.”

  She fondles olive and black lysithea paws in a vase on the table without turning her head. Their perfume spreads, it lingers.

  “Molten Rock.” She speaks softly, slowly savoring each syllable.

  “Venus,” he says. “Something horrid happened to you.”

  “What do you mean, Mage?”

  “His name was Lawless.”

  No recognition flickers in her eye at mention of that name.

  “See, you hitched with a Ganymede, Venus,” her father says. �
��The worse of the worst.”

  “But no one has ever set eyes upon a Ganymede. They’re invisible. And when they make themselves seen, they are hideous and red, they groan and gurgle and are terrible creatures to see. Their torsos are like snakes, fingers like tentacles. They are walking blood and pus and claws and brain. Wretched, how wicked . . .”

  “He had a sect. Lawless was powerful, charismatic, evil. Three months. Three months he kept you—”

  “Papa, don’t!”

  “Almost broke your maamy’s heart. Finally, when it was too much and our lives began falling apart, I did the inconceivable. What can a father do?”

  He throws his hands up helplessly.

  “I paid a bounty hunter to abduct you. A shade whose body took all forms. Now she was a rock, a tree, darkness, an iguana. Morphed into the walls of the fortress, scuttled like a lizard along its white imposing walls overlooking a loch. She was a giant hawk when she carried you unconscious back to us. To your maamy.”

  His silence is more remarkable than his words.

  “After the rescue, we moved you from state to state so the cult could never find you. A few months later, they were gone. The whole miserable lot of them. Doomsday. A suicide herb in the name of deliverance.”

  “No!” A nail of anguish cuts through her distress.

  Suddenly, she understands the nights.

  Her dreams, his caresses. The ghost of Lawless coming to reclaim her.

  “Before he knew it,” her father continues painfully, “despite his knowledge, the brother of the one who rescued you fell in love with you, Venus.”

  “No,” she says again, hoarsely.

  “Yes. His name was Triton.”

  “But how?” she cries. “Triton was not even a shade!”

  “He lacked the gift. But he loved you very much, Venus.”

  “If what you say is true—how could I not remember? The Ganymedes? Lawless?”

  “I used all within my power, money, to treat you, de-memorize you. It worked. And then the child was born. Not a child but a thing. It looked childlike and innocent but it was a monster nonetheless. Imagine Triton’s grief, my fear, that you might have a relapse—remember the past.”