The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories

by Eugen Bacon

  “I didn’t,” her voice and eyes are flat.

  Light from the fire warms the back of her pale hair. It lifts as she flicks her head, a defiance born of desperation.

  “Venus—” he says with urgency, reaches across to her.

  She pulls her hand away.

  “Look at me, Venus. Look at me.”

  She keeps her face turned.

  “There is no excuse for that sort of deception,” he says. “The child is not Triton’s. Now you know. You have to see we had to keep this secret—”

  “I just wonder.” She steps away from him, tipping her chair.

  It crashes behind her.

  She climbs over the fallen seat with outward calm. Inward she feels like death. She edges around the table.

  “I’m sorry, Venus,” he says.

  “Is this how cheaply you dismiss your lies?”

  “Your maamy died of a ruptured aorta and punctured spleen,” he says quietly.

  That stalls her.

  “How?” she says.

  “Exactly.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “Couldn’t bring myself to tell you the shaman’s verdict. Someone, something attacked her.”

  “Why now?”

  “Telling you seemed inconceivable at the time.”

  “Why tell me now?”

  She can’t bear to see them, signs she has ignored.

  Now they blur her vision. The hangman’s necklace on Triton, the writhe of her maamy’s agony, a sitter’s body face down in the water . . .

  “Why now!” she cries.

  “It could be a point of life and death.”

  “Surely! Not!”

  “I tell it as it is. That child is no child. Molten Rock created a demon.”

  Her face is blazing. She spits words rebounding from instant insult: “Bugger all, Mage. You may be my father. But you’re crazy! And I thought I knew you.”

  Dampness collects and spreads in shiny driblets around his sun-whipped brow.

  “Three years,” Mage says. “Three years I’ve said to myself—she’s just a child.”

  “Don’t make me choose!” yells Venus. “Dee is all I have between sanity and me. I won’t choose between my daughter and your . . . your . . . warped logic!”

  She cannot separate betrayal from her voice.

  “A nanny’s dead!” he cries. “Do you think Cora’s death was an accident?”

  “Yes, Mr. Slick,” she retorts. “You know everything. Don’t you!”

  A tight expression shuts him from her world. She bounds to the door, footsteps angry and aloof.

  ***

  Venus shifts her weight to a gentle purr of the bed, a soft sigh of sheets under her body. Far away, outside the sway of curtains, two dogs mourn pitifully.

  Her eyes lift an inch. Sleep dust and dried tears clog her vision. Moonlight shifts with the blow of drapes, making clouds and droves of eerie paint patterns on the ceiling, inside a soft hum of the air conditioner.

  Sleep brushes her eyelids.

  A velvety song sprawls through closed doors down the hallway.

  “Maamy duck said Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack! but no little duck came back.”

  Venus feels herself going down, down.

  Water shimmers across glistening rock in this haze. Lawless steps through a glass pivot door spilling white light from an open terrace. He is transformed. Not smelling or spilling or oozing. Now, he is a god. He shrugs off his robe, touches her beneath the glow of a pendant brass, on a bed of solid timber, dovetail drawers and rustic charm.

  More white light enters the den from a large open window. Giant ants pour in with the light, crawling toward them.

  Shrouded inside a screen of trees . . . white walls . . . privacy, she strains against him, surrenders to his lips. Lips like glory parting hers. Gentle, probing. Soft, directional light in the manor balances the color of sex, wrapping around their naked hands and feet. Shimmers of rain out the window fall like specks of dust from the sky.

  The taste of sleep in his mouth, his soft breath as he slips in and out of her, rouses her to the wetness of egg white. She tosses back her head and arches her back.

  Surrender.

  And the train of ants spills into the bed, blanketing their bodies.

  ***

  A big burst outside the den wakes her fully. Something falls with a thud. She understands the blink of disaster in seamless time. Shadows hang under the sleeve of her door.

  Despite her speed of reaction, a smitegun goes off inside the night, above a dirge of sobbing wolves. The bang catches her hand on the doorjamb. She turns the handle down as a heavy smell of blood, guts and broken smoke rises in the air.

  Night sings.

  The smell, the horrid smell, fills her nostrils.

  The door swings inward.

  A flash of milk-white baby skin spattered with beads of fresh ruby trembling into the den. Straight into steady arms.

  “Shush, my baby. I’ll protect you through everything.” Troubled, helpless, caring, Venus strokes the little flame head.

  THE ONE WHO SEES

  “Solo! Solo!”

  “What?”

  “Will you look at the cookies in the oven?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Don’t mess with me, child.”

  Her warning from the bathroom is harmless. It’s harmless from anywhere. But inside, she’s a lion. That’s her animal spirit. Assertive in her personal power, Mama is effective when she wants. As effective as Baba’s square gaze, even from his photograph taken in Melbourne, now standing on the mantelpiece. He is graceful in a suit. Immaculate hands holding a conference paper on the impact of climate change. You stole his face—that much is clear from the portrait in its silver frame. Generous nose, lush lips. Tan skin like a kudu’s. You have his antelope eyes, the specks of coffee inside the honey of his pupils. Eyes ever watchful.

  Mama enters the kitchen. She’s drying roped braids falling like a mane to her shoulders. The light of the fading sun enters the room from a large open window. It casts its softness on Mama’s regal face.

  You keep your eyes away from the gentle whiff of vanilla and sugar, from perfect golds in rotund circles, now cooling where you put them on a wire rack on the zebrawood table.

  She directs her cat eyes at you. “How many have you gobbled?”

  You smile. Looking at her is like seeing the heart of heaven pulsing on the savannah. She has laughter lines on her cheeks, skin smooth as the inside of a stone-hearth baked yam.

  She presses her finger on a cookie. The texture is fine. “Should have known better, asking the jackal to mind the hen house.”

  “But I’m a leopard, Mama. That’s my spirit animal.”

  “Leopard, jackal—what difference does it make? Both are hunters.”

  “But I’m the one who sees. That’s the difference.”

  “Are you ready?”

  “I’m always ready, Mama.”

  She looks at your collared shirt, short-sleeved; trousers, urban print; moccasins, ebony and shining like mirrors.

  “The missionaries are teaching you well.”

  This you, the one you are now, stands apart from the children in Grandma’s village with their polyester garments, ankle-grazer trousers and dirt-caked faces. Some urchins navigate the orange dust and savannah grass barefooted, if not bare bottomed. You miss their free loping, their sense of timelessness. You miss the khaki shorts and black sandals made of bicycle tires, the ones you wear when you go to visit Grandma. You take the ferry across the lake to get there. You miss Keledi: her warming eyes that weep, her laughter that tinkles, her special name for you—how she calls you City.

  “I’m just from a little town over the lake,” you tried to explain. “It’s nowhere as big as the city w
here I go to boarding school.”

  “Boarding?”

  “It has fences and gates. You sleep there.”

  “Closed inside?”

  “A bell rings in the morning and you wake up—’

  “A bell?” Her laugher tinkled. “Does the bell tell you to go to eat?”

  “It rings to plan, so you know it’s time to do something. Or stop.”

  “A bell.” She rolled on the grass, wept with laughter. “Are you cows now?”

  You did not tell her about the city’s roads like a giant koboko snake with babies slithering near and far, how easy it is to get lost in the suburban heartbeat or the snatch of a stranger.

  ***

  You are a child betwixt. The village and the town run in your blood. And now the city too.

  “Is Baba coming to see me off?”

  “You know he’s busy.” You avoid Mama’s gaze, but she knows without seeing that tears are stuck in your eyes. “Come. Leopards do not cry.” You feel the cotton of her yellow and black weaver bird dress, the heave and fall of her breast where your head rests.

  Your father is your grandfather’s son, and you do not mean it just in terms of bloodline. Your father and his father were men who took providing for the family seriously: your grandfather with his fishing nets, Baba with his new job—not-for-profit. Gone are the days when a twinkle danced in his eye, when he read you how and why stories: How the hyena lost his tail; How the leopard got his spots; Why the snake lost his legs; When the tortoise got his shell . . . He still told some stories when he took a teaching job in the city college, but was weary when he came home. The stories—let alone the touching: a ruffle of hair, a grip of fingers on your chin, a press of palm on your shoulder—altogether stopped. Then you heard him arguing with Mama about putting bread on the table, about the new job and how it came with more money. He made a choice. As he more and more traveled and saw the world, his kudu eyes grew more and more distant and did not see you.

  You often dream of your father. In one dream, the one that wakes you with soot in your heart, his body is an icebox. You are curled in a small space right there between his hooves. Despite ice flakes in your eyes, nose and ears, you are hot and cold all at once. You look up with questions: Why did you, when did you . . . How? Baba’s eyes are glass. In another dream, his antelope lips are frothed with blood. You take just a second and begin to cry with the knowledge of a span to one’s time. The best dream is where you ride his strong back across a vast grassland. Time evaporates and the sky opens to infinity.

  ***

  You step out of the taxi. Mama pays, hands you the brown bag with cookies. The town station is not as big as the one in the city. Buses are arriving and leaving, spilling with passengers. People and animals everywhere, laughter, yells, horns, screeches. Squ-a-ck! A rooster escapes beneath the wheels of a parked truck. Mama guides you to your bus. A coolie helps her put your duffle bag in the luggage compartment of the overnight bus that runs across the country to take you from the small town to the big city.

  You feel stupid, overdressed in the crowd. There is a woman carrying a basket of guavas on her head. Are you well, my daughter? she says to Mama. A man with muddy eyes is leaning against the bus, his back lined up against streaks of yellow, red and blue paint on the metallic body. He rolls tobacco into a cigarette, lights up. He catches your Mama’s eye, nods in greeting.

  “Looking forward to school?” Mama directs her question at you.

  “I’m rapt,” you say. “Rapt.”

  Her gaze reaches your soul. “Kids giving you stink?”

  You don’t tell her about the poking with a sharpened pencil, about the royal flush—your head in a toilet bowl. You vomited after that. You remember the heave sound. You always cry when you vomit. They outnumbered you. The missionaries know about the “freshie” inductions, but they do not interfere. Nature runs its course, says Brother Samuel. How was this nature? But you redefined yourself, intuited the wedgy. You saw them gang up, before they did. As they demanded that you strip to your undies, you untamed the leopard. You hissed, pulled out claws. Intuition guided your words. “Do you know who I am?”

  They snickered but didn’t come close. They looked at you, a strange animal.

  “There’s one of you, and many of us,” some fool said.

  “All I need is one.”

  “Who are you anyway?”

  “Jungolo,” calmly you said, and your feline spirit mushroomed with wilderness.

  “Jungle what?”

  “Touch me. And you’ll see.”

  No one asked what the heck is Jungolo. You don’t know why you said it. It was a choice perhaps, an identity, your own this time—unlike the choice or identity that Baba created for you with the town and the city and his not-for-profit work that took him to everywhere but you. You were not sure why, but you said it. It was creative and you were prepared to die with one person, and that was all that mattered. Perhaps that was your deeper understanding of life. Your passion and strength. None of the city kids, even the big ones, messed with you after that.

  You don’t tell Mama any of this. Instead you say, “Keledi talks to herself.”

  “Does she answer back?”

  You both laugh.

  You’ve never thought to ask who is Keledi, how you are related. She is there, Keledi is, at Grandma’s. The daughter of a daughter of a cousin’s daughter of a daughter . . . You cannot say for sure. She just is: Keledi. Tears shimmer on her lashes when she laughs. Her laughter turns out the pink in her lips, like the inside of a fish. She sleeps to the wink of starlight, wakes to the caress of sunlight. School has no bearing. Every day is the same . . . same different, and she approaches it with wide-eyed curiosity, no hesitation. She arrives to meet you from a point of equal, difference is unimportant. If you were a skyscraper and she was the jungle, she would treat you like you were both of the same river, moving downhill from one place to another, reaching and reaching uncontained.

  You take swimming lessons at the boarding school. Keledi, who has never seen the inside of an instruction on water safety, breathing pattern or stroke technique, travels in the water like a fish. At the lake where women knead and beat clothes until they are clean, where men cast nets far out until they are swollen with a catch for the market, at this lake Keledi stands stark naked on a rock. She puts her hands together above her head, arches in a perfect curve, harpoons into the depths. You worry about typhoid, so you only toe the water’s surface. But Keledi glides back and forth in the black water, sometimes immersing her whole body for long minutes before spearing out at a place you didn’t expect, laughing at your panic . . . She does not care about crocs or sickness. She is as healthy as the calf of a cow serviced by the village chief’s strongest bull.

  But there is a lot Keledi does not know. You haven’t told her about the big plane that took Baba up in the sky all the way to Melbourne, into the middle of a faraway place and a changed time, where trains traveled under the ground and people in the same carriage did not look at each other, let alone say hello.

  ***

  The bus revs.

  “This thing will push off in a minute,” Mama says.

  The tone in her voice is the same as the one she used when Baba one day came home after midnight. His body was gruel, careening into walls. Your first instinct was to laugh. But Baba, sensitive as a kudu, tugged at his belt and all your longing and fear folded into one. There was dread in your belly, and a cusp of craving. With a whipping comes a touch.

  “I amuse you, k-kiddo?”

  She-lion Mama stood between you.

  “Leave. The child. Alone.”

  “The child I sired hasn’t sired me. Even the lion protects himself from flies.”

  “But you’re not a lion, are you?”

  “T-teach some m-manners.”

  “Is your only tool a hammer? Then every
thing else becomes nails. You have never struck a child. Do you want to start today?”

  He leaned his head against her shoulder, swaying as he stood, a giant antelope in her arms. You have seen his affection, of recent times to your mother only.

  Later, much later, neither of them thought you were listening through thin walls of a two-bed in a cul-de-sac neighborhood where you hear everything.

  “T-that’s a bit absent, that nightie.”

  “Cost three hundred shillings and the rest. I catch you with another woman, she’ll be the death of you. And drinking like that . . . It makes you angry at the boy, and anger and madness are brothers.”

  ***

  Mama smells of vanilla and cinnamon, the scent of her perfume.

  “But the bus isn’t leaving yet,” you speak against her breast.

  Her push is gentle. “Traveling is learning. But you will return to the old watering hole. You will always return, my son.”

  You show the bus driver your ticket.

  Mama has gone. She does not like goodbyes. A mozzie is buzzing around, digging into your arms. You remember the village, the vastness of landscape—space everywhere—and Grandma’s fading light. You think of Keledi’s tinkling laugh and her fluid, long limbs. Even though at eleven you were older, she ran faster. Together, you raced in a shower of dust under a scorching sun, shinned up trees to pluck papayas, rolled and wrestled over cow dung, returned ravenous to Grandma’s clover leaf scent and her bubbling pot on a three-stone hearth.

  You remember how, as you ate rice from a communal tray, dipped for bits of fish in a dense and inky broth, you talked and talked about this and that, even when Grandma squinted and said, “Children don’t speak at the table, let alone with food in the mouth.”

  “There is no table,” you said.

  After the meal, you sat around the dying embers of fire, curled toes under your feet. Keledi rubbed her hands above the stone hearth, out of habit, not for cold. The night was awake with the buzz of creatures. The sky burnt red. There was rust in the air. In the town—even in the city—for all its floodlights, night closed like a fist. In the village the night bided its time.