The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories

by Eugen Bacon

  You fingered Grandma’s ash-dusted hair, and her half-blind eyes shone like silver.

  “Is Keledi a peacock?” you asked.

  “You would think it, with that beauty, her laughter at life,” said Grandma. “But Keledi is a crow, a keeper of secrets. She brings healing and creation. She’s insight, soaring over obstacles, searching for answers.”

  “How do you know all this?” you asked.

  “Nobody is born wise. You learn, then you teach.”

  You often wondered if Grandma was a bat. She was nurturing, spreading her wings from the womb of Mother Earth.

  Sometimes she talked about the late Babu, your grandpa. She told of how she never cast eyes on his strong jaw and smiling lips the color of rich berries until they were wed. How, as a young man, he moved without sound, no rustle of grass at his gentle tread. How, her big fisherman, his net caught the biggest tilapia in the village. Sometimes, when she paused from reminiscing, you and Keledi tossed up stories, the day’s gossip gathered in your tripping and wrestling in dirt across the village: who was a night runner, who had sold his daughter to a suitor beyond the mouth of the lake, who was putting a witching spell on a neighbor through buried eggshells that induced barrenness, who had summoned the crocodile from the lake to take his child for wealth, who had found a koboko snake in the shed and that meant losing something precious . . .

  ***

  You have a window seat. You press your nose to the glass. A flood of nostalgia sweeps through you.

  “What does your father do?” Keledi asked.

  “He works in an office.”

  “It has walls?”

  “Many people work in offices, they make money to buy food.”

  “Can’t you grow cassava in your garden?”

  “Mama’s planted flowers. There are violets that go white and blue, daisies the color of the moon—”

  The tinkle of Keledi’s laughter halted you midsentence.

  “Is your mother foolish?” She wiped tears from her eyes.

  “She’s got smarts!” you roared.

  “She’s got posh nosh. Are you going to eat flowers?”

  And you understood about Keledi, her search for answers. But you also knew that you couldn’t tell her, not then, of the dizzying height of Baba’s multitiered office, how you pressed a button with a number to tell the lift where to stop and let you out.

  ***

  The bus coolie is announcing the bus is leaving. New passengers are running with buckets of tomatoes, bags of maize, cartons of cooking oil or bags of belongings that land squashed beside your luggage in the rib of the bus. The rest ends up on the roof, tied with rope—the coolie sees to it.

  ***

  The day you left the village, Keledi threw herself at you, knocked you to the ground. She kissed your ears and nose. Her eyes were shining, shining. Just as swiftly, she disengaged, flew off. You sat up, unfocused. As your eyes cleared, you saw Keledi soar with the wind, unquestioning that your school holidays had whipped by so fast, or of your return to the town or the city, or that you would come back to the village. When? It did not matter. Her world was timeless.

  ***

  You gaze out the window. Soon the bus will drive off. You are on the tip of entering a world altogether foreign to Keledi. How could she ever understand the city? Already the town with its offices and flower gardens is a strange animal.

  Inside the flurry of activity outside the bus, your leopard spots the antelope from an impossible distance. He is a head above the rest, weaving his big shoulders across bodies and bags. You fling open the window.

  “Baba!”

  He follows your voice, locks his square gaze onto your window, in his graceful hands a bunch of yellow bananas.

  Tires crunch, the bus rolls away from the station. That night, head on a stranger’s shoulder, you surrender to the arms of a dream where your father evolves into his animal spirit. He’s loping across grasslands, two-and-a-half meters long of him. He’s a full-grown kudu, kilos and kilos in a bounce. The twist of his horns curls to the sky as he canters on the blonde grassland splashed with rays of the sun’s yellow shimmer. You’re a leopard, a seer. You gaze from the height of a baobab, sprawled on a furrowed branch. You study the antelope and his carefree jog. He is blind to a stir in the murmurless grass, the crouch and stalk of a lone lioness the color of the pale savannah. She’s a wild cat, not your mother whose animal spirit is a lion. This one’s hunger or that of her cubs is an unstoppable beast. She’s flesh and bone, muscle and jaw. Her sudden tear closes the gap in a radical and committed leap. You hiss and puff out yonder from a tree, but can do naught. Nothing can deny the validity of your witness. Nothing delusional about your father’s blood dripping like crimson tears along the untamed whiskers of a fat-pawed she-lion holding down his head.

  You awaken to the whiff of vanilla cookies, crisp in their brown paper bag, the sweet aroma of soft and warm ripe bananas cradled on your lap, and a mausoleum in your soul.

  BEATITUDES

  The young siren floated on the water reed . . . She remembered little of how she got there. Flashes came and went of an olive-colored field bathed in crimson, bones everywhere—fresh bones—some still evidencing sinews of torn flesh.

  Other times she remembered a darkness that opened like a yawn, a terrible singing that was more of a war cry in a chase of ululation . . . Sea monsters. The creatures had climbed from the belly of the ocean and . . . and . . . her heart caught.

  Her curiosity wasn’t big enough to take her there. And she wasn’t sure what to believe. But she could not disremember a little of her past, a time before the blackness. Her mind’s eye saw green water and an emerald sky. The rest was blank.

  Now here she was on an aquatic weed, forever floating to someplace or noplace, and the water was not green, and the burnt-orange sky not emerald.

  Just then a poem shattered the core of her deepest misery:

  Blessed are they with a bearded arse,

  for they shall receive no time for waxing

  oh such levels of escapism.

  She looked at her tail where the horrid verse that held no rhyme came from. On her person, perched on her tail, was a toad. He was brown and warty and big black-eyed.

  She looked at him. He looked at her. All was silent as the water quietly bucked. And then the toad renewed his croak:

  Blessed are they with a curious affection for a god of tithes,

  for they shall inherit altar boys

  whatever it takes.

  “Lay off!” cried the siren and flipped her tail.

  “What the croak! I figured you’d eventually take heed.” The suckers at the ends of his toes held fast to her tail.

  “What are you!”

  “A toad obviously. A better question is why am I.”

  “A traveling musician?”

  “Streuth, no. I’m just a bloody toad.”

  “I can see that, living up to it with that godawful song or poem.”

  “Too right. But if you haven’t noticed, this place is cursed.” As if to prove the point, a sigh rose from the water. “And just so you know, it is not a song or a poem. It is a beatitude.”

  The reed quietly slipped along the eerie ocean.

  The Toad’s Story

  On reflection I didn’t know if I was living my purpose on her king bed with its triple pillows, a perfect white. My mind struggled with the immeasurable space between putting down roots and making quests.

  Kylie wanted stability. How do you plant roots in a traveling salesman who stumbled with his electrical wares—minishavers, saltshakers, tiny blenders and microwaves—into a Pentecostal church in Richmond, Melbourne, all the way from Perth?

  Blue sky, the sun was out, there was this beautiful music coming from the church, it was like a spell. Maybe I needed saving: by this time people were buying online, not
from traveling salesmen knocking door to door. I wandered in and there she was in the front pew with a fascinator hat.

  It wasn’t the pastor’s hell and brimstone sermon that encouraged me to donate my wares to the faithful at the end of the service. I palmed out the last of the saltshakers and followed Kylie home like a puppy. I was a boy enchanted with finesse. And she was moneyed and lived in a honeycomb house spiraled with staircases. And she was bewitching.

  But it didn’t take long before I started feeling unwinged. But were my wings of feathers and wax like Icarus’s, puffed up and ready to explode with regret forever and a day? Would I also fly too near the sun?

  One morning I woke up and I was just the man in her bed. I stared from the past’s frame and didn’t recognize the identity that was me. I had been naïve, clasping in a fragile heart the ingredients that formed the essence of us. There was, oh, the pleasure of her kiss. And there was, oh, the wonderment of Kylie. As days passed, and months passed, and a year passed, then another, warm air and cold air encircled me and formed clouds that towered in an upward draft, and matured to a large and organized silhouette. And then it was rain, heavy rain whose energy dissipated and left me with bare facts and viewpoints, and bottomless knowledge that a thunderstorm was a cloud, a tall cloud that wasn’t all thunder when it relaxed into a sedentary phase. She was bewitching.

  Pushing thought into words was always clear to me. So when I half recognized destiny but the picture was crooked, and my mind fluttered to the hourglass woman who wore a fascinator hat in a Pentecostal church where tots spoke in tongues, and now I lay in her king bed, I wondered if the story offered itself to a twist.

  When I got morose about it, she said, “Don’t worry. Pull your head in.”

  Despite her enchantment, her persistence to get me baptized left me unconverted. This was the beginning of her turn. She became like a wicked stepmother, such a shrew, even to her own daughter. And she had this mirror she kept looking at. Mirror, mirror . . .

  Most people let themselves go once they think they’re all loved up, knowing they’ve harvested a mate. No need for effort. But not this one—she kept up the effort. No chance in hell that one day she’d wake up and look like she’d gobbled a few wombats.

  Mirror, mirror . . .

  Two years on, as I pondered more and more about my life with Kylie, I got into beatitudes. It was easy from the onset. I belted them out loud in the shower, piping out whatever came from my head:

  Blessed are they that lead with two chins

  for they shall receive the canny one, but remain the hand model.

  But good night spells in two ways, bloody oath, looks like I’m a donkey.

  Pissed her off real right. Like the night after footie finals, when the West Coast Eagles pipped Collingwood five points, less than a goal:

  Blessed are they that exercise the voice box at the stadium

  for they shall receive guts and jumpers, scarves around their necks.

  As for those two peanuts over there . . . fair dinkum, blessed, are they?

  You’d wonder what the heck’s wrong with some shit about scarves and fair dinkum. Bloody nothing. It’s just that Kylie barracked for Collingwood, and she was sore about her footie team losing to the Eagles and blamed the umpire and me and the rest of the world, even the good Lord, for she had prayed for victory. It didn’t help that Kylie’s teenage daughter, Narelle, was allergic to nuts. But the straw on Kylie’s camel back was she thought the allusion to peanuts was to . . . It wasn’t. It was bloody nothing.

  I tried to make it up, took Kylie to this restaurant where they served fresh pink parcels of salmon dipped in sesame-coated rolls turned inside out . . . tender white strips of chicken soaked in enoki-infused broth speckled with crisp black seaweed . . . There we sat. Chatter as patrons wallowed in smorgasbords of complex and loved-up offerings, whispers as they drenched in sweet ancient wine that floated table to table in imperial striped jars. But the two of us . . . We sat in emphatic silence, navigating chopsticks, nibbles, tweets and texts, as we connected with all the world but us. Our eyes met over stone fruit brûlée, and she lifted the green dragonfly cast iron pot. “Tea?” she said, as though I were a stranger from someplace in history, and it was repeating itself.

  Take it like this: Think of Kylie as the insomniac boss who surges up a plan, and it pitches clear in her goddamn head in all textural density in a color that sunburns everything, but it means nothing to everyone else in all imagination. I had no idea where to place her thinking. She would ask me to do something, task me to be the lead in delivering her vision, didn’t care how I did it, so long as I did it her way. She wanted me to fix the roof, I fixed it. Hose the truck, I hosed it. Slave for her, I slaved, even as mischievous fae in the wind pressed against my ear and murmured that I’d never do it right, that in the end she’d flatten me with her heel, apologizing in full hush for any inconvenience my fuck up had cost her.

  Mirror, mirror . . .

  One day Kylie went mirror, mirror . . . and the mirror said Narelle was more beautiful.

  The hate toward me and her daughter tripled. I’d steal at dawn to a place of memory, a beloved place I could sing out my beatitudes. The rush that swept through my body soared me to a play-filled wonderland enriched with blessedness and grace, the sermon right there on the mount.

  But it was more than I bargained for—our outward declarations of inner hate. My beatitudes, her bossiness. It didn’t matter how we ate or slept, and we slept together a lot when we felt the most spite. Our emotions dragged us to exhaustion in a trail of plummeting humanity jousting with thought. We were eaten up by our own monsters, and listened to the rain, burning, burning, and the ground around us sizzling like jazz.

  So I took them to Lake’s Entrance, Kylie and Narelle. Nothing like a change of scenery, right? Wrong. What her daughter did was speak to an altar boy with curls and big hands and the tattoo of a viper on his arm. We stayed in this motel, Union Club—Kylie and I in one room, Narelle in another. And when it was twilight, bang! bellowed the door.

  “Jesus,” I cried naked from the bed. A snap of wood at once with a tumble of door off the hinge. Ruby eyes, saber teeth and the yawn of a black-bellied snake dove into our room. A roar, and a she-beast that turned out to be her daughter cuffed me across the room . . . A blink of light and shade from the street outside the window. Me still scattered on the floor. In Kylie’s trembling hands, the book of gods.

  “I bind you. I command you,” Kylie’s ardor as she chanted to cast out the monster in Narelle. What was she, Kylie? But it worked. The ruby dimmed, and her daughter’s eyes drew inward. The charcoal serpent recoiled into a tongue, the beast in the saber-tooth fled, Narelle . . . she turned into a mermaid with a big fat tail. And all that was left was Kylie and a choice to sit it out—shouldn’t witches disappear before daylight?—or belly dance until dawn.

  She danced.

  She was dancing and making a sound that was howling or wailing. Then there was darkness like a great, big yawn, and it swallowed me. When I woke, I looked at myself in the mirror and I was a toad.

  I started screaming, and Kylie pointed a finger. Suddenly I was floating on a water reed that turned out to bear you, dear you, my sad little mermaid.

  Now tell me your story.

  The Siren’s Story

  I think I’m a siren, not a mermaid.

  I was somewhere then something happened. I don’t know where I’m going.

  ***

  They looked at each other on the floating reed.

  The toad broke the silence. “Not much of a talker, are you?”

  “It’s all I’ve got. Can’t remember much, sorry.”

  He hopped up her tail and took her hand. “Something about you . . . This toad thing, it’s shifted my perspective . . . Sure you’re not Narelle?”

  “I don’t think so, but we can try peanuts.”

 
“The heck we will, an allergy is not something to treat with levity.” He squeezed her hand.

  Something in the water shifted. There was a giddiness in the air. A headiness that came and went.

  She looked at him.

  ***

  She looks at him.

  Her heart is a room full of blank photographs and cloud pillows wafting around rehearsing melancholy and reinstating torment. They drift threefold on the peripherals of kitchen walls and bathroom mirrors in a lost religion that came to beatitudes and spoke of destiny. To forsake the green water and emerald sky that is now burnt orange is like turning a blind eye to a topography of flames. But there is still no word, just somber silence in the floating photographs and neglected pillows cartwheeling unaligned past the blender and the microwave in a fairy tale of space that does not involve breathing.

  ***

  There was still no word, just somber silence in the floating photographs and neglected pillows cartwheeling unaligned past the blender and the microwave in a fairy tale of space that did not involve breathing.

  “I think sea creatures climb out of the water every three hundred years,” she said.

  “Yes, oh, yes.”

  “Not me, stupid. Those mean-spirited ones that eat people.”

  “Sure thing, if you say.”

  “A great big finger put me on a water reed and pushed me afloat.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  The water was calm, everything was calm.

  “You’re so radiant,” he said.

  ***

  The water is calm, everything is calm. “You’re ever so radiant,” he says.