by Linda Rogers
Who killed the baby? I never saw it, just took my mother’s word that it existed at all. Her terrible weeping was proof of her unrequited love; and her ruby mourning-ring was proof of my father’s love for her. Her, her, her; I was so glad to meet Coon and accept another pronoun into my life. Coon was father, brother and friend. He was my map of the wilderness on both sides of our garden fence. Him.
I am a bloodhound when it comes to following my nose. My father used to call me Ole Yeller, because of the haystack colour of my hair and my hounding instincts. “Where is the chocolate?” he’d ask, and make me sniff out an Oh Henry or a Mars bar he’d brought home from work. My father smelled of cigars and hair tonic. My mother smelled of gin and cigarettes. My dog smelled wet.
Coon slept in a bed made of cedar branches and cooked over an open fire. I can’t remember his face or the sound of his voice after all these years, but I will never forget his smell. His brackish odours had the stink of innocence. Unlike most kids, I was evolving backwards to a time I barely recalled. By the time Coon came to steal fruit from our garden, I was pretty hard-bitten. There wasn’t much romance in living with the burnt-out star that had fallen from the ceiling of my father’s movie theatre. Coon was my chance to grab a piece of childhood before it all went up in her cigarette smoke.
We were kids, side by each, both of us orphans. My mother said I made him up. Maybe so. My father promised an angel would visit me. What would it have mattered if he were material or immaterial? He was real to me. His cave was real. She saw that for herself. “You did it!” she said, in the firm belief that a splash of reality would bring me to my senses and keep my hand on her plow. Someone had to wash her widow’s weeds, and I had to keep going to school or sooner or later she’d have the authorities on her back.
I did it, all right. I started the fire that silenced her and disappeared him. I was on my own from that moment to this.
I was sure the moment I met Blackflies Littlebear that I had met him before. Blackflies’ carving shed was a storage locker a few doors down from my massage studio. One sunny day, while I was taking a break, eating an egg sandwich out in the parking lot, he blocked my sun. He smelled like trees. For a minute I thought he was Coon coming back.
“How much does it cost to get a massage?” he asked. I told him.
“Do you trade?”
“What for?”
“Carving.”
“Maybe. I’d have to see what you’ve got.”
I’d already sniffed Blackflies’ woodsy locker and wondered who and what was inside it. He was all set up with his tools hanging on the wall the way my father had arranged his – with the outlines drawn on the drywall in felt pen, so he’d always know where they were. I breathed in and felt myself getting bent out of shape. Blackflies Littlebear had a neat wall of tools, long black hair, and he smelled of cedar. What more could a girl ask for? That was ten years ago.
Another wall was hung with masks in various stages of completion.
“This here’s Wild Woman,” he said, taking down a round face with real hair. “I’m making her for my sister.”
He told me the stories of eagle, bear and mosquito, trying on each mask and showing me a dance or a bit of a song. When Blackflies let me wear his masks, I felt free to look at his body. He wore jeans, a Wounded Knee T-shirt and sneakers. I could see the shapes of his muscles through the tight cloth. When he turned to the wall, I fell in love with his neat little bum.
I traded Blackflies a beautiful hummingbird mask inlaid with abalone for six massages. He said I’d made a good choice.
“You were eating when I met you,” he said, “just like a hummingbird. I never met anyone that liked food so much.” I didn’t tell him that I used to be fat, that a miracle had melted it all away, everything but the breasts.
The first time, I gave Blackflies a back and shoulder rub. He’d complained that his shoulders got sore from doing his work. Part of the problem was his posture. He sat on a stool to carve with the wood in his lap. I had a client who was a ukulele player and he had the same problem. I told them both they had to sit up straight for their backs, but neither of them listened. Blackflies Littlebear wasn’t going to learn anything from me. He was himself and that wasn’t going to change.
My carver was shy about undressing in front of me, so I massaged him fully dressed. I’ve seen Indians swimming with their clothes on and I thought it was because they couldn’t afford bathing suits. He told me the missionaries had made his people shy.
“They fucked our ancestors,” he said, his face going dark. “That made us ashamed forever.”
“What about you, Blackflies? Who fucked you?”
“Sister Teresa.”
“Your sister?”
“No, a nun. I went to Residential School. I broke some rules and I got punished.”
“Like what?”
“I spoke our language to my brothers and sisters and I wet my bed, so I had to clean her office, and, when I was done, she did bad things to me.”
“Like what?”
“I had to take off all my clothes and she beat me with a ruler until I bled. Then she made me beat her.”
“I wouldn’t hurt you like that.”
The next time, Blackflies took his jeans off and I massaged his legs and his ass, but I was careful to tell him the muscles were connected. I didn’t want to scare him away because he was the best-looking man I had ever seen, with or without clothes. His skin was smooth and muscular, lovely to touch. When I let my hand creep up his thigh, he made little happy noises like a puppy licking his bowl.
I wonder if it is possible to forget pain. Is that why we fall in love?
When I touched Blackflies, I closed my eyes and smelled carbon dioxide. I saw Coon standing naked in the summer rain, laughing and telling me the rain was his shower from heaven.
“How did you get your name?” I asked him one day.
“There are too many flies in the North. You’ve got to stay ahead of them. I was a restless baby, so they called me ‘Blackflies.’”
“Do you think they gave you a good name?”
“I never stopped moving.”
“Would you like to take my dad’s old car for a spin?”
Blackflies said he knew how to drive a car with a gearshift, so we pulled the blackberry vines off the garage door. The Chev was covered in dust, but it started right up.
“My dad parked it here the day he had his heart attack. That was twenty years ago, and no one’s driven it since.”
He backed out of the driveway. “Where to?”
“Just take me somewhere fast.” I wanted to speed and be afraid of speed. I’d had that feeling before and it was good. Mr. Gudewill called it sex feelings, what happens to a cat if you scratch the base of its tail.
“Faster,” I said, when he got out on the Pat Bay Highway.
“Just this once,” he said. “Once is enough.”
Blackflies was telling me something, but I was enjoying the stories so much I didn’t let myself think about the time when he’d be gone. I even stopped giving extras to my other customers. That meant emptier pockets, but I didn’t care.
One night, I dreamed Blackflies had given me a handful of magic mushrooms after his massage. I don’t usually remember my dreams because I am such a deep sleeper, but this time I did. “These here are sacred,” he said, and I ate them. Before long, the world was beautiful. My bottles sparkled with fairy dust.
“Let’s catch a stroll,” he said, taking my hand. I felt as if I was walking on the moon. We headed for the woods. I was weightless and the night air embraced me, lifting me up so my feet hardly touched the grass. The colours were beautiful, blues and greens running together in the darkness, stars lighting our way.
“Let’s lie down,” I said. I thought Blackflies might touch me, but he didn’t. We just lay on our backs looking at the galaxies, rising among them, floating free.
“I see God,” I said, or was it my dad?
Blackflies heard it firs
t, the voice of an angel.
“Hear that?” he whispered.
“It sounds like a baby,” I answered.
“It’s right here,” he said.
We followed the sounds further into the bush. In a clearing lit by moonlight, a small elf sat talking to himself in the elf language, or wawa, as Blackflies often said.
“Who sent him?” I asked.
Blackflies scooped up the elf and we carried him to my house. By the time we got home, he was asleep. The little guy had scabs on his hands and feet.
In the morning, Blackflies wasn’t lying beside me as I had hoped in that moment before consciousness when I realized I must have been dreaming.
That day, I asked Blackflies if he’d like to stay at my place.
“No flies on me,” he grinned. “I gotta move on,” was all he said.
“Why?”
“Because I’ve finished my work here.”
“But you’re not finished with me.”
“You are my work, “ he said.
“I don’t get it.”
“You will.”
The following evening, I turned on the light in my locker and saw a yellow cedar box with a carving of Dzunu_kwa, Wild Woman of the Woods, sitting on my massage table. I backed out of the room as if that box had bubonic plague in it. There was no answer when I knocked on Blackflies’ door. I tried the latch. It was unlocked, so I went in. The place was empty. Everything was gone: his stool, the tools, the stack of wood, the cans of paint, and the masks and rattles he’d been working on. He’d even scrubbed his “carving shed.” It smelled of Pine Sol.
I got it. Blackflies must have driven off in my dad’s old Chevrolet and left me the box. His name was carved underneath. I wondered how long he’d been working on it.
For a long time, I would open it up and smell Blackflies Littlebear. That helped me remember what it was like to be with him, and long before that, my summer with Coon, lying on a bed of cedar boughs and frying eggs over his fire.
“Those are rubies,” I said about the spots on the eggs, but I knew they were blood.
That made me think about Jesus on the cross and nuns who fall in love with his suffering.
So that was it.
My box has vanished but I still remember the smell of the yellow cedar. I googled his name and found out that Blackflies Littlebear had died in a car accident three years before I met him.
Something goes bump in the night. It could be a dove stuck in the warm tar on the roof above my head. It could be a truck loading up garbage from the hotel, or a drunk, loaded with rakı, in the hallway, trying to fit his key in the lock and losing his balance. I hear a sound and it wakes me out of a sleep in which someone is gently making love to me, as if a piece of cool silk were being teased down the length of my body. I am annoyed because I don’t want the dream to end.
“Who is it?” I whisper. “I know you’re there. I can smell you.”
There is no answer. While I lie awake, listening, I hear thunder in the distance and then closer. There are flashes of lightning so bright my room lights up as if someone is turning the electric light on and off.
I close my eyes and open them. My mother is standing in the room, wearing the dress she wore the night my father died. “Star!” she says once, and then vanishes.
ROSE-COLOURED GLASSES
Sevmek’s letter to the motherboard
Mad is going to the mountain and I believe our time with her is almost over. It remains to be seen what she will hear. Revelation is relative. She might see blood in the snow. Güzel may reveal himself. That option is always open to him.
I’m surprised she didn’t mention that her chickens pecked at one another. If she didn’t notice then perhaps she wasn’t ready to fully understand human nature. That may still be coming to her.
There is an axiom about bullies. They seek victims, just as hens peck at other hens that are already wounded. At about the time Mad’s mother lost her ring, a distressed farmer in Peta-luma, California, egg basket of the world, whose hens were murdering one another, lifted a sleeve of red eye on his front porch and saw a crimson world through the bottom of his near empty glass. Eureka, he’d made the discovery that, if all that chickens saw was red they would not discern the red spots on one another’s white feathers, and the brutal pecking would stop.
The chicken farmer called an optician and had red lenses made for all his flock. No sooner were they fitted with rose-coloured lenses than the cannibalism stopped.
I am surprised it didn’t occur to anyone that we could order rose-coloured glasses for the entire population of the world.
Maybe it did. War is good for business.
I wonder if Mad will see what is to come when she jumps off Mount Baba Dag˘ı and has a clear view of the Mediterranean coastline from Turkey to Israel. Will she see the feribot, Mavi Marmara, crossing the water? Will Güzel transfer to her his memory of its decks awash with the blood of Turkish pacifists? Will she look down at the flawed world and understand that her quest for the perfect imperfect is her vocation?
BABA DAGI
O my lord and my spouse, the hour that I have longed for has come.
—ST. TERESA OF AVILA
Güzel is becoming anxious. I can smell his sweat, a little different from my own. He does not wear sunscreen. He drinks his salty ayran by the pint in the hot weather. His skin smells of lemons and milk. İnşallah. This is out of our hands. There is a God or there isn’t. The wind will come up to carry us out past the mountains over the sea, or it won’t. Güzel loves me or he does not. Bakalım. None of it matters. In a matter of years, I will be dust, despite the outcome of this evening’s ride. I just want it to be over so that I can say to myself or someone else can say about me, “She had the courage to live.”
The blood orange sun rests on top of an island in the distance. It may be a Greek island. Any part of Turkey could be somewhere else. I thought the hills planted with vineyards around Izmir could have been Sonoma Valley in California. Now we know the Etruscans came from Smyrna. I come from Smyrna. I am tricking my mind, keeping it busy with thinking so that I will not change my mind.
I hum a tune. It is “Paper Doll,” my parents’ song. My mother sang it over and over after my father died, proving to herself that he still loved her. “When I come home at night she will be waiting.” No one is waiting for me on the beach at Ölüdeniz, except possibly the English woman who told me she was too afraid to jump but might change her mind if I did.
Now I know what I am going to do with my father’s ashes. I will not drop them into the Mediterranean as planned. I will find a way to smuggle them home with me, maybe in a box of powdery Turkish delight. When I get there, I will buy a soccer ball and fill it with his dust. Then I will take the ball to Ogden Point and kick it into the sea.
Güzel is telling me the story of Ölüdeniz, the beach and lagoon far beneath us. Ölüdeniz means Dead Sea in Turkish. One day, long ago, a father and son who had been out fishing approached the beach in a storm. The son, who was at the helm, insisted on heading for the rocky shore, and the father was equally adamant that they would be dashed on the rocks if they attempted to find shelter in a cove. Desperate to save himself, the father knocked the son overboard with his oar and the son drowned. Just as the boat was about to smash on the rocks, the boat turned into the calm lagoon.
“I will steer us to the lagoon,” Güzel says.
When we land, he will step out of the harness and gather up the parachute. He could run off down the beach without looking back. He might lick his lips and taste my sweat. Then he might wipe them the way I did after my father kissed me. Or not. He might swallow and go.
If he does, I will go back to the Sugar Beach Resort, ask to change to a room with a bath instead of a shower, and order a bottle of rakı. I will take the plastic pouch containing what is left of my father out of my pocket and pack it in my suitcase. Then I will lie in a cool bath and sip the potent anise-tasting liquor, one glass after another, until I fal
l asleep.
Looking all the way down from the top of Baba Dag˘ı makes me nauseous. I can’t tell if I am enamoured with death or taking the easy way out, but at this moment it feels as if it would be easier to jump than go back down the mountain at night. “Why do people take risks like this?”
“I think to have an ecstatic experience, life and death in the same moment.”
“So, jumping off the mountain is like falling in love?”
“You never know how it will turn out.” My companion smiles at his brutal joke, kicking the dirt on the slope to determine if there is enough wind to fill the parachute. Every time he scuffs his boot in the rocky soil, a thin plume of dust rises and falls. That could be me, deflating at the critical moment. I can only hope it happens over the sea and not on the rocky goat-speckled cliffs below the peak where we are waiting for a warm gust from Africa to fill the ’chute.
Now that the wind has died, I am anxious to jump. Anything would be better than a return trip down the narrow mountain trail. On the way up, I felt the right back wheel spin in the air. I heard rocks fall into the sea. I heard Güzel curse, or was he praying?
“İnşhallah,” Güzel shouts from a higher place on the mountain. God go with you. In another life I would be self-conscious. I would worry that he would be repelled by the taste of my salty sweat, my fear; that he would misunderstand. I don’t want him to think I am not up to the challenge. I don’t want to be a wimp in a country filled with courage. Now, at last, I am beginning to understand Turkey, and maybe myself. Güzel and his countrymen have withstood far more than a fall from a mountain. I know that their unnamed streets and non-linear thinking are passive resistance to every form of violation: social, cultural, geological and political. They live in the moment, because it is the only way to get past fear.
I am not afraid in the way I thought I would be. Now I just want to get it over with. I am sweating because it is hot inside my helmet and combat boots. Even though I have been drinking quarts of water every day during this heat wave from Africa, I rarely pee. No, I am thinking of the Guy Clarke song, “Trust in Your Cape,” about little kids who jump off roofs in their Superman costumes. I trust mine. Either it will take me down gently or it will not. I have seen many people die. In the end, they are not afraid. That is what Güzel will taste.