Claiming T-Mo

by Eugen Bacon

  “Are you offering?” Vida’s gaze is on her breast.

  “Contain yourself, husband. Wild berry cider in that flask.”

  “Darn, you can bribe.”

  “When you put me in an untenable position—yes. You’re not helping me with that sort of thing.”

  “Giving me the stick. Untenable?”

  She nods at the child.

  “Ah,” says Vida. “I misremembered.”

  “Know your place. Don’t mess with me again.”

  “Danke!”

  “Stop it with those words!”

  “Hai!”

  They share laughter.

  180C has put on a beautiful day. She carries an aroma of spice: cinnamon, rosemary, even mountain oregano, in varying intensity. It is a color-filled world, livelier than the botanical gardens between Central Station and Shopping District back in Middle Creek. It is a sound-filled world, awash with the sway of porcupine trees, the clack! of sand acorns that transform to hoover crabs and softly mewl or harshly caw.

  The pocket of land Vida chose is slanted toward Oorong, a vast lake, alive and powerful. Its thermal waters bubble turquoise. The picnic blanket is spread near a water-licked coast, under an ocean-green broccoli tree that towers above their heads in a bold climb to the sky.

  Tempest is fascinated by movement. Her eyes gobble everything. “What a that?” she points.

  “That,” explains Vida, “is a sparrow-giraffe.” He holds the child to his lap.

  The red-breasted creature sways his neck in the distance.

  “Would you like to see it closer, darling?” says Myra.

  “A closer,” says Tempest.

  But closer is too much for the sparrow-giraffe. He flutters his wings, doesn’t fly: runs. Tempest wriggles from Myra’s hold and chases, an amazing feat for a child who has never walked.

  Vida understands the child’s ability and is startled by it. Being precocious is like a plant the color of a crystal, a rare crystal that is luxurious to own, the kind one would find on a necklace or a bracelet or a ring curved by the finest jeweler. Angelite. Topaz. Lapis Lazuli. You stand regal in a meadow of olive green grass. Grains of your celestial blue shimmer like starlets bounded by plain grass. Millennia in your grand beauty, the color of royalty, what an incredible blue, how it transcends you . . . Each reed and creeper in the pasture is outclassed. You are lustrous, a thing from beyond, something whose dazzle is a promise or a wish and way out of reach. Encircled as you are in a prairie, you are alone, fated by your beauty. Your splendor reeks with anguish. The sun throws its light on your ultramarine arms, leaves that sway toward a couple, a man and a woman. They stare at your radiance, at your intensity, your preciousness as if entranced. You see in his eyes that he wants to pluck you and hand you as a gift; he’s been wooing her for days, coaxed her to a picnic and now wants to sneak a touch up her thigh with the bribe of your beauty. He forgets to reason that snatching you from the earth, from its texture and temperateness, from its dampness and granularity where you long to be, where you must be if your planthood is to thrive, that such taking will make you wilt and die. Despite her laughter, her tenderness, you see it in her eyes that she wants to clutch you, to possess you, to stifle you in the clasp of her fists, sweated fists full of panic, as she is also fearful of what omen such beauty might bring. Such is the curse of a gifted life, one like Tempest’s. Vida yearns to give this child a normal life, but normality is not his to bestow.

  He watches as Tempest runs, her race different from Myra’s streak of light sweep; this one is lithe. With one big surge and a leap, Tempest is riding the galloping beast now headed for steaming waters.

  Myra catches them at the lip of the lake, her chase full throttle by hybrid standards.

  “Come, darling.” She is breathless. She clasps Tempest’s hand. “I suppose you want me to teach you how to swim.”

  • 36 •

  Tempest soars languid in a clean arc that little breaks the water’s surface. She surfaces meters from the coastline, shakes hair coiled in ringlets. The child is as effortless in water as Myra, and one up.

  Vida watches them.

  Myra doesn’t appear disenchanted that her plan to initiate Tempest with gentleness to the water has rebounded. If any learnings are to be made, they are nothing but Myra’s own; she understood this when the child cast her clothes at the speed of lightning, raced with the freedom of blowing wind, leapt with the ease of a rising bird and hurled herself into the abyss of the lake.

  Tempest has oriented herself. She navigates her swim by instinct. Gold, white and yellow birds soar above her head in a soundless hunt for fish. South of the lake, voracious vegetarian rodents dine in endless warble.

  Vida strips to his jocks, but only dips in the shallows. He splashes against heated currents, resigns to a back-float on bobbing waves, frightens a pair of coupling flamingo-eels.

  Myra swims naked. Her breasts are pert as ever, unbroken by motherhood. She shimmies like a water snake, alerts Vida with more than eyes to her intention. The hands that fondle his belly are full of curiosity. Vida disengages. Myra’s fingers are angling for something he is unwilling to encourage now that he has not misremembered. “Temptation be gone,” he says. “Let’s just hang out.”

  “Thanks dictator.”

  “One can dream.”

  “Come on. She’s dancing with the sparrow-giraffe.”

  “Who’s three times her size.” He dodges her fingers.

  But his paddle is no match. In an instant, he is captive. Squealing and laughter lend their water play a childlike glee. The lake hums. A distant purr of waves, soft coughs as they lap the shore.

  Then all is too silent. The merry singing of birds and insects has subsided. Suddenly there is a crack like thunder, a spear of lightning, and then a roar.

  Vida glances up. “Look,” he says.

  Myra turns her gaze toward a tumble of waves gushing deep into a core, a perfectly round crater right at the point where Tempest was playing moments earlier. “A waterfall?”

  “See it before?” Vida.

  “Him I definitely don’t remember.”

  A bronzed male, fully-grown and ginger-haired, is stalking the eastern shore of the lakeside.

  Vida’s eyes seek Tempest. He follows the focus of the strange man who has appeared without warning. He sees Tempest’s slender frame vanish with a spit of water into the crater. Minutes, seconds, she reappears at the top of the waterfall as if it were a circle, and squeals in another downward ride. Vida and Myra swim nearer, acute eyes tight at the stranger whose gaze on their little one holds disturbing interest.

  Tempest is tall for her age. Her legs are bottle-shaped, not chubby as an infant’s. Her hips are narrowed, her belly flat, her navel fully healed and sunken into soft, olive-toned flesh that is as perfectly spotless as her mother’s—all plain notice board for trouble in the wrong company.

  “If that zucchini-faced hog takes one step closer,” says Myra.

  “You’d slap the orange off his head?” The question is rhetoric, Vida knows.

  “He’ll friggin’ have that, bronzed pedoperv.”

  “That’s a lot of slap.”

  Vida climbs out of the water, jocks dripping. He walks toward the stranger, still watching in raw rapture the nimble child with long legs and smooth arms and mermaid power, as she dives into the churn and plunge of a cascade. She tumbles, “Whee!” into the gush as if it were a slide in a children’s playground. Inside the blue water’s rush, her wet ringlets shine bright as a ruby.

  “Zing ama ha ha,” Bronze Man says. His face tilted toward the waterfall, his voice as metallic as the color of his skin. “Chillo hu?”

  “I’m sorry,” Vida says. “I don’t speak 180.”

  A torching gaze meets his unreasoning eyes.

  “Amaz-ing,” Bronzie says, his yellow lynx
eyes sparkling. “Offspring to you?”

  Vida nods. His pulse calms a little.

  “Storm in that child,” Bronze Man says. Turns camera-flashing eyes back at Tempest, absorbing, memorizing, storing. “She make waterfall.”

  Myra’s cool hands clasp Vida’s. “So she did.” A pulse of pride in her tone permeates Vida’s wonderment.

  A run, a swim, a waterfall, he is thinking. One day in the life of an infant. She makes . . . waterfalls.

  • 37 •

  Silhouette . . .

  “I’ll have my way with you.”

  Red finished its song, started the chorus over.

  Salem was mindless in her minding, remiss in her observations to begin to guess the plant’s intention. But I noticed the plant, which for once didn’t wag, swell up or clack when LynK neared, when it forsook all territorial display. I saw LynK shake, sway in his chameleon and toddle walk, as he neared Red close enough to touch.

  And I saw the spikes that launched, the ones that seized LynK.

  Red’s new funnel leaves opulent with tint, shine and spines were a snap-trap, one whose poisoned syrup overwhelmed LynK. So just like that, Red consumed LynK whole.

  But Salem never saw. She is still looking for LynK.

  By the time Tempest returned from 180C, Red’s puff, as it gradually ingested LynK, had leaned. What-am-a-say? R, R. I open my mouth, curl the tip of my tongue without touching the roof of my mouth. R, R, R, the roar of a beast, a soft roar.

  Red reminds me of the silent vile in Novic, his charm while manipulating for gain. Ma Space thought the world of him, how could she not? I was a child-bride, but didn’t he wait until she found the node of fertility in my collarbone before he debased me? I was a dutiful wife, but didn’t he see her in her grave before he put a poker in my eye? His wives Yaris, Vara, Xinnia and Clarin must by now know the real Novic . . . or is his puff all lean?

  • 38 •

  It was the gift that led Tempest to the refugee Balmoral in Camp Zero. Her sight led her to his memory.

  • • •

  First they hurt his daughter, then his wife. Alcohol-emboldened males with laser weaponry, the kind that more than amputates—it disintegrates life forms to states lesser than dust—burst into his two-bed log house at Camp Zero and zapped him to vigilant paralysis. They stood with restless boots and sharpened smiles in a molesting queue, taking turns on his family.

  Gagged, helpless, Balmoral watched. His adolescent daughter Jacadi fought each and every one of them, each time. His wife Nickel, simply lay, feet facing east and south, eyes unblinking.

  By the time the invaders shackled Balmoral’s limbs, by the time he recovered from the numbness of being zapped and they dragged him into night black as tar, he had traveled from rage to impotence, from shame to tears, and finally to a state of barrenness. The thing inside him was inhospitable, too arid for feeling.

  His captors hauled him to the north side coast, to a steel wall of shuttles whose glinted metal matched the manacles that ate into his wrists, his ankles. As more guards with lasers joined him with more prisoners, only then did it sink in, his predicament. Those rumors of shuttles that hissed behind clouds, that stalked silent the night sky of Middle Creek Town, those tales of guards from penal settlements out to kidnap labor, now sharpened from hearsay to fact.

  The river rollicked in the pale light of dawn. Balmoral sat with men as ill-fated as himself, men inward with thoughts and shames too big to share, men who knew that before long, when enough cargo was acquired, the shuttles would freight them all to a labor camp in Shiva.

  At nearly seven years old, Tempest saw all this and more when, at almost dawn, she stepped inside Balmoral’s wide set eyes, slit, and shared the husk of the man he once was, and his memories.

  • • •

  Perhaps the gift started on 180C.

  Remember how she curled her palm to clasp wind, how the storm in her fist uncoiled to a giant wave of wind barrels? That was the day she formed a waterfall with her hands.

  Or did the gift start when those rowdy boys, hardboiled hoods of town, focused their unruliness upon her?

  Dusk was falling, she remembered.

  Tempest headed homeward from a visit to Nana Salem who lived in the misty mansion on the hilltop, an affluent manor with several views to the river below. It was not the aesthetic view of her grandparents’ house that drew Tempest to the hilltop that day and every other day, not the charming singsong of tinkling chandeliers in her grandparent’s drawing room. It was not the fact that there was always food in Salem’s house, whiffs of baking, curing meats, simmering broths, roasting trays . . . scents that guided you to the right place—kitchen, out the back, dining room, living room—for a feeding, where Salem and her servants pampered you. What it was—the thing that drew her—was something about Nana Salem, perhaps the fragility in her eyes, her closeness to tears when she thought no one noticed. That certain element drew Tempest to forge a bond with her grandmother, a love only surpassed by a fierce affection for Vida and the wanderer koala-lynx no one could find: LynK, here boy. Where you, LynK? Here, boy!

  That night, as a red sky gathered in the horizon and deepened from copper to purple, Tempest arrived at the fork of a road whose one trail wound downward to Camp Zero, an exile shelter that had been temporary seven years now. The other track swerved left past Middle Creek Community School to run along Shopping District and beyond.

  She gazed wistfully at the school with its brick walls and slant of gray roofs and a chuck-a-dollar fountain outside the principal’s office. Northwest stood the gym with orange and blue squares on its windows. The community school was one whose stone floors Tempest’s feet had never trodden, whose sea green grass she had never pressed her face against, and whose students she had never befriended. Not that she could but didn’t; it just never was. Her father, alarmed by express growth in a two-year-old who looked as though she was four, in a six-year-old who resembled an adolescent, was unshakable on homeschooling.

  Vida had explained best he could how she had a thing called “different” and not all people understood “different,” especially big kids at Middle Creek Community School.

  First time he said it, Tempest retorted, “Why can’t Different just stay home so I can go to school without it, and I will pick it up later when I get back?”

  “Different is not a pet,” said Vida.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s in the blood.”

  “How?”

  “You’re just different.”

  “Can’t the doctor at Coulthird Clinic, the one who looked at my new teeth, can’t he take out the different or give it medicine?”

  “It’s not that simple,” said Vida.

  “Why isn’t it simple?”

  “Because your Migsy . . . your mother is special.”

  “Special? Why isn’t she different?”

  “She’s different too.”

  “Why?”

  “Some people, like you, like your mother, are born . . . different.”

  “Why?”

  Vida was as apt a teacher as he was a Cosmo scientist. But he was best as a dad. Yet he couldn’t explain “different” and resorted to examples of his green thumb: “See the other day how I fixed Mrs. Bright’s tomatoes and they stopped dying? She couldn’t fix them but I could—”

  “Because you’re also different, Pappy?”

  “Aha!”

  Now, at six years and a half, Tempest was lofty and shapely enough to pass for twice that age.

  That day from Nana Salem’s, she was inside a yawning field courted on either side by a shadow of trees, halfway toward the community school, when she saw a knot of boys. At first they seemed to be standing, perhaps talking. Then with a shift of moonlight, she realized they were dancing. As she drew closer, she recognized them. It was Rock and his punks, a gang of rar
e breeds who bordered on dangerous. They were the nucleus of most insurgencies against government, stalking the waterfront and making trouble. They terrorized by day citizens of Middle Creek whose very tax and sweat they effortlessly took in dole handouts, but danced to silent music and welcomed dusk at close of day.

  Children piped puns about the camp:

  What’s the meaning of nothing? / Camp Zero.

  Thanks for nothing! / But why, I didn’t create Camp Zero.

  What is the sum of many numbers? / Camp Zero.

  What did Zero say to Eight? / Ate. / Ate what? / Free food at Camp Zero.

  Shunned, bored, the boys of Camp Zero danced: a shimmying of hips, a ripple of bared chests (toned), a movement of feet so fast they dizzied.

  Tempest was still meters away when one dancer, the one whose shoulders carried the biggest sway, the one with the richest savage face, disengaged and approached. He was top dog Rock. He took another step toward her and, in a stagger of stilling motion, the rest of them stopped dancing, one by one. They milled beside him.

  Tempest stood, a sole girl on a woodlands jaunt, facing hard-core hooligans a dozen strong. Rock parked himself in front of her and whistled.

  “Look what we got.”

  A responding whistle came from the back.

  “Oh, my, yes.”

  “Bit brave, ain’t she.”

  “Bit pretty too.”

  “Ain’t she a scone?”

  She picked her way, moved to skirt around them but Rock and the crowd shifted to stand in her path. Her hands balled to fists by her side.

  “Feisty!” said Rock. The gang roared, merry.

  “She the little freak whose mama’s a hybrid,” a voice in the back said.

  A fresh ripple of laughter.

  “That true?” Rock eyed her. “You a hybrid?”

  “She no hybrid,” someone quipped. “She a quarter-brid!”