by Eugen Bacon
Myra nuzzled her chin against Amber’s rust-red head, spoke against it.
“You love him,” she said.
• • •
Myra wondered about him even more now. What was he? What did she know? What if he was the kind who courted prepubescent girls, the kind who sketchily or carefully found invigoration in youth? In the innocence of unmade faces, the vulnerability of young cheeks, the boldness of coning breasts, the half-formation of hips that had known nothing of birthing. Was he looking for short term gain; instant gratification? It was without doubt he was living large and irresponsible . . . how he explored a sense of trespass that was nectar to Amber and Tempest.
The knock began from inside, specifically in Myra’s heart. It slapped into her belly, weakened her knees. By the time it turned into a wild hammer that preferred her head, her mind was made.
He sat on the low branch of a ghost gum at the edge of the garden. Tempest was dancing around its trunk. She was singing, ducking clumps of olive leaves that hung from the branch upon which he sat. Amber was nowhere to be seen.
He looked steadily at Myra, as if waiting for her mind. He nodded calmly, as if understanding already, wondering how she would say it. Something present in his eyes devoured with interest her intention, dared her: do it, do it, do it . . .
How would she say it. . .?
Who do you think you are?
We need to talk?
Won’t have you messing with their hearts?
How would she respond if he said, Amber is adopted, how is that incest?
In that blink of silence as they stared at each other and he stared her down, she knew. She knew with conviction that she wouldn’t, couldn’t, ask him to leave. Because, honestly, she didn’t know how.
Until the first death.
• 53 •
Before the deaths, sometimes Myra would sit with Odysseus on the patio. They were each enshrouded in a world, buying time, catching up with time, not talking about things, or things that came with time. They clawed at normality. But nothing taunted them, not any more. Their silence was easy, more so for their lack of endearment.
One day, she tried. “I don’t know how to do this,” she said.
“Do what?”
“This, this . . . kindred thing.”
Odysseus looked up. Then he smiled. “It’s not a thing.”
“Where do I start?” she said.
“This is a start.”
Myra had no reasoning to argue with the strength of her heart, her fondness for someone about whom everything was not right. He had a habit of creeping in unannounced. A shadow would touch her, and she would look up from a book, a pruning of roses, a wide ajar fridge door . . . And there he was, standing there, ultramarine hair blinking with radiance. Only when she actually saw him did she catch his forest scent, a fruit forest smell that sometimes overwhelmed.
• • •
They found Fuller Goodwill face down in the Forest of Solemn. His skull was caved in, but his face stayed calm. It was as if he was unaware of danger when it happened. Middle Creek rangers, keen as chili, cordoned what they could—perhaps a clue would lead to his assailant. After nine days of hunting, of fanning out and tearing that region of the forest, of sifting through terrain like archaeologists, it became clear they had nothing. Rumors didn’t help. Townsfolk whispered of Mayor Jenkins, vengeance for his adulterous wife. Just like that, the slaughter was bagged.
A second man vanished. He was an able man, a first-rate wrestler. He was also a family man with no reason to vanish. The missing man was as strong as Samson, his strength perhaps born of defiance to his name. Syke Putnam. He was known in the ring as Artveneta, a mythical god of power; and his agent as the Tandoor, a result of shrewd business sense. The Tandoor secured Artveneta prime fights, all won. Now Artveneta, that infallible man, had vanished. This crime carried no motive for Mayor Jenkins. Nor did the third killing—a Camp Zero woman this time.
By the third crime, the nervousness of the inhabitants of Middle Creek had turned to fear, then horror. Not knowing what pattern or frequency the killing might take, horror begot panic. As reporters swarmed to Middle Creek, Myra’s eyes moved to Odysseus. That began the crack in their relationship.
They were alone in the kitchen. Myra rinsed glasses, Odysseus dried them.
“I will ask,” she said.
“Is that a question?”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Why these . . . such games?”
“Games are for children.” His eyes were flat. “And the one you’re proposing is unwinnable. I don’t wish to fight with you, Myra.”
“What makes you deadly is you do not present as evil.”
“Those are words of a hot-head.”
“I can put it in a different way if you like.”
The crack stretched into a ravine.
Thoughts of his guilt came at dusk to haunt her. In the heart of a dream he would take the shape of a beast. She would wake up cotton-mouthed and miserable, only again to wonder about his guilt. Or innocence.
Someone walking a dog found Artveneta face-down and melted into grass at the sleeve of the forest that ran away from the river. He too had a caved skull. When Middle Creek rangers flipped him, they found his face was gone. But his flaxen-haired wife said it was him. The clothing was Artveneta’s, she said. She touched him and naked skin came loose in her hands. No character is left when you take away a person’s face. But she said it was her husband. The length of his hands, the curl of his toes, it was him and she was taking him home to bury him.
Middle Creek folk conjured tales of the forest to paralyze wandering children or wayward husbands. Solemn became a place where the macabre happened, where the wind barked and trees changed shape to phantoms. In this place, in its inmost space where it bordered different worlds, where wilderness came alive to stalk wandering feet, to poke or grab hold of a person, the earth was said to shift and pull a man out of his skin.
• 54 •
Weeks, months passed. No more killings, or answers to them.
If Odysseus knew what Myra was thinking, he did not say it loud. She scoured her mind, his background. She pondered his reasons for silence, asked herself if they were as sound as her craving to press him for a confession. The desire to know was one thing; tolerating the knowing was another. If she asked right, eventually he might tell. But what if, after the telling, she felt no disenchantment, no revulsion of him? What, what, would that make her? If he were, in fact, monstrous, she had allowed him in the presence of her children. One girl was in hapless adulation of him, the other weakened to tears by a sleepless longing that ran feathers on her nape, that opened up hair. What mother was she?
As the finger of doubt reseeded itself, and the unsafe question hovered on Myra’s lips, the crack that had stretched into a ravine became a tiered gorge. As if biding time, Odysseus took to shining shoes. He was slow and careful, nourishing and gentle. His precision was almost military as he polished, polished . . . to mirror finish. He took Myra’s pull-ons unasked, her knee highs, zip ups, cold weathers . . . and polished them. He took Vida’s wellies, his mudguards, four-eyeds, twelve-eyeds, even thongs . . . polished them. By the time he reached the girls’ rain and shines, everyone was too agreeably surprised to protest any more.
After the shoes, he picked through jewelry. Time went. He repaired the pin stem in Vida’s broken watch. Soldered a wrecked chain Myra had not worn since her twenty-first. Cleaned a rhinestone bracelet Salem had gifted Myra last Christmas. Pulled apart and restrung a choker of pearls. When he offered to mount anew the stones of her bracelet charm, Myra said no. He did it anyway. Soon they were absentmindedly asking him to do things and he threw himself to do them.
Until the day Myra read out loud from the Evening Times of a suspect who had confessed to all three killings in Middle Creek. Didn’t
anyone care—Myra asked, again aloud—that the article also reported how the alleged suspect was said to be bipolar, prone to aberrations of the mind and delusions of grandeur? Why was everyone keen to accept his confession, if not for the quietude from terror such acceptance allowed?
• 55 •
That night she found him knelt on the floor at the back of his room. She watched as he clipped open chromed latches on the hard-shell case, as he lifted the curved sax from its plush lining and placed it on foam cushions. He disassembled it. He took a brush, dipped it in alcohol, cleaned the mouthpiece.
“Germs kill,” he said.
Silence.
He used a swab, then a cloth cleaner, for inside the sax. He cleaned it bell to neck. “Saliva is decomposing to the instrument,” he said.
He rubbed the rods, the keys, was more careful around the springs. He caressed the bronzed body, took time to polish, polish, polish the sax until it shone. He assembled the crook, placed it in its compartment. He used his fingers to straighten the padded interior. He assembled the rest, gingerly laid the sax back into its lining. He clipped the latches, arranged the carrying strap.
Myra watched as he did all this. Now she looked at a crack on the ceiling above his head. “Owe you an apology,” she said.
His eyes filled with shadows. He raised the cowboy hat from a doornail, thumbed its inside layer. He arranged the hat on his head, removed it, laid it next to the sunnies on the mirrored dresser. He spoke through the mirror’s glimmer.
“Better make tracks,” he said. “Crack of day.”
It dawned upon Myra as she lay in bed next to Vida’s dreamful stirring that she had never heard Odysseus play the saxophone. Not once. What was his truth? The finger of doubt regenerated, and once again the unsafe question.
• 56 •
Silhouette . . .
“Whoop! Whoop!
A Ballard? A Bianca? An Olivia.
Something pretty. He took.
Gone, gone.
Forever in a day.
Whoop! Whoop!
Her heart in a swelling for a Ballard.
Something pretty. He took.
She’s gone.
Forever in a day.”
The plant’s dirge at first light shook up the house. Red sang in a frenzied way that dawn. It wailed. It squawked: Whoop! Whoop!
Indeed Odysseus was gone, and so was Amber.
Amber!
She is more than what you know—Novic and T-Mo both said it. With Novic it was trickery, his play with our minds. With T-Mo, why did he say it? Who planted the seed in Odysseus to snatch the girl?
Odysseus!
That was the truth of him, the truth Myra sought. He snatched away things from people who loved them. He destroyed. “What makes you deadly is you do not present as evil,” Myra had said. Didn’t know how close she was. Didn’t Odysseus take a fistful of heart with bare hands from that tail-wagger at Miss Lill’s? Took four men—four!—to pry him from savagery, and he was just four and foaming in the mouth.
So what if he healed the girls from continually squabbling, from fights increasingly bitter, to united obsession? What if he let them flirt with him a little, jump his lap and all? That’s a what! Leaps out, don’t you think? Then he did worse: skulked away with one, Amber, left a smitten one behind. Tempest.
“Whoop! Whoop!”
Once the plant roused the house, it was the beast in her belly, the undead thing, that sent Tempest roaring into the Forest of Solemn where she lunged into trees. She flattened with bare fists century-old trunks, ancient trees that had stood on their own for millennia. Trees that had grown fifty meters and then some toward the sky. She stormed to the river where her screams formed a half-moon gorge, and big water arced and fell. It took Myra and rangers with rifles in their hands, plus a doctor with tranquilizer enough for an elephant, into the buttock with a dart rifle, to contain the girl.
Myra was beside herself.
Didn’t take long to find the stolen chile. Found her trembling, dress torn, all alone at the heel of the forest.
“Did he. Hurt you?” asked Myra.
Amber shook her head.
What-am-a-tell? He wanted to, started to, but something happened before he could harm the poor chile.
Poor chile—how to explain to her momma a T-Mo/Odysseus conundrum? For what Amber saw was the strangest thing. One moment he wanted to hurt her, next he was fisting himself, banging himself, like . . . like . . . he was warring with his self. When she ran and collapsed at the mouth of the forest, she had run from roulette. For who knows which one, T-Mo or Odysseus, might have emerged?
Tempest was swift to forgive the abandoning—Amber’s betrayal. The girls locked themselves in their room and spoke in pa tabe dome, that secret language that allowed them to speak of unspeakable things, past and present:
“Gen ba cool fi esk ung mes loc est way che bran . . .”
“Cor ank wod tem zi bo set que . . .”
It coded the language of wind, of rain, of death, the harmony of wilderness, until they lost time.
A wonder then that Myra didn’t kill him when Odysseus hauled himself limping to her door. Completely tousled, he was a mess. His lapis-lazuli hair was a mess. The sax and sunnies were gone. But so were the flat eyes, the smooth and shifty in them.
“Why are you here?” she said.
“Just so you know, I love her.”
“Amber?”
“Amber?” He was surprised. That’s how she knew it was T-Mo.
“Why return now?”
“To see.”
“See what’?
“See who, not what.”
“Who, what, why, does it matter?”
“She matters. Take me to Salem.”
“Why?”
“It’s a story you think you know. But you don’t know it.”
“You took her from the IGA; that part I know.”
“Good.”
“What I don’t know is the rest of it, after the coffin.”
“That part you don’t need to know.”
“Give me the truth.”
“Truth is the same.”
“With you it isn’t. I don’t trust you.”
“That’s no good. Take me to Salem.”
“You let her go.”
“Had to . . . told you already.”
“What will you say when you see her?”
“Enough.”
“You are not to tell me when I am finished—”
“I will say to her just enough. I’m not here to break her. Now will you take me or do I have to find her myself?”
He wouldn’t listen to rage or reason, Myra’s or Vida’s. Refused suggestion to see Salem at the manor, the one full of balustrades, the one that bore Tonk’s name. So they agreed to meet at dusk, when shadows were long, at a clearing ringed in webs in the Forest of Solemn.
• 57 •
Salem wore a gown with a skirt that ballooned like a little girl’s. Myra was surprised to see this unthwarted self. Wasn’t the T-Mo who wanted to see Salem now the same one who years ago had abandoned them both? Myra had never thought she would ever put Salem and T-Mo in the same sentence. Clearly, for the effort Salem was putting, something was yet unextinguished.
Salem also wore fragrance. She had always loved scents. Sometimes she would break a sprig of rosemary from her garden, sniff it, and say it helped her remember. What didn’t she want to forget? She never said.
“I’d f-forget my head if it wasn’t s-screwed on.”
Her scent now was something sweet. It was sultry and intense.
“A bit rich,” said Myra, as they walked.
Salem did not reply. Perhaps this was a wiser version of Salem who understood something that Myra was yet to grasp.
She insisted o
n walking, Salem, said she didn’t want any “s-scaling of trees or c-climbing of air”. Flights in people’s arms weren’t really her thing.
Tonk, who thrived in his own civil war, had shaken his head at the audacity of the proposed meeting. “Imbecile. Martian! He would want her? Now?” Slammed the door of his study to Myra’s face, locked out the ridiculousness and impossibility of such a concept: The insinuation that Salem was still desirable, and T-Mo might want her back.
Vida stayed home with the girls.
Myra and Salem walked in silence down the hill to the fork of the road. One path led to the Middle Creek Community School and further away into the suburbs of Seal Rock and Passings Lane, the other past Little River to the fold of a valley surrounded by shrubbery and trees.
Myra remembered this pocket of land: years ago it used to host the night market.
• • •
She stumbled upon it at the edge of Middle Creek in one of her dusk jaunts. It was the second or third year of moving into Tonk’s manor, and he had already put Salem in a fishtail gown for the altar, having already wooed her with a diamond necklace and a ring whose dazzle made your eyes flicker.
The night market ran every third Saturday of the month. It stayed open past midnight. Tonk’s lip curled when Myra suggested a family excursion to peruse the fair, because it really was more than a market. Despite its temporary constructs, stalls sprung up to last a single night (there were cardboard shacks, wooden huts, mobile carts and portable panels), an array of amusement for all ages rendered the nocturnal market good as a carnival.
“Fire eaters,” said Myra. “They do nothing like you’ve seen before.”