Pepsi Bears and Other Stories

by Anson Cameron

  In high doses, it is said, cocaine will make a person feel extremely agitated, paranoid and aggressive. Unpleasant physical effects include dizziness, hallucinations, nausea, vomiting, tremors, headache and heart pain. But studies on the metabolic effects of surviving such a rare meteorological/chemical event as a blizzard of cocaine have not been available until now.

  So let this episode serve as a study, and let the study show that if you are a Red Guard of the Nicaraguan Liberation who despises cocaine as an evil and have never partaken and thus have the tolerance of an ascetic nun, then you will either: (a) Believe you are dead, and be thus horrified to find yourself in the waiting room of San Pedro preparing to state your case for entry to a glorious afterlife while sporting a boner. And will be, then, slapping at your crotch and calling, ‘Modestia, Anselmo. Modestia’ (the reaction of Red Guard Anselmo Zapata); (b) believe that if you pretend to be a parrot you will escape the further horrors of this revolution because people will think you insane and limit you to a woman’s duties (the reaction of Red Guard Napoleon Noriega); (c) be so amazed at the transparency of your own skin you decide to rent yourself to a medical school in Paris as a star exhibit for a fortune (the reaction of Red Guard Jesus Zin); (d) believe you are bidden by a God, who strictly speaking you shouldn’t believe in, to apologise to whoever you meet for all of the sins committed by everyone ever (the reaction of Red Guard Anselm Anselm); or (e) believe you are Russ Hinze’s chauffeur and that everyone else is Russ Hinze with a busy day ahead and not yet fully dressed (the reaction of El Capitan Zambro himself, who, though a Marxist revolutionary only moments before, now seems to consider this servitude a proud station). These are the five reactions, noted and recorded, of the five Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation to being caught in a fog of cocaine.

  The two rowing chums from Sydney, Chris Barlow and Matt Downey, being private school graduates of that city, are weekend users. But this is no place for amateurs and dilettantes. This is a mighty shit-storm of white with no reprieve. Every breath here is another step down into the cellar of flat-arsed, rat-faced stonery. They can only look at each other and laugh. Chris says, ‘Well … good. This is good. Who wants to meet a Jorge Luis Whatever straight? I needed a little something … to meet a dude like that.’ They drop to their knees giggling, sniffing like beagles at air laden with happiness.

  Only Amelia breathes freely. Naked, she stands in the fog burrowing her toes into the black sand with her hands held to the sky, inhaling deeply, accepting this bounty. In the crystal palaces of the Sydney A-list she has raced her face back and forward across a thousand tabletops hoovering up the ambrosia that is raining on her now like great gouts of love from a God that looks like Kurt Cobain. If in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king, then in this blizzard of cocaine Amelia is queen and this fogged-out beach is a country she rules.

  By the time a southerly breeze has dispersed the cocaine and cleared the air, dopamines are caroming around her veins like drunk tourists through the streets of Pamplona pursued by bulls. She feels beyond happy. Only minutes ago she was destined for a terrible fate. So happiness seems a ramshackle halfway house on the road to this place here and now. She drops into a crouch, hands held before her like a ninja, cutting dance moves through the clear mountain air toward the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation. Her mind has hacked into some mainframe of human wisdom and she is able to prophesy simultaneously five or six steps of five or six different scenarios ahead of any other person on this beach. These men, mouthing their idiocies, are homo erectus, a million generations behind her, at closest.

  Schmoozing coked-out scumbags has been how she’s made her income for a number of years now. So these guys on the black sand beach dressed in their khaki and their red scarves, each beset by a compelling predicament invisible and unknowable to the world, are no surprise to her. One Red Guard is seated, slapping at his crotch, wailing apologies to San Pedro. Another is walking circles, flapping his arms like wings, and El Capitan Zambro, born-again obsequious, is standing before this Red Guard twirling his red bandana on the upright middle-finger of his right hand, imploring his flapping comrade to hold still as it is time for the double-windsor and its attendant procedures. The Red Guard stops his circling and flapping and lays his head on its side and eyes El Capitan Zambro a moment before screeching at him like a macaw and flaring his wings. El Capitan Zambro leaps then, thrusting his finger and casting his bandana like a lasso and the two wrestle in the black sand, the Red Guard screeching and his captain shouting, ‘Por favor, Senor Hinze. Por favor.’

  Another Red Guard sits in the sand transfixed by the diorama of his forearms, the pumping blood and twitching muscles, tendons making the finger bones dance like puppets. Beside this transparent Red Guard sits the final liberator of Nicaragua apologising to him for the rape of Nanking by the Japanese.

  Keeping one AK-47 for herself Amelia throws the others into the lake. Out in the water she sees the tip of an aluminium wing pointing skyward, on fire. She dresses and dresses her brother and his friend and gathers the Red Guards as easily as a goatherd gathers his flock, and using her rifle she prods the soldiers and raps at their legs and bids them lead on to the hidden village of Jorge Luis Enriquez Great Leader of the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation.

  The Red Guards stumble and slap and flap and apologise their way along the jungle trail above the lake. In order to prevent themselves being adorned by El Capitan Zambro with a bandana in the same ingenious manner in which Russ Hinze was adorned with a necktie by his chauffeur, they cover their buttocks with one hand and cover their heads with the other and he is frustrated in his duty.

  After an hour they move through a mountain pass and there is the village laid out below them. A mere sprinkle of huts in the jungle, made of the jungle itself, it hardly looks like the El Dorado which will birth revolution and utopia.

  Amelia halts her party of stoned dolts and takes El Capitan Zambro aside. She sits him on a fallen tree and sits beside him and lays a hand on his knee gently. Many birds are calling through the jungle and his head is moving absently tracking their sounds. She slaps his face to get his attention before admonishing him. ‘Chauffeur, these men … these men here you have been trying to adorn with your necktie, they are not Russ Hinze. What type of chauffeur are you? Do you even have qualifications? A driver’s licence?’ El Capitan Zambro nods his head vigorously, scrambling through his pockets for such a document. Amelia catches his hands and places them in his lap. ‘These fellows are lackspittles and gofers who do not know a chauffeur from a greenskeeper. Look at them.’ El Capitan Zambro does look at them. And, detecting lackspittles and gofers, sneers at them. ‘Russ Hinze does not slap at his crotch and beseech San Pedro,’ she says. ‘Nor does he preen himself and raise his splayed fingers above his head crestlike, in imitation of a cockatoo. Russ Hinze is a Great Leader. You will know Russ Hinze when you see him. He will be fat. A very fat man.’ El Capitan Zambro is nodding his head slowly now, absorbing this. It seems to make sense. These men, with their scrawny necks, and so modest regarding their buttocks, they do not resemble the turtle that the chauffeur in the story defeated. They do not appear to be mighty potentates who have eaten themselves amorphous. This woman is talking true.

  ‘He is down there,’ Amelia points through the foliage at the village below. ‘Russ Hinze is down there,’ she whispers urgently. ‘And, Dios mio, he is late for an appointment. He must be dressed quickly. Made ready in his dignity. What are you doing sitting here? Are you not his chauffeur?’

  El Capitan Zambro leaps to his feet and shuffles hurriedly down the trail toward the village, holding his bandana before him. His men, though not his men now, fall in behind him from habit, one slapping at his crotch, another flapping his wings, a third lifting his shirt and marvelling at the circuitous plumbing of his gut, and the fourth berating himself and asking the Red Guards’ forgiveness for the shrivelled potatoes and the likewise shrivelled Irish of the Irish Potato Famine of the eighteen
-fifties.

  Amelia sits Chris and Matt on the log beside her to watch the progress of that party of five. They are lost to view in the jungle for half-an-hour while she scans the village with her binoculars. Then they reappear, entering the village from the north, still flapping and swatting while returning the welcoming waves of fellow Red Guards.

  Atop the largest hut in the village flies the triple-barred red and yellow flag of the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation. This hut is obviously the home of Jorge Luis Enriquez. And it is to this hut the party makes its way, led by El Capitan Zambro. And it is from this hut the scream comes.

  Greek mythology tells us that when Zeus, in the form of a swan, took Leda unwillingly in the night, she was of such chaste body and mind, so unsuspecting of the debauchery about to befall her, that she gave off a sound so replete with betrayal, shock and despair that it split the sky above Sparta and a thousand angels tumbled to their doom. A similar chastity might be assumed for Jorge Luis Enriquez, Great Leader of the Red Guards of the Nicaraguan Liberation. For the scream that emanates from his quivering jowls rolls up out of that village through the jungle of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve, sending a thousand birds into panicked flight, alerting all that an unthinkable indignity has been visited on a demigod.

  Matt and Chris and Amelia, looking down on the village from their place of hiding in the jungle, grimace at the sound.

  ‘What … on earth … was that?’ Matt whispers, standing and glancing around fearfully.

  ‘A chauffeur,’ Amelia tells him. ‘Making turtle soup.’

  Jesus rides a cash cow.

  History throws up many examples in which people have talked to or seen God through animals. But Australia is young and the case of the Friesian adorned with a portrait of Jesus was the first of God’s revelations to his children in that land through the medium of his quadrupeds.

  Near the irksome town of Korumburra in the green hills of Gippsland a dairy farmer named John Kirkoff was devout enough, and poor enough, to discover he had a Friesian milker with a black patch that, if you squinted and believed, resembled a silhouette of a Lord Jesus with cauliflower ears.

  The mutterings and objections from more traditionally religious people went unheard. For any man who has been raised above the masses by having God stamp his cow with a likeness of His son is hardly likely to pay heed to the jealous sniping of those who have not.

  Bus loads of fans came out to see that cow and Farmer John grew fat charging them ten dollars admission and selling them half-litres of Holy Milk at a hundred dollars a pop. Why not? Holy Milk needed no pasteurisation, Farmer John avowed, and he pumped it straight out of the Jesus cow into whatever receptacle the believers held, be it Coke can or hip-flask.

  This killed a born-again Baptist from Punchbowl who skolled the milk while crossing the border back into New South Wales lest it be confiscated by fruit-fly inspectors. They buried him in the Punchbowl cemetery.

  The death of the born-again Baptist killed off the allure John Kirkoff’s Friesian held for Christians and air-conditioned buses of devout fans no longer came to see her. Her days as a star attraction, where she stood fondled by crowds of lowing believers, were over. Not wanting Jesus to be implicated in the poisoning of a Baptist, people squinted at their snapshots of the cow and said she fooled them at first, but now they were onto her. Now she seemed to be besmirched with the visage of a stoned Argentinean rugby prop, rather than adorned with the likeness of Our Lord.

  Though she was defrocked, in Gippsland she had ignited a need in people for their animals to be living, breathing, holy messengers who could turn a buck. In the year of Our Lord 2009, a year in which the Cassini spacecraft sent back close-up photos of Saturn, the Lord touched a hundred beasts in Gippsland and left them with his clear and unmistakeable mark. This is the story of that regrettable outbreak of holy branding and the Church’s efforts to bring the contagion to a close.

  On the Friday night after the born-again Baptist from Punchbowl went dead again, John Kirkoff’s accountant, Hector Landis, was in the front bar of the Austral Hotel in Korumburra sipping his brandy-and-soda, while poker-machines played sound bites of orchestral pomp and a trio of mute TVs showed men at rugby and cricket and the dirt-bike scramble. Other men in that bar, beer drinkers, were laughing and joking about John’s debunked milker. Leo Gibbs commented that unless John found the face of Jesus on his arse real quick he was likely to have both buttocks sued off by the twice-born Baptist’s family. Normally a close adherent to client confidentiality, this remark angered Hector Landis so much he had to speak out. As John Kirkoff’s financial advisor and himself a beneficiary of the blessed cow he was bound to say something in their defence. ‘Leo … you think I’d formulate a business model in which my client was not fully covered for public liability?’

  ‘Dude poisoned a Baptist, Hector.’

  ‘He sold a tourist a relic that that tourist foolishly ingested. Be very careful what you say, Leo. The Law is wolf unto slanderers.’

  ‘So, Hec, you reckon that really is Jesus’ face on John’s Friesian, do you? Eh?’ Leo asked.

  ‘Professional confidentiality prevents me from saying. Have I ever spoken publicly on your father’s brie?’ Hector Landis asked.

  Leo Gibbs pouted and shook his head.

  ‘No. Your father’s a client of mine, and I never will speak of his cheese publicly. Even if it laid waste a hall full of senior citizens, I wouldn’t seek the limelight as commentator and air my downbeat views.’

  ‘Take that back about my father’s brie.’ Leo Gibbs put his beer on the bar.

  ‘I didn’t say anything about your father’s brie. That was my whole point.’

  ‘Saying you wouldn’t say anything about it even if it killed a hall full of seniors is saying something about it, Hector.’

  ‘Then … sorry.’

  ‘Good. It won a medal.’ Leo Gibbs picked up his beer.

  ‘In the same year Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.’

  ‘Now you’re going to have to say sorry again.’ Leo Gibbs put his beer back on the bar.

  ‘Okay. Sorry again. But regarding John’s Friesian, I will say this much, I will extend client confidentiality this far; I’ll say it’s the only cow in Australia that has milked people rather than vice versa.’ Hector lowered his voice. ‘For a year it’s been the most profitable tourist attraction in Gippsland. Think of that. That’s a big achievement for a cow. And you blokes …’ Hector stared around at the beer drinkers, ‘you know I do the books for the Giant Earthworm.’

  The beer drinkers shook their heads at this news. They had thought the cow’s spirituality spurious, but no one could doubt its profitability once vouched for by Hector Landis, accountant for the Giant Earthworm.

  ‘It beat the earthworm?’ Leo Gibbs asked.

  Hector Landis nodded and, save for looped symphony-snippets from the poker machines, the bar went quiet as men blinked and pouted, searching for meaning in a world where a Friesian wearing a knot-eared Jesus could become a richer nugget than an eighty-metre-long cement earthworm with a jumping castle at its arse-end.

  Later that night most of the farmers from that front bar went down on their hands and knees in their sheds and paddocks to scrutinise their livestock for the mark of the Lord by torchlight. Jack Chiseller’s wife, Margaret, found the stigmata on their labrador, Buck, though there was suspicion he had got his front paws caught while besmirching Farley’s spaniel bitch through a cyclone fence.

  Jason Hillier, by looking at his Hereford herd, first the right way up, and then as he hung from his shed rafters like a bat, eventually discovered an upside-down Moses with a cowlick like Elvis in the white forehead blaze of a steer. Hallelujah.

  Eunice Stronghold owned thirty-five Nigerian Dwarf goats who gave a sourish milk that had not captured the local palate. She investigated them, one-by-one, for the Lord’s artistry and came up empty handed, and was calling them an economic disaster and worthless runts and a pack of thankless
little bastards when it suddenly dawned on her that their bleating resembled a loose Gregorian chant. By experimentation, Eunice found if she stood them on the iron grate floor of her milking shed and ran a few encouraging volts through that floor and turned those volts up at the right moment and down at the right moment, she could modulate and temper their chant into something akin to that emitted by the barbarous cathedrals of Eastern Europe. She called them the Assembly of God Korumburra Quadruped Choir and had her kelpies assemble them for two performances a day. Christians who came to visit never knew electricity was involved in the choir’s harmony. They assumed it was a flock of willing amateurs under the Lord’s baton. It became a great attraction.

  Tim Watson saw the dark green face of Mary on a seedless watermelon he reared. Seedless, you see. Both the watermelon and Mary … confirmation the face was hers. The advantage of this watermelon over most of the other holy produce was it could be put in a pram and wheeled through the streets of Korumburra and a veil flipped up for viewing after a small donation had been made. It was a portable attraction. Though sadly, being seedless, it was a dead end as far as the propagation of further holy attractions was concerned. There would be no second coming for Tim Watson and his sacred melon.

  Tim was an ox of a man and had, until Mary revealed herself on his fruit, been considered a good farmer. Now he abandoned the fields and perambulated his wonderful melon through the streets of Gippsland towns, flipping the veil for anyone who would part with a tenner. Whereupon they saw a wrinkling fruit with a coin-sized face that wore a slightly leery expression. The people who had parted with a tenner believed it was Mary, and the people who hadn’t didn’t. Such is the way of revelations.

  Suggestibles came from all over Australia to Gippsland to glory in this outbreak of Godly sign and revel in the sight of His creatures, shampooed and groomed and miraculously decorated with biblical likeness. When a busload of believers has ridden from Cairns to Victoria to see John the Baptist revealed on the haunch of a Wessex Saddleback, they’ve travelled too many kilometres and eaten too much fried roadside food for disappointment to be an option. The most far-fetched likeness is swallowed whole and called a miracle by those who have committed to it by purchase of interstate bus tickets. So Christians fell to their knees before pug-ugly Marys and pecan-headed Christs and hollered their hallelujahs as though these malformed icons were duly ratified by the Church.