Rocket Boy and the Geek Girls

by Phyllis Irene Radford

  At the waterhole.

  I was on the ground in the grass. Thin old khaki-pale grass, but enough to hinder my view. I went to jump up and stopped in case it sent the horse right off. I knelt up instead and squinted through the stems, over the last smoke wisps, down the bank. Dust and grass-stubs, all pale Dry-time colors, then the black and white trees and the coffee-colored mirror of water between.

  There was nothing that I could have expected. Nothing floating. No yellow stuff. Nothing on the bank. No sound.

  No sound at all. The wind had stopped. The air was practically sitting on me, thick, and still, and heavy with storm, the light had gone all shadowless with one of the big clouds over the sun, and usually that’s when birds sing by daylight. But there wasn’t a sound.

  Nothing but the horse, still carrying on like he’d seen a ghost.

  And the ripples, the last of the huge, slow ripples, coming to shore in the waterhole.

  oOo

  I can’t remember what I told myself. A fish? A croc? They’re supposed to come up along the river, though I’ve never seen a mud-slide myself. Something dropped by a bird? A pelican must’ve dived? And flown off again?

  None of that should have worried the horse.

  oOo

  I remember I saddled up, not exactly in a hurry, but not wasting time, either. There was something — strange — about the silence, the light, something more than river country and a day working up to storm. But when the ripples stopped the horse had just dropped his head and gone back to normal, so I told myself it was more imagination. Nothing to worry about.

  But I didn’t forget it either. When the first storm came through and we checked the fences on every blessed river crossing, I went down in the old Toyota four-wheel drive. Cranky and shaky and short of a passenger-side window, but it would be better, I told myself, than a horse.

  Which it wasn’t. Late afternoon, headed home, I drove over the bottom crossing, at the foot of the waterhole, and put a new underwater snag into the sump.

  The truck had to come out of the creek, of course. If more rain came, no point in losing the lot. But it couldn’t be driven any further. And we didn’t use two-ways. I had a whole lot of choice: leave the truck and walk home, in the dark, or sit tight, and wait for somebody to come out, next day.

  They knew where I had gone. And it was coming on to rain. Which meant the full moon wouldn’t light me home, and I’d get wet as well.

  I had an apple left from dinner, and a tarp in the back, along with the axe, and matches, and tea in the old tucker-box. I said a few sulfurous words, then took it all up on the highest spot along the top bank, and started settling in for the night.

  The storm came through just before dark. Not much wind. A slow-moving front, so it seemed to go on for ages, great, wide sheets of lightning, white as searchlights, and then the thunder. Ker-thump. Ker... thump. Not the nasty high crackle of a dry storm or an actual strike. This was the rich, solid bass note you get with decent rain.

  I had dug a drain and tied the tarp down well. I sat dry while the last wood faded down into coals, and listened to it all. The rustle, drum, patter of rain on the tarp, the husssh of rain on leaves, the steady purr of rain on bare ground and worn-out grass. The slow, fading thunder-peals. The trickle and tap, the splat and plink as the last drops came to ground.

  Then I wrapped the old corn-sacks round me for token blankets, and lay down to sleep.

  oOo

  I don’t know what time I woke. The rain-noise had all stopped, I remember that. And the moon was out. Full and clear, in a cloudless sky. The whole side of the waterhole was lit up, black and silver, like they say in paintings, chiaroscuro. Tree-shadows in separate leaf-clots, the way our thin-leaved timber grows, and a snatch of branch between, black and silver netting-work, patterned on the ground. Wisps of hair-and-silver shadow. Grass. Soft splotches, where water had lain long enough to turn to mud. And the waterhole, beyond the grass-stems, a silver and charcoal patterned plain. Bright as the moon, and that was glowing like platinum, almost over my head.

  But it was not the moon that woke me up.

  It was — I don’t know how to describe it. It was music, I know that. You can tell music from random noise. Song? I suppose so. It was no nightbird I could pick, and I can tell a frog-mouth from a mopoke owl. Let alone that heart-stopping screeee a curlew makes. Like a damn lost soul, people say, when they wake up with their hearts in their mouths and their hair on end. Like a banshee, that calls without warning, mourning, waking the dead.

  This was not a bird. It was high, and lilting, sort of, and if it had been human I couldn’t have said if the singer was woman or man. But it had more parts than one, and patterns, and I couldn’t understand them, but I knew the patterns had sense. They were made of words.

  All that doesn’t say anything about — the real thing. How beautiful it was, how absolutely pure and unearthly, like the voice of moonlight. How liquid, running like distilled water, trills, arpeggios, cascades of it, smooth, sure, unbroken.

  And so sad.

  Imagine all the water in the world, all the world there has ever been. And it has a memory. It remembers everything it was, from the first beginning. Fog. Mist. Cloud. Raindrop. Snow. Running water. Rivulet, stream, river, the sea’s untouched foundation. Living things.

  Cells. Amoebas, embryos. Water plants, sea plants, land plants, grass, stem, leaf, tree, all the juice and sap that makes them live. Coral polyps, oysters, fish, whales. Ants, insects, monkeys, elephants. Human beings.

  Conceived, and growing, being born, living, gathering the water into them, giving it patterns, giving it shapes. Growing old, fading, decaying. And the water running out, to begin again, another life, another shape, over and over. Remembering it all.

  Because water is life, and water is eternal. But everything that’s born is going to die.

  oOo

  The tears were already running when I woke. Sliding sideways down my temple, then over my cheeks when I sat up. Not needing to speak, to hold my hands out. The tears were saying it for me. Water answering water. Called by water, its own element, its memory, its grief.

  Calling water back.

  The noises reached me first. Ripples in the waterhole, not the slap a fish makes, but a slow, turning slushshhh. Slap, tap, against the margin roots. Trickle, splash. Water falling downward out of air, back into itself. The way it does when a swimmer breaks the surface. Rises from the level, shedding, dripping, comes to land. Stands up.

  And then the pattern, splat, tick, splat, of remaining droplets on grass and leaf. Light and silvery as the moonlight. Moonlight moving, liquid, laborious, a mass of moon-shadow and highlight, up the bank.

  It was slow-moving. Effortful. The struggle up between the roots, the snap of broken sticks, the ruffle of dragged-down grass, the labored breath. And moonlight is not sunlight, it lights but never truly illuminates. I never did see the details. Just dark and silver moving, coming where I called it. The breaths, slow and whistling, the flop, flop of difficult, unaccustomed feet.

  It was dark under my roof. That blurred the arrival, when moonlight slid behind it, leaving just a silhouette. Two arms, two legs, a down-bowed head. A mass of body. Moon-faded, bobbly masses slung across a shoulder, trailing over ribs. I put my hands out, and it bowed to come under the lintel and collapsed, gasping and panting, next to me.

  My hands gave me the first truth: it was flesh and blood. Alive, responsive, flexible, warm, under the surface-chill, the cold slick of skin still wet from the water. Firm, cold-tautened skin, slippery and smooth over solid muscle as an Olympic athlete just out of the pool.

  Just at first, it might almost have been a woman’s body. Not the skin texture, or the bulk of muscle, but the contours, the proportions, the weight of flesh rather than bone in the shoulders, the fineness of ribs and waist... But I’ve never held a woman naked, so maybe I imagined it. After all, male swimmers are smoother muscled than runners or wrestlers, anyhow. And when the hands drew me close
, they were too big for a woman’s. Long, smooth hands, with very long fingers, yes, but the wrists and palms you would never take for anything but male.

  Or the body. A swimmer’s body, with the strong swell of pectorals, cool and smooth as living marble, and the male nipples, the ridged belly muscles, the flat taper of the torso, that no woman has, and the heavy girdle of muscle over the hips. You can see it on those old statues. Or on pictures of champion divers or triathletes. Men who really swim.

  And it was definitely a man below that, with the long smooth thigh muscles, still slippery and chilled from the water, rippling against me. All of him was smooth, cold and firm but slippery as water-smoothed marble, his chest, his flanks, his shoulders, with the heavy bunch and flex of muscle down the back, the ridged loins, the tight curves of his backside, even the long, long, delicately boned, bruised feet. The hands, smooth and eager, slipping round me, following as I undid clothes, touching, exploring, arms, neck, breasts, belly, the eager, opening mouth. And the hot, smooth column of the phallus rising, curving a little, all but leaping into my hands.

  Touching, eager to be touched in turn, more than willing to be touched all over. Except for his hair.

  If it was hair. It began on his head, yes, and went down over his back, I know that much, and it fell down over his ribs sometimes, and his flanks, like a great heavy tress. I thought of it as hair, and I think it must have been the yellow stuff I saw in the water. I felt the weight of it, like wrist-thick dreadlocks, when one fell across my neck or arm. Dreadlocks is what I thought, but maybe... We see things as what we know.

  All I know is, the first time it fell, I tried to touch that too. He let out a hiss as if I’d burnt him and grabbed my hand away. Not hurting, but fast and strong enough to get it over: Not that. Not there.

  No words. There were never any words, from either of us. But he talked to me, all the time we lay there. Sang to me, in that liquid music, water’s voice. Calling, flowing, telling me, It has happened, you have heard me, for this night, this hour, this second, I am not alone. I am alive, you are alive, water waking, meeting. You are here.

  While we made love, in the moon’s dark on the dusty cornsacks, the way dolphins ought to do it in the moving sea. Arms linked, bellies, bodies pressed together, one flesh leaping, curving, singing, joy met and plunging into union. Flesh, blood, being, all in their own element, shared.

  oOo

  Here in the hospital, nobody knows me. I made absolutely certain of that. I’ve been planning this ever since I woke that morning. With the first light showing the trees, gray and faint as pencil-lines, and the leaves blurry in their sheaths of dew. And the little trail of mist, white as breath, just masking the water, that was absolutely still, absolutely empty, with the sheen of old, cooled steel.

  And nothing beside me, except the smell of sex and sweat from the cornsacks and the great wet patch under them, on the ground around them, where we had lain.

  It was under the tarp. Where it ought to have been dry. So I made sure I pulled the tarp down, and folded it, and doused the sacks in the waterhole, and folded them too. Before I made another fire and sat down to boil tea for breakfast, and wait for the noise of an engine and the moving hood of the new Toyota among the trees, with one of my brothers driving up.

  I never went back to the waterhole, any more than I looked for a sign that morning. I knew it had all been said. I didn’t expect anything else, and there wasn’t. Not a ripple, a snatch of song, a glimpse of yellow, floating — hair.

  And I never told the family anything. Except, about a fortnight afterwards, when we all went to the Amateur Races, I said I thought, for the Wet, maybe I’d stay over, perhaps get a job, in town.

  Then it was easy enough to move to the coast, another town, another job, change clothes and fashion with them, start wearing hippie things, loose and floppy, up in the tourist resorts. When you come into town already pregnant, so long as you have a story, there’s really nothing to hide.

  I did work at saving money. I haven’t worked — I knew I wouldn’t be able to work — the last two months. Not that it’s been a hard pregnancy, as these things go, but I wanted to be sure.

  The family think I’m just wandering about a while. I write to them, or at least to Mum. Talk about people I meet, things I do, send photos. With me carefully not in them, or behind someone else. If anything’s been difficult, it’s not having Mum here, to moan at about all the things that must be usual. The swollen feet, the backaches, the having to pee every five minutes. The sudden urge to go out and eat waterlily roots, in the middle of the night.

  I never had an ultrasound, though. It’s the only thing that’s really worried me. She might have had all sorts of defects. But it was just too risky. If they’d noticed. Not that something had been wrong, but that something was different.

  The labor was easy too, the way I knew it would be. I could feel that, the way, since that night, I’ve felt everything. As if it was water, moving through me, speaking without words, in the blood.

  The doctor’s just been in. There was a bit of a fuss after she was delivered, they had to take her to the ICU to make sure she breathed properly. But he says I can have her this morning. He raised his eyebrows a bit when I said I wanted an immediate discharge, but after all, I’m healthy. She’s healthy. And they always need the beds.

  I know exactly what we’ll do afterwards. Out of here, down to another coast-town, get a job. Somewhere near the beach, where a creek or a river comes in. Where we can stay for a couple of years, until she’s old enough —

  Until she can swim.

  Somewhere, perhaps, that I can take her out on a boat, between the islands. To see the dull yellow rafts floating, dipping in the swell, undulating, when the coral spawns.

  Somewhere she can make her mind up. Which way she wants to go.

  I won’t think past that. I know what I have to give her. A mother, a place to grow up, kid things, grandparents later, maybe, depending how things go. All the things you can have, when you’re one of us. I know what’s expected of me. There were never any words, but I know. It’s what we were there for. Water to water, life to life. However he got there, whether he was trapped there, he’s going on now. I don’t know if she remembers, but he will. Water to water. Going on, the way she will, after I’m gone. Into a new shape. Living again.

  Of course I know what it could have been. Living in the bush, I know about sex, you can’t help it. And anybody half-smart knows about men. It could have been that, yes. One quick, slick fuck, no promises, all they want, and off they go.

  Except I still remember that first minute, when it was flesh and blood I touched, but it might as easily have been a woman in my hands. And I wonder, was he really a he? Was it just for the moment? For whatever he is, does being man or woman matter? What would have come out of the waterhole, if the one who heard the singing was a man?

  Not so practical, really. Because I do know the other stuff. I read a book about it, down at a resort once. Reproduction of a species. Selfish genes. Just as slick, getting the chromosomes carried over. Nothing more.

  But I heard the singing. I can remember the sadness. And the way it sounded, when I held my hands out, and he took them. That wasn’t selfishness. That was joy.

  oOo

  I still want to have her with me now, to see her and hold her. Give her the first real drink. Make sure she’s —

  Really here.

  In this world, the daylight world. She must be perfect, just like us, or there would already have been the most enormous upset. That fuss about breathing must have been the only hitch. She must already have — adjusted — properly.

  She can’t breathe, the way I’m almost sure he did, through whatever it was that wasn’t hair.

  The doctor’s back again. Carrying her himself, really quite gushy. She looks just like any other newborn, screwed-up face, eyes shut like a kitten, that cute little mouth. Her head’s quite bald, but he says that’s pretty normal. And she breathes through
her mouth, and snorts a bit, the way kittens or puppies do. And sucks like a limpet. He says that’s normal too.

  He was leaning over the bed end when he said it, laughing at the faces I made. “No,“ he said, “she’s fine, absolutely fine. Picked up the oxygen in a minute. Slick as the way she arrived. Everything else is perfect — well, some unseparated digits, you’ll have seen those. Second and third toes, both sets. Looks a little odd, perhaps, but it’s not unusual. Heritable, actually. It won’t affect her gait, and if she does get self-conscious, later, it can be fixed. The surgery’s purely cosmetic, though it’s better done before she’s two.“ He laughed a bit more before he walked away. “Myself, I’d stick with nature. If she asks, you can always say that once upon a time a fairy godmother left her a special gift. So if she wants, she could be an Olympic swimmer: and she will go like a piranha in the water. It really helps to have webbed feet.“