Claiming T-Mo

by Eugen Bacon

  “Why think it was for you?” she said.

  “Wasn’t it?”

  She swirled. He stopped too, and looked at her with a worrisome eye, his focus not on blazing sparkle but on a northern point on her forehead.

  “Your legs are spindly,” she said. “Remember that. But you are not my boyfriend.”

  “All good.” His eyes shifted to her grazed chin.

  “Is it?”

  They walked in silence to the fork of the road that separated them: one path up the hill where Myra lived; the other down to the fold of a valley where Vida lived in a weatherboard house surrounded by a solid thicket of wild trees.

  “Until then,” he said, parting.

  She nodded.

  He was well on his way down the vale when a pound of feet chased him.

  It was Myra.

  “I thought, maybe,” she paused. “Maybe you wanted to come to the river with me.”

  “No sweat.”

  She started running, surging into a warm, chaffing wind. Her claret tunic lifted and sank with her knees. He ran behind, too slow to catch up, duffle bag too heavy, the path too cobbled in parts. And then they were out in sprawling fields of wild grass that led to the river, away from the knot of trees surrounding Vida’s house far east. Myra was swift and lithe, looping around shrubbery, gunning for it. Her laughter made melody in the whistling wind. He laughed with her as they ran, his own sound utterly rusty and scratched.

  Finally she spun around. They almost tumbled in a heap. They lay face up, arms spread, fingers almost touching, eyes cast at a spotless emerald sky. Myra smelt of fennel.

  “Dale’s a bitch,” she said to the skies.

  “Class was wretched,” said Vida.

  “Wasn’t your fault. Girls are bitches.”

  “Aren’t you, Myra?”

  She looked at him.

  “A girl?” he clarified.

  “You crackers?”

  “So you really are then . . .”

  “Grovean?” she helped.

  He was going to say hybrid. “Are you?”

  “And if I am?” Her gaze lingered.

  He flushed.

  “Tell me, Vida.” She knew his name. “What if I am Grovean?”

  “People talk.”

  He had caught snatches of hushed conversation, sometimes from his parents. All harmless talk, really, but sometimes anxious words, frightened even.

  “. . . move with velocity of light . . .”

  “. . . switch through time, between worlds . . .”

  “. . . never die, not normally, anyways. Wonder what happened to T-Mo?” Myra’s father, her Grovean past.

  People tried to place her: “Is she a mammal?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Then what?”

  Her mother, Salem, was wide-eyed and tear-prone. Fully mortal, as was Tonk: steel, brisk and dapper. But even his arrogance could not shield him or his wife from the shadow of the Grovean mantle. Though it was not explicitly spoken, young children were forbidden with a glance, a tug, a furrow of brow from entering the house with misted windows on the hill. A manor that climbed, open to the stars.

  Now Vida’s curiosity overcame him.

  “How come he died?” he asked. “What happened?”

  Grass trembled slightly. A torn leaf, desiccated and useless, raced along the ground. Myra did not ask whom.

  “You miss him?” he tried again.

  She faced away. “How old are you?”

  “Eleven,” he said. “You?”

  “Ancient.”

  He sat upright. “What do Groveans do anyway?” Bolder now.

  “Slay people.”

  “Really?!”

  She eyed him as if he deeply amused her.

  “Can you?” he said. “Kill people too?”

  Her expression altered. “What do you think?” A voice within a voice, distant.

  The glint in her dark eyes was almost difficult to catch. His brow lifted. His heart sang. He blinked, and she kissed him. His world swelled with shadows and light, distinction, restriction, temperature, ice, salt, earth. Texture, promise, complexity, integration: all trapped in an instant. His knees jellied, his hips blazed. His hands lost sensation. When he opened his eyes to find his brittle fingers on the rise and fall of her chest, he knew not how to lift them to the velvet smoothness of her face. At first, he could not define the borders of what he felt. Then in a breath, Vida was new and old and happy and deliciously in love.

  Myra jumped and skipped away, her laughter uncomplicated. She threw her head back and the glitter in her hair, a sapphire waterfall, bounced. He climbed to his feet, brushed his khaki shorts and chased, fast this time, running at his best until his heels sang. Elation touched him; the significance of the moment. Strangely, with wind on his face and a big, clean sky above him, he also felt . . .

  A surge of purity.

  At last they came to the swell and swirl of the river. They stood on their crag, the sacred place of their first meeting. Vida’s heart leapt at the sight of a figure in the water. Although Myra was half-close to a smile, her face was pallid. She gazed in silence at russet hair moving in silver waves below.

  “Is that you-know-who?” she said quietly.

  Vida processed the scene before him. It was Dale Hocking. Swimming in their river. Not as effortless as Myra, not as clumsy as Vida, who was wary of the water’s belly. But there swimming, nonetheless, spoiling their fun.

  “Come.”

  The touch of Myra’s fingertips was frost.

  “Where to?” Vida hesitated.

  “You know where.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  “No. Myra, I don’t.”

  Still, he followed, as if in a spell, knowing she was plotting something.

  “You shouldn’t—” he froze his feet a little, resisting weakly.

  But she pulled him, the light in her eye too keen. And in a wink she was gone. Vanished. She had literally thinned in air. Next he saw her, she stood silent on a northbound shore, naked; skin aglow; half-formed breasts alert. His breath caught. Dale was still swimming, free, shameless, playful even, oblivious of added presence.

  Not a ripple broke the water’s surface with Myra’s dive. She slithered, gliding like a water snake toward her prey. When water closed above Myra’s head, chill touched Vida’s flesh. Suddenly Dale was gasping and choking; soundlessly flapping and splashing. Then water covered her head too and it fizzed, bubble after bubble foaming and floating on the water’s face. Endless bubbles broke the calm surface one after another. Then the bubbles stopped.

  Even then, Vida wasn’t convinced.

  He sat and hugged his legs, waiting. Night fell whole and silent. Shadows awakened and crept. Wind pulled water from his eyes. A yellow moon, hostile, sinister, stalked across the river. A wave slapped at the raised crag, and ice-cold spits struck his skin. Somewhere in the distance, inside the silence of night, Vida heard the crystal ping of a calling bird. He caught movement behind him and there she was—Myra. She slipped, fully clothed, beside him. She smelt of seaweed. Her face looked weightless.

  They sat very still. If, disoriented, he wondered . . . nothing was said of it. How and why he spoke nothing, he didn’t know. Perhaps it was a method to madness, or was it his acceptance of Grovean . . . codes? he silently asked himself. Myra hummed. Her low song carried something surreal and gray and wistful and sweet. He listened without melancholy, a part of him both frozen and thawed.

  “Better head,” she said calmly, when at last she spoke.

  “I guess.”

  His awareness of her reeled his mind. He stood up, abrupt.

  She watched him, head tilted. Her moonlit face was tender, ever so soft. Bewildered, he turned and ran, chased by a pounding of
heart. In a flash, Myra’s weed scent flew past him—up the ridged footpath, swift as a spear. Dusk swallowed her litheness.

  He surged behind her into spreading darkness, running further and harder than he ever remembered. He closed the space between them, madly laughing as he ran.

  • 25 •

  Transition.

  So they are. Vida and Myra. She is half-alien to his humanness. Her Grovean mantle is strange, it is shifting, sometimes disquieting. Sometimes it is intense right there. It is that Grovean thing that makes people talk. But Vida doesn’t care.

  • • •

  Myra took him to the house on the hill, the manor that climbed. Took him up ironed balustrades, C-shapes and S-curls. His hand followed the curves and twirls all the way to Myra’s bedroom. Despite her denial of femininity, Girls are bitches, she had said, she was a girl. There were mirrors and frames, shelves and hooks. Whimsical lights gave the textured wall a muted hue that cast a soft gold upon the geometric pattern on the floor rug. The bed had latticed pillows and throws—fuchsia, lavender and taupe—petal-edged. By the window, beside a floor-to-ceiling drape—ribboned—a large-leafed plant with tints of scarlet and bronze brought the room to life.

  It was a jealous plant named Red, and it was very territorial. Soon as it saw Vida accompanying Myra, it started to wag, swell up and clack. And then it sang, morosely, for Vida:

  He’s a jolly keen fellow

  Oh, jolly keen fellow,

  Deny, deny?

  Jolly keen fellow,

  Deny, deny?

  “Stop being petty,” said Myra. “Vida’s not replacing you.”

  Red turned to a wilt. Took an hour before it responded to Vida’s touch, and when it did, it squirted dye on him.

  “You really have to stop this,” said Myra, and Red promptly went into a Spindly Vida, Leggedy Vida song. It sang in a baritone. Its sweet, harshless music of ascending and descending melody was weak and airy in parts, before it swelled to slapstick flourish, operatic. Spindly Vida, Jiggety! Red extended and held the last note.

  • • •

  Myra and Vida sink into a courtship of the young, one filled with inexperience and unfussiness, a courtship of the kind before adulthood bends down to catch up with it.

  Today, they lie side by side in their sprawl on a glen that is yellow by day, muted by night. The sun’s heart is right there with them. Vida wonders what it is about Myra that stirs him so. Is it her kinship with water—how she spears into rolling waves, immerses without effort into rapids that are twenty-four seas, that howl over her head? Or is it how she wriggles a toe just so, enough to bring pause to the heart of his sentence? Or how she throws her head and light splashes in the spray of her hair? Or how she puts timbre in her voice in a special sound for Vida? What he feels is not lust, but something close.

  The first day he saw her swimming naked in the river, her skin a dark caramel, her baby breasts just coning, his interest pitched. Like clothing, it slipped off his body to follow her scattered garments on the shore and spread its curiosity like mist. He could not move beyond it, his notice of the girl, her newness and secrecy as she swam, possibly mad, unhinged in uncontrollable waves. The scene before him was glorious and astonishing, and he sat hopeless—or was it hopeful?—on that bleak cliff. He watched and watched Myra until his yearning heated the wet blue of her hair and she swam into a fiery sapphire in his eyes, until the pound of his heart eclipsed all sound of the untamed river. He became a boy with dreams, arrow sharp. Hers were loose. He could tell from the way her smile was just so—private—when she rose from the black waters. She stepped indifferent into a charcoal wool skirt whose color matched the somberness of her eyes. When she straightened, topless and open to his scrutiny, he uncurled from his hunch to rake fingers through his hair. Perhaps it was the liquid in her eyes, or the loudness in her silence, or her bare back to him as she pulled on a flame orange shirt, hippy and bold . . . His throat caught. Just then, just so, as silver from the stars bathed her hair—she tossed a pebble and it bounced several times in the waves. And she spoke to him without turning. “So you come here,” she said.

  Now Myra gets to her feet, holds her hand out. “Come, Vida.”

  He wants to finish his story, the one he was telling before adulthood caught up and, somehow, somewhere, without warning, his voice broke right in the middle of a consonant and a syllable.

  Despite the way Myra walks, the way she tilts her chin and allows him a glimpse of the woman she might become, despite her ancientness, he understands that her adolescence is steps behind. His is early.

  A gang-gang cockatoo swoops from the sky and perches on Myra’s shoulder. A hurricane of yelps, and more cockatoo hover in the horizon.

  “I feel mature,” says Vida.

  Myra stands there without response, guides the gang-gang bird to the skies with an upward stretch of her hand. The cockatoo walks the length to her palm, rubs his beak along her finger, and lifts off.

  “Mature?” Now she looks at him. “Why say that?”

  “Don’t you? Feel it too?”

  “Whatever you’re on about.” Her mirth leaves him inadequate with words.

  How does one voice the antlers that make him feel things a boy shouldn’t? He doesn’t mind some grownup thoughts he experiences. But he minds the fierce searing; the one that sometimes accompanies those other thoughts. When he tries to collapse the thoughts, contain them before they spread to his hips, he finds he cannot catch them.

  “Why so serious?” And she is off leaping and burrowing in the glen, skipping over cowslips, dancing with trees. “See, Vida. Chase me.”

  Ah, heck.

  Vida lets loose before that grownup thing returns to break his simple world of cowslips and dreams. He is cool with the grownup thing, as long as he can retrieve his childhood afterward and race about the fields, carefree and wild as she. They are all knees and elbows, giggling with a carpet of dahlias, banksias and kangaroo paws.

  “Look, Myra. A moth butterfly.”

  She leaps sky high to catch it, dispatches it with a kiss. She speaks to nature in the language of a humming bird. The dahlias respond by bending petals her way. A bumblebee eyes her from the tip of an olive blade and sings his sultry tune for her.

  As nature’s corsetry lifts to reveal apricot and white petticoats, Vida knows he would do the same if he were a plant. Now, right now, it is just wonderful to be. But sometimes, as they lie stretched on cool grass, their bare feet open to the fingers of the sun, something creeps upon them unbidden. It slips in the memory of one Dale Hocking, of her small face and russet tresses (sopping wet). Dale, pushed to the river’s bed and it became a tomb. If anyone at Middle Creek Community School wonders what happened to Dale, how she vanished, nobody wonders aloud. But the children, the rest of them, the way they look at Myra is different now. And their look has rolled on to Vida.

  • 26 •

  He found her growing on a tree. Not Myra, but a woman with hair the color of a cartoon. Right there, at a fork of two roads, one leading up a hill, the other back to the river, she was hoisted on the branch of a tree that twisted downward. She had a short crop on her head and vacant miles in one eye. Her good eye was sharp as that of a lynx, filled with moonshine and a hint of morning, intense and interrogating. The way she rested her cheek on the bough, she looked like she was growing from it.

  Vida stopped in his tracks and blinked. When his eyes opened the tree had moved. The woman raised her cheek and he noticed that half her face was disfigured. The disfigurement was old, dead tissue mangled and pasted like a mask on her face. He lowered his gaze, to respect her space, but his eyes drew back. Her smile was a thing left over from a memory; he wasn’t sure it was real. Everything about her was like stages of a dream where her face was familiar, yet she was a stranger. When she moved, like when she forgot the hug of the tree and set her pose, arranged it for him, it was as if
he were seeing her inside a mirror of reflections, a dream within a dream within a dream. The tree and her body overlapped, intermittent, in hues of black and white.

  She made a sound then, a sigh, it was deep and halfway to a groan, but trapped in something else. The sound bounced like an echo off the tree. It vibrated in the air toward him, then silence swallowed it.

  Part of him filled with trepidation, and he wanted to retreat. The other felt emotions of a strange kind, and he wanted to reach out and squeeze the woman’s hand. But fog took hold. When it ebbed, the woman with one broken eye and one gobbling eye was gone. What stayed were a strange sound in the air of sad music, and a floating in the wind of wet and moss and fur and oil. Later, not much later, he couldn’t remember what she wore, if she wore . . . All he remembered was one side of her face smooth as cream, the other covered with trail. And the perfectly round eyes: one a broken portal to a faraway place, unusable and indeterminate in its form, the other interrogating and vivid.

  And though, far as Vida knew, Myra was unconnected with the odd woman and her equally odd appearance and disappearance, Vida thought of Myra. He didn’t know who he was without her. All he knew was that he should know.

  • 27 •

  Rain crept nearer, as did dusk. Vida and Myra ran all the way to the woods, inside a fold of land that leaned toward the river.

  Vida loped several lengths behind Myra. His duffle bag that held three textbooks skipped and bobbed on his back. A chafing wind on his face carried the backward float of Myra’s laughter that was a soft tinkle of bells, a rustle of leaves, a deep-seated stomach purr. Her sound scattered in the breeze. When she stopped, breathless, her face—the perfection of it, the mystery of it—caught sapphire shimmers from her hair as light bounced in it.

  Wind and drizzle fell backward. Air warmed and dusk swelled. Myra spoke of places she’d been, worlds that burst with color, places whose horizons filtered rainbow through a silhouette of trees. She spoke of dropping valleys that whispered, climbing hills that blazed, spitting volcanos that touched the sky, singing water that solidified at her touch.