THE KOOKABURRA’S TALE
Kira Henehan
Prologue
After the secession, well, strange forces came into power. A disposable symmetry was the order of the day. There was looting and yellow tape and everything I saw from my old gum tree. More than they knew we lived with ghosts. More than you know. I saw it all from high atop the bronze boulevard. I bribed an entire police force in the comfort of my pink silk bathrobe as you somewhere down La Cienega coughed out your Asian flu. You perhaps worried. It was not so much what you said for you said nothing. We perhaps knew everything all at once. The rain was nervous and disheveled that day. Its travels left it not so much hungry as unlikely. And the monsters mashed and the fates fated and the muses mused and the poor beleaguered godhead headed off the militias and the dragonflies once so determined to tango had no choice but to fold up their eager wings and watch it all go down.
Act I: The Devil Came to Long Beach
You were mostly getting the mails. You not so strongly, did not so strongly, dislike me. The idea of a train passed several times. Our visas were at least in order. As pretty a possibility as any, we supposed. Our car companion was cross-eyed and harelipped and lisped and had bangs and I wondered out loud how it felt to know no one would ever love her.
I said: I wonder how it feels to know no one will ever love you.
She said: I was one hot number whose number is up.
She said: Take your union back, Jack, and don’t come round no more.
She said: We boom boom like the mushroom hour. She said: It mostly feels like the way so many bad things happen in Southern California.
I understood completely although of course not. How could I? I told her a story that had relevance to her plight.
I said: When there is a disconnect between songs and their substance (I cast her a meaningful look and she nodded a bit hysterically), well for instance, to say it another way: the telephone rang and a skittish bomb blew quite accidentally and was shamed before its superiors.
She wept then and we cleaved to one another, myself and this monster, and I petted her horrid hair.
It had been a bright idea: when we got to the mainland, the vineyard would paint us gold and pink. There I would unlearn dour. Green my hair. Take a shower. Pound down years like vanilla bourbon tangerine pomade. And the young ones who know the fine wines: I would witch them. I remember now to have left (it like that) it all in the attic. I handed you that.
You said: My lovely brutal girl, put down your pinking shears. Don’t unroll your trouser cuffs just yet. And for godsakes stop reading over my shoulder. We’ve got angry retirees out the westward windows. We’ve a surplus of Balinese dancers making the caboose drag. And the whole world will fall apart so if you would please, please, just stop driving me up a tree with your ways, well, it would certainly be a start.
Indeed. A dramatic piece was playing in the front car. I took my wretched companion and left you to your ogles and fancies. It went so:
Constance: And how were your fruits?
Pithy (in strangled tones): Barely! Constance: And you tossed some buttery wagons?
Pithy: Dragons?
Constance: Wagons!
Pithy: Hot buttery wagons, you say?
Constance: Well I certainly would not mind very much one.
And so on it went. It was very very Dutch. My loathsome companion laughed and laughed and held her sides to keep from splitting. She quite abandoned me to attend the cast party with a shabbily-dressed stagehand and I shouted epithets at her broad back. I think she may have found love and if so well then anything’s possible.
Act II. Night in the Republic of Plato
It was dangerous here. Monsters in the sky, monsters in the trees. These were hard stars and grainy, and the weathervane bent as we watched. It pointed towards July and copper coins strangled the fountain like the hard stars choked the night. The rum train traded in orange sparks throughout the countryside, so much so that everyone thought it was war and fled. And the countryside relaxed back into itself and slept, with some graying sheep.
We amused ourselves in various ways. We made rhymes.
I said: O beloved Mr. N— , I cannot read your countrymen.
You said: All that Chekhov did for me was slowly drive me up a tree.
I said: I tried to read some Mandelstam but from the pages dropped a bomb.
You said: Enough of this nonsense. I’m trying to read.
I said: Tolstoy with his brainy head has me wishing I were dead.
You said: Seriously. Enough. You scaly strumpet.
I said: I am not scaly; I am smooth as a seal. You said: You’re a silly oyster.
I said: I’m a fine and resplendent temptress.
You said: You’re a flying Dutchman. And turned towards the window.
I said: I am not Dutch. I does not exist in this at all. And turned towards the aisle. I practiced silently my nomenclature. To think of it as disembodied sails and billowing is the trick. Though I tend to fall prey to certain distractions. To banish from your eyes the words read, so as to approximate some pleasant mode of not-read memory; like that. And I wished I had the window. I’d heard so much about the women of the inside city. I was holding life a bit in suspicion. I was translating you and living a clandestine language. And maidens bleach their summer frocks—the end-all and be-all of letters. No issue with tempo or nostalgia, no trouble. A pale and blue eyelet wrapped the shores.
Act III. The Widows’ League All-Stars
We woke in the hacienda interval. How it swifted about! That terrible time goes all ways and is honeyed like lamb. A filthy bossanova provided the backdrop.
I tried to remedy the situation.
I said: There is no trouble, you have the finest calves.
You said: Did you hear the one about Sandy Koufax in Puerto Rico?
And so it went. It went splendidly. We laughed at the girls, said they were “absolute khaki” and so forth. You let me perch on your shoulder as you read and it was a treat. We saw dragonflies pollinating about the wide bleached boulevards—alight, alight and fly, and alight, so incessant. The green had dried in the night and each beige blade fanned out across light hatched from some torpid sky we craned our necks and yet failed and failed to catch sight of. Mr. N— snoozed in his lonely corner, awaiting his curds and whey. We saw semaphore and pachyderm, blooming and grazing, respectively. With the relevance of an epic I made extravagant claims: I will not populate my thoughts with dragonflies. I will not dirty my fingernails with copper. I will not scratch copper, etch timepieces into your palm. The terrible time is passing and I will not. I did not say it out loud for I wanted you to think it was how I’d always been.
The train paused to allow some springtime ritual to take place across its tracks.
You said: Would you look at that! admiringly and made room for me to see out your window.
The bride had already been captured but it was nonetheless fascinating. Entire tribes advanced and retreated and spoke what had only been true before they began. And I know that you lie—but not why—flat on your front with your hands at your hipbones and it mattered less why the more that I watched. The art of imitation is hateful, but anything remotely resembling baseball is gorgeous. They called a standoff, old-style glorious, and everyone got to wear holsters and garters. They were only running slowly through an imperfect day, with bees. They were a lesson to us if we can only remember.
Epilogue
We are the bedridden holier-than-thou. We think bright swans and cut-stone walls. We say brooking and bawdy and mean it. With the milk comes grace. And this is your ankle and this is what I can scarcely comprehend. And here is an account of the maiden, fair maiden, who spits out earth, eats air and water. I’m astute, but you’re a stoat, so I will have you for my coat! Now don’t look that way, I am in jest. My summer frock needs no such accessory; my pinking shears dull upon their hook. Your lovely brutal girl am I. You say. It’s tempered some. And out one window, indolent ocean, out the other, the new regime’s wreckage, but inside-of-doors our favorite fun, a rare rain game involving fantastic feats of strength and the strategic trade of spent shell-casings.