Travellers May Still Return Read online

  ©Michael Kenyon, 2019

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Thistledown Press Ltd.

  410 2nd Avenue North

  Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7K 2C3

  www.thistledownpress.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Travellers may still return / Michael Kenyon.

  Names: Kenyon, Michael, 1953- author.

  Description: Short stories.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190131357 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190131764 | ISBN 9781771871877 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771871884 (HTML) | ISBN 9781771871891 (PDF)

  Classification: LCC PS8571.E67 T73 2019 | DDC C813/.54—dc23

  Cover painting, West of Flight, by Lorraine Thomson

  Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada for its publishing program.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to the fine people at Thistledown. Special thanks to Seán Virgo, brilliant editor, traveller of travellers.

  In memory of Tom Clifford Kenyon

  CONTENTS

  The Prehistory of Jesse Green

  No One But Himself

  Mistress of Horses, Mistress of the Sea

  Eros does not lead upward only but downward into that uncanny dark world of Hecate and Kali.

  CG Jung

  THE PREHISTORY OF JESSE GREEN

  for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready; it was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure.

  Revelation 19:7-8

  She was crazy she was not she was beautiful and rich she knew Miami meant my friend or my soul that’s why we went there and lived in a hotel like tourists though it wasn’t the destination just a place to rest and relate she said soul mates find out what’s after friendship and her eyes lit up when she told me and I wanted nothing else but to go with her wherever even Panama she was so serious I got serious too after all it was an easy decision for me that spring sitting on a bench on Cornwall in Vancouver looking at water freighters high-rises trees mountains snow sky and her green eyes mostly her eyes and when the jay landed in the maple tree over the fence and chattered everything slowed down and it was the sign she said that we should stop talking and go

  1.

  “Chucha! Qué sopá?”

  At first I could only see a silhouette, then the figure turned its head and I saw Jesus on the veranda outside the door, his terrified face grinning and nodding at a tall guy who spoke to him from the top of the stairs. “Tell me what’s been found. Who has been here?”

  Jesus laughed aloud and shrugged his shoulders. The moon was still up. That hissing was rain coming back or wind rattling the leaves, and the tops of the trees waved in a white wind and two lights shone from across the track, lanterns swaying slightly, or the moon reflecting on a vehicle, not yet, the road wasn’t finished. Jesus’s thin shoulders shrugged again under his gleaming shirt, how nervous he was. The man behind him was still talking, his voice low, one arm resting on the thick round rail. He’d come through the jungle or from the sea looking for us, and darkness jumped, a microscope lens cracking a slide, and their heads were together for a long time, night air singing around them, then first rain hit the roof, drowning out the wind in the estate’s fields, and I kneeled on my bunk, trying to see Jesse in the huge hammock by the window, but Sucre’s bulk was all I could make out, rolling in sleep, and her skinny hammock hanging loose beside his. “Jesse.” No answer. For six months I’ve woken scared that she’s been spirited away by a gangster, a gang of punks, in Vancouver, in Miami, any place between, in Panama City. No, no. She was in Sucre’s hammock, squished under him. Easy as locks in the canal.

  Around dawn I started to shake and soldiers were in the shadows, the ones who’d rescued us from police who’d held us on drug charges near the harbour, the young officer asking over and over who was our favourite rock-and-roll band, Jesse thin and wild, her clothes rags. “I know very well that you have rich friends here.” The covered truck all over again through the deep green tunnel to the ugly pile of roots.

  The fever lasted the whole day, events circling with the mosquitoes outside the gauze, the net, the gauze, the net, finally let up as darkness fell, and I walked around the compound and ate a bunch of tortillas and got buzzed on maté. Light as a feather, hollow as a reed. Screeching night birds and animals splashing in the tide-filled forest kept me back-checking, feet planted in mud at the beginning of the new road, for a long time, and I saw a silver coin, Mother Magda’s face, in the trees. When she stepped out, her naked body was all scarred up, except the skin between her belly button and her blonde fur, which seemed pure and vast as a desert. When she turned I was freaked to see she had a short thick fleshy tail.

  Late that night, after Sucre had gone to sleep, Jesse quit his hammock to join me in my narrow cot against the back wall of the house and we listened to the tide seeping out of the swamp. “It’s salt crystals drying in the moonlight,” she whispered. “It’s killing the crops.” And she’s right. Each day the corn turns blacker and blacker while Sucre sits on his big stinking earthmover and digs his dumb road past the cemetery to the old port so he can go fetch the owner’s new car and take Jesse dancing. When I told her about the tall man on the veranda the night before, she laughed.

  “It’s only Jesus and a lover,” she said. “Just get your strength back, okay? Don’t waste your energy.”

  “Maybe it was the owner,” I said.

  “It’s under control,” she said. “Absolute control. We are totally safe.”

  “How do you know, Jesse?”

  “Just we’d know if Pedrarias was here. Sucre would tell us. It’s common sense. And when he sees me, he’ll want to fuck me. You know something, Kenneth? If he comes before the road’s finished I’ll get him to fire Sucre. We’ll be okay.” She moved a fraction away from me, as far as she could in the slender space, and I could see her eyes. Something in me crouched. She always creates this little gap between us so I can see her body or some detail of it, and often, if I’m quiet, something happens, some deep agreement. The little fox in me woofed and nodded.

  “How did it go today?” I asked.

  She reached between my legs. “We’re way past the cemetery. This is crazier than any place we’ve been. It’s really wild, you know? There’s something trying to happen. Feel it?”

  “Yeah.” I watched her face. “You fucked Sucre all day?”

  “We worked on the road. Sucre’s crazy about the road. He thinks it is cool that a man can build a road through jungle all by himself. Sometimes his bucket hits these buried rocks and roots and — ” She paused, her fingers teasing. “He likes me to ride on his thigh, so when he’s finished a hard bit he can shut off the engine and lift me onto his cock . . . ”

  “He does that?”

  “Yeah.”

  Every leaf glimmered out beyond the veranda. In the mangrove, black water reflected the moon. The clamour of insects got muffled. I zipped my fingers across the netting. Cold flat light filled the land. The villagers were all sleeping.

  “Jesse?”

  “What?�
�

  “When are we leaving?”

  “Soon,” she said. “The road’s through, you know, almost ready. He’s going to steal Pedrarias’s car right off the freighter.”

  “I know.”

  “Pedrarias, he’s rich. Way richer than my parents. He paid off the army. Sucre says his family’s been ripping off peasants for generations. And Sucre’s gonna rip off Pedrarias. It’s like a showdown. He’s like a rebel. We just need to be patient a bit longer.”

  She told me to go to sleep and slipped out of the bunk. I pulled the netting closed. She padded back to Sucre’s hammock. A bird shrieked once. The big hammock rocked and creaked as the banker’s daughter, Jesse Green, rode the rebel manager and made the same noises I’d heard her make to settle a horse.

  It is true, I guess, that we’ve escaped, farther than I imagined possible, out of North America, beyond deep stuff like material and morals and ethics and safe sex, yet I’m still seventeen, Jesse’s still nineteen, and the manager’s a mean fat clueless son of a bitch. Jesse says we’ve come from the tits of the continent down to the cunt and we’re home, but the word’s a bubble, a tough clay marble, like the first pure ones she made in the college kiln. I’m scared though, same kind of scared as in my father’s barn after dusk, my father. All I used to have to do. Remember Jesse’s mouth that first time, remember the swallows over tall yellow grass, remember her in the hayloft before we cut loose. One night I counted seven times that Sucre fucked her.

  I woke after midday, not a trace of fever, and lay in the bunk, curled up, listening for the distant machine pounding. Nothing. They’d be in the next valley, beyond the convent ruins. There was a thick smell in the room. My intestines struggled. The rain had stopped. I was very hungry and my bladder was full, so I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and went out into the yard. Women from the shacks were cooking flatbread on a dull metal sheet over the open fire; the black urn simmered with beans. The women didn’t look at me. I pissed behind a tree. Over the little hill rose a thick column of smoke. Parrots swooped from the mangroves to the jungle, lighting briefly on the roof of the manager’s house, before taking off over the owner’s villa, all shuttered, perched on a small rise above the little village. Jesus was with the women, speaking sharply. They gestured at me. They handed him a plate, which he brought over.

  We stood together, Jesus bowing and grinning, while I scooped beans into my mouth. He mimed the bulldozer, his body jogging up and down.

  “How are you, Ken?”

  “Good.”

  “How is Jesse today?”

  “Very good,” I said.

  “The road is nearly finished. Nearly perfect.”

  “So I hear. Mr Pedrarias will return soon?”

  “You want water now?” He ran to the well. Parrots yammering in the trees behind him. The women laughing. In the time it took for him to bring the canteen, sun had broken through the clouds and the intensity of the green blew me away. A dog crawled out from under the veranda and flopped by the well.

  I gulped from the canteen, biting the brackish water, challenging each mouthful to make me sick. “Mr Pedrarias, when will he arrive?”

  Jesus looked around, wringing his hands. “When the car comes from Italy,” he said. “That black very cool car, man. Very famous car. When the road is finished, Mr Pedrarias will drive the car out of the ship and all the way here. All the way from the city, man.”

  “Won’t the road have to be graded?”

  “He is loco.” Jesus glanced at the villa, then opened his hands, his eyes wide. “He comes on the estancia once, twice a year by helicopter. He will kill that car. But you and Jesse.” He laughed. “You and Jesse, man! You are the chosen! And the new car, of course, of course. All together.”

  “Mr Sucre says he will drive the car.”

  “Sucre fucks boys, girls, animals, no matter! He can’t fuck a car. He counts this much.” He pinched thumb and forefinger together, frowning. “Don’t worry. I tell you a big secret. The road will change everything. Next year Mr Pedrarias will fire Sucre and get bored of his car and bored of you, you will go home, and I will be manager and fill in the mangrove and make good pasture.”

  “After the road.”

  “Yes. After the road. Yes. It is beautiful, no?” His body tilted. He held his arms wide. And I saw us from the air, two guys in a clearing, the blue ocean on one side, jungle forever, a state-of-the-art bulldozer in the next valley tearing a narrow rough cut in the ground. “It is beautiful, of course, like you. In the swimming pool that first day, you are white angels, like beautiful nuns, yes. Like nuns.” He crossed himself. “Like nuns. Yes.”

  “Jesus, who was that man on the veranda two nights ago?”

  “No man. There was no man.”

  “He spoke to you.”

  “No, you are wrong.” He backed away across the dirt into the shadow of the wooden stairs. “You should not walk alone in the cemetery or in the fields. You should not walk in the mangrove or the ruins. You risk everything.”

  “Tell Jesse, not me.”

  “Because of the dead and because of the living. Because of Magda.”

  Just then the village men appeared along the rough road. Silently, they squatted before the cook fires, and the women ladled beans from the big pot into brown clay bowls and the men peeled flatbread from the hot metal with their fingers, swallowed it steaming with mouthfuls of dark beans. They reached for the water vessel, ran wet fingers through their hair.

  Inside the house it was dark, though the sun still shone on the country around. Flies in the centre of the room kept changing direction. My face in the small mirror looked way young, like a foetus. A week ago Sucre had worked his bulldozer too close to the cemetery and pronged an old skeleton, face up, jaw gone. Then, close to the burn clearing, well clear of the cemetery, he’d unearthed some tiles, shards and more old skulls. I sat on the floor and kept watch through the screen door. The men finished their meal and went back to their cluster of shacks for siesta. Several of them peered up at the house without stopping their slow conversations. After a while, children and young women arrived from somewhere and the place filled with shouts and laughter. A young mother clutching her baby climbed the veranda stairs. I’d spoken to her a few days ago. She was nice. She stood in the doorway and said she had something she would like to sell, would I buy this thing from her.

  The curved clay whistle was brown-red, evenly fired, and hard. On it was a raised design.

  The woman’s eyes followed my fingers as they traced the serpent’s forked tongue. When I raised it to my lips, the baby’s head fell back, then forward onto her breast, mouth fastening on her nipple. Rain poured from the sky, beating everything, then stopped. The children raced from the shacks to leap into the new puddles. The sound was thin and wavering. The woman’s eyes, close to mine, were as dark and brown as the dark brown serpent’s outline.

  “Where did you get it?” I whispered, closing my fingers on the warm clay, stroking it.

  “From the new road,” she said. Her breath smelled like limes.

  “It’s old,” I said. “And smooth, like skin.”

  She cupped her hand over the baby’s head. “The tide is coming,” she said. “Give me money. I must go.”

  I gave her some of Jesse’s money. She tucked it into the front of her dress.

  I smoked one of Sucre’s cigarettes and watched wind ripple the edge of the jungle.

  The mangroves turned red in the last sun. Sucre’s earthmover rumbled over the hill toward the house. Through the cab’s slanted windows I could see his hairy shoulders, the muscles in his back straining. The weight of his belly pulled him forward as he stepped down from the cab and strode through the muddy yard. The cook fires, rekindled after the rain, were burning fiercely, and he took the food the women gave him without slackening his pace. He set the bowls on the outside table and came in to wash. “Where’s Jesse?” he growled.

  “I thought she was with you.”

  “No.”

&
nbsp; I felt a trickle of fear, electric, along my spine, as I watched him scrub sweat and dirt from his upper body. My shoulders tensed and my fingers curled into fists. After washing, he walked over and slapped my face and I fell back against the cot, my eyes filling with water. When they cleared, Jesse was framed in the doorway. She looked numb, closed. Sucre grinned at her, helped me to my feet, and the three of us went out to the veranda. He yelled for Jesus to bring beer and we sat together drinking, watching the fires and the bloody moonrise. Smoke still billowed from the hill. He picked up the whistle, turned it over, studying the serpent. “What is this?”

  “Mine. I found it.”

  I was terrified he was going to accuse me of something. Or hurl the whistle away. “I am tired,” he said. He set the serpent on the reed table. “We will sleep.”

  2.

  One day last spring I saw a fifty-dollar bill flying in the rainy wind on Robson Street and no one else seemed to notice but a beautiful girl, and I kneeled there, the soggy bill in my hand, and breathed in this small dark intense being who carried herself like a warrior, and she helped me spend the money.

  She was eighteen and had slept with tons of men. She wasn’t smarter than me, but she knew more about sex. We used the condo her parents paid for or we used her car or we used my parents’ barn. The farmhouse was out of bounds because of my sister in her wheelchair, my mother always pushing her along the hallways, and Dad’s ghost which, when it wasn’t haunting the horses in the pasture that belonged to the neighbour now, hung out drinking in one room or another. Jesse Green was into tats and piercings and crack and ecstasy, pushing herself at different obnoxious men, which I didn’t understand until it dawned on me that she loved testing her immunity to worship, admiration, cruelty, deviousness. And then one day she said she would quit drugs, alcohol, coffee, and would not fuck around, at all, ever, if I promised to go away with her. She’d been in and out of institutions and rehabs since she was twelve. Her parents, a banker and a psychologist, supported her from Calgary. She’d gone to school in England and now was registered at Emily Carr College of Art but never attended classes, needed only access to the kiln, where she’d fire different-sized variegated clay balls, and to be near the ocean, wandering Kits beach or the sea wall. “We’ll get lost in the summer,” was her phrase, and, “Keep me on track,” as we tried to switch from crack to crystal meth. She wore this cool kind of amazing protective, maybe inherited, kind of wild friendliness that intensified the reactions of those around her, to lust of course, but also confusion. Guys hitting on her often stalled as if the signals she was sending were impairing their lines and angles. I saw desire lines everywhere in Vancouver. She acted outrageous to bend light. She made everything equal and talked fast. It was hard to understand and impossible to know where things were going but everything seemed solid state, like no gaps between things, then no things at all.