On Terminal Moraine.

By Iam Beauchamp.

On Terminal Moraine.

Once a great glacier retreated from where he stood. Massive boulders, erratics they call them, rest on smaller rocks that make up its terminal moraine. On a previous visit his Slave, (latest model bought at auction from a Chinese Overlady), demanded he take her splayed out on the protruding nose of a semi submerged erratic.

Geese fly in wedges across the darkening sky and land on the lake created by that retreating glacier. Slave told of how her ancestor, the celestial navigator Rakaihautu, dug the lake out with his po, a digging stick fashioned from a paddle he had explored this land with a thousand years ago. She descended from those early hunter-gatherers, themselves hunted and gathered by a fiercer tribe who had then found Christ. Or so she’d been programed to believe.

A pair of Paradise ducks come in with their particular cry which says they mate for life. Paradise. What’s the old batch worth now that the village has prostituted itself to overnighters. He also thinks of what he will leave his adult child from a brief and volatile engagement: The house overlooking the city, a used car lot or two, his pounamu collection, his tattooed head, and yes, he’d leave him his Slave.

So here Henry is, late in life, looking at the ducks and the geese coming in for the night. Tomorrow he’ll chuck that nutter Pauls’ ashes into the same lake, and yes, in the morning he’ll again confront his mother on the truth of his paternity.

In the morning he wakes with an erection needing to pee. Engaging the muscles of his pelvic floor he is able to both suppress the need to pee and prolong his erection. Lying on his back he thinks of his Slave. Two days since she had trimmed his beard, and he’d asked her to be careful around his jugular. Your what? she’d said, and he’d told her, and she’d given him a hickey. At 72, fuck me. The tent he erects under the sheets tightens as he feels where she’d then trimmed his pubic hair. Where was she now?

He could hardly have brought her with him. Mother wouldn’t understand. Her son with a dark-skinned slave girl. No, he couldn’t have brought her along.

Where was she now.

When he told her why he was going to the lake with his mother, she went north to visit her father. Her father was in hospital with prostate cancer, under guard from prison, having killed her mother with an antique sword. Or so she’d told him as she left.

He lies in bed upstairs at the batch subsiding into more of the night before they parted, his erection firming. He’d noticed a small scare on her ankle, “How’d you get this?” he’d asked. She’d told him she got it breaking into a loft above a bank looking for a place to sleep. Away from my parents, she’d said. Then she’d rolled over and whispered, “I’m late.”

“How late?”

“Late enough.” Then she said, “I’ll murder you if I’m pregnant.”

Her father died before she got there. He called her as she traveled on the fast train to the capital to say he was sorry.

“For?” She’d said.

He’d hung up and died.

So.

She had to clean up the mess he’d left, though she had to admit he’d done a reasonable job of running his deals from inside. However now that he was dead, the extensive family she’d grown up with was making things hard for her. “Things” being the sale value of various assets used to run the secondhand business that covered for the drug trade, and the trade itself. The house left to her she did not want. An Uncle had buried a girlfriend there. She may have felt threatened into giving it all away. Which she may have done. Except for the black Mercedes which she may have loaded with her pick of the marketable goods and may be heading toward the lake to surprise her master and his yet-to-be met mother. Or was she alone, paused somewhere, resting.

Lying there Henry imagines his Slaves splendid breasts crushing into his eyes. His erection pulsing into the sheet, a photograph of his mother’s breasts appears. The muscles of his pelvic seat immediately relax, and the blood drains from the penis.

The urge to pee returns. He sighs, rises, sighs more deeply, moves, and then stands still in the middle of the room and looks at the window. That photograph was taken here. He’d never really entertained the thought before, that in this very bed he was conceived. Busting, he clenches to stop the dribble and moves to the bathroom. His penis now flaccid he drops his pajama bottoms and sits in case he needs to shit and lets his head sink into his hands.

Downstairs his mother stokes the stove, fills the kettle, and he hears water move through the pipes. She goes to the table, sits and looks out the window to where the snow on the mountains turns golden. She is here to scatter, at last, her husband Paul’s ashes which have sat on her mantle back in the city since he’d ended it. She tilts her head up to the ceiling and listens to her son’s footfall. What is he doing up there? The bloody deluded fool. She shakes her head and recollects what had happened all those years ago. After Paul had brought her here that first time. After Mike had turned up not so unexpectedly as they sat down to dinner. After Paul had read some of his poems fire side. After they’d smoked a little pot. After Mike had got up and hugged his brother and gave him to understand that he loved him. After Paul had suggested they try something- some LSD he’d been prescribed for his mental health. After they had knelt on the floor before the open fire. After Paul had given to each tongue a small tablet. The body of Christ, he’d said, The body of Christ. After they had all gone upstairs.

After.

She looks down the table to where his urn sits. Oh Paul.

The evening she became certain of her condition, Angela telephoned Paul. They hadn’t seen or even spoken to each other since that night and now she rang to tell him that one of them had fathered a child, and that they would need to decide which one.

Paul rang Mike and they arranged to meet.

“How is Korea?” asked Paul.

“Cold. Can it be yours?

“Well, it probably is.”

“So you’d done it with her before then?”

“No”

“So, why would it be yours?”

“Because, though you probably don’t remember, you let me go first.”

“Did I? Whale oil beef hooked. Where did she say she’d meet us?”

“The batch.”

“Tekapo! Do you think she wants to...you know...again?”

“No. No. Hell no, I have flashbacks. Do you remember anything?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“O.K. Then. No, she just wants to meet us there, decide who the father is, and then...”

“What? And then what?

“They get married.”

“They? You don’t you mean.”

“Well yes. Will you be my best man?”

“With pleasure.”

“That didn’t take you long,” said Angela as they climbed from Mikes Valient.

“Angela,” said Paul.

“Paul,” said Angela.

“Angela,” said Mike.

“Mike,” said Angela.

They stood, the three of them, casting glances.

“You found the key alright?” said Angela.

“Yes. It was where you said it would be. Come, I’ve made tea.” They followed her into the room and sat at three sides of the table.

The fourth side is where old Angela now sits remembering the agreement they made then. Deciding what Paul and Mike had already decided. “Well, they had to decide didn’t they”, she says aloud, “That Paul’s sperm were more likely to have fertilized my egg as they were probably the first to arrive. According to Paul. I can’t remember who went first. Who came first, Hah! It might have been a dead heat. If that’s at all possible.”

Angela married Paul. Mike went back to Korea, to the cold mountains firing 25-pound shells of high explosive at people he would never meet. Occasionally, especially during the firing of his piece, there would flash before him an image of Angela, wide eyed under him. Paul, still dressed, setting up his camera before the window.

Mike would visit Paul, Angela and the child Henry only twice before another war claimed him. The last time when Henry is seventeen and Paul recently committed to the ward.

“He’ll come right soon,” says Mike.

Henry snorts. “Have you taken drugs Mike?”

Mike looks away, takes a swig of his beer. They are sitting on the porch in a warm breeze. Angela is doing the dishes.

“Yeah. Yes I have.”

“The ones Paul takes”

“How’d you know what Paul takes?”

“He sells me some.”

“For fucks sake. He...”

“He what Mike?”

Mike swings his chair around and looks out over the city, his mind a whirl through that first acid fueled night when this boy was made. Then he swings back.

“He, your father, has written some of the best bloody poems to come out of this country. I don’t think he could have done that without...”

“Tripping helps huh.”

Mike looks at Henry, “Sometimes young Henry, sometimes.”

“Have you ever had a bad trip.”

“Boy you...” Mike looks away...have no idea.

“Have you?”

Next day Mike and Henry meet Paul in the grounds of Princess Margeret Hospital. Angela hasn’t visited Paul since she drove him there. Henry goes at Mikes insistence.

“Come on mate, he’s ya father.”

“Is he?”

They are directed to where they find Paul sitting on a bench under a willow. He stands at their approach. The sun glances down.

“Gidday ya mad bugger” says Mike, arms open.

Henry stands further back and looks at the ground.

“Hello son,” says Paul.

Henry turns away.

Mike drops his arms. “Henry,” he says.

“Doesn’t matter,” says Paul and turns to walk away.

Henry turns back. “Got any drugs?” he says.

Paul stops, looks around, looks at his son, advances toward him.

“Look, I’m sorry as hell I ever...a better man...”

“There’s no better man,” says Mike moving between them.

Paul lunges past, arm out, Mike bumps him off with his chest.

The brothers stand gasping.

“Does he not know. Does the wee bastard not know” says Paul and lopes of into the trees.

Mike turns to Henry whose fists are tight, eyes are watering.

“Not know what Mike. Not know what?”

Mike is killed when a Napalm strike finds him where he wasn’t supposed to be. There are no remains. A memorial service is held at The Church of the Good Shepherd to which Paul is escorted by a sturdy psychiatric nurse.

After the service they return to the city. It is a small brown envelope that Henry opens. Henry and Angela are in Mikes room, a dank bedsit he slept in when home. They are there to sort out Mikes belongings. Paul has been returned to the Psychiatric ward by his minder.

Henry will confront Paul once he has realized who it is that is depicted in the small black and white photograph he takes from the brown envelope found in a shoe box under Mikes bed. He will do this on a rare occasion when Paul is allowed to visit his wife and son, waving the photograph in his face. My father got vaporized, he will say when Paul calls him son. Angela is out.

I knew it. I knew you weren’t my father. My father got vaporized, he will say and then walk away.

Paul will die soon after this by falling from a large tree in the grounds of the psychiatric ward.

Head in hands on the upstairs toilet, old Henry thinks of that photograph and how he had pulled it from the small brown envelope, with his mother gasping at the state of the kitchenette in Mikes bedsit. He remembers not recognizing them, however as it was a photo of three naked people heavily made up, he’d thought it interesting enough to keep, so, glancing to ensure his mother did not notice, pocked it. Though there was something familiar in their heavily made-up faces, he only realised that this busty girl in the photograph was his mother when back at her house that evening for dinner, and the eyes looking at him from his mother’s wedding photo on the sideboard told him so. While his mother was fetching desert he had then pulled the found photo from his pocket and there, he almost chocked, there they were. She had been with both these men, these brothers that flanked her, grinning out at him. He was sure of it.

Henry stands and flushes. His mother raises her head from the table below and listens to the water in the pipes. He straightens his pajamas and walks to the wardrobe. Soon he holds the photo which he has kept with him all this time and looks again at the three mascara smudged faces smiling from it. He holds it up to the window it was taken at and nods his head, “Here, in this room, in that bed. Christ mother.” He would, at last, confront her with this.

Downstairs he finds the kitchen empty. The porridge in the pot on the wood stove plops. On the table is the urn. A card leans on it. He picks up the card and turns it over.

Your Father, it reads.

He drops the card and turns for the door. Outside the wind is fierce and the lake is alive with white horses. He beats his way over to the large erratic they have always gone to. She is there, sitting hands in lap, eyes open. He strokes them shut. A car stops on the road above, and he looks up to see his Slave getting out of a black Mercedes.

He stands and turns from his mother.

“My mother,” he calls, “She’s dead.”

Up on the road his beloved smiles and rubs her belly.