Tibetan Cross

by Mike Bond

  “You're safer trusting Nepalis than westerners.” Cohen had turned away. It seemed now not weeks but days ago. He had felt vaguely used, yet curious to know their plans. He had avoided the Peace; they had appeared at his two-room hut off King's Palace road. This time Eliott had been more blunt: “We need two American climbers right away for a photo trek to Mustang. It's short notice, but the guys we planned on ran into trouble. Wanna go?”

  “Up there's off limits without a permit.”

  “We're working on that. We may even want to reach the border.”

  “Tibet?”

  “Where else?”

  “To climb what?”

  “Depends on what's there.”

  “I can tell you what's there and it's all off limits.”

  “There's five grand in it for you and five for your buddy,” Stihl had interposed. “You let us worry about the permits.”

  “Which buddy?”

  “The guy you climb with – what's his name? Vlasic?”

  “Alex Vlasic. He's one of the guys I climb with. Paul Stinson is the other.”

  “Stinson? Lives with a white girl, doesn't he.” Cohen had nodded, conscious of Eliott's smiling drawl. “How's his stamina in the cold?”

  “Better than yours, or mine.” Cohen had glanced toward the open door. “I don't think we're the people you want.”

  “We've made a mistake.” Stihl stepped outside to tip cigar ashes. “We didn't realize you three worked together. In that case Stinson should come.”

  “With five in it for him?”

  Stihl had hesitated. “We could go maybe twelve, for all three. Four grand apiece.”

  “That's a ridiculous lot of money.”

  “There's a lot to be made. Photo sales, magazine articles, a book.” Stihl had puffed his cigar gently.

  Cohen had gone that evening into a walled garden to knock on a carved door beneath suntala trees, and Paul had given him rice wine and Tibetan hash while Kim sat on pillows behind a trestle table knitting a sweater for her niece in Oregon.

  “Stamina in the cold?” Paul had chuckled. “Who is this boy?”

  “A Texan,” Cohen had grinned.

  When they had discussed it next morning at the Globe, Alex had been more precise. “I don't like the sound of that motherfucker.”

  “Which one?”

  “Either.” Alex had stopped to lift a piece of rango from his stew to his mouth. “But I can use four grand.”

  Paul had laughed. “I'm a poor boy too.”

  Alex had licked his fingers, stroked the lapels of his homespun Sherpa vest. “The secret is to act rich.”

  “I vote we go, then,” Paul had said. “So I can act rich too.”

  HE WAS SHIVERING. Dampness had risen to the hills, cold on his back, knees, and feet. A scuffling grew louder from the east, the silhouette of a porter hunched under a load. As the light strengthened, more followed, tumplines taut around their brows, loads tall above their heads.

  By sunup no one had passed but porters and a few women hurrying to neighboring rice fields. With a fingernail he scraped dried blood from the gashes in his feet, stood and stretched his aching legs, descended to the trail, and took off at a steady lope. As his muscles warmed he ran faster, imagining each person he passed describing him later to mounted Tibetans – “Ho, one barefoot sahib, running east.”

  The day turned hot, sweat cutting channels through the dirt on his chest. Repeatedly he switched trails, always choosing the less traveled, misleading the few Nepalis who called out “Kata janahuncha?” – “where you headed?” – by yelling “India-ma janchu.”

  In late afternoon he forded the Mristi Khola and ran steadily up the zigzag trail on the east side of its canyon, stopping a half hour later to catch his breath at the summit.

  The low sun inflamed the dusty, high air, washing out color and depth, but in the distance, on the far side of the canyon, three horsemen trotted onto the trail leading down to the river. The moment they dropped out of sight into the canyon he sprinted from the trail up a stony track into the hills.

  When the sun sat fat and orange over the lower crests of Dhaulagiri he bolted a chai, tea boiled with yak's milk, in a butthi at a fork in the path. “The sun sets, sahib,” the butthi man said.

  “Ho.”

  “You will stay?”

  “Huena.”

  “It is wiser not to travel when the leopard hunts.”

  Cohen gave him ten pence. “To Hell with leopards.”

  “This one does not eat the goat, but the man who watches the goat.”

  “How far to the next butthi?”

  “Tensan Bazaar. Perhaps two hours.”

  HE RAN EAST, leg muscles screaming, on the springy earth between terraced rice fields that glinted like emeralds in the sun's reddish afterglow.

  Atop a forested knoll he checked his back trail. The land tilted westward in pinkish gray ridges and aquamarine valleys, the sky's magenta streaked by leaves. Boughs rustled in a cooling breeze; a tinkle of water waxed and subsided. In the hazy western distance, movement that might be a farmer with two water buffaloes, going home, or perhaps two riders. He rubbed his glasses on his shirt and squinted, shook his head, and glanced around at the rugged scrubby hills settling into darkness.

  Two hundred feet below him a leopard slipped onto the path and raised her green eyes to him. She flicked her tail, stretched languidly, claws kneading the earth, her back quivering. She shook her head from side to side like a dog, glanced round once and trotted uphill.

  Frantically he sought a tree. Only rhododendrons, low and spindly. He raced down the far side of the knoll but the path vanished in a ravine choked with magnolias. Dead – don't realize, sprawling into a stream, tearing his hand, smashed through the magnolias and up the far side of the ravine. Thorns ripped his knees; rock spilled away underfoot and clattered down the slope. The leopard bounded over the knoll into the ravine.

  Steeper. Dashing along a ledge till it narrowed to inches. The leopard slipped through the trees, crouched on her belly at the side of the ledge, grinned, licked her nose. Huge bone-white saber teeth, one top fang missing. Ears flattened, muscles rippling, she glided toward him, a silky ribbon of saliva drooling from her jaws. He fell, jammed his fingers into a seam. Belly arching, yellow claws gritting the stone, she padded closer, sniffed his bloody hand, slashed at him, fanning his leg.

  He could not free his hand. The leopard edged forward, balancing carefully. She was slightly above him now and he could see a row of pink nipples through her belly hair. She clawed at him and he twisted away, toes scrambling for a hold. She was purring, a hideous rumble of pleasure deep in her chest. He slid back down; she raked at him. Swinging sideways, he found a crack with his other hand and pulled himself up, yanking his fingers from the seam. Above this crack he found another, and then a slanting crease that took him hand over hand up a cliff face to a grassy shelf. Below on the ledge the leopard rose on hind paws, seeking a way up the cliff.

  He scrambled across the shelf to the edge of the precipice, swung on a root across to the steep wall of the hill, and dashed over the top into a muddy field. Beyond it a tiled roof was silhouetted against the dusk-red snow of Macha Pucchare.

  Two football fields. She'll get me. His feet slogged in the soft earth; breath thundered in his ears; his spine ached with terror. Dreamlike, the roof drew no closer, the leopard gaining invisibly behind him. He hurdled a wall into a courtyard, yelled “Namasté!” Far away a dog barked. The door gaped open. He pounded down a corridor patched by dim light from open rooms.

  The first room had no door. The next had a thick door with a rusty bolt he kicked home. Gasping, head spinning, he crossed the room. Its vacant window stared into the garden four feet below. He stumbled back from the window to the door but the bolt was jammed, ran to the window and climbed through it up a prickly cypress to the second floor, stones crackling as the leopard soared over the wall into the courtyard.

  The cypress teetered with his weight.
From its top he could not reach a second floor window. The leopard's lithe shadow crossed the starlit courtyard like a shark through dark water. Plaster rattled in the corridor. The leopard shot through the window, green eyes gleaming. Shuddering with fear he shinnied higher but the cypress tipped sideways and down toward the leopard. Hastily he slipped down several branches, closer to her. The treetop righted.

  The leopard vaulted into the courtyard and stretched up the cypress, her claws rending bark and shivering the boughs under his feet. The tree lurched sideways. He grabbed a second floor window sill as the treetop tilted past it. The tree sprang upward, the leopard snarled and dove for the window as he squirmed through it, her claws shredding the sill as she crashed back into the courtyard.

  She lunged up the cypress. He tore a stone block from the lintel. As the cypress tottered and she tensed for another spring at the sill he hurled the stone into her green eyes. She roared in surprise, tumbled to the courtyard. He pried loose another stone that hit her neck as she jumped into the cypress.

  The corridor. In the other rooms no doors. Through a slack-jawed window a field and the glow of huts under the Himalayan wall. Dog's bark.

  Scrabble of plaster on the stairs – she exploded into the corridor. Screaming he bolted the door as it shuddered under her claws. He ran to the window but she careened downstairs into the courtyard, charged at his window, fell back with a crash and leaped into the cypress.

  She halted near the top, huffing, her eyes the pure green of ice burning underwater, green eyes of the Devil, mirthful and pitiless. He flung another stone that thudded into the cypress. She moved higher, leaned the cypress toward the window and caught the sill as he sprang into the corridor slamming the door, her claws splintering its planks. He bounded the stairs and garden wall and raced for the huts.

  3

  HIS FEET LEADEN with mud, the deserted building looming endlessly over him, the leopard closing silently. He roared into the yard of the first hut and pounded on the door. A chained dog ran whimpering to him.

  “Ho!” A man's sleepy voice.

  “Open! The leopard!”

  “Who's there?”

  “Help! The leopard comes!”

  Light shifted through cracks in the door. The dog growled high in its throat. “It's the leopard,” a woman's voice whispered. “Don't open!”

  “No!” Cohen wailed. “I'm running from her.”

  “Go, Leopard Demon, go!” the man screamed. “You cannot trick me, Devil Leopard!”

  “Help. A butthi!”

  “This is not the butthi! It's on the Pokhara trail.”

  Cohen glanced behind his back. The dog whined, rubbed its shoulder against his knee. He scratched its ear unconsciously, pounded again. “The leopard!”

  “Butthi chaina!” the man repeated shrilly. “Pokhara-ko batoma cha.”

  The dog growled into the darkness, retreated on its chain to paw the door, licked his hand, then howled as he sprinted uphill past other huts where firelight snuck through window bars and under doors, children chattering inside like swallows. The leopard flashed across the darkness behind him – he spun round to face her. The dog screamed, a snarl of rage from the leopard, the ping of the chain snapping, choked gurgle of blood in the dog's throat. The trail forked, its east branch sinking toward Pokhara. He banged at the last hut.

  “Ho?”

  “Butthi cha?”

  “Butthi cha.” The door opened. Lamplight yellowed the butthi man's stubbled chin, his stained and crinkled topi. “Good you are just one, sahib. My house is full.” He waved his arm into the dim room, where half-naked porters squatted round a rice-oil lamp. “Yet scarce would I leave you for the leopard.”

  Cohen shut the door and leaned panting against it. “In the village – they called me – Leopard Demon.”

  The butthi man's black eyes appraised him. “Kali can adopt the human form. They feared her in you.”

  Cohen sank gasping to the floor. “Better the two-step snake than the leopard.”

  “So says the proverb.” The butthi man bolted the door.

  “Either seems a fearful fate.”

  HE SAT cross-legged among the porters, their talk muted by his alienness, in the bittersweet haze of green wood smoke and ganja. The butthi man had bandaged his hand with hazel leaves; a bowl of dhal bhat, rice and lentils, lay untasted in his lap. The room, low and smoky, the porters, emaciated and sour-smelling, the glimmering coals and the needle flicker of a rice lamp, the coarse grain of the bowl in his palm, had no meaning, no presence; like a man awaiting execution he felt equally numb in the tangible and the dream. Dead but don't realize. He stared at the porters fingering their food. They too.

  One by one the porters rolled into their burlap sacks on the hardpan floor, the room quieting to their breathing. The coals shrank silently toward the center of the hearth till two yellow eyes remained.

  He clenched his arms round his knees to stop their trembling, bit his wrist till blood flowed. Alex is dead. Nothing I can ever do in the whole unrolling universe of time will wake him. Nor Goteen. Stihl killed them. Stihl and his bomb. Perhaps Paul's dead too.

  I've never given up. Have I? Haven't I always fought back? How easy that was: football games when we were behind, or teams that blacklisted me over Vietnam, hardened minds hating me for what I'd done. Mountains that would not be climbed. But when Sylvie and my folks died what did I do? Gave up, ran to Nepal. Gave up love. Quit the fight.

  War's just a symbol of the fact we're already dead. Only a person whose soul's dead could want to kill, could stop another's life.

  Then my soul is dead. For now I will kill. Baptized in Alex's blood, I'll kill every killer. First Stihl, then those who sent him, then those who sent the bomb. The people in the factory who made the gun that killed Alex. Kali, Mother of Death, Daughter of Death – I swear this to you. Leopard Demon, I give myself to you forever; give me your help in return.

  I will become like them. I will kill them. For you, Alex. For you and the two million of Vietnam, for my half-sisters and half-brothers in Buchenwald and Dachau and on the bonfires of Spain, for every victim since the first day of time.

  HE UNBOLTED the door and stepped into the lanceolate shadows of the rhododendrons. Under a scimitar midnight moon the village lay bathed in gray silence. A silvery wire looped northwest up the nearer hills: the Tatopani trail. Beyond these hills rolled higher, darker ones, and over these rose foamy clouds. Above the clouds towered the black icy Himalayan wall, and soaring from it, severed from the world, sailed the glittering peaks whose bleak jaws rent black space and blotted out the stars.

  Macha Pucchare's great white spire sang of hope founded on incomparable beauty, on a savage, pure elation that now only angered him. He scrutinized the Tatopani trail; nothing moved along it either mounted or on foot. I should go now. The thought raised waves of fatigue quivering from his thighs up his back and across his shoulders. A little sleep, then go.

  He reentered the hut's odors of curry, burlap, ganja, and sweat, moving cautiously round the sleepers lest he step across one with the sole of his foot and thereby injure him in a future life.

  “Kata timi janchau?” whispered the butthi man from a corner by the barred window. “Where do you go?”

  “Pisab garna pardaichu,” Cohen answered.

  “It is better to hold your water when the leopard hunts.”

  “The leopard had dog to eat this evening. He will not hunger till tomorrow.”

  “If he's filled his belly.”

  “He surely has. Who would not prefer a dog to man?”

  Cohen pulled up his burlap and adjusted his hip into a niche in the hardpan. Something bumped his knee; he raised the burlap. A yellow foot, horny and flattened, lay against him. With his own foot he pushed it down.

  Hands behind his head, he stared at the dark patterns in the thatch, hearing the porters’ steady exhalations. I should have stayed with Paul. The route through Thorungtse's harder. Maybe he's already dead. He gripped his
temples with both hands to squeeze out the thought, but the thought remained, and with it the rerunning mental film of Alex thrown backward in a hail of bullets. He sat up, leaning forward, head on his knees, biting back the words. I should have stayed with Paul.

  Maybe Alex was wrong. It wasn't the bomb, but just some machinery, a pump or something. He snorted in derision at his own wishfulness. Whatever it was, it was important enough to kill for. To kill Alex. He cringed at the picture in his head, bullets punching lung and bone through Alex's chest.

  Who'd send a bomb to Tibet? Who was sending guns? The CIA. In the Chinese civil war the CIA helped prepare Tibet as a refuge for Nationalist armies. Then the Nationalists under Chaing Kai-shek retreated to Taiwan instead. But to protect their flank the Chinese invaded Tibet in 1950 against ferocious but poorly armed opposition. The CIA was soon in the business of outfitting Tibetan guerrillas for their war against occupying Chinese armies. But would they, could they, send that bomb? Why?

  A cynical acceptance of one form of exported violence quails before imagination of the other. Who'd put the bomb together, and where? There were no answers to such questions, and he twisted and turned against the hard ground as if to find some solution there.

  Before the moon had sunk into the western hills he rose again. By the door a stub of twine flickered in a saucer of rice oil. An untouchable, his forehead grooved by the tumpline, sat cross-legged before it.

  “You wake early, father,” Cohen whispered. He folded his burlap, took his glasses from his shoe, and cleaned them on his shirt.

  “Burdens are lighter before the day is hot.” The untouchable snuffed the wick and tucked it in the rags about his waist.

  “Why the lamp?”

  “The flame?” The untouchable stood, bony-kneed, calves like wrists, naked but for his cotton waistcloth, and pointed to the center of his brow. “As I go I watch it, with the third eye.”

  “I see.”

  “You do not. But you could. Light a little flame, and sit before it. As you watch it, do not think. Let the flame simply appear as it wishes. Later, when you need to see it, it will be here.” He touched his brow.