Points of Departure: Stories

by Pat Murphy

  I reach out and touch her shoulder, and the tears spill over. For a moment a fearful child, Marshall’s only daughter, peers from the blue pools where she mourns her father and says, “He’s dead, Sam. Do you think he wanted to die?” Tears spill, and she kneels by her father’s battered head. I stand with my hand on her shoulder; I understand now why she had been afraid of her power. With the power, she had been able to help her father find what he sought. I understand, but that changes nothing.

  We leave the bear claws around his neck, and we leave his rifle and his spear at his side. We build him a cairn, Kirsten and I, rolling and carrying rocks to surround him, to pile over him, to keep back the animals, and to protect him. I do not know who I will see each time I look at Kirsten: woman, bear, or girl-child.

  When we finish, Kirsten stands over the mound of rocks. Her hands are scratched and bruised, but they are relaxed now. “I wonder if he truly wanted what he found here, Sam.” Her voice is puzzled and wondering. “I wonder if he is happy now.”

  We make the journey back to my hut in two days; and as we walk, she becomes at ease with herself and the forest, moving quietly. Her eyes are wise and calm. She tells me I must continue to wear the bear claws around my neck, but I cannot tell whether the woman speaks or the bear.

  Perhaps both. She is my friend.

  She speaks the Old Tongue, and the birds and the beasts listen. We dine on fish that she calls to her from the stream edge. She hears the voice of the wind and the rattling complaints of the hones of the earth.

  But her quiet eyes betray her greatest strength: she is no longer afraid of her power. I do not know what she will do when she leaves my valley. What strange fishes will she call forth in the Outside? Will she ask the earth to tremble and the winds to blow a hurricane gale? Will she fill the cities with beasts? Or will she watch the humans and laugh: large, compassionate, sometimes generous, sometimes vindictive.

  I do not know what the shaman-woman-bear-girl-child will do.

  At my hut, she turns toward the Outside. When she lifts her pack I touch her shoulder and say, “Fortune go with you, Kirsten.”

  She smiles tentatively. It is a small smile, but it carries hints of great wickedness, hints of great joy and great sorrow.

  “Did I do right, Sam?” she asks.

  “You did what you had to do,” I say. “You did well.”

  “Can I come back to visit, Sam?” she asks and I can see the girl-child peering from her eyes.

  “Come back whenever you wish, my friend,” I say, and lift my hand in farewell.

  She walks toward the Outside, casting a shadow larger than herself.

  On a Hot Summer Night in a Place Far Away

  GREGORIO IS A hammock vendor in the ancient Mayan city of T’hoo, known to the Mexicans as Merida. He is a good salesman—el mejor, the best salesman of hammocks.

  He works in Parque Hidalgo and the Zocalo, T’hoo’s main square, hailing tourists as they pass, calling in English, “Hey, you want to buy a hammock?”

  Gregorio is short—only about five feet tall—but he is strong. His hands are strong and the nails are rimmed with purple from the plant dyes that he uses to tint the hammocks. Two of his front teeth are rimmed with gold.

  He is, most of the time, a good man. He was married once, and he has two little daughters who live far away in the village of Pixoy, near the city of Valladolid, on the other side of the Yucatan peninsula. Gregorio’s wife threw him out because he drank too much and slept with other women. When she married another man, Gregorio left his village and traveled to Merida. He sold hammocks and lived in the nearby village of Tixkokob. Once, he went back to his village to visit his daughters, but they looked at him as if he were a stranger and they called the other man Papa. He did not go back to visit again.

  Gregorio was sad when his wife threw him out, and he misses his village and his daughters, but he knows that drinking and sleeping with women does not make him a bad man. He has stopped drinking so much, but he has not stopped sleeping with women. He believes in moderation in virtue as well as vice.

  Gregorio met the very thin woman in the sidewalk cafe beside the Parque Hidalgo. She was watching him bargain with an American couple: The bearded man in the Hawaiian shirt had been determined to get a good deal, and the bargaining took about an hour. Gregorio won, though the tourist never knew it; the final price was slightly higher than Gregorio’s lowest, though lower than he would usually drop for a tourist. The gringo was pleased and Gregorio was pleased.

  Gregorio noticed the woman when he was tying up his bundle of hammocks. She was a thin woman with pale blond hair cropped close to her head and small breasts and long thin legs that she had stretched underneath the table.

  She held a notebook on her lap and a pen in one hand.

  She wore white pants and a white shirt and dark glasses that hid her eyes.

  “Hey, you want to buy a hammock?”

  She shook her head slightly. “No, gracias.”

  “Porque no? Why not? You ever try sleeping in a hammock?”

  “No.” She was watching him, but he did not know what was going on behind the dark glasses. There was something strange about her face. The eyebrows, the cheekbones, the mouth—all looked fine. But there was something strange about the way that they were put together.

  Gregorio set down his bundle of hammocks and looked around. It was late in the morning on a sunny Sunday.

  Chances were that most tourists were out visiting Uxmal or some other ancient site. He pulled out a chair. “Okay if I rest here a while?”

  She shrugged again, setting her notebook on the table.

  Her fingers, like her legs, were long and thin. Gregorio noticed that she wore no rings. And even though there was something strange about her face, she was a good-looking woman.

  He whistled for the waiter and ordered cafe con leche, coffee with milk. When it came, he poured six teaspoons of sugar into the cup and sat back in the chair. “Where are you from?”

  “Here and there,” she said. And then, when he kept looking at her, “California, most recently. Los Angeles.”

  She did not act like a Californian—Californians talked too much and were very friendly—but he let that pass.

  “You on vacation?” he asked.

  “More or less,” she said. “Always a tourist.”

  They talked about the weather for a time, about Merida, about the surrounding ruins. Gregorio could not put this woman in a category. She did not seem like a tourist. She was not relaxed. Her long fingers were always busy—twisting the paper napkin into meaningless shapes, tapping on the table, tracing the lines of the checks on the tablecloth.

  He asked her if she had been to visit Uxmal and Chichen Itza.

  “Not this trip,” she said. “I visited them before. A long time ago.”

  The church bell at the nearby church rang to call the people to noon mass; the pajaritos screamed in the trees.

  The woman sipped her cafe and stared moodily into the distance. She made him think of the tall storks that stand in the marshes near Progresso, waiting. He liked her; he liked her long legs and the small breasts that he knew must be hidden by her baggy shirt. He liked her silences and moodiness. Quiet women could be very passionate.

  “You would sleep well in one of my hammocks,” he said.

  She smiled, an expression as fleeting as a hummingbird.

  “I doubt that.”

  “You will never know until you try it,” he said. “Why don’t you buy a hammock?”

  “How much are your hammocks?”

  Gregorio grinned. He quoted her his asking price, double the price he would accept. She bargained well.

  She seemed to know exactly when he was serious in his claim that he could accept no lower price, and she seemed, in a quiet way, to enjoy working him down to the lowest price he would accept. The hammock she bought was dyed a deep purple that shimmered in the sun.

  Gregorio finished his coffee, hoisted his bundle of hammocks, a
nd returned to work, hailing two blond gringos in university T-shirts. He lured them into a bargaining session before they realized what was what.

  Tourists stroll through the Zocalo, stare up at the cathedral built from the ancient stones of Mayan temples, admire the colonial architecture of the buildings in the city. Many regard the hammock vendors as pests, like the pigeons that coo and make messes on the lintel above the cathedral door. Many tourists are fools.

  The hammock vendors know what happens in T’hoo.

  They are a select company: only thirty men sell hammocks on T’hoo’s streets, though often it seems like much more.

  Each man carries a bundle of hammocks, neatly bound with a cord. Each man carries one hammock loose, using it as a cushion for the cord looped over his shoulder. When he hails a tourist, he stretches the loose hammock open wide so that the tropical sun catches in the bright threads and dazzles the eyes.

  Hammock vendors live at a different tempo than the tourists. They sit in the shade and talk, knowing that the luck will come when the luck comes. They can’t rush the luck. Sometimes, tourists buy. Sometimes, they do not. A hammock vendor can only wander in the Zocalo and wait for the luck to come.

  While they are waiting, the hammock vendors watch people and talk. The French tourists who are staying at the Hotel Caribe will never buy a hammock; they bargain but never buy. There are pretty women among the Texans who have come to study Spanish at the University of the Yucatan, but all of them have boyfriends. The tall thin woman with pale hair is always awake very early and goes to her hotel very late.

  “There she is,” said Ricardo, looking up from the hammocks he was tying into a bundle. “She was in Restaurant Express last night until it closed. Drinking aguardiente.”

  Gregorio glanced up to see the thin woman sitting at the same table as the day before. She had a lost look about her, as if she waited for a friend who had not come.

  “She was here at seven this morning,” observed Pich, a gray-haired, slow-moving hammock vendor. “She needs a man.”

  Ricardo looked sour and Gregorio guessed that he had suggested that to the thin woman the night before without success. The hammock vendors discussed the woman’s probable needs for a time, then continued an earlier discussion of the boxing match to be held that evening.

  The woman was of passing interest only.

  Still, when Gregorio wandered on to search for customers, he passed her table and said hello. Her notebook was on the table before her, but he could not read the writing.

  Not Spanish, but it did not look much like English either.

  Though the morning sun was not very bright, she wore the dark glasses, hiding her eyes behind them. “Buenos dias,” she said to him. “¿Que tal?”

  “Good,” he said. He sat down at her table. “What are you writing?” He peered at the notebook on the table.

  “Poetry,” she said. “Bad poetry.”

  “What about?”

  She glanced at the notebook. “Do you know the fairy tale about the princess who slept for a thousand years? I’ve written one about woman who did not sleep for a thousand years.”

  “Why do you look so sad today? You are on vacation and the sun is shining.”

  She shrugged, the slightest movement of her shoulders.

  “I am tired of being on vacation,” she said. “But I can’t go home. I am waiting for my friends. They’re going to meet me here.”

  “I understand.” He knew what it was like to be homesick.

  She looked at him long and hard and he wondered about the color of her eyes behind her dark glasses. “Did you sleep in my hammock?” he asked her at last.

  “I strung it in my hotel room.”

  “But you did not sleep in it?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged lightly. “I don’t sleep.”

  “Not at all?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Why not?”

  “I slept at home,” she said. “I can’t sleep here.”

  “Bad dreams? I know a curandera who can help you with that. She’ll mix you a powder that will keep bad dreams away.”

  She shook her head, a tiny denial that seemed almost a habit.

  “Why not then? Why can’t you sleep?”

  She shrugged and repeated the headshake. “I don’t know.”

  He stared at her face, wishing that she would remove her glasses. “What color are your eyes?” he asked.

  She moved her sunglasses down on her nose and peered at him over the frames with eyes as violet as the sky at dusk. … Her eyes were underlined with darkness. A little lost, a little wary. She replaced her sunglasses after only a moment.

  “You don’t sleep really?” Gregorio asked.

  “Really.”

  “You need a man.”

  “I doubt that.” Her tone was cool, distant, curious. It did not match the lost look in the violet eyes he had seen a moment before. She gestured at two American women taking a table at the other end of the cafe: “Those two look like they need a hammock,” she said.

  Gregorio went to sell them a hammock.

  Gregorio did not mention to the other hammock vendors that the thin woman did not sleep. Odd that he should forget to mention it—it was an interesting fact about a strange woman. Nevertheless, he forgot until he met her again, very late at night. He was wandering through the Zocalo, cursing his bad luck. He had missed the last bus to his village, Tixkokob, because he had taken a pretty young woman to the movies. But the young woman had declined to share her bed with him and he had no way home. He was in the Zocalo looking for a friend who might have a spot to hang a hammock.

  He noticed the thin woman sitting alone on a bench, watching the stars. “What are you doing out here so late?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “The cafes are closed. What are you doing here? All your customers have gone home.”

  He explained and she nodded thoughtfully and offered him a drink from the bottle of aguardiente that sat beside her on the bench. Aguardiente was a potent brandy and the bottle was half-empty. He sat beside her on the bench and drank deeply. With his foot, he nudged the paper bag that rested on the ground by her feet and it clinked: more bottles.

  “I like this drink,” she said slowly, her head tilted back to look at the stars. “It makes me feel warm. I am always cold here. I think, sometimes, if I found a place that was warm enough, then I would sleep.”

  The guitarists who serenaded tourists were putting away their instruments, grumbling a little at the evening’s take.

  The Zocalo was almost deserted. Gregorio shifted uneasily on the bench. “I should go to Parque Hidalgo and see if Pich is still there. He would let me stay at his house.”

  “Keep me company a while,” she said. “You can stay in my room.” She glanced at him. “And don’t bother looking at me like that. I plan to sit up by the hotel pool tonight.

  It’s a good night to watch the stars.” She leaned back to look at the night sky. “Tell me—have you always lived in Tixkokob?”

  “I come from Pixoy. But it is better that I am not there now.”

  “Better for you?” Her eyes were on the sky, but he felt vaguely uncomfortable, as if she were watching him closely.

  “Better for everyone,” he said.

  “I understand,” she said. She drank from the bottle and gave it back to him. They watched the moon rise.

  Her room was on the bottom floor of the Hotel Refonna.

  It was a small dark room, very stuffy and hot. His hammock was strung from rings set in the walls. A stack of notebooks rested on the small table beside the bed. On the dresser, there was a strange small machine that looked a little like a cassette player, a little like a radio. “What’s this?” he asked, picking it up.

  She took it from his hand and set it gently back on the table. The aguardiente made her sway just a little, like a tall tree in the wind. “My lifeline. My anchor. And maybe an albatross around my ne
ck.”

  Gregorio shook his head, puzzled by her answer, but unwilling to pursue it. The brandy was warm in his blood, and he was very close to deciding that the thin woman had invited him here because she wanted a man. He came close to her and wrapped his arms around her, leaning his head against her chest. He could feel her small breasts and that excited him.

  She pushed him away with surprising strength and he fell back against the bed. She picked up her notebook and the strange small machine, tucked the bottle of aguardiente under her arm, and stepped toward the door. “Sleep,” she said.

  He slept badly. The tendrils of someone else’s thoughts invaded his dreams. He wandered through a warm humid place where the light was the deep purple color of his hammock. The place was crowded with men and women as tall and thin as the thin woman. He asked them where he was, and they looked at him curiously with dark violet eyes. He wanted to go home, but when he asked if they could tell him the way, they said nothing. He was fired, very tired, but he could not rest in that place. The air was too thick and hot.

  He woke, sweating, in the thin woman’s room, and went to the patio to find her. The first light of dawn was touching the eastern sky, but stars were still visible overhead.

  She sat in a lounge chair beside the pool, speaking softly into the machine. He could not understand the words. Two empty aguardiente bottles were at her feet and another was on the table at her side. He sat in a chair beside her.

  Fireflies were dancing over the pool. She gestured at the bottle that rested on the table and Gregorio saw that a firefly had blundered inside the bottle and seemed unable to find its way out. It crawled on the inside of the glass, its feeble light flickering. “I can’t get her out,” the woman said in a harsh voice blurred with brandy and filled with uncertainty. “And she can’t find her way. She just keeps flashing her light, but no one answers. No one at all.”