Points of Departure: Stories

by Pat Murphy

  Without speaking, Gregorio took the bottle to the ornamental flowerbed by the side of the pool. He took a brick from the border, lay the bottle on the cement, and tapped it lightly with the brick, once, twice, three times. A starburst of fine cracks spread from each place he struck the bottle, and when he pulled on the neck, the cracks separated and the bottle broke. The insect rose, sluggishly at first, then faster, dancing toward the other lights.

  She smiled, and he could tell that the brandy had affected her. The smile was slow and full, like a flower unfolding.

  “She returns to her place,” the woman said, blinking at the dancing lights. “Sometimes I think that I have returned home and maybe I am asleep and dreaming of this place.

  Sometimes I try to think that. I go for days believing that I am asleep. Then I come to my senses and I know this is real.” She reached for the last bottle, but it was empty.

  “Where do you come from?” Gregorio asked.

  She lifted one thin arm and pointed up at a bright spot of light high in the sky. “That one.”

  Gregorio looked at her and frowned. “Why are you here?”

  She shrugged. “Merida is as good a place to wait as any. It’s warm here, warmer than most places. My friends are supposed to come get me. They’re late.”

  “How late?”

  She looked down at her thin hands, now locked together in her lap. “Very late. Just over one hundred years now.”

  Her hands twisted, one around the other. “Or maybe they never intended to come back. That’s what bothers me. I send out reports regularly, and maybe that was all they wanted. Maybe they will leave me here forever.”

  “Forever?”

  “Or for as long as I live.” She glanced at him. In the light of the rising sun, he could see her strange violet eyes—wide and mournful. “I don’t belong here. I don’t …”

  She stopped and put her head in her hands. “Why are they so late? I want to go home.” He did not understand what she said next—the language was not English and not Spanish. She was crying and he did not know what to say or do. She looked up at him with a face like an open wound. Her violet eyes were wet and the circles beneath them stood out like bruises. “I want to go home,” she said again. “I don’t belong here.”

  “Who are you?”

  She closed her eyes for a moment and seemed to gather strength to her. “The explorers brought us here,” she said. “The ones in the spacecraft. They left us to gather information about your people.” She looked down for a moment and he thought she would stop talking, but she looked up again. “We travel with the explorers but we are a different people. When we meet with new ways, we adapt. We learn. We take on a little bit of the other, retaining a little bit of ourselves. We blend the two.” She spread her hands on her knees. “We are diplomats, translators, go-betweens for merchants. We live on the border, neither fish nor fowl, not one thing and not the other.”

  Her hands closed into fists. “There were three of us, but Mayra died two years ago. Seena, last year. We grew tired, so tired. They left us here too long. I have lost myself. I don’t know who I am.

  “I should not speak, but it has been so long.” She shook her head and rubbed her eyes with her slender fingers.

  “You will forget this. I will make you forget.” She leaned back in her chair and stared at the sky. The stars were gone now, washed out by the light of the rising sun. “I send them poetry instead of reports, but still they do not come for me. Maybe they don’t care. Maybe none of this matters.” Her voice had a high, ragged note of hysteria. “It did not bother me at first,” she said. “Not while the others were alive. Only recently.’ It bothers me now. I would like to curl up and sleep for days. For weeks.

  Gregorio took her long thin hand in his, squeezing it gently for comfort. This woman, she needed help. And he wanted her. She was aloof and foreign and he wanted to hold her. He wanted her because of her long thin legs, like a heron’s legs, her long thin hands, like the cool hands of the Madonna.

  He said nothing, but he was thinking of the place that the dream had brought to his mind, the dark, warm, limestone cavern just outside the nearby village of Homun.

  He had been thinking about seeing the thin woman naked, swimming in the waters of the cavern, alone with him.

  She looked at his face and suddenly laughed, a small chuckle that seemed drawn from her against her will.

  “Sometimes, I can find my way out of my own self-pity, and I see you, son of the strange men who built those cities, goggling at me for … what? What do you want?”

  She stared at him, her violet eyes filled with amusement, then suddenly widening as if she were trying to see something in dim light. “Wait … where is this … this place… where?”

  Her thin fingers were playing over his face as if searching for something. She reached out and ran a cool finger along the back of one hand. She had moved closer to him, her eyes wide and eager.

  The quiet ones, he thought to himself. They are always the most passionate. And he imagined her clearly again, a long pale naked woman stepping into the warm water and smiling at him in invitation.

  But she pulled back then, leaning back in her chair and slipping the dark glasses over her violet eyes, hiding behind the tinted lenses.

  Later that day, Gregorio could not remember all that had happened out by the pool. He remembered the woman’s hand in his; he remembered telling the woman that he would take her to the caves of Homun, to a very private cave he knew. But there was a curiously incomplete blurred feel to his memory.

  Gregorio liked the woman, but he did not like the vague feeling that he was being tricked and he acted to prevent such a thing from happening again. In his right pocket, for clarity of mind, he carried a clear polished stone that had been thrice blessed with holy water. In his left, for good luck, he carried a jade bead that had been carved on one side with the face of Kin Ahau, the sun god who watches by day, and on the other side with the face of Akbal, the jaguar-headed god who watches by night. With these talismans he was confident. His mind would not be clouded.

  The bus to Homun was hot and crowded. It dropped them on the edge of the village and Gregorio led the woman through the monte, the scrubby brush that covers much of the Yucatan, to the entrance to the cavern.

  The Yucatan peninsula is riddled with limestone caverns that lead to deep dark places beneath the earth. Here and there, the caves dip beneath the water table, forming subterranean pools. Gregorio knew of such a cave, a secluded subterranean pool that was a fine place to bring cute American tourists for seduction.

  He tunneled deep into the underworld to a pool of clear water in a limestone cave. Shells that remained of ancient clams and oysters were embedded in the rock.

  Another tunnel, extending back from the first pool, led to an even more secluded pool.

  Gregorio took the woman to the most remote pool.

  Stalactites hung low over the pool. The air was close and humid, very hot and moist. He carried a small flashlight and shone it on the limestone to show her the way. She was smiling now, following close behind him.

  Gregorio strung his hammock on the two hooks that he had set in the limestone walls long ago. As soon as he had it strung, the woman sat on the edge of the hammock and then lay back with a soft sigh.

  “We can swim,” Gregorio said. He was quietly stripping off his clothing.

  No reply from the woman in the hammock.

  He went, naked, to the hammock. She was curled on her side, one hand tucked under her cheek, the other resting on her breast like a bird who has found her nest.

  Her eyes were closed and she breathed softly, gently, rhythmically. He touched her cheek, warm at last, brushing a stray tendril of hair back into place, and kissed her lightly. When he touched her, he felt a bright warm sensation, like the spreading warmth of brandy but quicker, cleaner, more pure. He saw in the darkness the tall thin people, holding out their long arms in welcome. He felt content and loved and very much at home.
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  He did not wake her. He swam alone in the warm water, dressed, and left her there, sleeping peacefully.

  In a limestone cavern at Homun, a woman sleeps like a princess in a fairy tale. Gregorio knows she is there, but few others know the way to the hidden cave and if anyone does chance to find her, Gregorio knows that the person’s mind will be clouded and he will forget. Gregorio visits her sometimes, touches her lightly on the cheek and feels the warm glow of homecoming. And he watches for the day when a tall thin man who does not sleep comes to town and sits in the cafes, sitting up late as if waiting for a friend. This one, Gregorio will take to the cavern to wake the woman who sleeps—so soundly, wake her with a kiss and take her home.

  Sweetly the Waves Call to Me

  THE HARBOR SEAL lay just beyond the reach of the waves, its dark eyes open in death. The surf had rolled and battered the body; the mottled gray fur was dusted with white sand. Gulls had been pecking at a wound in the animal’s head.

  Kate shifted her weight uneasily as she stared down at the body. She was alone; Michael, her lover, was still asleep at the cottage. Kate had come walking on the beach to escape the restless feeling left by a melancholy dream.

  She could not remember the dream; it had retreated like a wave on the beach, leaving behind feelings of loneliness and abandonment.

  She raised one hand to touch the ivory pendant that dangled from a chain around her neck, a circle etched with the likeness of a seal. Michael had given her the pendant the night before as a peace offering, she thought.

  Michael had come to visit for the weekend to apologize and to forgive her—managing the seemingly contradictory acts with the competence that he brought to every task.

  Kate had left Santa Cruz and Michael to live for a summer in her parents’ old cottage; she had needed the solitude to finish her thesis on the folklore of the sea. Michael had brought her the scrimshaw pendant to apologize for accusing her of using her thesis as an excuse for leaving him.

  She did not think that she was using the thesis as an excuse. But sometimes, in the dim light of early morning when the gulls cried overhead, she was not sure. She knew that sometimes she needed him. She knew that he was solid and he was strong.

  She could hear the distant roar of a truck traveling down Highway 1. The cottage was halfway between Davenport and Pescadero—south of nowhere in particular, north of no place special. A lonely place.

  Looking down at the dead body of the seal, Kate had the uneasy feeling that she was being watched. She looked up at the cliff face, then out to sea where the waves crashed. Just past the breakers, a dark head bobbed in the water—a curious harbor seal. As she stared back, he ducked beneath a wave.

  She hurried back to the cottage, scrambling up the sandstone slope, following the narrow path that was little better than a wash eroded by the last rain.

  The cottage was perched at the top of the bluff. The waves that pounded against the cliff threatened to claim the ramshackle building someday. The sea fog had begun a slow offensive against the cottage, the white paint was chipped and weathered, the porch sagged at one corner where a supporting post had rotted through, the wind chimes that hung from the low eaves were tarnished green.

  “Bad news,” Kate said as she stepped in the kitchen door. “There’s a dead seal on the beach.”

  The kitchen was warm and bright. Michael was making coffee. “Why’s that bad news?”

  “Bad luck for the person who shot it,” she said. “It could have been a silkie, a seal person who could change shape and become human on land. If a person kills a silkie, the sea turns against him.”

  Michael was watching her with an expression that had become familiar during the time that they had lived together—he did not know how seriously to take her.

  “You’ve been working on that thesis too long,” he said, and poured her a cup of coffee.

  She laughed and slipped an arm around his waist, leaning up against him and feeling the warmth of his body.

  Almost like old times. “Huh,” she said, “there speaks the scientist.”

  “It’ll be simple enough to get rid of any bad luck,” he added. “I’ll call the university at Santa Cruz. There’s a class that recovers stranded marine mammals for dissection.”

  Kate released him, and sat down in one of the two wooden kitchen chairs. The cup of coffee warmed her hands, still cold from the fog. “They don’t need to get it. It’ll wash out to sea at high tide tonight.”

  Michael frowned. “They’ll want it. This is the only way that they can get specimens.”

  “Oh.” She sipped the hot coffee. Far out at sea, over the crash of the waves, she could hear a sea lion barking.

  “It doesn’t feel right,” she said. “It seems like the body should go back to sea.” Then, before he could laugh or call her foolish, she shrugged. “But I suppose it doesn’t matter. In the interest of science and all.”

  Michael called the university and arranged to have a crew of students come to pick up the seal that afternoon, explaining that Kate would meet them, that he would be gone.

  He looked at her when he hung up the phone and said, inexplicably, “Is that all right?”

  “Of course, of course, it’s all right,” she said irritably.

  And when he came around the table to hug her, she realized that he had meant that he was leaving, and was that all right? She had been thinking of the seal.

  When Kate stood alone on the porch, waving good-bye, she felt uneasy again, unsettled. The fog smelled of salt spray and dying kelp. Michael lifted a hand in farewell and she listened to the crunch of wheels on gravel and watched the sedan until it vanished into the fog. The engine changed in pitch when he stopped at the end of the drive, turned onto the highway, and picked up speed.

  Kate realized that one hand was clinging to the pendant around her neck, and she released it. A gull shrieked in the fog and she retreated into the kitchen to work.

  The papers that she spread on the kitchen table were the result of months of collecting the stories told in the Santa Cruz fishing community. There were so many stories and so many warnings about how one should behave around the sea.

  She remembered sitting in the sun on the fishing dock while an old man mended a net and advised her: “If you cut yourself near the sea, never let the blood touch the water. Blood calls to blood. If the sea has your blood, you belong to the sea.” She remembered a Scottish fisherman’s widow, a sturdy old woman with bright blue eyes, had served her tea and warned: “You must not take the sea lightly. Those who take from the sea lay themselves open to the powers of the sea. And many dark creatures dwell beneath the waves.”

  The sea dwellers of legend were tricky. The kelpies or water horses could take human form to entice mortals into the water to drown. Mermaids and mermen could raise storms to sink ships.

  But the silkies, the seal people that Kate’s thoughts kept returning to, were a gentle folk. Kate leafed through one of her notebooks and found the widow’s account of a young salmon fisherman who had shot a seal feeding near his boat, and had died in a storm the next month. The old widow had said that the silkies were tolerant of humans and angered only by the death of their own kind. They came ashore on moonlit nights to dance on the beach in human form. Fishermen had captured silkie maidens for wives by stealing the skin they used in their seal form; silkie men had been known to take human lovers.

  Kate began listing the elements that the widow’s tale had in common with traditional tales of silkies. Just before lunch, she was interrupted by the sound of tires on the gravel drive. She picked up her sweatshirt and stepped onto the porch.

  Three students—two men and a woman—climbed down from the cab of the ancient pickup truck parked in the drive. “I guess you came to pick up the seal,” Kate said hesitantly. With Michael gone, her uneasiness about the seal had returned. But she could not turn the students away. “I’ll take you down,” she said.

  The day was still overcast and the wind from the sea was col
d. Kate hauled her sweatshirt over her head. The cloth caught on the chain of her pendant and she yanked at the sweatshirt impatiently—too hard. The chain broke and she caught the pendant as it fell. “Damn,” she muttered.

  Aware of the eyes of the students on her, she stuffed the pendant and chain into her pocket. “I’ll take you right down,” she repeated.

  The students unloaded a stretcher from the back of the truck and followed Kate down the narrow path. They had to scramble over the jumble of rocks that extended from the base of the cliff to the water. At high tide, the waves crashed against the cliff, making the broad beach where the seal lay inaccessible from the path. When the moon was full and the tides reached full height, the sea swallowed both the tiny beach at the bottom of the path and the broad beach to the north….

  Kate felt ill at ease with the students, unwilling to introduce herself or ask their names. These people did not belong on her beach. She stood several yards away as the two men squatted by the seal and positioned the stretcher so that they could roll the seal onto it. The woman stood at the animal’s head. She shifted her weight uneasily, glanced out to sea, then back at the seal. Kate crossed her arms and hugged her sweatshirt tighter around her, suddenly cold. The woman shivered, though she was dressed more warmly than Kate.

  She stepped toward Kate and caught her eye. “You must be half seal yourself to go in swimming this time of year.”

  Kate frowned. “Why do you figure I’ve been in swimming?”

  The woman pointed to a set of footprints, left by bare feet, leading along the edge of the sea toward the body.

  The prints were almost obscured by bird tracks and boot prints.

  “Not me,” Kate said. “But that’s odd. Those weren’t here this morning. And I’m the only one who lives near here.”

  The woman shrugged. “Probably just a hitchhiker who stopped off the highway to walk on the beach.” She looked out to sea, where the gray waves crashed against the rocks.