Points of Departure: Stories

by Pat Murphy

  In the empty house, the evening of his mother’s death, Xavier was truly alone for the first time in decades. He felt strangely hollow—not lonely, but empty. He felt light, insubstantial, as if the slightest breeze could carry him away. He could do anything. He could go anywhere. He thought about his father’s trunk and went to the attic.

  The trunk had been pushed to the farthest corner, tucked under the eaves—behind a broken lamp, a dressmaker’s dummy stuck with pins, a box of Xavier’s old toys, and an overstuffed armchair with torn upholstery in which generations of mice had nested. The trunk was locked and, for a moment, Xavier hesitated, considering retreat. Then he realized that the house and all its contents were his.

  With a screwdriver and hammer, he attacked the trunk’s rusty hasp and tore it free of the lid.

  On top of the newspaper-wrapped bundles in the trunk lay a package wrapped in brown paper and decorated with Nepali stamps. Xavier carefully unwrapped the package and found a leatherbound notebook filled with spidery handwriting that looked curiously like his own.

  Xavier opened the book and read a page: “I have decided to leave the expedition and press on alone, following the Kali Gandaki to its source. In the bleak northern hills, I am certain I will find the man-ape that the Sherpa call the yeti. Winter is coming and many will call me foolish, but I cannot turn back. I miss my wife and son, but I like to think that my son, if he were here, would understand. I cannot turn back. The mountains will not let me.”

  Mingling with the dusty air of the attic, Xavier thought he smelled incense, a foreign smell that awakened unfamiliar urges. Kneeling beside the trunk, with his father’s journal in his hands, he felt, in some strange way, that he had made a decision. He knew that he would not return to school for the fall term.

  In a new backpack, purchased at the local sporting goods store, Xavier packed field notebooks, camera, and many rolls of film. He bought a kerosene stove and tested it in the backyard, boiling water for tea in a lightweight aluminum pot. He bought a plane ticket to Katmandu by way of Bangkok and converted $5,000 cash into traveler’s checks. He studied a book titled Nepali Made Simple, memorizing simple phrases. He haunted the local college library, reading all the accounts of yeti sightings that he could find.

  Mountaineers described the beast as inhumanly tall and covered with shaggy hair. Some said it was nocturnal, prowling the barren slopes between the treeline and the permanent snows. Some said it was like a monkey; others, like a bear. Tibetans and Nepalis credited the beast with supernatural powers: its bones and scalp were valued as objects of great power.

  He read his father’s journal, lingering over descriptions of the terrain, the mountains, the wildlife. His father’s books had maintained a heroic tone: men battled the wilderness, always fought fair, and usually triumphed. The journal gave a more realistic account: describing stomach upsets and bouts with dysentery, complaining of lazy porters, recording bribes given minor officials for quicker service. The journal told of superstitions: Tibetans believed that shamans could transform themselves into birds, that finding a hat was unlucky, that dogs howling at dawn were an inauspicious omen. Xavier read all this with great enthusiasm.

  At night, Xavier dreamed of cold slopes, scoured clean by endless winds. He was filled with a feverish longing for the high country, where the snows never melt. He would find the yeti, track its movements, study its biology. He would finish the task that his father had begun and return to his mother’s house to write of his success.

  On his first day in Katmandu, Xavier wandered the narrow streets of the alien city, marveling at how strange and yet how familiar it seemed. It matched his father’s descriptions, yet somehow, on some level, it seemed quite different.

  A shy Hindu boy with a red tika dot painted on his forehead stared at Xavier from a dark doorway. The child wore no pants and his dark skin reflected a little light from the street, a subtle sheen on thin legs, thin buttocks. In the shade provided by a shrine to Ganesh, the elephantheaded son of Vishnu, a street dog rested and licked her sores.

  The market smelled of incense, strong spices, and cow manure. Xavier shooed away the vendors who tried to sell him tourist trinkets, the rickshaw drivers who asked in broken English where he was going, the black market money changers who offered him a good rate, a very good rate, for American dollars. He was caught by the feeling that something was about to happen, something sudden and strange, something exotic and unanticipated. He stared about him with impassioned hungry eyes, watching for a secret signal that the adventure began here.

  In a small square, bedsheets and other laundry flapped from the second floors of the surrounding houses. The wooden frames of the windows had been ornately carved sometime in the last three centuries. The faces of Hindu deities and demons stared from a complex background of twisting human bodies, vines, and flowers. In the square below, heaps of yellow grain dried in the autumn sun. Small children kept guard, stopping noisy games to chase away cows and dogs and pigs.

  In a small street stall frequented only by Nepalis, Xavier ate lunch, crouching uncomfortably on a wooden bench just barely out of the street. The high clear piping of flutes played by flute sellers mingled with the honking of rickshaw horns and the jingling of bicycle bells.

  Though the Nepalis ate with their hands, the shopkeeper insisted on giving Xavier a tarnished and bent fork and on showing the American how to sprinkle hot peppers on his daal baat, the rice and lentil dish that served as the staple of the Nepali diet. The shopkeeper, a wizened man in a high-crowned brimless hat, sat beside Xavier on the bench I and watched him eat.

  “You come from England?” the shopkeeper asked Xavier.

  “No, from America.”

  “You going trekking?”

  “Well, yes,” he said. “I plan to go up past a town called Jomsom. I …” He hesitated, then plunged on. “I have read that yeti have been seen in that area.”

  “Ah, you wish to find the yeti?”

  “Very much.”

  The shopkeeper studied him. “Westerners do not have the patience to find the yeti. They hurry, hurry, and never find what they look for.”

  “I have all the time in the world,” Xavier said.

  The shopkeeper folded his hands in his lap, smiled, and said, “You will need a guide. My cousin, Tempa, can take you where you need to go.”

  Xavier ate and listened to the shopkeeper praise the virtues of his cousin Tempa. Sitting in the open stall, he looked up at the thin strip of sky visible between the houses. A single bird flew over, heading northwest. Xavier watched it vanish from sight and knew, with the same certainty that had caused him to quit his job and come to Nepal, that he would go northwest to the Himalayas, to the high country where anything could happen.

  On the fourth day on the trail, Xavier and Tempa were caught in a violent hailstorm that transformed the path into a running stream that splashed merrily around Xavier’s boots. The water quickly penetrated the waterproof oil that Xavier had applied to the boots in Katmandu. His socks were soon soaked and his feet ached with the cold.

  In a low stone hut that served as teahouse and provided primitive accommodations, they found shelter. The group of ragged porters that huddled by the fire looked up when Xavier ducked through the low doorway. The teahouse was filled with woodsmoke and the scent of unwashed clothing.

  The small fire that burned in the center of the single room seemed to provide more smoke than warmth.

  Xavier blinked as his eyes adjusted to the dark interior.

  Not elegant accommodations, but better than a tent and no worse than the teahouses that had sheltered them for the past three days. Xavier propped his pack against the wall and hung his rain parka on a nail that jutted from the wooden doorframe.

  The proprietress, a Tibetan woman, offered him rokshi, locally distilled wine, and he accepted gratefully. The clear liquor smelled faintly of apples and tasted overwhelmingly of alcohol. The first mouthful seared his mouth and throat with a bright, almost painful warmth
that spread slowly to his chest. He sat on a wooden bench by the door and slowly unlaced his wet boots.

  Tempa was already deep in conversation with the porters who crouched by the fire. He looked up at Xavier, his eyes reflecting the firelight. “They say that snow has fallen in the pass to the north,” Tempa said to Xavier. “And a big storm is coming.”

  Xavier shrugged, pulled off his boots, and gingerly wiggled his toes. Since the very first day, Tempa had been complaining about the weight of his pack, the length of each day’s hike, the perils of bad weather. “Not much we can do about the weather,” he said.

  Tempa frowned. “Big storm,” he said. “Too late in the season to go on. Tomorrow, we go back.”

  Xavier shook his head and frowned at Tempa, trying to assume an air of authority. “Go back? We’ve just started. If there’s a storm, we’ll wait it out.”

  “Too cold,” Tempa said. “Winter is here.”

  “Tomorrow, we go on,” Xavier said. His father had written of stubborn porters and of the need to show them who was boss. “Do you understand? I’m not ready to go back.”

  Tempa returned unhappily to his friends by the fire.

  Xavier relaxed, loosened the collar of his damp flannel shirt, and leaned back against the stone wall of the teahouse. The warmth of the rokshi spread throughout his body. Outside, the rain had stopped and a rooster was crowing. Xavier closed his eyes and listened to the soft whispering of water flowing down the trail, the gentle clucking of the chickens that searched for edible insects in the scrubby weeds that grew just outside the teahouse door. The breeze that blew through the door smelled of mountains that had been washed clean by the rain. He took a deep breath, but caught a whiff of another scent, something stronger than the woodsmoke or the rokshi—an animal scent. He looked up to see an old man standing in the hut’s open doorway.

  Though the afternoon breeze was cold, the old man wore no shirt or jacket, only a loose loincloth of an indeterminate color. The cloth may once have been white, but it had become an uncertain shade of gray: the color of dust, of wood smoke, of ashes and grime. The man’s long gray-streaked hair was wound in a topknot. The ancient face was stern—a high forehead, a nose like a beak.

  Around the man’s neck hung a string of round beads, each one a different shade of off-white. Xavier stared at the beads, recognizing them from a description in his father’s journal. Each of the 108 beads had been carved from the bone of a different human skull. At the man’s belt dangled a carved ivory phurba, the ritual dagger carried by all shamans of Bon, the ancient animistic religion that had preceded Buddhism in the Himalayas.

  In one hand, the man carried a metal bowl, which he held out to the Tibetan woman. She beckoned him in and he squatted beside the fire.

  “Namaste,” Xavier said, the traditional Nepali greeting that meant “I salute you.” His voice was suddenly unsteady. Here was adventure—a traveling shaman visiting the same teahouse.

  The old shaman stared at Xavier, but did not return his greeting.

  Xavier beckoned to Tempa. “Who is the old man?” he whispered.

  Tempa’s small vocabulary deserted him when he did not find it convenient to speak English. Now, occupied with a glass of rokshi and eager to return to his friends, Tempa shrugged. “Ta chaina.” I don’t know.

  “Where is he from?”

  Tempa frowned, seemingly reluctant to say anything about the old man. “He lives alone.” Tempa waved an arm toward the hills.

  “A hermit,” Xavier said.

  Tempa shrugged and returned to his friends.

  The Tibetan woman served dinner, scooping a serving of rice into the old man’s bowl and moistening the grain with a spoonful of daal. The old man silently accepted the offering. The woman dished out a similar dinner for the others.

  After his third glass of rokshi and a plate of daal baat, Xavier had relaxed. The old man, he noticed, ate alone, squatting in a corner of the hut. With rokshi-induced courage, Xavier went to the corner and endeavored to begin a conversation with the old man.

  “Rokshi?” Xavier said to the old man, and then he signaled the woman for another glass. The old man studied Xavier with impassive black eyes, then accepted the glass.

  “Timiko ghar ke ho?” the old man asked Xavier. “Timi kaha jane?” Where are you from? Where are you going?

  Xavier replied in halting Nepali. I come from America.

  Then he waved a hand to indicate his destination, pointing northward toward the high cold mountains that filled his dreams. “Meh-teh hirne,” he said. Which meant, more or less, I look for the yeti.

  The old man took Xavier’s hand in a strong grip and peered into the American’s face with sudden intensity. He spoke rapidly in Nepali, but Xavier could not follow his words. When Xavier shrugged, looking bewildered, the old man called to Tempa, who sat with the other porters by the fire. Tempa responded in Nepali.

  The old man broke into a grin, his stern face collapsing into wrinkles. He reached out a withered hand and cupped Xavier’s chin, lifting the biology teacher’s face as a doting grandmother might lift the face of a shy child. The old man threw back his head and laughed at something that he saw in Xavier’s face. He released his hold on Xavier and said something, but the only word Xavier could catch in the rapid string of Nepali was “meh-teh.” Something about yeti.

  Xavier smiled uneasily, wondering how his father would have handled a situation like this. “What’s all that about?”

  Xavier asked Tempa. Reluctantly, Tempa left his friends and came to squat beside Xavier and the old man.

  “He wants to know where you are going,” Tempa said. “I tell him you look for the yeti.”

  Xavier nodded and smiled at the old man.

  The old man said something else in rapid Nepali. Xavier shook his head and asked him to speak more slowly.

  Still grinning, the old man repeated himself, pausing after each word and accompanying his words with gestures. Xavier couldn’t follow everything that the old man said, but he thought he caught the gist of it: The old man had seen the yeti many times. He was a powerful shaman and he had hunted the yeti many times.

  Xavier poured the old man another cup of rokshi and asked him to tell about the yeti. Beside the fire, three porters played a noisy game of cards. Outside the door, by candlelight, the Tibetan woman washed the dinner dishes. Inside the smoky teahouse, Xavier leaned close to the old man, ignoring his animal scent, and listened to tales of the yeti.

  The yeti looked like men, only different, the old man explained slowly. They hunted at night, and they were very strong. With only his hands, a yeti could kill a yak, break the neck. (The old man brought his hands together like a man snapping a stick.) The yeti is fierce and cunning.

  Xavier, with hand gestures and halting Nepali, asked the old man how he hunted such a fierce beast. With a dirty finger, the old man tapped his temple and nodded sagely.

  He called out to the woman, and she brought a stoneware crock and two tin cups. The old man filled the cups with a ladle and offered one to Xavier. “Yo chang ho,” the old man said. This is chang.

  Xavier had heard of chang, a thick beer brewed with rice and barley. Unwilling to offend the old man, he sipped the thick beverage. It tasted like a mixture of sour porridge and alcohol, but after the first few sips, it wasn’t too bad.

  The old man tapped the cup and told Xavier that he hunted the yeti with chang. He launched into a long explanation which Xavier followed with difficulty. To catch a yeti, it seems, the old man found a Village where a yeti had been bothering people, stealing their crops and killing their goats. On a night when the moon was new, the old man left a pot of chang in the path where the yeti would find it. The yeti drank the chang and fell asleep, and in the morning, the old man captured it easily. Yeti, said the old man, like chang.

  More chang, more labored discussion of the habits of the yeti. Xavier grew accustomed to the smoke that filled the room. At some point, the Tibetan woman lit a candle, and the flickering
light cast enormous shadows that danced on the walls. The old man’s face, illuminated by the candle, seemed filled with sly amusement. Sometimes, it seemed to Xavier that the old man was laughing at him beneath the words, teasing him with some private joke.

  But the room seemed small and cozy and Xavier’s Nepali improved with each glass of chang. It was a good life, a good place to be. Xavier lost track of how many cups of chang he drank. The old man seemed like a good friend, a faithful companion.

  Somehow, Xavier found himself telling the old man about his father and his search for the yeti. Groping for words in Nepali, he tried to explain that he needed to find the yeti, to finish what his father had started. He tried to explain how he felt about the mountains. In a mixture of Nepali and English, he tried to describe his dreams of mountains and snow.

  The old man listened intently, nodded as if he understood.

  Then he spoke softly, slowly, laying a hand on Xavier’s hand. I can help you find the yeti, he said to Xavier. Do you want to see the yeti?

  Drowsy from chang, half-mesmerized by the candlelight, Xavier took the old man’s hands in both of his. “I want to find the yeti,” he said in English.

  The old man fumbled for something in the pouch that dangled at his belt. He displayed his findings to Xavier on the palm of a withered hand: a small brown bone etched with spidery characters. The bone was attached to a leather thong. It was made of yeti bone, the old man explained. Very powerful, very magical.

  Xavier reached out and touched the small dried object.

  It was warm to the touch, like a small sleeping animal.

  The old man smiled. His dark eyes were caught in a mesh of wrinkles, like gleaming river pebbles in a bed of drying mud.

  The old man nodded, as if reaching some conclusion, then looped the leather thong around Xavier’s neck. Startled, Xavier protested, but the old man just smiled. When Xavier lifted the pendant, as if to remove it, the old man scolded him in Nepali.

  They had more chang to celebrate, and Xavier’s memories were fuzzy after that. He remembered the old man reassuring him that he would see the yeti. He remembered lying down on a bamboo mat by the fire and pulling his still damp sleeping bag over himself.