Like You'd Understand, Anyway

by Jim Shepard

  I stick myself off in the stacks, looking back and forth through the same book. Who cries on the morning of a big game? I hold my hands in my lap as best I can.

  When I was six or seven, my brother took me into the woods behind our house. I think those woods are gone now but I haven't been back to check. He broke sticks on trees. Every stick he picked up he laced into tree trunks until it broke. Sometimes it took a while. Sometimes the splinters went whizzing by my face. We walked for half the afternoon and then we stopped. I took my sneakers off because there was a rock in one. I could hear traffic, a highway, somewhere. He whacked more sticks into trees while I sat there. “It's just me and you now,” he finally said, though I knew that. He meant about our dad. He was only eleven or twelve himself. “You're not gonna leave me here, are you?” I said. I asked because of the way he was talking.

  Even then I knew he couldn't help me and I couldn't help him. And he looked like he knew what I was thinking. “You're not going to leave me?” I asked again, but he just got up and headed home.

  I had to hustle to keep up. “You mean like we gotta stick together?” I remember asking. “No. We don't have to do nothin',” he said back. And in nightmares I had after that he took me out on a dock and the dock became a rug and there'd be this bell going off in the distance.

  The library's computers have our team Web site on their monitors to show spirit. This year's slogan at the top is Declaring War in 04. I check out the Port Neches-Groves site on the net. Their news headline is Indians Shorthanded for Biggest Game of the Year.

  For our on-field introductions there's some kind of mylar tent or tunnel leading past the north bleachers into the end zone. The nonstarters form two lines leading into it for us to run through. It's like going through a human funnel that empties onto the field. We end up at the 50 yard line in a big pile, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing. Guys're throwing themselves on the top and flipping and ending up in the middle on the bottom. From the seedings it's clear we'll have to win four straight, including this one, for me to meet that kid Corey in the 5A semifinals. Childress wins the toss and the defense huddles up around Coach and he gets on his hands and knees in the grass and scrabbles around whacking our shoes with his hands. He goes all the way around the huddle doing it to everybody. “Check your feet see if you're ready,” we hear him shouting over the crowd. Wainwright's just outside the huddle. He already thinks his feet are ready.

  First series Childress goes 73 yards in 11 plays and has a first and goal at the 3. We stuff them twice and they overthrow their tight end and so that fast it's Thrilling Goal-Line Stand time: fourth and inches, and they're going for it.

  Wainwright's standing there, weight on one leg, hands on his hips like he's waiting for a fat guy to catch a bus. Somewhere east of us down near the Gulf of Mexico, Corey's getting down in his three-point stance, nowhere near one hundred percent. Guys are waiting on the other side of the line like horses at a starting gate with a baby in the middle of the track. All over Texas, kids are getting ready to cripple and be crippled, and parents are doing their bit or downing a drink or missing out entirely because they've got things to do, too.

  Childress runs a flanker reverse, of all things, and I get caught going the wrong way and chopped at the ankles by somebody. I hit the ground and something spears me and launches off my back, taking my wind with it: Wainwright's cleats. He catches the flanker high and clotheslines him.

  What's it mean to say you want to do something if you don't do it? It took our family two days to drive down here from New Jersey. The first night, all our stuff in the back, they thought I was asleep, and started talking about my dad again. My mom got defensive. She said he always meant well.

  “What good does that do us?” I asked.

  “Look who's up,” my brother said.

  “Everybody's worried about what he didn't do for us,” my mother said. “What about what we didn't do for ourselves?”

  It shut us up for a while. “Sounds like we got the right dad after all, then,” my brother finally said. And we left it at that.

  The stands go nuts. Our defense mobs itself in celebration. I still can't breathe. Some of my ribs must be cracked. My sternum feels like it did in the hospital. My arms and legs and head are okay, but everything else wants to die. Wainwright squats next to me and shrugs off some glad-handers, his eyes unreadable under his helmet shadow. The Sisters of Mercy hustle towards me with their stretcher. If I can walk or be carried I'm going to be there for Corey in four weeks. I'm going to be there so his father can see. I'm going to be there so his father can see and say, Who is that kid? That kid's amazing. That kid's a terror.

  Ancestral Legacies

  This is the roof of the world. An immense, sequestered place, the highest of the high plateaus, many times the size of the Reich. I'm still sick. The porters still gesticulate and exchange private jokes when they assume my attention is elsewhere. Beger's bad ankle is still swollen. Somewhere I've misplaced my certainty.

  The day was brutally hot and now no one can get warm. We sit around the fire like terns thunderstruck by the cold. Ahead of us the hardpan goes on for two thousand kilometers before it encounters a tree. It feels like the back of the beyond, the place where rumors lose their way. This is the second week of the trek, and every aspect of what's surrounded us has been featureless.

  Beger lies on his side wrapped in a blanket. The boot on his good foot is too near the fire. We watch its sole sizzle as though we're dumbfounded by speech. Above us the starlessness comes and goes. When the wind dies, there's no sound. One of the pack animals coughs up something with a ragged, liquid snort.

  We're feeding the fire with pats of yak dung. So even it is hushed. It's a feeble, smelly warmth.

  We're without information or curiosity. Neither of us speculate. Confronted with what surrounds us, our powers of imagination have dissipated.

  The world is empty. The world in every direction is empty. After sunup the sky comes down like an edict. The blue is so intense that birds fly low to the ground, intimidated.

  In Lharigo I was chased away from a nomad encampment.

  Children threw stones. Dogs gamboled unpleasantly about my heels. Women waved small ceramic pots of flour to exorcise my evil spirit.

  Beger received the same greeting when he straggled in an hour or so later. “I don't think we should ask about the yeti,” he said, grimacing at his forearm. A dog had shredded his sleeve.

  My name is Ernst Schäfer and I sit with my assistant, Beger, and seven sherpas with uncertain work habits only a very small part of the way across the Chang Tang, the frozen desert between the Trans-Himalayas and the Kunlun Mountains.

  The sherpas, already convinced of our slow-wittedness, tell stories of the yeti—women the yeti have abducted, yaks killed in a single blow, shattered sheep pens, and always the ubiquitous footprints. How can you tell when a yak's been killed in a single blow? Beger wants to know. In response they snigger at him and pass around a small pot of dried cream and a sack of what they call tsampa, a kind of roasted barley. Beger is offered none of either. They're really a very dirty people.

  Gulam, the sherpas' leader, intones as though telling ghost stories to a child, “They come into the village and take what they want.” The other porters parody the terrified expressions of the eyewitnesses.

  “When the facts run dry, they start inventing,” Beger complains, gingerly unlacing his boot. “They lie to us on principle.”

  His foot does not look good. My guess would be an infection from a leech at the beginning of the trip.

  Beger and I are the entirety of Operation Tibet, which was a closely guarded secret when we began and, now that we're a fly-speck in the darkness on the other side of the moon, has no doubt become even more so. We are what's known back at the offices of the Reichsführer SS as the Schäfer Unit. This has been the cause of much bitter amusement on Beger's part. Whenever we hit a snag or find ourselves powerless before native intransigence or a pack of goats that won't cle
ar the track, leaving us half-frozen and shivering and peering miserably down into an icy abyss, Beger will say, “Don't they see that we're the Schäfer Unit?”

  “I think they do,” I'll tell him.

  Our purpose, as far as the Reichschancellery understands, is twofold. First, we're to explore prehistoric and linguistic issues related to locating the core of the Nordic-Aryan legacy. The language is the Reichsführer's. And second, the two of us are to incite the Tibetan army against British troops. The plan involves our rendezvousing with emissaries from our new ally, the Bolsheviks. With their help, I'm to become a German Lawrence of the Himalayas. The Bolshevik emissaries are nowhere to be found. There is no Tibetan army, and there are no British troops.

  This kind of foolishness carries very little water with me. Before I was assigned to Ancestral Legacy, an odd bureaucratic backwater recently flooded with funding, I was an ornithologist of international renown, as well as an expert in zoology, botany, agriculture, and ethnology. Not to mention one of the foremost Tibetan specialists of this age. So, as I told Beger, while I've been continually impressed with Reichsführer Himmler's political gifts, I've been able to contain my awe when it comes to his scientific theories. His theories are the donkey cart we've used to land us where we want to be: here on this high plateau with sufficient funding and no oversight, in search of the yeti.

  Beger's interests in the yeti lie in his having made a name for himself with a precocious monograph on the importance of the forehead in racial analysis. He studied anthropology at the institute in Berlin-Dahlem with Fischer and Abel, and he's convinced the yeti are an early hominid. He can imagine to what uses a yeti skull could be put in his research. And naturally he's devoted to science, so in the normal course of events he can work up a useful curiosity about most phenomena. Plus there's the invigorating fact that service in the Schäfer Unit has excused him from active military duty. His service to the Fatherland is supposed to be his ongoing evaluation of the Tibetan material we're intended to gather.

  We haven't gathered much. He did some desultory poking around with one of the sherpas as translator before we left Lha-rigo. But for the most part I've led us to areas considered desolate even by Tibetan standards: areas of the yeti, or of nothing at all.

  The ideal age for a man on an expedition like this is between thirty-one and thirty-five. I'm thirty-seven. A man much younger, like Beger, who's twenty-five, possesses the necessary vigor in abundance but not the discipline and focus of mind so crucial to patient inquiry.

  And lately his powers of observation have been curtailed sharply by a postadolescent self-absorption. He's miserable about his foot and miserable that we're so out of touch with the world. He has two brothers serving in the war with Poland, a bit of news we learned about from a week-old Italian newspaper.

  Of course we knew something was up before we left.

  One brother is a Stuka pilot, the other a sapper in the Wehr-macht. I do a poor job keeping track of which is which.

  This part of the Chang Tang is far from even the rarely used trade routes. Gulam has led us here because his uncle and brother insist that yeti roam these regions at night in search of food. During the day, with nothing stirring in any direction, the notion seems absurd, but we do well to remind ourselves that over the centuries the Tibetans have learned to survive in an environment that presents an unyielding stone face to outsiders.

  We have more than Gulam's assertions on which to base our decision: two days into the trek we encountered a veritable square dance of footprints baked into a previously marshy depression near a water source. The footprints were six inches deep and two and a half feet long. A separate and enormous big toe was clearly visible on each.

  “What was this, a meeting hall?” Beger remarked, unsure where to begin with his measuring tape.

  …

  One sherpa stands watch while the others sleep. Beger's head is under the blanket, and because his complaints have stopped I assume he's asleep as well. Eventually he pulls his boot from the fire.

  Each night, my shivering prevents me from listening as intently as I would like. I have not found a solution to this problem. The previous night I walked off half a kilometer into the darkness, keeping a fix on the wavering glow of the fire. The exercise warmed me a little, and as soon as I stopped moving, small, brittle sounds rose up around me. Nocturnal rodents or insects, perhaps, going about their business. Gazing off at a tiny glow of warmth in the distance: that must be, I realized, the yeti's experience.

  When I wake, the fire's gone out. The sherpa standing watch is on his back, snoring. There's a whistling—at a high, high pitch— impossibly far off.

  When Alexander had conquered the entire known world—when he'd finally subjugated even the Indus Valley and pushed his phalanxes up to the precipices and chasms of the Kashmir—he's said to have sent a small expedition off to engage the yeti, maddeningly visible on the higher elevations. The expedition perished and the yeti eluded him. Pliny the Elder, who would later fall victim to his own thirst for knowledge while attempting to record natural processes during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, insisted that in the Land of the Satyrs—the mountains that lay to the east of India—lived creatures that were extremely swift and could run on two feet or four. They bore a human shape and because of their agility and strength could be caught only when infirm or old.

  Aelianus, historian of the Emperor Septimus, wrote of his legions' frustration with the same satyrs, whom he described as shaggy-haired and startlingly accurate with stones. As far back as 1832, Britain's first representative to Nepal described an unknown creature that moved erectly, was covered in long, dark hair, and had no tail.

  But of course it wasn't until a scientist—the renowned Tibetan specialist L. A. Waddell—reported sightings that Western interest was piqued. And when in 1921 Howard-Bury reported the animals on the north side of Everest at nineteen thousand feet, a journalist rendered the yeti's Tibetan name as abominable snowman: a mistranslation that torments us to this day. “And no wild goose chases after abominable snowmen,” the Reichsführer warned me during our last personal interview before my departure.

  “What do they eat?” Beger asks once we're under way the next morning. He's taken to riding one of the pack animals for part of the day to rest his foot. Undifferentiated flatness stretches as far as the eye can see. Occasionally some brittle yellow grass. And this is the late summer, when the vegetation is at its best.

  “Glacier rats,” Gulam calls from the front the column, two animals ahead. “Some rabbits. Maybe a marmot.”

  Our column is stopped for the rest of the morning by winds we heard approaching while they were still hours off. When they scoured across the last few hundred yards we could see the hard-pan come alive in a line. Now that they've arrived we can lean at an angle into them without falling forward. A piece of clothing is ripped from one of our bundles and spirited off into the distance. Eventually the animals are gathered in a circle and made to sit while we take shelter in the center. Beger and I wrap our heads against the blowing grit. We can hear the porters playing bakchen, a game like dominos.

  Our plan is to go at least seventeen hundred kilometers into the heart of the Chang Tang. The Tibetan name is synonymous with hardship and desolation. The entire plateau possesses no plants other than artemisia, wild nettles, a few dwarf willows I'm assured are still a thousand kilometers away, and these arid and burnt-looking needlegrasses now aflutter in the gale. Only two nomadic and elusive tribes inhabit its rim. Gulam's second in command is along principally to work his magic to prevent hail. Within minutes a clear sky here can cloud over with horrendous and lethal hailstorms. In one of the first European accounts of the plateau, an entry lists the loss of five men, each of their names followed by the phrase Dead by Hail.

  As quickly as the wind comes, it's gone. We stand again, and what we shake off glitters in the sun. The ground feels frozen—the bone-dry hardpan rests on permafrost—and yet the sun is hot and there's no trace of s
now. We estimate our altitude to be sixteen thousand feet. Our hearts pound every day, as a matter of course, from the thinness of the air and the excitement.

  We get under way again. Within the hour, there's some distress from the porters. They've lost their tea maker, and I refuse to allow them to go back for it.

  Beger is back on foot, keeping up nicely, with a little hop-step he's developed. He asks my opinion of the Polish air force.

  “Are you thinking of Ewald?” I ask.

  “Alfred,” he says. “Ewald's the sapper.”

  “Of course,” I tell him. “Ewald's the sapper.” After giving the matter thought, I dismiss his worries. One of the few details the Italian news account was able to provide concerned the massive nature of our initial attacks on the Poles' airfields. “And I've seen the Poles' airfields,” I remind him. “They're the Tibetans of Europe.”

  He laughs, pleased, and repeats the phrase.

  I overheard him and some of his cronies in a wine cellar near the university the night before we left. He was unaware I was occupying the next high-backed booth. “He's like a father to you,” one of the cronies had joked.

  “Yes, the kind effortlessly surpassed,” he'd responded. When the laughter subsided he referred to my book, published the year before, and quoted the opening sentence.

  “All right, you lot, keep it down,” the serving girl had scolded the gathering with a mock sternness from her station behind the bar.

  Say what you will about the National Socialists' ideologies, but they're all essentially ideologies of human inequality. Of which a half hour in any Tibetan village would provide ample proof: between the walls and the woodpiles in every courtyard are the proudly displayed chest-high mounds of horse manure; beside the manure will always be someone as apparently simpleminded as he is elderly, pounding butter tea in a knee-high cylinder. For days afterward you'll smell of frozen garlic and rancid fat.