The Chorten Stone
“It isn’t done, man, it isn’t done,” he growled.
Potter squinted at Willard’s back-pack as if exercising x-ray vision, but actually making deductions from the size and curve of the green nylon. Even before this Willard hadn’t thought Old Potter liked him much. Finally, he had stumped over and toed with his boot at the rip-stop material of Willard’s newly- heavy back-pack where it lay propped against the field-stone and mud mortar of the porch. They were waiting to get their mid-day meal from the Tamang farm-wife who owned the house.
“It has to be one of the Tibetan inscriptions.”
“I bought it.” Willard lazily stretched his arms, his legs and his words. The younger man had been hanging behind for two days, though he half-knew Potter would find out what he was carrying and wouldn’t like it. Anticipation gratified added sting to the burn of the actual event.
Potter’s big face darkened as creases contracted it toward his eyes. “Bought it, bought it from who?”
“From the man who ran that little shop we slept in with all those mule drivers..., near some rickety swinging bridge two days back.” He was defiant. “Paid my money and got permission, right and proper.” He didn’t quite turn directly toward Potter. “Don’t like it? Tough!”
“That man doesn’t own the chorten stones,” Potter pressed on. “Nobody owns them.” His hands clenched and opened with a dull silver glint that could have been indignation, but was really just his ring.
“Then there’s no problem with me having one,” Willard answered.
He was practiced at this kind of sparring, having had a lifetime of it with his father. “I suppose that’s your idea of satisfactory grades, Ronald.” In place of Potter, an image briefly swam up of his fat, old man, standing in the basement he had refinished as a recreation room,“With no help from anybody.” And before he could blink it away, Willard smelled the well-remembered damp from beneath green indoor-outdoor carpet.
“It’s my idea of what those stupid courses deserve,” he had snapped back. “If you don’t like it, that’s your problem.”
So that Potter would not see his annoyance, Willard turned his narrow face toward the summer-green trench of the terraced valley that yawned off to the right of the farmstead.
“Those stones were carved in a dead language in an extinct alphabet by monks nearly extinct themselves. They’re supposed to help open and close the doors between the living and the dead. You just can’t take them!” Potter lectured.
But Willard had gone deaf on the subject. He always acted as if he and Potter only chanced to be following the same foot-path through the long slopes and narrow valleys of the Nepali high-Himal by coincidence and that no connection existed between the two of them, something which was not exactly the truth. Willard ate what Potter ate and drank what Potter drank. He very nearly had to.
Originally, Willard had gone up into the mountains alone, with the pile of rupees he had gotten from selling his diesel truck to a wealthy man in Kathmandu, as was possible in the late sixties. And he still intended to buy something of value that he could carry back to sell in America. Un-exchangeable Nepali rupees were of no use outside the country, but as Willard had discovered in the first week, they were not much use within the country either. The vast mountains with their crevice valleys had no merchandisable treasures to offer. What Willard wanted was not cheap handicrafts– buckle-less woven belts, yak’s-wool hats or salt-bags, nor brass pots or a wooden churn for buttering his tea. What he wanted was some few items of high value, easily transported, easily sold on the up-scale side of the market. The ice-diamonds at their tips were the only jewels these mountains seemed to bear, though. He had hoped at least to buy some rugs. Willard was not above making a fool of himself with hand-signs and pantomime, even though he did not do whatever the lingo was up here in the high country. Still, there just seemed not to be anything to buy. And the foot-paths between villages were tough going, though he still had some legs on him from Vietnam. Play-acting had gotten him lodging and food, but only the most basic version of either.
Willard had already lived two weeks on one meal of potatoes or cornmeal mush daily by the time he had come across old Potter, sitting cross-legged in a wayside hangar of woven bamboo. A deep brass plate of rice and curry steamed on the neat mat before him. Potter had some ability with the language, it looked like. He lived pretty well along the trail, too, and it had been a genuine relief for Willard to eat meat again. And the local raksi! Some of it, by being cheaper and stronger, could have driven paint-stripper off the market; and some of it could have elbowed good scotch away from the bar.
But that had left Willard’s money-belt hot with newly printed rupees and still nothing to buy. He got to follow the old duffer into village after mountain village, sucking avidly at the thin air, only to watch Potter snap up a deep-pile, nine-by-twelve carpet on the second day and a holy-figure carved from ten pounds of nearly transparent jade on the evening of the fifth, bits of the jetsam come floating over the passes from the on-going wreck of Tibet. The knowledge that these were things Willard would never have seen in the first place only made it worse to watch, powerless to get anything for himself. In the unspoken competition for the cream, Potter was eating him up.
So, he trailed an hour or two behind old Potter, back towards civilization, poorly represented, he thought, by the airfield at that over-grown collection of villages called Kathmandu. The carved stone was a measure of his desperation, heavy as sin. But he wouldn’t come out of those hills empty-handed.
Then late one evening, well into the autumn, Willard received a surprise as he identified Potter sitting alone in the gloom, the only customer in a five-table restaurant cobbled together by some Tibetans. After the pair of them had tramped back to K’du, he and the older man had purposely lost each other. And Willard finally found what he was looking for–a nice compact item, which he could easily get rid of back in the States on an eager, seller’s market..., and for a lot more than he had paid for it. This evening he was supposed to see a man about the business in this eating place. The un-painted, almost un-lighted, wooden room was so short and narrow that it was practically a box.
The slender chimneys of a pair of overmatched kerosene lamps could only dissolve faint color into the underground murk. Willard thought he would have looked intimidated if he ignored the only other customer, so he slid into an unpainted chair across Potter’s wobbly table. Anyway, his contact might not arrive for a long time. Showing up the next day for a meeting was considered punctual.
“I’ll order dhal-bhat with masu, if there’s a waiter anywhere around,” he said lightly.
“I see you remember your Gurkha,” Potter said in his un-surprisible manner. But he was probably not tickled to death to meet Willard either. Unconsciously, he began to play with his ring, back and forth over his knuckle. It was one of those German-silver puzzle rings available in bazaars Istanbul to Bombay, eight crooked hoops of interlocking tin wire that assembled on the finger to look like a knot. The cheap fakes would never go together for Willard.
“Right, rice-and-lentils with meat. I don’t think I’ll forget that one or good old raksi, either,” Willard answered, trying to sound hearty.
“Old Norbu here serves a very nice form of sulfuric acid under that name,” Potter joked. “Shall I?” He called something and the indistinct figure of a man stooped promptly through a low, dark doorway. The waiter seemed to have a permanent forward thrust to his neck from the low ceiling of the room. It gave him a strangely predatory air. As the man trod heavily the floor-boards, Willard saw that he was in fact wearing a bulky mask, featuring elaborate jet moustaches and eyebrows of red flame on a yellow face with tusked incisors modeled in papier-mache–the sort of thing Buddhist dancers used. That he was a Tibetan was confirmed by the fact that he was tall enough to brush the ceiling and by the way his long coat, belted to bag at his waist, was worn even indoors.
“What’s this,” Willard jerked his thumb unenthusiastically, “something new for the tourists?”
“It’s Halloween, our calendar,” Potter answered, “didn’t you know? Old Samhain, the day doors open for the dead to return. Hereabouts they show up on bridges and isolated paths as women in funeral clothes who call to the living. Those who answer don’t come back, so they say. Don’t worry though,” he gave a small laugh, “you can spot them by the way their feet are on backwards, like the yeti.” The waiter placed two short glasses on the table between them, with a saucer of dark squares, something resembling fudge. “Like this,” said Potter, popping one of the squares into his wide mouth and chewing it with open-mouthed relish for a moment before downing the glass of raksi. Willard was remotely disgusted; the act reminded him sharply of his father, childishly gobbling chocolate. He followed suit though, not to seem timid. He was surprised to discover that it did not set his mouth aflame with red pepper.
“That’s was pretty fair,” Willard said, when the harsh whiskey chaser had faded from his pipes enough to let him speak. “I thought it was fudge, but it wasn’t sweet. What is it?”
Potter smiled. “You don’t want to know what goes on in the kitchen of a restaurant– slipping a customer’s left-overs back into the pot, chopping a pie-dog into the curry. In fact, Nepali’s are always telling stories about what happens to the innocent when they go down to India. My favorite is the bit where a man and his son go into a strange eating place. The boy’ll go off to the W.C. and never come back. After a longish while, the old man orders his meal and while eating the meat, he comes across his son’s ear-ring.” He raised his voice just slightly and the Tibetan appeared again with a bottle. “Meat’s expensive.”
“No, really,” Willard protested and put his hand over the top of his glass, “I can’t drink any more. I’m supposed to meet a man here.”
“That’s me,” Potter said, pushing Willard’s frozen hand aside with his index finger.
“You! What do you know about... my business?” Willard asked irritably while the tall Tibetan poured.
“I’m the one you were sent to see. I have something to sell you,” Potter said, leaning forward so that his wide cheeks and high forehead emerged in the dim light. “This.” He reached down and from the seat beside him and brought up a package. Peeling off waxed-paper wrapping revealed an irregular lump half the size of his fist. Willard was over his surprise and all attention now that business was to hand. He took the fecal-brown weight, noting its aromatic astringency as he felt the wax-and-taffy consistency. There was that slight stickiness on his finger-tips, which haphim has when it is still fresh.
He sniffed again and nibbled at the mass. His father used to say, “Never trust anybody over money.”
“How much?” he asked sharply.
“Ten kilograms in return for the stone,” Potter answered.
Willard paused. Then with show of teeth, barely bent into a smile, he reached across the table to take Potter by the ring hand. “Done!” he said and downed another little non-fudge square and the glass of clear raksi. He could relax then. After another glass of that fiery distillation, he finally thought to ask about the salty squares as yet another saucer was placed between them. “What the heck is this stuff, anyway? It’s good.”
“Like it, do you? Blood pudding, goat’s I suppose...or buffalo.”
The news produced only a slight hesitation in Willard’s hand on its way to his mouth. Maybe it was an effect of booze mixed with the potency of the haphim he kept tasting, but he shrugged indifferently and popped the morsel between his teeth. He downed it with scorching alcohol.
“When can you have the stuff ready?” he demanded, blurring a couple of consonants.
“Right now, if you like,” Potter answered, “if you can deliver the stone.”
“I can deliver the stone.” It was only back in his hotel room. “I could be back here with it in an hour.”
Potter raised a hand. “No need to carry it all that way. Norbu will send some people with you to receive it. You give them the stone; they’ll hand you what you want and then you can come back here to a feast the like of which you can’t buy for money.
Outside, between the built-out upper-stories that over-hung the alley with its paving of black earth, no light penetrated from the stars, nor was there was any other source of illumination. But Willard’s night vision had been enhanced by the hash, so he could tell when he was joined by several others. His head was in a strange place, he thought as they emerged into the comparative light of a cobbled street, because he was hardly fazed by the appearance of his companions. Their faces were concealed by demon masks, like the waiter– some with snouts, some with bobbing manes. Maybe there were about a half-dozen, though he could not get them counted properly. He fingered the lump of hash in his pocket, where it was softening against his palm.
They wouldn’t try anything, would they? No, he decided, not if they knew what was good for them.
The world seemed insubstantial, something he could throw about at will. He brought out a pea-sized pinch of the stuff in his pocket and popped it into his mouth with a sense of the incredible good will the world felt toward him...and he toward it. His old man had been death on tobacco and booze but could forgive himself anything if it filled his belly. When he thought about it at all, Willard had supposed whatever was opposite was the way to go, so he had always looked at sweets as a moral flaw but booze and hash were just recreation. He didn’t want to end up fat, like his old man, or to die with no idea what the world had to offer.
Back at the little flop he had a room in, management was not what anybody would call particular about who you took up to your quarters. But when this masked group surged into the base of a stair-well which served as lobby, the young desk clerk actually vanished into thin air. Amazing. Willard stood transfixed for a moment before his distracted mental processes gained traction and he decided that it must have been an illusion produced by the hash.
Upstairs, he crouched to reach under his bed to drag out the heavy stone, which he kept wrapped in his wind-breaker. But one of the Tibetan’s, a short one in a parachute-cloth jacket of bright orange, squatted putting his hand on Willard’s arm to stop him, and seized a corner of cloth to draw the object out by himself. There was a murmur as he stood. The Tibetan had not known to reach back under the bed for the second stone, the small one, bundled in a shirt. Willard almost said something, but the thought was easy to put aside when he felt the weight of what had been thrust into his arms. The smell alone was enough to tell him that this was the goods. He tore at the wrapper on one of the lumpy blocks and tasted the waxy stuff`. If it wasn’t ten kilos, it was close enough for him. He felt extremely well, about the transaction and about life in general.
Willard looked up to discover that he was nearly alone in his hotel room, with only a single companion. By now the Tibetan looked practically normal in his red and black mask, apparently a buffalo-demon.
“Now is time to take your fooding.” he told Willard in a remarkably deep voice, beckoning downward the way they did.
Suddenly Willard was famished, ravenous. He could have eaten a buffalo. He desired chocolate like a lover, though usually the sour memories of his father’s tremulous jowls and infantile craving for the stuff made him avoid it. Tossing the load of hash on his bed, he rushed out of his room. He realized what a bad idea that was when the Tibetan seized him by the arm and pointed at the unlocked door.
When they pushed in at the entrance of the dim restaurant, it was as empty as his stomach. There was no sign of Potter and when he turned to ask about the old coot, there was no sign of his Tibetan guide either. Willard took a seat anyway. Suddenly he was feeling tired. Well, Potter might have gone to the pot. Finally, the pot had a Potter to piss in it. He sniggered intensely. It was hard to say, time passed so strangely in the dark of these mountains, but it might have been a long time before a plate abruptly appeared before him on the table. He was aware of a hand withdrawing to the side from his narrowed field of vision, but Willard’s eyes sank immovably into the vision of food. First, he devoured a bowl of noodles with broth and slivers of whatever. Then he was given a shiny tray of the little wrapped dumplings they called momos. He placed one after another in his mouth, impaled on the chop-sticks he could suddenly use like a champ, and savored its fragile texture on his tongue for half-a-second before chewing it up like a starved pie-dog. There followed an enormous brass plate with rice heaped above its high sides, steaming flat-bread and several matching cups containing lentil sauce, a couple of chutneys, vegetables and a curry of meat– goat, buffalo, chicken, Willard could not tell and cared not at all. He fell on his dinner with the hunger of a Norse god, clearing all before him like flame.
Thanksgiving dinner, little Ronald peering up at the turkey, lodged high in the middle of the table and spewing stuffing indecently, snow-peaks of mashed potato, muddy rivers of gravy and his father, leaning into his plate like a plowing horse, eating and arguing at the uncles with his mouth full.
Willard was brought more of anything he finished, so he lost count of the little bowls, especially the meat curry. He motioned for more rice and reached to spoon yet another piece of meat from the dark gravy. Still, you had to eat carefully, as the local method of butchery involved chopping meat, skin and bone together, into bite-sized pieces. Months before Willard had learned that you could stab your gums or the roof of your mouth with a splinter of bone if you weren’t careful.
Ronald hated it that the whole family, uncles and aunts, cousins and grandparents had gathered again to witness his father’s unbridled gluttony. “How about some nice white meat?” his father asked around his own mouthful. “How about a nice roll?” Titters rose electrically around the table at Ronald’s refusal. “Pig-fat, pig-head old swine,” he would eventually call the old man to his face when he left home for the army.
“Cripes,” he muttered, “what the hell is this?” The food was great, but back in the kitchen something must have dropped into the pot. He dribbled the mouthful onto the table top. He was getting terribly full, suddenly, so he paused to examine the offending object. Something shiny. It was around both the piece of meat and the piece of bone which ran through it. Wire or something, wasn’t it? He peered closer and pulled the thing free. The eight, interlocking hoops came apart in his greasy fingers, but Willard had seen what it was. “My God,” he slowly enunciated. “Dear Lord!” His stomach clenched tight around all he had been packing into it. He staggered for the door and just made it to the alley before he lost all he had eaten.
The way back to his hotel was harder than days on the trail had been, as he stumbled through the nearly empty lanes which laced their way through the bazaar. Every so often he stopped, sometimes losing the battle to bile, nausea and self-disgust.
As he got down on his knees to shove the goods under his bed, for whatever safe-keeping that offered, his memory flashed the image of his father, puffing as he lowered himself to one knee. Willard usually tried not to think of his old man too much, but his father seemed to be popping into his head often lately. After all, he was dead and that was that. When he had been alive they had a sour, sarcastic relationship until Willard had cleared out entirely for the draft. The old man had lived just to tell his son where he had deviated from perfection. And Willard had not even gone back for the funeral. The estate would have been a collection of bills; such relatives as might have been at the service would have made him uncomfortable with curious stares and nosey questions. There was an old girlfriend he might have run into, as well.
He was annoyed to find himself kneeling beside his bed, lost in pointless daydreams. Briskly he shoved the paper-wrapped package of hash toward the middle and felt it hit the other one. The other one; he pulled it out. What he was going to do with that, he had not decided– ship it home, chuck it in the river... He had struck a good deal when he let the large chorten stone go to Potter’s Tibetans. Smart as he thought he was, Potter had not known about the smaller stone.
Willard had gone back up the ridge early that mid-summer morning, following the donkey-men. Potter, he had left at the little hut by the cable foot-bridge, still packing up his gear for another day’s march back toward town. Ahead of him, twig-legged burros had each balanced two huge sacks of grain knee-high on their backs. Those impossible loads would have been lowland rice traded for salt, which was dug up beyond the high mountains. Willard could hardly have wanted rice, so later he had told Potter that one of the Tibetan drovers had bargained with him over the couple of pieces of turquoise he wore strung through his ears. At the ridge crest, the animals had been whistled on through the windy pass while Willard rested his pack on the chilly, stone bench made just for that purpose by the locals–a chorten, they called it, so Potter had said. Then, when he was alone, he had selected a flat rock, like an Old Testament tablet, with attractive script carved in relief from the collection of such stones which were set along the top of the back-rest. There was a limit to how much country rock he could carry, but an impulse of greed had prompted Willard to reach for a second tablet of stone, only hand-sized, with its single character almost worn away from the surface by wind-blown grit. Probably, what had caught his eye was that the red shale was a different material from the larger ones it was propped beside. It had fit in the pack among dirty clothes and old Potter had never had any reason to suspect that Willard had it. So, he had it still, his souvenir, and though he was not big on memorabilia, the point was that it was his.
Before first dawn sleep was too dreadful to try any more. With hashish-powered intensification, he had been trapped in a terrifying vision of his old man, rocking on his toes in that way he used to have which seemed to flaunt the peak of his middle up and down. Willard, lost in the dark outside this father’s illumination, waited in awful dread for him to turn his attention to his son. Then, when his father had slowly rotated his glare toward Ronald, he had failed to recognize his own offspring. That indifference was more debilitating than the scorching anger, ahead of which he had been expectantly cowering. He was even powerless to call out to attract his father’s attention. In that passive instant which came as he surfaced to wakefulness, the smell of damp carpet came back to him, familiar and choking.
With his head pounding dangerously and his saliva ropey with nausea, Willard lurched down the hall to the W.C. He hardly knew which end to stick first in the keyhole-in-the-floor toilet once he got there. When he slumped back to it, he couldn’t stand the sight of his cubicle any more either–the scatter of rumpled clothes and torn papers. His eye settled on the chorten stone where it lay amid general disorder. It wore the suffocating air and ominous threat of the dream from which he had just awakened. That settled it– he would drop the damn thing in some dark hole or maybe on the edge of a temple or something. It was a relief just to have made up his mind. And, by God, he would throw that damn ring of Potter’s in with it. He scrabbled in the flimsy little drawer for it with one hand. Curry had dried on the tangle of hoops and the alloy boasted its silver content by turning black. He thrust it into a trouser pocket. Weariness made him stumble as he moved down the corridor, purposely, defiantly leaving the door to his room unlocked.
He hid the hand-sized stone where it wouldn’t be so obvious, a sloppy bundle of cloth beneath his jacket and shirt– though he told himself defiantly that he didn’t know what he had to be ashamed of. It lay against his stomach, making a paunch like his father had, and he cuddled it to him like an ulcer. He spared a moment for distaste as he glanced quickly up and down outside. The streets were narrow and dark, with only the homeless kids who crowded into various shrines for shelter from the chilly night making any sort of presence. He moved as quietly and quickly as his stumble-footed physical state let him, wanting to avoid the nagging “Paisa, Paisa!” and the dirty palms with which they begged for coins. Narrow ways led down-hill towards the river where there would be plenty of stones to keep his one company.
When he stepped out of the dark lane he was the only moving figure beneath the small moon, which glinted weakly on threads and puddles in the rocky bed of the Bagmati. On two low arches downstream, the road crossed wide shallows, which was all the river amounted to until rainy season. From the bridge, a road led toward a small hill dominated by the sleeping stonework of Swayambunath temple, which in turn were dominated by sleepless Tibetan lamas, who were dominated in their turn by the unsleeping monkeys that lived on pious offerings and bold-faced theft. Willard was suddenly put off by the river bank. He didn’t like the thought of what he might step into. He had seen that this was where people went to relieve themselves or to dump dead animals and street sweepings. Across the valley he had seen them burning white-clothed corpses, throwing ash and the charred bones into a branch of this same stream. He would go down the bank-path to the bridge, he decided, and maybe toss the stone and ring over one side from there. The way would be somewhat longer, but flatter, and maybe less taxing in his debilitated condition.
Willard stepped along slowly, weary in a way he had not felt before; and the cold bothered him, though it would have resembled Indian summer back home. He trudged along the mud path between brick houses and the weedy edge of the river to the point where it joined up with the gritty causeway.
Turning left between the short walls of the bridge, he was bothered by a prickle on the back of his neck and turned to look behind. Although diminished by distance, along the paved road there came a western-dressed figure striding steadily through the moon’s dream-light toward him. He knew that figure, he was sure of it, and he felt his bowels stir painfully.
He’d taken two backwards steps further onto the bridge before he turned again, so he was well into the channel between its walls when he noticed a native woman. With her head covered in a white sari, she stood motionless in the middle of the road-bed at the center of the bridge. He stopped, despite the feeling that he didn’t want to meet with the figure coming up from behind. The woman raised her hand inside a fall of her garment and beckoned him forward with that peculiar downward motion that they used. She didn’t speak at all and, in the chancy light of the remote moon, he couldn’t see her face beneath the head-fold of her sari. The overall effect was unreal. That was the trouble with this place, he thought. Temples could not keep their gods decently inside, but flaunted them on their outsides and things that got worked out as dreams in civilized countries– or nightmares, even– took place right on the streets. Willard supposed she was a whore. What else could she be? But he had the certain feeling that he shouldn’t respond to her summons. Lots of times they had a couple of goondas with clubs or knives waiting out of sight. They’d be after his money. The woman’s covered hand moved again to wave him forward.
But between the desire to escape what was striding up from behind and the feeling that he ought to avoid the native woman, an internal bookkeeping took place that moved his feet slowly, by incremental deficits, forward over the stone paving blocks and in the direction of the center of the bridge. Nearly crouching as he shuffled, he clutched the stone in his loose, old shirt against his stomach as a defense. His slack gut, unable to support its own weight, lay weakly against the chorten stone, and somehow made an open door to his interior, where his essential things lay at the mercy of this woman’s will. He was conscious that he was neither moving fast enough to avoid being overtaken nor slow enough to avoid for long coming up to the white figure stationed on the stone flags of the bridge. Tension made him bend forward, as if expecting blows both from behind and before.
His brains seemed to be swelling painfully against the inside of his skull and nausea curled in its fur on his tongue as he gradually approached the woman. Just as he had covered half the distance that separated him from her, the strength of his knees gave out. He thought of throwing himself over the side of the bridge, but he only sank forward onto all fours. It was terror, frank terror, that immobilized him.
But what moved him forward again was the terrible desire of the white-clad figure. It entered his limbs and joined with some starvation at his core, bringing him–with his own will and against it– slowly down the remaining yards to the center of the bridge. With his left hand to cradle the stone against his stomach, he just inched forward and inched forward in a three-legged monkey crouch, waiting every second for a hand or a blow from that look-alike behind and he dared not raise his eyes ahead to try to make out any face.
Dropping again with knees and elbows onto dusty pavement, he caught the bundle of shirt and stone as it fell forward and he cowered. He was suddenly very aware of what it was to have an unfillable need, an un-backed gap in the fabric of being that endless packing would leave empty. He felt it in himself And he felt pity for the starved creature he himself had become. And then he turned his mind in awe to the ravenous vacancy that stood beckoning him. It seemed not to be a faceless, native woman but somehow– he blinked– a small boy, who blinked and looked with brief, destroying yearning at him, before turning away, crippled with shame. And he knew that boy, he had not only been that shamed boy, he suddenly felt that he still was. He felt so sorry for him..., for himself it must be, with a tenderness he had never felt for anyone, had never been able to offer to anyone, since he had always withheld it from the boy. And in the glut of new understanding, he felt how it had been for his old man, stuffing himself only to swell emptily. And then, something he had not ever expected to do, he felt sorry for his father. It was such a surprising thing–Willard thought he had never pitied anything..., anyone before. Tender regret flowed from him with the rupturing force of vomiting. As a drowning man is moved to wave a hand futilely in the air, he was moved to offer what he had, though it was being taken. He knew he would offer himself, but first, since he was clutching it anyway, he twisted the stone free of the cloth and reached forward to place it at the terribly familiar feet.
At the sound of gritty footsteps from behind he remembered fear. Willard leapt to his feet and staggered, desperately off-balance, toward the parapet. When he felt a rough hand on his shoulder, he flailed around with a blind fist. But he only caught the side of his arm against somebody’s shoulder as he was seized. The edge of the stone guard wall against his back brought them up short. Slowly, he became aware of a voice angrily barking at him.
“See here, old man, give it a rest or I shall let you have a good one.”
Willard’s eyes came back into play jouncing over the face of the man who was shaking him by means of a terrific grip on the upper arms. “It... it’s you!” His voice was a husky whisper and he drooped in the other’s grasp.
“You’ve soiled yourself for auld lang syne, is it?” Potter said, releasing his hold, allowing Willard to collapse back against the masonry. Almost, Willard could have lost consciousness, but he struggled to drive his hand into the pocket of his trousers, digging urgently among a jumble of loose money. His arm shook as he held forth what he brought out. He raised it wordlessly on his palm, though the other was forced to bend to see what Willard offered.
“You did have it, then. A right job to clean it, too.” With thumb and index finger, Potter picked the crusted tangle from Willard’s palm. “You know, old sport, I’ve been trying to catch up with you all night. I even went so far as to wonder if you were avoiding me for having pulled your leg. Greater fool I.”
Willard goggled at Potter’s face. “It is you,” he repeated almost automatically. Suddenly, recollecting himself, he darted a glance at the place where the native woman had been standing. A few crumpled rupee notes and the wrapping lay near the spot, but it was vacant.
Potter followed his glance and walked over to stir the loose rag of Willard’s old shirt with the tip of his shoe. It pulled easily across the stone roadway, concealing nothing. “Is this yours, then?” he asked. He came back and looked down at Willard. “Who’d you think I was, for God’s sake?”
A hole about the size of his hand seemed to have been stopped in his middle after too much had been lost. Just barely keeping himself from collapsing with an arm flung over the cap-stone of the parapet, he husked out, “Somebody...,” an explanation that was news to him, too, “it was somebody I thought I knew." With surprise still in his voice, he added, "I've been sick. I've been sick for a long time."
Potter squinted at Willard’s back-pack as if exercising x-ray vision, but actually making deductions from the size and curve of the green nylon. Even before this Willard hadn’t thought Old Potter liked him much. Finally, he had stumped over and toed with his boot at the rip-stop material of Willard’s newly- heavy back-pack where it lay propped against the field-stone and mud mortar of the porch. They were waiting to get their mid-day meal from the Tamang farm-wife who owned the house.
“It has to be one of the Tibetan inscriptions.”
“I bought it.” Willard lazily stretched his arms, his legs and his words. The younger man had been hanging behind for two days, though he half-knew Potter would find out what he was carrying and wouldn’t like it. Anticipation gratified added sting to the burn of the actual event.
Potter’s big face darkened as creases contracted it toward his eyes. “Bought it, bought it from who?”
“From the man who ran that little shop we slept in with all those mule drivers..., near some rickety swinging bridge two days back.” He was defiant. “Paid my money and got permission, right and proper.” He didn’t quite turn directly toward Potter. “Don’t like it? Tough!”
“That man doesn’t own the chorten stones,” Potter pressed on. “Nobody owns them.” His hands clenched and opened with a dull silver glint that could have been indignation, but was really just his ring.
“Then there’s no problem with me having one,” Willard answered.
He was practiced at this kind of sparring, having had a lifetime of it with his father. “I suppose that’s your idea of satisfactory grades, Ronald.” In place of Potter, an image briefly swam up of his fat, old man, standing in the basement he had refinished as a recreation room,“With no help from anybody.” And before he could blink it away, Willard smelled the well-remembered damp from beneath green indoor-outdoor carpet.
“It’s my idea of what those stupid courses deserve,” he had snapped back. “If you don’t like it, that’s your problem.”
So that Potter would not see his annoyance, Willard turned his narrow face toward the summer-green trench of the terraced valley that yawned off to the right of the farmstead.
“Those stones were carved in a dead language in an extinct alphabet by monks nearly extinct themselves. They’re supposed to help open and close the doors between the living and the dead. You just can’t take them!” Potter lectured.
But Willard had gone deaf on the subject. He always acted as if he and Potter only chanced to be following the same foot-path through the long slopes and narrow valleys of the Nepali high-Himal by coincidence and that no connection existed between the two of them, something which was not exactly the truth. Willard ate what Potter ate and drank what Potter drank. He very nearly had to.
Originally, Willard had gone up into the mountains alone, with the pile of rupees he had gotten from selling his diesel truck to a wealthy man in Kathmandu, as was possible in the late sixties. And he still intended to buy something of value that he could carry back to sell in America. Un-exchangeable Nepali rupees were of no use outside the country, but as Willard had discovered in the first week, they were not much use within the country either. The vast mountains with their crevice valleys had no merchandisable treasures to offer. What Willard wanted was not cheap handicrafts– buckle-less woven belts, yak’s-wool hats or salt-bags, nor brass pots or a wooden churn for buttering his tea. What he wanted was some few items of high value, easily transported, easily sold on the up-scale side of the market. The ice-diamonds at their tips were the only jewels these mountains seemed to bear, though. He had hoped at least to buy some rugs. Willard was not above making a fool of himself with hand-signs and pantomime, even though he did not do whatever the lingo was up here in the high country. Still, there just seemed not to be anything to buy. And the foot-paths between villages were tough going, though he still had some legs on him from Vietnam. Play-acting had gotten him lodging and food, but only the most basic version of either.
Willard had already lived two weeks on one meal of potatoes or cornmeal mush daily by the time he had come across old Potter, sitting cross-legged in a wayside hangar of woven bamboo. A deep brass plate of rice and curry steamed on the neat mat before him. Potter had some ability with the language, it looked like. He lived pretty well along the trail, too, and it had been a genuine relief for Willard to eat meat again. And the local raksi! Some of it, by being cheaper and stronger, could have driven paint-stripper off the market; and some of it could have elbowed good scotch away from the bar.
But that had left Willard’s money-belt hot with newly printed rupees and still nothing to buy. He got to follow the old duffer into village after mountain village, sucking avidly at the thin air, only to watch Potter snap up a deep-pile, nine-by-twelve carpet on the second day and a holy-figure carved from ten pounds of nearly transparent jade on the evening of the fifth, bits of the jetsam come floating over the passes from the on-going wreck of Tibet. The knowledge that these were things Willard would never have seen in the first place only made it worse to watch, powerless to get anything for himself. In the unspoken competition for the cream, Potter was eating him up.
So, he trailed an hour or two behind old Potter, back towards civilization, poorly represented, he thought, by the airfield at that over-grown collection of villages called Kathmandu. The carved stone was a measure of his desperation, heavy as sin. But he wouldn’t come out of those hills empty-handed.
Then late one evening, well into the autumn, Willard received a surprise as he identified Potter sitting alone in the gloom, the only customer in a five-table restaurant cobbled together by some Tibetans. After the pair of them had tramped back to K’du, he and the older man had purposely lost each other. And Willard finally found what he was looking for–a nice compact item, which he could easily get rid of back in the States on an eager, seller’s market..., and for a lot more than he had paid for it. This evening he was supposed to see a man about the business in this eating place. The un-painted, almost un-lighted, wooden room was so short and narrow that it was practically a box.
The slender chimneys of a pair of overmatched kerosene lamps could only dissolve faint color into the underground murk. Willard thought he would have looked intimidated if he ignored the only other customer, so he slid into an unpainted chair across Potter’s wobbly table. Anyway, his contact might not arrive for a long time. Showing up the next day for a meeting was considered punctual.
“I’ll order dhal-bhat with masu, if there’s a waiter anywhere around,” he said lightly.
“I see you remember your Gurkha,” Potter said in his un-surprisible manner. But he was probably not tickled to death to meet Willard either. Unconsciously, he began to play with his ring, back and forth over his knuckle. It was one of those German-silver puzzle rings available in bazaars Istanbul to Bombay, eight crooked hoops of interlocking tin wire that assembled on the finger to look like a knot. The cheap fakes would never go together for Willard.
“Right, rice-and-lentils with meat. I don’t think I’ll forget that one or good old raksi, either,” Willard answered, trying to sound hearty.
“Old Norbu here serves a very nice form of sulfuric acid under that name,” Potter joked. “Shall I?” He called something and the indistinct figure of a man stooped promptly through a low, dark doorway. The waiter seemed to have a permanent forward thrust to his neck from the low ceiling of the room. It gave him a strangely predatory air. As the man trod heavily the floor-boards, Willard saw that he was in fact wearing a bulky mask, featuring elaborate jet moustaches and eyebrows of red flame on a yellow face with tusked incisors modeled in papier-mache–the sort of thing Buddhist dancers used. That he was a Tibetan was confirmed by the fact that he was tall enough to brush the ceiling and by the way his long coat, belted to bag at his waist, was worn even indoors.
“What’s this,” Willard jerked his thumb unenthusiastically, “something new for the tourists?”
“It’s Halloween, our calendar,” Potter answered, “didn’t you know? Old Samhain, the day doors open for the dead to return. Hereabouts they show up on bridges and isolated paths as women in funeral clothes who call to the living. Those who answer don’t come back, so they say. Don’t worry though,” he gave a small laugh, “you can spot them by the way their feet are on backwards, like the yeti.” The waiter placed two short glasses on the table between them, with a saucer of dark squares, something resembling fudge. “Like this,” said Potter, popping one of the squares into his wide mouth and chewing it with open-mouthed relish for a moment before downing the glass of raksi. Willard was remotely disgusted; the act reminded him sharply of his father, childishly gobbling chocolate. He followed suit though, not to seem timid. He was surprised to discover that it did not set his mouth aflame with red pepper.
“That’s was pretty fair,” Willard said, when the harsh whiskey chaser had faded from his pipes enough to let him speak. “I thought it was fudge, but it wasn’t sweet. What is it?”
Potter smiled. “You don’t want to know what goes on in the kitchen of a restaurant– slipping a customer’s left-overs back into the pot, chopping a pie-dog into the curry. In fact, Nepali’s are always telling stories about what happens to the innocent when they go down to India. My favorite is the bit where a man and his son go into a strange eating place. The boy’ll go off to the W.C. and never come back. After a longish while, the old man orders his meal and while eating the meat, he comes across his son’s ear-ring.” He raised his voice just slightly and the Tibetan appeared again with a bottle. “Meat’s expensive.”
“No, really,” Willard protested and put his hand over the top of his glass, “I can’t drink any more. I’m supposed to meet a man here.”
“That’s me,” Potter said, pushing Willard’s frozen hand aside with his index finger.
“You! What do you know about... my business?” Willard asked irritably while the tall Tibetan poured.
“I’m the one you were sent to see. I have something to sell you,” Potter said, leaning forward so that his wide cheeks and high forehead emerged in the dim light. “This.” He reached down and from the seat beside him and brought up a package. Peeling off waxed-paper wrapping revealed an irregular lump half the size of his fist. Willard was over his surprise and all attention now that business was to hand. He took the fecal-brown weight, noting its aromatic astringency as he felt the wax-and-taffy consistency. There was that slight stickiness on his finger-tips, which haphim has when it is still fresh.
He sniffed again and nibbled at the mass. His father used to say, “Never trust anybody over money.”
“How much?” he asked sharply.
“Ten kilograms in return for the stone,” Potter answered.
Willard paused. Then with show of teeth, barely bent into a smile, he reached across the table to take Potter by the ring hand. “Done!” he said and downed another little non-fudge square and the glass of clear raksi. He could relax then. After another glass of that fiery distillation, he finally thought to ask about the salty squares as yet another saucer was placed between them. “What the heck is this stuff, anyway? It’s good.”
“Like it, do you? Blood pudding, goat’s I suppose...or buffalo.”
The news produced only a slight hesitation in Willard’s hand on its way to his mouth. Maybe it was an effect of booze mixed with the potency of the haphim he kept tasting, but he shrugged indifferently and popped the morsel between his teeth. He downed it with scorching alcohol.
“When can you have the stuff ready?” he demanded, blurring a couple of consonants.
“Right now, if you like,” Potter answered, “if you can deliver the stone.”
“I can deliver the stone.” It was only back in his hotel room. “I could be back here with it in an hour.”
Potter raised a hand. “No need to carry it all that way. Norbu will send some people with you to receive it. You give them the stone; they’ll hand you what you want and then you can come back here to a feast the like of which you can’t buy for money.
Outside, between the built-out upper-stories that over-hung the alley with its paving of black earth, no light penetrated from the stars, nor was there was any other source of illumination. But Willard’s night vision had been enhanced by the hash, so he could tell when he was joined by several others. His head was in a strange place, he thought as they emerged into the comparative light of a cobbled street, because he was hardly fazed by the appearance of his companions. Their faces were concealed by demon masks, like the waiter– some with snouts, some with bobbing manes. Maybe there were about a half-dozen, though he could not get them counted properly. He fingered the lump of hash in his pocket, where it was softening against his palm.
They wouldn’t try anything, would they? No, he decided, not if they knew what was good for them.
The world seemed insubstantial, something he could throw about at will. He brought out a pea-sized pinch of the stuff in his pocket and popped it into his mouth with a sense of the incredible good will the world felt toward him...and he toward it. His old man had been death on tobacco and booze but could forgive himself anything if it filled his belly. When he thought about it at all, Willard had supposed whatever was opposite was the way to go, so he had always looked at sweets as a moral flaw but booze and hash were just recreation. He didn’t want to end up fat, like his old man, or to die with no idea what the world had to offer.
Back at the little flop he had a room in, management was not what anybody would call particular about who you took up to your quarters. But when this masked group surged into the base of a stair-well which served as lobby, the young desk clerk actually vanished into thin air. Amazing. Willard stood transfixed for a moment before his distracted mental processes gained traction and he decided that it must have been an illusion produced by the hash.
Upstairs, he crouched to reach under his bed to drag out the heavy stone, which he kept wrapped in his wind-breaker. But one of the Tibetan’s, a short one in a parachute-cloth jacket of bright orange, squatted putting his hand on Willard’s arm to stop him, and seized a corner of cloth to draw the object out by himself. There was a murmur as he stood. The Tibetan had not known to reach back under the bed for the second stone, the small one, bundled in a shirt. Willard almost said something, but the thought was easy to put aside when he felt the weight of what had been thrust into his arms. The smell alone was enough to tell him that this was the goods. He tore at the wrapper on one of the lumpy blocks and tasted the waxy stuff`. If it wasn’t ten kilos, it was close enough for him. He felt extremely well, about the transaction and about life in general.
Willard looked up to discover that he was nearly alone in his hotel room, with only a single companion. By now the Tibetan looked practically normal in his red and black mask, apparently a buffalo-demon.
“Now is time to take your fooding.” he told Willard in a remarkably deep voice, beckoning downward the way they did.
Suddenly Willard was famished, ravenous. He could have eaten a buffalo. He desired chocolate like a lover, though usually the sour memories of his father’s tremulous jowls and infantile craving for the stuff made him avoid it. Tossing the load of hash on his bed, he rushed out of his room. He realized what a bad idea that was when the Tibetan seized him by the arm and pointed at the unlocked door.
When they pushed in at the entrance of the dim restaurant, it was as empty as his stomach. There was no sign of Potter and when he turned to ask about the old coot, there was no sign of his Tibetan guide either. Willard took a seat anyway. Suddenly he was feeling tired. Well, Potter might have gone to the pot. Finally, the pot had a Potter to piss in it. He sniggered intensely. It was hard to say, time passed so strangely in the dark of these mountains, but it might have been a long time before a plate abruptly appeared before him on the table. He was aware of a hand withdrawing to the side from his narrowed field of vision, but Willard’s eyes sank immovably into the vision of food. First, he devoured a bowl of noodles with broth and slivers of whatever. Then he was given a shiny tray of the little wrapped dumplings they called momos. He placed one after another in his mouth, impaled on the chop-sticks he could suddenly use like a champ, and savored its fragile texture on his tongue for half-a-second before chewing it up like a starved pie-dog. There followed an enormous brass plate with rice heaped above its high sides, steaming flat-bread and several matching cups containing lentil sauce, a couple of chutneys, vegetables and a curry of meat– goat, buffalo, chicken, Willard could not tell and cared not at all. He fell on his dinner with the hunger of a Norse god, clearing all before him like flame.
Thanksgiving dinner, little Ronald peering up at the turkey, lodged high in the middle of the table and spewing stuffing indecently, snow-peaks of mashed potato, muddy rivers of gravy and his father, leaning into his plate like a plowing horse, eating and arguing at the uncles with his mouth full.
Willard was brought more of anything he finished, so he lost count of the little bowls, especially the meat curry. He motioned for more rice and reached to spoon yet another piece of meat from the dark gravy. Still, you had to eat carefully, as the local method of butchery involved chopping meat, skin and bone together, into bite-sized pieces. Months before Willard had learned that you could stab your gums or the roof of your mouth with a splinter of bone if you weren’t careful.
Ronald hated it that the whole family, uncles and aunts, cousins and grandparents had gathered again to witness his father’s unbridled gluttony. “How about some nice white meat?” his father asked around his own mouthful. “How about a nice roll?” Titters rose electrically around the table at Ronald’s refusal. “Pig-fat, pig-head old swine,” he would eventually call the old man to his face when he left home for the army.
“Cripes,” he muttered, “what the hell is this?” The food was great, but back in the kitchen something must have dropped into the pot. He dribbled the mouthful onto the table top. He was getting terribly full, suddenly, so he paused to examine the offending object. Something shiny. It was around both the piece of meat and the piece of bone which ran through it. Wire or something, wasn’t it? He peered closer and pulled the thing free. The eight, interlocking hoops came apart in his greasy fingers, but Willard had seen what it was. “My God,” he slowly enunciated. “Dear Lord!” His stomach clenched tight around all he had been packing into it. He staggered for the door and just made it to the alley before he lost all he had eaten.
The way back to his hotel was harder than days on the trail had been, as he stumbled through the nearly empty lanes which laced their way through the bazaar. Every so often he stopped, sometimes losing the battle to bile, nausea and self-disgust.
As he got down on his knees to shove the goods under his bed, for whatever safe-keeping that offered, his memory flashed the image of his father, puffing as he lowered himself to one knee. Willard usually tried not to think of his old man too much, but his father seemed to be popping into his head often lately. After all, he was dead and that was that. When he had been alive they had a sour, sarcastic relationship until Willard had cleared out entirely for the draft. The old man had lived just to tell his son where he had deviated from perfection. And Willard had not even gone back for the funeral. The estate would have been a collection of bills; such relatives as might have been at the service would have made him uncomfortable with curious stares and nosey questions. There was an old girlfriend he might have run into, as well.
He was annoyed to find himself kneeling beside his bed, lost in pointless daydreams. Briskly he shoved the paper-wrapped package of hash toward the middle and felt it hit the other one. The other one; he pulled it out. What he was going to do with that, he had not decided– ship it home, chuck it in the river... He had struck a good deal when he let the large chorten stone go to Potter’s Tibetans. Smart as he thought he was, Potter had not known about the smaller stone.
Willard had gone back up the ridge early that mid-summer morning, following the donkey-men. Potter, he had left at the little hut by the cable foot-bridge, still packing up his gear for another day’s march back toward town. Ahead of him, twig-legged burros had each balanced two huge sacks of grain knee-high on their backs. Those impossible loads would have been lowland rice traded for salt, which was dug up beyond the high mountains. Willard could hardly have wanted rice, so later he had told Potter that one of the Tibetan drovers had bargained with him over the couple of pieces of turquoise he wore strung through his ears. At the ridge crest, the animals had been whistled on through the windy pass while Willard rested his pack on the chilly, stone bench made just for that purpose by the locals–a chorten, they called it, so Potter had said. Then, when he was alone, he had selected a flat rock, like an Old Testament tablet, with attractive script carved in relief from the collection of such stones which were set along the top of the back-rest. There was a limit to how much country rock he could carry, but an impulse of greed had prompted Willard to reach for a second tablet of stone, only hand-sized, with its single character almost worn away from the surface by wind-blown grit. Probably, what had caught his eye was that the red shale was a different material from the larger ones it was propped beside. It had fit in the pack among dirty clothes and old Potter had never had any reason to suspect that Willard had it. So, he had it still, his souvenir, and though he was not big on memorabilia, the point was that it was his.
Before first dawn sleep was too dreadful to try any more. With hashish-powered intensification, he had been trapped in a terrifying vision of his old man, rocking on his toes in that way he used to have which seemed to flaunt the peak of his middle up and down. Willard, lost in the dark outside this father’s illumination, waited in awful dread for him to turn his attention to his son. Then, when his father had slowly rotated his glare toward Ronald, he had failed to recognize his own offspring. That indifference was more debilitating than the scorching anger, ahead of which he had been expectantly cowering. He was even powerless to call out to attract his father’s attention. In that passive instant which came as he surfaced to wakefulness, the smell of damp carpet came back to him, familiar and choking.
With his head pounding dangerously and his saliva ropey with nausea, Willard lurched down the hall to the W.C. He hardly knew which end to stick first in the keyhole-in-the-floor toilet once he got there. When he slumped back to it, he couldn’t stand the sight of his cubicle any more either–the scatter of rumpled clothes and torn papers. His eye settled on the chorten stone where it lay amid general disorder. It wore the suffocating air and ominous threat of the dream from which he had just awakened. That settled it– he would drop the damn thing in some dark hole or maybe on the edge of a temple or something. It was a relief just to have made up his mind. And, by God, he would throw that damn ring of Potter’s in with it. He scrabbled in the flimsy little drawer for it with one hand. Curry had dried on the tangle of hoops and the alloy boasted its silver content by turning black. He thrust it into a trouser pocket. Weariness made him stumble as he moved down the corridor, purposely, defiantly leaving the door to his room unlocked.
He hid the hand-sized stone where it wouldn’t be so obvious, a sloppy bundle of cloth beneath his jacket and shirt– though he told himself defiantly that he didn’t know what he had to be ashamed of. It lay against his stomach, making a paunch like his father had, and he cuddled it to him like an ulcer. He spared a moment for distaste as he glanced quickly up and down outside. The streets were narrow and dark, with only the homeless kids who crowded into various shrines for shelter from the chilly night making any sort of presence. He moved as quietly and quickly as his stumble-footed physical state let him, wanting to avoid the nagging “Paisa, Paisa!” and the dirty palms with which they begged for coins. Narrow ways led down-hill towards the river where there would be plenty of stones to keep his one company.
When he stepped out of the dark lane he was the only moving figure beneath the small moon, which glinted weakly on threads and puddles in the rocky bed of the Bagmati. On two low arches downstream, the road crossed wide shallows, which was all the river amounted to until rainy season. From the bridge, a road led toward a small hill dominated by the sleeping stonework of Swayambunath temple, which in turn were dominated by sleepless Tibetan lamas, who were dominated in their turn by the unsleeping monkeys that lived on pious offerings and bold-faced theft. Willard was suddenly put off by the river bank. He didn’t like the thought of what he might step into. He had seen that this was where people went to relieve themselves or to dump dead animals and street sweepings. Across the valley he had seen them burning white-clothed corpses, throwing ash and the charred bones into a branch of this same stream. He would go down the bank-path to the bridge, he decided, and maybe toss the stone and ring over one side from there. The way would be somewhat longer, but flatter, and maybe less taxing in his debilitated condition.
Willard stepped along slowly, weary in a way he had not felt before; and the cold bothered him, though it would have resembled Indian summer back home. He trudged along the mud path between brick houses and the weedy edge of the river to the point where it joined up with the gritty causeway.
Turning left between the short walls of the bridge, he was bothered by a prickle on the back of his neck and turned to look behind. Although diminished by distance, along the paved road there came a western-dressed figure striding steadily through the moon’s dream-light toward him. He knew that figure, he was sure of it, and he felt his bowels stir painfully.
He’d taken two backwards steps further onto the bridge before he turned again, so he was well into the channel between its walls when he noticed a native woman. With her head covered in a white sari, she stood motionless in the middle of the road-bed at the center of the bridge. He stopped, despite the feeling that he didn’t want to meet with the figure coming up from behind. The woman raised her hand inside a fall of her garment and beckoned him forward with that peculiar downward motion that they used. She didn’t speak at all and, in the chancy light of the remote moon, he couldn’t see her face beneath the head-fold of her sari. The overall effect was unreal. That was the trouble with this place, he thought. Temples could not keep their gods decently inside, but flaunted them on their outsides and things that got worked out as dreams in civilized countries– or nightmares, even– took place right on the streets. Willard supposed she was a whore. What else could she be? But he had the certain feeling that he shouldn’t respond to her summons. Lots of times they had a couple of goondas with clubs or knives waiting out of sight. They’d be after his money. The woman’s covered hand moved again to wave him forward.
But between the desire to escape what was striding up from behind and the feeling that he ought to avoid the native woman, an internal bookkeeping took place that moved his feet slowly, by incremental deficits, forward over the stone paving blocks and in the direction of the center of the bridge. Nearly crouching as he shuffled, he clutched the stone in his loose, old shirt against his stomach as a defense. His slack gut, unable to support its own weight, lay weakly against the chorten stone, and somehow made an open door to his interior, where his essential things lay at the mercy of this woman’s will. He was conscious that he was neither moving fast enough to avoid being overtaken nor slow enough to avoid for long coming up to the white figure stationed on the stone flags of the bridge. Tension made him bend forward, as if expecting blows both from behind and before.
His brains seemed to be swelling painfully against the inside of his skull and nausea curled in its fur on his tongue as he gradually approached the woman. Just as he had covered half the distance that separated him from her, the strength of his knees gave out. He thought of throwing himself over the side of the bridge, but he only sank forward onto all fours. It was terror, frank terror, that immobilized him.
But what moved him forward again was the terrible desire of the white-clad figure. It entered his limbs and joined with some starvation at his core, bringing him–with his own will and against it– slowly down the remaining yards to the center of the bridge. With his left hand to cradle the stone against his stomach, he just inched forward and inched forward in a three-legged monkey crouch, waiting every second for a hand or a blow from that look-alike behind and he dared not raise his eyes ahead to try to make out any face.
Dropping again with knees and elbows onto dusty pavement, he caught the bundle of shirt and stone as it fell forward and he cowered. He was suddenly very aware of what it was to have an unfillable need, an un-backed gap in the fabric of being that endless packing would leave empty. He felt it in himself And he felt pity for the starved creature he himself had become. And then he turned his mind in awe to the ravenous vacancy that stood beckoning him. It seemed not to be a faceless, native woman but somehow– he blinked– a small boy, who blinked and looked with brief, destroying yearning at him, before turning away, crippled with shame. And he knew that boy, he had not only been that shamed boy, he suddenly felt that he still was. He felt so sorry for him..., for himself it must be, with a tenderness he had never felt for anyone, had never been able to offer to anyone, since he had always withheld it from the boy. And in the glut of new understanding, he felt how it had been for his old man, stuffing himself only to swell emptily. And then, something he had not ever expected to do, he felt sorry for his father. It was such a surprising thing–Willard thought he had never pitied anything..., anyone before. Tender regret flowed from him with the rupturing force of vomiting. As a drowning man is moved to wave a hand futilely in the air, he was moved to offer what he had, though it was being taken. He knew he would offer himself, but first, since he was clutching it anyway, he twisted the stone free of the cloth and reached forward to place it at the terribly familiar feet.
At the sound of gritty footsteps from behind he remembered fear. Willard leapt to his feet and staggered, desperately off-balance, toward the parapet. When he felt a rough hand on his shoulder, he flailed around with a blind fist. But he only caught the side of his arm against somebody’s shoulder as he was seized. The edge of the stone guard wall against his back brought them up short. Slowly, he became aware of a voice angrily barking at him.
“See here, old man, give it a rest or I shall let you have a good one.”
Willard’s eyes came back into play jouncing over the face of the man who was shaking him by means of a terrific grip on the upper arms. “It... it’s you!” His voice was a husky whisper and he drooped in the other’s grasp.
“You’ve soiled yourself for auld lang syne, is it?” Potter said, releasing his hold, allowing Willard to collapse back against the masonry. Almost, Willard could have lost consciousness, but he struggled to drive his hand into the pocket of his trousers, digging urgently among a jumble of loose money. His arm shook as he held forth what he brought out. He raised it wordlessly on his palm, though the other was forced to bend to see what Willard offered.
“You did have it, then. A right job to clean it, too.” With thumb and index finger, Potter picked the crusted tangle from Willard’s palm. “You know, old sport, I’ve been trying to catch up with you all night. I even went so far as to wonder if you were avoiding me for having pulled your leg. Greater fool I.”
Willard goggled at Potter’s face. “It is you,” he repeated almost automatically. Suddenly, recollecting himself, he darted a glance at the place where the native woman had been standing. A few crumpled rupee notes and the wrapping lay near the spot, but it was vacant.
Potter followed his glance and walked over to stir the loose rag of Willard’s old shirt with the tip of his shoe. It pulled easily across the stone roadway, concealing nothing. “Is this yours, then?” he asked. He came back and looked down at Willard. “Who’d you think I was, for God’s sake?”
A hole about the size of his hand seemed to have been stopped in his middle after too much had been lost. Just barely keeping himself from collapsing with an arm flung over the cap-stone of the parapet, he husked out, “Somebody...,” an explanation that was news to him, too, “it was somebody I thought I knew." With surprise still in his voice, he added, "I've been sick. I've been sick for a long time."