Points of Departure: Stories

by Pat Murphy

  As she walked past a coffee shop, she saw the man inside. He sat alone at a table, drinking coffee and reading the paper. Her eye registered the details that she did not want to know. From the way he held his coffee cup, she knew that he was protective and a little possessive. The angle of his newspaper revealed that he was shy, but he covered that up with outward show of sociability. He was slow to express his emotions. He was uncomfortable in his body.

  She hurried past, carrying her small package as if it held a bomb because she knew the future, she often started saying good-bye before she said hello. In the blank hours before she fell asleep, she rehearsed farewell speeches. She was very skilled at saying good-bye. She could toss it off as if it didn’t really matter: “It’s been nice.” “So long.” “See you around.”

  That night, she sent out for Chinese food. It came with two fortune cookies. The first one said: “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” The second said: “Watch your step.” She burned both scraps of paper in the incense burner by her bed. The smoke from the fortunes smelled faintly of jasmine.

  A dream: the dark-haired man was walking toward her, and she wanted to run away. She turned and ran, but she was running in slow motion, as if she were running through glue. She woke drenched in sweat and wrote the dream down, cursing the lack of detail.

  She was working at the counter when her boss grabbed her hand and pried it open.

  “You are avoiding something,” he said. “But you can’t avoid it much longer. The energy has to go somewhere.”

  She was dimly aware that he was stroking her hand and smiling.

  “What should I do?” she murmured, half to herself.

  He grinned at her as if he had thought she would never ask. “Put yourself in my hands,” he said. “I know what to do.” His grip on her wrist tightened.

  She pulled away and stared him down with glacial eyes.

  Whenever she was upset, she walked on the beach, trying to read the messages that the waves painted on the sand. She could not read the waves; and she liked that.

  People were too easy. They wore their futures on their faces, out where everyone could see. She could not help but read them, whether she wanted to or not.

  The sandpipers ran ahead of her, leaving footprints on the sand, but the waves always washed them away, wiping the beach clean again.

  She was concentrating on the waves, and she looked up just in time to see him walking toward her. He was looking out to sea, where the sunset was smearing the clouds with color. She turned and ran, but the loose sand slowed her down.

  She dreamed: she sat with him on a green park bench and held his hand. He looked at her and said, “I love you,” and then he kissed her. And she knew, sure as anything, that he would leave her.

  She could not sleep again that night. She sat up and read the tarot cards, thinking of him. In the cards, she found heartbreak, betrayal, and pain.

  It is not good to read your own cards, she reminded herself. The accuracy is suspect. She shuffled and read again. Entrapment, confusion, destruction.

  Yet again: happiness, contentment, peace. Too many futures.

  She shuffled repeatedly and laid the cards out on the table, searching in the brightly colored pictures for patterns in which she could believe.

  At dawn, she reluctantly went for a stroll in Golden Gate Park, where the morning sun was just beginning to burn off the fog.

  She found him on a green park bench, feeding popcorn to the pigeons. They flocked around him, running after the kernels that he tossed. Their footprints in the dust made an intricate pattern of crisscrossing lines. It was impossible to tell where the prints left by one bird left off and the prints of another began. She stood for a moment and watched him.

  He looked at her—a quick sidelong glance—and then returned to the pigeons before she could meet his eyes.

  Still, he did not speak.

  “What bothers me is the inevitability of it all,” she said. “Is my life a paint by numbers? Doesn’t knowing the future set me free? Apparently not.”

  He looked at her, bewildered. “What?”

  He didn’t look so dangerous, really. A bold pigeon climbed onto his tennis shoe and reached for the popcorn in his hand. He squinted a little because the sun was in his eyes.

  “Nice morning,” she said, and he nodded.

  “About that reading,” she said and, against her better judgment, she took his hand. “Don’t say it,” she told him before he could open his mouth. “Just don’t say it.”

  Then she stole a quick look at her own palm. It seemed that the heart line was a little stronger and that maybe the life line did not cross it at all.

  “I still think you’ll leave me,” she said softly. She looked up and met his eyes. He was confused. She was doing things in the wrong order again. It wasn’t time to say good-bye. Not yet.

  “All right then,” she said. “I’ll risk it.”

  And then, despite it all, she kissed him.

  Clay Devils

  DOLORES DREAMS OF the devil one night. The devil of her dream is one of the many devils who live in the malpais, the bad lands outside the village. He is tall with a craggy face and a body covered with coarse dark hair, like the hair of a goat. Dark red horns grow from his head.

  He leers at her, and his teeth are long and yellowed, like the teeth in a coyote skull that she once saw in the desert. He reaches for her with his long claws, but she wakes before he can catch her.

  Tomas, her husband, and Esperanza, her daughter, are still sleeping when she slips silently from beneath the blanket and pulls on her thin cotton dress. The sun’s first pale light is shining between the loosely woven branches that form three walls of the kitchen, a small shelter built on the back of the one-room adobe house. Dolores opens the door to the wooden chicken coop, and the two chickens, skinny birds that never grow fat, ruffle their feathers and peer nervously out the door.

  In the hearth, a few coals from last night’s fire still glow.

  She fans them to life and feeds them with tinder, saving the cost of a match. By the time Tomas wakes up, she has ground cornmeal on the grinding stone, cooked tortillas for breakfast, and packed a lunch of tortillas and beans for her husband to take with him to the fields where he will spend the day working.

  Tomas uses a gourd bowl to scoop water from the aluminum can that stands just outside the kitchen. He splashes his face, dries it on his shirt, then stands for a moment in the kitchen doorway, gazing out at the hills. A few drops of water, caught in the hairs on his arm, glisten in the sunlight like bits of broken glass by the roadside.

  “Soon, the American will come,” he says without looking at her.

  Dolores, like many of the women in her village, makes clay toys and whistles that her husband sells to tourist shops in the city market. One man—an old American was particularly pleased with Dolores’s work: clever whistles shaped like doves, like owls, like chickens, like dogs baying at the moon; miniature clay men and women, dressed like the people of her Village. The American had asked Tomas whether Dolores made other clay figurines, and Tomas, eager to do business, had said yes, she made many beautiful figures. The American had arranged with Tomas to come to their village to see the beautiful things that Dolores made.

  “Yes,” says Dolores, putting another tortilla to cook. “In a few days, I will fire the toys and paint them.”

  Tomas nods. He is a good-looking young man and Dolores knows that he wants to do well at business. He has never been content to work in the field—he complains that the afternoon sun makes his head hurt and using a short-handled hoe to knock down weeds makes his back ache. He wants to wear black store-made pants, rather than the homemade white trousers that village men wear when they work in the fields.

  Esperanza toddles from her bed to stand by her mother, and Dolores gives her a warm tortilla to eat.

  “Today, I will make many figurines,” Dolores says, and Tomas nods his approval. Soon, he takes his lunch and goes to the fields to wor
k.

  The clay, which Tomas helped Dolores carry from the river, is wrapped in black plastic to keep it damp. Warmed by the sun, the clay feels good in her hands. It smells of the river; aromas of dark secrets and ancient places. Dolores kneads the clay like dough, squeezing out air bubbles that would make her pottery burst in the firing. After kneading the clay smooth, she breaks a handful away from the rest and begins smoothing it into shape, trying to think of something to make that will please an American.

  Esperanza plays in the dirt and sings to herself, a series of notes without a tune. The chickens scratch in the dusty weeds, searching for insects to eat. On the roof, doves make small mournful sounds, grieving for some long forgotten loss.

  The house is on the very edge of the village, and Dolores looks out onto the rolling pine-covered hills of the malpais, where devils live. Without thinking, Dolores shapes a little man with a craggy face, deep-set eyes, and horns that curl from his forehead.

  When Dolores was a little girl, only a little older than Esperanza is now, her grandfather warned her about the devils in the malpais. “Don’t go walking there alone,” he said. “Or the devils will take you with them to Hell.”

  Grandfather said that he heard the sounds of a devil sniffing around the house on the night that Pedro, Dolores’s favorite brother, died of fever. When Dolores’s father got drunk and could not work, grandfather blamed the devils.

  When Dolores was stung by a scorpion, grandfather knew that the devils were at fault. When she was a little girl, Dolores had feared the devils. She knew that they were responsible for the bad things that happened in the village.

  Now, a grown woman, she refuses to be afraid of a clay doll that she can twist in her hands. She gives her toy devil grasping talons and a gaping smile that shows his sharp teeth. She bends his legs so that he is dancing and tilts his head back so that he is laughing. A silly devil, a child’s toy.

  Dolores puts him in the sun to dry and begins working another handful of clay. She finds herself making another laughing devil. This time, she gives him a guitar to strum with his long sharp claws, so that he may play while his brother dances. Together, they dry in the sun. Another devil, a trumpet player, joins them.

  She does not like the look of the three devils, lying on their backs in the sun and laughing, probably at something evil … But she leaves them and hurries to make other figures: a whistle shaped like a frog and one shaped like a dove; a clay burro with its neck outstretched to bray; five clay goats and a man to tend them.

  Finally, when the sun is high overhead, she wraps the rest of the clay in the black plastic, gives Esperanza a tortilla to eat, and begins her other chores: carrying water from the public fountain, gathering firewood from the malpais, pulling weeds from her small garden. She puts beans to soak for the evening meal and sweeps the dirt floor of the house with a twig broom.

  Just before Tomas comes home, she checks her pottery.

  The figures are warm to the touch. The afternoon sun is red on the devils, touching the dark clay with light the color of blood. The laughing figure makes her uneasy, but she is not a little girl to be so easily frightened.

  When Tomas comes home, she shows him the figures.

  He picks up one of the devils—in the afternoon sun, the clay has already stiffened. He examines the figure casually, just as he might examine a whistle or a clay burro. “The American will like these,” he predicts. And he pokes the devil lightly in the belly, as if tickling the small figure. “Oh, how he dances.” Tomas’s presence banishes her uneasiness and she smiles at her own fears.

  That night, when Esperanza is sleeping, Tomas makes love to Dolores. The night is warm and they throw back the thin blanket. Their bed frame is built of wooden packing crates, and the slats creak beneath their shifting bodies, a rhythmic song that keeps time to her soft moans. With his arm around her, she falls asleep and has no dreams.

  A few days later, she fires the pottery in a pit that she has dug on a barren patch of ground near the house. When she lights the wood and straw, flames cackle and the wood snaps like gunfire. The heat of the fire touches her face, hotter than the afternoon sun, and Esperanza crows with delight, clapping her hands to see the flames. Black smoke from the straw rises like thunderclouds.

  Dolores goes about her chores while the fire burns: carrying water to her garden, fetching firewood to replace the wood she has burned, going to the market to buy a little rice, a little chili. Late in the afternoon, the fire has burned low. With a green branch, she rakes away the ashes, uncovering the blackened figurines. Soot-colored dove whistles nestle in the ashes; baying dogs lift their blackened heads. Two goats have broken, cracking when the air trapped within the clay expanded in the heat of the fire. But the devils are intact. Silently, they play their instruments with their inhuman hands, laughing and dancing on the smoking ground.

  The next day, she paints the figures with the bright paints that Tomas brought her from the city. She leaves the devils until last, then gives them red horns and yellow teeth and flashing golden eyes. The bright colors shimmer in the afternoon sun, and the devils leer at her as she works, staring with their bulging eyes.

  The American is a thin gray-haired man in a brightly flowered shirt and pale brown pants. His face and the top of his head, visible through his sparse hair, are reddened from the sun. He speaks Spanish well, and he is very polite.

  He is a very clean man: his hands are pale and soft. Dolores notices that his fingernails are as clean and as neat as a woman’s. He picks up a dove whistle with his soft hand and looks at it, turning the toy this way and that.

  Tomas stands beside the American, his legs wide apart, his thumbs hooked in the waistband of his trousers. “They are very good,” Tomas says. “Very beautiful.” He is like a nervous rooster, strutting for show.

  Dolores stands back, keeping her eyes down, her hands hidden in her apron. She is wearing her best dress, the newer of the two she owns, but she is ashamed of her looks. Her own fingernails are broken and stained with clay.

  The American says nothing. He puts the dove down and picks up the dancing devil. One by one, he examines each of the devils. “The others are pleasant, but nothing special,” he says at last, dismissing the other toys with a wave. “But these show imagination. I know a few folk art collectors in America who …” He stops without finishing his sentence. “I will buy these,” he says, pointing to the devils. “And I would like to see more.”

  Before he leaves, he and Tomas shake hands. They will do business.

  That evening, Tomas buys tequila with money from the American. Other men from the village come to hear him brag of his success. Dolores watches from the doorway of the house.

  The men sit on the rusting hulk of an old car that was abandoned on the edge of the malpais. The car’s wheels were stolen long ago. Now the car rests on its belly, and men perch on its rusted hood. They drink tequila and laugh loudly. The light from the setting sun paints them red. Their shadows stretch away into the malpais.

  Dolores dreams that night of devils One is feathered like a rooster and he struts through the dream, puffing out his chest and preening his shiny horns. Another has a bulging belly, like an old sow with a litter. His ears are hairy, like the ears of a pig, and his horns curl like goat horns.

  Tomas has little to say at breakfast. His eyes are red and weary looking, and he complains that his head hurts. He pushes Esperanza away when she comes to kiss him good morning. “Make more devils,” he tells Dolores before he goes to the fields.

  She comforts Esperanza and makes devils of clay. In her hands, the fat devil becomes fatter. Her fingers smooth the round curve of his belly, a pig’s belly supported by spindly legs. His ears droop mournfully as he dries in the sun. He is a ridiculous devil, a child’s toy, but somehow she cannot laugh at him.

  From a handful of clay, she makes the strutting rooster devil, with his puffed out chest and his nose like a beak. The devil looks foolish, but Dolores is uneasy. The devils stink of dar
k and ancient places, and she remembers her grandfather’s tales.

  “Never call the evil one by name,” her grandfather told her. “If you do, you will call him to you and give him power.”

  She pats the clay, molding the delicate shapes of devil’s horns and wondering what her grandfather would say about these toys. A breeze blows from the malpais and she feels ill, weak, and feverish.

  Tomas insists on bringing the devils into the house that evening. He sets them on a shelf beside the bed, pokes the fat one in the belly, and laughs.

  Again, Tomas and his friends sit on the old car and drink tequila. Dolores goes to bed, but she does not sleep. She can hear Tomas talking and the laughter of his friends.

  And she hears other sounds—small sounds, like mice searching for grains of corn on the dirt floor. She lies awake, knowing that the devils are moving on the shelf, their claws scratching against the wood.

  She is awake when Tomas stumbles into the house. He brings his bottle of tequila with him: she hears the clink of glass as he sets the bottle down by the bed, the rustle of clothing as he takes off his shirt. He lies beside her in the bed, and she turns toward him. His breath stinks of tequila, and he pulls her toward him, pressing his lips against her throat. He makes love to her in the darkness, but she thinks of the devils, watching from the shelf. The bed sings, but she is silent. At last, Tomas sleeps.

  While her husband and daughter sleep, Dolores listens to the devils moving on the shelf. In the morning, the devils are quiet, standing as if they had never moved. That morning, on her way to fetch water from the public fountain, Dolores stops at the house of the curandera, the village healer and herbalist.

  Doña Ramon’s house and yard have a pungent smell from the drying herbs in the rafters and the growing herbs in the yard. Esperanza stays close by her mother, her eyes wide, a little fearful of Doña Ramon.

  Dolores tells Doña Ramon of the American who wants devils, of her terrible dreams, and of the sounds she hears at night.