Abchanchu

A woman, shaken at heart, goes for a strange walk through the woods...

Winter’s blue night sucks me outside of my candle-lit home. Those warm glows and gleams vanish, not solely from my eyes but my flesh too, as my body passes through the front doorway of my home. It might as well be a gateway to another world�"an unrecognizable world of white, everywhere as far as the eye can see. The ground is trapped under a one foot blanket of the stuff. I hope for stars sweltering up high, but the gods reward me with heavy clouds that resemble the bags under the eyes of a sad old lady. The moon peeks drunkenly through the folds of two plumes, inspecting the storm’s work.

We don’t see snow often here. The air is too dry. Last time anything like this happened was almost a decade ago�"I was too young to appreciate the threat it imposed on the crops�"instead I begged my mother to let me play outside. I remember my father and uncle cursing like the Devil trying to figure out what to do with the alpaca. Poor animals. Two didn’t make it, and another died a couple weeks after. That didn’t make my father too happy that night. He’d just stared out the window, hair messed up on one side, digging his fingers into the sill. 

I know that this storm is a sibling of that one, but this time no one tells me to stay inside.

My neighbor’s across the street huddle around a crank-up flashlight with an antennae jutting out of the side�"one of those emergency all-in-one devices with a built-in radio. Its big and clunky, likely an outdated contraption bartered for in the city. That’s how things work. The city gets the future, and the villages get the past. Hand-me-downs of another decade. Candles swivel in dim oranges on the table, and there is a fire in the background. My skin fidgets with envy as I envision the crackling wood and the gentle pulse of heat finding my hands. I stare too long and the mother waves to me while the kids�"two daughters around ten years of age�"stick to her sides like those little fish that cling tightly to larger fish for survival. A wool blanket is draped over the three of them, and the father bears the cold in a flannel jacket. 

To wave back or pretend I did not see her? That I wasn’t caught spying on their togetherness. A frosty fog floats like hundred ghosts, and I use it as a veil, though I know it isn’t thick enough. Isolation is my only friend tonight. Just myself and I. 

Snow squishes beneath my worn-down tennis shoes. The left one has a hole in the front�"a small opening from to much friction against my big toe. My mom used to wear them, but she had smaller feet than mine. I don’t mind, though. It makes me feel loved. To have something that was once a part of her now a part of me. The extra squeeze was a hug�"a blessing from my mother that followed me everywhere I set my feet. But the snow find refuge in the mesh of my right shoe, melts into my only pair of wool socks, and tickles my toes with a numbing cold. I adjust my pony tail and see my black hair whip into view for a heartbeat, and then I press on.

It was his fault.

Over and over I repeat those words, hoping that as they leave my mouth they’ll be filtered like minerals through a sifting pan, and I’ll find truth nestled in them. Two and a half years of warmth, of smiles, of five-dollar bottles of Cabernet from the city, and squeezing onto a twin-sized bed. But we shared so much more than the bed and the time. I close my eyes and I try to hear his American accent. Blunt, confidently incorrect, yet charming…

My eyes open and once again I find my vision drunk from tears. The dirt road is lost to white powder, but I know these roads too well to be lost. For generations my family had lived in the same house�"on the crest of the village where buildings gave way to vast fields and hills of farmland. Snow could not steal my roots from this land. It was a part of me, just as much as I was a part of it. Ages ago, in the same village, my mother told me how there was something to that. To know the lay of the land, to be able to close your eyes and still see the roads, the familiar buildings, and know where there would be a turn�"that was too belong to something. At the cemetery on the hill�"decorated with its mix of wooden and rock grave-markers�"deep in the ground my mother rolls and chides me for not listening to her. 

Never trust someone who doesn’t know this village. Never.

I continue down the old beaten path I’ve walked innumerable times. Away from the village, past the cemetery, and up the nearest hill. My breath accelerates from the climb, but once at the top I can see the foggy, snow-dumped village, the farming fields, and then the lake from which we rely on to give us fertile soil. To see my village I feel somber�"almost like I am at a funeral. My father used to work the fields from dusk till dawn, coming back with my uncle to have a beer and listen to the radio. My mom and grandma used to work away at crafts to sell to traders�"often destined to end up in the hands of a tourist in the cities. They also cooked and took care of the alpacas, keeping all of the life of my family well-fed. Years had passed since I had that family. 

Then he came into the picture, and left with it.

A broken down Chevy pick-up is half-way sunken into the lake, just on the other side of the hill I stand. When I see it, I think of how lonely it is, spending decades sliding down the bank, slowly and steadily until the water takes it. With the choking frosts of winter, the Chevy is haunting, like the scene of a murder. There was no owner. No driver. There hadn’t been one for a long time.

Winter is season of absence. No crops shooting out of the earth. No sun’s kiss. No reliable electricity and power. No one beside me in my bed in the mornings. No one sharing showers with me after a romantic evening. No one sitting opposite me for breakfast. I feel empty, even in my head�"that place happy memories were said to dwell.

I hate myself for letting him in.

The truck had a story. The reclamation of nature over mankind. Stopping there, I examine this scene and wonder what it means for something as sacred and beautiful as the lake to devour mankind’s detracting invention. Its legacy losing to something that was here before, and will be here after. If the seasons were the life cycle, is winter the womb or the grave?

Silence inspires me to hum a tune from one of the Christmas CD’s he’d left behind. Frosty the Snowman. All of the songs he would play were so catchy. Sticking like duct tape to the mind. 

Snow crunches behind me. I turn and squint to shape-up an old man wearing a faded flat cap and a hole-ridden blue jacket�"one of those jackets that when brand new would be worn on an expedition into the deep Andes. It is thick and comes down to his mid-thighs. 

His face is wrinkled like aged-leather, the skin a frosty white and spotted like a leopard with the blemishes and pigmentation of a long-lived life. Grey hairs spring from his upper lip. His flat nose looks squished into his face, and his eyes are withdrawn inside his skull like beasts hiding in caves. He takes slow steps over to me with black shoes missing the entire front halves. I see his pale, blue hairy feet creep out the fronts. The toe nails protrude, long and jagged. 

“Excuse me,” the man says, lifting a limp hand. “Excuse me, Miss.”

“What?” I ask sharply. The way he snuck up to me startles the little nerves in my body. They tingle and warn. Instinctively I straighten my shoulders and stand taller. A jaguar posturing in its territory.

He steps closer, and his teeth reveal themselves to be an incomplete set as his mouth hangs open. Discoloration makes a brownish rot of some of them. Not an unfamiliar sight, as I recall memory of my father, uncle, and grandfather. All of the males in my life had those teeth. Except him. But he was American. Billboard good-looks. As for the rest--smokers that didn’t brush away the plaque two times a day. 

“I’m looking for my grandson,” the man says, eyes moist and imploring. “He ran off into the fields just over there.”

A bent finger points off the hill behind him. There aren’t any houses or people out that way. The needle-like cold pricks my cheeks and I think of a little boy underdressed out alone in fields.  

“He went that way? Do you know for sure?”

The old man walks down the hill slowly, turns to look at me, and I see my own grandfather in that face. I’d never met him. He died before I was born. “This way,” the stranger says. “Please.”

I follow him, stepping in his footprints. Three inches larger than mine, they make for an easy landing. As far as the eye can see there are fields, and much further still. My heart is beating hard against my chest, and I wonder if it is because I am once again in the company of another human being. Five days spent inside, a hermit to the world, must have made a corpse of me. Did I look as lifeless as the man I now followed? It still feels too soon to be around people, but it is some kid’s grandfather, not him. 

“What’s his name?” I ask. “We must shout for him or we won’t have a chance.”

All I see is the man’s blue coat and some grey wires of hair spilling out of his flat hat looking like a dead rodent’s fur after the scavengers had gotten to it. Walking in the snow with his bare feet exposed is insane. Surely he will get frostbite if he is out too long. I squint to protect my eyes from the river of cold air that passes by my face. He says nothing.

“What’s his name?” I repeat, thinking that ears don’t hold up with age. 

Still nothing. I wonder about this stranger. I’ve never seen him before, and I start to think that maybe I shouldn’t be trusting him. But he is weak and frail�"can hardly walk�"and I am twenty four, young and capable. And I am sadness going on to anger. A wounded wolf would be less vicious. 

“I’m not familiar with this area,” the man tells me. “Are there any houses nearby?”

The last house was back past the cemetery. I shake my head. “No.”

My feet stop in the snow. The ankles of my jeans are wet. “I don’t think we are going to find him over here,” I say, looking down at where my feet sunk into the ground�"lost to white.

“I know he went this way. Just a little further I’m sure.”

I look at the old man’s face, sagged and worn with time, the half-color of the hairs on his face, debating between black and grey, and the marble texture of his coco bean eyes. Nothing in that face looks like my ex-lover, yet it transforms into him. My hands open forcefully and I step back. 

“I’m sorry,” I tell the man. “I’ve got to go back.”

“Please, Miss,” the man pleads, “Just a little further. My grandson is lost.”

“I’m sorry,” I tell him once more. “There aren’t even footprints in the snow. He couldn’t have gone this way.”

A moment passes. His lips peel downward and the old man starts trembling. Tears fall from his eyes. “Please, Miss. I can’t go back without him.”

My heart wants to meet his halfway. It wants to dance with a fellow mourner, but I can’t. “I’ll tell the police station. We can get more people to search. Maybe he is already in a house.”

“No police,” the man says. “No police.”

“I already told you there are no footprints,” I search his eyes for reason, but can’t see past those salty droplets sliding down his cheeks. An ailment I am well-acquainted with at this point. 

“I’m going just a little further,” the man insists. “Please don’t make an old man go off on his own.”

I have no explanation for why, but I shake my head and say no. Then I think of something�"something not entirely irrelevant to the situation. “Where are you from, sir? You must not be from here. I don’t recognize you.”

He hesitates. “I live in another village. We are visiting family�"my grandson and me.”

The list of residents and neighbors forms in my head and I can’t remember any one mentioning they were going to have guests from out of the village for the holidays. “Who is your family, sir?”

“That isn’t important right now, Miss,” he hisses. “My grandson might be freezing to death right now!”

He waves his hand to me, signaling me to come. I turn the other way. “I’ll notify the police, but I won’t go any further with you.”

“Do you not trust me?” the old man asks, wiping his face dry. “Why don’t you trust me?”

Because my ex-lover took it back to America with him. I want to tell the old man it’s not his fault. That an a*****e from the Peace Corps told me we would be married in a few years. A few years later he said a few years more. And then he left. He knew I was stuck here. He knew that I would forever be that campesino woman living in the high plateaus of Bolivia. An exotic trophy to brag to his American friends about. Nothing more, nothing less. 

Never trust someone who doesn’t know this village.

I walk away, and the man makes a distorted face, his cheeks rise up to his eyes and his eyebrows bend up and then sharply down like lightning bolts. He doesn’t speak, but rather growls. And hunches over in a convulsive fit. I walk faster, and look back only once to see something wicked and feral resting behind the winter fog staring at me with a pair of luminescent yellow eyes�"those of a predator of the night. Prayers roll around in my head as I run away. The creature howls, but doesn’t follow me.

As I am about to open the front door to my house, the neighbors call to me from across the street. “Have you heard the news?”

I take my hand off the door and walk across the street. “What news?” I ask the older woman with flowing black hair. Behind her I see the kids, and her husband sitting around the table. The radio voice talks of the record-breaking winter storm. It smells like freshly baked bread�"sweet and tantalizing to my starved stomach. 

“A boy was taken�"abducted�"in the village two miles east,” she says, her thick eyebrows strained with concern. “The footprints were heading our way, but there was no sign of the man. The boy was found safe and sound, but the man was supposedly hunched over him like some kind of beast about to sink its teeth into its prey. Apparently he came to the boy crying and asking for help finding his lost dog.”

A shiver goes down my spine. I look down the dark road and see the hill past the cemetery. There is something standing up there, but it’s too hard to tell with the cold air hovering about.

“Please join us tonight,” my neighbor insists. She looks at the ground, her hand resting on the door frame. Her fingers knead the wood as she waits for an answer. “I know you are alone, but we would gladly have you here. It is safer for you.”

“Well, I suppose I could,” I say with a smile. It feels like I broke a layer of cement that had been laid over my lips. “Thank you.”

Before I enter the warm house I make a cross touching my head, heart, and shoulders, and then thank God and my mom. I think about the man who left me a damaged bird less than a week ago, and think about the old man I the fields looking for his grandson. In my calming heart I know that I’ve escaped not one monster, but two.

The radio man says, “This storm is the worst to hit since I’ve been in the job. The last major snowfall was a decade ago.”

My host pulls out a chair for me and tells me to sit. The father of the family rubs his mustache. “That was a bad one. This one is too. But when you’ve lived through a hard winter, the other ones feel like nothing.”

My heart wakes up, and my eyes water.

“What is wrong?” the mother asks me.

“Earlier I was thinking about something. Something silly. I was wondering if winter was the womb or the grave…” I say looking at the crank-up light and radio, the sliced homemade bread on a red cloth, and the family gathered around with glowing faces. “I woke up this morning feeling alone, but then I’m here, and I don’t feel it anymore.”

“I know this winter has been tough on you,” the mother says, with a sympathetic smile, sliding the cloth of bread over to me. “But it is just a season. Did something happen to you out there? I saw you go down the street for a walk.”

I shake my head and accept a slice of bread. “I almost got lost. But I found my way.”

The daughters look at me curiously, and I remember my younger self. I suck in my emotions and lean forward. “Do you want to hear a story that my grandmother told my mother, and my mother told me?”

“What kind of story?” the eldest one asks.

“It’s a story about the Abchanchu,” I say, putting my hands by my face and displaying my teeth. “A story about strangers, and why you should always remember�"never trust someone who doesn’t know this village.”

The girls jumped in their seats excitedly. And I began.