Tampico (James A. Michener Fiction Series) (10 page)

I inched ahead again, my knees bunching the blanket, occasional drops of water falling to my neck, and in a few moments had reached the rubble and was working to pull it away, sweeping pebbles and sand to the side, lifting the larger rocks and hunks of cement in both hands, my elbows on the blanket through which water was seeping, wetting my sweatshirt. I shoved the last rocks away and saw there was a crude opening beyond, an old watercourse or a place where different strata had joined and had shifted apart. It was a brief tubular passage through grey shale and clay, a rivulet of water meandering
down its center, and the mineral veins that ran through it were visible in various bright colors in wetness at its end, where I saw the latticework of light, a jagged circular opening filled with roots, bits of earth hanging from filaments, and a soft fluorescent-like glow in the interstices.

I hesitated only for a moment, then crawled through the remnants of rubble, my knees chafed by grit pressing up from the hard marble floor. Then my knees were beyond rock and marble and were forcing shallow cups in the forgiving clay.

I crawled forward, my gloved hands and my feet to the sides, the narrow river running between my legs, and in a few yards had reached the light lattice at the passage’s end. I guessed I was no more than ten feet from the back of the wine vault, fifteen from the foundation of the house itself, and yet I felt I’d traveled a long way and was in a different world entirely.

The roots were twisted in gnarled layers filling the opening, much like a crudely woven basket, and when I reached my hand into the matrix and pulled at the clinging clods of dirt the fingers of my glove caught in stiff thorns and I had to withdraw it. I took the glove off and tried again, snaking my hand and my arm up to the elbow in the rigid web. I was still kneeling, my free hand in the river on the passage floor, and suddenly that hand was moving, water rushing between my gloved fingers, and I was falling forward. The root basket was turning in the opening. It had hold of my arm at the wrist deep within it, and as it rotated the light coming through it was like that in a kaleidoscope, flashes of circling color on the passage walls and in my eyes. And it was moving back as it turned, like some massive withdrawing screw, pulling me toward the opening.

I was on my stomach then, in the river, my toes dragging clay as I slid ahead. I saw a corona of leaves and vines coming toward me, my arm like the stump of a stiff battering ram disappearing into the root basket. Then the basket was turning out in the air, and through the empty opening I could see the oak tree, its thick trunk and its branches and leaves in a massive silhouette against the night sky. I was hanging out in the air up to my chest when the roots released me, and I watched the tree turn slowly and grow smaller as it fell, end over end, its roots unraveling like Medusa snakes, then bounced once on the steep escarpment and rolled down like a dervish, coming to rest on the beach, still shaking and vibrating, its branches dipping in the phosphorescence of the incoming surf, foam thrown from its leaves.

My arms hung along the cliff surface, palms pressed into clay. I could
feel it oozing through my fingers, falling in wet worms into darkness. The soaked glove slipped from my right hand, and I saw the cuff kick veils of sand beads free as it tumbled and fell. Large shadows took away definition in the cliff face, and only where the alluvial escarpment began, a good hundred feet below, was the moonlight in evidence, a dull shimmering, floating over that broad fan that reflected and absorbed it. There was a large, dark hump, down to the right in shadow below my fingertips, and I couldn’t see the beach over it in that direction, only the curls of gentle waves beyond the surf. I lifted my chin up, turned slightly in the opening, and could see the waxing moon. A single wisp of cloud had drifted across its face and was half hiding it. I turned further and looked beyond the moon and into the cold sky, then turned completely until I was on my back in the shallow river and could see up to the cliff’s brink, only a few yards above, and then I understood the shadows.

The lip hung out a good fifteen feet into the air, and I could see wet roots hanging down from its underside, a pottery shard, pieces of burnt wood, and a slab of stone, fashioned by some hand, imbedded in it. And it was oozing, droplets of falling water dissolving into a smoky mist before they reached me. I lifted my hand to the wet shale in the cliff’s face above, but it was only wind-carved sand in the shape of shale, and it dissolved at my touch and fell in a wash down into my face. I shook my head, turning again, and pulled my father’s cap off and dabbed at my eyes with the clean wool on the inside, and when I could focus again I found that the cloud had drifted away from the moon and the hump in the cliff’s face below me was no longer in deep shadow, but clearly visible in its familiar symmetry. I’d thought it some natural outcropping, but now I saw the distinct edges, and now that all the sound of my turning and touching had ceased I could hear it shaping the hushed waterfall and could see that too.

It was a broad course of cement steps, its treads deep and descending steeply, and were the cliff a house façade and were there an entrance door one might have climbed that stairway and entered into the vertical face. But there was no door, no earth below the first tread but only the moonlight, high above the escarpment and the beach, to step off into where the stairway ended in the air. It hung out a good twelve feet from the cliff face, and from the brink of its lowest step a veil of water spilled, dissolving into a thin rain as it fell down into darkness. The stairway glistened with water, a slow flood that appeared stationary as it followed the sharp contours, and it was only in the
scatter of twigs and shriveled leaves, like those blown across the porch steps of a country house after a winter storm, that I could see its movement, miniature waves over branch tips, an acorn lifted on the tide. And I thought of my own porch steps and my lost lover descending them in rain after that final argument four years ago, then turning to look back at me for the last time, curls of blond hair wetted by the rain, stuck to those temples I’d kissed into wakefulness for lazy love in the night, gone now.

And I thought the stairs might soon be going too. They were basement stairs, poured cement and very heavy, and unless they were connected to a cellar inside the cliff somehow, they couldn’t stay there, suspended out in air, and would soon fall and plow a deep cut in the escarpment below, then tumble to the tree in the surf and crush it or land heavily beside it, tilted and half imbedded in the beach.

I hung out in the cold air just above the stairway. It was off to the right a little and I could see most of it, but couldn’t reach down far enough to touch the top step. I felt at the cliff’s face above it. The icy clay was spongy and water-laden there, and wet chunks came away easily in my palms. I let them fall in globs, down to the stairway, where they dissolved quickly and were carried away in the waterfall. Then I extended my arms in the night air parallel to my body, and digging my toes into the river in the floor behind me and rocking my shoulders from side to side, I pulled myself back into the passage until I could see the edges of the opening again and the corona of that moonlight I’d been out in just moments before.

When I reached my bedroom again and looked in the mirror in the closet door, I saw that my hands and face were smeared with clay and dirt and that my clothing was soaked, my sweatshirt heavy with water and so stretched out that it hung almost to my knees. I stripped the clothes away, stacking them along with my soiled tennis shoes on the closet floor, then went shivering to the shower and climbed into it and took a hot one. My mother had called it that when I was a child. How about a hot one, she’d say, when I’d come into the house sweaty and soiled after hours of play. There is no bathtub in the house, and my mother would get into the shower stall with me, modest in her swimming suit, and would scrub my body with cloth and brush, pressing my head into her breasts as she flooded my scalp with cool shampoo. I flooded it then, too, imagining my mother stepping in through the wet curtain, then dried myself and dressed in clean clothing and shoes. Then I went in search through the cabinets in the kitchen, looking for the clothesline rope
I knew my mother had kept there, finding it in a deep drawer to the side of the sink. Then I went out into the moonlight on the porch, feeling that tonight I couldn’t go beyond the house easily. There was no specific panic, just a slight fear of fear and a beginning sense of derealization. The night seemed a dream night, the cold and biting breeze as if it blew out of a tomb in some other place and year, and I turned back to the familiar doorway, opened the screen again and wedged the rubber kick in firmly. I could see down the hallway, the kitchen light illuminating the picture frames and carpet. Then I turned and went back out on the porch and headed for the end.

I tied the rope around the pillar at the sea side edge, my fingers aching in the cold, then played the coils out as I moved down the steps to the brief gravel path that runs from the front of the house to the tight turnaround area where Arthur parks. Then I stepped off the path and into the silver frost and headed for the cliff’s brink beyond the house side. There was thirty feet or more of ground between house and cliff, and though my mother had gardened there, the space had grown over completely with honeysuckle and scrub oak since her death so many years ago, and a thick spray of beach grass wavered in the moonlight at the very edge.

I squeezed the rope, pulling and testing the knot as I pushed bare branches aside. I was nervous, waiting for the fist to come, but aware of no aura. Then I slid my foot forward into the brittle grass at the brink, pressing it down hard for a good purchase, then leaned out, the rope taut in the air behind me, and looked down into the night.

I could see the escarpment far below, and the beach and the tree in the surf in phosphorescence, but I could see nothing of the cliff face, the opening and the stairway. They were back behind me, somewhere under the ground I’d passed over, and I stepped away from the edge, counting two steps, then stood in the moonlight calculating. Then I paced off the distance, somewhat unsure of it as I stepped over surface roots and struggled through the oak branches. I was ten feet from the house side when I counted the final number, and I stood there looking at the clapboards and the windowsills they butted against. I moved ahead and got down on my knees, dragging the rope at my side, and pressed the dead grass flat at the foundation with my free hand, then crawled along it, digging my fingers into the earth where it met cement. I was near the rear of the house when my hand slipped in and I found I could reach down along the foundation up to my elbow. The earth had pulled away from cement there, and though the house cast a shadow down over me and I couldn’t see
well, when I turned my hands palm down beside each other to measure the space, there was nothing on either side of them but air.

I lifted the rope from where I’d pushed it against my knee to feel it and keep it close, then climbed up to my feet and looked back along its length. It hung in a sinking arc, brushing the clapboards like a jump rope, and I could imagine it caught up under a board, the rough wood then fraying it and its strands unraveling. I felt the flush rise in my cheeks then, and I pulled at the rope, snapping it taut. It was still firm at the pillar, and gripping it like a lifeline, I carefully coiled it, concentrating on the act, as I moved hand over hand until I had reached the porch, where I dropped it, and then stepped back through the screen and into the safety of the house.

Last night, after Arthur had driven me home from the Manor and I was undressing at the foot of the bed, I looked over and found I couldn’t see the betta gliding in the illuminated azure water of the tank. It was damp in the room and I was sweating. The wind had turned and was coming in cool from the northeast, a promise of dry air behind it, and I was shivering in my underwear as I crossed to the tank, then stood beside it and looked down into its waters and saw the betta floating there, like a piece of undulating sea lettuce on the surface the bubbles stirred into wake, his body shaped by the swells.

I reached around the tank and turned the handle of the valve, and the water settled into stillness, and then his body was still, in the shape of a perfect cutout, a glossy image lifted from the pages in a magazine of exotic sealife photography, the bands of startling colors even more distinct than they had been in life when he was always moving, the bands widening into pastels as they expanded and bled into each other, heading toward that translucency at the tips of the broad and extended display of his fins, the entire spectrum radiating out from an electric red and blue center of pigment on the impossibly wide field of his still body.

My arms were damp with moisture where they hung at my sides, and I could feel the beginnings of a soaking wetness where the edges of my underwear touched my body. I was shaking in the cool breeze coming in from the open window to seaside, and I left the tank and went to the bathroom to get my robe and slippers, then walked down the hallway and into the kitchen, where I searched the drawers to the side of the sink, finding the small, handheld strainer in the bottom one. It was a flat strainer, one my mother had seldom used. It had a thin wooden handle that ended in a circle of wire mesh that was as dense as a window screen, and once I’d worked it out from where
it was tangled in the thick electrical cable of the old mixer, I rinsed it in the sink, then carried it out in the air at my waist as I walked back to the bedroom and the tank.

The betta was as I’d left him, his colors and the scalloped texture of skin below them still vibrantly alive. His mouth was closed, stolid beyond any attitude or conviction in the way he often held it while swimming, and it was only his stillness and a milky glaze over the small round dome of his eye that signaled his death. I realized I didn’t know when he had died, couldn’t quite remember having seen him the night before when I had fed him. I couldn’t remember talking to him, not for a good long while, since those first few days following the death of his mate, and I was troubled by this and by the sight of the dead, as if the fish were waiting there in some limbo, poised near the beginning of transit, unnaturally, waiting for me to set the world right and send him on his way.