Tampico (James A. Michener Fiction Series) (11 page)

I dipped the strainer into the still water near the tip of the betta’s extended bottom fin, insinuating it down and under the fish carefully so as not to disturb him, and when the handle and my fingers were in the water too, I raised the strainer and the fish settled in the circle of wire mesh as I lifted it, then held it just inches above the surface as he drained, losing his color.

At first I thought it was the northeast air in the room, washing the humidity away, drying and dulling the glossy surface, but it was not that. The bands of color were moving, drifting away from the center, slipping over the low domed body of the fish out toward the edges, then falling through the wire mesh of the strainer down to the still surface below. And the center was growing colorless and grey now, an expanding field of grey, redefining the shape of the fish as the bands thinned and expanded and washed over each other, shimmering in bright new hues at the edges, outlining the fish in moments of neon. Then it was over, and the betta lay in the circle of mesh, drained of his personality, and I stood holding him and looking down at him as if he held some universal message. Then I moved the strainer to the side and saw the ghostly figure on the water.

The betta’s colors had fallen into a ragged image of itself, and as the water swelled slightly from the flooding they were reconstituting, forming the shape of the fish again, a wavering spirit image, that even as I watched was dissolving, floating away from the center to become an aura of blues and greens that slowly faded into a vague phosphorescence that blinked out finally in the azure surface.

I brought the fish back over the empty water and gazed down at his embryonic
figure, a simple oval shape now, before display of color, those flags of filament at fin tips, before breath swelling his sides, narrowed to a knife edge in exhalation and gliding. But it was no embryo, though it left life, as is said, as it came into it, emptied of its world’s face, that specific and yet generic one, the body picture given up to commerce with its own kind and the particularity of color pattern that distinguished it among others.

I saw then another face as I gazed down, watching the betta’s body as it faded to a lighter grey in the cool, dry breeze, then turned white and became the image of a medallion carved from ash, so smoothly fashioned that its scalloped surface seemed translucent. Its skin shimmered as the last moisture left it, then stretched tight over its body in a kind of rigor mortis. Then even that final scalloped patterning was gone, and I could see through its skin, as through glass, down into the dense meat and those impressions in it that were the bones of its universal skeleton, a structure that even as I watched seemed to be rising, shedding flesh and ligament and tendon, and the juice in the synapses of its primitive brain.

I thought then of the
calaveras
I’d heard mention of in John’s story, his voice rising in enthusiasm and drifting into the instrument room where I was cleaning the tracheotomy tubes and their cannulas. The tubes were intrusion, but they were means to a last connection, possibility of that air rising around them to be shaped into words, and then stories.

And the old men were the young men in the stories, and the women too, putting it off in reconstruction, just as I had in the certain knowledge that my house was stable.

But the earth was shifting now, and the
calaveras
might soon be dancing, in the Manor, in the figure of the fascinating man behind the curtain, down under the lighthouse. And I wondered if the time would come that I might join them, free of the house and my mother and the Manor. I wondered if I too might dance, in the meadow, out of sight of the sea and the image of that park in Tampico, my agora and the beginning of my travail.

He was traveling again and it was close in the truck’s rattling cab, and through the splatters of dead bugs on the windshield he could see the live ones coming in a hazy veil, risen like sandstorm on the wind blowing over the hot desert floor. He reached for the crank and tightened the window and tried to turn to the driver, then they were under the veil, the cab awash in a hushed pelting, and his nostrils stung in the bite of burnt oil rushing in from the truck’s leaky engine, and he could smell rancid food and taste the acid of digestion. Again he tried to turn. The windshield was opaque now, and he saw the driver’s hand, the wipers smearing the dead bugs, and felt the truck lugging down. The hand was shaking on the shift, the heavy load behind them pushing the cab forward against the gears and he felt the brakes grab. Was it his father? He couldn’t move his head. The door was open now, wild smell of decaying desert flowers coming in, and he saw the wet rag in the bug smear and a swath of clear glass and trails of water running down from it. Then he could see the flames in the low buildings at horizon and to the right of that fire, and much closer, the shading oak on a hill in a green oasis. There was someone under the tree, lying in shadow in the grass there, another tending him. It’s me, he thought, one of them. And then he was looking where the windshield met the rubber at the cab’s ceiling and was hearing a faint creaking. He was falling back, and only by hooding his eyes and looking along his
cheeks could he see the figure standing at his feet,
ángel de la guarda
all in white. Then it was dark again and his lid was lifted and it was bright, but he could see nothing. He felt the rag on his lips, bug juice and water, but he couldn’t turn his head, and someone was touching him and he felt a breeze on his leg, and when he opened his eyes again it was night and he heard a murmur of voices. He could turn his head then, and when he did he saw the folds in the white fabric screen and the metal rod and the plastic bag, hanging in moonlight at the top. He heard the hushed footsteps coming and tried to wait for them, but before they reached him he was asleep in a real sleep.

“Have you ever had a head injury, Mr. Ebano?”

“It’s Ébano,” he said, and the doctor blinked and shifted in his white medical smock and rocked on the chair’s swivel.

“Yes. Of course,” he said.

Carlos stared at him, the way his fingers formed a basket at his chest, then looked down at his own hands, the right palm resting over the left wrist in his lap. They didn’t seem his own somehow, and he hesitated to move them since he wasn’t sure he could. He felt a breeze come in at the open doorway, and when he lifted his head and looked over there he saw the body on the gurney in the hall and the screen door and the gravel drive beyond it. A sheet covered the face, but it was turned sideways and the feet were exposed, the twisted toes of a dead old man, skeletal and chalk white. The doctor saw him looking and rose and went to the door and closed it. Then he moved back to the chair again, the plastic hissing as he settled in.

“It happens,” he said, his sigh audible and forced, and Carlos watched his face, and soon the doctor seemed uncomfortable and looked away, then back again, but Carlos was still watching him.

“What is this place?”

“Well,” the doctor said.

He removed his glasses and he was fish-eyed. Then he pressed a knuckle into his eye, then lowered the glasses and glanced at the closed door. He was short and pudgy, his skin pallid, and his hair was thinning, though he looked only in his thirties. He seemed unable to continue, stuck for the right words.

“
En
Matamoros,” Carlos said.

“What?” He spoke softly, coming back from reverie.

“I got it once in Matamoros.”

“When was that?”

He’d slipped his glasses on and turned. He was focused again, and curious.

“I don’t know for sure. Maybe thirty years ago?”

“Well, I don’t think it
is
that,” the doctor said. “The cause, I mean. But did you pass out that time? Were you unconscious?”

“No. I don’t think I did then. Just for a few minutes.”

“But you went to the hospital. Maybe there are records still, and we can get them.”

“No. I didn’t do that. I don’t think there was one.”

“No hospital?”

“I was with my father then and we were working.”

“Well I don’t know what to say. I’d like to run a few tests though. Just a few more days.”

“What for exactly?”

“Well, to find out, you know. To get a proper diagnosis.”

“Am I okay now?”

“Yes, yes, I think so. But you were unconscious for a week you know. Can you remember how it happened?”

“Well, you know,” Carlos said, smiling at him and using his phrasing. “Once I was there, and then I wasn’t.”

“Well,” the doctor said. “I don’t know what to say then. We could run those tests. Maybe we could learn something.”

Empresa descabellada
, thought Carlos. Then he looked down at his hands again and moved them from his lap.

The attendants were lifting the body into the ambulance when he left the Manor, the sheet tapping at the gurney’s sides in gusts of wind, and Carlos felt the hair flick at his ears and he touched his cap brim to the dead and nodded as he passed by, then headed across the gravel parking lot to Peter’s car. He could see the old house above it in a growing darkness on the hill, and across the meadow to the right was the lighthouse. A few cars were gathered near the base, official seals on the sides of some of them. Thick clouds rolled in from the sea, and he felt a spit of rain on his arm as he climbed in, speaking even before the door was closed.

“Did you ever wear something white?”

He removed his save the lighthouse cap and snugged it over his knee, the bill pointing down his shin, then turned in the seat as Peter got the car going and headed beyond the gravel to the narrow road that would take them to the highway and into Provincetown. The blacktop was cracked and there were places where slabs tilted up and roots pushed through, as if the product
of some earthquake, and Peter drove slowly, the car’s wheels in bearberry at the shoulder, avoiding potholes. It was raining and the wipers smeared the windshield, and Peter had to use the washer to clear it.

“You mean when I came to see you?”

“That’s right.”

“No. I don’t have clothing of that kind. A white shirt maybe.”

“Then I guess it was a dream. Or some attendant.”

They reached the highway and had to sit there and wait for a break in the slow winter traffic. The rain rose into mist and the wheels of the passing cars sprayed clouds of wash that drifted over them, and Peter cranked the wipers up to a higher speed. Then there was a space, and he edged out into the flow. Fog had joined the rain now, moving in from the sea, and the traffic slowed and headlights blinked on. He drove near the shoulder, and once they’d reached the edge of Pilgrim Lake he glanced over at Carlos.

“You look okay to me. Maybe a little drawn, green at the gills. What did the doctor say?”

“He said I was okay now, but he didn’t know what it was. Why I was under for so long.”

“Do you?” Peter asked. “Can you remember it?”

“Well, you know, I was watching the shoring at that time, and that was it.”

His fingers moved on the khaki at his thighs. He was looking through the windshield into fog, and Peter could see that ancient profile in shadow in the dash lights. It was only four o’clock, but the rain and fog had turned the car interior into dusk.

“Yeah?” Peter said.

“Well they’ve got the thing jacked up pretty high now you know, and there are lights down under it. They’re wanting to dig away at the sides of the hole to test the firmness, and there was a hassle with the Coast Guard officials. They’re hanging around there, giving the contractor what trouble they can. And the national government guys are there too. They keep stopping and arguing. They’ve got a little layered city under there, levels and chalk lines, that kind of thing. But I guess that was a week ago at this time and it might have changed.”

“It has,” Peter said. “They’ve put a stop to everything now, even the shoring.”

“Is that right?” Carlos asked.

“Could you see clear enough?”

“Oh, indeed, quite good enough. The fence ain’t far at all.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. A creak I think. They say it was a good size piece of wood, from the scaffolding. I think I saw it turning, after the creaking. When I looked up, you know? And that’s when I was falling.”

“And a damn good thing there were people there.”

“Right. I was at the fence, and there was a crowd behind me. They must have caught me.”

“That’s what the guy with the truck said.”

“You spoke to him.”

“Yeah, he called me. I was over there in a half hour or so. To the Manor, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” Carlos said.

“Do you feel okay?”

“Good enough for me, I guess. Some little pain in the head is all. It may have knocked some sense in. I hope so.”

They passed beyond the lake, and the highway divided and narrowed a little and headed into the dunes. Sand had blown across the road in places and they saw the red taillights on the cars ahead, and Peter touched the brakes and they slowed down to a crawl. The rain had let up and turned to a cold drizzle, but the wind had stiffened and it rocked the car and blew the thinning fog in waves across the windshield. Neither of them said anything for a while, then Peter did.

“Charlie called. Just yesterday. About Strickland.”

“You’re kidding.”

Carlos turned from the window as he spoke.

“That’s right,” Peter said.

“After all this time? I thought it was over.” His fingers stroked his thighs. “What did he say?”

“Something about a list. Strickland’s papers. Seems there are missing ones.”

“He’ll be coming down then?”

“No, not that. There’s no reason. The house in Orleans has been gone through. It’ll be on the market soon. It’s us. We’re going to Philadelphia.”

“Why me?” Carlos asked.

“If you’re up to it. Why not? A little trip. Something to do.”

I learned I was HIV positive on the fourteenth of November, and it was later that same day I received my first call as a private citizen detective. There was a breath of silence on the phone, and I watched the drops fall from my arm, stain the white pad and bead on the red porcelain, then repeated the odd-sounding words again: “Peter Blue Investigations.”