Tampico (James A. Michener Fiction Series) (14 page)

The room beyond was a small library, bookcases and the books in them lined up in careful rows against the back and side walls. I could see a dark oriental on the floor, glowing in the illumination cast down upon it from track lighting suspended from the ceiling. There was an easy chair to either side, the one on the left bathed in the light of a floor lamp close behind it, and in that one a man was sitting, eyes closed, his head back on the cushion, and I could hear the music rising. He was a small man, in a grey jumpsuit, and the chair was large, and it and the music, deep and percussive, seemed to be swallowing
him. The window seemed to be vibrating, and the figure of the man beyond it slipped in and out of focus. I could see his dark hair, bunched at his neck, thick fingers spread apart on the chair arms. He wasn’t sleeping. The music was too loud for that. He was listening, and I saw his face move to the side from time to time and thought he must be feeling rhythm or the intent in some complexity of a rhythmic figure.

I climbed down out of the tree and went to the door again, then opened the screen and knocked loudly. I could hear the music in the distance. Then I knocked again and waited, but he didn’t come. I tried it a few more times, but there was no response, so I headed back to the tree, scooping up a handful of shell fragments as I went.

He was still sitting in the chair. The hair at his neck had fallen down a little at his cheek, and I could see it was braided, a short braid, but as thick as a small log. Then the music stopped, end of a movement or the piece itself, and before it could begin again I cast some shells at the window, hearing them click against the glass.

He heard them too. His head lifted from the cushion, eyes open now, black pools. Then he pushed up out of the chair and crossed to the window and cupped his hands around his face and stared out. Then he dropped his hands and turned and went out of sight. The overhead lights went out, and I saw his shadow figure as he moved to the floor lamp. Then the room was completely dark and I heard the window riding up in the frame, and in a moment he was leaning out and looking across at me, smiling.

“What in the world are you doing in that tree?” he said. “Is that a place for you?”

The kitchen looked out on the deck and the bay beyond, and the large windows were coated with a light dusting of windblown sand. “I ought to have cleaned those,” he said.

I’d asked him about Strickland’s cough, and he said he was no smoker.

“Something chronic. In the last few months I’d say.”

Then I’d asked him about the music.

“Ives,” he said. “I figured to spend some time trying to hear it, playing it loud enough.”

The death came back to him then, though briefly. He looked to the side, at the sandy windows, then reached up behind his head and pulled at the gathering of hair. I could see the result at his temples, his broad and unwrinkled forehead and his momentarily lifted brows. Then his hand was back at the table, his finger circling the cup’s rim.

He’d been working for Strickland for close to a year, taking care of the house when he was away, living in a basement room there. Strickland had left for the airport early, and he’d set to work, cleaning the place up and repairing a couple of broken shutters. There was other work to be done, and he’d taken it up in the next few days, reading and listening to music in the evenings, getting to bed early. The phone machine was on. That was their arrangement,
and he’d had no reason to check it. Strickland was a doctor, but out here in Orleans he was a recluse. He read books and studied his documents and remained unavailable to the city throughout the day. He’d check the phone calls in the evening, then answer the ones that were necessary. He never called the house when he was away in Philadelphia.

“I wonder what I’ll be doing now,” Carlos said.

He put it strangely, both real question and acknowledgment of choices. There was no anticipation in his voice, nor was he looking for the answer yet, not from himself and certainly not from me. I gave it without thinking, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and I don’t know why I did, though I’ve not troubled this decision because it was the right one.

“Well,” I said. “I’ve got a whole empty house and there’s some work to do. I can’t pay you anything yet, but maybe later that would be possible. You’ll have your privacy.”

He looked up at me and held my eyes for a good long while, and I think I blushed and I think he was waiting for that, and only then did he speak.

“That’s very good,” he said. “Let’s call it a deal.”

Driving back in the darkness to Provincetown I told him about myself, about Sara and our divorce, my years on the force and my new position as a private investigator. I even told him about my mother’s death and the little money she’d left me. I couldn’t seem to stop talking. Then I invited him to Thanksgiving dinner, and he accepted, and when we got back to the house we stayed up into the night and I told him about the HIV and he told me a few things about himself.

We spent a good part of the next day getting Carlos settled in. The guest bedroom was full of boxes and old clothing, and I even had the rubber raft in there. We lugged things down the basement stairs and Carlos knocked together some wooden skids to put them on.

The guest bedroom had its own private bath, and once we’d scrubbed and vacuumed, the place looked bright and cheery, and Carlos whistled softly as he opened the closet door and hung his clothes. I left him to it and went to the kitchen to take stock of things for Thanksgiving dinner, and in a while he was beside me at the sink, holding the turkey’s breast as I stripped away the plastic covering, then fished in the cavity for the sack of giblets. We had things ready by six, and I called out for Chinese food. “Sesame noodles,” Carlos said when I asked him, and we spent the rest of the evening in front of the television, watching an old movie about cowboys and Indians.

“The Indians have pale faces,” Carlos said, and when the movie was over we went to bed.

In the morning I got up late and went out to the car to check the odometer, then walked back into my new office to write things down. I’d call the lawyer in Providence the next day, give him the complete picture on Erica Plummer and the name of her motel. It would take him some time to get the court order, but he’d be quick about it once he heard the story from her own mouth. I’d worked with him before, always against him actually, when I was on the force. He’d kept us on our toes, getting more than one offender off because of faults in procedure. He was efficient and tough-minded, utterly fair, and I was pleased to be on the same side of the table as he was now.

I heard Carlos in the kitchen as I was finishing up, and when I got there he was sitting in a chair with a pot in his lap, trimming the ends off the wax beans, and the turkey was sitting in the black roaster on the table.

“Room temperature,” he said, and I went to the refrigerator and got out the sweet and white potatoes and took them to the sink for washing.

We had the turkey in the oven by two-thirty. It was a small bird, though big enough and there’d be leftovers, and once we’d heard the pops and crackles and had basted it, we decided on a short Thanksgiving walk on the beach, just an hour, then we could return and finish the preparations and set the table. I had two bottles of good Chablis in the refrigerator and we’d drink a little Irish before sitting down.

“Around five?” Carlos said, which sounded right to me.

The sun was already sinking behind us when we stepped from the parking lot and down to the empty beach at Herring Cove. The tide was out and the beach was broad and the sky over it had cleared of clouds, and there was light in the water, a last pink wash, and we saw it in the bodies of a few gulls riding the swells beyond the foam of the first breakers.

“The sea,” Carlos said. “Unlike the bay. That was like Mexico, but not as much life.”

“You mean at Strickland’s house.”

We’d walked down to the quiet surf and I’d picked up a stick, a barrel stave worn white by salt and sand. Pipers rushed to the edge of receding waves, then raced away.

“In Mexico,” Carlos said. “Before we left Tampico. There were men-of-war, and those transparent sticky ones, and you could see the fins of ribbonfish caught in pools when the tide was out.”

“When was that?”

“In ’60,” he said. “I’d place it there. Wouldn’t that make me thirteen? Something like that.”

“And then you left,” I said.

“That’s right.”

“I’ve been thinking about the time of my leaving too,” I said.

“To put something dramatic on it?”

“I guess so. I haven’t really felt it yet, so I think about it. A certain feeling?”

“You could talk to someone,” Carlos said. “A community feeling. There are such things.”

“Maybe I will,” I said.

But I couldn’t think anymore. The sun was behind the dunes now and the sea was awash in pink all the way to horizon, and when the gulls rose up from the pink sea their bodies were white, but their wings were red and their tails were fans, rosy and translucent at the tips.

“That’s something,” Carlos said. “I never saw that in Mexico.”

The table was covered with a white cloth, and there were candles near both ends and the light flickered in the wine. The turkey sat on a yellow platter in the center, not golden, but the color of a light wet mahogany, the tips of its ankle bones gathered in rosettes of foil, and at its left, in a round white casserole, the orange sweet potatoes were hidden under a field of melting marshmallows stained with caramelized brown sugar and a pattern of roasted almonds, and on its right was another bowl, the mashed potatoes, butter melting and flowing among its craters. The black olives were black pearls spilled from a string, and some sat in a row in a green boat of celery, a few fluted blossoms left at the end, and the pearled onions were pearls or caviar from a monstrous fish still held in the birth fluid that was a light cream sauce. The corn was corn. The tomatoes were green and red, and the wax beans were lime, laid out in rows like small loosened faggots on a shallow ceramic boat fashioned to look like wax beans, though slightly darker ones, and stuffing erupted from the turkey’s cavity, a large silver spoon embedded in it, its handle active in flickers of candlelight, ready for the taking.

It was five o’clock and dark outside, and we sat in the kitchen. The table was small enough to reach across, but we spoke somewhat formally for the occasion and didn’t reach and passed the plates and the bowls and wine, smiling and nodding to each other over the turkey and around the tapers, and when we were finished we filled our glasses again and picked at the food.
There was plenty left for the next day and maybe even the next.

His mother died in a fire in Matamoros when he was just fourteen years old. It was a house fire, but the interior walls of the house had been torn away in order to make a large sewing room, and other women had died too at machines there, and some had died after leaping out of windows, their twisted bodies and exposed bones in billows of black smoke, blood soaking into the dirt street and their thin flowered dresses.

His father had brought them north a year earlier, talk of work at the border, but it was steady work for his mother only, and the odd jobs his father managed to find were an insult to him, a man with no Mexican in his face at all. “He looked like a gringo, but he put a veil over his past entirely and I don’t know his sources, but that he was adopted and that the people who had raised him were long dead. And then my mother died in the fire and my father left, went over the border illegally, and I never saw him again. Then I crossed over too. I was just fourteen, and it took me ten years and a little help to become a citizen.”

He’d crossed the United States, then wandered back again, and in the course of his years of travel he’d worked at many menial jobs, then had found a good man who had taught him carpentry and house repair, then a few jobs as a handyman and some where he was a resident, once at a large ranch in New Mexico, another at a resort in the Catskill Mountains, a year of tenure in which he repaired the ramshackle dormitories of the transient waitresses and kitchen help. There were holes in his story, years vacant and unaccounted for, and I kept feeling that he, like his father, held up a veil of privacy, lest I learn too much and get to know him.

It had all been a constant leaving and arrival, vague feelings of regret and anticipation, and after a while those had dulled for him, as well as the little moments of anxiety in uncertainty between places, and he told me of the solace he’d taken in reading and mastery in woodwork and diagnosis in electrical and plumbing problems, worlds he could take with him that remained constant. He had a bag of tools and he left books behind him and acquired new ones, and in a while he was closed off in himself, and then he came to the Cape and found his place with Strickland.

I reached across the table to fill his glass, wanting more, some glue of narrative.

“What about the war? Vietnam, I mean.”

“I was in Chicago when things got cooking. So I left. I was never bothered
about the draft. I just kept moving, and the work was mostly cash, you know. Very few records, and no social security.”

“How old was Strickland?”

“Forty-five,” he said. “Two years older than I.”

“Me too,” I said. “I mean, I’m forty-three.”

“In a fire. Like my mother. I believe he must have been an excellent pilot.”

“They all are,” I said.

“But I know something about that. His care with things. His document collection. He was quite meticulous. And he was an internist. That takes plenty of care, and reasoning too, often dealing with the unknown and surprising, much like flying a plane I think.”

“Did he have any patients at all here?”

“Oh, no. This was a getaway for him. He left that all behind, almost as if it were painful.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Well, I’m reasoning now,” Carlos said, lighting up a cigar. “I never heard him on the phone, nor saw him hold a book of that kind, though they were on the shelves. And when we talked it was about things far from that. He showed me how he’d plot courses to Mexico, and I told him details about woodworking. We talked about wine, something I’d picked up on the way. Nothing, ever, about medicine.”