Tampico (James A. Michener Fiction Series) (22 page)

“But if you get sick,” Frank said.

“Oh, fuck that,” Gino said. “I’m sick already. I’m a very old man. I want some life now while I have it. Not this waiting around to die.”

Frank started to say something, to bicker, then he smiled faintly and said something else.

“Well, I must admit, I think of it too.”

“Have you?” Gino said.

“No. Not really. But I can understand the rest. This place I mean. It’s not exactly wholesome.”

“I have,” Larry said. “Especially since this chemo. I can go back to Philadelphia, actually do some work again.”

“The fucking chemo,” Gino said. “Just another instance. They’re not
treating
us here. This is a holding tank. They only do it because of the contract. Like that useless speech therapist. Legality, not medicine or ethics. Nothing like that.”

“That would close the place,” John said.

“But for the guy out there on the ward,” said Gino. “I hope he lives to be a hundred and ten. Fuck these doctors, these businessmen.”

“You’re serious about this, aren’t you,” Larry said.

“You bet your ass I am.”

He shuffled off to his locker to get the Chicago papers and his ledger book, and Frank set the chessboard and pieces to the side and got a yellow pad and a pencil and began making lists. Larry shuffled the cards absently, thinking about the uncertainty of endings and of beginnings, more difficult for Frank he thought than for himself. He wasn’t sure about Gino, even when he returned and showed them the ads he’d carefully marked, describing the various locations with a quiet enthusiasm.

“If only there were decent relatives,” Frank said.

“Why?” Gino said. “It could be the same as this, just different furniture.”

“I have a son,” said Frank. “That could be even worse.”

They heard the sound of sucking from the ward, and Gino looked at each of them, then turned back to the window.

“Maybe I could go to Tampico once again.”

It was John. He held his cigarette in the air, poised there, and there was something in his tone that got to each of them, both fantasy and possibility in the words. Then Gino coughed and lit his pipe again, and they could see the smoke rise, puffs disintegrating into a wispy haze above his shoulders at the window.

He turned then and began talking, picking the words carefully out of memory, telling the story in a formal way, as if he had no care or part in it, as if it were someone else’s life in the balance there, for he had come through it all and was here now for the telling and was only the messenger of his past. John adjusted his wheelchair and faced him and tapped a cigarette on his can, then lit it, the smoke flooding from his tracheotomy tube, and settled in with the two others to listen.

“… and Ramona was born in the tenth year of our marriage, my wife desperate for her in the lost romance of her own childhood, that she would join a company of virginal lovers and study her posture standing in the doorway, makeup and fine clothing, candlelight and flowers. But it was always Gino coming, the little guy in work clothes, and with the birth of a daughter the romance changed for her—image of the perfect mother, sister and confidant—so when Ramona pinned her tongue with the fake diamond she was accepting of it in bewilderment, and when she brought the tattooed boys around, ominous but manipulated, it was no last straw for her, though it was for me.”

High school, 1950, held back a year for truancy, his wife was giving her secret money, she was nineteen and hysterically theatrical, and he was already sixty, the ancient dull-witted father, but his wife was only a child for her, and Ramona was no fool about that until she was.

Sitting in the living room in the suburbs, wanting money, that dark boy in his mid-twenties on the couch beside her, carefully groomed, but dirt at the cuticles of his pared nails and in the wings of the hair he’d greased and combed, a thick hanging chain, and the black ironed shirt he wore, those stains at the pockets’ edges, and those tattoos.

When
I
get a proper life! When I get some decent clothes! Spark of the diamond on her tongue flicking in the red wound. When I get out of this
shit
hole!

Why not now? he’d said. And that stopped her, and the diamond disappeared behind her teeth, and she dragged the useful boy up out of the couch and slammed the door behind them as they left.

“We thought it was temporary of course. My wife died in 1962. She was just fifty-nine, my child bride. Have I mentioned her name yet? It was Mona. And in the days of the twelve years of her daughter’s absence she was getting ready to die, though I don’t think she knew that. It was a cervical malformation that caused the stroke, and I think it came from her hanging head, lifted only when she looked through the window, as if the physical gesture of anticipation could produce the desired object, Ramona on the sidewalk, coming home. I was retired then and seventy-one, and I thought I might be dying too, for I was some malignancy in the household, reminder in my presence of the cause of our daughter’s leaving, and it was true that I never loved Ramona, felt her absence only as relief, and I think my wife saw this, and I walked the suburban streets and read books in the evenings, and we both waited for something, but not the same thing. Ramona was a late child for us, and the only one. No excuse of course for her failed parents. But I think she held a pathology that we didn’t bring to her, though I accept responsibility for a certain coldness.

“But I didn’t die, and Mona did, and then I made my one pathetic move. I bought an isolated house near Cairo, on thirty acres, and set myself to gardening and fussing with repairs, and waited absently for death.

“I said I traveled to Tampico once, but that wasn’t true. It was only conversation in this place, part of our useless joking and badgering, and that’s why I’m leaving. I never traveled, or took pleasure in places or people, nor did I have the warmth of a woman in my bed beyond my early fifties. I worked and had a wife and daughter, and then the one left and I retired and the other died, and that was my life. I walked the streets like a man whose days were over, when they were only half over, and then I set myself to mindless tasks, and when I wasn’t mindlessly doing them I sat at a kitchen window smoking a special blend, gazing out vacantly at the possibilities of life there, with no heart for them at all.”

He
does
look like Harry Truman, John thought. They’d be of a similar age had Truman lived, and those pixie ears would have thinned by now to the
same parchment. He wondered if Truman had such small hands, had lifted them to touch his brow and nose with the same vacancy. Gino’s robe had fallen open at his chest, and moonlight washed over his ribs, and his dark nipples in that variegated bony field were gemlike, black pearls in mottled alabaster, and John thought of the men he’d seen at the roadside near La Loma, traveling up to Matamoros with Chepa, so many years ago. They were baking, shirtless, in the sun, sitting at the ditch they’d been digging, drinking water that ran in rivers down their dark leathery chests as they lifted glass jars, and there was one to the side, and when he saw them passing he lowered his jar and looked at them, and quite suddenly it was he who was the subject, and they were only the world passing for his interest, and John had imagined he had been there before anything had. He would have thought, before the start of all living human commerce, but he was too young for such thinking.

Now he saw the same thing in Gino, but only as a similarity of knowledge in his blue eyes. The gestures that surrounded them were searching in the story for his body in its age, and he was getting there, but it was a long and difficult journey because he was a hundred years old.

The moon was bright in the windows above the radiator, and Larry still held the cards. John had reached up to the IV pole and turned off the light, and Larry could hear his breathing in his nose and the faint whistle in the suck of the cigarette in his tracheotomy tube. Frank leaned back in his chair across the room. He was watching Larry’s hair fall, but absently, giving himself up to the story now and the lesson of its apocalypse.

“And could this time be only moratorium, hospitals and rest homes, a delay of grafts, and medication and months in metal tubs and debridement turning into eighteen years, and certain moments of potential passing by in bewilderment, and then this cancer really only an excuse?

“I was eighty-two years old, and she came in a camper and with two others, and the camper’s wheels guttered in the gravel drive and sprayed stones, and the other two climbed out. They were like her boys in the past, but older and foreign in some way, but they never spoke and I got no sense of their origins. They wore jeans and light leather jackets, and one had a ponytail tied up in a greasy knot, and the van’s panels were painted with vague images of adorned skeletons and women in white robes attending them in swirls of mist and sun rays. Then Ramona climbed down to the gravel and came up to the porch where I was sitting and stood in the stones and looked up at me.

“It was money, but at first it was the mechanics of greeting, the empty awe
of the years. She came up on the porch in her tooled boots and sat down in the wicker chair, and I told her her mother was dead, but she seemed to know that, and I had nothing else to tell her, so I told her the details of my moving and living there. But that was over in moments and the force of the vacancy of my life came down on me, and I asked her about her years, but there was little that she could find to say. She mentioned places I’d never been—Las Vegas, New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, Mexico. I said, ‘But you’re forty now.’ ‘Not
quite
,’ she said.

“She was dressed in leather, though it was summer and very hot, and I saw sweat beading on her brow and soaking into the ludicrous headband, and I looked for the diamond in her tongue, but it wasn’t there, and she’d shaved her eyebrows now and drawn a black line to replace them matching her lipstick, and I saw flecks of the lipstick on her teeth and a scar running from her eyebrow down her cheek and the lines of middle age at the corners of her eyes. I said, ‘I hope the traveling’s been in style,’ and she was still theatrical in the way she tossed her hair above the band, but she didn’t answer and just stared at me, and I saw a hardness in her eyes and behind it a certain hysteria of desperate need, and in her posture and her glancing down to the men at the camper’s doors the wherewithal to satisfy it.

“‘I’m your father,’ I said. ‘Fuck
that
,’ she said. ‘I need money!’ And I could see her need was for more than that in the way her nostrils flared, her chest under the leather lifting in energy toward some vague action she was unaware of, and I looked down to the men poised at the camper’s doors, then back to her face now set in a fixed clown’s grin and without expression. ‘I can give you a thousand dollars,’ I said, and I got up and went into the house and closed the door and bolted it. Then I went to the back door and locked that, then checked the windows on the first floor. She was still sitting on the porch when I got back, and she caught me looking at her through the window, and I saw the wetness of hard tears in her eyes and on her cheeks, and she kept sitting there, grinning still, for a quarter hour.

“I watched her, and I could see the camper in the drive, and the men were gone now and it was dusk, and when I tried, the phone was dead, and I went to the basement and got the .22, and while I was down there I heard her banging on the door, and when I returned to the window she was gone and so was the camper.”

He had no money. It was in the house and land and in the small pension and social security, and in tobacco and the seed and food, and in a few bottles
of liquor. He had shells for his .22, and plenty of coffee, and he roamed the house and checked the windows and watched out for them, but nothing happened. Then it was night.

He went to a dusty room on the unused second floor and pulled a chair up to a window and covered his knees with the blanket he’d brought along and placed the rifle across them, and in a while he fell asleep and was awakened by the hammering. They were boarding up the windows and the doors, and when he opened the window he sat before he could hear hammering below and the ripping away of siding from the old barn in the distance, and he fired a shot into the starry night, but it was like a popgun. Then he got up out of the chair and went downstairs again and fired into a window and the wood covering it, but the hammering continued and the sound of the gun and shattering glass was inconsequentially lost in the banging.

He went to the basement again and got a box of shells and when he passed up through the house it was darker than night was and the hammering had ceased, and once he’d barricaded the door at the top of the stairs with furniture and gone back into the room he saw light at the window. It was dawn and the last stars were fading, and there was a sliver of moon still risen over the low hill in the distance, and as he watched, the branches of the tree upon the hill materialized in the morning and the dew, hanging in their weeping like a willow, but it was an oak tree, and there was something in a crotch in the branches, and then he saw that it was her and saw the camper under the branches at the tree’s base.

“I went to another dusty room and dug in a box and found the binoculars, then I went back and lifted the window and raised and trained them until I could find her in the tree. Then I did find her. She was sitting still in the crotch with a limb rising from her own crotch, her legs hanging down like stovepipes in the wet leather. She was soaked through, her head among leaves, strands of her hair lifted wildly on twigs and branches, and the wet oak leaves had brushed her painted eyebrows, smearing the paint up into dark feathers on her brow, and her shirt flowed like black water over her breasts, and she was leaning forward among the limbs and leaves, gazing toward the house like some deranged wood nymph, the limb in her crotch a massive vegetable member growing from her.”

He saw her shoulders tilt, her extended leafy arm, then saw the man on the camper’s roof reach up with his binoculars. Then he heard a huffing below the window and lowered the glasses and when he looked down he saw the shadow
of the other man, running away across the yard and through the plot of staked tomato plants, vines and dark dirt flying, and then he lifted the glasses and smelled something and looked to the tree again. Her own glasses were lifted now, “and she might have been looking directly at me, but I couldn’t tell, and in moments there was a cloud of smoke in the dawn between us, obscuring her as she climbed down through the limbs and into the man’s extended arms, and I lowered the glasses again and leaned out the window and saw flames crawling up the clapboards toward me, and when I turned back into the hazy room my legs were in a foot of smoke and I stumbled to the hall and saw it seeping through the door frame at the barricade, flames eating at the panels, and as I watched, the easy chair I’d pushed against the knob came suddenly alive like a bloody throne in flames, and I turned and opened the bathroom door across the hall and stepped inside and closed it behind me, then crossed among cardboard boxes and broken screens to the old claw-foot tub and turned the handles, but there was nothing.