Tampico (James A. Michener Fiction Series) (31 page)

“My, oh my.” It was Gino once again, and Carlos saw his father’s face and the recognition in it when he looked at him across the table.

They sat there, all of them, for a long time, trying not to watch John and Chepa. It was hard to do, as in their slow turnings in the chair and their whisperings they were much like lovers in some private bed. It was Gino who disengaged
them when he reached over and took Ramona’s hand. She still held Manuel in her arms, but she surrendered to her father’s touch, and Carlos saw her finger move along the dark tissue at his wrist. Then Larry stood and stretched himself and touched his lips with his fingers, then placed his hand over his heart. He was looking beyond the couple in the wheelchair, out into the darkness where the men sat, and though he gave no other sign that Carlos recognized, the two men rose beside the women as if at his beckoning, and Larry started toward them. They were smiling as they came into the light, and when Larry reached them, the blond one touched him lightly on the arm, then on the shoulder, and the three of them moved off, passing the women and the chairs and heading into darkness toward the buildings at the square’s side.

Then Gino was rising, and Ramona too, releasing her husband to go with her father, hand in hand, to the far side of the fountain, where they sat at the broad stone edge, their heads close together. Frank remained seated, his back to the table now, hands folded in his lap, dreaming again, or looking off vacantly into the darkness. Then Alma rose and moved around the table and headed for the wheelchair, and Carlos heard a quiet yipping, and when he looked to the fountain’s broad edge he saw a chihuahua standing there, squat and very still, as if a sculpture, her yellow body turned to terra-cotta in torchlight. Then he heard the squeak of the wheelchair, and when he turned he saw it moving from behind the table, Alma pushing it, the two figures folded into one as they passed him and headed beyond the guttering candles on the serving table and into the moonlight that guided their way toward the square’s end.

He could see the glass house clearly in the distance now, the strict, geometric lines of its metal skeleton, its veranda awash in light, a shine of silver, much like that seen on shore, phosphorescent in the full moon, and then he heard his father cough, and when he glanced at him, he saw his dark, watery eyes, then looked beyond him to the fountain’s edge and saw the dying torch and that the chihuahua that had stood there, so silently, was gone. He could see Ramona and Gino, sitting close together at the fountain’s other side, and when he brought his eyes back to his father’s face, he saw that he was weeping quietly as he fumbled with his pipe. Then he looked beyond him and found them again.

They were moving down the square’s center, Alma leaning forward at the chair’s handles in the effort of pushing them. And the dog went before them, prancing and leaning ahead too, as if she were tethered to the chair and was
pulling it, dragging a weight as heavy as all Mexico behind her, though really quite easily, given her strength and resolve.

His father sat at the table across from him, stuffing his stone pipe carefully with tobacco, and when he was finished and looked up at him he was no longer weeping, though his eyes glistened in the recognition that passed between them. Carlos lifted his own pipe, urged to a taste for it by his father’s actions. Between them, facing away from the table, Frank sat with his head in his hands, his elbows on his knees, an image of exhaustion in surfeit or the despair of the empty observer left only with the vision of what has passed.

Carlos looked at his father, then beyond him to the now vacant square. Then his father lit his pipe, flame rising up at the bowl, and he lit his, and they both smoked in the moonlight, their hands on the white cloth among the guttered candles and the leavings of their fine dinner, while the oldest generation took part in the pleasure of each other, off in the distance in their private world.

Iguess it’s left to me to straighten out the story, though I was absent for most of it, wandering through the tilted rooms of my house and watching the lights blink at the barricades when there was no illuminating moon and a secret approach might be possible. I’d gotten rid of everything important, and I’d been going through memories of my mother and father and my times with them, in order to put the past behind me and to know for sure I couldn’t find the cause of my malady there, even though I knew ahead of time I wouldn’t. It was just something to do, as were the treadmill and the weapons placed at the windows and my changing into what I called my battle garments, just an old pair of Levi’s and my father’s warm hunting jacket, made with pockets and fabric loops for holding shells, comfortable against the night’s chill and the rain that leaked in through the roof to form puddles on the carpets and floors when it missed the pots I’d put out to catch it. The house was torquing and twisting, the hardwood lifted to waves in the kitchen and hallway, and though I looked out the same windows for the framed views I had in mind, I kept seeing something else.

My father killed a man with fingers around his hat brim, and this brought him north from Tampico. I’ve come to think of that man as death’s image, though thwarted, since the fingers must have shed their flesh, until the bones clacked against each other as he moved in the world in search of his next victim,
announcing him, his brim like the clock of a grim reaper, messenger of mortality.

The papers were original deeds and other documents, the ones my aunt gave us in Chorreras, hidden assets of a General Corzo, spread around in the names of his men to avoid taxes and confuse the government and whatever other interests might be out to get him. The general was meticulous and so was Joaquín Sánchez, and the two had constant business together and needed to remain on firm and congenial footing, and when Chepa decided to remove her lost lover’s name from the contract she’d had drawn up for the house, shifting ownership to her grandson, Joaquín filed those papers officially and changed the deed itself and returned the original to Corzo and my father’s files. And when my father left Tampico in the wake of the killing he left the papers behind. That’s how they came into my hands. And once both my father and mother were dead, I managed with the help of Arthur to sell them to a man named Strickland. I didn’t really need the money, but Arthur needed the commission, and I needed Arthur.

Frank was deep in a funk when they returned, and even after the negotiations and the sale, when renovations began, I’d see him sitting in a chair in the grass at the edge of the meadow, the contractor’s trucks passing on the stone drive behind him, hands limp on his knees. I could see the lighthouse too, from my bedroom window, each day in a slightly different location, and soon it was no longer the local police who were after me, nor even the Coast Guard, but the National Parks Service itself. The shapes and colors of the barricades kept changing, and it became less danger than unsightliness that was at issue. They wanted my house out of there, before they finished the move and the new parking lots and bathrooms and opened the lighthouse to tourists at its new location. They’d solved the problem of the underground river and the soil shifts, and then they got after me. But I still had my well, and Arthur had rigged up the hand pump, and I had canned goods and various trail mixes and my weapons at important windows, and I thought I could hold out indefinitely, at least as long as the house did, though the cliff had fallen away only two feet from my foundation, and that might not be very long at all.

Carolyn called me on the cellular phone she’d smuggled in, leaving that last patient in coma and coming across the meadow in the dead of night when there was no moon. She let me know that Frank had gone, then returned again with his daughter-in-law, a woman named Erica Plummer. She said he seemed happier now and that the two were making plans, and she kept me posted on
most everything else that was going on at the Manor, and I needed to hear these things, to keep in some human contact in my isolation. I had no Arthur coming anymore, and no Manor, and I was sick to death of walking through my tilted rooms, napping fitfully in daylight so I could keep watch at night. Once a reporter from some national exploitation journal made it almost to the porch, and he was insistent until I showed him the rifle. The porch itself had sunk a few feet, really to my advantage, though the constantly bursting water pipes in the basement had kept me down there and vulnerable to quick assault. I had to keep going up and checking, but there’d been nothing for quite a while. They’d concentrated their efforts on the lighthouse move, once they’d gotten the go-ahead. Then the men had returned from Tampico, and I had something else to keep me occupied.

“Oil,” Carolyn said, her voice so squeaky through the awkward instrument that I thought it might be someone else.

“What?” I said. “Who is this?”

She told me of the man then who had been in the solarium, behind the screen, that one with the stony face that I’d been interested in. His name was Carlos Ébano, and he’d come back with the men from Tampico, and she’d found out he was John’s grandson. Others had come back with them, Gino’s daughter and her husband too, who turned out to be John’s son. Larry was there, the only one unattached once Frank had returned with Erica, and he’d left for a while to go to Philadelphia, then had come back again, and it was he who had told her about the oil and the money that had come from it, enough to buy the Manor and to support all of them in it, and enough left over to help in the AIDS projects he was involved with in Philadelphia. And there was enough too to keep the last man alive, and to tend to him, and this was part of the negotiations with the owners and with the Veterans Administration, funds set aside for doctors on call and professional around-the-clock care, and she told me this was where I might come back into things. I knew, had the man died while the others were away, the doctors would have been freed from their contract and would have sold the place. Thus the man was a kind of savior in his longevity, my savior, and I’ve been careful and gentle in the tending of his skeletal body now that I’ve returned to my place at the Manor once again.

Carlos has had a room built on the sunny side, windows overlooking the lighthouse on its new cement pad, and could the man awaken, free of his deep coma, he could see the tourists walking the road toward it and climbing up
into it, their shifting images in their colorful clothing through the glass tower at the light itself below the witch’s hat. I see that, and so does Carolyn at the beginning of her evening hours. Theresa, the old woman hired for the graveyard shift, sees nothing beyond the room itself, but it’s a beautiful room, the medical properties of the hospital bed hidden by a dust ruffle, hardwood floors and historical pictures on the walls, and even a canopy, and she’s thoroughly intent on the care of the man anyway, and wouldn’t notice. She was a nun, back in her past somewhere, and the uniform she wears looks like the undergarments of a nun and may well be that. I see her in the early morning, when I relieve her, bending over the man in the white skeleton emerging through his skin, she too in white, but for the grey-flecked and still raven hair gathered in a bun at her neck. She’s looking down into the face of impending death already resurrecting into the
calavera
, curious, I think, as she herself approaches that, and sometimes Larry passes the room, up early, and looks in at her with his own curiosity. Larry will be leaving soon, after the party, and so will John, and I can see that Gino is getting itchy.

It was a month ago, and early morning, and I was sitting in my kitchen drinking herbal tea. The sun was coming up into a clear June sky, but the barricades were still rainswept after a night of heavy weather, and I could see the drops falling in a slant in the wind, rosy red in the blinking lights, and could hear drops tapping on the floor in the hallway and plopping in the full metal pot I’d placed on the carpet in the living room. Then I couldn’t hear that, and when I rose and limped across the tilted floor to the screen door, I saw the rain had stopped, and so had the wind, and I could see the blanket of shine on the meadow disappearing in a broad moving wave as sun dried the grasses and bearberry and the meadow darkened into its variety of subtle color once again. And then I saw a spot of yellow in the grasses, and it was moving, and behind it, on the roadway that ran through the meadow from the Manor to the barricades, I saw Arthur’s dark limousine, and could see the window shades were up and that there were people in the backseat.

The spot of yellow was a dog, but I could only recognize that in her gait once she had left the meadow and slanted to the roadway, then trotted up in front of the limousine to reach the barricades ahead of it. A very small dog, and she walked right under the wooden sawhorses and headed toward the porch without hesitation, and by the time she had reached the first tilted step I had pulled the screen open and was standing in the doorway holding the rifle and looking down at her.

The dog looked up at me, a Chihuahua dyed yellow, identical to the one that had tapped on my knee in that agora in Tampico years ago, and I felt myself tilting more than was necessary in the twisted doorway and had to reach out for the frame with my free hand to steady myself, though the dog seemed to take nothing from this possible cue and just stared up at me, her head cocked to the side, eyes full of expectancy and resolve. Then she climbed up the porch stairs, slowly, and once she had reached me and had looked up my leg and into my face again, she rose on her hind legs and placed her paws on my shin, then stretched her body, bowing her back and yawning, then kicked gently away, turning, and came down to the sill beside me, facing out to the drive as I was, one forepaw planted on the toe of my tennis shoe, and when I looked up from her and out toward the barricades again I saw the man I’d been interested in, months ago, in the solarium.

Arthur stood at the limousine’s open door, and I saw him touch his hat brim and saw Gino at the fender on the other side, grinning at me, as the other passenger stepped between the horses of the barricade and started up the drive. The breeze had died completely, and the sun was coming up over the far rise where the meadow met the escarpment that fell down to the sea, but it was a soft sun and I was not blinded and could see the buttons on his linen shirt and the edge of the thick knot of ebony hair, and might have seen all of it had he turned his head.