by Olson, Toby
TAMPICO
James A. Michener Fiction Series, James Magnuson, Editor
Tampico A NOVEL
by Toby Olson
“’Taint No Sin (To Dance Around In Your Bones)” (Walter Donaldson | Edgar Leslie) Donaldson Publishing Co. (ASCAP) | Edgar Leslie (administered by Herald Square Music, Inc.) All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.
The author wishes to credit Joseph Hergesheimer’s novel Tampico, published in 1926, from which a few words and images have been lifted for this version, and to thank the following journals for publishing parts of this book in earlier forms: Conjunctions, Fiction International, Schuylkill, TO, and the Western Humanities Review.
Copyright © 2008 by Toby Olson
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2008
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:
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The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997)
(Permanence of Paper).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Olson, Toby.
Tampico : a novel / by Toby Olson. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (James A. Michener fiction series)
ISBN 978-0-292-71827-2 (alk. paper)
1. Veterans—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Tampico (Tamaulipas, Mexico)—Fiction.
4. Philadelphia (Pa.)—Fiction. I. Title.
pS3565.L84T36 2008
813’.54—dc22 2007045104
For Peter Markman
and in memory of Roberta,
the spirit behind the mask
’Tain’t no sin to take off your skin
and dance around in your bones.
—Song lyric by Edgar Leslie, 1929
Contents
BOOK ONE: The Manor
John
Frank
Kelly
Carlos
Peter
Carlos
Larry
Kelly
BOOK TWO: Philadelphia
Peter
Carlos
Gino
Kelly
BOOK THREE: Tampico
The House
The Foothills
The Mountains
The Village
EPILOGUES
Kelly
Peter
BOOK ONE
The Manor
John
Chepa colored the dogs by dipping them in iron cauldrons out back. Estrella was a struggler and almost as large as she was, and Chepa’s arms would be flooding pink fans from the elbows when she lifted her out. Then it was Don Lupe, the spaniel dyed grassy green, and yellow for the Chihuahua, Rata, the only true Mexican of the three.
There was a time when the cauldrons had been used for the scalding of chickens that were fed to the troops, but that was when General Corzo had owned the house, one of many, and before he lost it to Chepa in a game of cards at the Louisian. Chepa had wagered servitude, and it was a good thing for General Corzo that she had won.
The cauldrons rested in a row on the ground below the crude porch, beyond them and Chepa’s small vegetable garden and the oak sapling she’d planted at the garden’s edge the foothills rising above the dusty plains of the state of Tamaulipas, becoming those lush and mysterious mountains from which she had descended, that even from the sky were lost to sight under cloud cover and perpetual mist.
Those perfect circles were my beacon, their colors blinking through drifts of smoke from oil and gas fires, and I’d let the de Havilland take the mountains’ updrafts, bring her into a stall as I banked over the house. Then I could see the derricks and camps off in the distance, a few thin fingers of flame, and the matrix of pipelines, vectors disappearing in the direction of Tampico and the Gulf. I’d dip my wings, and below would be the small figure of Chepa, those bright colorful dots that were the dogs bouncing at her heels as she brought them across the baked clay of the front yard to the edge of our crude landing strip, then paused and looked up to find me.
Maybe a bowl of chili, tamales steaming in corn husks, a cool bottle of sweet Mexican beer. I’d step down from my cockpit, steam rising from the block of ice in the forward one, and Rata in fresh yellow would run and jump at my knee. I could see the breeze in Estrella’s long hair, hear it in the clack of chimes hanging from the porch eaves once the engine had coughed and died, then Chepa’s laughter and the soft clicks in her Indian talk in the dogs’ yapping as she lifted the meal in its stoneware vessel, grinning and cocking her head boldly and not stopping until she was pressing me against the fuselage with her hip and the scent of her cooking was in my nose. It was 1923. Obregón had exempted U.S. oil interests from Article 27 of the constitution. I was twenty years old and Chepa, my Huasteca, was thirty-five.
I hadn’t gone south leaving a dark story behind me, like so many others. I was too young for that. But I had flown the Gulf Coast for Texas Oil all the way from Corpus to Galveston and inland to Hearne and Seguin. It was mail mostly, occasionally executives and small parts, and when Obregón made his move they decided to move me. I had a first week in the city, going over aerial maps of Tamaulipas and Vera Cruz to the south. It was two words then, Vera Cruz, and the maps marked the camps with names—Columbus, Álvara, Aguascalientes—as if they were towns and not just clusters of oil rigs, crescents of barracks and mess halls and a few rooms for bosses and company visitors from the States.
From my hotel window on the second floor I could see down the narrow street into the city’s central square, the corroding church they called a cathedral, public buildings to either side of it, and the flapping awnings and cloth skirts of the various vending carts that lined the perimeters every day. Women leaned over wooden boxes of fruits and vegetables, men in cowboy hats lifted small tools and examined them, a few dusty peons, and away from the shopping, around the bubbling fountain at the square’s center, oilmen in clean shoes bargained and told extended stories. Everything seemed benign in its activity there, but when I held the fan-blown curtains back and followed the drops of sweat falling from my nose to the street below I saw a seamier and more exciting side of things. At least it was that in the eyes of the twenty-year-old I was then.
The Louisian was just across from me, and in the evenings under the gas flares I’d watch women flirting with men in sombreros, some wearing sidearms, on the boardwalk in front of the Café Bolívar a few doors down. It had rained for a solid week before my arrival, and though the street was still mud and I’d watch men dancing across it on narrow boards, the heat was back and the mosquitoes too. The men would slap at them and the women would brush them away, gestures that seemed often in time to the faint strains of Cuban danzón coming from the Lluvia del Oro, the bar Joaquín had told me about, out of sight beyond the Bolívar at the turn.
Joaquín was a Mexican born in Tampico, but he’d been raised up north in McAllen across the border from Reynosa. He had both English and Spanish perfectly and in his early thirties had been hired by Texas Oil. He’d been a kind of advance man, preparing the way for leases and later for payoffs to the various generals and their small armies that provided protection for rig sites. To the south, the aftermath of revolution continued in assassination and uprising, but in Tampico there was yet another enemy, one from the north, and revolution took its form in tribute, a kind of people’s taxes. Joaquín had greeted me at the airport, holding a
basket of fruit and smoked fish. It was his job to help me get settled in with the maps and to fly with me until I was oriented, and in the evenings of my first days he took me out into the life of the city streets and to the bars, and one evening had occasion to lean against me and say the following.
“I am told that if holy water falls on her it boils.”
He spoke in a damp whisper, and I could smell the anise on his breath. We were sitting beside each other at the bar overlooking the tables and the small dance floor at the Lluvia del Oro. The French band had finished its set, and people had risen not for dancing now but for drinks and conversation. We’d been talking about the day’s rough landing at a camp called Cerro Azul. The runway had been sabotaged with rocks, and I’d had to make a second pass, then hug the edge. Joaquín had figured it was a warning only. The camp boss had paid the general, but Alcázar hadn’t liked his attitude. Joaquín had spoken to him a few days before, something about a lack of seating for his men and inappropriate dress.
I’d been watching a gathering near the dance floor’s edge as we spoke, three men and a woman sitting across a table from them, and another woman, standing, with hands on her hips, her face in profile, and Joaquín had followed my look, then said those words. It was that profile that had drawn me, something I’d seen in museums.
The men were looking up at her. The one in the middle had a faint smile on his lips. He was leaning back in his chair, medals hanging from his leather vest, hands at rest in his lap. He wore a carefully clipped mustache that drooped at the edges of his mouth, and his hair was thickly oiled and glowed with a dull sheen in the dim bar light. The ones to either side of him wore their hats, fine-looking Stetsons, and though they were watching the woman they glanced to the man in the middle from time to time as if for cues. The woman sitting across from them was weeping. I could see it in the shake of her shoulders and the backs of her arms. Her wrists tapped at the table’s edge, and her head moved from the men to the standing woman. She seemed to be saying something through her sobs.
“The older one in the center is General Corzo,” Joaquín said. “And the woman standing, the one you are interested in, she’s pure Indian and not to be trifled with. She and the other one weeping, they work this place. It’s not Corzo who seems to be the problem for them. It’s the one on his right, Calaca. They call him that because he’s so thin. He’s a sneaky bad customer.”
And now the standing woman was talking to him. Her hands had moved from her hips and she was gesturing. Calaca had tipped his hat back and was looking up at her, grinning, his face a skull’s face, weathered skin like parchment stretched over bone. General Corzo had turned a little in his chair and crossed his legs and raised his palm to the one sitting on his left. That one had seemed to be rising, but then settled back. The woman had stepped forward now and raised a finger and was waving it in Calaca’s face. She was short and just a little stocky, but her hips swelled out from a delicately thin waist, and I’d been watching the backs of her beautiful legs, her calves, as the black spiked heels she wore pushed them into definition through her red stockings. Her dress too was black, a clinging silk worn off the shoulder, and I could see the tendons lifting her scapulas, the beginning of her straight and stationary spine as she gestured, the bounce of her coal black hair.
Calaca was laughing now, watching her finger, and just as he leaned forward and opened his mouth as if to bite it, she hit him, her fist flattening his nose and two arcs of blood squirting out to either side of her knuckles.
General Corzo looked down, curious, as Calaca lurched back and fell over in the chair, his head hitting the wood floor with a dull thud, hat bouncing away. He rolled and tried to rise but she was on him, hitting him in the cheek this time, then sitting astride him, one hand gripping the greasy hair on the top of his head as she pounded him in the face one last time. General Corzo watched patiently until she was finished, and the woman across from him had risen and leaned over the table for a better view.
And so it was, only four days after my arrival in Tampico, that I met Chepa and fell in love with her. She was a mother to me and a sister and a perfect lover for a young man of little experience such as I. My mother had died when I was just fifteen. I’d had no father that I knew of, and I’d been on my own since then, a roustabout, and finally with the help of a fatherly man from Texas Oil I’d become a pilot. Then he too had died. I’d had no social life to speak of, a few cool prostitutes and rum and Coke across the border in Matamoros and once an older woman who had taken me under the stars on Padre Island for her brief pleasure. It had all been thoroughly mechanical, until Chepa, and though ours isn’t the story I set out to tell, I’m going to tell some of it anyway.
At first it was clearly the money and that I was a young and innocent man. I went back to the Lluvia del Oro, bought her the grenadine syrup and water she drank to stay sober there. I asked her about Calaca and why the general didn’t intervene. She seemed both charmed and annoyed by the question but wouldn’t answer it. We spent the night together at my hotel, and the next morning Chepa insisted on showing me the sights of the city, though they were few. Bars and offices had invaded historic public buildings and old haciendas, and refinery pollution had eaten away at façades and outdoor statuary. But there were a museum and a few churches, lagunas and parks, and places where the shores of the Panuco were unsullied by terminals and tank farms. We spent the day together, and in the evening we ate dinner together at the Louisian. And the next night, after a day of fishing the Panuco for tarpon, we dined at the Ciudad de Pekín, my first taste of Chinese food. Then I slept in her arms in my hotel room, our bodies glued together in sweat under white sheets through which occasional mosquitoes stimulated us.
Then it was Monday, and I was off with Joaquín on our reconnaissance flights. We flew each of the camps, both north and south, and Joaquín waved his arm in the open cockpit in front of me, pointing down at the Texas Oil flags waving from the highest derricks. There were buzzards too, descending in slow and symmetrical spirals, then rising up from the smell and movement in the living flesh below, then trying it once again.
I had the maps and the places they represented, which from the sky were very much like the maps, and in only a few days Joaquín was grinning and shaking my hand vigorously and I was on my own, carrying mail, valves, and other replacement parts, north through the oil fields of Tamaulipas and south through Vera Cruz.
I never found out how Chepa came by the hand roller, a fifty-gallon oil drum filled with cement. She would hitchhike from her house to the city, but only after a walk of five miles to the main road, which out there was no more than a dirt track. Wednesday, when I returned to the hotel in the late afternoon, she was sitting at the foot of the bed, my open and neatly packed suitcase resting on the coverlet behind her.
“Dónde?” I said. I had this little bit of Spanish and she a good, though often crude, English she had learned from oilmen. I hasten to say she was no prostitute, though she drank grenadine syrup and water and sat with men for money at the Lluvia del Oro. Some there were, but she told me she made her own choices and they didn’t include that.
“A mi casa,” she said, pointing over her shoulder to the open suitcase on the bed behind her. “Joo close now?”
She was smiling, but her broad brow and cheeks were expressionless, her face still as a face carved in a block of dark wood. A small and smoothly hooked nose, lips full and cut straight across below it, and above, her large eyes, pupils black as her hair and penetrating. Often she held two expressions, mouth saying one thing, eyes another, the latter both intimate and impenetrable. Her words were as much an order as a request, and I’d been taking pleasure in her aggressiveness so I did what I was told.
Later, in the de Havilland, it was Chepa and not Joaquín who was pointing down, and as I banked low over her house I saw the oil drum at the edge of the new landing strip she’d rolled. The strip was narrow and short and at the end of it she’d positioned two huge potted plants to either
side as warning beacons. She turned around in her seat and grinned at me as I brought the plane down, rocking the wings to make sure of the wind.
The house was elevated a few feet off the ground on pilings, and Don Lupe liked to take the shade at the edge under it, Estrella, with her thicker coat, back behind him deep in shadow. But Rata had no care for the heat and she danced near my ankle, head high and sniffing, as I crossed the clay yard and climbed the steps to the veranda, Chepa slightly behind me, lugging my suitcase.
The house held one large room, an iron stove and an icebox and a sink with a hand pump at the rear, a few crude chairs, and tables with kerosene lamps and candles in onyx holders resting upon them near the walls. There was an open closet in a corner, just a wooden pole upon which were hung the dark and colorful clothing Chepa wore. I saw the black silk dress I remembered there, on a wire hanger beside others. And carved into the boards of the wall beside a window was evidence of the previous residents: VIVA VILLA and ZAPATA. Pencil-thin shafts of light came up through bullet holes in the floor, and in one corner there was a large faint stain that I imagined was blood. The bed was brass and double, its head against the room’s left wall, and at its foot, defining its space as separate, was a beautiful silk screen.
“China Boys,” Chepa said, as I studied the road, the bridge, and the elegant figures caught in their various gestures moving from top to bottom. Most cooks at the camps were Chinese, and there were some who had set up stalls in the square.
“So this is why,” I said, “at the bar, the general didn’t interfere?”