by Olson, Toby
“It’s the calentura,“ he said. “What Sosa was yelling. It’s malaria.”
A woman rode in on the side of a wagon on a low wave. The wagon’s wheel was spinning above her head, and Calaca was lifted out of the water as he grabbed it, then tossed into the wake. General Corzo had hold of her arm. Then the wagon was turning and they disappeared in the sea under it and Calaca was diving.
People were staggering in the sand. Half-dressed skeletons struggled against objects in the surf all along the beach. I saw a wooden chair, a green painted table with a pig sitting on it, a floating harness, a rat on a stick. And there were dead fish in the water, kelp, and sea lettuce ripped from its mooring, marzipan bones, dozens of wooden hangers, some dragging dresses and costumes, papier-mâché figures, a lamb and a deer painted for the Day of the Dead and bobbing high on the undulating water, their distended rib cages swollen with the sea, the hat of the ship’s captain, a guitar, a devil’s head, his red shoulders visible through foam, a fork sticking up in the spray, hundreds of onions, purple and yellow squash, and the transparent balloons of Portuguese men-of-war. I saw gulls coming down, hovering over the dead fish, saw a tall and beautiful woman, dark twisted hair falling like a dirty mop as she reached under the water, then lifted a straw basket in the air, the sea flooding from it catching a rainbow as the sun broke through completely and sparkled in the wake and sand. And I could hear talking, some laughter and crying, and a dull, constant moaning.
Then we were in the water, together with Calaca and General Corzo, Joaquín and me. We went to help those who were still foundering both in the sea and malaria. Some were delirious, absently searching among floating objects, but they gave in easily when we touched their chilly or hot arms. A young man looked in my eyes, knowing me, sweat flooding down his cheeks. “¿Es aquella Cardel?” he asked weakly, gesturing toward the shore with his chin, then fell against me, his thin body light as a bag of feathers. The general and Calaca had a large man between them and were leaning against a receding wave, and Joaquín went to help them. Calaca smiled at me, his free hand raising a thumb. His sombrero was back on his head at a rakish angle, as if he were drunk in some bar and getting ready to sing. The general swore, “¡cabron!,” spitting out spray sent up by a donkey fighting for footing beside him, then bucking its rump as it splashed at the surf line and climbed to the beach. I heard voices, and when I lifted my head from the young man’s sweaty brow I saw townspeople and oilmen climbing down the rocks, carrying blankets, canteens and canvas bags, and a man in a white coat, gripping what I thought was a medical case, as he slipped on the last rocks and fell down on the sand beside Sosa, who turned to him and said, as if in professional consultation, “Es calentura.” Dagoberto covered a seated woman with a blanket as others plodded in the sand, heading toward me or down the beach. Then there were dozens of helpers gathering up objects and people, dragging everything across the beach to the rocks and where the rocks met the beach. I saw a man holding the donkey’s halter, unaware of the activity around him, his hand stroking the animal’s muzzle to quiet its shivering body.
Calaca, Dagoberto, and I climbed on the rocks, heading for the brush above and beyond them to gather wood. Clothing was draped over boulders now, coming back to vivid color as it dried in the last rays of sun, and there were furniture, open suitcases, crates and other tilted objects as far as the eyes could see. And there were people moving on the rocks also, those shipwreck survivors free of malaria, touching things, smoothing out wrinkles, searching for what was theirs. We had to step carefully, check for clear footing as we made our way up. The sun was sinking now, and when we reached high ground, the wagons hauling those with malaria were dappled in shadow beyond the scraggly trees where the road was as they creaked slowly toward Chorreras a quarter mile off.
We built a huge bonfire in the sand, but only after a half hour of panic in which children were lost, five girls and a boy, in the accounting done by the ship’s clerical mate as he moved among groups of blanket-draped survivors, a clipboard holding the records he’d managed to save in his hands. But then we heard faint voices, words of that song about a rancho grande, and when we crowded down to the surf’s receding edge and looked out over the still and darkening Gulf waters, we saw the raft, one whole side of the ship’s wooden wheelhouse, and the children sitting cross-legged in the dusk upon it, singing, as it drifted in. Then mothers and fathers were in the water, gripping the raft’s timbers, reaching up and petting the children’s bodies.
The captain sat in a lawn chair beside me. Calaca and Dagoberto had retrieved them from the rocks below General Corzo’s house when they went there to get the case of tequila and the lemon. Calaca had filled his pockets with salt, and he sprinkled it carefully into people’s palms as he circled the fire. Some sat on crates and suitcases, and I could see others lounging on blankets through the smoke and flames. The captain was talking and gesturing, tapping his chest with a finger. He’d found his hat, and though it was still wet he was wearing it. He was a small man, compact and vibrant, and his thick mustache twitched at the corners as he spoke. He leaned close to me at times and almost whispered, as if we were involved in some conspiracy. Joaquín was on the other side of him, the bones of a chicken leg on a page of newspaper in his lap, and he was smiling as he worked bits of skin from between his teeth with a small gold pick. He’d lost his suit jacket but still wore his fine tie. Boxes of fruit had been carried to the beach and there were fried chicken, tamales, jugs of wine, and baskets of fresh bread.
“He’s telling about the shipwreck and his mates and about the contract. He would have stayed with his ship to the bottom, he says, but for the pendejo owners. He says they knew about the storm coming ahead of time and said nothing.”
“How could they know?” I said.
“He doesn’t say that. But he will go soon to find them, and he will straighten things out then,” Joaquín translated.
Sweat was beading on the captain’s brow, and we both saw it, and Joaquín pushed up from his chair and headed toward Sosa and the rocks to find the doctor.
And before long it was night on the beach and the sky was filled with stars and the fire was fed with dry wood brought from Chorreras. Others fell into sickness of the calentura, shadow figures helped or carried up the rocks to where the wagons waited, family members and close friends following. The ship had carried sixty souls, dancers and musicians and their children, all sailing north from Cardel for the Day of the Dead fiesta in Tampico, and though not a soul was lost, only twenty-five remained in good health on the beach once activity of the aftermath was declared over. An old man, leader of a mariachi band, declared it, the neck of his guitar at his cheek as he began to strum. He’d found the chest holding the skeleton costumes and both he and the one remaining band member, a young, quick-fingered boy with an accordion, wore the bones. Calaca and Dagoberto had given up their sombreros, and the two calaveras moved around the fire playing ballads and border polkas, their singing punctuated by quick calls and high squeaks. I saw a woman dancing in a long dress, then turning a cartwheel in the sand, her legs gleaming in firelight as the singers strutted by, and I thought of Chepa’s legs. Hers were thicker, her muscles longer and smoother, but they were just as agile. Women and men danced to the music now, wearing their bony costumes. I saw a boy throw a pelota, a young girl catch it. Some roasted ears of corn in embers at the fire’s edge and the sweet smell drifted on the smoke to us.
I was tired in my skin, the fire hot on my face, but my bones felt hard and oiled at the hinges as I lifted my hand and sucked the lemon, then swigged from the full bottle Calaca handed me and passed it on to General Corzo. The five of us were seated in chairs in a half circle facing the fire. Only Sosa was absent, still playing doctor, though there was no longer any need for it.
“Well, I suppose this means we are all settled up, ese.” The general spoke to Joaquín in perfect English after lowering the bottle, passing it on to Dagoberto, then wiping his mouth with his sleeve.
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nbsp; Joaquín answered in Spanish, his eyes sparking in the firelight, and Calaca laughed.
“I said, ‘For the time being at least,’” Joaquín told me.
“Sííí,” said the general, in a mimic of The Lazy Mexican.
Calaca grinned his skull face at me, passing the bottle, and I could tell it was okay with us for the time being also. Then General Corzo was speaking again, Joaquín translating softly for Calaca and Dagoberto.
I leaned back in my chair, lifted my face from the fire’s heat, and gazed up into the sky’s broad dome. There were thousands of stars there, and in the general’s soft talk, the singing and quiet laughter that edged into it, I felt I was rising up toward them, just a little, until I couldn’t feel the chair under me anymore and was floating in the world of what he was saying. Well, it was close to that kind of thing at least. But I was tired, right at the edge of exhaustion, a state where one can feel suspended and be where the real world is, just too worn out for anticipation, or thoughts of the past behind it.
“Ah, the revolution, articles of the constitution, and that pendejo Obregón. And smoke rising from gas fires, and the drilling, and a bone caught in the throat eating, and cauldrons for the scalding of chickens, music and dancing, tribute, and the turn of a card in the thick fingers of Chepa, the nose of Calaca whistling in his laughs, tobacco and tequila.
“I have a man wearing a ring of fingers around his brim, a good man, each cut and counted. One wears a ring still that I recognize, onyx, who was a good man too. The fingers jiggle when the man walks, and there are those who fear him, though it’s the counting that concerns me. One and two, a dead mother and my father, your father, the painful permanence of the onyx, for solitude, peace maybe, after shipwreck, after sabotage, just after some moments with a woman before starting again.
“I tell you, this life means nothing to me, because anything can happen, and if you try counting it out it surely will. I said shipwreck, who could imagine it, and all souls saved, so pass me the bottle, my dear skeleton, and the cigar and a chicken leg, pass over the tribute money and the pleasures it can buy me, one of which is help easily given to survivors, another just good fellowship, here, under the stars.
“It’s the Dead’s Day. There are stories. Don Lupe has told some in pictures, his calacas dancing: businessmen, housewives and journalists, bandidos with weapons clacking against their ribs, even a priest, el presidente even, that maridillo, putas, and young girls too of the purity still of the Virgin. All gone into the company of the dead, our reminder, most purely secular, since only the bones are the souls, their dancing and commerce. And thus do I fancy the ancients, dressed in the skins of the dead, as irony. And now I’ll tell the story of two calaveras.
“An old woman was dying and her husband, feeling death at his door also in anticipation, went to her bedside to soothe himself. One might expect wisdom in the aged, but the man was a politician and as such was without it. Always he was counting, accumulating, while his wife had been living in the pleasures of sewing and cooking, in cleaning, and in walking the street and in shopping in the sweet and sour presences of the here and now.
“The man touches his wife’s fingers where they rest on the coverlet, as close to her bones as is possible, and when she looks up, hollow-eyed and smiling, he recognizes he doesn’t know her and never has.
“‘Water,’ she says, her voice brittle. ‘Could you bring cool water?’ And he goes to the pump and draws it, but when he returns to her bedside she doesn’t need it, since she is dead.
“If only, the man thinks. The water. If only the votes and the counting. Only that summer, in youth and forgetfulness. If only singing and dancing. Only fishing the Panuco River for tarpon together. If only the pleasures of children. If only for memory. And he sits alone at her grave, weeping tears of regret, but she is not there.
“Mystery of the unlikely. A ghost story. But we are all ghosts apparently, hidden from life in our soft coverings, only shadow figures, until flesh falls away and we are skeletons, calacas clacking as they join the dance.
“At least, so this story goes, in which an old woman has risen up into hard bone and the common skull, who now wears her personality in action rather than appearance, but for clothing as mocking costume, our serious lives in exaggerated burlesque, that comedy of complete wastefulness now celebrated.
“She wears a business suit, hiding the bone girdle of her gender, her husband’s hat, and she minces among politicians, poses in conversation with Obregón, that lechoncillo, and finds her way into the art of Don Lupe.
“One day the man has recovered. He sits in his office. He’s reading the paper, and there, above an article exposing petty corruption, graft, vote fixing, betrayal of the people, he sees the calavera, himself in his wife in his fine suit, talking to el presidente, his jaw flapping, his big teeth, symbols of words vomiting out, splashing on his wife’s shirt. The man dies then, right there in his chair, and those who come to the funeral speak softly as they divide his constituency among them.
“The story might end here, a lesson, but you know, he too is the skeleton. He rises up as his wife did, wears her dress, her high shoes, is found cooking, steam billowing from the pot so skillfully rendered in the etching. He’s shopping, sitting at a window sewing, while outside the skeletons are dancing in colorful costumes in fiesta. There is no comedy, nor irony, in his activities, yet he is at peace and happy, if such can be said of calacas. This is the man’s paradise, but he has paid for it with the other, and one might notice that his wife had both.
“Paradise. This fire, this chicken, these mariachis. Survivors dancing, smell of dead fish, and whispers of jetsam from shipwreck in this quiet sea. This good fellowship and the presence of women in memory in this talking. It’s Chepa for you John, Theresa, a woman with a beautiful saint’s name, for me. Pass over the bottle now and the lemon. Calaca, pinch me a pinch of salt. We have nowhere to get to, nothing to do. And this is paradise.”
Frank
There were four tattered easy chairs in the solarium and Larry and Frank sat in two of them and John sat in his wheelchair. Gino’s folding chair was pulled up at the windows, and his fingers tapped the metal cover of the radiator below them absently as he gazed out. Even from the back he looked like Harry Truman, and Larry turned and smiled at John in that recognition, already a worn joke among them.
It had rained for a solid week, but then a cold March wind came out of the northeast to blow the storm away, and now a full moon hung in the sky above the sea near shore. Its light washed over the men’s legs, and a dim wash rose to their faces from night-lights, pearlescent through polished seashells plugged into sockets in the baseboard, and glowed in their metal flanges. The end of the room was screened off, and above the screen the rods of the steel hanger and the words on the bag of glucose were distinct in the moonlight. John held a cigarette in his throat, its tip swelling to a red glow as he drew, smoke leaking around the flange, then streaming from his nose. A door closed, and they heard the rumble of a car’s engine and one of the windows hummed briefly.
“Kelly.”
It was Frank. He’d belched up the word, his lips barely moving, then shifted his heavy body in the chair, and Larry and John turned too and followed his look.
They could see all the way out to the crest, the shadow of a cut through beach grass and bayberry that was the road descending from the Manor into the broad moonlit meadow, then rising up to where the house sat in layers of silhouette against the sky, one dim lamp in a window.
“Chicken light,” Frank said, and Larry sighed, huffing through his tube.
“All right,” he said. “It’s about time, isn’t it?”
“In good old Indiana,” said Gino, his voice muffled behind his bony shoulders.
“It’s Kentucky!” Frank barked. “How many times do I have to say it, you old fart?”
Gino lifted a leg and farted, a quick dry explosion, and the cigarette popped from John’s throat and tumbled into his lap.
/> “Christ, Gino!” he croaked, brushing sparks of fire from the blanket that covered his knees. A trail of smoke rose from the fabric, an acrid smell, and he slapped his palm down into it over and over as he shook. He was a little taller than Gino, but very thin, swallowed up in the poncho that brushed his arms, and his face was angular and hard beneath bushy eyebrows, a broad old scar running down from his left eye to his chin. They all wore pajamas, and Frank wore a tweed jacket, and Larry’s hair curled up at the edges of his black watch cap. A door opened, a click of metal at the far end of the ward beyond.
“That’ll be Carolyn,” Frank said.
It was a story they all knew, the bones of it at least, about Frank, going out for candling, catching his mother in the coop. She was bedding the one hand they had there, a boy no older than Frank himself then, though it was not those details that would hold the point of the story, but things in the aftermath that Frank hadn’t as yet spoken of. He’d started with his relationship with his mother and with his father too, just sketching it out. He’d gotten up to the coop door, and then they’d come for him in the ambulance for chemo. When he returned, his hair had begun to fall out, and he couldn’t talk for a while. Two others had been there then and Larry hadn’t. Now the two were tubed up out on the ward, the only ones there, and they could hear Carolyn changing the drips and the dull hum and gurgle of the suction machine as she cleaned their throats and lungs.