by Olson, Toby
“Son of a bitch,” Larry said quietly.
They heard a creak of springs from beyond the screen at the solarium’s end, only a few yards away, but none of them acknowledged it.
“Last stop,” said Gino, turning back from the window.
John stubbed his cigarette in the can he’d wired to the wheelchair’s arm then lit another. Then Larry lit one and Gino went to work on his pipe, reaming the bowl. It was close to midnight, and the beds Kelly had stripped and cleaned, then made again, were waiting out in the ward for them, but there’d be no sleep yet for a while.
Carolyn padded into the room on her rubber-soled shoes, then stood with her hands on her hips and smiled at the four of them. She wore a starched white dress and her blond hair was pulled back and tied in a ponytail, and the skirt of her dress appeared flat in the moonlight, like a dress on a paper doll, her slim legs thickened in white cotton stockings, pure as the moon.
“You’re a vision of loveliness,” John said, the words belched up from his chest, then formed into careful and round articulation in his mouth.
She smiled, then looked at each of them in anticipation.
“Everything’s okay,” Frank said. “Kelly’s got us in good order.”
She nodded, then turned and headed behind the screen at the room’s end, and they could hear whispers of fabric as she pulled the sheets tight, the tap of plastic on metal, a deep groan and her voice almost beyond hearing as she cooed and sighed, then lifted the glucose bag from the metal hanger and replaced it with another. She waved at them as she headed for the door, brought a finger to her lips as she passed through. Then they could hear the squeak of her sneakers, the sound receding as she passed between the rows of empty beds on her way to the small office at the ward’s end.
“Ah, youth,” said Larry.
“Only in memory,” said John.
“And that reminds me,” Frank said. “What about Chepa and afterward? Did you stay in Tampico? And Joaquín, what happened to him?”
He was putting his own story off for the savoring, getting back to the one John had told the night before. He glanced out toward the chicken light at the promontory, but it was gone now, only those planes of shadow like layers of dark cardboard in the moonlight.
“I was in Tampico once,” said Gino.
“Are you sure it wasn’t Idaho?”
“When was that exactly?” John said, ignoring Frank’s bait.
“It was … I don’t know.” Gino grinned at Larry, then took his time in tamping and lighting up his pipe. “It was aught eight, I think, or probably nine.”
John blinked at him, squinting under his thick brows.
“So you can’t really remember it, just a baby I guess,” said Larry.
“I was nineteen years old.”
“Are you crazy?” Larry said. “How old are you?”
“A hundred.”
“You’re shitting me!”
“I don’t think so.”
“I used to think I was the old guy here,” said John.
“How old are you?” Larry asked.
“Well, I was in Tampico in ’23 and I was twenty years old. What is it, ninety?”
“That seems right.”
“Then I’m eighty-seven, or eight. What month is it?”
“It’s still Winter,” Gino said. “The fifteenth of March.”
He glanced out the window as if to confirm it, and they could see the faded blotches of scar tissue at the edge of his chin, spoiling his Truman profile, and the purplish spots, like mud, on the inside of his arm as he lifted his pipe away.
“Seven, then.”
The moon had moved in from the sea and the house on the promontory had come into definition. It was an old Victorian, gingerbread in the eaves, and though it was fenced off by rambling white pickets, it had no lawn but a yard of honeysuckle and autumn olive, leafless and skeletal bushes brushing the clapboards. Gino had turned his chair and was looking out again, and Larry was watching him.
“He’s checking the wind speed or the temperature or something,” Frank said, brushing the falling hair away from his coat sleeve. He was much heavier than the others, thick through the chest and arms, but muscle was turning to fat now and wasting away, and his jowls hung in softened folds below his chin.
“He’s old enough to be my father,” John said, and the two turned to him.
“Wait a minute,” Frank said. “Thirteen?”
“That’s old enough.”
“Christ,” Larry said. “Me too. I’m only eighty-four. Would make him sixteen. In the old days, that would be plenty.”
“Gino!” Frank said, sharply, and Gino turned from the window and took the pipe from his mouth. “What is it exactly that you did?”
“Ordnance.”
“No. He means after the war. For a living,” John said.
“Trucking.”
“That rips it,” Larry said, his mustache twitching. “The old eighteen wheeler. Women in towns along the way. When did you have your first child?”
“Forty-two.”
“Nineteen forty-two. A war bride. Gino on the trail of love in the European Theater.”
“No. I was forty-two. It was 1931, I think. Around there. Between wars.”
“I had a child once,” said Frank.
“Mine was a girl,” Gino said.
“Where is she now?”
“I have absolutely no fucking idea at all.”
“My son’s dead,” said Frank. “In Korea. He was a colonel. It killed my wife.”
“I didn’t have a wife,” said Larry.
“Not a one,” said John.
“But I did have a few boyfriends.”
“The gay business again,” said Frank. “You told us that.”
“Loafers,” Gino said. “We used to say light in the loafers.”
“Did you,” Larry said.
“Well, not often, actually. There weren’t any gays in the suburbs then.”
“Not that you knew of at least,” said Larry.
“Was it good for you?” John said, lighting another cigarette, watching the match.
“It was okay. It was Salt Lake City though, and that was a crusher. But then the war came, and after that, traveling. I lived in Cleveland for a good long while, then Philadelphia finally, and it was okay.”
“What did you do?” said John, and Frank swallowed a laugh and grinned at Larry and Larry laughed. Then they all were laughing, and in a few moments they stopped.
“Metallurgy,” Larry said.
“Me too,” said Gino.
“I thought it was trucking.”
“Yes, but not driving them. I handled load logistics, routes. It was measurement, some geometry and volume, map reading. Things like that.”
“That’s not metallurgy.”
“It was steel. I-beams and such. Out of Chicago. I’d call that metal.”
“School?” John said.
“A few college courses and seminars,” said Larry. “The company paid for them. Aluminum. Then in Cleveland it was farm equipment, the manufacture of it. Then Philadelphia, and I gave everything up for the cause.”
“The gay business again,” said Gino.
“And I built houses,” Frank said. “Until I lost my shirt. Then I got into the work of moving them.”
“Like the lighthouse,” Gino said.
“Not exactly.”
“How old are you, Frank?” said Larry.
“Eighty-five.”
“You’ve got me by a year.”
They were interrupted by the squeak of Carolyn’s shoes as she stepped into the solarium, smiled at them, then went behind the screen again. They heard the pumping of the pressure cuff, the scratch of a pencil on the chart, saw her hand reach up to the tubing near the glucose bag and adjust the drip. Then she was passing toward the door again, her white stockings whispering against her inner thighs, and when she was gone Gino was smiling around his pipe stem, and winking.
“You can forget
that, you old fart,” Frank said.
“Not for a single, solitary minute,” said Gino.
“I’ll buy that,” said Larry, “though the gender could be better. What about you, John? Flying?”
“Well, yes, that, but I did other things too after a while. Mostly hydraulics, first in oil fields, then with heavy equipment.”
“We’re a regular consulting firm,” said Gino.
“But who in their right mind would hire us?”
“A man of reason,” Larry said. “But couldn’t you do something with that lighthouse?”
“Well, I think I could as a matter of fact,” said Frank. “They certainly don’t seem to know what they’re doing.”
“It’s the government,” John said. “They put it out for bids, then pick the most incompetent one. It’s written in their procedures.”
“I could do something with Carolyn,” Gino said.
“Sure. In your mind,” said Frank. “Until you forgot the words.”
“I can still see her when I think of her,” John said. “Just like yesterday. But there’s no use loving the dead, and she would be by now. She was fifteen years older than I.”
“That’s only a hundred and two,” said Gino. “Let’s not get carried away here.”
“How long were you with her?” asked Larry.
“Not long enough,” said John.
It was after the shipwreck, a month or more. A series of fall storms came through, and he was grounded, and once he’d managed to get the de Havilland back out to the house, they holed up there and got to know each other better.
At least two weeks. And Chepa cooked extravagant meals and dyed the dogs again, and John cleaned up the cockpits, rolled the runway once or twice in rain, and in the evenings they ate and drank, and one late night had a picnic by firelight up in the foothills between storms.
“Then one day a rider came down out of the hills, a boy on a large mule, and leading another mule. He sat on a saddle of a kind I’d never seen before, cloth and wicker, a large wood knot at the pommel, and he was broad browed and thick through the chest and waist, and I knew he was as much an Indian as Chepa was.
“I saw him first. He just sat on the mule, waiting, out beyond the back garden and the ruined chicken coop, where the foothills started. The empty animal was saddled too, and he’d dropped the reins, and the mule stood where the reins brushed the ground.
“Chepa went out to the boy. I waited at the cauldrons, and I saw her hand reach up and hold his thigh as he spoke to her, his face lost under the brim of his straw hat. Chepa nodded, and when she turned he turned and started back into the hills, his head down as he watched the mule’s feet stepping carefully through those fans of stones that had washed down with sand and mud in the rain. The other mule stood where he’d left it, never looking back.
“She had to go, I guess. She told me it was family and sickness, but she wouldn’t say more. She said she’d come back, in a week, maybe two. I said I’d watch out for the dogs and house. I’d stay there and wait for her.
“I watched her as she climbed up onto the mule’s back. She’d packed only a small blanket, food, and a few pieces of rough clothing in a straw basket, and I saw it hanging from the horn as she turned and waved, then turned again and headed toward the high mountains. I watched until she was out of sight. The mule stepped into a mist, and she was gone.
“Three weeks went by, and nothing. I was flying again, spending nights at the house. At times I’d hear things and think it might be her, but it wasn’t. Then it was a month, and I went to the Lluvia del Oro and talked to Ana, that woman Chepa had saved from Calaca. ‘I don’t know nothing,’ she said. She said it sweetly and with concern, and I drank with her that night, then slept with her in drunkenness in that same hotel near the square. It was the weekend, and I drank some more, and it was Monday night when I landed at the house again. I’d been gone for three days, and the dogs were hungry and yapping, and once I’d fed them I went behind the screen to the bed, tired and still a bit hungover.
“The note was there, on the pillow in a clean white envelope, below it the contract she had made with General Corzo, signed by him. She’d signed the house over to me, and there was even an official seal beside her signature. In the note she wrote of the dogs, that I could keep them, but if that were trouble she’d included the name of a man who would take them. I could find him through Ana at the Lluvia del Oro. She called me her lover boy, and she wrote some other things, and she’d drawn a careful heart at the bottom and below it just the one word, ‘Adiós.’
“There was talk in the bars of some insidious disease among some Indians in the mountains, news of an Indian uprising at a rancho in the foothills filled the papers for a week and then was gone. Every conversation seemed to mention the Huastecs, but I was of course looking for that, making up the beginnings of stories that I quickly abandoned in my desperation and sadness.
“And I was drinking a lot, and one night even found myself in Zacamixtle, a town on the edge of the city that I’d been warned away from. I was assaulted there in the street, and my money and my boots were taken, and I was cut on the arms and got this scar here on my face at that time. Then something happened, then another thing.
“I was flying back to the house to feed the dogs. It was two in the morning or so, and I was drunker than I thought, and I missed my landing, clipped one of the potted plants with my wing. The de Havilland tipped and spun, and when it came to a rocking rest I was stuck in the soft sand beyond the runway’s end. I recognized, as I dug myself out and sobered up, around dawn I think, that I was lucky. To be alive, I mean. And the next day I did the second thing, intentionally. I got hold of the man in Chepa’s note, and while I was waiting for him I cleaned the house and covered the furniture and the bed with sheets. Then the man came, in an old pickup truck, and we loaded the dogs and their gear into it. He’d thrown some dusty blankets in the bed so they could stand without slipping, and that seemed right and good to me. The dogs had faded in their colors, and Rata was almost white again. Don Lupe watched me, his snout above the tailgate, as the man pulled away.
“I never went back to the house. I took a room at the hotel and concentrated on my work, and in a week went to the Texas Oil office at the airport to talk with Joaquín.
“I remember he said, ‘Compadre, a transfer? But this is good here, the money’s good.’
“‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s Chepa.’
“‘Well, of course. I can understand that, these reminders. But are you sure?’
“‘It’s either that,’ I said, ‘or I quit.’
“‘I understand,’ he said.
“And I did quit. Joaquín took my part as he could, but they needed me there, and the bosses pushed the issue. The money was good. I was richer than I’d ever been before, or since, at that time, and they must have thought I’d back off. They refused to talk to me about it, and though for a week Joaquín was champion of my cause, my heart wasn’t in it and I told him to stop.
“We were both sad in our good-byes at the bus station, and I think Joaquín had tears in his eyes. I’d saved enough in six months to last me more than a year of good living, and I was dressed in the finely tailored leather clothes and new boots I’d bought in town the day before. I’d bought a new suitcase and a Stetson too, and Joaquín had taken me to his barber for a shave.
“‘You’re looking good,’ he said, as he shook my hand, ‘a little better than when you came. How is your corazón?’
“‘It’ll have to do,’ I said, then squeezed his hand and released it and turned and climbed up into the bus.
“There were chickens in the bus, a large hog and a couple of painted dogs and a parrot in a cage. And children were laughing and playing games with bones and cards in the aisle, their mothers bent over them in caring scolding and smiling and childish conversation. The bus was crowded, and people were standing and the windows were open, and the driver held a cat in his lap, a tiger cat. I had to bend down from where
I stood to see out the window, and I looked for Joaquín as the bus pulled out, but he was gone, and when I rose up again I felt the fingers of the man beside me on my arm and turned to him. He held out a bottle of mezcal and shook it. There was an inch or two of liquid in the bottom and the white worm. I took it and thanked him and swigged from it, then handed it back, a last matter of formality and social grace, leaving Tampico forever.”
It was after one. A curl of smoke rose up from Gino’s pipe and drifted against the windows and dissolved. He was looking out again, and Larry turned from John and watched him. Frank’s chin was on his chest, his hooded eyes on the pencil he rolled between his fingers. He’d been scratching on a yellow pad, lines and figures. A deep, muffled sigh filtered out to them through the screen at the solarium’s side, then Gino turned and took the pipe from his mouth.
“Ah, memory,” said Frank, his pencil active on the pad.
“The lighthouse?” John asked, and Frank nodded, but didn’t look up.
“What about Chepa’s house. What happened there?” It was Larry.
“I suppose it’s gone now. After all this time. I gave the contract to Joaquín, right there at the station as I was leaving. He said it was as good as any deed. I think I said for safekeeping, thinking I’d see him again sometime, but I never went back to Tampico, and I never did.”
“Wouldn’t that be a place to go!” said Gino at the window. Then Frank began.
He and his father knocked up the coop together, soaking corner posts in creosote, then sinking them and framing that and toeing the floor joists in. The floor itself was cut from warped lumber found out in the barn, and they put in a wainscotting and screening and a tin roof at a good enough angle to drain rain. His father went off in the flatbed, then came back with the wire cages and grain, and his mother watched from the porch as feathers flew and the chickens hopped into their new home. His father dug a trench and put in lights and what his mother called the chicken light on a long cord and a place to hang it near the door, and as they stood admiring their work, his mother called out, and they turned and saw the young man trudging up the rutted drive.