Tampico (James A. Michener Fiction Series)

by Olson, Toby

  “No. I didn’t do that. I don’t think there was one.”

  “No hospital?”

  “I was with my father then and we were working.”

  “Well I don’t know what to say. I’d like to run a few tests though. Just a few more days.”

  “What for exactly?”

  “Well, to find out, you know. To get a proper diagnosis.”

  “Am I okay now?”

  “Yes, yes, I think so. But you were unconscious for a week you know. Can you remember how it happened?”

  “Well, you know,” Carlos said, smiling at him and using his phrasing. “Once I was there, and then I wasn’t.”

  “Well,” the doctor said. “I don’t know what to say then. We could run those tests. Maybe we could learn something.”

  Empresa descabellada, thought Carlos. Then he looked down at his hands again and moved them from his lap.

  The attendants were lifting the body into the ambulance when he left the Manor, the sheet tapping at the gurney’s sides in gusts of wind, and Carlos felt the hair flick at his ears and he touched his cap brim to the dead and nodded as he passed by, then headed across the gravel parking lot to Peter’s car. He could see the old house above it in a growing darkness on the hill, and across the meadow to the right was the lighthouse. A few cars were gathered near the base, official seals on the sides of some of them. Thick clouds rolled in from the sea, and he felt a spit of rain on his arm as he climbed in, speaking even before the door was closed.

  “Did you ever wear something white?”

  He removed his save the lighthouse cap and snugged it over his knee, the bill pointing down his shin, then turned in the seat as Peter got the car going and headed beyond the gravel to the narrow road that would take them to the highway and into Provincetown. The blacktop was cracked and there were places where slabs tilted up and roots pushed through, as if the product of some earthquake, and Peter drove slowly, the car’s wheels in bearberry at the shoulder, avoiding potholes. It was raining and the wipers smeared the windshield, and Peter had to use the washer to clear it.

  “You mean when I came to see you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “No. I don’t have clothing of that kind. A white shirt maybe.”

  “Then I guess it was a dream. Or some attendant.”

  They reached the highway and had to sit there and wait for a break in the slow winter traffic. The rain rose into mist and the wheels of the passing cars sprayed clouds of wash that drifted over them, and Peter cranked the wipers up to a higher speed. Then there was a space, and he edged out into the flow. Fog had joined the rain now, moving in from the sea, and the traffic slowed and headlights blinked on. He drove near the shoulder, and once they’d reached the edge of Pilgrim Lake he glanced over at Carlos.

  “You look okay to me. Maybe a little drawn, green at the gills. What did the doctor say?”

  “He said I was okay now, but he didn’t know what it was. Why I was under for so long.”

  “Do you?” Peter asked. “Can you remember it?”

  “Well, you know, I was watching the shoring at that time, and that was it.”

  His fingers moved on the khaki at his thighs. He was looking through the windshield into fog, and Peter could see that ancient profile in shadow in the dash lights. It was only four o’clock, but the rain and fog had turned the car interior into dusk.

  “Yeah?” Peter said.

  “Well they’ve got the thing jacked up pretty high now you know, and there are lights down under it. They’re wanting to dig away at the sides of the hole to test the firmness, and there was a hassle with the Coast Guard officials. They’re hanging around there, giving the contractor what trouble they can. And the national government guys are there too. They keep stopping and arguing. They’ve got a little layered city under there, levels and chalk lines, that kind of thing. But I guess that was a week ago at this time and it might have changed.”

  “It has,” Peter said. “They’ve put a stop to everything now, even the shoring.”

  “Is that right?” Carlos asked.

  “Could you see clear enough?”

  “Oh, indeed, quite good enough. The fence ain’t far at all.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know. A creak I think. They say it was a good size piece of wood, from the scaffolding. I think I saw it turning, after the creaking. When I looked up, you know? And that’s when I was falling.”

  “And a damn good thing there were people there.”

  “Right. I was at the fence, and there was a crowd behind me. They must have caught me.”

  “That’s what the guy with the truck said.”

  “You spoke to him.”

  “Yeah, he called me. I was over there in a half hour or so. To the Manor, I mean.”

  “I don’t know,” Carlos said.

  “Do you feel okay?”

  “Good enough for me, I guess. Some little pain in the head is all. It may have knocked some sense in. I hope so.”

  They passed beyond the lake, and the highway divided and narrowed a little and headed into the dunes. Sand had blown across the road in places and they saw the red taillights on the cars ahead, and Peter touched the brakes and they slowed down to a crawl. The rain had let up and turned to a cold drizzle, but the wind had stiffened and it rocked the car and blew the thinning fog in waves across the windshield. Neither of them said anything for a while, then Peter did.

  “Charlie called. Just yesterday. About Strickland.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Carlos turned from the window as he spoke.

  “That’s right,” Peter said.

  “After all this time? I thought it was over.” His fingers stroked his thighs. “What did he say?”

  “Something about a list. Strickland’s papers. Seems there are missing ones.”

  “He’ll be coming down then?”

  “No, not that. There’s no reason. The house in Orleans has been gone through. It’ll be on the market soon. It’s us. We’re going to Philadelphia.”

  “Why me?” Carlos asked.

  “If you’re up to it. Why not? A little trip. Something to do.”

  Peter

  I learned I was HIV positive on the fourteenth of November, and it was later that same day I received my first call as a private citizen detective. There was a breath of silence on the phone, and I watched the drops fall from my arm, stain the white pad and bead on the red porcelain, then repeated the odd-sounding words again: “Peter Blue Investigations.”

  I was sitting naked in the kitchen, which was not my office. That was down the hall in what used to be Sara’s sewing room before she left me but the phone wasn’t hooked up yet. We’d worked out a settlement for the places in Provincetown. Proceeds from the sale of the Spice Shop on Commercial Street had gone to her and I’d kept the house. The phone rang as I stepped out of the shower. Winter was coming and the metal chair back was cold and I leaned away from it, a green towel over my shoulder. It was three o’clock, and the sun was already sinking.

  “Excuse me. I wonder if you can help me.”

  His voice had gravel in it, a cold or a smoker’s rasp, and I couldn’t get his age or a sense of his attitude, not yet.

  “We could start out with a name,” I said, then waited while he coughed.

  About the HIV. I’m not gay, or at least I don’t think I am, but I was drunk and lost in drugs and can only place the situation vaguely. I know the woman is extremely thin, her robe parting to reveal her skeletal body as she comes out of the bathroom. Her hair is long, not too recently blond and blood dark at the roots, and I’m touching her small breasts, her nipples, and she’s watching the naked man beside me on the bed, and when I look over there and down I see the needle in my arm and the hose, and then I’m falling back.

  I know it’s Boston and the Combat Zone, and I know it’s after Beth Charters’s death. I was with the police then and was investigating her rape and falling in love with her. T
hen Sara left me and Beth was dead, and it was only the help of her father Charlie, a milkman and a singer, that brought me back. We got Beth’s killer in a while, and then I could visit her grave at the cemetery in Truro.

  The fresh mound was anonymous, but it had rained, and the white petunias in clay pots circling her head had drooped inward on their stems to form a kind of flowered parasol, or a hat, against the late October sun, and someone, Charlie I guess, had placed oyster shells and pearled beach stones at her feet. This had been a year before, and though I’d been to the cemetery on occasion since, it had been a good long while since I was there.

  His name was Gordon Strickland, and he’d gotten my name through Warren at the station, and the job seemed an easy enough one. He had some rare documents, he said, a collection of things, and he’d made arrangements to sell them to a dealer in Boston. It was the insurance, a legal matter. I’d be along officially for security. I told him I was licensed, though he didn’t ask. We’d drive to the city together, deliver the stuff, then return the same evening. We’d be going in eight days, on the last Wednesday of the month.

  “It’s four hundred a day,” I said. “Plus expenses.”

  “There aren’t any.”

  “Well, there’s gas,” I said, wanting the foolish words back even as I spoke them.

  “To Orleans? It’s no more than twenty miles. Is it done this way?”

  “No. Of course not. You’re right. Just the four hundred.”

  I hung up and scribbled some figures under his name and number. It was cold in the kitchen and I was shivering. My first case, and already I’d be eating a few dollars of gas money. I felt cheated, unprofessional.

  I got to Amy Minten’s office early, around ten to five, and was just settling into the vinyl sofa in the empty waiting room when she came out the door. She was dressed as usual, thin cotton slacks and tennis shoes and a loose green smock, her beautiful blond hair pulled back severely into a ponytail. She wore no makeup at all, but her serious enthusiasm for her work lit up her face as always.

  “Oh,” she said. “You’re early. Come on in.”

  She sat across from me, fingering through the file, and I could see the diplomas, both her husband’s and her own, in cheap frames on the wall behind her head. I was reading them, squinting to get the small print, and when she looked up she saw me doing it.

  “Hey,” she said. “Can you relax a little? You’re wired.”

  I looked into her face, her clear eyes, and realized it was true. The shower at three o’clock in the afternoon, the job, and since her call at nine in the morning I’d been roaming around the house, straightening things, cleaning, and now I was sitting still and there was nothing to do. She told me to take a few deep breaths, and I did that. Then she asked me if I was okay, could I listen, and I said I could.

  “Well, then,” she said. “Are you gay?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. I think it was a dirty needle.”

  Her eyes blinked. “Do you do that?” she said. “I wouldn’t have thought so.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “It was a binge, I guess, about a year ago.”

  “That Charters matter?”

  I remembered then that she’d been involved in it and had made an important diagnosis. She’d been Sara’s doctor as well as mine and must have heard of the rest there. Unless I’d told her myself. She was an easy person to confide in. Absolutely no nonsense at all, absolutely accepting.

  “Yes. That was the time of it,” I said.

  “Well, it’s confirmed now, just as I told you on the phone. There’s no question about it, and you’ll have to be clear about that. Your T-cell count is fine, and I couldn’t find anything else to worry about. But it’s very early. Do you have any symptoms of any kind?”

  “No,” I said. “There’s nothing. But I was wondering, to be exact about it?”

  She didn’t hesitate.

  “Eight to eleven years, on the average. Fifteen at the outside, though there are exceptions, under 20 percent. And that’s from the time of infection.”

  She loaded me up with pamphlets, even a few books, and a scratch sheet of her own devising. She’d had plenty of occasion to deal with HIV, and AIDS too, here in Provincetown, and once she’d penciled in a monthly appointment on her calendar, she told me it was bound to come down upon me before long, not infection, but the facts of the situation.

  She knew a support group wouldn’t be the right thing for me, not in this town, given my past on the force, and she doubted that a psychiatrist would help, though she gave me the name and number of one.

  “But you can talk to me,” she said, “Whenever. Don’t think twice,” and when we reached the outer door she touched my shoulder, then leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. “Hey,” she said, “I’m sorry,” and I knew she was watching me as I shuffled down the dark pathway to my car.

  It was three days later that Warren called about Strickland. I was in the sewing room with the phone man, watching him twist wires at the jack, his unit cupped in his shoulder at his ear.

  “You’ve got one,” he said, though there was no ringing. “In the kitchen.”

  Warren and I had worked together on the force for many years. It was an intimate circumstance in Provincetown, just a dozen of us, plus summer cops, and we’d become good friends, both at work and away from it. We fished when we had the time, and Warren had seen me through the death of Beth Charters and the divorce, and once my mother died in Florida, leaving me just enough to pay bills for a year, and I’d quit the force to set up shop for myself, he said he’d keep his eyes open for clients, and it was through Warren I’d gotten the first one.

  “Too bad,” he said. “But it’s worse for him.”

  The phone was on the wall beside the sink, and I saw the egg-encrusted breakfast plate, just the one, and turned away from it. The curtains lifted and parted in a breeze at the open window, the grey day visible beyond. It had rained steadily, all morning until noon, then humid air had settled in, too heavy for the breeze to blow it out, and my shirt stuck at my collar, neck cold and clammy when I turned my head.

  “When?” I said.

  “At six-o-three this morning. He had clearance for Philadelphia.”

  “He had his own plane?”

  “Right. A new Cessna. They’re checking that now. The FAA.”

  “How bad was it?”

  “Not really too bad at all. He was off the end, they said. Then he just glided down to the beach. But then there was the fire. We only got his name, routinely, a few minutes ago. The chief’s been out there all morning.”

  “Are you going?”

  “You bet,” he said. “Right now.”

  “I’ll meet you,” I said.

  A white gull sat on the Cessna’s wing at the waterline. The tide had swelled to full, and the wash rode under the wing and came up over the plane’s bullet nose imbedded in the sand and left foam on the blue metal, like soap suds, in its receding. The prop was gone, or the gull might have sat there, and I saw it dip its head, then rise to its webbed feet as the tern came out of the clouds where the sun would be and clipped it and shot away. Then another came in low over the sand, and the gull opened its wings and jumped off the metal and drifted out to sea. A man stood at the top of an awkward ladder in the sand, reaching to get the leather sling around the high tail. He wore somebody else’s hat, a ludicrous straw sombrero too big for him, and the terns’ wings struck the edges as they dove, rocking and tilting it, until it was on the bridge of his nose and he had to grab the tail and drop the sling and knock the brim back up so he could see again.

  “It’s a nesting area.”

  Warren was beside me in a green slicker. We were back in the hummocks in beach grass. I’d asked him in the parking lot if he thought it might rain again and he said they called for it. I was wearing a light jacket only, but I’d put on a cotton sweatshirt under it. We’d driven down the single runway to the end. All the cars were parked there, and the yellow tow truc
k had backed up to the edge. Then we trudged through the low dunes the few hundred yards to the beach. They’d staked out the crash path, a rectangle of yellow plastic police ribbon open at the ocean end, and as we made our way around it I saw the impacted sand and torn shrubs where the plane had bounced, then, at the beach, the almost perfect trough where it had hit again and skidded to a stop. Warren touched my arm and we stepped through bearberry and dusty miller and headed off to the side for a better view. A man had crossed the beach to hold the ladder, and the terns were coming at him from the sea. He’d raised his shoulders and lowered his head to a rung, and I saw his elbows flapping, trying to ward them off.

  “They like to come in out of the sun,” Warren said. “And even though it’s cloudy they’re doing that. You’re blinded then, and they can get your eyes that way, something vulnerable you know?”

  “They do seem plenty pissed,” I said.

  “Wouldn’t you be? It’s a whole fucking city disrupted there. This is war!”

  We moved off for a few more yards, then turned and saw the Cessna’s side. It looked virginal, untouched by the crash, but for the blackened cockpit and the smoke flames on the hull behind it that seemed painted over the blue metal. The windows were opaque with soot, the plastic rippled from heat, and through the open cockpit door I could see only the outlines of the seats and instrument panel. The space was like a film negative, everything reduced to a common blackness.

  “Where did they take him?” I said.

  “To Boston. What was left of him.”

  “Jesus. What a way to go.”

  “I don’t know,” Warren said, and I realized I didn’t either. Maybe quick is better.

  Back in the parking lot, we talked things over. We were standing at my car and over the hood and across the lot I could see the SAVE THE LIGHTHOUSE kiosk, a small trailer, its hitch supported on a cinder block. T-shirts blew on hangers in the breeze and card tables held stacks of coffee mugs and other paraphernalia, all embossed with the logo, a figure of the lighthouse and the keeper’s shack and the words printed below. A woman moved between the tables, securing calendars and postcards with beach rocks. The wind gusted and a T-shirt swelled as if it held a body, then lifted in the air, and I saw the woman reach up and deflate it and twist the hanger tight around the rod. I had an urge to tell Warren about the HIV, my new circumstance, but I didn’t.