Tampico (James A. Michener Fiction Series)

by Olson, Toby

  Carlos

  He could see the grill of the ruined truck and the sandblasted fenders, hear the gearing and the farts of the gutted muffler, and then the cab was up beside him, shaking on the dirt street at the gate, and he saw the pyramid of cannibalized engine parts above the rails in the long bed, and then he was climbing the metal running board and reaching for the handle.

  His father was spiderlike behind the circle of the wheel, his bare arms thin and corded, and he wore a cowboy hat, and as he worked the gears and hit the pedals he leaned into the wheel and almost stood, and Carlos saw a translucent drooling at the corner of his mouth as he grinned at him, his teeth horsey under rheumy, sleep-starved eyes that blinked in sweat that flooded from his brow.

  Up out of Tamaulipas and Veracruz, back to the Rio Grande and home to pick up Carlos, they were heading northeast from Matamoros to a wrecking yard in the foothills near Nueva Rosita. There was a buzzing in the primitive cab when they got going and the biting scent of scorched oil coming in through vents and holes in the metal floor, and there was something rancid, and his father was talking, but Carlos couldn’t get his language through the grind of gearing and the engine noise, and he knew he was there for work and not fellowship, and he turned away from his father’s groggy gestures and kept his eyes on the road.

  They stopped once at a place near Anáhuac, wooden picnic tables under a greasy awning beside gas pumps, and something under thick brown gravy, carrots and corn bread, and real truckers calling out the names of destinations, Chihuahua, Juárez, Hermosillo, and Carlos watched them rise and stretch and head for their massive rigs, and others replaced them, and these looked at the two, wondering about this gringo traveling with an Indian boy, and his father couldn’t find it in himself to eat and only sipped coffee and sweated and stuck cigarettes into his mashed potatoes, then rose finally into the curse of his Mexican blood, that frustrated anger Carlos recognized as who he was, and they were out of there, and in two hours or more had dumped the parts and loaded the bed again, industrial sewing machines, bobbins and thick spools of thread for delivery to a warehouse in Valle Hermoso on the return trip home.

  They were on the road again and descending, geared down to fight the heavy load behind them, and it was late afternoon and the clouds of insects came in against them and they couldn’t see, and his father fought the gears and brought the truck to the dusty shoulder and leaned back in the pelting and said he needed some rest. His eyes were milky, his words muffled in the dirty towel he lifted and pressed to his face, and Carlos felt a humming in the seat and saw him vibrating, his hat and then his arms, and there was a certain yearning in his face when he lowered the towel and looked at him again, and Carlos knew right then that he’d be leaving.

  They were in the foothills still, but had moved down to the higher desert, and once the plague passed over they climbed down and below the shoulder and through the dry gulch and headed up the low rise among prickly pear, wildflowers and stones, to where the oak cast shadows out over an oasis of thick grass, and his father lay down in the grass and rested his head against the tree’s base, his face under his hat, and Carlos stood over him, below the branches.

  They were high enough, not far from home, and Carlos could see out over the desert plains, the dusty, earthen buildings of Matamoros, and beyond that sad clustering, the blue gulf and even a hint of whitecaps he thought, as he stepped forward squinting, then heard his father groan in sleep and turned quickly and struck his head against a low limb. He was quaking, slipping from himself, falling to a hazy ground and into a posture that was not from falling, but for sleeping, and when he awakened it was dusk and he was looking up through the skeletal figures of the oak’s branches and could see the first stars, blocked then by his father’s hat brim, and could hear the urgency, “Carlitos! Despiértate! Carlitos!” Then he was awake, and rising, his father pulling him and pointing, and he saw the flames, and it was as if the whole city of Matamoros was burning, below in the distance across the desert plains, and he felt the fire of the blow in his temple and the swelling, and he knew it was his mother burning and that his father knew that too and that he would soon be leaving, and he couldn’t look into the blue of his gringo’s eyes.

  All remnants of a recent sudden rain were gone, and he tipped the visor down against the cold sun and drove in the slow lane, thinking back to the death of Gordon Strickland as he headed for Orleans.

  The letter had been propped against the sugar bowl, a white envelope with his name written across it. Much like a letter in a story, it could have been on a mantel. There was one in the living room, holding photographs of Strickland’s parents in antique frames, snapshots of a few men standing together, hips slung in swimming suits with towels hung from shoulders and arms touching on a sandy beach, one of a woman in a broad, theatrical hat, her face unrecognizable in shadow under the brim.

  It was seven-thirty when he found it, having slept through Strickland’s leaving. A suicide letter, nothing less, and Carlos had read it with great care, then read it again, and though it was that, it held no despair, but a certain reasoning and a plan for the future. Yet it need not have been written, and before he took it to the sink and burned it, he read it once again.

  It was the AIDS and a certain insurance policy. Strickland wrote that he was failing now and the policy had a rider that wouldn’t cover that. But it would cover accident, and the beneficiary was the hospice movement, in the name of a certain man involved with him in that, a Larry Paradise, and there would be no note for him, but he would see to the use of the money properly. He’d sold most everything of value now, and he’d no longer be going to Boston with his New England materials.

  There was two thousand dollars in the envelope, wrapped in a sleeve of paper with his name and the words severance pay written across it, and Carlos folded the money neatly and put it in his pocket. Then he drank his coffee and sat at the table and looked out the salt-stained windows. Sparrows danced on the deck rail, and when they left he got up and filled his cup again, then went to his basement room and dressed himself. He worked around the house for the next four days. There was cleaning to be done, tile work in the shower in one of the bathrooms, and in the evenings, when the work was done, he listened to Ives and to pieces by other composers. He went to bed early. The phone rang a few times, but he didn’t answer it, just left the calls to the machine. Then Peter Blue arrived and said the words and Gordon Strickland’s death became actual, and Carlos swallowed up that relationship and the contents of the letter too.

  He’d called from Peter’s house before leaving.

  “Still completely out,” Charlie said.

  “What are the doctors saying?”

  “What they’ve been saying. Pneumonia. The fever at least. They say it’s too soon for HIV symptoms, so it isn’t that.”

  “Not even delirium?”

  “No. Nothing. It was the fact he cracked his head. Falling, you know? That’s what Paradise said. He heard it. Quite a whack I guess. The doctors say that too. Are you coming back?”

  “Not just yet,” Carlos said.

  “Well, that’s okay. There’s plenty of us here. He doesn’t seem in any real danger. They’ve done tests. Nothing severe. Concussion they think.”

  Carlos wondered if Peter was dreaming, in the way he had, just a week ago in the solarium.

  Someone had the locks changed, and he’d had to go round to the deck and crawl under it to a basement window for a way in. There were boats out on the bay, April sailors, and the cold breeze blew in and he could hear hints of voices. Then the wind turned and they were gone and he was down on his knees and moving among the pilings into sandy dampness.

  The shades were drawn, and it was dark in the living room, and when he flicked the light there was nothing, and he’d had to return to the basement again to throw the master switch. The furniture was covered with white sheets, but the top of the oak desk was as Strickland had left it, papers and medical pamphlets and a ceramic bowl holding pens and
rubber bands at the corner, and he could imagine him sitting there in the twilight working, and he touched the warm wood of the surface as he fished in the bottom drawer for the flashlight, then opened the upper drawers, one of which had not been closed tight again, and saw evidence of the search in the mild disorder, clips spilled from the shallow tray, a curling at a paper’s edge.

  The air was musty, and he couldn’t hear the wash on the bay’s shore at all through the closed windows, and he went to a window and raised it and felt the breeze come in against his chest and flow past him, clearing the staleness. Then he closed the window again and headed down the hallway to the library.

  Things were pretty much as he’d left them, though the floor lamp had been moved and books and journals had been taken down from the shelves. They rested on the floor and in the chair. An abandoned search, he thought. No documents here. He checked the tape deck; the Ives was still there.

  He stuffed the flashlight in his pocket, then went to the center of the case and pushed the books to the side, enough so he could get his hand in at the corner of the shelf. His fingers found the indentation and the peg, an eighthinch of thin doweling protruding just a little from the hole he’d bored for it. He pushed it in until he heard the faint click of the disengaging latch. Then he pulled at the bookcase edge and it moved away from the wall on its hinges, like a door, and he stepped around behind it and fished the flashlight from his pocket and sent the beam into the opening.

  It was a small and narrow opening, no more than two feet high and one wide, a doorway into the back of a closet in the room beyond, where he’d built the false wall, to be a temporary hiding place for those valuable documents that passed through. Some were missing now, and he had a copy of the lists, but the beam showed nothing at the mouth, and he got down on his knees and turned and edged his shoulders into the space, then crooked his wrist and shone the flashlight to the left and craned his neck and looked there, nothing but a bent nail shining in the beam’s circle on the hard wood, a few blond curls of pine shavings. He edged back out of the tight opening and turned the other way and shuffled ahead on his knees to look in again, the beam sliding to the right, and then his head jerked back and cracked against the lintel at the top and his eyes phased out of focus and then came back again, and he was looking into the teeth and vacant eyes of another face, no more than inches from his own.

  It was the skull face of a real human skull, upon a black pedestal, and its grin was particular beyond the common, and the light shone in the U of gold at the right incisor and upon the lightning crack near the suture at its temple, but it couldn’t reach beyond the protruding shine of the orbits, and it seemed the eyes might be there, deep in those black wells, and that he might touch their gelatinous pupils with his fingertips as he reached into the sockets. He found the skull lighter than he thought he might, and lifted it on extended fingers and set it carefully to the side, where it seemed to watch him like some perfectly objective witness as he reached across its stolid grin and back behind it for the small cardboard box.

  He took the skull along, its empty gaze looking up from under his arm, and placed it at the end of Strickland’s desk below the photographs on the mantel. Then he stacked the papers and pamphlets to the side and took the lists from his pocket and lifted the glassine envelopes from the cardboard box, and in the dim and dusty light of the table lamp, surrounded by the ghostly shapes of covered furniture, the skull looking at him, he came upon his own name on the official deed and another name above it, one he didn’t recognize, that it negated. The date beside that name was 1920, and to the side of his name 1961 had been penned in. He’d been fourteen years old then and his father had left, and he too was getting ready to leave Mexico. There were small seals and what he took to be notary stamp impressions beside each name. The document was laced with a faded red ribbon and was written out in a formal old Spanish and was sealed with a wax emblem, the figure of a stone cathedral and a man on horseback recognizable as Obregón.

  Gino

  Larry shuffled the deck of cards. He was in his robe and slippers and wearing a beaded cap, and his brows were falling, fine filaments upon his lids and cheeks and drifting to the table, and he was blinking. Gino sat at the window, his arm resting on a folded towel on the radiator, and John was tamping a cigarette against the can wired to his wheelchair. Shadows of early evening fell across their legs, and Gino turned in the shadows and looked out into the meadow, then turned back again.

  “This Peter Blue guy,” said John.

  “That’s right,” said Larry. “He just fell down on the floor, right in front of me. A good crack on the head. But it’s more the other one’s the corker.”

  “The little guy,” said Gino, tamping his pipe again.

  “Just about your size,” said Frank. “I’d call that little.”

  But Gino didn’t respond, and Frank looked blankly at the others.

  “Not much of a chance to talk to him,” said Larry. “Just briefly.”

  “One crazy coincidence,” said John.

  “Then there’s Kelly.”

  It was Gino, his words muffled around the stem and left behind him as he turned away. He could see the house clearly, now that the rain was gone. The evening sun lit up the meadow as it sunk, and for a few moments there was a line of red like fire along the metal gutters. Then the sun fell down completely in the west, and the lights blinked at the barricades.

  “What’s going on?” Frank said.

  “I don’t know. A timer? Maybe they’re light sensitive.”

  “Is there anyone out there?”

  “No. They won’t be,” Gino said. “Not at night.”

  He could see the metal horses on the meadow road, skeletons of the wooden ones bathed in a sick yellow glow across the gravel drive a hundred feet beyond the porch. There were no lights in the house, and it was drifting toward those layers of silhouette as the moon came up beyond it over the sea.

  “The moon,” Gino said.

  “The fucking moon,” said Larry, blinking the hair away.

  Then they heard a coughing in the distance and the rattle of the metal cart.

  “Early a-fucking-gain,” said Frank. “He just can’t seem to get it right.”

  Then John was turning in his wheelchair, and Larry lowered the cards, and they all watched Mark roll in the dinner cart and stand aside as steam billowed from the open doors. He was thin and blond, his white slacks and jumper stiffly pressed in the way Carolyn did her dress, and he looked like Carolyn and smiled at them, benignly, in the same way.

  The trays were passed, and John stubbed out his cigarette in his can, and Mark pushed the cart to the room’s side and left, his shoes squeaking like Carolyn’s, the sound fading as he headed down the ward.

  “Don’t he look like Carolyn,” Larry said, working at a piece of chicken.

  “He ain’t Kelly though,” said Frank. “Too early with the fucking food.”

  “How long?” John said. He’d pushed the chicken to the side and was rolling the carrots around, looking for the good ones.

  “Two weeks,” said Gino, without hesitation.

  “How the fuck do you know?” Frank said.

  “Carolyn. We had a little talk.”

  “It was a surprise to me,” said Larry.

  “And that’s not all you missed,” said Frank.

  “What else?”

  “They’re showing the fucking place.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “And they weren’t pleased at our behavior,” John said.

  “We drove the fuckers off,” said Gino. “A few young punks in suits.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “Filthy language.”

  “Can you imagine the gall?” Frank said. “Trying to sell it in our face like that? The promise of a closing when the old bastards are dead?”

  “A comment upon the business of medicine, ethics of the culture,” Gino said. “I thought it was interesting.”

  The govern
ment had come, a man in uniform and two in suits, and Gino had seen them talking to Kelly out on the ambulance dock. He spoke to Carolyn that night, and she told him Kelly was going on vacation, and the next evening Mark was there. They knew little else, but they had seen the barricades go up, and Gino had been watching closely ever since and growing a little moody.