Tampico (James A. Michener Fiction Series)

by Olson, Toby

  The spot of yellow was a dog, but I could only recognize that in her gait once she had left the meadow and slanted to the roadway, then trotted up in front of the limousine to reach the barricades ahead of it. A very small dog, and she walked right under the wooden sawhorses and headed toward the porch without hesitation, and by the time she had reached the first tilted step I had pulled the screen open and was standing in the doorway holding the rifle and looking down at her.

  The dog looked up at me, a Chihuahua dyed yellow, identical to the one that had tapped on my knee in that agora in Tampico years ago, and I felt myself tilting more than was necessary in the twisted doorway and had to reach out for the frame with my free hand to steady myself, though the dog seemed to take nothing from this possible cue and just stared up at me, her head cocked to the side, eyes full of expectancy and resolve. Then she climbed up the porch stairs, slowly, and once she had reached me and had looked up my leg and into my face again, she rose on her hind legs and placed her paws on my shin, then stretched her body, bowing her back and yawning, then kicked gently away, turning, and came down to the sill beside me, facing out to the drive as I was, one forepaw planted on the toe of my tennis shoe, and when I looked up from her and out toward the barricades again I saw the man I’d been interested in, months ago, in the solarium.

  Arthur stood at the limousine’s open door, and I saw him touch his hat brim and saw Gino at the fender on the other side, grinning at me, as the other passenger stepped between the horses of the barricade and started up the drive. The breeze had died completely, and the sun was coming up over the far rise where the meadow met the escarpment that fell down to the sea, but it was a soft sun and I was not blinded and could see the buttons on his linen shirt and the edge of the thick knot of ebony hair, and might have seen all of it had he turned his head.

  He didn’t turn his head, though he lowered it from time to time to watch his footing in the stones, and when he raised it again his brow was broad in shadow as I remembered it, looking down at him in his bed, and I was nervous in the doorway, wondering about the reason for his coming, though when he reached the bottom step and then looked up and spoke to me I found there was no reason for concern.

  He offered me the job and housing too, right there, and I accepted it, and though he gave me time, I didn’t want any, and when I felt that early warning derealization creeping up in me at the prospect of the open meadow and my passage, I looked out at Arthur at the car door and knew he would be back for me and that he’d pull the shades.

  Carlos Ébano was half turned in his leaving when I felt the absence of the dog’s paw on my foot, and he paused there for a moment, waiting for the bright yellow animal to skip down and join him in the stones. Leaves had blown across the porch steps in the early wind, oak leaves, a little wet and glistening still from the rain, and when I looked up from them and saw his posture I thought of the last leaving of my lost lover, so far in the past. I’d wished it a posture of hesitancy and indecision, but I knew then it had been no more than a final sighting of what had been put behind out of complete resolve and recognition of the impossibility of relationship with someone such as I, with my malady, which was itself impossible. This one though was leaving only temporarily, and I’d be following, and would soon see him again. I looked up at Arthur then and thought he was smiling. Then I watched the man, the dog prancing before him, as he headed back toward the barricades and the limousine, and before he got there I had turned and entered my ruined house for the last time.

  Peter

  When someone called at the house those days, there was a ring in Sara’s sewing room, my half-finished office. I’d been sitting in there a lot, working on the civil service examination, and just that morning it was Warren, phoning to buck me up.

  “You’ll do okay,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

  And he was right, nothing but a little embarrassment and chagrin, but thoughts of freedom also from the private life. Soon the tourists would be gone and the summer cops too, and if the promised vacancy held up and the exam went well, I’d be on the force again by fall, and I could edge back into the job and forget my civilian failures.

  It was raining earlier, a soft August rain, and I was working on Miranda and those odd situations when it’s difficult to give it, a dry run through a series of multiple-choice questions in the prep book, and I remembered it was raining too when I woke from that coma in Philadelphia to find Charlie standing over me at the bedside. He was smiling, then he was speaking, having to repeat himself to get the words down into the last fading of my delirium. “It isn’t the AIDS,” he said. “Not yet.”

  I’d been out for more than a week, and it took me a few days to get my legs again when I awakened and another few before I was able to fly back to Provincetown, where I went the very next morning to see Doctor Minten, who gave me a clean bill of health and her usual warning. “You’re still HIV positive. That doesn’t change.”

  “Just a good hard whack dentro de la cabeza,“ Carlos said, the next time I saw him. He was dressed in rich casual clothing, an indulgence I hadn’t expected, linen shirt and tooled leather cowboy boots and a fine, recently brushed fedora he’d bought for himself in Tampico. He’d called as soon as he and the men got back to the Manor, but he’d been busy and so had I, and it had been a while before he’d come to the house for drinks and a good long talk in the evening. He placed his hat carefully on a chair, and we sat with our elbows on the bare porcelain, the same kitchen table at which we’d eaten our Thanksgiving dinner more than a year ago.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “How did she know enough to find you?”

  “She didn’t. She’d gotten a call from that guy at the records office, telling her John and I had been there and that I was headed out to the house for the survey. Then she sent Alma down with the horses.”

  “She had a phone?”

  “Oh, hell yes, a cellular. She had a gas generator too, at that glass house. A TV and a radio, a very comfortable setup. It was hard to pull John away from there. He’ll be going back pretty soon in fact, my grandfather.”

  “Christ,” I said. “But the house. How in the hell did she get the materials up there, get it built?”

  “Well, you see it was a little theatrical, the whole thing. Maybe even a hoax, if you don’t think kindly. There’s a good sized village, a town really, just over the hill from there. Paved streets and a good road in. Department stores, markets, lumberyards, you name it. It’s only a quarter mile away. Some of that light, moonlight, the torches and all? A good deal of that was electrical, flooding into the sky from there.”

  There was nothing much to be said about that, so I let it settle and tried something else.

  “And why didn’t she leave the place to your father? The house in Tampico, I mean.”

  “That’s a whole other story,” he said. “The village was decimated by disease, and when she found out she was pregnant and then had him, she put him out for adoption, both because of the disease and his gringo blood. Then I was born and was an Indian, and she knew about that and took my grandfather’s name off the document. He was gone, you see, she thought permanently, maybe even dead, and it was after my mother died and my father left for the States, just a brief period when I was alone there. And it seemed right to her. Then, of course, I was gone too. There was no reason to change anything after that. She had her position in the village, what was left of it then, and she just went on with her life.”

  “Did she every marry?”

  “No. She became a public person, a kind of matriarch. Most of the men her age had died, and she took charge of the younger men and women. She kept busy with their economy, in touch with Joaquín Sánchez on the legal-political side of things. It’s a wonder the village lasted at all. But she managed it, and it did.”

  “Such a simple story,” I said, laughing lightly, knowing it was only the bones of the matrix.

  “Yeah. But in the spaces,” Carlos said. “That’s where the real thing g
ot played out.”

  Renovations at the Manor were finished in the second week of September, and I received my formal invitation to the open house and lawn party on the Monday before the Saturday of the event. Carlos had called earlier with the date, on the very day I received notice that I’d passed the civil service examination and had heard from the chief that I was reinstated and could start work on the first of October.

  They’d repaired the rutted road that ran in from the highway, and when I reached the last rise and entered the stone parking area I could see balloons bobbing at the railing of the wheelchair ramp leading up to the ambulance dock. Carlos was there, in the doorway in his fedora and a white summer suit, and I saw him touch his brim, then wave, as I pulled in beside the other cars, two with MD plates, Cadillacs, and a half dozen more modest vehicles lined up to the side of them. I saw the pickup truck with the PAL sticker on the back window, and knew Warren was already there.

  I’d been in the Manor only once, years ago when I’d been called there officially about some disturbance or other, and I didn’t remember the layout of the place, but once Carlos had handed me a glass of champagne and I’d followed him in and across the short hallway and into the small doctor’s office, I thought I remembered being there. It was still a doctor’s office, though they’d replaced the asphalt tile with hardwood, and where diplomas had hung behind the desk was now a large painting of the lighthouse at the cliff’s edge, and I recognized the work of a local artist. There was a glass instrument cabinet against the wall, gussied up with a Mexican serape that hung down into fringe at the cabinet’s sides, and Carlos told me it was the best they could do. The room was for the on-call doctors, when they came to see the one remaining patient, and they thought they’d continue to leave it this way, even after he was gone. “For the rest of us,” he said, “if necessary.”

  Once we had left the room and stepped down the hallway, I could hear voices that grew clearer when we made the turn into a broader hallway and were heading for what had been the Manor’s central spine.

  “The place is shaped like a cross,” Carlos said. “The long part’s the solarium and ward, with the nurse’s station, bathroom, storage closets, and a kitchen at the end. Well, they were that, but we’ve made changes, added another crossbeam and a few rooms.”

  He was whispering, though there seemed no reason for it, leaning close to my shoulder, and the wine sloshed in my glass as he brushed against me. Then we reached the small foyer at the building’s center, open doorways to the left and right, and when we turned into what had been the solarium, I saw the profile of Erica Plummer as she looked out the row of windows and down into the meadow beyond. A heavy, old man stood at her side, the face of a bulldog when he heard us and turned around, and I soon found out he was her father-in-law, a man named Frank. Erica had heard us and turned too, smiling, and she came across the room to join us, reaching up to kiss me on the cheek. She looked fine. The frosting on her hair was gone, as well as the heavy makeup, and she wore a flowery summer dress, light and loose, that allowed for a freedom of movement that was evident in her quick steps and broad gestures.

  “That’s where I lay,” Carlos said, pointing to the room’s side, but I could see no evidence of a place for him. The space was decked out as a kind of game room or lounge, hardwood tables, one with a chessboard set into its laminated surface, another holding a carousel of poker chips and decks of cards. The chairs were soft recliners, end tables beside them, and a refrigerator and sink and bar, all in a dull, brushed stainless steel, lined the wall where Carlos had pointed. The room had been painted in a warm, dusty grey, and the window frames were bright white, announcing the view, and a couch had been placed before the windows, and there were bowls of dips and chips on the new ledge that covered the cold radiators below the frames.

  “You had to see it before,” Frank said, as we shook hands. Then I saw him take Erica’s hand, and she smiled up at me.

  “We live here now!” she said.

  Her face held the pleasure of a teenager, and I thought at least I’d done something right as a private citizen detective, though I knew I’d had only a small part in her redemption, and that just at the very start of it.

  “You’ll see,” she said. “Everything’s open today.”

  I could see out the window beyond them, the play of wind in the yellow canopy tent near the meadow’s edge, tables under it and a few people standing and talking beside them. I saw men in white uniforms, carrying platters heavy with food, and a photographer in strange clothing working at his tripod, out under the sun to the tent’s side. Carlos touched me on the arm then, and we turned, and the four of us left the room and headed through the doorway and into what had been the open ward.

  It was still open, a long graceful rectangle, but there were no beds now and what had been a low ceiling had been cut away to show the freshly sanded beams that rose in the cathedral space. Couches and easy chairs rested in various arrangements, and there were rich oriental carpets in the spaces between them, and at the end of the room a large stone fireplace had been constructed, a heavy brass fender and a peacock screen on the brick apron before it. The room had the feel of a hunting lodge or a common room in some hotel. There was even ash wainscotting along the walls, a dozen or more tall brass urns holding cattails and thin, feathery reeds.

  “It’s a little weird,” Carlos said, and Frank laughed and said, “a community effort,” and Erica laughed too and said, “but we like it.”

  “That’s Carolyn, and the suits are two of the asshole doctors,” Frank said, almost loud enough for them to hear.

  “Easy,” Carlos said, and Erica laughed uncertainly, and when I looked over at her I saw she was blushing.

  The men were small and soft, both balding prematurely, and the woman in the crisp white A-line was at least a head taller than both of them. They were standing beside the fireplace, talking, and I could see her white stockings and tennis shoes and the black pager hung at her hip and thought I could hear a faint shushing as she turned in conversation and her thighs brushed against each other. She wore a little white hat, pinned at the top of her head, holding her blond hair up, and I could see wisps of it that had fallen to brush her neck, and when we reached them she turned and grinned at us and the two doctors smiled and lifted their glasses and complimented Carlos and Frank too on the renovation. One of them was slightly fish-eyed, a pupil dancing and distorted through his thick glasses. We left the transformed ward then, glanced in at the modern kitchen, then came to the new wing, a row of rooms off a gracefully curving hallway, all the doors, but the one at the far end, open.

  “This is mine,” Erica said, when we got there, a quiet and spare little room with windows looking out on a field of wildflowers and scrub oak, light flooding in to bathe shapes in the wallpaper, a geometric mural of open fans and fabric swatches like figures in a New England quilt.

  We looked into other rooms, each with its own private design, homey and particular, and across from the closed door at the end of the hall, we entered a large shower room, sauna and hot tub to either side, and beyond that an exercise room, a large one, full of mats and machines, weights and stationary bikes and treadmills, and when we left there, Frank and Erica smiled and said good-bye, see you soon, and then went out the glass door leading to a small patio at the wing’s end, and Carlos and I stood before the closed door and he explained that the pager on Carolyn’s hip was a monitor.

  “That way, she can get out and around on her shift and still be vigilant.”

  The bed sat in the center of the room, a dust ruffle hiding the fact that it was a hospital bed, and the canopy that hung high over it was attached to the ceiling and allowed free access to both side of the bed. There was a row of machines against the wall, an oxygen unit, heart monitor, and a suction pump, each dressed in a cloth covering that rendered it more like a piece of furniture than a medicinal station, and the sounds of our feet were softened by modern Scandinavian carpets that covered the wooden floor. I
could see the lighthouse on its new cement pad through the windows as we crossed to the bed. It was September already, but still there were tourists visible through the glass cupola, others waiting in line near the base.

  “I want you to look up into the canopy,” Carlos said, as we approached the bed’s side. “It was Larry’s idea, and it’s something special.”

  And it was that, and it was only after I had looked up for a long time and my neck grew stiff that I lowered my eyes to see the figure in his repose, head on the pillow in a position where he might look up too, though more comfortably than I had. I put my fingers on the bed, touching a coverlet made of the finest woven cotton, soft as a diaper, and could feel the embossment of leaf and flower figures in the stitching, and I could feel the faint beat of the man’s pulse at the bones of his wrist through them. I leaned in over his chest, expecting the medicinal, but there was nothing, no issue of breath, though my head was near his chin when I turned and looked up.

  The hanging canopy was like a large open umbrella or the dome of the sky, and it was lined in a dark blue fabric the color of night’s sky, figures of stars sewn in at the circular border and in what seemed strategic places in the blue field that was otherwise empty in the spaces between the photographs, and I saw immediately, in a faded ferrotype, that the man had been born in Idaho before the turn of the century: a newborn in a quilted crib, head framed in a white bonnet, and the stiff figures of a mother in bell-shaped dress, his father wearing a stovepipe. They were standing before a sign announcing a granary and its location, and the date of birth had been penned in the vacancy at the building’s side.

  There were dozens of photographs, and most were in black and white, though a few color snapshots, more informal, punctuated the field like fading planets, and I knew as my eyes roamed through the field that I was seeing the history of the man’s life there, in a patchwork, much like real life, the narrative in the empty spaces between memory-evoking images and in the matrix that they created. There were farm pictures, a boy standing in a fenced enclosure among pigs, then high on the seat of a horse-drawn reaper, and war pictures, young men sitting on blasted stumps beside a trench, eating K-rations from metal bowls that looked like emesis basins, photographs taken at country lawn parties and at funerals and those that commemorated marriages and other, obscure occasions. There were pictures, too, of lovers, in chaste poses near lakes and in gardens, one child only, a thin sickly girl in a loose dress, born to them, and the grandchildren of others possibly, a sister or a brother, in the few colored ones. His wife seemed to be fading already, at his side in their wedding picture, heading toward her invisibility, and surely his daughter was too, and since he was well over ninety now, all must be dead but for him. And still the pictures raised up the past again, though not in regret or accusation, but simply to establish that it had taken place and that its story was not in the pictures themselves but in rearrangement, something he might take on in fancy or the listless moments near the end of his own passage, should he awaken and look up again.