Tampico (James A. Michener Fiction Series) (18 page)

“And the reason?” I said.

She didn’t hesitate.

“It was a killing. A man of some distinction, but a soldier too. An insult as I remember. Your father Roberto, Calaca, he had to leave.”

I looked at my mother, but she was silent, already on her way back to America.

“But there was another too,” I said. “Another brother?”

“Yes,” she said. “And another nickname. Of a woman. He was called Sosa, a translator, business manager for General Corzo. And later, for our brother Dagoberto as general, he continued. My three brothers. Did he die in peace?”

“Yes,” I said. “In his sleep.”

“That’s good.”

“But he left none for us,” my mother said as she rose from her chair, her voice like a remnant.

I held the purse under my arm as we walked back to the boat, and my mother held her hands tight at her waist at the rail as we chugged up the Panuco toward Tampico. I still have the pesos, in the purse, in a box in the basement. I sold the documents my aunt gave us, something arranged for me by Arthur, after my mother died, and I still have the memory of my mother raising her hand in the hotel dining room as I began to speak. We finished eating in silence, then went up to our rooms, and the next morning we were shopping in rain. She was focused and insistent as she selected clothing and trinkets, and there was no room for talk of other things. Then she was stepping out from the curb and the bus was coming and I was calling out to her, and my umbrella was blowing away in rain in the muddy street.

Water’s been leaking in and we can’t find the source. All the pipes are exposed, up between the basement ceiling joists, and Arthur has checked the pump seals and the prime. It’s pooled on the dirt floor in the morning, and only by noon has it leached down into clay. Arthur has checked the toilet and the shower, the kitchen sink, and the stone walls are dry. Sometimes it isn’t there at all. It comes in with the dampness and after rain, and I don’t know. I’ve managed to get down to the wine cellar, with difficulty. There’s rubble in the passage now, another cave-in, but the rocks and fallen earth are dry enough and that can’t be it, and Arthur’s found nothing at the foundation. He’s trying to shore it up, a cement and sand mix where the earth has shifted, but I can’t
go out there now to watch him. When I think of the rope tether, the edge of panic rises, even just glancing through the window, and I’ve pulled the shades down on that side, and I look down at my feet as I walk to the limousine in my dark glasses. My bettas are gone and the windy weather is feely, and Arthur holds my arm, and I’ve been closing the curtains tight on our way across the meadow to the Manor. I think there is no hope for it at all, and I think I feel the house move under me in the night.

There’s only one to suck and clean on the ward now, and it was strange, and it troubled me, how the other lost his anonymity as he died. I was sucking him, those automatic convulsions as the tube went down, his lungs bucking, and this was all the movement and life we’d gotten out of him for many weeks. He’d been unconscious in morphine, the flesh falling from his chin and neck until his jawbone was exposed and his lower lip was beginning to go. The doctors had been bandaging him, but they’d lost places for anchor, and near the end they let him be, just pulled the Airwick up to mask the smell and didn’t come around, and it was left to Carolyn and me, the cleaning, and the replacement of the plastic bib.

And he was bucking and that was common and I wasn’t watching. I was looking past the wasted and still body of the other one and down the ward to where the old men who are still vibrant have set up their commune, the four beds and the colorful dish towels on their nightstands and their floor lamp, and the flowers Gino had escaped to buy in cheap vases on the stands, and the coatrack and the clothing draped over the metal frames of the beds. A home away from home, and not a bit of desperation in it, a commandeered space of some specific qualities for living. There was an IV stand, but its function was masked by a large towel, some Mexican design, and my mind was wandering to the fascinating man in the solarium, his ancient face, and back in the direction of Tampico, to a time before my mother’s death and my agora, when I was free and could walk out in the world. Then the bucking stopped, though I was still sucking, and when I looked down his chest was still, and when I looked up his eyes were open and he was watching me.

His lower jaw was ivory in the dim light, a common jaw, and above his open eyes his forehead was a smooth plane, and I saw that the hair at his brows was gone, the ridge of bone there pushing up to form the sockets. Then his jaw moved, opening and closing as if testing itself, and I saw the remnant of his upper lip retract in a strange and particular smile, his teeth working their way forward. It was more a grin than a smile, or at least it seemed to become
that as he winked, just the one lid lowering, then raising itself. He looked at me as if I knew something that he knew, as if we shared some common history, and I recognized him for the first time I think. His pupils were contracted and focused. His jaw vibrated, then dropped open, and I leaned over to listen, but he said nothing, and when I looked up his lids had lowered, covering his stare, and he was gone somewhere.

I left early. It was the man dying and the man in the solarium rising and then going, and it was word that the lighthouse had shifted, the weight of equipment on the cliff side behind it and the digging beneath it, just an inch or two, measured only by instruments and a faint rumbling in the Manor’s foundation, something I may only have imagined, but I called Carolyn, and she came in early, and I called Arthur at the house, and when Frank shuffled down the ward to check things out, I told him nothing. Why worry an old man?

Arthur drove slowly and carefully, and I could feel the branches of the scrub oak brushing the fenders as we headed down into the meadow. The curtains were drawn, and I could see nothing of the darkness around us, and that was helpful. Then I felt the nose of the car rise a little as we left the meadow and heard gravel under the tires as we entered the drive leading up to the parking area. I was waiting for the brakes then, and gathering myself, and when the car stopped I turned in my seat to face the door, knowing its opening would for me be a closing. I pictured the gravel, the steps and porch, the screen at the entrance. Then the door swung away into cold moonlight and its ominous potential, and Arthur was a guarding shadow in the frame. I climbed out into that shadow, and he took my arm and held it awkwardly, as we staggered toward the house and safety.

Charlie was playing piano at the Key West, a few doors up from a place called the Venture Inn on Comac Street, and when we hit the warm air at the door he glanced out over the white Steinway, then smiled as he moved into “Imagination,” the last tune I’d heard him working in Province-town in what seemed the distant past. He was expecting us, and once we’d settled on stools he looked up from the song’s extended prologue and said, “Peter,” then nodded to Carlos. There were two older men across the piano from us, both grey at the temples and dressed in similar silk shirts, and a young man sat near Charlie’s elbow, beside a woman in linen pants. He was lean and hard and wore a thin silver choker, and she was bending toward him, listening to whispered gossip. Charlie looked the same, his barrel chest and a thickness in his arms and neck, all those years of heavy work, and lounge light filtered through exotic Florida flowers, bouquets spilling from tall white wicker at his shoulders, bathing his bald crown, more like that of a milkman than a singer. He fingered
a cloudy day
, then
sunny
, and we waited for our drinks and entered into the sweet foraging and whispered words, the tune constructing itself, echoes of others folded in,
here’s that rainy day, on old Cape Cod.
It wasn’t nine yet and the place was almost empty, voices and the quiet laughter of a few men and a tinkling of glass and metal at the bar behind us.

It had been over a year since Strickland’s crash. The plane had yielded nothing,
and the FAA had finally named the cause as pilot error. I’d thought the matter was behind me, though it had never actually been my case, until Charlie called. Work had come my way. I’d had a day job watching an errant husband, another one through Warren again, some organized pilfering at a few stores in Hyannis. I’d stopped touching my mother’s money and was getting along meagerly on fees, and there’d been that party of my imagination, women in furs and jewels in Boston, and I’d brought a suit. It had been a long time since Plummer had come through the door. He and his friends were out on bail, awaiting trial and bargaining down to lesser charges, and they were staying clear of Erica. She’d found an apartment in Providence, and I stayed in touch through her lawyer. I’d been easing my way into a new life, one with Carlos, and he’d been setting my house in order.

He’d started out on the windows on mild days, caulking and resetting a few panes. Then he’d painted the baseboards and trim, weather-stripped the doors, and when the new year came he got to work in the attic, hauling out rotted lumber and boxes of junk that had been there for many years. He dropped a new bed of insulation between the floor joists and repaired the broken exhaust fan in the eave. He had plans for gardening in the spring, and in the evenings we sat and talked about that and about the possibility of some fishing when it warmed up. We listened to music and watched television and played cards, and once Carlos hauled out books and showed me etchings and engravings, illustrations of skeleton figures who were dancing and gesturing and stood in poses that were stories. All were renderings by the Mexican artist Posada, and we sat at the kitchen table, shoulder to shoulder, and studied them.

Our talk was easy and casual, and when it dipped down into the personal, that was easy too. He had a matter-of-fact way about the past, as if it were a story only of what had been, which it is, and I soon felt I could tell him anything that came to mind. He told me stories of his early life, each one like an anecdote, though without judgment or lesson, told for the pleasure in the savoring, just something to say. One was about his father and a truck and his first blow to the head and how he’d come back from it and into his mother’s death. Then one day he went to watch the excavation at the lighthouse, and when I got the call I realized how much I’d come to count on him. There was a week of bad days, and on one of them Charlie called. Then Carlos was okay again and so was I, at least temporarily.

There was a smell under the smell of Florida flowers at the Key West. Charlie was playing “Nancy,” whispering
too bad for you
, and the flowers were
rustling in their wicker in the warm air of the heating system, forming a garish Mardi Gras hat for the man who sat before them, his face wasted and skeletal, lips lifted to salmon-colored gums as he mouthed the words. I saw his cane handle at the piano’s bar rail, the profile of the man beside him. The smell of subtle cologne? There were others at the Steinway’s edge now, men and a few women, and drifts of laughter and talking coming from the bar and tables behind us as the Key West was filling. It was something under the perfume, a medicinal smell guarding something deeper, a faint scent of rotting. I turned to Carlos—he was singing along,
she has no sister
—then caught it near my shoulder, the smell of dried sweat under my shirt collar, faintly rancid, unhealthy as the start of invisible mold on turning cheese. I glanced from Carlos to the young man with the skull face, and he grinned at me and nodded as if we shared some secret.

Then it was “Laura,”
footsteps in the misty gloom
or something like that. I was watching Charlie and the way his head came up into the refrain, the bright look of his dead daughter in his blue eyes, that woman I had thought to love, whose death had sent me into the Combat Zone, to drugs and alcohol and HIV. I heard a weak cough, saw the man lean his face into the handkerchief, wisps of thinning hair and the hand of the other on his shaking shoulder bending in to tend him,
only a dream
, and Charlie was turning from that tune,
a house, a showplace
, bending into
no place
, coming to the set’s end. “I Can’t Get Started,” he said, sang
with you
, then led us all carefully through a few verses, and there were laughter and applause at the final punctuation, and a woman leaned forward on her stool and slid a five-dollar bill into the big brandy snifter on the Steinway’s wood above the keys.

We sat at a table in the corner, back behind the flowers and away from noise. Men were dancing now, slow tunes on the stereo, and waiters in tight black T-shirts slipped among them, carrying trays of drinks. Carlos sat beside me, Charlie on the other side. “Carlitos,” he’d said, when they were introduced, and Carlos had said “same name.”

“Friday night. Sad winter tunes and nostalgia.”

“Is that it?” I said, wiping the sweat away with a paper napkin.

“Are you all right?” Charlie said.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s hot in here.”

“Or the difference,” Carlos said. “Between outside and in.”

“It’s been an incredible winter,” Charlie said. “The storms and ice. I’ve only one more set to go, but I’ll hang around. Friday’s slow dancing. I do the weeknights
late. There’s show tunes on Thursdays. Tonight was standards.”

“I got that,” Carlos said.

We were taking our time and we both knew that, little bits of information sliding in. Charlie had been in the city for a year now, moving from job to job. He’d been at the Key West for six months. It was a good place, quiet enough, and some were serious about the music. I told him I’d checked the cemetery. They were tending her grave. He was living alone, between things, but maybe, he said, there is this man. He grinned at me, then glanced at Carlos in curiosity.

“You know better than that,” I said, and he laughed, and I told him about Carlos and Gordon Strickland.

“That’s what got us together.”