Tampico (James A. Michener Fiction Series) (17 page)

Larry looked over at Theresa, but she was going, her black stockings and black shoes and her petticoats, and her hair bouncing at her white shoulders as she scrambled up the embankment and over it and out of sight. He looked in at Matthew, who was smiling. His eyes glanced up the embankment and he shook his head, and Larry looked down at his navel and the stripe of curls and they both blushed a little and grinned when their eyes met. Then Sister Theresa was climbing back down, dragging the heavy grease bucket and Larry was pulling his shirt off.

They reached in as far as they could, globs of grease in their palms, and coated his arms and shoulders, his neck, and the roots that entangled them. Then Larry climbed into the basket itself, slipping among the roots, until he could reach out and touch Matthew’s hairless chest, and he coated that, feeling the blood rise in his cheeks as he reached into his armpits, his slick fingers in musk. He felt a root press down on his leg, then Sister Theresa was in the basket too, suspended below him, the grease bucket hung on a nub, and he could see her stained scapulas, strands of her hair hung on the sticky roots and her extended white arms and her greasy fingers touching the buttons. He could feel Matthew’s breath on his cheek, and when he looked up their faces were inches apart and there was panic in Matthew’s eyes, and when he glanced down from them and along his slick stomach, he saw her hands on his bare hips, his pants and his underwear sliding down and his white erection just inches from her face.

She coated his hips and that too, then reached back into the bucket. Then her hands were sliding down between his legs and she was twisting through the roots, greasing the backs of his knees and his calves. Then she was pulling his shoes and socks off, and Larry saw her greasy fingers sliding over his ankles and between his toes, and before long they were covered with grease, their hands stroking the roots, and Larry slid his chest over Matthew’s hip and Sister Theresa’s arm was between them, and he pushed up, bowing his back, and the root gave a little, ripples of the shock wave of its movement radiating out to the basket’s edges, and Matthew’s leg came free. Then they worked together near his neck, both leaning against the bowed taproot, until his head could move, and then his extended arms were twisting in the lubrication, his wrists slipping free of the bondage, and they were out of the root matrix and standing in the pit, pulling him, naked and slick as a newborn, until he was free of the basket and was lying on the ground.

Larry bent over and covered Matthew’s delicate groin with his shirt, and when he looked up the sister was wild, beautiful in her soiled binding, her soft white shoulders, and her grease-crazed hair. Her hands were together and she was praying, smiling beatifically, “and I knew right then there was no hope for her, but that there was for me.”

It had grown dark in the room, and Larry picked up the cards and leaned back, his face in shadow. Then Gino lit his pipe again and the match flared, and the tip of the cigarette in John’s throat lit his chin, the jaw of a skeleton, and Frank coughed and reached for the tubing and adjusted it. Then John coughed and ashes fell and sparkled in the moonlight.

“Everything came out fine then,” Frank said, and Larry laughed lightly.

“You could say that.”

“Back to the nunnery,” said John.

“It was just a school, but that’s right enough. It was Matthew’s school, not mine. We left the next day, and I never saw her again, him either.”

“That’s too bad,” said Gino.

“Not really. Maybe it was just adolescence, for him I mean.”

“True, very true.”

“What would
you
know about that?” Frank said.

“I know a few things.”

“Easy now, boys,” said John.

“Do you know where the light is?”

“I do, indeed, and if you’ll hold your horses for a fucking second or two I’ll turn it on.”

“Not the bright one,” Frank said, and Gino got up from his chair, stretched and shook his lean body, then shuffled to the far wall and threw the switch. It was night-lights in the baseboard and a small lamp on a table.

“Thanks,” Frank said, and Gino nodded as he passed him and headed back to his seat. He settled in and lifted his pipe from the radiator, then tamped it down and lit it and blew smoke at the ceiling. Then it was later, and Carolyn brought in their dinners on metal trays.

“You’d think we’d have gotten at least
this
far from the war,” Frank said, pushing his fork around in the chipped beef.

“You’d think,” Gino said.

“With the microwave,” said Larry.

“They could do better than this shit,” said John.

“At least a TV dinner,” Frank said.

But they ate it, and when they were done Gino farted and then lit his pipe, and Frank groaned, and John lit a cigarette and so did Larry and both of them coughed.

“That’ll kill you,” Frank said.

“I know, I know,” John said. “But at this point it’s a race.”

“Who’s winning?” Gino said.

“Certainly not me,” said Larry.

“Chemo?”

“Right. I’m heading out tomorrow.”

“I told ’em to fuck it,” Gino said.

“I wasn’t sure,” said Larry. “I haven’t tried it yet.”

“It’s an experience,” said Frank.

“And what else have we got?” Larry said.

“Memory,” said John.

“It could be a long story,” Gino said.

“About your daughter, I bet.”

“That’s right. A story about a lost daughter, found again in betrayal.”

We took a slow boat down the Panuco River from Tampico and headed in mild anxiety toward the sea. I remember my mother standing at the rail clutching her purse, so full of pesos, watching refineries pass by, stillstacks and agitators, the ruined loading dock at the Alianza station, and when I was beside her in my linen jacket, flying fish flew up to startle us and I thought I saw stains on their bodies. There’d been an oil fire, and black smoke had drifted over the city, and when we passed the fire’s source at Aguila Petroleum there was blue oil in the water at the river’s edge and burning wood, and I saw a rat on a timber, flames rising at the end and smoke and hissing when it moved away and the fire touched the river, at least I think it was a rat. Aguila was devastated, and the fire had blossomed to the paraffin plant beside it, and we smelled a giant candle in the charred rubble. Then we came to a bend in the river and a sea breeze and left the influence of a smoky Tampico behind us, and we could see the Gulf and the hill at Chorreras, boats in the water, nets hanging in sunlight from their riggings.

Empty of Spanish and subtlety, of all but a few names and money, empty of the continuity of our historical past now in my father’s revealed lies, we moved slowly along, my fingers brushing the sleeve of my mother’s cotton dress as we climbed the dusty road, then came in sight of the town, a small village of winding dirt streets, ramshackle houses, and the flat-roofed structures
for net mending and boat repair at the water’s edge, where I saw women working and dinghies and a tilted fishing boat at dry dock on the sand and men scraping at barnacles. We were above the town, and we could see far out over the Gulf to the remnants of oil stations, a few active ones, pipelines suspended on wood structures running out from shore, and the misty shadow of a tanker at horizon.

We walked down the road and into the town’s central square, just a few stores, cantina and church, a dribbling stone fountain at the center, and what looked like a public building off to the side, and my mother demurred, and it was up to me to go in with the names.

The old man at the desk wore a wrinkled summer suit the same yellow as my jacket, and he shook his head, considered the hammered tin ceiling for a moment, then dragged the information up from dim memory and looked at me with bright eyes. He gave me the street name, then repeated himself, then counted the numbers out on his fingers. “
Último
,“ he said.

It was midday and humid after rain, and by the time we’d trudged up into the foothills a little and found the street and the house at the end of it, we were sweaty and our shoes were coated with dust and my mother’s permanent had fallen in limp curls to her cheeks and my own hair was wet and straightened, and we stood in the dirt road before the house like immigrants.

It seemed an ancient place, weathered wood and moss on the wood roof and cloth hanging in window frames, and a front door at the end of a stone pathway, a hatch of slats woven together with twine or wire, standing open, and at the house side, where the hill ascended, flowers and thick vines had crept down to it and climbed up over its walls and halfway across the roof, and there were flowers growing around a crude skylight, its door pushed up into them, a screen of vines over the opening. And there were flowers in the yard, roses and blooming cactus in clay pots, and bougainvillea ran blood red on a trellis surrounding the doorway, bleeding up into the eaves above it. The sea lifted a gust of perfume and the vines shook and petals blew, and one landed on my cheek, a touch of velvet, and I lifted it away and looked down in my palm, a translucent purple crescent, and I wanted to eat it. Then I heard a creaking, and when I looked up a woman stood in the doorway, tall and very thin, a loose dress hanging from the points of her shoulders, sleeves falling around bony arms, as old as my grandmother would have been, had I had one.

Mother touched my arm, and I saw the purse clutched at her chest, then
turned to see the woman step out beyond the trellis, the face of a skeleton, but smiling, her hand up and gesturing.

“English?” she said. “French? German?”

I answered, and she spoke again.

“Come in! Come in out of the heat!”

The room was dark and cool, and she brought iced tea and cookies and small folded rags on the tray beside the pitcher so we could wipe our brows, and breeze lifted the hanging cloths in the window frames, and the rugs on the bleached wooden floor shone in their subtle earth-tone colors as stripes of light came in. We sat in white wicker, around a wooden table, and there were pictures of mountain snow scenes on the wall behind her and a military uniform dripping with medals on a hanger hung from a nail, displayed like a picture, and flowers in stone pots sat on tables and wood pedestals below the pictures and in earthenware vessels on the floor in the corners of the room. The blond table was waxed, and my mother’s purse sat at the corner as on a mirror, and the woman glanced at it, and when my mother mentioned the names we’d come with, the woman smiled faintly, then turned toward the cloth window, the skin at her cheek like parchment, and sighed, and then turned back to us, and when she spoke her voice was thin and steady and I heard a faint echo, as if her skull were an empty chamber.

“But they’re gone,” she said, “my brothers. There’s nothing anymore. Just that.” She glanced over her shoulder at the uniform. “And a few trinkets and documents. Like any family. Now you tell me of Roberto, and he too is gone, and now there is only me.”

“Roberto,” my mother said. “From fishing. A hard life.”

“My father,” I said.

“Yes, my dear. And I am your aunt.” She looked at my mother. “But I have been gone, you see, since the early ’30s, when I was seventeen. To Europe for my study. Then for a life. I just recently returned, two years ago. I came back to die here in Chorreras. This is my home.”

“Are you ill?” my mother said. “Is there anything we can do? Can we give you money?”

She was looking at the purse, wanting rid of it I thought, to be done with the whole thing finally, to be rid of my father.

“Oh, my, no!” the woman said. “I’m very healthy I think. I didn’t mean soon. I meant I’ll stay here until then. I have all the money in the world.”

There was a full bookcase on the wall and I saw the edge of another
through a doorway. Books sat on tables beside plants, and there was a stack of them on the floor beside a lamp and chair.

“Reading,” I said. “And not fishing.”

She laughed lightly, her lips pulled back to the gums, buck teeth protruding. I heard a click as her mouth closed and her eyes blinked, saw her brow wrinkle in puzzlement.

“You keep mentioning that. Fishing. But I don’t understand.”

“Well, the family,” my mother said.

“And my father,” I said.

“This
is
a fishing village. But this is a summer place, one of many, but the best one I think. Did you see the view?”

We hadn’t turned to look, and she got up and moved to the window and lifted her arm to usher us over, and then she pulled the cloth aside, and we could see the village far below, the church steeple and the huts and boats on the beach and the white stone of the rocky shoreline for miles to either side and the grand expanse of the blue gulf opening out in sun to the far horizon.

“I don’t understand,” my mother said.

We were seated again, and the woman poured tea and passed the plate of cookies. She’d left the room, and we’d heard a drawer opening in the distance, then she came back carrying a wooden box, scrolls of thick paper with colored ribbons dangling from them sticking up at the top. She’d placed the box on the table beside the purse, then poured the tea, then leaned back in her chair.

“Those are documents,” she said. “Contracts and deeds, and some of them are yours now. Did you know your father had another name then, what you call a nickname?”

“I never heard of that,” my mother said.

“Yes,” she said. “Calaca. He was called that. Because of his bony face. He was a soldier in General Corzo’s army. There was trouble and he left for the north then. But then the general died, and my brother Dagoberto became general. That is his uniform. There was no fishing.”

“A soldier,” my mother said.

“Yes. Unofficially. It was tribute. These documents. It was oil then, and a revolution against the constitution. There were many generals.”

I could see my mother’s face harden in the face of my father’s lies, a new one now, but a last one for her. They could keep coming as far as she was concerned. Her look drew a final line against him, and all she seemed to want now was to be out of there, to leave the money and go. But the woman who
was my aunt didn’t want the money, didn’t need it. They both looked at the purse for a long moment, then I interrupted the silence, still needing more.