Tampico (James A. Michener Fiction Series) (2 page)

And now the standing woman was talking to him. Her hands had moved from her hips and she was gesturing. Calaca had tipped his hat back and was looking up at her, grinning, his face a skull’s face, weathered skin like parchment stretched over bone. General Corzo had turned a little in his chair and crossed his legs and raised his palm to the one sitting on his left. That one had seemed to be rising, but then settled back. The woman had stepped forward now and raised a finger and was waving it in Calaca’s face. She was short and just a little stocky, but her hips swelled out from a delicately thin waist, and I’d been watching the backs of her beautiful legs, her calves, as the black spiked heels she wore pushed them into definition through her red stockings. Her dress too was black, a clinging silk worn off the shoulder, and I could see the tendons lifting her scapulas, the beginning of her straight and stationary spine as she gestured, the bounce of her coal black hair.

Calaca was laughing now, watching her finger, and just as he leaned forward and opened his mouth as if to bite it, she hit him, her fist flattening his nose and two arcs of blood squirting out to either side of her knuckles.

General Corzo looked down, curious, as Calaca lurched back and fell over in the chair, his head hitting the wood floor with a dull thud, hat bouncing away. He rolled and tried to rise but she was on him, hitting him in the cheek this time, then sitting astride him, one hand gripping the greasy hair on the top of his head as she pounded him in the face one last time. General Corzo
watched patiently until she was finished, and the woman across from him had risen and leaned over the table for a better view.

And so it was, only four days after my arrival in Tampico, that I met Chepa and fell in love with her. She was a mother to me and a sister and a perfect lover for a young man of little experience such as I. My mother had died when I was just fifteen. I’d had no father that I knew of, and I’d been on my own since then, a roustabout, and finally with the help of a fatherly man from Texas Oil I’d become a pilot. Then he too had died. I’d had no social life to speak of, a few cool prostitutes and rum and Coke across the border in Matamoros and once an older woman who had taken me under the stars on Padre Island for her brief pleasure. It had all been thoroughly mechanical, until Chepa, and though ours isn’t the story I set out to tell, I’m going to tell some of it anyway.

At first it was clearly the money and that I was a young and innocent man. I went back to the Lluvia del Oro, bought her the grenadine syrup and water she drank to stay sober there. I asked her about Calaca and why the general didn’t intervene. She seemed both charmed and annoyed by the question but wouldn’t answer it. We spent the night together at my hotel, and the next morning Chepa insisted on showing me the sights of the city, though they were few. Bars and offices had invaded historic public buildings and old haciendas, and refinery pollution had eaten away at façades and outdoor statuary. But there were a museum and a few churches, lagunas and parks, and places where the shores of the Panuco were unsullied by terminals and tank farms. We spent the day together, and in the evening we ate dinner together at the Louisian. And the next night, after a day of fishing the Panuco for tarpon, we dined at the Ciudad de Pekín, my first taste of Chinese food. Then I slept in her arms in my hotel room, our bodies glued together in sweat under white sheets through which occasional mosquitoes stimulated us.

Then it was Monday, and I was off with Joaquín on our reconnaissance flights. We flew each of the camps, both north and south, and Joaquín waved his arm in the open cockpit in front of me, pointing down at the Texas Oil flags waving from the highest derricks. There were buzzards too, descending in slow and symmetrical spirals, then rising up from the smell and movement in the living flesh below, then trying it once again.

I had the maps and the places they represented, which from the sky were very much like the maps, and in only a few days Joaquín was grinning and shaking my hand vigorously and I was on my own, carrying mail, valves, and
other replacement parts, north through the oil fields of Tamaulipas and south through Vera Cruz.

I never found out how Chepa came by the hand roller, a fifty-gallon oil drum filled with cement. She would hitchhike from her house to the city, but only after a walk of five miles to the main road, which out there was no more than a dirt track. Wednesday, when I returned to the hotel in the late afternoon, she was sitting at the foot of the bed, my open and neatly packed suitcase resting on the coverlet behind her.

“
Dónde?
” I said. I had this little bit of Spanish and she a good, though often crude, English she had learned from oilmen. I hasten to say she was no prostitute, though she drank grenadine syrup and water and sat with men for money at the Lluvia del Oro. Some there were, but she told me she made her own choices and they didn’t include that.

“
A mi casa
,” she said, pointing over her shoulder to the open suitcase on the bed behind her. “Joo close now?”

She was smiling, but her broad brow and cheeks were expressionless, her face still as a face carved in a block of dark wood. A small and smoothly hooked nose, lips full and cut straight across below it, and above, her large eyes, pupils black as her hair and penetrating. Often she held two expressions, mouth saying one thing, eyes another, the latter both intimate and impenetrable. Her words were as much an order as a request, and I’d been taking pleasure in her aggressiveness so I did what I was told.

Later, in the de Havilland, it was Chepa and not Joaquín who was pointing down, and as I banked low over her house I saw the oil drum at the edge of the new landing strip she’d rolled. The strip was narrow and short and at the end of it she’d positioned two huge potted plants to either side as warning beacons. She turned around in her seat and grinned at me as I brought the plane down, rocking the wings to make sure of the wind.

The house was elevated a few feet off the ground on pilings, and Don Lupe liked to take the shade at the edge under it, Estrella, with her thicker coat, back behind him deep in shadow. But Rata had no care for the heat and she danced near my ankle, head high and sniffing, as I crossed the clay yard and climbed the steps to the veranda, Chepa slightly behind me, lugging my suitcase.

The house held one large room, an iron stove and an icebox and a sink with a hand pump at the rear, a few crude chairs, and tables with kerosene lamps and candles in onyx holders resting upon them near the walls. There was
an open closet in a corner, just a wooden pole upon which were hung the dark and colorful clothing Chepa wore. I saw the black silk dress I remembered there, on a wire hanger beside others. And carved into the boards of the wall beside a window was evidence of the previous residents:
VIVA VILLA
and
ZAPATA
. Pencil-thin shafts of light came up through bullet holes in the floor, and in one corner there was a large faint stain that I imagined was blood. The bed was brass and double, its head against the room’s left wall, and at its foot, defining its space as separate, was a beautiful silk screen.

“China Boys,” Chepa said, as I studied the road, the bridge, and the elegant figures caught in their various gestures moving from top to bottom. Most cooks at the camps were Chinese, and there were some who had set up stalls in the square.

“So this is why,” I said, “at the bar, the general didn’t interfere?”

“No,” she said, moving up behind me and pressing her hands against the small of my back. “This house means nothing to him. He has many. It was Ana, the weeping woman, and that Calaca, a business between them I had arranged. The general had no part in it. It was a matter of honor.”

And I suppose it was honor too that kept the rhythm of our relationship so consonant. I was white as a criollo, but no Spaniard, and she was no mestizo, but pure Indian. And though I was a product of the oppressor, I was a child to her and to myself, though becoming a man through her. Neither of us was part of the franchise, though we were both making our livelihood from it.

I had money to burn, and I bought Chepa jewelry and clothing in the square. I bought small pieces of furniture, pottery, pictures for the walls and ice for the beer and wine, strapping it all into the de Havilland’s forward cockpit before I commandeered the plane each evening. Some noons I would ferry Chepa back to Tampico for grocery shopping. Then we would fly out together as the sun was setting. Though the city was hot and malarial, wind blew down from the foothills in a steady stream to cool our house. “It’s coming from where my people are,” she said. Her well was a deep one, and the water was cold and sweet on the tongue.

In the night, after dinner and brandy and cigars, Chepa would light many candles and move the screen away from the foot of the bed. We’d undress in the shadows, then pull the coverlet away and lie down beside each other on the cool white sheets. The pink Estrella would sit in a chair across from us, grinning, her red tongue lolling over her lip, Don Lupe curled like a healthy pine bough on the floor below her. Only Rata would be moving, a small piece of
yellow fruit visible occasionally in candle and starlight as she sniffed at the rugs and in the corners of the room, looking for something she could never seem to find. Then Chepa would turn to me, her hair and lips brushing my shoulder and the soft flesh on the inside of her thigh crossing my knee. I’d feel her breath on my cheek, the whisper of her words so close to my ear it was as though my head was a tabernacle and her voice was inside it, disembodied, and as intimate as my own thoughts might be, were I thinking. She’d be singing, those soft, guttural Indian songs, then telling any number of stories as if they were all part of the same one.

A society woman on the streets of the Zona Rosa in Mexico City. She’s come from New York and her husband, a businessman, has given her the day for shopping. She’s done that, eaten a light lunch, and now she’s bored. The clothing and the pieces of fine jewelry she’s bought as souvenirs for friends make but a small bundle and a light one and she has only a broad shoulder purse and a sturdy shopping bag for toting. So she sets off into the back streets of the Zona, down into those byways where only Mexicans live.

The streets are empty, it’s siesta, and deep in a shadowy alley between a bookstore and an artist’s studio, she glimpses a sliver of movement as she passes. She stops, pauses, then returns to the alley’s mouth, and there, growing increasingly visible as it limps forward from the shadows, is a dog.

It’s a very small dog, short-haired, with large oval ears and a pug snout. Its color is a dirty white, and over the foreleg it holds limply above the ground, its chest is a row of bird bones, and its eyes, its protruding eyes, like those of a just-born calf, are rheumy and running, and it’s those eyes that get her.

A Chihuahua, she thinks, poor thing, and she squats down gracefully, places her shopping bag to stand alone on the broken pavement beside her, then reaches her palm and her opening fingers out toward it. The dog limps from the final shadows and to her hand, extends his snout tentatively and sniffs her fingers. Then, his mooning eyes in her eyes, protruding from his small skull as if they might pop out should he stare much longer, his salmony tongue slides through his lips and touches the tip of one of them. Her fingers curl back quickly. She’s a little startled, but she’s undeterred, and she takes the silk scarf from her neck, makes a kind of hammock out of it, then reaches down and lifts the dog, light as a single tortilla, swaddles him and stuffs him gently down into her shoulder purse, among the jewelry, cosmetics and air freshener.

This is a good woman, you can see, and unapproachable, so when she does
not tell her husband about the dog, smuggles him aboard the plane, it is no wonder she is successful, given her husband, her fine clothing and demeanor. The dog leaves the bag only when the two have reached the woman’s apartment in New York City, the guest room that her husband never enters.

But the dog will not eat. The woman tries everything, and still he fails. Soon he no longer limps, though he might stand shivering beside the guest bed. And his eyes are closing, victims of an oozing infection.

Veterinary medicine? She’s tried that, pills and potions gathered from friends surreptitiously. And every imaginable hard food and liquid sustenance too. He’s sipped only at a saucer of milk, and this briefly, but that gives her the idea, mother’s milk. She’s heard it somewhere, a thing about animals, and she sets out with efficiency to find it, and she does.

The dog drinks and drinks again, and for a few days he’s limping, his eyes seem to be opening. But then he takes a turn and is failing again, even more quickly than before. No longer can he stand now, and his rheumy eyes have closed completely. He begins to resemble a premature fetus, a small dirty bladder of some kind, curled into a shallowly panting bit of wet empty flesh at the foot of the guest bed.

The woman, in desperation, calls the family doctor, who recommends a veterinarian of stature. Then she calls him and makes a special appointment for the afternoon. She goes then to the dog and lifts him, in a thin rubber pillowcase this time, and settles him gently on a bed made of dishrags deep in a cloth satchel.

They arrive at the doctor’s office on time and are ushered right into the examination room, where the woman takes great care in lifting the dog out of the bag. She places the small rubber package on the shining surgical table, then steps away, and the doctor steps forward and peels back the swaddling.

The dog has become nothing to the woman, nothing surprising that is, so when the doctor jumps back, a little shaken at the sight, she is offended. It’s only a dog, she says, though a very sick one. Ah, well, the doctor says. But did you feed it mother’s milk? I did, the woman says, and they both look down at the dog, only now recognizing that its eyes are half open and completely glazed over and that it is not breathing.

My poor, poor dog! the woman cries, her hands fluttering near her face.

Poor, yes, the doctor says, that is true. But this is no dog, Chihuahua or otherwise. This is a Mexican slum rat, numerous in those cities. Did you find it there?