Tampico (James A. Michener Fiction Series) (21 page)

“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.

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 government 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.

They ate what they could manage, and Larry could manage nothing but a cookie and water, and once Mark had taken the trays away and they’d lit cigarettes and Gino had lit his pipe, Larry stubbed his cigarette after a few puffs and worked himself out of his chair and headed down the ward to bed.

“It’s the fucking chemo,” Gino whispered at the window when he was gone.

It was only nine, and they were getting through the laziness of their digestion, energy coming back again, and Frank proposed a game of chess, and he and Gino sat across the table from each other, bickering quietly over the board. John smoked and read the
Boston Globe
, and sparks burned tiny holes in the paper, and he shook it free of ashes as he turned the pages.

There was moonlight in the room and a small lamp over the chessboard. John had rigged a shaded bulb that hung from an IV stand beside his chair, and they could hear the intermittent whir of the suction machine, and each thought of the ghostly man in coma there and of Larry and the chemo, but only in brief moments, then moved back to their activities, in which they could lose themselves in ideas of the common mind.

Then it was a little later, and Larry was standing in the doorway, tying his robe and adjusting it. He no longer wore his beaded cap, and his hair hung to the sides from a central part, a stripe of baldness running down to his forehead.

“Couldn’t sleep?” asked Frank.

They’d finished their game and Frank had proposed another, but Gino had declined and now sat at the window again. He was looking out, but turned when he heard Frank, and then saw Larry.

“The fucking chemo,” he said softly.

“I think you’re right,” said Larry. “That’s the end of that shit for me.”

He crossed to his chair and sat down and took up the deck of cards, and they heard that hushed shushing of fabric they all knew.

“Must be eleven,” said Frank.

Carolyn came into the room then like a paper doll. Her hair was gathered in a bun this time, strands falling along her cheeks, forming a delicate basket around her face. She paused and the shushing stopped and she leaned over and placed the tray of cookies and milk on Larry’s table, then stood up straight again in her starched white uniform and looked at them expectantly. Larry looked at Frank, then over at Gino, who had turned back to the window. Then he looked up at her and smiled.

“I guess we’re all set,” he said, and she smiled at him and Frank too, and smiled quizzically at Gino’s back, then pirouetted and shushed out through the doorway to the ward, and when she was gone the two looked toward the window.

“Gino?” Frank said.

But he didn’t turn. His elbows rested on the towel on the radiator, his chin in his hands, and they could see the curls of fine grey hair at his smooth neck. His robe hung loosely from his shoulders, his body somewhere under it, and he wore black oxfords and black socks and they could see the pattern of veins running to blotches of dark scar tissue on his white calves above them. Then he did turn, lifting the chair up under him and turning it too, and then leaned back in the chair and crossed his legs, his arms crossed over his chest.

“Is there something out there?” Larry said.

“Just the whole world,” said Gino.

“What does
that
mean?” said Frank.

“It means I’m going to leave this place,” he said. “Get the fuck out of here.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I’m serious.”

Larry could see that he was, and Frank could too, and Larry blinked through falling hair, and Frank started to say something, but didn’t.

“But where would you go?” John said, finally. “Your daughter?”

Gino lowered his hands to his naked legs. His robe had parted and fallen to the side, and his fingers touched his knees, then floated down to his scarred shins. He looked very much like Harry Truman now, the same expressionless face and vacant brow, but he wore no glasses and his eyes were blue and large.

“I haven’t told you that story yet,” he said. “You’ll know when you hear it. And anyway, she’s probably dead by now. All the rest seem to be.”

“If we could buy this fucking place,” said Frank, glancing at Larry.

“But that’s the point,” Gino said. “I feel retired from life here, but we’re not dead yet, are we? All this fucking around and joking and argument. This business with Carolyn, like a bunch of kids. I’m a hundred years old now, man, but I ain’t dead yet. I’m getting out of here.”

“But where?” John said.

“Chicago. But not the suburbs or the country this time, the city. I’ve got the little pension and the social security, and I’ve checked the papers. I can get a room there. I can go out to museums and get a drink. I can take a walk along the lake.”