Tampico (James A. Michener Fiction Series) (23 page)

“I got down on my hands and knees on the hot tile, my shoulder striking the metal of the ruined vacuum cleaner beside the toilet, then reached behind and got the knobs and turned them and heard the pipes groan and cough and air hiss from the spigots, and then the spurts came and finally the rush of rusty water, and I struggled to my feet again, and when I turned I saw flames sawing through the door, and I reached down to the vacuum cleaner and detached the hose, then lifted the canister and staggered in smoke to the small window and rammed it against the pane, and in the shatter of glass I felt the damp morning air flood in, then quickly heat to a boiling as it fed the flames, and I could feel the fire licking at my back now and could smell the fabric burning there and the hair at my nape, and when I turned again the door was a sheet of flame, and I reached into the tub and gathered the sodden rags and old clothing in my arms and threw them at the door and heard them hiss and watched as the flames devoured them, and I could feel my shoulders pulling back as my shirt burned and the skin beneath it puckered, and I could smell it roasting through a bright new pain.

“I had the hose and the tub of roiling water, and that was all I had, and I believe I thought of the wherewithal in a child’s story as I stumbled to the window and pushed the hose through and wedged it against a spike of broken glass, but I was sucking smoke and the image of a child breathing through a reed in a pond quickly left me as I saw the bracelet of fire at my sleeve, then turned away from the window and stepped through fallen plaster toward the
tub, then climbed into the warming water, the spigots spraying and the wake rising and spilling to the floor as I sunk to my shoulders, hearing the hissing of my back and hair, extinguished as I went completely under, then came up again. I had the hose in my hand, and for a moment I sat looking into the smoke. All the walls of the room were now aflame, and I could feel my brows curling in the heat and could smell the singeing. Then I took the metal flange at the hose end in my mouth and sunk down under that turgid surface. Meteors of flaming lath and tumbling red nails had begun to rain down by then, and though I could see them only vaguely through the whirling water, I could feel the heat in their small craters bubbling against my face.

“I remember reaching back into the heat to turn the hot water spigot and that it made no difference. I remember my legs drifting to the surface, then seeing my pants come alive in flame along my shins. I remember the shadow of a falling timber and then its splash and another body turning and boiling in the tub beside me and bumping against my hip. I think I remember the tub shaking oddly, then settling, then the foot tipping and a waterfall and my head rising up into flame, and I think it might have hissed as the other end of the tub fell down and I went back under again.

“I remember flames rising into smoke in the morning sky and the realization that I was seeing the sky, and I remember my arm jerked from the water, the hose dragging me up into smoke and fire as the tub fell away below me. Then I was hanging there, turning on a spit, and when I released the hose I was falling through the fire. And I remember the feeling of landing in the water and the splash rising into steam in the air around me as after a fall into the sea from a crumbling precipice. And the sea itself was falling then, the tub drifting under a light-show canopy of joists and fiery doorways, tilted floors, and flaming furniture tumbling by, and it was rocked by timbers bouncing off its sides and was falling slowly, as on some magic carpet. I looked over the lip and could see the floor coming up toward me, and I think I tried to turn the tub, maneuver it with my hands somehow. Then I heard a scraping under my body, and felt the tub settle into the ruins with no more than a shudder.

“I looked above, into the sky through smoke and dying flames and a matrix of tilted and charred timbers. Then I saw the high and red glowing arches of the copper water pipes. They were rising from the spigots behind my head to the second story, then looping down again, until they met the floor and went through it to the basement, and I knew the fire had bent them, its heat that of a torch, as the wall containing them had burned away, and had let the tub
fall down gracefully from above and come to its final resting place in the steaming rubble of what had once been my living room. The water was flooding from the spigots still, and I could hear the hum of the pump still chugging in the basement.

“I climbed out of the tub, then reached back in and turned the handles. I could feel my wet shirt pulling at my arms, the fabric melted into the burned skin of my back, and I stepped in my sodden clothing through the ruin to the place of the absent doorway, then climbed down into the dirt where the porch had been and moved slowly across the gravel to the grassy verge beyond.

“I turned back then and the house was gone, no longer obscuring sight of the rise behind it, and I saw the oak tree shimmering above the ruins in the last thin clouds of rising smoke. And before I sat down on the ground, then lay down, I think I heard the sound of sirens in the distance, though it could have been my own voice, searching for this place of dead ambition that has been within me since.”

Arthur has been moving the valuables out, making a show of it for anyone who might be watching. He’s borrowed a pickup truck and he loads it with furniture and boxes, and last evening we sat in the kitchen and drank tea once he was finished, and he looked over his cup and watched me and glanced at the shotgun resting on the counter near the stove. I’ve settled weapons near windows at the three exposed sides of the house, those hunting rifles my father cared for, and Arthur knew it was no use to argue, even though they seem ludicrous and even comic there, and simply took a marble out of his pocket and placed it on the floor at his feet, and we both watched as it rolled quickly across the linoleum and clicked against the baseboard below the sink. He looked up at me then, quite seriously, then he was wistfully smiling, returning my own smile and shaking his head slowly, because he knows I cannot leave the house, though wind blows up from the cellar to shake the candle flames and carpets rise in ghostly ripples on the bedroom floor.

They came at the start of my shift and we talked out on the ambulance dock and they told me what I already knew. I had some time, at my own risk they said, but they were putting up barricades to warn others away. They’d be shutting down the electricity, sporadically, for a few days, then permanently at the first of the week, and someone would come for the bottled gas before
then, and I’d better set about removing the things I wanted to save immediately. Then there was a call from the insurance company, voiding the policy and the personal one too if I didn’t get out of the house.

Arthur drove me up to the Manor early the next day and I had a talk with the doctor, the youngest of the four owners, who sat in his chair in the office in his white smock and glasses, his arms folded across his chest, and looked to the side of my face and down at the scatter of papers on the desk’s surface as he spoke. He said I couldn’t stay there, and anyway they’d be closing the place down before long and I wouldn’t even have the job then. That’s when I came to the necessary decision and asked for the two weeks’ vacation I had coming and asked Arthur to go for the candles and bottled water, the canned goods and wood for the stove, and the shells I ordered from the hunting shop in Orleans. Now he comes only in daylight, and I don’t let him linger, and in the evenings I hold up my mother’s dresses against my body and my father’s shirts and pants before packing them, and I look at stained photographs and pathetic souvenirs, and I think of the old men at the Manor growing restless in the recent weeks and the one left on the ward without clothing for travel and how the pumping of his diseased heart may be the only pulse left in the life of that place before long, and I recognize now that whenever I dressed myself it was for going out, a perversely undying habit dragging me always into useless memory.

I have a manual treadmill in my parents’ bedroom, and I’ve wedged it with pieces of wood to make it level again, and when I walk it and close my eyes and imagine I’m walking in the world in safety, I think of my mother and my last days out in the world on the streets of Tampico, and I think of a time before that too and of my father and the stories he told me about his life in old Mexico and the lives of various spirits and ghosts when I was a small child. Not one of the stories was about fishing, and I think I knew my father had been no fisherman and that we had a secret together, but I was too young then to imagine anything beyond that.

My father was a hard and secretive man, but he came alive in his stories, and I was his perfect admiring audience. One of his stories had the flavor of something told many times before and within it were the lives of
calaveras
and children. He told it through pictures of skeletons in a book I can’t find in the house anymore, though I have been searching in candlelight and down in the wind in the basement for it. And late in the night of my searching the lights came on and I was faced with the vulnerability of my foundation, sight of the
tilting out of the seaside wall and the numerous fissures that had opened in it, some large enough for a man or a woman to slip through, and I was in that familiar panic. Then the lights blinked off again and I turned and tugged at the rope and climbed up the slope of the dirt floor to the banister and the stairs. It was dawn when I reached the window, and raining lightly, and I saw a figure on the beach below, under dark and moving clouds, and below the window was no ground now, but only the cliff face and the morning sun on the alluvial escarpment and the cement stairway down in the sand. I saw the figure climbing the steps, collar raised against wind and rain, before I stepped away and went to check the weapons and the barricades, then brewed a pot of tea on the camp stove and sat in the kitchen in my sweats and sneakers and waited for the last clouds to pass and waited for the sun to reach the room.

In the dances of skeletons, the parodies lie in activities and the broad, yet subtle, exaggerations these figures in their bones bring to them. Risen up from the dead well after their moldering,
calaveras
partake of the same world that got them there. But in the common anonymity of their figures, clothed always in uniforms—even a house dress is that—thrust this world into example and instance, and thus celebration, of both the menial and significant, rendering the poses of both ludicrous through gesture and tableau. Women are men, and children are only smaller versions of women and men, and only by virtue of action in tasks or bending to pantomime in mute conversation are the bones expressive, though a jaw might creak up a fraction at the corners, the subtle hint of a thought that provokes a particular grin that never comes. And this is the art of the dead come alive, and within it the recognition that everything is a story.

And in these stories all
calaveras
have their parts, from the politician vomiting words out over the crowd, to the culpable businessman at his elbow and the henchman at the platform’s edge. And each in the crowd too is an actor, in gesture of agreement or of disgust, varieties of pantomime, and the raising of weapons in the bony hands of the military at the periphery. And yet among them, on rare occasion, in the figure of a foot soldier, a carpenter, provocative virgin to the side of a gathering of virgins, one finds the empty skull gaze, the figure in ambiguous gesture beyond the story, head tilted in longing toward the might have been. These are the traveling
calaveras
, and whether they are few or many is not certain, for one may see the same one seen before without knowing it because of the traveling, that search for a proper circumstance in which the dance can be mindlessly entered, which is never found, because the
skeleton is the free essence beyond longing or nostalgia, and these are the aberrant
calaveras
, dragging the memory of the flesh and desire with them.

Two children, a boy and a girl who were farm children. They passed through a dark wood on their way home, and at a bend in the trail in the wood they came upon a fallen oak tree and a
calavera
sitting on the trunk among branches, and they were not hesitant because they were children and had no fear of death. The
calavera
wore the uniform of his last engagement, the vestments of a bishop who had sold the votes of his diocese for money. His grinning skull face stared out from the folds of his robes, his head cocked arrogantly to the side in remembered gesture, but there was a certain look of longing in his teeth and hollow eyes that the children noticed immediately as they climbed among the branches to sit beside him. Are you lost? they asked. He said he was, but he was grinning, and they were not sure of the meaning of his answer. They could see his bare clavicles where his garment opened at the neck, and they thought he must be cold wearing only his bones under his clothing, and they reached up to raise the hood of his cloak over his head, and it fell down to cover most of his face, guarding against any clear view of it. They helped him to climb free of the branches, and then they walked beside him, holding the bones of his fingers, as they led him home.

It was a farmer’s home, one room with a large wooden table and a stove and sink and a stone fireplace. There was a double bed in a corner and pallets on the floor, and the mother fell back at the sight of the bishop in the doorway, flustered and honored, and led him to the table and put food and drink before him that he could not eat. He said he just needed a little rest, and she placed a chair near a window, and the
calavera
sat in it, and the children gathered on the floor at his feet. And once he’d answered the few halting questions the mother put to him, she went about her business of cleaning and cooking, and he sat still in the chair in his spectral garments, watching her.

Then, at day’s end, the farmer came home from his labors. He held the children up in his arms and kissed his wife and bowed to the bishop. Then candles were lit, and the family took up the routinized activities of their evening. All was action and gestures of interchange, and the
calavera
thought of the possibilities of exaggeration as he watched them and thought nothing of the next leg of his journey, the search for that future circumstance in which he might find his place.