Tampico (James A. Michener Fiction Series) (30 page)

It was dark by the time he had dressed again, in clean clothing, light khaki pants and shirt, and had stepped out through the building’s open doorway and onto the walk that edged the square. He found they were all there waiting, even Alma, in shorts like the bare-chested men had worn, but in a loose white shirt with beaded piping at the pockets. His father stood beside Ramona, who had traded her western costume for a long dress. She wore a silver necklace, but no makeup now, and Carlos thought she looked her age and might even be comfortable in it. Gino stood beside them, dark splotches on his bare legs that looked like thin sticks below his baggy shorts. Larry stood off to the side a little, looking toward the square’s center in the distance. He was wearing his loose, pajama-like outfit once again and his tennis shoes, and he’d replaced his cowboy hat with that beaded skullcap. Carlos could see lights where he gazed, around the dark shadow shapes of the low fountain, torches he thought, their flames dancing in the soft cool breeze he felt at his collar. Figures moved at the fountain’s edges, and some seemed to be carrying and adjusting things around it.

“The bath was very good,” Frank said. His clothes were almost formal, a pair of cotton slacks and a black belt and white dress shirt, tucked in at the waist and bulging over his thick chest, and black tennis shoes. It was too dark now to see clearly under the shadow cast by the building, though the last remnants of sun, those final geometric figures, covered the square, starting beyond the walkway and the planters lining it, an enigmatic pattern that moved down its length to the fountain and beyond.

John stood beside his wheelchair, the bright feather dusty in the brim of his derby hat now, in pants reminiscent of the ones Alma had worn on the trail and a similar woven shirt. His hand gripped the sidebar, and Carlos waved him off and lifted the chair down the few steps to ground at the square’s edge, and once John was seated and settled in, they started their slow procession, heading for the fountain. John lit a cigarette, as Carlos walked behind him and pushed him, and smoke flooded from his tracheotomy tube, to rise and disappear above them.

There were lights in the huts along the hill, a shimmering in doorways like vacant movie screens, and the light seeped up into their roofs, leaking through the thatching, and the roofs seemed to be levitating. The flames off in the distance at the fountain had steadied, breeze rising from the square and leaving, and Carlos could hear it going in faint rustling in leaves and branches high above the huts where the hill peaked, and he thought he could see light in the sky there, though there was no moon. And he saw a glow of light too at the glass house.

“Oil,” John said, a faint creak in the mechanism as Carlos pushed him, “all that dust and sand along the way.” His voice was creaky too, a deep exhaustion in it, but it held some energy as well, and the others seemed expectant also. He thought he could see it in their shuffling gait and even in Ramona, his father at her side, in the way she shook her loose hair that fell gracefully to her shoulders. Then, in a while, they were moving out of the darkness, coming into the edge of light cast by the torches at the fountain’s sides.

The fountain was made of heavy slabs of dark stone that had been fashioned into rectangles to form a low wall that contained it. The wall was broad, at least a yard wide, and the lanterns rested on it, three on each side of the roughly rectangular shape, the contained pool rising up almost to the edge and lapping there. What had been a small animal figure stood up at the center, worn away over time, and a broad cylinder of water climbed up in the air above it, just a few inches, to form a mushroom head that spilled down, causing a turgid bubbling at its base, then changed to quieter ripples that dissipated into that lapping when it reached the walls.

Carlos heard Ramona laugh lightly, then laugh again through a quiet sneeze, and when he looked beyond where she stood beside his father and Gino, he saw two women at a table on the far side of the fountain. He heard a click on glass, then saw the light flame at the fat candle wick as one of them lit it, and in that light a flag of white fabric floated on the night air for a moment,
then fell to cover the wooden table, upon which the woman placed the candle and covered the flame with a glass chimney.

There was another table beside it, set slightly askew as in some Paris café, and the women prepared it and more candles were lit and men came out of the darkness with more lanterns and yet another table. Soon light bathed the entire area, and Carlos could see the food in the wooden boats the men carried, those two that had met them earlier in shorts only, but now wore fabric smocks that hung down below their knees, brushing at their legs. They still wore their earrings and the blond one wore a beaded bracelet, and Carlos thought he could see a hint of color on their cheeks and noses, and he saw that Larry was watching them as well. They set the bowls down on the tables, then turned and walked back into the darkness at the lights’ periphery, only to appear again, carrying pitchers and baskets piled high with tortillas and a kind of cakey bread.

The women held dishes then and wooden utensils, and they all watched as the tables were set for dinner and mugs were placed to the right of large pottery plates. Then Alma raised his hand again in that now familiar gesture, and the old men shuffled toward the tables, speaking softly, negotiating a proper seating, and Carlos and his father and Ramona followed after. Gino joined them, and so did Frank, and John and Larry sat with Alma at the other table, which was slightly smaller and edged out into the darkness a little where the lantern light failed. Then the wooden boats were lifted by the two men and the women and were brought to their sides and offered up so they could serve themselves.

The food was similar to the stew Alma had served on the trail, but thicker and fresher, and they could smell sweet spices in the steam that rose above their full plates. The drink was water only, laced with mint, but spring water and delicious, and they lifted their mugs to toast each other and dipped tortillas and hunks of bread in the juices. The napkins were made from pieces of old clothing, large squares that had been cut and stitched by hand, and they used them sparingly to dab the brown juice away from their lips and chins, and their utensils clicked against their plates with dull sounds, wood against ceramic, and there was little talk, but only light laughter and a few whispered comments as they ate.

When they were finished and their plates had been cleared away, the two men produced tobacco in a small wooden bowl and clay pipes and the women arrived again with a plate of candy balls with colorful veins running through
them, some pasty substance, sweet, but with a tang that bit lightly at the tips of their tongues.

Carlos could see beyond the other table now to where the legs of a row of straight-back chairs poked out of the darkness and into candlelight. There were five of them, and in four he could see the shadow figures of those who had served them. They must have sat there, attentively, all the while the company had eaten, then brought the tobacco and the pipes and candy and then retired there again. They sat there now, as pipes were lit and the rich scent of smoke drifted away over the tables, and he could see the crossed legs of the men, the women’s dark hands in their laps.

The talk was quiet and subdued among them. Frank was at his side. He’d leaned back in his chair, moving out of elements of conversation, but for the whispered wonder talk of the here and now, he had no real part in. Ramona leaned against Manuel, and both were turned slightly, their heads in profile, looking down at Gino, his elbows on the table, who was telling them something Carlos couldn’t quite hear. Just a few words drifted across the table, borne on some insistence: smoke, hydrotherapy, skin. Frank’s hands were on his ample stomach, the pipe in his teeth. He was looking up to where the stars might be, but when Carlos glanced above he could see nothing in the darkness, and he wondered, just briefly, where his mind might be. He could hear Larry’s voice from the other table, something about flowers and air, and when he looked there he saw that John had pushed his wheelchair back a little from the table’s edge and had turned it. He’d given up on the pipe and had lit a cigarette, and he was watching Larry’s hands as they moved in tight, delicate gestures, forming things he was speaking of.

The cigarette stood in John’s throat, a glow at its tip expanding as he puffed and smoke rose to his face, then drifted away behind him. Even Alma was watching, intent on Larry’s hands also, some possibility of understanding there, and beyond the three of them and the larger, ragged circle of the torch and candlelight were only the chairs and shadow figures of their hosts, though a faint glow was seeping down over them now, and when Carlos looked above them and toward the place of the glass house in the distant darkness, he saw the full moon had risen and was clear of any earthly structures, though low at night’s horizon, an unnatural glow in the sky behind it, almost artificial. Clouds drifted across its face, or maybe it was ground mist, expelled in the earth’s cooling in sun’s absence. But it wasn’t cool, just a mild cleansing breeze flickering the candles in soft warm air, carrying pine scent and the sweetness of roses.

He looked down again and saw his father, older now, but the same gringo face, though absent of that desperation he remembered. It had gotten lost in age lines and a sagging of skin at his neck, been replaced with something Carlos thought might well be character, though he couldn’t be sure yet of that. Then he was thinking of his mother, really no more than a shadow presence, possibly constructed only from imagined images and through a filter of dead rage he had put aside long ago. He tried to find a way to hate his father once again, but he couldn’t accomplish that, and he could find no proper posture either that could bring him to forgiveness. There seemed nothing much to forgive. It seemed only a story.

And he was thinking these things, then was looking at Frank, his white shirt like a broad sail over his chest, who was thinking his own private thoughts, and when he turned slightly, he could see the cigarette glowing in John’s throat and the way the bones of his face came back into hard distinction under his straw derby and bushy brows, his scar a routed groove, as the smoky veil drifted away after each puff, then clouded that skull again with the next. Then he looked beyond him toward the edge of darkness where the chairs sat in the square’s hard earth. All four were still there, the women and the two men, and beside them, in the chair that had been empty, was now a figure, slightly smaller than the others, but not much different in clothing and stolid demeanor, another woman he thought, then was sure of it when she leaned forward a little and her face came into the candlelight. Gino had pulled his chair up closer and was intent on something, and Ramona and Manuel had leaned toward him and were listening. Carlos thought to reach out and touch Frank on the arm, but he couldn’t bring himself to interrupt his reverie. He looked over at the other table and saw Larry’s hands, both John and Alma watching them, and beyond them he saw the woman rise from her chair.

She was an old woman, and she wore a woven dress composed of those small rectangles of color he’d seen in Alma’s shirt the day they’d started their journey. The dress hung from her shoulders, unbelted like a poncho, its hem above her knees, and her legs below the dress were thick, ropes of smooth muscle ending at thin ankles, her feet in leather sandals. Her hair was grey and oiled and pulled back tight at her temples and tied behind in a kind of braided bun that showed itself, a silver knot where her spine started, as she turned her head slightly and glanced at the company at Carlos’s table. He could see her face clearly, the broad brow and small hooked nose, those slabs of flesh that were her cheeks, stonelike and expressionless, and above them her black eyes.
They were bright in the candlelight, though he could see no pupils.

“Chepa.” Just the one word, softly, coming from Gino, so softly that Ramona looked back at him quizzically as if he’d cleared his throat or tracheotomy tube oddly, only that, but Carlos heard it, something rising from a story, among those shards that were still in him, buried deeply in remembered delirium, that bed in the solarium at the Manor and someone touching him, and his father too in the stories, in a dream. He heard a creak and knew it was the wheelchair turning and that John had heard the spoken name as well.

Then she was moving. She said something. She was not feeble, but she moved carefully, slightly hesitant, but not pausing. She was crossing the space between the edge of darkness and John’s chair, and Carlos looked to the chair and saw a spark fly up and tumble in the air as he flicked his cigarette away. Then his hands rose and reached out, palms open, and she was moving without thought for moving, a faint smile on her lips, her eyes still bright and enigmatic above it, and when she reached John’s legs she touched them, searching for his bony knees below the blanket that covered them, leaning over his lap, her face only inches from his. Then she was climbing into the chair with him, careful not to hurt him, sliding her legs over his legs, her knees moving up toward her stomach, and Carlos saw her fingers touch the nape of his neck, pulling his head down to her face, and saw John’s fingers as he raised them to his brim and took his hat off and threw it into the darkness. Then her cheek was against his, her mouth at his ear, and she was whispering words meant only for him, and Carlos saw John’s head move as he answered her, his thin silver hair, saw moments of hesitation and stiffening in the arms that held her, and in a while he saw her hand working at the buttons of his rough, woven shirt, her fingers slipping in between the folds of multicolored fabric to touch the flesh at his stomach.

Frank had awakened from his reverie, and he too now turned in his chair to watch them, his back to the table. Larry sat only a few feet away from them, awkward there, and Carlos saw him turn and cross his legs, then look off to fix his gaze on those seated in the line of chairs, moonlight in the beads of his skullcap.