Tampico (James A. Michener Fiction Series) (5 page)

Dagoberto climbed the crate and pried the man’s hands from the straps, then lowered him into the waiting arms of General Corzo, who fought the water sucking at his legs and carried him beyond the surf up to the wet beach where Sosa was standing close to the rocky incline. Sosa held the shoulders of Joaquín’s heavy raincoat, its body flapping on a level in the wind, and was lowering it to the sand to make a bed. Calaca had stepped down from his lookout on the rocks, and once General Corzo had settled the man on the coat, Calaca bent over him,
dos calaveras, pero
Sosa edged him aside, then worked to loosen the Day of the Dead costume and get him air.

The crate creaked against my shoulder then settled. Dagoberto was sitting at the edge of the surf, now pouring seawater from the mouth of a boot, and though wind whipped his hair the rain was gone, and when my eyes found Joaquín I saw light in the soaked sleeve of his cotton suit coat where the woman’s head rested. The two were sitting in the surf, foam lapping at their chests. An empty dress drifted beside them, as if a thin woman in dead-man’s-float were looking down, and a broad brush at the end of a thin stick bobbed toward them on the crest of a low wave, as yet indistinguishable objects following, and down the beach beyond them I saw a man with a small child in his arms kneeling in the wash, then saw General Corzo, his heels kicking up
sand spray as he ran toward them. He passed Calaca, who was standing kneedeep in the water and gazing out over the waves.

I pushed away from the crate and looked up. The dark clouds had receded into the sky and there were rips in the blanket now, shafts of light coming through. I heard something thump into the crate, then tap along its far surface. It was a small box of wood and wire, two white chickens inside, looking at me and clucking as they came into view. I grabbed the wire mesh, the spongy handle of the leather suitcase that bobbed behind, and lugged them both out of the water and up to the beach. I saw Joaquín lower the woman to the sand, then cover her body with the dress. He stood over her for a moment and I thought he was speaking, then he turned and headed for me. The general was in the water with Calaca now, and the man holding the child and another man, in skeleton legs and wet shirt hugging the bones of his thin chest, were gathered around Sosa as he knelt in his tending of the prone
calavera.
I heard Sosa cry out, his words distinct, and realized that the wind was dying, and when I turned back to the sea the general and Calaca were standing among bobbing objects in calmer water. Then Joaquín reached me.

“It’s the
calentura
,“ he said. “What Sosa was yelling. It’s malaria.”

A woman rode in on the side of a wagon on a low wave. The wagon’s wheel was spinning above her head, and Calaca was lifted out of the water as he grabbed it, then tossed into the wake. General Corzo had hold of her arm. Then the wagon was turning and they disappeared in the sea under it and Calaca was diving.

People were staggering in the sand. Half-dressed skeletons struggled against objects in the surf all along the beach. I saw a wooden chair, a green painted table with a pig sitting on it, a floating harness, a rat on a stick. And there were dead fish in the water, kelp, and sea lettuce ripped from its mooring, marzipan bones, dozens of wooden hangers, some dragging dresses and costumes, papier-mâché figures, a lamb and a deer painted for the Day of the Dead and bobbing high on the undulating water, their distended rib cages swollen with the sea, the hat of the ship’s captain, a guitar, a devil’s head, his red shoulders visible through foam, a fork sticking up in the spray, hundreds of onions, purple and yellow squash, and the transparent balloons of Portuguese men-of-war. I saw gulls coming down, hovering over the dead fish, saw a tall and beautiful woman, dark twisted hair falling like a dirty mop as she reached under the water, then lifted a straw basket in the air, the sea flooding from it catching a rainbow as the sun broke through completely and sparkled in the
wake and sand. And I could hear talking, some laughter and crying, and a dull, constant moaning.

Then we were in the water, together with Calaca and General Corzo, Joaquín and me. We went to help those who were still foundering both in the sea and malaria. Some were delirious, absently searching among floating objects, but they gave in easily when we touched their chilly or hot arms. A young man looked in my eyes, knowing me, sweat flooding down his cheeks. “
¿Es aquella Cardel?”
he asked weakly, gesturing toward the shore with his chin, then fell against me, his thin body light as a bag of feathers. The general and Calaca had a large man between them and were leaning against a receding wave, and Joaquín went to help them. Calaca smiled at me, his free hand raising a thumb. His sombrero was back on his head at a rakish angle, as if he were drunk in some bar and getting ready to sing. The general swore, “
¡cabron!
,” spitting out spray sent up by a donkey fighting for footing beside him, then bucking its rump as it splashed at the surf line and climbed to the beach. I heard voices, and when I lifted my head from the young man’s sweaty brow I saw townspeople and oilmen climbing down the rocks, carrying blankets, canteens and canvas bags, and a man in a white coat, gripping what I thought was a medical case, as he slipped on the last rocks and fell down on the sand beside Sosa, who turned to him and said, as if in professional consultation, “
Es calentura.
” Dagoberto covered a seated woman with a blanket as others plodded in the sand, heading toward me or down the beach. Then there were dozens of helpers gathering up objects and people, dragging everything across the beach to the rocks and where the rocks met the beach. I saw a man holding the donkey’s halter, unaware of the activity around him, his hand stroking the animal’s muzzle to quiet its shivering body.

Calaca, Dagoberto, and I climbed on the rocks, heading for the brush above and beyond them to gather wood. Clothing was draped over boulders now, coming back to vivid color as it dried in the last rays of sun, and there were furniture, open suitcases, crates and other tilted objects as far as the eyes could see. And there were people moving on the rocks also, those shipwreck survivors free of malaria, touching things, smoothing out wrinkles, searching for what was theirs. We had to step carefully, check for clear footing as we made our way up. The sun was sinking now, and when we reached high ground, the wagons hauling those with malaria were dappled in shadow beyond the scraggly trees where the road was as they creaked slowly toward Chorreras a quarter mile off.

We built a huge bonfire in the sand, but only after a half hour of panic in which children were lost, five girls and a boy, in the accounting done by the ship’s clerical mate as he moved among groups of blanket-draped survivors, a clipboard holding the records he’d managed to save in his hands. But then we heard faint voices, words of that song about a
rancho grande
, and when we crowded down to the surf’s receding edge and looked out over the still and darkening Gulf waters, we saw the raft, one whole side of the ship’s wooden wheelhouse, and the children sitting cross-legged in the dusk upon it, singing, as it drifted in. Then mothers and fathers were in the water, gripping the raft’s timbers, reaching up and petting the children’s bodies.

The captain sat in a lawn chair beside me. Calaca and Dagoberto had retrieved them from the rocks below General Corzo’s house when they went there to get the case of tequila and the lemon. Calaca had filled his pockets with salt, and he sprinkled it carefully into people’s palms as he circled the fire. Some sat on crates and suitcases, and I could see others lounging on blankets through the smoke and flames. The captain was talking and gesturing, tapping his chest with a finger. He’d found his hat, and though it was still wet he was wearing it. He was a small man, compact and vibrant, and his thick mustache twitched at the corners as he spoke. He leaned close to me at times and almost whispered, as if we were involved in some conspiracy. Joaquín was on the other side of him, the bones of a chicken leg on a page of newspaper in his lap, and he was smiling as he worked bits of skin from between his teeth with a small gold pick. He’d lost his suit jacket but still wore his fine tie. Boxes of fruit had been carried to the beach and there were fried chicken, tamales, jugs of wine, and baskets of fresh bread.

“He’s telling about the shipwreck and his mates and about the contract. He would have stayed with his ship to the bottom, he says, but for the
pendejo
owners. He says they knew about the storm coming ahead of time and said nothing.”

“How could they know?” I said.

“He doesn’t say that. But he will go soon to find them, and he will straighten things out then,” Joaquín translated.

Sweat was beading on the captain’s brow, and we both saw it, and Joaquín pushed up from his chair and headed toward Sosa and the rocks to find the doctor.

And before long it was night on the beach and the sky was filled with stars and the fire was fed with dry wood brought from Chorreras. Others fell into
sickness of the
calentura
, shadow figures helped or carried up the rocks to where the wagons waited, family members and close friends following. The ship had carried sixty souls, dancers and musicians and their children, all sailing north from Cardel for the Day of the Dead fiesta in Tampico, and though not a soul was lost, only twenty-five remained in good health on the beach once activity of the aftermath was declared over. An old man, leader of a mariachi band, declared it, the neck of his guitar at his cheek as he began to strum. He’d found the chest holding the skeleton costumes and both he and the one remaining band member, a young, quick-fingered boy with an accordion, wore the bones. Calaca and Dagoberto had given up their sombreros, and the two
calaveras
moved around the fire playing ballads and border polkas, their singing punctuated by quick calls and high squeaks. I saw a woman dancing in a long dress, then turning a cartwheel in the sand, her legs gleaming in firelight as the singers strutted by, and I thought of Chepa’s legs. Hers were thicker, her muscles longer and smoother, but they were just as agile. Women and men danced to the music now, wearing their bony costumes. I saw a boy throw a
pelota
, a young girl catch it. Some roasted ears of corn in embers at the fire’s edge and the sweet smell drifted on the smoke to us.

I was tired in my skin, the fire hot on my face, but my bones felt hard and oiled at the hinges as I lifted my hand and sucked the lemon, then swigged from the full bottle Calaca handed me and passed it on to General Corzo. The five of us were seated in chairs in a half circle facing the fire. Only Sosa was absent, still playing doctor, though there was no longer any need for it.

“Well, I suppose this means we are all settled up,
ese.
” The general spoke to Joaquín in perfect English after lowering the bottle, passing it on to Dagoberto, then wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

Joaquín answered in Spanish, his eyes sparking in the firelight, and Calaca laughed.

“I said, ‘For the time being at least,’” Joaquín told me.

“
Sííí
,” said the general, in a mimic of The Lazy Mexican.

Calaca grinned his skull face at me, passing the bottle, and I could tell it was okay with us for the time being also. Then General Corzo was speaking again, Joaquín translating softly for Calaca and Dagoberto.

I leaned back in my chair, lifted my face from the fire’s heat, and gazed up into the sky’s broad dome. There were thousands of stars there, and in the general’s soft talk, the singing and quiet laughter that edged into it, I felt I was rising up toward them, just a little, until I couldn’t feel the chair under me
anymore and was floating in the world of what he was saying. Well, it was close to that kind of thing at least. But I was tired, right at the edge of exhaustion, a state where one can feel suspended and be where the real world is, just too worn out for anticipation, or thoughts of the past behind it.

“Ah, the revolution, articles of the constitution, and that
pendejo
Obregón. And smoke rising from gas fires, and the drilling, and a bone caught in the throat eating, and cauldrons for the scalding of chickens, music and dancing, tribute, and the turn of a card in the thick fingers of Chepa, the nose of Calaca whistling in his laughs, tobacco and tequila.

“I have a man wearing a ring of fingers around his brim, a good man, each cut and counted. One wears a ring still that I recognize, onyx, who was a good man too. The fingers jiggle when the man walks, and there are those who fear him, though it’s the counting that concerns me. One and two, a dead mother and my father,
your
father, the painful permanence of the onyx, for solitude, peace maybe, after shipwreck, after sabotage, just after some moments with a woman before starting again.

“I tell you, this life means nothing to me, because anything can happen, and if you try counting it out it surely will. I said shipwreck, who could imagine it, and all souls saved, so pass me the bottle, my dear skeleton, and the cigar and a chicken leg, pass over the tribute money and the pleasures it can buy me, one of which is help easily given to survivors, another just good fellowship, here, under the stars.

“It’s the Dead’s Day. There are stories. Don Lupe has told some in pictures, his
calacas
dancing: businessmen, housewives and journalists,
bandidos
with weapons clacking against their ribs, even a priest,
el presidente
even, that
maridillo, putas
, and young girls too of the purity still of the Virgin. All gone into the company of the dead, our reminder, most purely secular, since only the bones are the souls, their dancing and commerce. And thus do I fancy the ancients, dressed in the skins of the dead, as irony. And now I’ll tell the story of two
calaveras.

“An old woman was dying and her husband, feeling death at his door also in anticipation, went to her bedside to soothe himself. One might expect wisdom in the aged, but the man was a politician and as such was without it. Always he was counting, accumulating, while his wife had been living in the pleasures of sewing and cooking, in cleaning, and in walking the street and in shopping in the sweet and sour presences of the here and now.