Tampico (James A. Michener Fiction Series) (8 page)

“It was almost dark and a damp breeze had come up, and there was a mist moving in the branches of the highest trees. I remember clouds in the sky, coming in low over the coop, and a drop of rain or two hitting my forehead as I approached it. I could hear the chickens clucking, a few of them, and maybe I saw the shadow of one moving in the screening, jumping down from a perch.

“They were on the floor together, off in a corner on blankets, and the chickens were watching them. I had the door half open, and I must have heard something, her voice possibly, or seen the chicken light at the end of its cord where she held it, wavering. I stopped there, just inches before the door’s squeak, and heard the muffled grind of grain under the blanket where his heels shuffled and a tapping that was the long electrical cord striking the floor as she bucked over him, riding him, facing me, but not seeing me. I could see the top of his head, her arm extended, hand gripping his shoulder, while the other one brought the light out under her chin, then back into her breast, her face in the light, then out of it, eyes rolling, hair ribbons brushing her cheeks.

“She was fully dressed, in one of her Sunday dresses, a high collar, and a long full skirt that spread out over him, the hem just under his chin, covering his arms and shoulders, even his legs, and she was sitting up straight upon him, the way she always said to sit at the table, something proper, modest even, a
way to be sitting for company, had there ever been any, not arrogantly, but self-contained, sitting in stillness until spoken to, as she had when she was a girl.

“But she was rocking, a movement under the fabric in her hips that I’d never seen before, not in anyone, like a child rocking on a wooden horse at a carnival, but not so insouciant, a rocking that was motivated, but not in her mind somehow. And yet above her hips she was not rocking, and her face had her mind elsewhere, in the way she often looked out the window as she was beating batter for a cake, as if she were gazing over a fence into a neighbor’s yard, her eyes focusing on desired objects and postures and events, then rolling back and moving on. Then the rocking stopped. The chicken light was at her chin, and I saw her eyes focus on me, come to a realization, then fill with hate. I couldn’t look in those eyes, and I turned away from her then, from him too, though he’d been nothing, and let the door slide silently shut behind me.

“It was three days later that she fell to the floor at the kitchen sink and died there, a heart attack. We’d not spoken nor looked in each other’s eyes since the night I’d caught her in the coop, and though Adam was gone I suspect she knew a time would come when we’d have to do those things, as if he were still present, and couldn’t continue to live in the knowledge of that necessity. She was thirty-four years old.

“But I haven’t spoken about my father enough, but for his place up on the hill under that old tree. He was a good man and an upright one, who had come on hard times, but unlike my mother was unbroken by them. I knew early on that I’d been conceived out of wedlock, though the fact went unspoken, that I’d been the cause of their marriage, which was not a good one, and, in argument, for their fall. They might have gone out on their own otherwise. They may never have married, in the first place, at all.

“It wasn’t sex that I caught her at, but the dangerous product of imagination, that one fatal step that took her beyond thought and into action, which in truth meant nothing to me, and when she saw me watching her she had reached the other side of the fence and there could be no going back again. I’d caught her denying her life, which was a terrible burden to her and was me, and she hated me for seeing her there, in that desired place, as defined without me. So I’d soiled it just in the moment that she’d reached it, and I think she couldn’t imagine her hate and that I’d seen it and had thus taken the only way out, appropriate that it be her heart.

“And there was nothing to do, but that I could do something for my father, and after the funeral I told him I’d be leaving.

“Even now I can see the look in his face, which stays with me even though he is long dead. He had to speak out of that look to hide it, but I noticed, as he was reasoning with me, halfheartedly, saying that I should stay, that he was taller than I, just a little bit, and that for the first time in a long time he was standing up straight in his body, knowing he was at the brink of freedom.

“He was standing that way still, loose in his legs and arms, his shoulder touching the old porch column, as I headed down the rutted drive. I turned once at the gate and caught him turning away, moving toward the house. He shrugged his shoulders and stepped back to the porch edge, then lifted his arm and waved. I didn’t turn to look again, and by evening I was out of Kentucky and heading north through Ohio.”

I watched the men move slowly through the meadow in their heavy coats, as if they were exhausted refugees escaping a firestorm or a flood. It was three a.m. and moonlight falling on my cheek had awakened me, and I’d risen and gone to sit in my pajamas at the kitchen table near the stove and drink tea. The moon was in the porcelain on the table, and I could see it in the sky beyond the crest, its light in beach grass at the edge, and in a while I felt the weight of sleep upon me again and I’d gone back to my bedroom and crossed to pull the curtains closed, and then I’d seen them.

John was between them, Larry and Frank, and Gino was behind, pushing the empty chair and leaning into it, spokes caught in bearberry, wheels wobbling in the meadow’s ruts. John can walk sometimes and sometimes he can’t. It’s the chemotherapy and the way he says he feels it in his joints. But he was walking now, though a little haltingly and watching his feet, and I saw Gino raise his arm and call out and the others stop and wait for him to catch up. Then they were through the meadow and climbing up the verge to the road, and I looked beyond them to that tapered cylinder, distinct in its white painted blocks of stone against the moonlit sky. There was no need for the beam on such a night, but I could see the broad circular lenses through the glass and steel rod cage, wearing its conical witch hat at the top.

There was heavy equipment all around the lighthouse base, and a new
fence, and I could see the massive I-beams that supported it, and in the moonlight I could see under them, a space tall enough for a man or a woman to stand in. The beams ran down the center of the road, like tracks, ending where the two small houses sat, awkwardly tilted, shored up and waiting for reattachment when the lighthouse arrived there. I thought about Carolyn and the Ivory soap she told me they’d be using on the beams as a lubricant. She’d be laughing and shaking her head now, then in a while, if they didn’t return, she’d call the police. She wouldn’t call the doctor. The old men had pulled this kind of thing before, just left the Manor for a walk, once even for a drink in town. They’d be coming back, or she’d get them back. She’d give them a little time.

Frank was working at the gate, having no luck, and I saw Gino head around the fence, the others following. Then Frank followed, and in moments they were standing shoulder to shoulder pressed against the fence and looking under the lighthouse, pointing and gesturing, and I could see their steamy breath on the night air.

I heard the sound of a motor, and when I looked up the road to where the houses were the police car was coming. It flashed to its high beams, and the men in their coats and woolen hats and bare ankles below pajama legs were caught in the bright light. Then the car stopped and the men turned and the officer climbed out of the door and strolled along the blacktop toward them, leaving footprints in the silver frost behind.

At times I can hold a tissue, still as a piece of heavily starched fabric, in the breeze in the hallway between the open doors, one looking out along the crest to sky and sea, the other down into the meadow and up to the Manor on the hill, and I leave the windows open in most weather, at least a crack in winter, to get some of the outside in, because I can’t go there, but for Arthur and the dark car he calls his limousine.

Last night John was sleeping in his bed early on in my shift, and when I passed the foot of the bed I heard him call out softly, “Chepa” in some dream, as if he were speaking to me. It was later that he told his story, and after I’d sucked the men on the ward, I’d gone behind the screen in the solarium to tend the one I’ve come to have feelings about. His face is oddly beautiful in its repose in his coma, and when I dab the sweat from his brow and cheeks I usually linger over him. His eyelids are utterly unwrinkled, long curling lashes, and he responds to my touch sometimes, coming up to a shallowness in delirium, and I feel I can almost reach him.

And I was tending him and John was telling his story, and though the circumstance
of the story was beyond my experience in time and intention, I was provoked at his mention of that square in Tampico, the place I’ve come to call my agora, and the old images came up to me again, the man leaving me to sit on a bench there, buildings pressing down over me, and the yellow chihuahua that came up to my knee and sniffed it.

I felt my stomach turning and I stepped out from behind the screen into the early stages of the story, interrupting it for a brief moment only, and went to the instrument room to clean the tubes and cannulas, to get my hands into alcohol and sputum and my mind free of memory.

My mother died in Tampico. I was eighteen years old and a licensed practical nurse and my father had died, and we went to Tampico to see his family and to give them money. My father was a fisherman, like his father before him a Mexican who had married an Indian woman, who was herself the product of a marriage between a Spaniard and an Indian before the turn of the century. My father left the fishing village of Chorreras when he was twenty-seven and had come up to the northeast without English to make his fortune. It wasn’t much of a fortune when he died at sixty-seven, but there was the house and boat and money in the bank, and he’d set aside money that my mother didn’t know of until the will was read, a few thousand dollars for his sister and brothers, those Mexicans that neither my mother nor I knew existed. He’d left money for air fare and hotels and a codicil that would tie the rest up if my mother didn’t go there.

It was a bus that killed her. It was full of chickens, and the chickens flapped at the windows and flew from the doors with the people when the bus slid to a stop in the muddy street over her.

I was helpless before it, hugging my raincoat in the rain, my umbrella skidding away, and it was only the old man’s arm around me that steadied me as he turned me away from the sight and led me through the doorway of a bakery at the corner.

His name was Joaquín Sánchez, a businessman of some kind just passing by, and he made arrangements with the coroner and for shipping the body back. Then he took me to dinner, spoke to me like a grandfather, and in two days came to get me at the hotel. I stood in shade under the awning while he spoke to the driver who would take my suitcases and my mother’s suitcases out to the airport and put them in a locker, then return and leave the key at the desk. I had a book and my toothbrush and some underwear in a bag over my shoulder. He said I shouldn’t be carrying anything heavy, not right then, and
he walked close to me as we headed up the street and into the square, where he sat me on a bench and went into one of the public buildings to finish up the paperwork.

It was early afternoon and the square was crowded with people. Vendors were busy at their carts, and I watched men passing in business suits, women strolling together, hand in hand, carrying shopping bags and large purses. The doors of the public buildings were heavy and windowless, and when people entered in through the dark spaces at their openings, they were closed tight again and looked like smoky paintings on the façades in which they were set. The places where the edges of buildings met at right angles, forming the square’s corners, were, I imagined, narrow passages, streets winding in from the serious industrial back streets of the city, transformed into shopping and business avenues as they spilled into the square, but I couldn’t see their mouths, and the buildings seemed butted together at their edges there, as if there were no entrances at all. There was only the street we’d walked down from the hotel. It entered at the side of the square, and I could see into it for a good distance to where it turned, shops and offices, people crossing in traffic and exhaust smoke, and could imagine the hotel beyond the turn and on the second floor my room there, and my mother’s full suitcases and my own, standing in a bulky gathering on the carpet beside the bed. Then I remembered the driver and thought the room would surely be empty now.

I felt something, a light pressure and a wetness, and I looked away from the street and down into the shadows the leaning buildings cast over me and saw the yellow Chihuahua, her paws on my leg, snout reaching up and touching the edge of my hand where it rested on my knee. I jerked my hand away, a little shocked by her presence and her color, and she looked up at me curiously, then kicked from my knee, turning before her feet hit the ground, and trotted off across the square. Beyond her and above her I could see a fire escape, no more than a steep vertical ladder climbing up the edge of a building’s front, and I found myself thinking of it as a way out of the square, but then I looked to the building’s base and saw that its first rung was too far up to be reached. The dog disappeared into a crowd. There seemed to be more people in the square now, and I looked quickly to the place where Señor Sánchez had entered, but the door was closed tight and I couldn’t see a handle, and I felt my stomach tightening, a rush of blood at my temples. I reached for my wrist and found my pulse. It was racing, and when I looked down at my hands, the one holding the wrist of the other, it was as if they were someone else’s hands, there in my lap.

And I was hearing things, a motor and laughter, a flapping in the breeze, and when I looked to the one remaining exit from the square I could see it was closing, a truck was turning, edging ahead, then back, coming horizontal at the mouth, blocking the street off.