Toby Olson

Tampico

For Peter Markman

and in memory of Roberta,

the spirit behind the mask

’Tain’t no sin to take off your skin

and dance around in your bones.

— Song lyric by Edgar Leslie, 1929

BOOK ONE. The Manor

John

Chepa colored the dogs by dipping them in iron cauldrons out back. Estrella was a struggler and almost as large as she was, and Chepa’s arms would be flooding pink fans from the elbows when she lifted her out. Then it was Don Lupe, the spaniel dyed grassy green, and yellow for the Chihuahua, Rata, the only true Mexican of the three.

There was a time when the cauldrons had been used for the scalding of chickens that were fed to the troops, but that was when General Corzo had owned the house, one of many, and before he lost it to Chepa in a game of cards at the Louisian. Chepa had wagered servitude, and it was a good thing for General Corzo that she had won.

The cauldrons rested in a row on the ground below the crude porch, beyond them and Chepa’s small vegetable garden and the oak sapling she’d planted at the garden’s edge the foothills rising above the dusty plains of the state of Tamaulipas, becoming those lush and mysterious mountains from which she had descended, that even from the sky were lost to sight under cloud cover and perpetual mist.

Those perfect circles were my beacon, their colors blinking through drifts of smoke from oil and gas fires, and I’d let the de Havilland take the mountains’ updrafts, bring her into a stall as I banked over the house. Then I could see the derricks and camps off in the distance, a few thin fingers of flame, and the matrix of pipelines, vectors disappearing in the direction of Tampico and the Gulf. I’d dip my wings, and below would be the small figure of Chepa, those bright colorful dots that were the dogs bouncing at her heels as she brought them across the baked clay of the front yard to the edge of our crude landing strip, then paused and looked up to find me.

Maybe a bowl of chili, tamales steaming in corn husks, a cool bottle of sweet Mexican beer. I’d step down from my cockpit, steam rising from the block of ice in the forward one, and Rata in fresh yellow would run and jump at my knee. I could see the breeze in Estrella’s long hair, hear it in the clack of chimes hanging from the porch eaves once the engine had coughed and died, then Chepa’s laughter and the soft clicks in her Indian talk in the dogs’ yapping as she lifted the meal in its stoneware vessel, grinning and cocking her head boldly and not stopping until she was pressing me against the fuselage with her hip and the scent of her cooking was in my nose. It was 1923. Obregón had exempted U.S. oil interests from Article 27 of the constitution. I was twenty years old and Chepa, my Huasteca, was thirty-five.

I hadn’t gone south leaving a dark story behind me, like so many others. I was too young for that. But I had flown the Gulf Coast for Texas Oil all the way from Corpus to Galveston and inland to Hearne and Seguin. It was mail mostly, occasionally executives and small parts, and when Obregón made his move they decided to move me. I had a first week in the city, going over aerial maps of Tamaulipas and Vera Cruz to the south. It was two words then, Vera Cruz, and the maps marked the camps with names — Columbus, Álvara, Aguascalientes — as if they were towns and not just clusters of oil rigs, crescents of barracks and mess halls and a few rooms for bosses and company visitors from the States.

From my hotel window on the second floor I could see down the narrow street into the city’s central square, the corroding church they called a cathedral, public buildings to either side of it, and the flapping awnings and cloth skirts of the various vending carts that lined the perimeters every day. Women leaned over wooden boxes of fruits and vegetables, men in cowboy hats lifted small tools and examined them, a few dusty peons, and away from the shopping, around the bubbling fountain at the square’s center, oilmen in clean shoes bargained and told extended stories. Everything seemed benign in its activity there, but when I held the fan-blown curtains back and followed the drops of sweat falling from my nose to the street below I saw a seamier and more exciting side of things. At least it was that in the eyes of the twenty-year-old I was then.

The Louisian was just across from me, and in the evenings under the gas flares I’d watch women flirting with men in sombreros, some wearing sidearms, on the boardwalk in front of the Café Bolívar a few doors down. It had rained for a solid week before my arrival, and though the street was still mud and I’d watch men dancing across it on narrow boards, the heat was back and the mosquitoes too. The men would slap at them and the women would brush them away, gestures that seemed often in time to the faint strains of Cuban danzón coming from the Lluvia del Oro, the bar Joaquín had told me about, out of sight beyond the Bolívar at the turn.

Joaquín was a Mexican born in Tampico, but he’d been raised up north in McAllen across the border from Reynosa. He had both English and Spanish perfectly and in his early thirties had been hired by Texas Oil. He’d been a kind of advance man, preparing the way for leases and later for payoffs to the various generals and their small armies that provided protection for rig sites. To the south, the aftermath of revolution continued in assassination and uprising, but in Tampico there was yet another enemy, one from the north, and revolution took its form in tribute, a kind of people’s taxes. Joaquín had greeted me at the airport, holding a basket of fruit and smoked fish. It was his job to help me get settled in with the maps and to fly with me until I was oriented, and in the evenings of my first days he took me out into the life of the city streets and to the bars, and one evening had occasion to lean against me and say the following.

“I am told that if holy water falls on her it boils.”

He spoke in a damp whisper, and I could smell the anise on his breath. We were sitting beside each other at the bar overlooking the tables and the small dance floor at the Lluvia del Oro. The French band had finished its set, and people had risen not for dancing now but for drinks and conversation. We’d been talking about the day’s rough landing at a camp called Cerro Azul. The runway had been sabotaged with rocks, and I’d had to make a second pass, then hug the edge. Joaquín had figured it was a warning only. The camp boss had paid the general, but Alcázar hadn’t liked his attitude. Joaquín had spoken to him a few days before, something about a lack of seating for his men and inappropriate dress.

I’d been watching a gathering near the dance floor’s edge as we spoke, three men and a woman sitting across a table from them, and another woman, standing, with hands on her hips, her face in profile, and Joaquín had followed my look, then said those words. It was that profile that had drawn me, something I’d seen in museums.

The men were looking up at her. The one in the middle had a faint smile on his lips. He was leaning back in his chair, medals hanging from his leather vest, hands at rest in his lap. He wore a carefully clipped mustache that drooped at the edges of his mouth, and his hair was thickly oiled and glowed with a dull sheen in the dim bar light. The ones to either side of him wore their hats, fine-looking Stetsons, and though they were watching the woman they glanced to the man in the middle from time to time as if for cues. The woman sitting across from them was weeping. I could see it in the shake of her shoulders and the backs of her arms. Her wrists tapped at the table’s edge, and her head moved from the men to the standing woman. She seemed to be saying something through her sobs.

“The older one in the center is General Corzo,” Joaquín said. “And the woman standing, the one you are interested in, she’s pure Indian and not to be trifled with. She and the other one weeping, they work this place. It’s not Corzo who seems to be the problem for them. It’s the one on his right, Calaca. They call him that because he’s so thin. He’s a sneaky bad customer.”

And now the standing woman was talking to him. Her hands had moved from her hips and she was gesturing. Calaca had tipped his hat back and was looking up at her, grinning, his face a skull’s face, weathered skin like parchment stretched over bone. General Corzo had turned a little in his chair and crossed his legs and raised his palm to the one sitting on his left. That one had seemed to be rising, but then settled back. The woman had stepped forward now and raised a finger and was waving it in Calaca’s face. She was short and just a little stocky, but her hips swelled out from a delicately thin waist, and I’d been watching the backs of her beautiful legs, her calves, as the black spiked heels she wore pushed them into definition through her red stockings. Her dress too was black, a clinging silk worn off the shoulder, and I could see the tendons lifting her scapulas, the beginning of her straight and stationary spine as she gestured, the bounce of her coal black hair.

Calaca was laughing now, watching her finger, and just as he leaned forward and opened his mouth as if to bite it, she hit him, her fist flattening his nose and two arcs of blood squirting out to either side of her knuckles.

General Corzo looked down, curious, as Calaca lurched back and fell over in the chair, his head hitting the wood floor with a dull thud, hat bouncing away. He rolled and tried to rise but she was on him, hitting him in the cheek this time, then sitting astride him, one hand gripping the greasy hair on the top of his head as she pounded him in the face one last time. General Corzo watched patiently until she was finished, and the woman across from him had risen and leaned over the table for a better view.

And so it was, only four days after my arrival in Tampico, that I met Chepa and fell in love with her. She was a mother to me and a sister and a perfect lover for a young man of little experience such as I. My mother had died when I was just fifteen. I’d had no father that I knew of, and I’d been on my own since then, a roustabout, and finally with the help of a fatherly man from Texas Oil I’d become a pilot. Then he too had died. I’d had no social life to speak of, a few cool prostitutes and rum and Coke across the border in Matamoros and once an older woman who had taken me under the stars on Padre Island for her brief pleasure. It had all been thoroughly mechanical, until Chepa, and though ours isn’t the story I set out to tell, I’m going to tell some of it anyway.

At first it was clearly the money and that I was a young and innocent man. I went back to the Lluvia del Oro, bought her the grenadine syrup and water she drank to stay sober there. I asked her about Calaca and why the general didn’t intervene. She seemed both charmed and annoyed by the question but wouldn’t answer it. We spent the night together at my hotel, and the next morning Chepa insisted on showing me the sights of the city, though they were few. Bars and offices had invaded historic public buildings and old haciendas, and refinery pollution had eaten away at façades and outdoor statuary. But there were a museum and a few churches, lagunas and parks, and places where the shores of the Panuco were unsullied by terminals and tank farms. We spent the day together, and in the evening we ate dinner together at the Louisian. And the next night, after a day of fishing the Panuco for tarpon, we dined at the Ciudad de Pekín, my first taste of Chinese food. Then I slept in her arms in my hotel room, our bodies glued together in sweat under white sheets through which occasional mosquitoes stimulated us.

Then it was Monday, and I was off with Joaquín on our reconnaissance flights. We flew each of the camps, both north and south, and Joaquín waved his arm in the open cockpit in front of me, pointing down at the Texas Oil flags waving from the highest derricks. There were buzzards too, descending in slow and symmetrical spirals, then rising up from the smell and movement in the living flesh below, then trying it once again.

I had the maps and the places they represented, which from the sky were very much like the maps, and in only a few days Joaquín was grinning and shaking my hand vigorously and I was on my own, carrying mail, valves, and other replacement parts, north through the oil fields of Tamaulipas and south through Vera Cruz.

I never found out how Chepa came by the hand roller, a fifty-gallon oil drum filled with cement. She would hitchhike from her house to the city, but only after a walk of five miles to the main road, which out there was no more than a dirt track. Wednesday, when I returned to the hotel in the late afternoon, she was sitting at the foot of the bed, my open and neatly packed suitcase resting on the coverlet behind her.

“Dónde?” I said. I had this little bit of Spanish and she a good, though often crude, English she had learned from oilmen. I hasten to say she was no prostitute, though she drank grenadine syrup and water and sat with men for money at the Lluvia del Oro. Some there were, but she told me she made her own choices and they didn’t include that.

“A mi casa,” she said, pointing over her shoulder to the open suitcase on the bed behind her. “Joo close now?”

She was smiling, but her broad brow and cheeks were expressionless, her face still as a face carved in a block of dark wood. A small and smoothly hooked nose, lips full and cut straight across below it, and above, her large eyes, pupils black as her hair and penetrating. Often she held two expressions, mouth saying one thing, eyes another, the latter both intimate and impenetrable. Her words were as much an order as a request, and I’d been taking pleasure in her aggressiveness so I did what I was told.

Later, in the de Havilland, it was Chepa and not Joaquín who was pointing down, and as I banked low over her house I saw the oil drum at the edge of the new landing strip she’d rolled. The strip was narrow and short and at the end of it she’d positioned two huge potted plants to either side as warning beacons. She turned around in her seat and grinned at me as I brought the plane down, rocking the wings to make sure of the wind.

The house was elevated a few feet off the ground on pilings, and Don Lupe liked to take the shade at the edge under it, Estrella, with her thicker coat, back behind him deep in shadow. But Rata had no care for the heat and she danced near my ankle, head high and sniffing, as I crossed the clay yard and climbed the steps to the veranda, Chepa slightly behind me, lugging my suitcase.

The house held one large room, an iron stove and an icebox and a sink with a hand pump at the rear, a few crude chairs, and tables with kerosene lamps and candles in onyx holders resting upon them near the walls. There was an open closet in a corner, just a wooden pole upon which were hung the dark and colorful clothing Chepa wore. I saw the black silk dress I remembered there, on a wire hanger beside others. And carved into the boards of the wall beside a window was evidence of the previous residents: VIVA VILLA and ZAPATA. Pencil-thin shafts of light came up through bullet holes in the floor, and in one corner there was a large faint stain that I imagined was blood. The bed was brass and double, its head against the room’s left wall, and at its foot, defining its space as separate, was a beautiful silk screen.

“China Boys,” Chepa said, as I studied the road, the bridge, and the elegant figures caught in their various gestures moving from top to bottom. Most cooks at the camps were Chinese, and there were some who had set up stalls in the square.

“So this is why,” I said, “at the bar, the general didn’t interfere?”

“No,” she said, moving up behind me and pressing her hands against the small of my back. “This house means nothing to him. He has many. It was Ana, the weeping woman, and that Calaca, a business between them I had arranged. The general had no part in it. It was a matter of honor.”

And I suppose it was honor too that kept the rhythm of our relationship so consonant. I was white as a criollo, but no Spaniard, and she was no mestizo, but pure Indian. And though I was a product of the oppressor, I was a child to her and to myself, though becoming a man through her. Neither of us was part of the franchise, though we were both making our livelihood from it.

I had money to burn, and I bought Chepa jewelry and clothing in the square. I bought small pieces of furniture, pottery, pictures for the walls and ice for the beer and wine, strapping it all into the de Havilland’s forward cockpit before I commandeered the plane each evening. Some noons I would ferry Chepa back to Tampico for grocery shopping. Then we would fly out together as the sun was setting. Though the city was hot and malarial, wind blew down from the foothills in a steady stream to cool our house. “It’s coming from where my people are,” she said. Her well was a deep one, and the water was cold and sweet on the tongue.

In the night, after dinner and brandy and cigars, Chepa would light many candles and move the screen away from the foot of the bed. We’d undress in the shadows, then pull the coverlet away and lie down beside each other on the cool white sheets. The pink Estrella would sit in a chair across from us, grinning, her red tongue lolling over her lip, Don Lupe curled like a healthy pine bough on the floor below her. Only Rata would be moving, a small piece of yellow fruit visible occasionally in candle and starlight as she sniffed at the rugs and in the corners of the room, looking for something she could never seem to find. Then Chepa would turn to me, her hair and lips brushing my shoulder and the soft flesh on the inside of her thigh crossing my knee. I’d feel her breath on my cheek, the whisper of her words so close to my ear it was as though my head was a tabernacle and her voice was inside it, disembodied, and as intimate as my own thoughts might be, were I thinking. She’d be singing, those soft, guttural Indian songs, then telling any number of stories as if they were all part of the same one.

A society woman on the streets of the Zona Rosa in Mexico City. She’s come from New York and her husband, a businessman, has given her the day for shopping. She’s done that, eaten a light lunch, and now she’s bored. The clothing and the pieces of fine jewelry she’s bought as souvenirs for friends make but a small bundle and a light one and she has only a broad shoulder purse and a sturdy shopping bag for toting. So she sets off into the back streets of the Zona, down into those byways where only Mexicans live.

The streets are empty, it’s siesta, and deep in a shadowy alley between a bookstore and an artist’s studio, she glimpses a sliver of movement as she passes. She stops, pauses, then returns to the alley’s mouth, and there, growing increasingly visible as it limps forward from the shadows, is a dog.

It’s a very small dog, short-haired, with large oval ears and a pug snout. Its color is a dirty white, and over the foreleg it holds limply above the ground, its chest is a row of bird bones, and its eyes, its protruding eyes, like those of a just-born calf, are rheumy and running, and it’s those eyes that get her.

A Chihuahua, she thinks, poor thing, and she squats down gracefully, places her shopping bag to stand alone on the broken pavement beside her, then reaches her palm and her opening fingers out toward it. The dog limps from the final shadows and to her hand, extends his snout tentatively and sniffs her fingers. Then, his mooning eyes in her eyes, protruding from his small skull as if they might pop out should he stare much longer, his salmony tongue slides through his lips and touches the tip of one of them. Her fingers curl back quickly. She’s a little startled, but she’s undeterred, and she takes the silk scarf from her neck, makes a kind of hammock out of it, then reaches down and lifts the dog, light as a single tortilla, swaddles him and stuffs him gently down into her shoulder purse, among the jewelry, cosmetics and air freshener.

This is a good woman, you can see, and unapproachable, so when she does not tell her husband about the dog, smuggles him aboard the plane, it is no wonder she is successful, given her husband, her fine clothing and demeanor. The dog leaves the bag only when the two have reached the woman’s apartment in New York City, the guest room that her husband never enters.

But the dog will not eat. The woman tries everything, and still he fails. Soon he no longer limps, though he might stand shivering beside the guest bed. And his eyes are closing, victims of an oozing infection.

Veterinary medicine? She’s tried that, pills and potions gathered from friends surreptitiously. And every imaginable hard food and liquid sustenance too. He’s sipped only at a saucer of milk, and this briefly, but that gives her the idea, mother’s milk. She’s heard it somewhere, a thing about animals, and she sets out with efficiency to find it, and she does.

The dog drinks and drinks again, and for a few days he’s limping, his eyes seem to be opening. But then he takes a turn and is failing again, even more quickly than before. No longer can he stand now, and his rheumy eyes have closed completely. He begins to resemble a premature fetus, a small dirty bladder of some kind, curled into a shallowly panting bit of wet empty flesh at the foot of the guest bed.

The woman, in desperation, calls the family doctor, who recommends a veterinarian of stature. Then she calls him and makes a special appointment for the afternoon. She goes then to the dog and lifts him, in a thin rubber pillowcase this time, and settles him gently on a bed made of dishrags deep in a cloth satchel.

They arrive at the doctor’s office on time and are ushered right into the examination room, where the woman takes great care in lifting the dog out of the bag. She places the small rubber package on the shining surgical table, then steps away, and the doctor steps forward and peels back the swaddling.

The dog has become nothing to the woman, nothing surprising that is, so when the doctor jumps back, a little shaken at the sight, she is offended. It’s only a dog, she says, though a very sick one. Ah, well, the doctor says. But did you feed it mother’s milk? I did, the woman says, and they both look down at the dog, only now recognizing that its eyes are half open and completely glazed over and that it is not breathing.

My poor, poor dog! the woman cries, her hands fluttering near her face.

Poor, yes, the doctor says, that is true. But this is no dog, Chihuahua or otherwise. This is a Mexican slum rat, numerous in those cities. Did you find it there?

The story unfolds no further, since the point has been made. It’s the weakness, cowardice, and filth of the Mexican and his representative dog, which is really a rat, or often mistaken for one and vice versa. But this has been a modern version of the story and a reversal is coming, which is not really part of the story but is suggested by it.

In the version just told, the woman is like the woman in any such story, elegant and refined, but though she is these things, and kind, she is also useless. There are no details in her life here, but for her concern with shopping, and though she is possessed of certain efficiencies she had no place to put them, but in the service of the failed resuscitation of a rat. The woman’s husband is completely absent in this version, a piece of reality and social commentary, since that’s the way it is up north.

And you might notice too a hint of the commercial quality of the fine main streets of the Zona Rosa here and how these are in contrast to those invisible byways behind it where the Mexicans live. The woman finds the dog in a dark alley and the concrete is cracked. But the alley is between two shops, one a depository of intellect, the other of art, those two crucial elements of the survival of a culture, the real Mexico here, el corazón of the healthy beating under the drumming of commerce.

And in the reversal the story has not quite ended though the point has been made, because the doctor was wrong. The thing left on the examination table was no rat at all, but a chihuahua of mixed strain, one who had drunk of pure mother’s milk and was not dead but was rising up in the night, his blood cleansed by that milk in the way Mexico might be cleansed, returning to the children of the Indian mother. For the pure chihuahua is an Indian, one who came down from those mountains behind us where I came from. He’s preening and turning in slow circles, his nails clicking on the slick metal, free now of the attentions of woman and doctor and the manipulations that might come from them. It’s dark in the room, and the dog shakes his bum leg and stretches, his eyes blinking, then opening wide as small saucers as he stares down over the table’s edge. He licks his lips. Then he jumps into the void of blackness below.

Her feet hit, her pads thumping on the hardwood of this floor. There she is now, returned to the female through her mother’s milk. In our candles’ light she searches the room for something she might never find. See her? She’s passing low over the carpet there. She looks like a piece of fruit. I think she must be the Indian phoenix that could rise again, redeeming a rodent and the meaning of a hue. This is why I have named my chihuahua Rata and why I have colored her yellow.

And yet this is not the story I have set out to tell, but one that begins on a windy morning in which Chepa had awakened me with the long smooth muscles of her small body and with the sun and we were active in a cool breeze on our bed. She had a way of holding me with her legs, her voice like a strange urging instrument as she fingered the base of my spine. But that is yet another story, and private, and inexpressible even now in this mind of an old man as he remembers.

Chepa stood in swirls of dust as I fired up the de Havilland. I could see the pink Estrella, her long coat feathering in the wind and brightening into cotton candy as the last shafts of sun were swallowed in the high clouds. She was trotting low, her muzzle close to the ground, heading back up the porch steps to join Don Lupe and Rata in the doorway. My goggles were sandblown and the house shimmered and I could feel grit at the cups’ edges. I glanced ahead, under the upper wing, and could see the planters rocking at the runway’s end through the prop’s whir. I looked down at Chepa. Her hand was guarding the side of her face and wind blew her loose dress against her body, revealing those large breasts that had not known mother’s milk, though I had sucked for it. She grinned up at me and I kissed my lips down at her. She wiggled as she waved me away. Our beautiful routine.

Once into the sky, the de Havilland was severely buffeted. My wings were rocking, my tail pushed to the side, and I had to cram my scarf down into the neck of my jacket to keep it from blowing across my face. Wind whistled along the leather of my flight cap where it hugged my cheek. So I took the plane higher, climbing until I was just under the clouds, no more than twenty yards below them. They were thick and almost black, and they raced over me, coming in from the sea. I felt the plane’s nose tip up toward them and had to look away, disoriented.

I was flying very high, and soon I could see the city of Tampico far below, and beyond it, ten miles off, the Gulf of Mexico. I could see the tiny shapes of a few tankers. They seemed still and untroubled by storm, but there were flashes of white in the dark blanket of water they rested upon, waves surely, and the sky was a roiling black wall where it joined the sea at horizon.

I had to fight the stick getting the plane down, and in my landing the wheels bounced and squeaked, then did it again. I parked the craft, chocked and tied it down, then struggled in the wind across the concrete to the Texas Oil office, glancing back once to see the de Havilland dancing at its moorings, its wings vibrating in gusts. I knew there’d be no flights that day, and I was already figuring how I might get back to Chepa as I opened the office door and saw Joaquín sitting at the large desk where the mail and parts chits were distributed. He was the only one there, and he looked up from the documents he’d been reading and smiled.

“¿Qué tal, hombre?”

“Well,” I said. “It’s a real pisser out there.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, and got up from the table. “A good storm. No sky riding today. How, then, is Chepa?”

“Fine,” I said. “Quite good.”

“Well, that’s good,” he said.

He’d risen in formality, and once I was in the chair across from him he sat down again. He was dressed up, in a fine cotton suit, and he wore a tie and his hair had been carefully combed and oiled. I’d already given up on the idea of getting back to Chepa, not in this weather, so when he indicated, somewhat obscurely and delicately, that he could use my help, I said fine.

“But why the suit?”

“That’s it!” Joaquín answered, lifting his hands from the papers. “It’s a meeting in Chorreras. With General Corzo.”

He must have seen something in my face, for he paused, his hands still in the air.

“Can this be a good idea?” I said. “My being there?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “That’s right. A very good idea in fact.” He’d gathered up the papers and was rising again. “Come now. I’ll tell you about it on our way.”

Chorreras was located on the Gulf, near where the Panuco River emptied into it. It had once been a thriving fishing village, much like so many others along the sea’s gentle curve of shoreline, but the arrival of oil interests had changed things. The construction of sea terminals, spills from the tankers, both had killed fishing, and with pipelines had come a need for workers and administrators. Chorreras looked much the same as it always had, but now its ramshackled stucco buildings contained offices and apartments. Some fishermen and their families remained still, and there was an old church and a village hall too, but most of the population was foreign — American, French and British — and there were no more than fifty Mexican workers at the few national terminals, like Corona and Aguila.

The driver moved the company car slowly through the busy streets of Tampico, heading for Laguna de Carpentero and the small-gauge railroad that would take us along the bank of the Panuco and out to the sea. I sat beside Joaquín in the backseat, sniffing his subtle cologne and listening to what he had to say. Outside the car window, the streets and the wooden sidewalks were crowded with pedestrians. It was the end of October and the city had been hot, still and humid for weeks. But the cool, stormy weather had cleansed and freshened the air, blowing out the acrid refinery smoke, and the people were taking a windy pleasure in it, standing before shops, pausing to look up into the cloudy sky, their hair flicking at their ears and napes, fingers holding the brims of their hats.

We passed the mouths of crowded side streets that were decked out for fiesta, ribbons and banners flapping over makeshift archways, women turning in traditional costume under them. We came upon the Ciudad de Pekín, where I’d eaten my first Chinese food with Chepa, and saw a small orchestra of men in pigtails playing strange-looking instruments, the refined and simple sounds momentarily everything in our ears, then disappearing suddenly as we moved by. We passed a bakery, a table of small white candy bones and skulls on the sidewalk in front of it, and a man dressed like a skeleton staggered in half-dancing drunkenness into the street so that our driver had to jerk at the wheel to avoid hitting him.

“It’s not just the weather,” Joaquín said, a faint scent of mint touching my nostrils as he turned and looked out the window too. “It’s the Day of the Dead. Not the day itself, but first days of celebration.”

“And Calaca?” I said. “Will he be there too do you think?”

“Yes, well I suppose he will be there, no doubt of it.”

It was to be a formal negotiation only, Joaquín had said, talk of figures, the signing of a few documents, then a delivery of cash. Corzo, like most of the generals, required this, a way of legitimizing what was seen by the oil companies as no more than extortion. But the generals saw it as tribute, as well as a slap in the face to Obregón. Some were no more than gangsters, but Corzo was old enough to remember his legitimate power in the revolution and young enough still to have hope for the future correctives he felt he would be a part of. Joaquín wasn’t all that sure about his army, the two dozen men who like Calaca had joined only after the constitution had been signed. They had been with General Corzo for three years now, though whether it was wealth or patriotism that drew them wasn’t clear.

“And why me?” I’d asked. “I’m surely not dressed for it.”

Joaquín laughed. “Well, it might be the house, I think. Surely it’s Chepa. Curiosity? Beyond that I can’t be sure. He doesn’t know you of course. But he knows of you.”

“He asked for me?”

“Yes, well, in fact he did. But it was just asking. Nothing more than that.”

“I’ll have nothing to do there then.”

“No, not that. Just to be there. It’s all very formal. You’ll see. Nothing more.”

The clack of the train’s steel wheels and the grind of the couplings made talking impossible even though the compartment was very small, like a child’s playhouse, and our shoulders were brushing. Out the window, beyond the pipeline running below the track bed, the Panuco was cooking, waves slapping at rocks along the shoreline. I saw flying fish pop out of the swells, fight for a few feet against the wind, then fold into small cigars and disappear into the river’s dark waters.

We passed agitators, warehouses, paraffin plants. Black smoke rose in solid columns from the chimneys of stillstacks, then quickly dissipated in the stormy air. We passed the Corona terminal, then the Waters-Pierce, and beyond that, where the Panuco turned, I spied that oddly virginal banking, a stand of banana palms and resida, the place where Chepa had taken me fishing.

It had been early on in our relationship, and I had still been searching for ways to be with her in those quiet moments that were unattached to loving or the times in anticipation of it or in the sweet and equalizing hours afterward. I couldn’t quite figure who I could be with her, young as I was, how take the place of a man in her presence. And I was often awkward and silent, and that made her an urging mother, which was not exactly what I wanted. At least I didn’t think I did.

But then we hooked a fish, a monstrous tarpon, and we were together in our struggle into exhaustion on the steep, rocky shore to land it. It was seven feet long. I know that, because I lay down on the ground under the banana palms beside it while Chepa measured. Then she too lay down, on the other side, and after we’d lifted our heads and grinned at each other across the tarpon’s belly like children we fell asleep only to wake again as the sun was sinking. We made ourselves a spit then and a fire and roasted the fish, turning it in fire and starlight until the skin was brittle and wrinkling and the flesh at the surface was hot white.

Then, sitting across the massive fish from each other, we pulled away pieces of meat, eating and licking the oil from our fingers and wiping them on our clothes.

Our activities were everything to me then, and I saw that with Chepa there need be no vacant and unattached moments, nothing of the absence of anticipation. I think I knew even then, as I tasted the fish, that this was my first life lesson and that it might go beyond even her, and I have tried to carry Chepa with me through all my travels in that knowledge.

Our four-car train clacked slowly toward a halt, and while it was still creeping ahead Joaquín opened our cabin door and the salty breeze washed in and rippled my collar, causing the tip to tap against my cheek. The wheels squeaked and the train stopped and I followed Joaquín, stepping down onto the gravel slope of the track bed and below it sandy soil. Up ahead the toy engine idled beside the guardhouse kiosk, and between them I could see the thin passage of the rail spur and the pipe running beside it as they headed on their systems of elevated pilings out into the Gulf and along the water’s swelling surface to the Texas Oil sea terminal, a low cluster of tanks and buildings, its flags blowing, awash in wind and spray on its platform a quarter mile off. A massive tanker was docked there, and beyond, where high waves had risen near the edge of a fog bank at the horizon, I saw the shadows of two others under a darkening sky.

Papers were passed, an arm held out a clipboard, then the train was moving again, and in moments the view opened and we could see the rutted dirt road that climbed to a low seaside crest and the roofs of the first buildings of Chorreras.

“Okay, then, vámonos,“ Joaquín said, and we stepped up to the track bed and over it and headed for the hill and the town.

The place where we were to meet General Corzo was situated at the far end of the village, a little beyond it, on a low bluff overlooking the sea. It had once been a public building, a place for women to gather and watch out for their husbands in stormy or clear weather as they fished at the edge of horizon. Used too, Joaquín had said, for drying fish in the sun on racks outside.

“But now it belongs to Corzo. You’ll see, he’s done some work on it. He won’t be there, you know. Not until we are.”

We walked at the edge of the muddy track of the main street. It was two o’clock and still siesta, but this was no longer a Mexican town and we saw lights in windows of those at work, passed a few huddled figures in a hurry to get somewhere, leaning into the wind. The sky was almost completely black now and the light like that at dusk. Joaquín wore a heavy, oilcloth raincoat, his hand over his heart to keep the fabric from filling with air, and I’d put my flight cap back on, buckling it tight under my chin. Then we passed the last town building and I could see the house a few hundred yards up in the distance, what light there still was washing in its windows.

It was a square box, with a widow’s walk on top, but the general had torn away the central cupola, turning the walk into a sundeck. I saw lawn chairs and a metal table there, a closed umbrella sticking up from its center, its edges flapping in the wind. Below he’d set large windows into the old board walls to get the view, and the path leading up to the house was white stone lined with cactus, a trellis hanging with bougainvillea surrounding the entrance door.

Joaquín knocked and we waited, then heard the sound of feet on wood. Then the door opened and a man who looked very much like Joaquín himself, though younger, stood aside, raised up his arm and ushered us in. This will be Sosa, I thought, a man with a woman’s name. The translator. Joaquín had told me about him, something General Corzo insisted upon. He would speak no Spanish with Joaquín.

“Sosa might be my counterpart, a patriot. Lucky that we look alike, a way for the general to insult me without actually doing so. In his eyes I’m a turncoat, but then he needs me, you know, to make it all go smoothly.”

The house held only the one small room, but the large windows lining three of the walls brought the outside in, expanding it, and from where I sat I could see both into the Gulf and along the rocky shore for a good distance. Waves washed on the rocks now, spray obscuring them, then leaving them to glisten under the dark blanket of cloud cover as the surf receded, and out the front window the sea had risen up into whitecaps all the way to the fog bank, which had crept in a little, and the tankers had disappeared.

Joaquín sat in an easy chair beside me, and across the fine wicker and glass table from us sat Sosa. The table held a bottle of tequila, salt, and lemon each in its own stoneware bowl, and there were other chairs in the room and a worn couch draped with colorful vegetable-dyed rugs. And there were rugs too on the hardwood floor, and engravings by the Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada on the walls between the windows. He was called Don Lupe, as was Chepa’s dog in his honor, and the prints all showed the calaveras, those skeleton figures he had introduced into art or at least had popularized. They were riding skeleton horses and bicycles, giving speeches, dancing, playing instruments, dragging the dead away.

“Yes, and it is the Day of the Dead, these weeks,” said Sosa, seeing me looking.

He was dressed in fine leather pants and boots and a white shirt with bits of fringe along the pocket edges and seams. Someone had done his short hair, and his smooth dark skin was without blemish, recently cleansed, I guessed, with cream.

We were waiting. The bottle sat on the table between us invitingly but nothing had been offered. Sosa had crossed his legs and his foot was bobbing, but then he noticed it and stopped. Gusts of wind rocked the walls from time to time, and I could hear the lawn furniture tapping on the deck above. The room grew darker and Sosa rose and went to a table off in a corner and lit a kerosene lamp, the sweet smell of the smoke curling up for a moment before he adjusted the wick. We heard a crunching on the stone walk, and when the door opened a breeze rushed in and swirled around the room, then collapsed and fell to the floor as General Corzo, Calaca, and the other one I’d seen at the Lluvia del Oro entered and closed the door.

They were dressed in makeshift uniforms this time, the general in a brown shirt with epaulets, his chest adorned with his medals, the other two in sombreros, pistols in holsters at their hips. All three wore cowboy boots. Calaca wore chaps, and there were spurs jingling at his heels. He sat down in a wooden chair near the table where the lamp was, and I could see in the lamp’s flickering that turn and flattening in his nose where Chepa had rearranged it. He grinned at me with his yellow skull’s teeth, then took a dirty bandanna from his pocket and, still watching me, spat into it.

General Corzo took a chair across the table from us, Sosa beside him, and Dagoberto, the other one, stood against the wall at a window, his hand resting on the grip of his pistol, sombrero tilted back.

The general looked across at Joaquín, a slight smile on his lips below his drooping mustache, then nodded. Then he looked at me and began talking.

“I’m afraid the figures have changed now, what we agreed upon? There is nothing for it. The expenses are increasing, I have so many men to care for you know. The accounting.”

Sosa was translating, looking at Joaquín, though the general seemed to be talking to me. I saw his eyes glance up to my brow and realized I was still wearing my flight cap. His smile broadened and his mustache twitched, and I felt my face flush. Then Joaquín was answering, and the general turned to him. I took the cap off and held it in my lap.

“But we are not prepared for this change. I have the papers, already with the entries, sealed and awaiting signature.”

Sosa translated, then the general spoke again. Calaca snorted and laughed and I saw Dagoberto’s sombrero rock a little on his head.

“But surely they are in pencil and available are gummed erasers.” The general turned his head and winked at me as Sosa spoke.

The negotiations continued. Joaquín stuck to the point, speaking briefly, often holding up the papers he had taken from his pocket. Green and gold ribbons fluttered between the pages, and red seals had been pressed in here and there. Unlike Joaquín, the general took his time, speaking extensively, then leaning back in his chair and watching Sosa translate those words that Joaquín already understood. He glanced over at me at times, nodding, and I welcomed his look taking me away from Calaca, whose eyes never left my face. Then the general saw me looking at Calaca, and he interrupted Sosa’s translation and gestured for him to say his new words. Sosa looked at me then, his face expressionless as he spoke.

“The general is saying about Chepa. How Calaca would like to know about her fucking. Because he would like some of that Indian for himself.”

“And maybe Calaca would like some of this American for himself too,” I said, the words coming out of my mouth before I could stop them.

Sosa blinked at me and then was silent. I felt Joaquín’s fingers on my arm, saw Calaca lean forward in his chair and then get up and move to the other side of the window from Dagoberto. His eyes were intent, watching me as he crossed. Beyond the glass the sea was rising and spits of foam hung on the pane.

General Corzo looked at Sosa, then back at me. Joaquín was rising, but the general raised his hand and stopped him. Then he looked at Sosa again.

“Traducción,“ he said.

And just after he’d said it, a spray of sea foam slapped against the Gulf side window like water tossed from a bucket, the following wave rocking the house and shaking the chairs we were sitting in. I saw the lemons bounce in their bowl. The tequila was dancing and tipping, and I rose and reached out for it, my nose hit by the general’s forehead as he grabbed for it too. I staggered, stars in my eyes, then came back to a watery focus as the window drained itself of wash and the Gulf beyond it was visible once again. Both Calaca and Dagoberto had turned to look out, and their heads were invisible behind their sombreros at the window’s edge. Sosa and the general were heading for the door, and Joaquín stood beside me, gripping my arm.

We could see the ship through the window, no tanker but a large sailing vessel, its sails ripped from its split and tilted masts and fluttering like damp sheets in the wind. It had foundered on rocks at the edge of the fog bank a quarter mile out. The fog had been creeping toward shore and the black blanket of cloudy sky had come down so far the waves reached up almost to touch it.

The side of the ship’s hull was visible, its tilted deck, and people were falling into the sea, their arms flailing among wave-tossed crates, what looked like suitcases bobbing, a cart, the prow of a sinking rowboat, a turning wagon wheel. Broad colored ribbons danced above it all, twisting like flat snakes in the wind at the waves’ white tips, and we saw the heads of a few frantic animals, a horse and a goat, a donkey, and a dog, disappearing into the hellish sea.

Calaca turned at the window, his sombrero brushing the frame, and spoke and moved quickly across the room. There was wind in the house now, rushing through the open door out of which General Corzo and Sosa had gone, and it blew out the kerosene flame, and in shadow Calaca’s face was a real skull, his teeth protruding from his lipless mouth, and when he spoke it was only the one word coming like a whistle out of bone. “¡Prisa!”

Joaquín and I were close on his heels, Dagoberto following, as we stepped out into the wind and driving rain.

The slope at the side of the house was already mud when we reached it, rivers of rain washing earth down over white rock at the shoreline. The lawn furniture had blown from the roof and Sosa was tangled in the metal table and a chair’s wicker arm, reaching out for General Corzo’s belt as they both slid down. He got it, and the general fell back into him. Then they were both rolling, arms, legs, and furniture in the air. I looked back for Joaquín, but he was gone. Then I saw him at the house’s side, struggling into his oiled raincoat, and turned my face into the wind again.

Calaca was on the slope now, stepping down sideways, boots and spurs digging in, Dagoberto behind him, and I could see out above them into the driving rain and over the surface of the turbulent Gulf, the ship tilting and fading as the fog came in. It was sinking. Its prow stood straight up in the rain, touching the black, low clouds. Its wheelhouse broke free and tumbled end over end into the sea. Joaquín was beside me and I saw his stiff arm as he pointed. There were people among the objects in the waves, arms flailing, some stroking toward others, reaching out for a purchase on any jetsam. I saw a man snatch a broad red ribbon out of the air, its tips disappearing like snuffed flames in the incoming swell that covered him. It was as if the remnants of a sunken city had risen and were drifting, storm-tossed, toward shore. Then I saw Calaca hopping as he reached firm footing on the rocks below. His chaps had fallen to his knees, and he was dancing and kicking into the leather to free himself. His hand was in the air, waving us down.

The rocks were slick with rain, and up ahead I saw Sosa grabbing at the general’s clothing. He was slipping and falling constantly, and the general kept reaching back to slap his hands away. Calaca was nimble, toe stepping over crevices and moss, his arms waving in the rain delicately for balance, and Dagoberto had screwed his sombrero down on his head and tightened the string up under his chin like a tourniquet. His face had turned purple. He was above Calaca, where the rocks descended steeply, using both feet and hands, and I suddenly realized the two were no older than I was, no more than twenty, though possessed of a certain adulthood I had not reached.

I stepped on a medal, its colorful soaked ribbon, and I saw a spur. Joaquín was ahead of me now, his raincoat flapping at his calves, and I passed the documents, wet paper sucked to the rock’s surface like skin. Up ahead General Corzo was moving down carefully to the beach, Sosa bumping and touching him, and in moments, as Calaca descended, I saw the two facing each other on the sand. General Corzo was leaning forward into Sosa’s face, dressing him down, his words lost to me in the wind and rain but not, I supposed, to Sosa. Then we had all climbed down to the storm-narrowed beach, and standing in a line we looked out into the waves but could see nothing.

The waves were high and whitecapped and the rain beating against our faces came in almost on the horizontal. We had to guard our eyes with our hands, turn away and spit out sea foam that had choked us. It was the general who made the decision. He looked sharply at Sosa, then sent Calaca back up as lookout. We turned and followed his climb, the rain more bearable as it beat into our shoulders and calves, and when Calaca had turned and was standing high above on the rocks we watched his face and hands for any sign, and one came immediately.

He pointed out over our heads, his fingers waving frantically, and turning back we saw the wooden crate above us on the incoming surf, the skeleton riding it, his bony fingers gathered in the straps. He was on his knees, leaning like a masthead before the wind on the wave’s crest, and his skull face held no expression whatsoever, until we could see his eyes.

The wave broke and the crate was lost in foam, only the bony torso hazily visible in spray. Then the foam melted and the horse’s head rose out of it, its insane eyes, and we looked back to the skeleton on the crate and saw that his eyes were the same, the pupils impossibly dilated, gazing into some other world. The crate hit the beach, sliding in surf and sand, the figure upon it still as a statue in the rain, and as its edge dug in it began to tilt and Dagoberto was rushing toward it, legs up to his thighs in surf, his boots filling, then leaning his shoulder into it, waving back for help. Then I was in the water too, pressing up beside Dagoberto to keep the crate right, as the horse came out of the wash behind it, fighting to stand, sunk in sand and surf up to its withers. It struggled free, nipped vacantly at my shoulder as it passed, then farted in the wind and whinnied weakly as it staggered down the beach and disappeared in mist.

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.

“The man touches his wife’s fingers where they rest on the coverlet, as close to her bones as is possible, and when she looks up, hollow-eyed and smiling, he recognizes he doesn’t know her and never has.

“‘Water,’ she says, her voice brittle. ‘Could you bring cool water?’ And he goes to the pump and draws it, but when he returns to her bedside she doesn’t need it, since she is dead.

“If only, the man thinks. The water. If only the votes and the counting. Only that summer, in youth and forgetfulness. If only singing and dancing. Only fishing the Panuco River for tarpon together. If only the pleasures of children. If only for memory. And he sits alone at her grave, weeping tears of regret, but she is not there.

“Mystery of the unlikely. A ghost story. But we are all ghosts apparently, hidden from life in our soft coverings, only shadow figures, until flesh falls away and we are skeletons, calacas clacking as they join the dance.

“At least, so this story goes, in which an old woman has risen up into hard bone and the common skull, who now wears her personality in action rather than appearance, but for clothing as mocking costume, our serious lives in exaggerated burlesque, that comedy of complete wastefulness now celebrated.

“She wears a business suit, hiding the bone girdle of her gender, her husband’s hat, and she minces among politicians, poses in conversation with Obregón, that lechoncillo, and finds her way into the art of Don Lupe.

“One day the man has recovered. He sits in his office. He’s reading the paper, and there, above an article exposing petty corruption, graft, vote fixing, betrayal of the people, he sees the calavera, himself in his wife in his fine suit, talking to el presidente, his jaw flapping, his big teeth, symbols of words vomiting out, splashing on his wife’s shirt. The man dies then, right there in his chair, and those who come to the funeral speak softly as they divide his constituency among them.

“The story might end here, a lesson, but you know, he too is the skeleton. He rises up as his wife did, wears her dress, her high shoes, is found cooking, steam billowing from the pot so skillfully rendered in the etching. He’s shopping, sitting at a window sewing, while outside the skeletons are dancing in colorful costumes in fiesta. There is no comedy, nor irony, in his activities, yet he is at peace and happy, if such can be said of calacas. This is the man’s paradise, but he has paid for it with the other, and one might notice that his wife had both.

“Paradise. This fire, this chicken, these mariachis. Survivors dancing, smell of dead fish, and whispers of jetsam from shipwreck in this quiet sea. This good fellowship and the presence of women in memory in this talking. It’s Chepa for you John, Theresa, a woman with a beautiful saint’s name, for me. Pass over the bottle now and the lemon. Calaca, pinch me a pinch of salt. We have nowhere to get to, nothing to do. And this is paradise.”

Frank

There were four tattered easy chairs in the solarium and Larry and Frank sat in two of them and John sat in his wheelchair. Gino’s folding chair was pulled up at the windows, and his fingers tapped the metal cover of the radiator below them absently as he gazed out. Even from the back he looked like Harry Truman, and Larry turned and smiled at John in that recognition, already a worn joke among them.

It had rained for a solid week, but then a cold March wind came out of the northeast to blow the storm away, and now a full moon hung in the sky above the sea near shore. Its light washed over the men’s legs, and a dim wash rose to their faces from night-lights, pearlescent through polished seashells plugged into sockets in the baseboard, and glowed in their metal flanges. The end of the room was screened off, and above the screen the rods of the steel hanger and the words on the bag of glucose were distinct in the moonlight. John held a cigarette in his throat, its tip swelling to a red glow as he drew, smoke leaking around the flange, then streaming from his nose. A door closed, and they heard the rumble of a car’s engine and one of the windows hummed briefly.

“Kelly.”

It was Frank. He’d belched up the word, his lips barely moving, then shifted his heavy body in the chair, and Larry and John turned too and followed his look.

They could see all the way out to the crest, the shadow of a cut through beach grass and bayberry that was the road descending from the Manor into the broad moonlit meadow, then rising up to where the house sat in layers of silhouette against the sky, one dim lamp in a window.

“Chicken light,” Frank said, and Larry sighed, huffing through his tube.

“All right,” he said. “It’s about time, isn’t it?”

“In good old Indiana,” said Gino, his voice muffled behind his bony shoulders.

“It’s Kentucky!” Frank barked. “How many times do I have to say it, you old fart?”

Gino lifted a leg and farted, a quick dry explosion, and the cigarette popped from John’s throat and tumbled into his lap.

“Christ, Gino!” he croaked, brushing sparks of fire from the blanket that covered his knees. A trail of smoke rose from the fabric, an acrid smell, and he slapped his palm down into it over and over as he shook. He was a little taller than Gino, but very thin, swallowed up in the poncho that brushed his arms, and his face was angular and hard beneath bushy eyebrows, a broad old scar running down from his left eye to his chin. They all wore pajamas, and Frank wore a tweed jacket, and Larry’s hair curled up at the edges of his black watch cap. A door opened, a click of metal at the far end of the ward beyond.

“That’ll be Carolyn,” Frank said.

It was a story they all knew, the bones of it at least, about Frank, going out for candling, catching his mother in the coop. She was bedding the one hand they had there, a boy no older than Frank himself then, though it was not those details that would hold the point of the story, but things in the aftermath that Frank hadn’t as yet spoken of. He’d started with his relationship with his mother and with his father too, just sketching it out. He’d gotten up to the coop door, and then they’d come for him in the ambulance for chemo. When he returned, his hair had begun to fall out, and he couldn’t talk for a while. Two others had been there then and Larry hadn’t. Now the two were tubed up out on the ward, the only ones there, and they could hear Carolyn changing the drips and the dull hum and gurgle of the suction machine as she cleaned their throats and lungs.

“Son of a bitch,” Larry said quietly.

They heard a creak of springs from beyond the screen at the solarium’s end, only a few yards away, but none of them acknowledged it.

“Last stop,” said Gino, turning back from the window.

John stubbed his cigarette in the can he’d wired to the wheelchair’s arm then lit another. Then Larry lit one and Gino went to work on his pipe, reaming the bowl. It was close to midnight, and the beds Kelly had stripped and cleaned, then made again, were waiting out in the ward for them, but there’d be no sleep yet for a while.

Carolyn padded into the room on her rubber-soled shoes, then stood with her hands on her hips and smiled at the four of them. She wore a starched white dress and her blond hair was pulled back and tied in a ponytail, and the skirt of her dress appeared flat in the moonlight, like a dress on a paper doll, her slim legs thickened in white cotton stockings, pure as the moon.

“You’re a vision of loveliness,” John said, the words belched up from his chest, then formed into careful and round articulation in his mouth.

She smiled, then looked at each of them in anticipation.

“Everything’s okay,” Frank said. “Kelly’s got us in good order.”

She nodded, then turned and headed behind the screen at the room’s end, and they could hear whispers of fabric as she pulled the sheets tight, the tap of plastic on metal, a deep groan and her voice almost beyond hearing as she cooed and sighed, then lifted the glucose bag from the metal hanger and replaced it with another. She waved at them as she headed for the door, brought a finger to her lips as she passed through. Then they could hear the squeak of her sneakers, the sound receding as she passed between the rows of empty beds on her way to the small office at the ward’s end.

“Ah, youth,” said Larry.

“Only in memory,” said John.

“And that reminds me,” Frank said. “What about Chepa and afterward? Did you stay in Tampico? And Joaquín, what happened to him?”

He was putting his own story off for the savoring, getting back to the one John had told the night before. He glanced out toward the chicken light at the promontory, but it was gone now, only those planes of shadow like layers of dark cardboard in the moonlight.

“I was in Tampico once,” said Gino.

“Are you sure it wasn’t Idaho?”

“When was that exactly?” John said, ignoring Frank’s bait.

“It was … I don’t know.” Gino grinned at Larry, then took his time in tamping and lighting up his pipe. “It was aught eight, I think, or probably nine.”

John blinked at him, squinting under his thick brows.

“So you can’t really remember it, just a baby I guess,” said Larry.

“I was nineteen years old.”

“Are you crazy?” Larry said. “How old are you?”

“A hundred.”

“You’re shitting me!”

“I don’t think so.”

“I used to think I was the old guy here,” said John.

“How old are you?” Larry asked.

“Well, I was in Tampico in ’23 and I was twenty years old. What is it, ninety?”

“That seems right.”

“Then I’m eighty-seven, or eight. What month is it?”

“It’s still Winter,” Gino said. “The fifteenth of March.”

He glanced out the window as if to confirm it, and they could see the faded blotches of scar tissue at the edge of his chin, spoiling his Truman profile, and the purplish spots, like mud, on the inside of his arm as he lifted his pipe away.

“Seven, then.”

The moon had moved in from the sea and the house on the promontory had come into definition. It was an old Victorian, gingerbread in the eaves, and though it was fenced off by rambling white pickets, it had no lawn but a yard of honeysuckle and autumn olive, leafless and skeletal bushes brushing the clapboards. Gino had turned his chair and was looking out again, and Larry was watching him.

“He’s checking the wind speed or the temperature or something,” Frank said, brushing the falling hair away from his coat sleeve. He was much heavier than the others, thick through the chest and arms, but muscle was turning to fat now and wasting away, and his jowls hung in softened folds below his chin.

“He’s old enough to be my father,” John said, and the two turned to him.

“Wait a minute,” Frank said. “Thirteen?”

“That’s old enough.”

“Christ,” Larry said. “Me too. I’m only eighty-four. Would make him sixteen. In the old days, that would be plenty.”

“Gino!” Frank said, sharply, and Gino turned from the window and took the pipe from his mouth. “What is it exactly that you did?”

“Ordnance.”

“No. He means after the war. For a living,” John said.

“Trucking.”

“That rips it,” Larry said, his mustache twitching. “The old eighteen wheeler. Women in towns along the way. When did you have your first child?”

“Forty-two.”

“Nineteen forty-two. A war bride. Gino on the trail of love in the European Theater.”

“No. I was forty-two. It was 1931, I think. Around there. Between wars.”

“I had a child once,” said Frank.

“Mine was a girl,” Gino said.

“Where is she now?”

“I have absolutely no fucking idea at all.”

“My son’s dead,” said Frank. “In Korea. He was a colonel. It killed my wife.”

“I didn’t have a wife,” said Larry.

“Not a one,” said John.

“But I did have a few boyfriends.”

“The gay business again,” said Frank. “You told us that.”

“Loafers,” Gino said. “We used to say light in the loafers.”

“Did you,” Larry said.

“Well, not often, actually. There weren’t any gays in the suburbs then.”

“Not that you knew of at least,” said Larry.

“Was it good for you?” John said, lighting another cigarette, watching the match.

“It was okay. It was Salt Lake City though, and that was a crusher. But then the war came, and after that, traveling. I lived in Cleveland for a good long while, then Philadelphia finally, and it was okay.”

“What did you do?” said John, and Frank swallowed a laugh and grinned at Larry and Larry laughed. Then they all were laughing, and in a few moments they stopped.

“Metallurgy,” Larry said.

“Me too,” said Gino.

“I thought it was trucking.”

“Yes, but not driving them. I handled load logistics, routes. It was measurement, some geometry and volume, map reading. Things like that.”

“That’s not metallurgy.”

“It was steel. I-beams and such. Out of Chicago. I’d call that metal.”

“School?” John said.

“A few college courses and seminars,” said Larry. “The company paid for them. Aluminum. Then in Cleveland it was farm equipment, the manufacture of it. Then Philadelphia, and I gave everything up for the cause.”

“The gay business again,” said Gino.

“And I built houses,” Frank said. “Until I lost my shirt. Then I got into the work of moving them.”

“Like the lighthouse,” Gino said.

“Not exactly.”

“How old are you, Frank?” said Larry.

“Eighty-five.”

“You’ve got me by a year.”

They were interrupted by the squeak of Carolyn’s shoes as she stepped into the solarium, smiled at them, then went behind the screen again. They heard the pumping of the pressure cuff, the scratch of a pencil on the chart, saw her hand reach up to the tubing near the glucose bag and adjust the drip. Then she was passing toward the door again, her white stockings whispering against her inner thighs, and when she was gone Gino was smiling around his pipe stem, and winking.

“You can forget that, you old fart,” Frank said.

“Not for a single, solitary minute,” said Gino.

“I’ll buy that,” said Larry, “though the gender could be better. What about you, John? Flying?”

“Well, yes, that, but I did other things too after a while. Mostly hydraulics, first in oil fields, then with heavy equipment.”

“We’re a regular consulting firm,” said Gino.

“But who in their right mind would hire us?”

“A man of reason,” Larry said. “But couldn’t you do something with that lighthouse?”

“Well, I think I could as a matter of fact,” said Frank. “They certainly don’t seem to know what they’re doing.”

“It’s the government,” John said. “They put it out for bids, then pick the most incompetent one. It’s written in their procedures.”

“I could do something with Carolyn,” Gino said.

“Sure. In your mind,” said Frank. “Until you forgot the words.”

“I can still see her when I think of her,” John said. “Just like yesterday. But there’s no use loving the dead, and she would be by now. She was fifteen years older than I.”

“That’s only a hundred and two,” said Gino. “Let’s not get carried away here.”

“How long were you with her?” asked Larry.

“Not long enough,” said John.

It was after the shipwreck, a month or more. A series of fall storms came through, and he was grounded, and once he’d managed to get the de Havilland back out to the house, they holed up there and got to know each other better.

At least two weeks. And Chepa cooked extravagant meals and dyed the dogs again, and John cleaned up the cockpits, rolled the runway once or twice in rain, and in the evenings they ate and drank, and one late night had a picnic by firelight up in the foothills between storms.

“Then one day a rider came down out of the hills, a boy on a large mule, and leading another mule. He sat on a saddle of a kind I’d never seen before, cloth and wicker, a large wood knot at the pommel, and he was broad browed and thick through the chest and waist, and I knew he was as much an Indian as Chepa was.

“I saw him first. He just sat on the mule, waiting, out beyond the back garden and the ruined chicken coop, where the foothills started. The empty animal was saddled too, and he’d dropped the reins, and the mule stood where the reins brushed the ground.

“Chepa went out to the boy. I waited at the cauldrons, and I saw her hand reach up and hold his thigh as he spoke to her, his face lost under the brim of his straw hat. Chepa nodded, and when she turned he turned and started back into the hills, his head down as he watched the mule’s feet stepping carefully through those fans of stones that had washed down with sand and mud in the rain. The other mule stood where he’d left it, never looking back.

“She had to go, I guess. She told me it was family and sickness, but she wouldn’t say more. She said she’d come back, in a week, maybe two. I said I’d watch out for the dogs and house. I’d stay there and wait for her.

“I watched her as she climbed up onto the mule’s back. She’d packed only a small blanket, food, and a few pieces of rough clothing in a straw basket, and I saw it hanging from the horn as she turned and waved, then turned again and headed toward the high mountains. I watched until she was out of sight. The mule stepped into a mist, and she was gone.

“Three weeks went by, and nothing. I was flying again, spending nights at the house. At times I’d hear things and think it might be her, but it wasn’t. Then it was a month, and I went to the Lluvia del Oro and talked to Ana, that woman Chepa had saved from Calaca. ‘I don’t know nothing,’ she said. She said it sweetly and with concern, and I drank with her that night, then slept with her in drunkenness in that same hotel near the square. It was the weekend, and I drank some more, and it was Monday night when I landed at the house again. I’d been gone for three days, and the dogs were hungry and yapping, and once I’d fed them I went behind the screen to the bed, tired and still a bit hungover.

“The note was there, on the pillow in a clean white envelope, below it the contract she had made with General Corzo, signed by him. She’d signed the house over to me, and there was even an official seal beside her signature. In the note she wrote of the dogs, that I could keep them, but if that were trouble she’d included the name of a man who would take them. I could find him through Ana at the Lluvia del Oro. She called me her lover boy, and she wrote some other things, and she’d drawn a careful heart at the bottom and below it just the one word, ‘Adiós.’

“There was talk in the bars of some insidious disease among some Indians in the mountains, news of an Indian uprising at a rancho in the foothills filled the papers for a week and then was gone. Every conversation seemed to mention the Huastecs, but I was of course looking for that, making up the beginnings of stories that I quickly abandoned in my desperation and sadness.

“And I was drinking a lot, and one night even found myself in Zacamixtle, a town on the edge of the city that I’d been warned away from. I was assaulted there in the street, and my money and my boots were taken, and I was cut on the arms and got this scar here on my face at that time. Then something happened, then another thing.

“I was flying back to the house to feed the dogs. It was two in the morning or so, and I was drunker than I thought, and I missed my landing, clipped one of the potted plants with my wing. The de Havilland tipped and spun, and when it came to a rocking rest I was stuck in the soft sand beyond the runway’s end. I recognized, as I dug myself out and sobered up, around dawn I think, that I was lucky. To be alive, I mean. And the next day I did the second thing, intentionally. I got hold of the man in Chepa’s note, and while I was waiting for him I cleaned the house and covered the furniture and the bed with sheets. Then the man came, in an old pickup truck, and we loaded the dogs and their gear into it. He’d thrown some dusty blankets in the bed so they could stand without slipping, and that seemed right and good to me. The dogs had faded in their colors, and Rata was almost white again. Don Lupe watched me, his snout above the tailgate, as the man pulled away.

“I never went back to the house. I took a room at the hotel and concentrated on my work, and in a week went to the Texas Oil office at the airport to talk with Joaquín.

“I remember he said, ‘Compadre, a transfer? But this is good here, the money’s good.’

“‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s Chepa.’

“‘Well, of course. I can understand that, these reminders. But are you sure?’

“‘It’s either that,’ I said, ‘or I quit.’

“‘I understand,’ he said.

“And I did quit. Joaquín took my part as he could, but they needed me there, and the bosses pushed the issue. The money was good. I was richer than I’d ever been before, or since, at that time, and they must have thought I’d back off. They refused to talk to me about it, and though for a week Joaquín was champion of my cause, my heart wasn’t in it and I told him to stop.

“We were both sad in our good-byes at the bus station, and I think Joaquín had tears in his eyes. I’d saved enough in six months to last me more than a year of good living, and I was dressed in the finely tailored leather clothes and new boots I’d bought in town the day before. I’d bought a new suitcase and a Stetson too, and Joaquín had taken me to his barber for a shave.

“‘You’re looking good,’ he said, as he shook my hand, ‘a little better than when you came. How is your corazón?’

“‘It’ll have to do,’ I said, then squeezed his hand and released it and turned and climbed up into the bus.

“There were chickens in the bus, a large hog and a couple of painted dogs and a parrot in a cage. And children were laughing and playing games with bones and cards in the aisle, their mothers bent over them in caring scolding and smiling and childish conversation. The bus was crowded, and people were standing and the windows were open, and the driver held a cat in his lap, a tiger cat. I had to bend down from where I stood to see out the window, and I looked for Joaquín as the bus pulled out, but he was gone, and when I rose up again I felt the fingers of the man beside me on my arm and turned to him. He held out a bottle of mezcal and shook it. There was an inch or two of liquid in the bottom and the white worm. I took it and thanked him and swigged from it, then handed it back, a last matter of formality and social grace, leaving Tampico forever.”

It was after one. A curl of smoke rose up from Gino’s pipe and drifted against the windows and dissolved. He was looking out again, and Larry turned from John and watched him. Frank’s chin was on his chest, his hooded eyes on the pencil he rolled between his fingers. He’d been scratching on a yellow pad, lines and figures. A deep, muffled sigh filtered out to them through the screen at the solarium’s side, then Gino turned and took the pipe from his mouth.

“Ah, memory,” said Frank, his pencil active on the pad.

“The lighthouse?” John asked, and Frank nodded, but didn’t look up.

“What about Chepa’s house. What happened there?” It was Larry.

“I suppose it’s gone now. After all this time. I gave the contract to Joaquín, right there at the station as I was leaving. He said it was as good as any deed. I think I said for safekeeping, thinking I’d see him again sometime, but I never went back to Tampico, and I never did.”

“Wouldn’t that be a place to go!” said Gino at the window. Then Frank began.

He and his father knocked up the coop together, soaking corner posts in creosote, then sinking them and framing that and toeing the floor joists in. The floor itself was cut from warped lumber found out in the barn, and they put in a wainscotting and screening and a tin roof at a good enough angle to drain rain. His father went off in the flatbed, then came back with the wire cages and grain, and his mother watched from the porch as feathers flew and the chickens hopped into their new home. His father dug a trench and put in lights and what his mother called the chicken light on a long cord and a place to hang it near the door, and as they stood admiring their work, his mother called out, and they turned and saw the young man trudging up the rutted drive.

It was 1920, and his father had lost everything in horses in Lexington and his mother had lost the proper family she imagined they were becoming. His father had kept enough to buy the collapsing house and the ten acres and the truck that came with it, and he’d taken up the hauling of anything that was available for hauling and that he could lift, and Frank had quit school in his third year and went to work fixing up the house. His father had a wicker rocking chair he’d salvaged and a place for it, under a large old oak on a hill in sight of the house, and Frank would watch from the porch as he sat and rocked there and looked back in the direction of Lexington a good hour away. He’d sip from a bottle and at times would raise his fist to his mouth and press his knuckles between his teeth. They worked together on weekends, and at times Frank would go out in the truck with him, but they had very little to say to one another, almost nothing, and Frank did most of his talking with his mother, listening mostly to her stories of their horsey past and their ascendance in a time he was too young to remember and the things she had planned for this “new” house. She put no time limit on the accomplishment of her vivid images, since there was no money and little hope for it, which was something she avoided mentioning.

The young man was dusty and hatless and the sweaty creases in his brow and cheeks were sharpened by wet dust and he looked older than he was. He needed to wash up, he said, and if there was any work around the place he’d do that, for food, and if there was more to do he could stay on for a while, just for a bed and meals. Frank had moved down from the coop, and the young man looked over at him where he stood below the porch. He said his name was Adam, what’s yours? and Frank’s mother looked up the hill to where his father stood at the coop’s side, and when Frank turned he saw his father nod, and in that nod he saw his disengagement, knowing even then that things were heading toward some ending.

There was plenty to do around the place. The roof leaked, windows hung in rotted frames, the useless barn was a hazard in its tilting and needed dismantling. The house sat below a hill, and rain had flooded down exposing two feet of stone foundation. They needed a runoff trench, and the earth was thick clay after a few inches and a shovel would hardly touch it. Only a pickaxe.

The young man worked hard, and this caused Frank to work even harder. Frank’s mother brought tea out in a jug to darken on the porch, and she watched the young man work, and when Frank moved into her line of vision she seemed to look past him. He knew very little of passion then, almost nothing, but he knew of a kind of absence and had never seen his parents touch each other. His mother, he thought, was in the wrong life, but then his father was too, and he thought that were they to find the right ones they wouldn’t be the same. She took to wearing a kerchief in her hair, a little makeup on her lids, and at dinner he noticed her pared nails when she passed the plates and bowls. The wrong life, he thought. It should be the horsey set, those dresses like soft bells and lawn parties and English saddles, nothing she’d ever had in actuality, though she’d seen it across fences, but a world in yearning, so actual she could almost taste and touch it.

He was heading up to the coop for candling. His father had a two-day-trip job, the moving of farm equipment over in the west side of the state, near Sturgis, and he’d set out with him, but had climbed off at Wilmore. The truck’s cab was close, and there were flies and mosquitoes in it, and a smell of scorched oil came up through the vents and burned in his nostrils, and he got sick to his stomach and had to throw up at the side of the road. And when they reached Wilmore his father told him to go back, it was okay, he could walk around town for a while and get some air. Then he could hitch a ride. There’d be no problem.

And there wasn’t. He caught a ride in a new Buick convertible, a man in a dark suit. They couldn’t talk in the wind, but the air was fresh and his stomach settled, and when the man let him off he was only a mile’s walk from home and was feeling better. When he got up to the porch and looked through the screen there was no one there, and though it was getting on toward dusk and shadows washed over the sink and table, there were no pots on the stove and no lights. He sat in the kitchen for a few minutes, then decided he could do the candling, get it done before dark.

“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.”

Kelly

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.

And people were climbing up on the truck’s long bed, and I saw that many were skeletons. Some wore sombreros, serapes draped over their bones, some were in business suits, their skulls chalk white under fedoras, derbies, and cowboy hats. And there were women too, in loose flowered dresses and blond wigs, and I thought I could hear their joints grinding and clacking as they reached their skeleton arms and hands down, their teeth grinning under the dark holes of their noses, and lifted up streamers, piñata pigs and skeleton horses and instruments. Then the skeleton band was playing, under the flowered archway they’d constructed on the truck’s bed, and the women and the small skeleton children were dancing, and streamers stood horizontal in the breeze above them, elevated on the pitchforks of horned devils.

I thought of my mother in the crude and efficient Mexican casket the old man had arranged for, saw her pushing then pounding at the wood above her as she shed her skin and tissue and became joints and bones and banged her way up through the splintering wood. She was coming for me, and I felt myself giving in to the suicide that would join us and thought I was going crazy.

I turned away from the dancing skeletons blocking the exit. Only I had been watching them. Everyone in the crowded square had paused and was looking at me, at my scarlet face, my hunched body and my hands clutching my chest. I tried to rise, imagining escape from that place, the hotel and the suitcases and the bed, and a place under the blanket and between the cool white sheets. But I was falling, knowing that the pounding in my stomach and chest was heart attack and that I would soon be dead. And I was embarrassed in my panic and falling, to have all these people watching me, learning of my single most shameful secret, the one that must be kept, lest they find out who I really was.

And that was the first time, but it was not the only time. In the second I was in the meadow on my way to the Manor. Fog had come in, and when I looked up the Manor was lost in it, and when I turned around the house was gone. Then that fist was closing in my chest again, gripping my heart, and I was falling to the ground.

The policeman stood among the old men at the fence. John had climbed into his wheelchair and was rocking it back and forth on the blacktop, and I saw Gino step away from the others and head around the fence toward the side of the lighthouse. The policeman went after him and Frank took the opportunity and turned to the gate again and rattled it on its hinges. Then Gino and the policeman were back and Larry was shrugging his shoulders and stepping toward the car. The others followed him, though haltingly, and when they reached the car door John climbed up out of his wheelchair, Frank holding his arm, and the policeman folded it and went to the trunk and opened it and put it inside as the men climbed in through the doors. Then the car was turning, its headlights washing across the beams, and once it had gone back up the road, the lighthouse and equipment were left in moonlight bright enough so that I could almost read the stop work order sign so recently attached at the gate’s side.

They’d come upon a river in their digging, unknown to them though they had made test borings, when they were putting in footings for the second set of hydraulic jacks. They’d had to work in winter, pushing their spring schedule back because of recent erosion caused by serious winter storms. They’d dug deeper then, under the lighthouse itself, and sand had fallen down into an old watercourse, threatening firmer ground near the lighthouse base, and they’d had to shore up the perimeter with heavy timbers and more footing and reconsider things. Engineers and politicians had come out, and the word had gotten back to Washington and the funding was put on hold, as was the project itself, though the crest behind the lighthouse was in increasing danger of further erosion should there be more storms. Now there were considerable rage and frustration on all sides. The project was lost in politics, and those concerned could only keep their fingers crossed and wait it out.

I cannot get to the Manor on foot anymore, though I can see it and the house too out the windows of Arthur’s car as we drive through the meadow. Arthur has rigged up curtains, and I can close them if I need to, and there have been good days, though long ago, when Arthur drove slowly and I walked at the side of the car, my hand gripping the frame of the open window. The house is safe and the open porch is safe, and I can step a few feet toward the crest, so long as I can see the porch. The car’s okay, though there have been tough moments from time to time, and I’ve worked at the Manor for over fifteen years, and it’s safe. I’m thirty-eight years old now and I don’t need the work, but it keeps me among people and I need that. Arthur gets my groceries and takes the trash away and drives me back and forth to work, and I have his fee and the utilities and food, and there’s enough in the bank to cover that. I have no friends, though I’ve had women and some men too over for dinner, and once I had a lover, but that was long ago. I had my two beautiful bettas in a tank in my bedroom, but the female died in June, and just last night the other failed.

The Manor seems to be failing too, and each of the four doctor-owners, one of whom comes daily, seems to be waiting only for the men to die so they can put the place up for sale and get out from under. It had its good days once, when it was a private home for the aged. There’s plenty of land there, and a view, and the wealthy used it. But then they began to bring the old men in, on a good contract from the Veterans Administration, and the wealthy drifted away. Now the Administration has withdrawn the contract, is consolidating and closing such satellites. And when the old men die, Lisa the day nurse told me, that will be the end of it.

The old men seldom speak of war, and the visible remnants of their injuries, John’s scar and Gino’s angry burns, seem to have nothing to do with war, nor do their psychological states as far as I can tell. The time in service that got them to the Manor is in a distant past. Gino, though he’s a hundred now, is spry, but there’s an absence that I’ve noticed in his face, some unfinished business, and I think I’ve seen the same in Frank. I can’t tell about Larry yet, he’s new and is still learning to get his feelings through his tracheotomy. The therapist comes once a week, but his work seems perfunctory. The doctors don’t care, and I think he must sense that, and any real movement toward articulation is left to the men themselves. It’s that they need to tell their stories again before they die that keeps them working at it.

The man behind the screen in the solarium haunts me. I was there when they drove him up from the lighthouse in the bed of a pickup truck, and the doctor was still there. It was near the end of my shift and Carolyn had come in, and I stayed for an extra hour, Arthur out in the car waiting for me, and helped to get him settled. The doctor was excited, not sure that the blow was cause of the man’s continuing unconsciousness and curious about it. “It’s the kind of thing I do,” he said, and I could hear an interest in his voice that had never been there when he’d spoken of the old men. He said it was definitely coma, most probably from shock. There was swelling where the heavy board had struck his temple, but not much. “We’ll just have to run the X-rays, blood work and some other tests, and watch him.”

This was a week ago and still he sleeps, and on my shift I pass into the solarium often to check the drip and pressure, though it’s not always necessary.

There’s something about his body and about his face. His arms are like the smooth arms of a woman where they rest along his sides on the sheet that covers him, but under his thick skin there’s muscle close to the surface, and when I lifted the right one to pull the sheet away it was heavy, and I saw that his legs had the same properties as his arms and that his hairless chest did too. His waist is thick, his stomach flat and hard, and below it his penis and small scrotum rest on a slight mound at the center of the broad girdle his hips make, womanish again, but not really that. There’s no woman’s fat, but smooth sinew and the bulge of tendons running out into his legs from their insertion in his groin.

He’s a small man, no taller than I, and his brow is broad and unlined, like smooth stone, and below the lids of his deep set eyes, his nose thick and slightly flattened above the line of his thin lips, his chin is small and rounded, what’s called a weak chin, though there’s power in the flat slabs of his cheeks above it.

I know his eyes are black eyes, because I’ve lifted his lids. And his hair is black too, each strand like a small braid, rich with natural oil where it lies shining on the pillow. He’s forty-three years old, but his face shows nothing of the wear of experience. It might as well be a child’s face, or the face of a very old man who has gotten beyond any care for experience. It’s a face like ones I think I saw in Tampico, but only in glimpses in reflections in store windows, and like those of children gathered in the skirts of their mothers passing on the street in my brief stay there. And I wonder about the ways his face might move when he awakens and what his voice will sound like beyond the deep sighs and groaning I’ve managed to draw out of him in our time together.

The other night in a dream in which my mother was rising through a fissure caused by natural eruptions in the earth’s crust, her rotted wood casket riding on a river of mud, coming down to where I stood in panic in a meadow out of sight of the house, I felt a constant pulse of water under the dream’s textures and the spongy ground below my feet was sinking and I woke up shaking, thinking it was the house, but it was me, my heart racing and a flush and tightening at my temples. I lay there, looking up into moonlight and shadows on the ceiling, and in a while I was beyond the aftermath of the dream, and I slipped out from under the covers, searched for my slippers with my feet, then put my robe on and stood listening, watched the betta circle under the dim fluorescent, searching the tank for his mate, thin as a knife blade when he faced me. I listened to the gurgling of the circulating pump, then noticed a sound under that sound, as in the dream, something below the bedroom floor, a pulse of water, faintly percussive, and I took my robe off and kicked my slippers away and dressed myself in jeans and tennis shoes and a loose sweatshirt and headed for the cellar stairs.

There are lights in the cellar, bulbs hanging from electrical fixtures, each with its own chain, and once I’d felt my way down to the foot of the ladder and pulled the first one, I saw that the floor was dry, a dirt floor, black soil over hard clay a few inches down. I went to other lights and pulled the chains, and when there was enough light I moved along the stone walls on both ocean and meadow side, but could find nothing. Bits of mortar dissolved under my fingers, fans of sand falling to my tennis shoes, but that was all. Then I looked up between the joists in the low ceiling, places where my father had hung boat and fishing gear. I saw a bargepole, paint worn away on a string of lobster buoys, and I saw the members of my mother’s dismantled quilting frame, the nails in rusty rows at the edges. But I could find no water, and when I went to the boxes sitting on wooden skids on the dirt floor, I found only the dampness of humidity in the cardboard. I was tempted to open a box, one marked with the first letter of my father’s name, but as I bent over it I heard a trickle and a quiet splash. It seemed to be coming from the end of the room, down in the old wine cellar under the building’s ocean side edge. My father had bought the house from a man who had owned it most of his life. He’d bought it, in turn, from an old sea captain, a whaler who had accumulated wealth and had a taste for wine. But we’d never used his cellar. It was a small dank room with a low ceiling, and I had to duck under the lintel as I climbed down into it, its floor two feet below the cellar proper.

It was dark there and I could see nothing, but I could hear the water falling, drop upon drop, deep in the room’s side. There’s no electric light in the wine cellar, but in moments my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and the light flooding in dimly from the other room cast shadows on the stone walls and I could see into the wine vaults, square openings at waist level, extending out beyond the house foundation, and I could see the serpentine green of the marble floor at the lip of one of them and could tell, in a faint glow coming from inside, that it was wet.

I moved to the vault and put my fingers into the shallow wash, then squatted down and looked in. I could feel a soft breeze on my face, and back between the rotted wine racks, I could see a rubble of rock and cement where the back wall had caved in, a space between the rubble and the vault’s ceiling, and the dim glow coming from behind it, a latticework of light.

The water had pooled in a concave indentation in one of the rocks, and drops fell down a few inches from its lip, striking the flooded floor with a faint ping, sending out miniature waves that caused a hushed echoing in the chamber as they rolled over the marble. It was the sound that had entered into my dream, no louder here than above.

I reached into the vault, my shoulders beyond the opening, and pulled at the wine rack on the left. The wood crumbled in my hands and wet sand fell from the ceiling into my hair. I backed out and shook my head, then climbed under the lintel again and up into the other room and went to my father’s box and opened it. It held old fishing clothes, and I dug among them, remnants of the scent of mothballs in my nostrils, until I found an old black watch cap, a blanket, and a pair of canvas gloves. I put the cap on, tucking my short hair up under it at the edges, then climbed back down into the wine cellar.

I pulled the rotted racks away, dropping the wood to the vault’s side, then pushed my sweatshirt above my forearm, stood to the other side and reached in and swept the water from the marble floor with my hand. Then I spread out the blanket, covering the floor as far in as I could reach, put the gloves on and boosted myself up, turning and ducking my head as I crawled in through the vault’s opening, and shuffled forward until my toes scraped at the chamber’s lip, and then I paused, stiffening, the feel of the situation coming to me in a rush. I was inside the chamber, like a child in an oven in a fairy tale, and the fist was closing in my chest and I had to fight myself to visualize the way out: the opening into the large cellar, the ladder, up into the kitchen, then down the hall to my bedroom. Sweat had beaded on my brow, and I had to shake my head to get the sting out of my eyes. Then a cool breeze was washing across my face, drying it, and in a few moments I was okay again. I’m in the house, I told myself, and I’ll have no trouble getting back.

I inched ahead again, my knees bunching the blanket, occasional drops of water falling to my neck, and in a few moments had reached the rubble and was working to pull it away, sweeping pebbles and sand to the side, lifting the larger rocks and hunks of cement in both hands, my elbows on the blanket through which water was seeping, wetting my sweatshirt. I shoved the last rocks away and saw there was a crude opening beyond, an old watercourse or a place where different strata had joined and had shifted apart. It was a brief tubular passage through grey shale and clay, a rivulet of water meandering down its center, and the mineral veins that ran through it were visible in various bright colors in wetness at its end, where I saw the latticework of light, a jagged circular opening filled with roots, bits of earth hanging from filaments, and a soft fluorescent-like glow in the interstices.

I hesitated only for a moment, then crawled through the remnants of rubble, my knees chafed by grit pressing up from the hard marble floor. Then my knees were beyond rock and marble and were forcing shallow cups in the forgiving clay.

I crawled forward, my gloved hands and my feet to the sides, the narrow river running between my legs, and in a few yards had reached the light lattice at the passage’s end. I guessed I was no more than ten feet from the back of the wine vault, fifteen from the foundation of the house itself, and yet I felt I’d traveled a long way and was in a different world entirely.

The roots were twisted in gnarled layers filling the opening, much like a crudely woven basket, and when I reached my hand into the matrix and pulled at the clinging clods of dirt the fingers of my glove caught in stiff thorns and I had to withdraw it. I took the glove off and tried again, snaking my hand and my arm up to the elbow in the rigid web. I was still kneeling, my free hand in the river on the passage floor, and suddenly that hand was moving, water rushing between my gloved fingers, and I was falling forward. The root basket was turning in the opening. It had hold of my arm at the wrist deep within it, and as it rotated the light coming through it was like that in a kaleidoscope, flashes of circling color on the passage walls and in my eyes. And it was moving back as it turned, like some massive withdrawing screw, pulling me toward the opening.

I was on my stomach then, in the river, my toes dragging clay as I slid ahead. I saw a corona of leaves and vines coming toward me, my arm like the stump of a stiff battering ram disappearing into the root basket. Then the basket was turning out in the air, and through the empty opening I could see the oak tree, its thick trunk and its branches and leaves in a massive silhouette against the night sky. I was hanging out in the air up to my chest when the roots released me, and I watched the tree turn slowly and grow smaller as it fell, end over end, its roots unraveling like Medusa snakes, then bounced once on the steep escarpment and rolled down like a dervish, coming to rest on the beach, still shaking and vibrating, its branches dipping in the phosphorescence of the incoming surf, foam thrown from its leaves.

My arms hung along the cliff surface, palms pressed into clay. I could feel it oozing through my fingers, falling in wet worms into darkness. The soaked glove slipped from my right hand, and I saw the cuff kick veils of sand beads free as it tumbled and fell. Large shadows took away definition in the cliff face, and only where the alluvial escarpment began, a good hundred feet below, was the moonlight in evidence, a dull shimmering, floating over that broad fan that reflected and absorbed it. There was a large, dark hump, down to the right in shadow below my fingertips, and I couldn’t see the beach over it in that direction, only the curls of gentle waves beyond the surf. I lifted my chin up, turned slightly in the opening, and could see the waxing moon. A single wisp of cloud had drifted across its face and was half hiding it. I turned further and looked beyond the moon and into the cold sky, then turned completely until I was on my back in the shallow river and could see up to the cliff’s brink, only a few yards above, and then I understood the shadows.

The lip hung out a good fifteen feet into the air, and I could see wet roots hanging down from its underside, a pottery shard, pieces of burnt wood, and a slab of stone, fashioned by some hand, imbedded in it. And it was oozing, droplets of falling water dissolving into a smoky mist before they reached me. I lifted my hand to the wet shale in the cliff’s face above, but it was only wind-carved sand in the shape of shale, and it dissolved at my touch and fell in a wash down into my face. I shook my head, turning again, and pulled my father’s cap off and dabbed at my eyes with the clean wool on the inside, and when I could focus again I found that the cloud had drifted away from the moon and the hump in the cliff’s face below me was no longer in deep shadow, but clearly visible in its familiar symmetry. I’d thought it some natural outcropping, but now I saw the distinct edges, and now that all the sound of my turning and touching had ceased I could hear it shaping the hushed waterfall and could see that too.

It was a broad course of cement steps, its treads deep and descending steeply, and were the cliff a house façade and were there an entrance door one might have climbed that stairway and entered into the vertical face. But there was no door, no earth below the first tread but only the moonlight, high above the escarpment and the beach, to step off into where the stairway ended in the air. It hung out a good twelve feet from the cliff face, and from the brink of its lowest step a veil of water spilled, dissolving into a thin rain as it fell down into darkness. The stairway glistened with water, a slow flood that appeared stationary as it followed the sharp contours, and it was only in the scatter of twigs and shriveled leaves, like those blown across the porch steps of a country house after a winter storm, that I could see its movement, miniature waves over branch tips, an acorn lifted on the tide. And I thought of my own porch steps and my lost lover descending them in rain after that final argument four years ago, then turning to look back at me for the last time, curls of blond hair wetted by the rain, stuck to those temples I’d kissed into wakefulness for lazy love in the night, gone now.

And I thought the stairs might soon be going too. They were basement stairs, poured cement and very heavy, and unless they were connected to a cellar inside the cliff somehow, they couldn’t stay there, suspended out in air, and would soon fall and plow a deep cut in the escarpment below, then tumble to the tree in the surf and crush it or land heavily beside it, tilted and half imbedded in the beach.

I hung out in the cold air just above the stairway. It was off to the right a little and I could see most of it, but couldn’t reach down far enough to touch the top step. I felt at the cliff’s face above it. The icy clay was spongy and water-laden there, and wet chunks came away easily in my palms. I let them fall in globs, down to the stairway, where they dissolved quickly and were carried away in the waterfall. Then I extended my arms in the night air parallel to my body, and digging my toes into the river in the floor behind me and rocking my shoulders from side to side, I pulled myself back into the passage until I could see the edges of the opening again and the corona of that moonlight I’d been out in just moments before.

When I reached my bedroom again and looked in the mirror in the closet door, I saw that my hands and face were smeared with clay and dirt and that my clothing was soaked, my sweatshirt heavy with water and so stretched out that it hung almost to my knees. I stripped the clothes away, stacking them along with my soiled tennis shoes on the closet floor, then went shivering to the shower and climbed into it and took a hot one. My mother had called it that when I was a child. How about a hot one, she’d say, when I’d come into the house sweaty and soiled after hours of play. There is no bathtub in the house, and my mother would get into the shower stall with me, modest in her swimming suit, and would scrub my body with cloth and brush, pressing my head into her breasts as she flooded my scalp with cool shampoo. I flooded it then, too, imagining my mother stepping in through the wet curtain, then dried myself and dressed in clean clothing and shoes. Then I went in search through the cabinets in the kitchen, looking for the clothesline rope I knew my mother had kept there, finding it in a deep drawer to the side of the sink. Then I went out into the moonlight on the porch, feeling that tonight I couldn’t go beyond the house easily. There was no specific panic, just a slight fear of fear and a beginning sense of derealization. The night seemed a dream night, the cold and biting breeze as if it blew out of a tomb in some other place and year, and I turned back to the familiar doorway, opened the screen again and wedged the rubber kick in firmly. I could see down the hallway, the kitchen light illuminating the picture frames and carpet. Then I turned and went back out on the porch and headed for the end.

I tied the rope around the pillar at the sea side edge, my fingers aching in the cold, then played the coils out as I moved down the steps to the brief gravel path that runs from the front of the house to the tight turnaround area where Arthur parks. Then I stepped off the path and into the silver frost and headed for the cliff’s brink beyond the house side. There was thirty feet or more of ground between house and cliff, and though my mother had gardened there, the space had grown over completely with honeysuckle and scrub oak since her death so many years ago, and a thick spray of beach grass wavered in the moonlight at the very edge.

I squeezed the rope, pulling and testing the knot as I pushed bare branches aside. I was nervous, waiting for the fist to come, but aware of no aura. Then I slid my foot forward into the brittle grass at the brink, pressing it down hard for a good purchase, then leaned out, the rope taut in the air behind me, and looked down into the night.

I could see the escarpment far below, and the beach and the tree in the surf in phosphorescence, but I could see nothing of the cliff face, the opening and the stairway. They were back behind me, somewhere under the ground I’d passed over, and I stepped away from the edge, counting two steps, then stood in the moonlight calculating. Then I paced off the distance, somewhat unsure of it as I stepped over surface roots and struggled through the oak branches. I was ten feet from the house side when I counted the final number, and I stood there looking at the clapboards and the windowsills they butted against. I moved ahead and got down on my knees, dragging the rope at my side, and pressed the dead grass flat at the foundation with my free hand, then crawled along it, digging my fingers into the earth where it met cement. I was near the rear of the house when my hand slipped in and I found I could reach down along the foundation up to my elbow. The earth had pulled away from cement there, and though the house cast a shadow down over me and I couldn’t see well, when I turned my hands palm down beside each other to measure the space, there was nothing on either side of them but air.

I lifted the rope from where I’d pushed it against my knee to feel it and keep it close, then climbed up to my feet and looked back along its length. It hung in a sinking arc, brushing the clapboards like a jump rope, and I could imagine it caught up under a board, the rough wood then fraying it and its strands unraveling. I felt the flush rise in my cheeks then, and I pulled at the rope, snapping it taut. It was still firm at the pillar, and gripping it like a lifeline, I carefully coiled it, concentrating on the act, as I moved hand over hand until I had reached the porch, where I dropped it, and then stepped back through the screen and into the safety of the house.

Last night, after Arthur had driven me home from the Manor and I was undressing at the foot of the bed, I looked over and found I couldn’t see the betta gliding in the illuminated azure water of the tank. It was damp in the room and I was sweating. The wind had turned and was coming in cool from the northeast, a promise of dry air behind it, and I was shivering in my underwear as I crossed to the tank, then stood beside it and looked down into its waters and saw the betta floating there, like a piece of undulating sea lettuce on the surface the bubbles stirred into wake, his body shaped by the swells.

I reached around the tank and turned the handle of the valve, and the water settled into stillness, and then his body was still, in the shape of a perfect cutout, a glossy image lifted from the pages in a magazine of exotic sealife photography, the bands of startling colors even more distinct than they had been in life when he was always moving, the bands widening into pastels as they expanded and bled into each other, heading toward that translucency at the tips of the broad and extended display of his fins, the entire spectrum radiating out from an electric red and blue center of pigment on the impossibly wide field of his still body.

My arms were damp with moisture where they hung at my sides, and I could feel the beginnings of a soaking wetness where the edges of my underwear touched my body. I was shaking in the cool breeze coming in from the open window to seaside, and I left the tank and went to the bathroom to get my robe and slippers, then walked down the hallway and into the kitchen, where I searched the drawers to the side of the sink, finding the small, handheld strainer in the bottom one. It was a flat strainer, one my mother had seldom used. It had a thin wooden handle that ended in a circle of wire mesh that was as dense as a window screen, and once I’d worked it out from where it was tangled in the thick electrical cable of the old mixer, I rinsed it in the sink, then carried it out in the air at my waist as I walked back to the bedroom and the tank.

The betta was as I’d left him, his colors and the scalloped texture of skin below them still vibrantly alive. His mouth was closed, stolid beyond any attitude or conviction in the way he often held it while swimming, and it was only his stillness and a milky glaze over the small round dome of his eye that signaled his death. I realized I didn’t know when he had died, couldn’t quite remember having seen him the night before when I had fed him. I couldn’t remember talking to him, not for a good long while, since those first few days following the death of his mate, and I was troubled by this and by the sight of the dead, as if the fish were waiting there in some limbo, poised near the beginning of transit, unnaturally, waiting for me to set the world right and send him on his way.

I dipped the strainer into the still water near the tip of the betta’s extended bottom fin, insinuating it down and under the fish carefully so as not to disturb him, and when the handle and my fingers were in the water too, I raised the strainer and the fish settled in the circle of wire mesh as I lifted it, then held it just inches above the surface as he drained, losing his color.

At first I thought it was the northeast air in the room, washing the humidity away, drying and dulling the glossy surface, but it was not that. The bands of color were moving, drifting away from the center, slipping over the low domed body of the fish out toward the edges, then falling through the wire mesh of the strainer down to the still surface below. And the center was growing colorless and grey now, an expanding field of grey, redefining the shape of the fish as the bands thinned and expanded and washed over each other, shimmering in bright new hues at the edges, outlining the fish in moments of neon. Then it was over, and the betta lay in the circle of mesh, drained of his personality, and I stood holding him and looking down at him as if he held some universal message. Then I moved the strainer to the side and saw the ghostly figure on the water.

The betta’s colors had fallen into a ragged image of itself, and as the water swelled slightly from the flooding they were reconstituting, forming the shape of the fish again, a wavering spirit image, that even as I watched was dissolving, floating away from the center to become an aura of blues and greens that slowly faded into a vague phosphorescence that blinked out finally in the azure surface.

I brought the fish back over the empty water and gazed down at his embryonic figure, a simple oval shape now, before display of color, those flags of filament at fin tips, before breath swelling his sides, narrowed to a knife edge in exhalation and gliding. But it was no embryo, though it left life, as is said, as it came into it, emptied of its world’s face, that specific and yet generic one, the body picture given up to commerce with its own kind and the particularity of color pattern that distinguished it among others.

I saw then another face as I gazed down, watching the betta’s body as it faded to a lighter grey in the cool, dry breeze, then turned white and became the image of a medallion carved from ash, so smoothly fashioned that its scalloped surface seemed translucent. Its skin shimmered as the last moisture left it, then stretched tight over its body in a kind of rigor mortis. Then even that final scalloped patterning was gone, and I could see through its skin, as through glass, down into the dense meat and those impressions in it that were the bones of its universal skeleton, a structure that even as I watched seemed to be rising, shedding flesh and ligament and tendon, and the juice in the synapses of its primitive brain.

I thought then of the calaveras I’d heard mention of in John’s story, his voice rising in enthusiasm and drifting into the instrument room where I was cleaning the tracheotomy tubes and their cannulas. The tubes were intrusion, but they were means to a last connection, possibility of that air rising around them to be shaped into words, and then stories.

And the old men were the young men in the stories, and the women too, putting it off in reconstruction, just as I had in the certain knowledge that my house was stable.

But the earth was shifting now, and the calaveras might soon be dancing, in the Manor, in the figure of the fascinating man behind the curtain, down under the lighthouse. And I wondered if the time would come that I might join them, free of the house and my mother and the Manor. I wondered if I too might dance, in the meadow, out of sight of the sea and the image of that park in Tampico, my agora and the beginning of my travail.

Carlos

He was traveling again and it was close in the truck’s rattling cab, and through the splatters of dead bugs on the windshield he could see the live ones coming in a hazy veil, risen like sandstorm on the wind blowing over the hot desert floor. He reached for the crank and tightened the window and tried to turn to the driver, then they were under the veil, the cab awash in a hushed pelting, and his nostrils stung in the bite of burnt oil rushing in from the truck’s leaky engine, and he could smell rancid food and taste the acid of digestion. Again he tried to turn. The windshield was opaque now, and he saw the driver’s hand, the wipers smearing the dead bugs, and felt the truck lugging down. The hand was shaking on the shift, the heavy load behind them pushing the cab forward against the gears and he felt the brakes grab. Was it his father? He couldn’t move his head. The door was open now, wild smell of decaying desert flowers coming in, and he saw the wet rag in the bug smear and a swath of clear glass and trails of water running down from it. Then he could see the flames in the low buildings at horizon and to the right of that fire, and much closer, the shading oak on a hill in a green oasis. There was someone under the tree, lying in shadow in the grass there, another tending him. It’s me, he thought, one of them. And then he was looking where the windshield met the rubber at the cab’s ceiling and was hearing a faint creaking. He was falling back, and only by hooding his eyes and looking along his cheeks could he see the figure standing at his feet, ángel de la guarda all in white. Then it was dark again and his lid was lifted and it was bright, but he could see nothing. He felt the rag on his lips, bug juice and water, but he couldn’t turn his head, and someone was touching him and he felt a breeze on his leg, and when he opened his eyes again it was night and he heard a murmur of voices. He could turn his head then, and when he did he saw the folds in the white fabric screen and the metal rod and the plastic bag, hanging in moonlight at the top. He heard the hushed footsteps coming and tried to wait for them, but before they reached him he was asleep in a real sleep.

“Have you ever had a head injury, Mr. Ebano?”

“It’s Ébano,” he said, and the doctor blinked and shifted in his white medical smock and rocked on the chair’s swivel.

“Yes. Of course,” he said.

Carlos stared at him, the way his fingers formed a basket at his chest, then looked down at his own hands, the right palm resting over the left wrist in his lap. They didn’t seem his own somehow, and he hesitated to move them since he wasn’t sure he could. He felt a breeze come in at the open doorway, and when he lifted his head and looked over there he saw the body on the gurney in the hall and the screen door and the gravel drive beyond it. A sheet covered the face, but it was turned sideways and the feet were exposed, the twisted toes of a dead old man, skeletal and chalk white. The doctor saw him looking and rose and went to the door and closed it. Then he moved back to the chair again, the plastic hissing as he settled in.

“It happens,” he said, his sigh audible and forced, and Carlos watched his face, and soon the doctor seemed uncomfortable and looked away, then back again, but Carlos was still watching him.

“What is this place?”

“Well,” the doctor said.

He removed his glasses and he was fish-eyed. Then he pressed a knuckle into his eye, then lowered the glasses and glanced at the closed door. He was short and pudgy, his skin pallid, and his hair was thinning, though he looked only in his thirties. He seemed unable to continue, stuck for the right words.

“En Matamoros,” Carlos said.

“What?” He spoke softly, coming back from reverie.

“I got it once in Matamoros.”

“When was that?”

He’d slipped his glasses on and turned. He was focused again, and curious.

“I don’t know for sure. Maybe thirty years ago?”

“Well, I don’t think it is that,” the doctor said. “The cause, I mean. But did you pass out that time? Were you unconscious?”

“No. I don’t think I did then. Just for a few minutes.”

“But you went to the hospital. Maybe there are records still, and we can get them.”

“No. I didn’t do that. I don’t think there was one.”

“No hospital?”

“I was with my father then and we were working.”

“Well I don’t know what to say. I’d like to run a few tests though. Just a few more days.”

“What for exactly?”

“Well, to find out, you know. To get a proper diagnosis.”

“Am I okay now?”

“Yes, yes, I think so. But you were unconscious for a week you know. Can you remember how it happened?”

“Well, you know,” Carlos said, smiling at him and using his phrasing. “Once I was there, and then I wasn’t.”

“Well,” the doctor said. “I don’t know what to say then. We could run those tests. Maybe we could learn something.”

Empresa descabellada, thought Carlos. Then he looked down at his hands again and moved them from his lap.

The attendants were lifting the body into the ambulance when he left the Manor, the sheet tapping at the gurney’s sides in gusts of wind, and Carlos felt the hair flick at his ears and he touched his cap brim to the dead and nodded as he passed by, then headed across the gravel parking lot to Peter’s car. He could see the old house above it in a growing darkness on the hill, and across the meadow to the right was the lighthouse. A few cars were gathered near the base, official seals on the sides of some of them. Thick clouds rolled in from the sea, and he felt a spit of rain on his arm as he climbed in, speaking even before the door was closed.

“Did you ever wear something white?”

He removed his save the lighthouse cap and snugged it over his knee, the bill pointing down his shin, then turned in the seat as Peter got the car going and headed beyond the gravel to the narrow road that would take them to the highway and into Provincetown. The blacktop was cracked and there were places where slabs tilted up and roots pushed through, as if the product of some earthquake, and Peter drove slowly, the car’s wheels in bearberry at the shoulder, avoiding potholes. It was raining and the wipers smeared the windshield, and Peter had to use the washer to clear it.

“You mean when I came to see you?”

“That’s right.”

“No. I don’t have clothing of that kind. A white shirt maybe.”

“Then I guess it was a dream. Or some attendant.”

They reached the highway and had to sit there and wait for a break in the slow winter traffic. The rain rose into mist and the wheels of the passing cars sprayed clouds of wash that drifted over them, and Peter cranked the wipers up to a higher speed. Then there was a space, and he edged out into the flow. Fog had joined the rain now, moving in from the sea, and the traffic slowed and headlights blinked on. He drove near the shoulder, and once they’d reached the edge of Pilgrim Lake he glanced over at Carlos.

“You look okay to me. Maybe a little drawn, green at the gills. What did the doctor say?”

“He said I was okay now, but he didn’t know what it was. Why I was under for so long.”

“Do you?” Peter asked. “Can you remember it?”

“Well, you know, I was watching the shoring at that time, and that was it.”

His fingers moved on the khaki at his thighs. He was looking through the windshield into fog, and Peter could see that ancient profile in shadow in the dash lights. It was only four o’clock, but the rain and fog had turned the car interior into dusk.

“Yeah?” Peter said.

“Well they’ve got the thing jacked up pretty high now you know, and there are lights down under it. They’re wanting to dig away at the sides of the hole to test the firmness, and there was a hassle with the Coast Guard officials. They’re hanging around there, giving the contractor what trouble they can. And the national government guys are there too. They keep stopping and arguing. They’ve got a little layered city under there, levels and chalk lines, that kind of thing. But I guess that was a week ago at this time and it might have changed.”

“It has,” Peter said. “They’ve put a stop to everything now, even the shoring.”

“Is that right?” Carlos asked.

“Could you see clear enough?”

“Oh, indeed, quite good enough. The fence ain’t far at all.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. A creak I think. They say it was a good size piece of wood, from the scaffolding. I think I saw it turning, after the creaking. When I looked up, you know? And that’s when I was falling.”

“And a damn good thing there were people there.”

“Right. I was at the fence, and there was a crowd behind me. They must have caught me.”

“That’s what the guy with the truck said.”

“You spoke to him.”

“Yeah, he called me. I was over there in a half hour or so. To the Manor, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” Carlos said.

“Do you feel okay?”

“Good enough for me, I guess. Some little pain in the head is all. It may have knocked some sense in. I hope so.”

They passed beyond the lake, and the highway divided and narrowed a little and headed into the dunes. Sand had blown across the road in places and they saw the red taillights on the cars ahead, and Peter touched the brakes and they slowed down to a crawl. The rain had let up and turned to a cold drizzle, but the wind had stiffened and it rocked the car and blew the thinning fog in waves across the windshield. Neither of them said anything for a while, then Peter did.

“Charlie called. Just yesterday. About Strickland.”

“You’re kidding.”

Carlos turned from the window as he spoke.

“That’s right,” Peter said.

“After all this time? I thought it was over.” His fingers stroked his thighs. “What did he say?”

“Something about a list. Strickland’s papers. Seems there are missing ones.”

“He’ll be coming down then?”

“No, not that. There’s no reason. The house in Orleans has been gone through. It’ll be on the market soon. It’s us. We’re going to Philadelphia.”

“Why me?” Carlos asked.

“If you’re up to it. Why not? A little trip. Something to do.”

Peter

I learned I was HIV positive on the fourteenth of November, and it was later that same day I received my first call as a private citizen detective. There was a breath of silence on the phone, and I watched the drops fall from my arm, stain the white pad and bead on the red porcelain, then repeated the odd-sounding words again: “Peter Blue Investigations.”

I was sitting naked in the kitchen, which was not my office. That was down the hall in what used to be Sara’s sewing room before she left me but the phone wasn’t hooked up yet. We’d worked out a settlement for the places in Provincetown. Proceeds from the sale of the Spice Shop on Commercial Street had gone to her and I’d kept the house. The phone rang as I stepped out of the shower. Winter was coming and the metal chair back was cold and I leaned away from it, a green towel over my shoulder. It was three o’clock, and the sun was already sinking.

“Excuse me. I wonder if you can help me.”

His voice had gravel in it, a cold or a smoker’s rasp, and I couldn’t get his age or a sense of his attitude, not yet.

“We could start out with a name,” I said, then waited while he coughed.

About the HIV. I’m not gay, or at least I don’t think I am, but I was drunk and lost in drugs and can only place the situation vaguely. I know the woman is extremely thin, her robe parting to reveal her skeletal body as she comes out of the bathroom. Her hair is long, not too recently blond and blood dark at the roots, and I’m touching her small breasts, her nipples, and she’s watching the naked man beside me on the bed, and when I look over there and down I see the needle in my arm and the hose, and then I’m falling back.

I know it’s Boston and the Combat Zone, and I know it’s after Beth Charters’s death. I was with the police then and was investigating her rape and falling in love with her. Then Sara left me and Beth was dead, and it was only the help of her father Charlie, a milkman and a singer, that brought me back. We got Beth’s killer in a while, and then I could visit her grave at the cemetery in Truro.

The fresh mound was anonymous, but it had rained, and the white petunias in clay pots circling her head had drooped inward on their stems to form a kind of flowered parasol, or a hat, against the late October sun, and someone, Charlie I guess, had placed oyster shells and pearled beach stones at her feet. This had been a year before, and though I’d been to the cemetery on occasion since, it had been a good long while since I was there.

His name was Gordon Strickland, and he’d gotten my name through Warren at the station, and the job seemed an easy enough one. He had some rare documents, he said, a collection of things, and he’d made arrangements to sell them to a dealer in Boston. It was the insurance, a legal matter. I’d be along officially for security. I told him I was licensed, though he didn’t ask. We’d drive to the city together, deliver the stuff, then return the same evening. We’d be going in eight days, on the last Wednesday of the month.

“It’s four hundred a day,” I said. “Plus expenses.”

“There aren’t any.”

“Well, there’s gas,” I said, wanting the foolish words back even as I spoke them.

“To Orleans? It’s no more than twenty miles. Is it done this way?”

“No. Of course not. You’re right. Just the four hundred.”

I hung up and scribbled some figures under his name and number. It was cold in the kitchen and I was shivering. My first case, and already I’d be eating a few dollars of gas money. I felt cheated, unprofessional.

I got to Amy Minten’s office early, around ten to five, and was just settling into the vinyl sofa in the empty waiting room when she came out the door. She was dressed as usual, thin cotton slacks and tennis shoes and a loose green smock, her beautiful blond hair pulled back severely into a ponytail. She wore no makeup at all, but her serious enthusiasm for her work lit up her face as always.

“Oh,” she said. “You’re early. Come on in.”

She sat across from me, fingering through the file, and I could see the diplomas, both her husband’s and her own, in cheap frames on the wall behind her head. I was reading them, squinting to get the small print, and when she looked up she saw me doing it.

“Hey,” she said. “Can you relax a little? You’re wired.”

I looked into her face, her clear eyes, and realized it was true. The shower at three o’clock in the afternoon, the job, and since her call at nine in the morning I’d been roaming around the house, straightening things, cleaning, and now I was sitting still and there was nothing to do. She told me to take a few deep breaths, and I did that. Then she asked me if I was okay, could I listen, and I said I could.

“Well, then,” she said. “Are you gay?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. I think it was a dirty needle.”

Her eyes blinked. “Do you do that?” she said. “I wouldn’t have thought so.”

“I don’t,” I said. “It was a binge, I guess, about a year ago.”

“That Charters matter?”

I remembered then that she’d been involved in it and had made an important diagnosis. She’d been Sara’s doctor as well as mine and must have heard of the rest there. Unless I’d told her myself. She was an easy person to confide in. Absolutely no nonsense at all, absolutely accepting.

“Yes. That was the time of it,” I said.

“Well, it’s confirmed now, just as I told you on the phone. There’s no question about it, and you’ll have to be clear about that. Your T-cell count is fine, and I couldn’t find anything else to worry about. But it’s very early. Do you have any symptoms of any kind?”

“No,” I said. “There’s nothing. But I was wondering, to be exact about it?”

She didn’t hesitate.

“Eight to eleven years, on the average. Fifteen at the outside, though there are exceptions, under 20 percent. And that’s from the time of infection.”

She loaded me up with pamphlets, even a few books, and a scratch sheet of her own devising. She’d had plenty of occasion to deal with HIV, and AIDS too, here in Provincetown, and once she’d penciled in a monthly appointment on her calendar, she told me it was bound to come down upon me before long, not infection, but the facts of the situation.

She knew a support group wouldn’t be the right thing for me, not in this town, given my past on the force, and she doubted that a psychiatrist would help, though she gave me the name and number of one.

“But you can talk to me,” she said, “Whenever. Don’t think twice,” and when we reached the outer door she touched my shoulder, then leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. “Hey,” she said, “I’m sorry,” and I knew she was watching me as I shuffled down the dark pathway to my car.

It was three days later that Warren called about Strickland. I was in the sewing room with the phone man, watching him twist wires at the jack, his unit cupped in his shoulder at his ear.

“You’ve got one,” he said, though there was no ringing. “In the kitchen.”

Warren and I had worked together on the force for many years. It was an intimate circumstance in Provincetown, just a dozen of us, plus summer cops, and we’d become good friends, both at work and away from it. We fished when we had the time, and Warren had seen me through the death of Beth Charters and the divorce, and once my mother died in Florida, leaving me just enough to pay bills for a year, and I’d quit the force to set up shop for myself, he said he’d keep his eyes open for clients, and it was through Warren I’d gotten the first one.

“Too bad,” he said. “But it’s worse for him.”

The phone was on the wall beside the sink, and I saw the egg-encrusted breakfast plate, just the one, and turned away from it. The curtains lifted and parted in a breeze at the open window, the grey day visible beyond. It had rained steadily, all morning until noon, then humid air had settled in, too heavy for the breeze to blow it out, and my shirt stuck at my collar, neck cold and clammy when I turned my head.

“When?” I said.

“At six-o-three this morning. He had clearance for Philadelphia.”

“He had his own plane?”

“Right. A new Cessna. They’re checking that now. The FAA.”

“How bad was it?”

“Not really too bad at all. He was off the end, they said. Then he just glided down to the beach. But then there was the fire. We only got his name, routinely, a few minutes ago. The chief’s been out there all morning.”

“Are you going?”

“You bet,” he said. “Right now.”

“I’ll meet you,” I said.

A white gull sat on the Cessna’s wing at the waterline. The tide had swelled to full, and the wash rode under the wing and came up over the plane’s bullet nose imbedded in the sand and left foam on the blue metal, like soap suds, in its receding. The prop was gone, or the gull might have sat there, and I saw it dip its head, then rise to its webbed feet as the tern came out of the clouds where the sun would be and clipped it and shot away. Then another came in low over the sand, and the gull opened its wings and jumped off the metal and drifted out to sea. A man stood at the top of an awkward ladder in the sand, reaching to get the leather sling around the high tail. He wore somebody else’s hat, a ludicrous straw sombrero too big for him, and the terns’ wings struck the edges as they dove, rocking and tilting it, until it was on the bridge of his nose and he had to grab the tail and drop the sling and knock the brim back up so he could see again.

“It’s a nesting area.”

Warren was beside me in a green slicker. We were back in the hummocks in beach grass. I’d asked him in the parking lot if he thought it might rain again and he said they called for it. I was wearing a light jacket only, but I’d put on a cotton sweatshirt under it. We’d driven down the single runway to the end. All the cars were parked there, and the yellow tow truck had backed up to the edge. Then we trudged through the low dunes the few hundred yards to the beach. They’d staked out the crash path, a rectangle of yellow plastic police ribbon open at the ocean end, and as we made our way around it I saw the impacted sand and torn shrubs where the plane had bounced, then, at the beach, the almost perfect trough where it had hit again and skidded to a stop. Warren touched my arm and we stepped through bearberry and dusty miller and headed off to the side for a better view. A man had crossed the beach to hold the ladder, and the terns were coming at him from the sea. He’d raised his shoulders and lowered his head to a rung, and I saw his elbows flapping, trying to ward them off.

“They like to come in out of the sun,” Warren said. “And even though it’s cloudy they’re doing that. You’re blinded then, and they can get your eyes that way, something vulnerable you know?”

“They do seem plenty pissed,” I said.

“Wouldn’t you be? It’s a whole fucking city disrupted there. This is war!”

We moved off for a few more yards, then turned and saw the Cessna’s side. It looked virginal, untouched by the crash, but for the blackened cockpit and the smoke flames on the hull behind it that seemed painted over the blue metal. The windows were opaque with soot, the plastic rippled from heat, and through the open cockpit door I could see only the outlines of the seats and instrument panel. The space was like a film negative, everything reduced to a common blackness.

“Where did they take him?” I said.

“To Boston. What was left of him.”

“Jesus. What a way to go.”

“I don’t know,” Warren said, and I realized I didn’t either. Maybe quick is better.

Back in the parking lot, we talked things over. We were standing at my car and over the hood and across the lot I could see the SAVE THE LIGHTHOUSE kiosk, a small trailer, its hitch supported on a cinder block. T-shirts blew on hangers in the breeze and card tables held stacks of coffee mugs and other paraphernalia, all embossed with the logo, a figure of the lighthouse and the keeper’s shack and the words printed below. A woman moved between the tables, securing calendars and postcards with beach rocks. The wind gusted and a T-shirt swelled as if it held a body, then lifted in the air, and I saw the woman reach up and deflate it and twist the hanger tight around the rod. I had an urge to tell Warren about the HIV, my new circumstance, but I didn’t.

“It’s nothing more than an accident, then,” I said.

“So far. When they get it out of there they’ll go over it in detail, but one of the FAA guys was up in there. He said he’d seen it before on a Cessna, a clogged fuel pump, then a backup. And if the guy was smoking or there was a spark, well, that would be reasonable.”

“Where do they take it?”

“I don’t know,” Warren said. “They could just keep it here, in that old hangar, the one for the sightseeing plane? They could keep it there. Once before they did.”

“Right,” I said. “That Beechcraft. A couple of years ago.”

“Christ, Peter, it was six! Have you forgotten us already?”

I laughed and touched Warren on the arm. Then he told me about the Taunton deal.

A woman had come into the station a little drunk. A rich woman, he thought. It was her husband, and she was frightened and talked about divorce, and in a while she seemed to come to herself, realizing what she was doing and saying, and then she backed off. Warren had given her my number at the door, and he thought she was in need of it and that she would indeed call.

When I got back home and went into Sara’s sewing room, I saw the light on the answering machine beside the new phone. It was the woman Warren had told me about and the message said I could call, so long as it was before five. I checked my watch. It was half past four and I dialed the number, and once she’d answered and found out who I was her voice dropped to a whisper.

“Is your husband there?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I’m alone,” but she kept whispering.

Clearly, she was very frightened, and though I urged her a little, she couldn’t make an appointment before Tuesday, four days off, and she was very careful about time and directions. We’d meet at a closed garden stand beyond the town. She’d park her car out of sight behind it and would wait there.

I called Warren on the morning of our meeting and told him the woman had phoned and that I’d be heading out to Taunton in a few hours.

“That’s good,” he said. “I thought she would.”

“And what about the plane, Warren, what’s going on with that?”

“Well, they’ve got it in the hangar and they’ve been breaking it down. The last I heard, yesterday in fact, they hadn’t found anything. It wasn’t the fuel pump though. That was okay. They’re looking for a rupture of some kind now, putting the lines under pressure.”

“Nothing suspicious then.”

“You’ve got some idea about that?”

“Not really,” I said. “I wonder if he was a good pilot.”

“Most of them are,” Warren said. “Or were.”

I’d decided from the beginning that I wouldn’t dress up if I didn’t have to, though I’d bought a suit and a new sport jacket and a few ties, imaginings of fancy parties at which I’d provide security for the fine jewels or white collar investigations in Boston. In Provincetown, it had always been casual or inventive, a thrift-shop style, the artistic or the camp of the gay influence: anything goes, so long as you wear it boldly. I wore chinos and a dark blue cotton sweater, no tennis shoes, but oxfords. The pants felt a little loose, and I slipped them and the shoes off and weighed myself, then realized I had no measure. The scale was dusty and my sock prints were there when I stepped off of it. I went to the bathroom mirror, looking for evidence, but only my healthy face stared out at me. Come on, I thought, it’s just over a year. I left the house then and drove to Taunton.

The nose of the Cadillac peeked out suspiciously from behind the fruit stand, and as I passed it I thought anyone else passing would surely notice it too. But the road was empty, the last of the fallen oak and beech leaves strewn in the road blew up at my fenders, and I figured the place would be good enough for our business. I slowed and turned into the mouth of a dirt driveway where the road crested, then backed out into it and headed down through the canopy of trees again until I could see the stand coming up in the distance on the right. The road continued in a straight line beyond it, a few farmhouses at the ends of long driveways, and to the left I could see marshland and fallow cornfields through the skeletal weave of bare branches. My tires crunched in the gravel as I pulled off the shoulder and I parked in front of the stand, in clear view, my car blocking sight of the other one from the road.

She was sitting behind the wheel, her face hidden in its structures, the tight white basket of her hair visible above it, and I saw her small hands gripping the top of the wheel and thought she must be a very old woman though I knew better. Then I reached the side of the car, and when I leaned down and looked in I saw her child’s face and that her hair was light blond streaked with platinum. She turned to face me, a sea green on her lids, and smiled tentatively, and I could see the edges of her perfect teeth surrounded by red which was itself surrounded by a thin dark line defining her lips. I heard the click, saw her hand come back to the wheel, then opened the heavy door and slid in on the leather.

“Thank you,” she said, lowering her eyes.

“Well, it’s nothing yet,” I said.

“But I mean for coming.”

Her voice was high and wavering and there was a deep breathiness under it that seemed sexual, but learned. And the voice went with her costume, that seemed really that, as if she were a child in dress up, ready for one of those exploitation ads, the darkest of all pornography. She wore a green knit dress over lime-colored underwear, the bra silken and loose, just hints of shadows under the weave, and an emerald choker circled her white neck, thick as a dog collar, and I saw green coral on her fingers and at her wrists. Her nails were green too and just at the edge of prostitution. She saw me looking and smiled faintly, and I knew many others had looked and that she was used to that, and when she spoke she was fighting against some automatic flirtation, knowing that my look too had been automatic, the very thing she was dressed up for.

“He buys my clothes,” she said. “It’s all I get to wear. And he follows me too, to make sure I’m in them.”

“What?” I said.

“He has me followed.”

“Just a minute.”

I got out of the car and moved to the front of the fruit stand. It was boarded up and the wooden outdoor racks that held the fruit in season were covered with plywood that had been tacked down with thin nails. I looked left and right. There were thin woods on both sides, and I could see for a good distance into them. Then I moved over the gravel to the road and crossed it and stepped down below the shoulder on the other side to where the trees started. They ended in a few feet, at the edge of a steep embankment, below which was an old dirt track running parallel to the road, between it and the marsh. I could see out over the wavering cattails to the cornfields in the distance.

I stepped carefully down the embankment, and when I reached the narrow road and looked up it, I saw the end of the car at a turning about fifty yards away. It was a Volkswagen bug, one of the last imported, and its plates were Massachusetts. Then I heard laughter, a woman’s voice, and when I looked into the marsh I could see the cattails parting and dipping. The young woman came out of the marsh then and climbed up to the brink of the road, a fist full of tall tails, and after she’d looked toward the car to orient herself, she turned and saw me.

“Oh, hello!” she said. “We’re picking cattails.”

“I can see that,” I said. “Looks like good luck.”

A voice from the marsh called out, “Andy?”

“That’s my name,” she said. “Hello! Yes! I’m over here!”

Then a young man emerged from the long weeds. He, like the woman, wore jeans and a flannel shirt and boots with lacings. They stood beside each other, their tails blooming from their fists, and grinned at me.

“Hey,” I said, turning. “Have a nice day.”

When I slid back into the Cadillac, she was watching me intently as if I might be bringing bad news, and I realized the shape she was in and that it wasn’t very good at all and that she’d been working to control herself.

“It’s okay,” I said, lifting my hands and pushing the palms at her. “Just some cattail pickers.” Then she was talking.

She was thirty years old and had been married to him for ten years, a certain Michael Plummer, who had once been a plumber, but was already a wealthy and successful plumbing contractor when they met. Her name was Erica.

“He’s in toilets,” she said. “That’s what he says, and once he put my head down into one, just for the fun of it, and to teach me a lesson.”

He was fifty now, but she’d been a child when they’d married, really that, and she’d liked the way he’d dressed her up and had given her money and the way he’d taken her places, vacations to islands and to resorts in New Mexico, but she hadn’t been liking it for quite a while now, and when he’d found that out it had pleased him, her unhappiness, and he’d worked to increase it, getting her up in clothes like this, and jewels, and forcing her into the color combinations of her makeup. “Even photographs,” she said. “He takes pictures. Not sex. He doesn’t do that anymore. But for a measurement, the ways he likes me. Then if I don’t get it right, he hits me, pushes food into my face. And if I talk to anyone at all and he finds out about it, he has a strap and handcuffs.” She leaned toward the door, her fingers brushing her buttocks. “Do you want to see?”

“No,” I said. “Do you have any relatives?”

“There’s no one,” she said.

I asked her if she’d ever called the police, and she shuddered. Once she had, and they’d joked and laughed in the doorway, and he was still laughing when the door was closed and when he had her by the hair and was dragging her, across the carpet, right over the furniture and the sills and the fine Italian tile. And that’s when he pushed her head down in the toilet, his foot on the base of her spine, and was still laughing.

“What about Provincetown?”

“I’m glad I did,” she said. “He was fishing with his friends and I had a few drinks, and that’s what got me to the police station. Then I got scared and left, and that’s when that man gave me your number.”

“Do you have any money?” I said.

“Money?”

She lifted her leather purse from the seat between us, unzipped it, and opened the mouth. It was full of money, bricks of twenties and tens with rubber bands around them. She pushed the purse toward me.

“Take it,” she said.

I reached over, brushing her fingers as I pulled the flap closed, and she jerked her hand away, then lowered her eyes, embarrassed.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Christ, don’t be. It’s understandable,” I said, and then we sat there, both breathing deeply, looking at each other, and when I thought she had settled down and we could talk in some reason, I laid the whole thing out for her.

I asked her for the name of a shopping center in Taunton and a store, then wrote them down. The keys would be in the ashtray and the driver’s door would be open and she’d know the car as the one with a playing card in view on the dash. I’d rent the car under an assumed name, but she didn’t have to remember that, but only the motel name in Providence. The papers would be in the glove compartment. And she didn’t have to remember the lawyer’s name either. He’d mention mine when he called and she’d know it was him.

“It’s better this way,” I said. “That I don’t actually take you, that you leave him on your own. Then there’s no question of coercion should it come to trial. The lawyer’s a good one, you’ll see. And I’ll be in touch with him. You might have to stay there for a week or so, maybe even more, until the papers are served. I’ll watch that too.”

“And him,” she whispered. “You’d better watch him.”

“I will, indeed,” I said. “And closely. Do you have any more money?”

“Yes,” she said. “A lot. I’ve been saving it.”

“Take all of it. Every last penny.”

Tomorrow was too soon, because she had to get ready, her personal papers and whatever ones of his she could safely get her hands on, and some proper clothes and anything else she could think of, and when I suggested the next day, she laughed lightly, her face brightening briefly in the first anticipation of some possible freedom in her future. The first time in a long time, I thought.

“But it’s Thanksgiving!” she said, and I was taken aback, then back down the road I’d traveled to get there, bouquets of dried corn hanging from door knockers and pumpkins on stoops. Christ, I thought, I have no family at all, no reason for the holiday, just like her.

But she had his friends coming over, men just as crude as he was, and he insisted that she cook and bake for the lot of them and that everything be right in the holiday spirit and that she hum to herself, holiday songs, as she cleaned up after them and they watched the football games on the large-screen television and drank beer and laughed and insulted each other, arguing the fine points of plays and players as if they knew something about them.

“How about Friday, then?”

“No,” she said. “And not the weekend either. He’ll take all the days off. Probably he’ll take me out somewhere on Saturday, but all day Sunday he’ll lay around.”

She was counting the days now, excited in naming them, most probably searching for moments in them, ways she would pack and hide things, get herself ready, and in the light coming in at the window I could see the delicate bones in her face as they pushed up through expression of her new animation. There was a child in there, but a woman too under the knit and silk trappings, the bloody lipstick and lime, a free woman who, unlike a battered plaything, could be a child again, at least in the unfettered power of her imagination. Light touched her high and angular cheeks, and the skin over the edge of her skeletal jaw looked like hard ivory, and then she turned to face me.

“Okay,” I said. “Is it Monday, then?”

“Yes!” she said.

“All right!”

We sat grinning at each other, both of us vibrating a little. I’d caught it from her, the opening into a new world, and I liked the feel of it. I could imagine the travail that lay ahead for her, but in the moment that seemed secondary. Then it must have come to her imagination too, but before her smile slipped completely she lowered her head and reached for the purse.

She counted out the money on the fine leather seat between us, and I was careful not to forget anything. I told her I’d figure in the mileage later, when we worked out the final bill. I took six days in advance as retainer, and we shook hands over the cash in the open purse, grinning again. Then I opened the door and got out and walked back to my car. I heard the Cadillac’s engine rush into life as I climbed in, then saw Erica wave through the windshield as she passed in front of me. She turned down the empty road toward town, leaves rising in a russet cloud behind her, and I started my car up and drove away in the other direction, toward Fall River.

I crossed the Sagamore bridge and headed down the mid-Cape highway thinking of Thanksgiving and the monstrosity it would be for Erica, though a last holiday occasion of that kind if she were lucky. I am, I thought, nothing quite like that in my life, and soon after I’d passed Dennis I had a menu and a shopping list, everything that had rested on the table, once my mother had carried it all in. I reached the Orleans rotary and turned off and drove to the Stop and Shop, and by the time I was loading the bags into the trunk the sun was sinking and the stillness of dusk was in the trees on their little islands in the parking lot. Tomorrow, I thought, I would have been going to Boston with Gordon Strickland. It seemed an odd day to have planned that, right before the holiday, and once I’d closed the trunk and climbed into the car, I searched my wallet for the directions.

The house was at the end of a long dirt road, bayberry and beach plum bushes dipping in at the shoulders, and before I came in sight of it, up on a slight promontory at the bay’s edge, I’d had to turn my lights on to see the ruts and turnings. The sun had gone down into a cloud bank at the horizon, and though it was just after four, it was dark as the end of evening. My headlights swept the windblown scrub guarding the house from clear view as I turned in at the drive, and they met another light, something dim on the far side, and I turned them off as I rolled to a stop, my tires crunching in shells where the drive ended in a parking area. There was no car there, and I realized I’d not asked Warren about one. Had Strickland driven himself to the airport?

I climbed out, pushing the door closed carefully until the lock clicked, then stepped along the stone pathway that led to the small front porch. There was no light in the fixture above the door, and the windows beside it were closed and locked. The pathway led to both sides of the house, and I took the right branch, touching the wooden shingles and ducking below the window frames as I headed toward the side, and when I got there and turned, a stiff wind hit against my chest as it rushed in off the bay. I could see the light ahead, a glow in a window where the house ended, a cement column supporting a broad, open deck, its edge visible, and I could hear something, music I thought, dissonant and carried on the wind. The pathway descended, cut down into the earth, and soon I was below the shingles and touching the house foundation, and when I reached the window and was under it, the sill was high up and beyond my fingertips and the music was louder and I thought I could feel it through my hands. I looked to the right and saw the oak tree, above the steep embankment, and turned and went back up the path, then stepped beyond it and worked my way through scrub pine and honeysuckle until I reached the tree. It was an easy climb and I needed no more than a few feet, and soon I was settled into a crotch in the branches and was looking in at the window.

The room beyond was a small library, bookcases and the books in them lined up in careful rows against the back and side walls. I could see a dark oriental on the floor, glowing in the illumination cast down upon it from track lighting suspended from the ceiling. There was an easy chair to either side, the one on the left bathed in the light of a floor lamp close behind it, and in that one a man was sitting, eyes closed, his head back on the cushion, and I could hear the music rising. He was a small man, in a grey jumpsuit, and the chair was large, and it and the music, deep and percussive, seemed to be swallowing him. The window seemed to be vibrating, and the figure of the man beyond it slipped in and out of focus. I could see his dark hair, bunched at his neck, thick fingers spread apart on the chair arms. He wasn’t sleeping. The music was too loud for that. He was listening, and I saw his face move to the side from time to time and thought he must be feeling rhythm or the intent in some complexity of a rhythmic figure.

I climbed down out of the tree and went to the door again, then opened the screen and knocked loudly. I could hear the music in the distance. Then I knocked again and waited, but he didn’t come. I tried it a few more times, but there was no response, so I headed back to the tree, scooping up a handful of shell fragments as I went.

He was still sitting in the chair. The hair at his neck had fallen down a little at his cheek, and I could see it was braided, a short braid, but as thick as a small log. Then the music stopped, end of a movement or the piece itself, and before it could begin again I cast some shells at the window, hearing them click against the glass.

He heard them too. His head lifted from the cushion, eyes open now, black pools. Then he pushed up out of the chair and crossed to the window and cupped his hands around his face and stared out. Then he dropped his hands and turned and went out of sight. The overhead lights went out, and I saw his shadow figure as he moved to the floor lamp. Then the room was completely dark and I heard the window riding up in the frame, and in a moment he was leaning out and looking across at me, smiling.

“What in the world are you doing in that tree?” he said. “Is that a place for you?”

Carlos

The kitchen looked out on the deck and the bay beyond, and the large windows were coated with a light dusting of windblown sand. “I ought to have cleaned those,” he said.

I’d asked him about Strickland’s cough, and he said he was no smoker.

“Something chronic. In the last few months I’d say.”

Then I’d asked him about the music.

“Ives,” he said. “I figured to spend some time trying to hear it, playing it loud enough.”

The death came back to him then, though briefly. He looked to the side, at the sandy windows, then reached up behind his head and pulled at the gathering of hair. I could see the result at his temples, his broad and unwrinkled forehead and his momentarily lifted brows. Then his hand was back at the table, his finger circling the cup’s rim.

He’d been working for Strickland for close to a year, taking care of the house when he was away, living in a basement room there. Strickland had left for the airport early, and he’d set to work, cleaning the place up and repairing a couple of broken shutters. There was other work to be done, and he’d taken it up in the next few days, reading and listening to music in the evenings, getting to bed early. The phone machine was on. That was their arrangement, and he’d had no reason to check it. Strickland was a doctor, but out here in Orleans he was a recluse. He read books and studied his documents and remained unavailable to the city throughout the day. He’d check the phone calls in the evening, then answer the ones that were necessary. He never called the house when he was away in Philadelphia.

“I wonder what I’ll be doing now,” Carlos said.

He put it strangely, both real question and acknowledgment of choices. There was no anticipation in his voice, nor was he looking for the answer yet, not from himself and certainly not from me. I gave it without thinking, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and I don’t know why I did, though I’ve not troubled this decision because it was the right one.

“Well,” I said. “I’ve got a whole empty house and there’s some work to do. I can’t pay you anything yet, but maybe later that would be possible. You’ll have your privacy.”

He looked up at me and held my eyes for a good long while, and I think I blushed and I think he was waiting for that, and only then did he speak.

“That’s very good,” he said. “Let’s call it a deal.”

Driving back in the darkness to Provincetown I told him about myself, about Sara and our divorce, my years on the force and my new position as a private investigator. I even told him about my mother’s death and the little money she’d left me. I couldn’t seem to stop talking. Then I invited him to Thanksgiving dinner, and he accepted, and when we got back to the house we stayed up into the night and I told him about the HIV and he told me a few things about himself.

We spent a good part of the next day getting Carlos settled in. The guest bedroom was full of boxes and old clothing, and I even had the rubber raft in there. We lugged things down the basement stairs and Carlos knocked together some wooden skids to put them on.

The guest bedroom had its own private bath, and once we’d scrubbed and vacuumed, the place looked bright and cheery, and Carlos whistled softly as he opened the closet door and hung his clothes. I left him to it and went to the kitchen to take stock of things for Thanksgiving dinner, and in a while he was beside me at the sink, holding the turkey’s breast as I stripped away the plastic covering, then fished in the cavity for the sack of giblets. We had things ready by six, and I called out for Chinese food. “Sesame noodles,” Carlos said when I asked him, and we spent the rest of the evening in front of the television, watching an old movie about cowboys and Indians.

“The Indians have pale faces,” Carlos said, and when the movie was over we went to bed.

In the morning I got up late and went out to the car to check the odometer, then walked back into my new office to write things down. I’d call the lawyer in Providence the next day, give him the complete picture on Erica Plummer and the name of her motel. It would take him some time to get the court order, but he’d be quick about it once he heard the story from her own mouth. I’d worked with him before, always against him actually, when I was on the force. He’d kept us on our toes, getting more than one offender off because of faults in procedure. He was efficient and tough-minded, utterly fair, and I was pleased to be on the same side of the table as he was now.

I heard Carlos in the kitchen as I was finishing up, and when I got there he was sitting in a chair with a pot in his lap, trimming the ends off the wax beans, and the turkey was sitting in the black roaster on the table.

“Room temperature,” he said, and I went to the refrigerator and got out the sweet and white potatoes and took them to the sink for washing.

We had the turkey in the oven by two-thirty. It was a small bird, though big enough and there’d be leftovers, and once we’d heard the pops and crackles and had basted it, we decided on a short Thanksgiving walk on the beach, just an hour, then we could return and finish the preparations and set the table. I had two bottles of good Chablis in the refrigerator and we’d drink a little Irish before sitting down.

“Around five?” Carlos said, which sounded right to me.

The sun was already sinking behind us when we stepped from the parking lot and down to the empty beach at Herring Cove. The tide was out and the beach was broad and the sky over it had cleared of clouds, and there was light in the water, a last pink wash, and we saw it in the bodies of a few gulls riding the swells beyond the foam of the first breakers.

“The sea,” Carlos said. “Unlike the bay. That was like Mexico, but not as much life.”

“You mean at Strickland’s house.”

We’d walked down to the quiet surf and I’d picked up a stick, a barrel stave worn white by salt and sand. Pipers rushed to the edge of receding waves, then raced away.

“In Mexico,” Carlos said. “Before we left Tampico. There were men-of-war, and those transparent sticky ones, and you could see the fins of ribbonfish caught in pools when the tide was out.”

“When was that?”

“In ’60,” he said. “I’d place it there. Wouldn’t that make me thirteen? Something like that.”

“And then you left,” I said.

“That’s right.”

“I’ve been thinking about the time of my leaving too,” I said.

“To put something dramatic on it?”

“I guess so. I haven’t really felt it yet, so I think about it. A certain feeling?”

“You could talk to someone,” Carlos said. “A community feeling. There are such things.”

“Maybe I will,” I said.

But I couldn’t think anymore. The sun was behind the dunes now and the sea was awash in pink all the way to horizon, and when the gulls rose up from the pink sea their bodies were white, but their wings were red and their tails were fans, rosy and translucent at the tips.

“That’s something,” Carlos said. “I never saw that in Mexico.”

The table was covered with a white cloth, and there were candles near both ends and the light flickered in the wine. The turkey sat on a yellow platter in the center, not golden, but the color of a light wet mahogany, the tips of its ankle bones gathered in rosettes of foil, and at its left, in a round white casserole, the orange sweet potatoes were hidden under a field of melting marshmallows stained with caramelized brown sugar and a pattern of roasted almonds, and on its right was another bowl, the mashed potatoes, butter melting and flowing among its craters. The black olives were black pearls spilled from a string, and some sat in a row in a green boat of celery, a few fluted blossoms left at the end, and the pearled onions were pearls or caviar from a monstrous fish still held in the birth fluid that was a light cream sauce. The corn was corn. The tomatoes were green and red, and the wax beans were lime, laid out in rows like small loosened faggots on a shallow ceramic boat fashioned to look like wax beans, though slightly darker ones, and stuffing erupted from the turkey’s cavity, a large silver spoon embedded in it, its handle active in flickers of candlelight, ready for the taking.

It was five o’clock and dark outside, and we sat in the kitchen. The table was small enough to reach across, but we spoke somewhat formally for the occasion and didn’t reach and passed the plates and the bowls and wine, smiling and nodding to each other over the turkey and around the tapers, and when we were finished we filled our glasses again and picked at the food. There was plenty left for the next day and maybe even the next.

His mother died in a fire in Matamoros when he was just fourteen years old. It was a house fire, but the interior walls of the house had been torn away in order to make a large sewing room, and other women had died too at machines there, and some had died after leaping out of windows, their twisted bodies and exposed bones in billows of black smoke, blood soaking into the dirt street and their thin flowered dresses.

His father had brought them north a year earlier, talk of work at the border, but it was steady work for his mother only, and the odd jobs his father managed to find were an insult to him, a man with no Mexican in his face at all. “He looked like a gringo, but he put a veil over his past entirely and I don’t know his sources, but that he was adopted and that the people who had raised him were long dead. And then my mother died in the fire and my father left, went over the border illegally, and I never saw him again. Then I crossed over too. I was just fourteen, and it took me ten years and a little help to become a citizen.”

He’d crossed the United States, then wandered back again, and in the course of his years of travel he’d worked at many menial jobs, then had found a good man who had taught him carpentry and house repair, then a few jobs as a handyman and some where he was a resident, once at a large ranch in New Mexico, another at a resort in the Catskill Mountains, a year of tenure in which he repaired the ramshackle dormitories of the transient waitresses and kitchen help. There were holes in his story, years vacant and unaccounted for, and I kept feeling that he, like his father, held up a veil of privacy, lest I learn too much and get to know him.

It had all been a constant leaving and arrival, vague feelings of regret and anticipation, and after a while those had dulled for him, as well as the little moments of anxiety in uncertainty between places, and he told me of the solace he’d taken in reading and mastery in woodwork and diagnosis in electrical and plumbing problems, worlds he could take with him that remained constant. He had a bag of tools and he left books behind him and acquired new ones, and in a while he was closed off in himself, and then he came to the Cape and found his place with Strickland.

I reached across the table to fill his glass, wanting more, some glue of narrative.

“What about the war? Vietnam, I mean.”

“I was in Chicago when things got cooking. So I left. I was never bothered about the draft. I just kept moving, and the work was mostly cash, you know. Very few records, and no social security.”

“How old was Strickland?”

“Forty-five,” he said. “Two years older than I.”

“Me too,” I said. “I mean, I’m forty-three.”

“In a fire. Like my mother. I believe he must have been an excellent pilot.”

“They all are,” I said.

“But I know something about that. His care with things. His document collection. He was quite meticulous. And he was an internist. That takes plenty of care, and reasoning too, often dealing with the unknown and surprising, much like flying a plane I think.”

“Did he have any patients at all here?”

“Oh, no. This was a getaway for him. He left that all behind, almost as if it were painful.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Well, I’m reasoning now,” Carlos said, lighting up a cigar. “I never heard him on the phone, nor saw him hold a book of that kind, though they were on the shelves. And when we talked it was about things far from that. He showed me how he’d plot courses to Mexico, and I told him details about woodworking. We talked about wine, something I’d picked up on the way. Nothing, ever, about medicine.”

And there were no women and no friends, and it was Carlos who did most of the food shopping, and though occasionally they went to restaurants in Provincetown, they went early and to quiet places. It was reading in the evenings, and quiet music, and the manuscript collection. And it was early to bed and early to rise and Gordon Strickland sitting on the deck in robe and slippers, drinking coffee, a book in his lap. Then it was Strickland flying to Philadelphia for a week or two, then coming back for a few days, then leaving again.

“I studied up on AIDS,” Carlos said. “In his library.”

“Books about that?”

“Oh, plenty. Journals and offprints too.”

The phone rang, startling both of us, and I rose and went to the wall beside the sink to answer it. Carlos was puffing at his cigar, reaching for the good brandy I’d brought to the table. It was Erica Plummer, her voice small and hysterical.

“I told him,” she said. “I had to tell him.”

“Easy,” I said. “What do you mean?”

“The cattails! It was his friend. He made me tell him.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she hissed. “He locked me in the closet, but I got out.”

“How long ago?” I said.

“Oh, I don’t know!”

I looked down at my watch. “It’s seven-fifteen.”

“Then I guess an hour, maybe more.”

“Just stay where you are,” I said. “Right there. I’ll call you back.”

I hung up the phone, then turned back to the table and heard the pounding. It was coming down the hallway from the front door, and I thought of the Steyr in the desk in Sara’s sewing room, then heard glass shattering. Carlos was on his feet now, and I held my hand out to stop him.

“This will be difficult,” I said. “Why don’t you try for the basement?”

But he didn’t move, just lowered his snifter to the table and smiled faintly, and I heard his feet on the carpet behind me as I headed down the hall and into the living room, where I saw a foot on the floor, grinding in broken glass, a work boot and the leg half through the window, and felt Carlos brushing by me as he headed there. Then I heard wood splintering and turned and saw the axe head in the door.

Its blade dipped and withdrew, then it ripped in again near the middle hinge, and I saw the frame splitting and the door torquing and wobbling and twisting inward and saw thick fingers at the edge, a hand shaking the door, and turned quickly and headed for the hall closet and Sara’s old bow and quiver. I saw Carlos as I turned. He had hold of the man’s leg and was lifting it. The foot was above the floor now and the toe of the boot reached down like a dancer’s, searching again for purchase, and I saw a fist come through a central light, glass and broken mullions in the air before it. Then hands gripped the frame and the man’s body filled it as he came through, his face cut and bleeding, shirtsleeves in shreds at his bloody arms. He kicked out at Carlos, catching him on the hip. Then he was in the room and very large and Carlos disappeared under him as they fell down in the broken glass. I saw the man buck, his hips rise as before a sexual thrust. Then they were rolling and Carlos had his fists in his hair, and I saw his broad forehead bang against the man’s nose, and more blood, and the man rolling away from Carlos, his hands over his face, as I reached into the closet and through the winter coats and found the bow.

I had to string it and get an arrow in place, and once I’d done that and turned again the door was falling inward and the man with the axe was climbing it and coming through and another was behind him, and as I pulled the bow and the door banged on the carpet just inches from my feet, I saw Carlos under the window at the baseboard. He was sitting across the man’s legs at his knees, pounding him repeatedly in the stomach. The man’s hands reached down to guard himself, and Carlos reached over them and hit him in the face, and I saw his hands slip from his chest and fall down beside his body into shards of broken glass.

The man hesitated on the fallen door, the axe held at the ready at his shoulders, and stared at me in half vacant surprise before his eyes focused. His hair was carefully combed, a thinning black, grey-streaked and oiled, and his head seemed too small above his thick shoulders and neck, and I thought I saw remnants of plugs at the hairline. His features were delicate, a pointed nose and thin lips, and his blond feathery brows seemed feminine and recently plucked. He was large and barrel-chested, broad through the stomach and hips, and his hands gripping the axe were thick-fingered, and I could see them in Erica’s hair as he dragged her child’s body over furniture and hard tile toward the toilet.

The man entering behind hardly budged him when he bumped into him, and I saw his head over Plummer’s shoulder, the cattail man, younger, as he reached out for the other’s arm and touched it, and they both glanced over at Carlos, whose palms now rested on the chest of the still, prone figure, just long enough, and I sent the arrow through Plummer’s thigh.

He looked down at it, the quivering feather end. Then he looked up at me. There were tears in his small eyes, saliva on his lips, and I knew that though he’d had no plan to kill me, just to come here and beat me, he had one now.

He lifted the axe up and staggered forward, and as he came at me and the cattail man reached out to stop him, I saw Carlos moving low over the carpet, then saw the cattail man falling, his legs in the air. His head hit the floor with a thud and Carlos was on him, his hands in his hair, and Plummer turned at the sound, and I stepped forward and grabbed the axe handle near the blade and swung the bow and hit him, hard across the cheek. Then I kicked out at his healthy leg and heard the patella crack, and once he’d fallen to the floor beside the cattail man I stood over him, the bow in one hand, the axe in the other. He looked up at me in wonder, then down at the feather. Then he stared at the ceiling, his eyes watering in pain and disgust.

I got handcuffs and duct tape and we secured them. Then I went to the phone and called the station and told the duty man we’d need an ambulance too. Then I called Warren at home. Carlos had a few glass cuts on his arms, and he went to the bathroom to tend them while I waited, and when Warren and the others arrived and we heard the ambulance in the distance, I went to the kitchen phone and called Erica Plummer.

“Can you leave in a few hours?” I said.

“Is he all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “He’ll be okay. And the others will too. But they’ll be locked up for a while. Is there anyone else?”

“I can’t say,” she said. “I don’t know. He has more friends like those. He may have called someone.”

“Just a minute,” I said, and put down the phone and went to talk with Warren, then came back again.

“An officer will come to the house,” I said. “You met him at the station in Provincetown. Then it’s the motel I told you about. You might have to sit tight until Monday, but I’ll call if I can get the lawyer there earlier.”

“Okay,” she said, her voice stronger now.

I called the lawyer in Providence then, but there was no answer, just the machine saying he’d return after the holiday weekend. Then I went back into the living room. The ambulance had arrived and they were loading the three men into it, Plummer and the one who had come through the window on stretchers, the other ambulatory. I could see the red taillights through the opening where the door had been, hear punches of static on the cruiser’s radio. It was a clear night, and starry, and a cool breeze came in and rustled the pages of magazines that had fallen from the coffee table. Warren was in the doorway. He waved his fingers and called me over.

“Who the hell is that?”

“You mean Carlos?”

“The little guy.”

“Right. Well he’s a friend now. He’s moved in here. We’re living together.”

“What for?”

“Well, to get some work done on the place. He’s a handyman, a carpenter. He used to work for Strickland.”

“Really?” Warren said. “Well he must be a tough little fucker, that’s for sure.”

“I just found that out,” I said. “And a good thing too.”

“So they’ll want you at the station, I suspect tomorrow.”

“Right,” I said. “And thanks for going after the Plummer woman.”

“Least I could do,” he said. “I put you onto her after all. Strickland, and now this. We’re batting a thousand.”

He gestured at the mess, then smiled at me and nodded to someone behind me, and then he turned and left. It was Carlos, and he was carrying his bag of tools and a few boards under his arm.

“I found them in the basement,” he said.

And before I could bring up our recent engagement, he had me holding the door as he spread the tarp. He removed the lock and knob, then got to work on the splintered panels, the door flat on the carpet, and while he was gluing and clamping I stood above him and counted my errors, considering the fiasco of my first real case as a private citizen detective.

Larry

The waning moon sat over Kelly’s house. It was early evening, no stars yet, and Gino could see the car in gravel near the porch and lights in a few windows, and then he saw a figure on the porch, carrying something and heading down the steps and toward the cliff, and he thought it must be Arthur. He looked over at the lighthouse. It was darkening in dusty shadows, and the structures and vehicles at its base were coming under shadow too, losing definition, and he could see the glowing string of night lights swelling up in the darkness at the perimeter. He heard the engine faintly in the sky then, one of the small Cessnas out of Provincetown. That’ll be the seven-o-five to Boston, he thought, connections to New York and Philadelphia. He knew all the schedules, and he knew it was a foolishness to know them, but it was something to do, though he was getting sick of it all, this doing something that was nothing.

“Yoo-hoo.”

It was that bugger Larry, farting around again, and Gino thought he wouldn’t turn, but then he did, his pipe between his teeth, and looked at the two of them. John was in his wheelchair, a blanket on his legs, and Larry was shuffling a pack of dog-eared cards over the small metal table he’d pulled up to his chair. He looked over at Gino.

“Back with us again?”

They heard a whisper of cloth slippers in the hall and they all glanced to the doorway. Then Frank shuffled in with the information and they were all there.

“Just the one now?” John said.

“That’s right,” said Frank. “I knew I heard that fucking ambulance. They think they’re keeping something from us? As if we were children? Those asshole doctors.”

“Maybe they planned for pillows under the sheets,” Larry said. “You know, to fool us?”

“Right, and a pumpkin for a head.”

“Anything about the other one?” John asked, lifting his chin to where the screen had been. There was nothing there at all now. They’d rolled out the bed and the IV pole, and he could see a horizontal gouge in the wall under the window where that bed and others had scraped it.

“I was here when Kelly came in,” Gino said. “Just stood there and looked, and then left.”

“Kelly’s upset, I think,” Frank said. “I don’t know. But the guy came around is how I hear it, and now he’s gone.”

“Who says?” said Larry.

“Kelly.”

“And we were watching the frigging Congress on the cable,” said Gino. “Wasting our time as usual.”

Frank was pulling an IV stand and mop string had caught in the wheels, and he jerked it up beside his chair as he sat down and the metal fitting on the bag clicked against the pole. He got the tube arranged and glanced up at the drip, and Larry put the cards down and Gino lit his pipe and John fished a cigarette out of a crumpled pack, straightened it with his fingers, then tapped it on the edge of his coffee can.

“What is it?” he said.

“Fucked if I know. Something about my electrolytes,” said Frank.

“It’s glucose. And probably a little potassium,” said Gino.

“How in the fuck would you know?”

“A little respect,” Gino said, as he tamped the tobacco down and lit the pipe again.

“Carolyn was surely pissed when we got back,” Larry said.

“Right. She was. But she was faking it some too, like an indulgent daughter.”

It was John, and his cigarette was in his tracheotomy tube again, sticking out of his throat, ash falling down to the blanket.

“Some daughter!” Gino said.

“I had a son once,” said Frank.

“You told us about that.”

“Not Frank Junior. He died in the war. I mean another one, still alive I think.”

“You said ‘had,’” Larry said.

“That’s the way it is. He was a plumber. Then he became a contractor. Too fancy for me I guess. He married some chippy, ten years ago or more. I haven’t seen him since then, haven’t heard from him either.”

“The right name for it,” Gino said. “Plummer.”

“That’s an old joke,” said Frank.

“Where is he?” asked Larry.

“He was over in Taunton, last I heard. Only a few lousy miles from here. But that was ten years ago, and I don’t know about now.”

“Children can be nasty fuckers,” Gino said. “My daughter for one.”

“Where is she?” said John.

“I told you. I have absolutely no idea at all.”

“Carolyn, on the other hand,” said Larry, winking.

“Well, now,” Gino said. “That’s another kettle of fish entirely.”

They settled into Frank’s revelation, yet another marker for each of them, even Larry, who had traveled in circles devoid of children, and John too, who had managed to miss family without ever trying. It was a marker of abandonment, the real thing and not the one romantically named as such, all those who had left them to go into death, quite naturally. There was nothing at all to be said about it, but to rail against it, and none had a taste for that because it was useless and undignified and seemed a childish thing even to consider. They weren’t thinking these things, though Gino took his pipe from his mouth once, then demurred, tapping the stem against his teeth, and Larry shuffled the cards absently. Frank held some papers in his lap, the tip of his pencil moving like a pointer over then, and John took the cigarette from his throat, coughed, then spoke.

“Whaddaya think about the structure? I thought the footings looked fine.”

“Depends upon geology,” Frank said. “Sand’s good, but they say there’s shifting they hadn’t counted on. And who knows what else they’ll find down under there.”

“The beams looked okay,” Gino said. “The jacks.”

“How do you think they get a level?” Larry said. “As simple as I imagine?”

“You got it,” Gino said. “A plumb line. Nothing more than that.”

“Well a few instruments, I’d think,” said Frank.

“Of course, of course, but it comes down to that. A plumb line.”

“I’ve been thinking about a job when I was just a kid,” Larry said. “It was on a farm one summer, when I was toughening up. To become a man I guess.”

“When was that?” said John.

“Nineteen twenty-one. I was just fifteen.”

“I was down in Kentucky then,” said Frank. “Not long before I left.”

“What ever happened to that kid?” Gino said. “The one in the chicken house?”

“Adam? I told you that. He left. He wasn’t part of the story at all, not my part.”

“Well, I would have thought, your mother and all.”

“Look,” Frank said. “The guy left. That’s it!”

“There’s a guy in my story too,” Larry said.

“Let’s consider the erosion, then,” John said. “There’s been a good many storms in the last month.”

“There’s erosion in my story,” said Larry.

“Well, the local rag says it’s still safe. To have the equipment behind the thing I mean. But it looked pretty fucking close to me,” Frank said. “Didn’t you think?”

“About fifty yards or so,” said Gino. “But what’s the soil quality under the cliff face? That’s the question.”

“I’m sure they’ve looked into that,” John said.

“They drilled test holes as well,” said Frank. “But they didn’t find that river. Not until now.”

“I’ll give you that.”

“What about this guy got whacked in the head down there?” Gino said, glancing to where the screen had been.

“What about him?” said Frank.

“Do you think it had something to do with the site, some earth shift? It could have.”

“Christ knows.”

“I doubt we ever will,” said John.

“Somebody passed out in my story,” Larry said, and they all turned to him. Then Gino turned to John and spoke again.

“Did you hear about the Ivory soap? I heard it from Carolyn. They grease the rails with it.”

“Not too surprising,” John said. “You should have seen what they used on oil rigs, when they ran out of grease? Chicken fat once, and even rancid tarpon. Smelled to high heaven.”

“I thought I was there once, in Tampico,” Gino said, lighting his pipe again.

They heard the squeak of tennis shoes in the hallway, a click of metal. Then Carolyn stepped in through the solarium doors, a vision of loveliness, early to work this evening, in her starched A-line, white cotton stockings, and cute little hat. Her hair touched her ears in blond ringlets, and she was carrying a tray, a plate piled high with sugar cookies, and her keys jingled against each other at her hip.

“Hi there!” Gino said, his pipe in his hand now and his shoulders squaring up.

She moved to Larry’s small table, bent over and set the tray down, then rose and turned to each of them, smiling in anticipation and concern.

“Everything’s just fine,” John said.

“The cookies. That’s good!” said Gino.

“It’s all in order,” said Frank, and Carolyn nodded, then turned and headed for the doorway, her steps light and the A-line twitching from side to side, and they listened for the hushed whisper of her stockings as she headed down the ward.

“That little hat,” Gino said. “I like that!”

“In your dreams,” Frank said.

“Like a nun’s hat,” said Larry.

“Oh, my!” said Gino.

“Let’s not get blasphemous, now.” It was John, and he was laughing lightly, tapping another cigarette on the can.

“There’s one in my story,” Larry said, and they all turned to him, then Frank spoke.

“She’s two hours early. At least that.”

“Do you think it’s Kelly?”

“Kelly was upset about something.”

“Maybe it’s the dead guy,” Gino said. “Something about that. I mean, to get things in order you know?”

“What’s to order?” Frank said.

“One less to be sucking,” said John, “to be cleaning. Just the one guy out there now.”

“For the time being,” said Gino, then Larry began.

It was Salt Lake City and the Mormons still dressed in the last century. But it was the start of the Roaring Twenties, and there were those coming out from the East in fine clothing and roadsters, stylish, and the women revealing themselves and the Mormon men with their heads down under their hats. And to be a Catholic child then in that oppressive city, but in view of the actuality of alternatives, was the burden that got him away from home and into the country, one summer, to a Catholic farm near Oakley.

There was another boy his age on the farm, from another school, and there was a nun on the farm, daughter of the owner, who had arranged for the boys to be there, to learn the ways of hard work and to toughen into Catholic men who could stand up in the face of the Latter-day Saints for the true religion of Jesus. She was young and beautiful and passionate, and though she had no idea of boys or even of the finer tenets of her religion and was a fool for Christ, she was an immaculate vision in black and white on the farmhouse porch. She’d look out over the dusty yard, hands on her hips, to where the boys worked at the greasy undercarriage of a tractor, rancid in the ooze of their adolescence.

She came, and then she went back to the city, then she came out on the porch again, and the boys abused themselves in the night thinking of her, unsuccessfully, then turned to a search for other visions. And when she came back for a whole week of summer vacation and followed out behind them, lifting her black skirts, the beads of her long rosary clacking, to watch them at work, they stiffened up as if they were men and focused to handle their tools with complete ease and sophistication.

“His name was Matthew, a beautiful boy as I remember, lean and articulate in his bony structure, smooth-chested, a mop of blond curls like a city flapper. He had a delicate nose, a sweet disposition, and the voice of an angel in the singing of comic nursery rhymes in our nights.”

The work was to dig up stumps in a meadow where trees had been cut, and the farmer had brought out the tractor and chain the night before and had left them there. The boys carried the axe and the shovels, and Theresa the nun followed them with the wicker basket, water and sandwiches, oranges and a few bananas.

They had to climb a rocky rise in the dawn light, and when they looked back to the nun struggling up behind them in her habit they imagined they were enacting the passion, she Mary Magdalene following the soldiers carrying the tools of crucifixion. She wore a half moon of immaculate white over her breast, sweat fell from her brow to stain it, and her hat was an archway over her beautiful girl’s face, her veil a silken banner on the breeze.

The meadow opened into a broad field of wildflowers under the hill, its horizon defined by a low cliff at the edge of a river that in flood rose up to the meadow’s edge. But the river was in recession now, though swollen and carrying pieces of quick-moving flotsam in morning mist and licking at the clay bank.

The tractor was there and the chain, and the stump was a massive old oak, a tree fed by the coursing river through more than a century, the flat surface left by the cutting the size of a dining room table, or a circle drawn in the dust for mibs. The stump rose up to the boys’ shoulders, and they could imagine Theresa kneeling upon it, hands clasped over her full breast, Our Lady of the River. She sat down on the tractor’s step, her hem dragged up to her black ankles, and watched them work.

They dug down into the earth to expose the roots, moving out and away from the stump as their shovels clanged into them. The roots seemed hard as iron, and when Larry sent the axe down into one and it bounced away they thought they saw sparks fly up. They dug, their shovels slipping between thick tuberous snakes, casting the dirt up behind them, and the sun rose and soon they were sweating and the pit they were making under the stump was growing, and soon the hole was a good twenty feet in diameter, ten deep, and the exposed root system was a massive basket rising above them, the stump and the roots a giant petrified spider, still as some odd prehistoric monument at the river’s edge.

“She was watching Matthew. He’d climbed into the root chamber, and I’d seen her creep up to a higher step so she could see over the hill of cast-up dirt. She had her hands in her lap up there, and her face was back in shadow under the archway of her hat and veil and I couldn’t see her eyes. But she was watching him, and so was I, jealous of her watching.

“He’d taken his shirt off and his curls were pasted to his brow with sweat, and his arms and chest were sweaty, slick and hard as the roots he was climbing among and blond as the nicks our shovels had gouged into their surfaces. He was reaching out for the taproot, deep in the twisted thicket of others, a straight column descending, and his body was limber as he slipped among the roots, and his bare arms were rootlike. He carried the axe against his chest, and at times the roots seemed to be piercing him. I saw his extended arm, the taproot near his fingers, then the earth moved.”

The nun rocked a little on her step, and he saw the tractor’s fender vibrate in the sun, then he looked back over at Matthew and saw the hole opening through the roots below his suspended body, years of hidden erosion, the whole far side of the chamber’s earth floor falling away, the cliff side gone, and he could see the river through the shaking roots as the stump settled and the axe fell, and Matthew caught in the roots looking out at him, the hint of a quizzical smile on his delicate, thin lips.

Theresa was a farmer’s daughter and she knew the tractor, and Larry climbed up and got the chain, then slid down again and stood at the edge of the root basket and reached the thick links in to Matthew. The roots held him at his hips and shoulders, but his arms were free, and he grinned at Larry and winked and then hooked the chain around the taproot. Then he reached out and gripped Larry’s arm at the wrist and they both looked up into the dark canopy of dirt and fiber. The stump had slipped a few feet down, blocking the sun, and Matthew’s blond limbs had grown darker, his chest and face deep in shadow, but Larry could see his blue eyes, his hair turned to amber, and could feel desire in his quick pulse. They said nothing, just smiled at each other, then Larry scrambled up the embankment again, dragging the heavy chain behind him.

Sister Theresa sat on the high seat, then fired up the tractor’s engine, its lung pulsing to life over the rush of the river, then worked it into gear and pulled ahead until the chain lifted from the ground and was taut and shaking in the air. Then she pressed the pedal down slowly, and the huge tires guttered and the chain vibrated, but the stump didn’t move. She backed off and looked over her shoulder at Larry, and Larry looked down at Matthew. His arm thrust out through the roots and his thumb was up, and Larry waved at Theresa, and she turned again, geared down, and pressed the pedal, and Larry stood there watching.

The tractor roared and the nun shook in her seat. The wheels guttered again, then began to turn, and the small tires at the front of the tractor rose from the ground and her veil lifted and waved in the air behind her. The chain hummed and Theresa rocked in her seat, and Larry saw Matthew shaking, the roots vibrating, and when he looked up the veil and the stiff white hat were drifting away over the river, and her dark hair was unfolding, pins popping free, and it blew out to stand where the veil had been, a dark wave riding the summer air, billowing, as were her black garments, and she was a nun riding a crazy horse or a hurricane.

The tractor bucked, the tires dug down reaching for purchase, and the stump growled in the earth, then Larry saw it shake and settle, and when he looked down Matthew was gone under a flood of dirt, and when the tractor stopped and the dust settled, the taproot was bent like a bow, the others twisted and flexed, and Matthew’s eyes were closed, his body impossibly entangled.

Theresa leapt from the high seat. Larry was sliding down the embankment, and they met at the edge of the root basket. She’d grabbed the bag, and Larry saw her hand disappear into the dark folds at her hip, then emerge again, dragging a white handkerchief. He had the bag open, the water jar on the ground, and while she wet the cloth, he looked in at Matthew, whose brow was dirt-streaked, his closed lids awash in dust, a few tiny pebbles at the corner of his mouth. He’d reached to push at the roots as they’d grabbed him, and his arms were extended, his palms open now in his unconsciousness, and Larry saw the place where a spur hooked his pants at the buttons, pulling them down, the beginning of a narrow stripe, tiny blond curls descending. Then he saw the sister’s bare arm and hand, the soaked cloth as she reached into the root tangle, and when he looked over at her, the black robes were gone and he saw the white, horizontal ribs in her binding, black hair spilling over ivory shoulders, and a mole near the crease at her sternum. Something shuddered, and he looked back, and it was Matthew. She’d flooded his lids and cheeks, and now the wet cloth was over his brow and he was stirring, coming awake and moaning. His eyes opened into clear focus and a moment of bewilderment. Then he was smiling, knowing it was she there, and Larry thought he was looking at her shoulders, the dark mole, then he was looking at him, a slight blush in his grin. He was okay, just stuck there, and for moments they were laughing. Then they felt the earth shudder as the stump settled again, and through the roots and below his suspended body they could see fans of earth fall across the opening, obscuring the coursing river beyond.

It was impossible. Roots at his ankles and knees, the small of his back, his armpit, the taproot pressing against his chest. And the roots were thorny and rough, and when Larry tried hacking away at them with a shovel the whole basket shook and a root pressed down onto Matthew’s neck and he looked up, his eyes wild for a moment, gasping for air. His pants were ripped, the fabric pierced by sharp spurs, and filamentary runners had woven their way into his hair.

Larry looked over at Theresa, but she was going, her black stockings and black shoes and her petticoats, and her hair bouncing at her white shoulders as she scrambled up the embankment and over it and out of sight. He looked in at Matthew, who was smiling. His eyes glanced up the embankment and he shook his head, and Larry looked down at his navel and the stripe of curls and they both blushed a little and grinned when their eyes met. Then Sister Theresa was climbing back down, dragging the heavy grease bucket and Larry was pulling his shirt off.

They reached in as far as they could, globs of grease in their palms, and coated his arms and shoulders, his neck, and the roots that entangled them. Then Larry climbed into the basket itself, slipping among the roots, until he could reach out and touch Matthew’s hairless chest, and he coated that, feeling the blood rise in his cheeks as he reached into his armpits, his slick fingers in musk. He felt a root press down on his leg, then Sister Theresa was in the basket too, suspended below him, the grease bucket hung on a nub, and he could see her stained scapulas, strands of her hair hung on the sticky roots and her extended white arms and her greasy fingers touching the buttons. He could feel Matthew’s breath on his cheek, and when he looked up their faces were inches apart and there was panic in Matthew’s eyes, and when he glanced down from them and along his slick stomach, he saw her hands on his bare hips, his pants and his underwear sliding down and his white erection just inches from her face.

She coated his hips and that too, then reached back into the bucket. Then her hands were sliding down between his legs and she was twisting through the roots, greasing the backs of his knees and his calves. Then she was pulling his shoes and socks off, and Larry saw her greasy fingers sliding over his ankles and between his toes, and before long they were covered with grease, their hands stroking the roots, and Larry slid his chest over Matthew’s hip and Sister Theresa’s arm was between them, and he pushed up, bowing his back, and the root gave a little, ripples of the shock wave of its movement radiating out to the basket’s edges, and Matthew’s leg came free. Then they worked together near his neck, both leaning against the bowed taproot, until his head could move, and then his extended arms were twisting in the lubrication, his wrists slipping free of the bondage, and they were out of the root matrix and standing in the pit, pulling him, naked and slick as a newborn, until he was free of the basket and was lying on the ground.

Larry bent over and covered Matthew’s delicate groin with his shirt, and when he looked up the sister was wild, beautiful in her soiled binding, her soft white shoulders, and her grease-crazed hair. Her hands were together and she was praying, smiling beatifically, “and I knew right then there was no hope for her, but that there was for me.”

It had grown dark in the room, and Larry picked up the cards and leaned back, his face in shadow. Then Gino lit his pipe again and the match flared, and the tip of the cigarette in John’s throat lit his chin, the jaw of a skeleton, and Frank coughed and reached for the tubing and adjusted it. Then John coughed and ashes fell and sparkled in the moonlight.

“Everything came out fine then,” Frank said, and Larry laughed lightly.

“You could say that.”

“Back to the nunnery,” said John.

“It was just a school, but that’s right enough. It was Matthew’s school, not mine. We left the next day, and I never saw her again, him either.”

“That’s too bad,” said Gino.

“Not really. Maybe it was just adolescence, for him I mean.”

“True, very true.”

“What would you know about that?” Frank said.

“I know a few things.”

“Easy now, boys,” said John.

“Do you know where the light is?”

“I do, indeed, and if you’ll hold your horses for a fucking second or two I’ll turn it on.”

“Not the bright one,” Frank said, and Gino got up from his chair, stretched and shook his lean body, then shuffled to the far wall and threw the switch. It was night-lights in the baseboard and a small lamp on a table.

“Thanks,” Frank said, and Gino nodded as he passed him and headed back to his seat. He settled in and lifted his pipe from the radiator, then tamped it down and lit it and blew smoke at the ceiling. Then it was later, and Carolyn brought in their dinners on metal trays.

“You’d think we’d have gotten at least this far from the war,” Frank said, pushing his fork around in the chipped beef.

“You’d think,” Gino said.

“With the microwave,” said Larry.

“They could do better than this shit,” said John.

“At least a TV dinner,” Frank said.

But they ate it, and when they were done Gino farted and then lit his pipe, and Frank groaned, and John lit a cigarette and so did Larry and both of them coughed.

“That’ll kill you,” Frank said.

“I know, I know,” John said. “But at this point it’s a race.”

“Who’s winning?” Gino said.

“Certainly not me,” said Larry.

“Chemo?”

“Right. I’m heading out tomorrow.”

“I told ’em to fuck it,” Gino said.

“I wasn’t sure,” said Larry. “I haven’t tried it yet.”

“It’s an experience,” said Frank.

“And what else have we got?” Larry said.

“Memory,” said John.

“It could be a long story,” Gino said.

“About your daughter, I bet.”

“That’s right. A story about a lost daughter, found again in betrayal.”

Kelly

We took a slow boat down the Panuco River from Tampico and headed in mild anxiety toward the sea. I remember my mother standing at the rail clutching her purse, so full of pesos, watching refineries pass by, stillstacks and agitators, the ruined loading dock at the Alianza station, and when I was beside her in my linen jacket, flying fish flew up to startle us and I thought I saw stains on their bodies. There’d been an oil fire, and black smoke had drifted over the city, and when we passed the fire’s source at Aguila Petroleum there was blue oil in the water at the river’s edge and burning wood, and I saw a rat on a timber, flames rising at the end and smoke and hissing when it moved away and the fire touched the river, at least I think it was a rat. Aguila was devastated, and the fire had blossomed to the paraffin plant beside it, and we smelled a giant candle in the charred rubble. Then we came to a bend in the river and a sea breeze and left the influence of a smoky Tampico behind us, and we could see the Gulf and the hill at Chorreras, boats in the water, nets hanging in sunlight from their riggings.

Empty of Spanish and subtlety, of all but a few names and money, empty of the continuity of our historical past now in my father’s revealed lies, we moved slowly along, my fingers brushing the sleeve of my mother’s cotton dress as we climbed the dusty road, then came in sight of the town, a small village of winding dirt streets, ramshackle houses, and the flat-roofed structures for net mending and boat repair at the water’s edge, where I saw women working and dinghies and a tilted fishing boat at dry dock on the sand and men scraping at barnacles. We were above the town, and we could see far out over the Gulf to the remnants of oil stations, a few active ones, pipelines suspended on wood structures running out from shore, and the misty shadow of a tanker at horizon.

We walked down the road and into the town’s central square, just a few stores, cantina and church, a dribbling stone fountain at the center, and what looked like a public building off to the side, and my mother demurred, and it was up to me to go in with the names.

The old man at the desk wore a wrinkled summer suit the same yellow as my jacket, and he shook his head, considered the hammered tin ceiling for a moment, then dragged the information up from dim memory and looked at me with bright eyes. He gave me the street name, then repeated himself, then counted the numbers out on his fingers. “Último,“ he said.

It was midday and humid after rain, and by the time we’d trudged up into the foothills a little and found the street and the house at the end of it, we were sweaty and our shoes were coated with dust and my mother’s permanent had fallen in limp curls to her cheeks and my own hair was wet and straightened, and we stood in the dirt road before the house like immigrants.

It seemed an ancient place, weathered wood and moss on the wood roof and cloth hanging in window frames, and a front door at the end of a stone pathway, a hatch of slats woven together with twine or wire, standing open, and at the house side, where the hill ascended, flowers and thick vines had crept down to it and climbed up over its walls and halfway across the roof, and there were flowers growing around a crude skylight, its door pushed up into them, a screen of vines over the opening. And there were flowers in the yard, roses and blooming cactus in clay pots, and bougainvillea ran blood red on a trellis surrounding the doorway, bleeding up into the eaves above it. The sea lifted a gust of perfume and the vines shook and petals blew, and one landed on my cheek, a touch of velvet, and I lifted it away and looked down in my palm, a translucent purple crescent, and I wanted to eat it. Then I heard a creaking, and when I looked up a woman stood in the doorway, tall and very thin, a loose dress hanging from the points of her shoulders, sleeves falling around bony arms, as old as my grandmother would have been, had I had one.

Mother touched my arm, and I saw the purse clutched at her chest, then turned to see the woman step out beyond the trellis, the face of a skeleton, but smiling, her hand up and gesturing.

“English?” she said. “French? German?”

I answered, and she spoke again.

“Come in! Come in out of the heat!”

The room was dark and cool, and she brought iced tea and cookies and small folded rags on the tray beside the pitcher so we could wipe our brows, and breeze lifted the hanging cloths in the window frames, and the rugs on the bleached wooden floor shone in their subtle earth-tone colors as stripes of light came in. We sat in white wicker, around a wooden table, and there were pictures of mountain snow scenes on the wall behind her and a military uniform dripping with medals on a hanger hung from a nail, displayed like a picture, and flowers in stone pots sat on tables and wood pedestals below the pictures and in earthenware vessels on the floor in the corners of the room. The blond table was waxed, and my mother’s purse sat at the corner as on a mirror, and the woman glanced at it, and when my mother mentioned the names we’d come with, the woman smiled faintly, then turned toward the cloth window, the skin at her cheek like parchment, and sighed, and then turned back to us, and when she spoke her voice was thin and steady and I heard a faint echo, as if her skull were an empty chamber.

“But they’re gone,” she said, “my brothers. There’s nothing anymore. Just that.” She glanced over her shoulder at the uniform. “And a few trinkets and documents. Like any family. Now you tell me of Roberto, and he too is gone, and now there is only me.”

“Roberto,” my mother said. “From fishing. A hard life.”

“My father,” I said.

“Yes, my dear. And I am your aunt.” She looked at my mother. “But I have been gone, you see, since the early ’30s, when I was seventeen. To Europe for my study. Then for a life. I just recently returned, two years ago. I came back to die here in Chorreras. This is my home.”

“Are you ill?” my mother said. “Is there anything we can do? Can we give you money?”

She was looking at the purse, wanting rid of it I thought, to be done with the whole thing finally, to be rid of my father.

“Oh, my, no!” the woman said. “I’m very healthy I think. I didn’t mean soon. I meant I’ll stay here until then. I have all the money in the world.”

There was a full bookcase on the wall and I saw the edge of another through a doorway. Books sat on tables beside plants, and there was a stack of them on the floor beside a lamp and chair.

“Reading,” I said. “And not fishing.”

She laughed lightly, her lips pulled back to the gums, buck teeth protruding. I heard a click as her mouth closed and her eyes blinked, saw her brow wrinkle in puzzlement.

“You keep mentioning that. Fishing. But I don’t understand.”

“Well, the family,” my mother said.

“And my father,” I said.

“This is a fishing village. But this is a summer place, one of many, but the best one I think. Did you see the view?”

We hadn’t turned to look, and she got up and moved to the window and lifted her arm to usher us over, and then she pulled the cloth aside, and we could see the village far below, the church steeple and the huts and boats on the beach and the white stone of the rocky shoreline for miles to either side and the grand expanse of the blue gulf opening out in sun to the far horizon.

“I don’t understand,” my mother said.

We were seated again, and the woman poured tea and passed the plate of cookies. She’d left the room, and we’d heard a drawer opening in the distance, then she came back carrying a wooden box, scrolls of thick paper with colored ribbons dangling from them sticking up at the top. She’d placed the box on the table beside the purse, then poured the tea, then leaned back in her chair.

“Those are documents,” she said. “Contracts and deeds, and some of them are yours now. Did you know your father had another name then, what you call a nickname?”

“I never heard of that,” my mother said.

“Yes,” she said. “Calaca. He was called that. Because of his bony face. He was a soldier in General Corzo’s army. There was trouble and he left for the north then. But then the general died, and my brother Dagoberto became general. That is his uniform. There was no fishing.”

“A soldier,” my mother said.

“Yes. Unofficially. It was tribute. These documents. It was oil then, and a revolution against the constitution. There were many generals.”

I could see my mother’s face harden in the face of my father’s lies, a new one now, but a last one for her. They could keep coming as far as she was concerned. Her look drew a final line against him, and all she seemed to want now was to be out of there, to leave the money and go. But the woman who was my aunt didn’t want the money, didn’t need it. They both looked at the purse for a long moment, then I interrupted the silence, still needing more.

“And the reason?” I said.

She didn’t hesitate.

“It was a killing. A man of some distinction, but a soldier too. An insult as I remember. Your father Roberto, Calaca, he had to leave.”

I looked at my mother, but she was silent, already on her way back to America.

“But there was another too,” I said. “Another brother?”

“Yes,” she said. “And another nickname. Of a woman. He was called Sosa, a translator, business manager for General Corzo. And later, for our brother Dagoberto as general, he continued. My three brothers. Did he die in peace?”

“Yes,” I said. “In his sleep.”

“That’s good.”

“But he left none for us,” my mother said as she rose from her chair, her voice like a remnant.

I held the purse under my arm as we walked back to the boat, and my mother held her hands tight at her waist at the rail as we chugged up the Panuco toward Tampico. I still have the pesos, in the purse, in a box in the basement. I sold the documents my aunt gave us, something arranged for me by Arthur, after my mother died, and I still have the memory of my mother raising her hand in the hotel dining room as I began to speak. We finished eating in silence, then went up to our rooms, and the next morning we were shopping in rain. She was focused and insistent as she selected clothing and trinkets, and there was no room for talk of other things. Then she was stepping out from the curb and the bus was coming and I was calling out to her, and my umbrella was blowing away in rain in the muddy street.

Water’s been leaking in and we can’t find the source. All the pipes are exposed, up between the basement ceiling joists, and Arthur has checked the pump seals and the prime. It’s pooled on the dirt floor in the morning, and only by noon has it leached down into clay. Arthur has checked the toilet and the shower, the kitchen sink, and the stone walls are dry. Sometimes it isn’t there at all. It comes in with the dampness and after rain, and I don’t know. I’ve managed to get down to the wine cellar, with difficulty. There’s rubble in the passage now, another cave-in, but the rocks and fallen earth are dry enough and that can’t be it, and Arthur’s found nothing at the foundation. He’s trying to shore it up, a cement and sand mix where the earth has shifted, but I can’t go out there now to watch him. When I think of the rope tether, the edge of panic rises, even just glancing through the window, and I’ve pulled the shades down on that side, and I look down at my feet as I walk to the limousine in my dark glasses. My bettas are gone and the windy weather is feely, and Arthur holds my arm, and I’ve been closing the curtains tight on our way across the meadow to the Manor. I think there is no hope for it at all, and I think I feel the house move under me in the night.

There’s only one to suck and clean on the ward now, and it was strange, and it troubled me, how the other lost his anonymity as he died. I was sucking him, those automatic convulsions as the tube went down, his lungs bucking, and this was all the movement and life we’d gotten out of him for many weeks. He’d been unconscious in morphine, the flesh falling from his chin and neck until his jawbone was exposed and his lower lip was beginning to go. The doctors had been bandaging him, but they’d lost places for anchor, and near the end they let him be, just pulled the Airwick up to mask the smell and didn’t come around, and it was left to Carolyn and me, the cleaning, and the replacement of the plastic bib.

And he was bucking and that was common and I wasn’t watching. I was looking past the wasted and still body of the other one and down the ward to where the old men who are still vibrant have set up their commune, the four beds and the colorful dish towels on their nightstands and their floor lamp, and the flowers Gino had escaped to buy in cheap vases on the stands, and the coatrack and the clothing draped over the metal frames of the beds. A home away from home, and not a bit of desperation in it, a commandeered space of some specific qualities for living. There was an IV stand, but its function was masked by a large towel, some Mexican design, and my mind was wandering to the fascinating man in the solarium, his ancient face, and back in the direction of Tampico, to a time before my mother’s death and my agora, when I was free and could walk out in the world. Then the bucking stopped, though I was still sucking, and when I looked down his chest was still, and when I looked up his eyes were open and he was watching me.

His lower jaw was ivory in the dim light, a common jaw, and above his open eyes his forehead was a smooth plane, and I saw that the hair at his brows was gone, the ridge of bone there pushing up to form the sockets. Then his jaw moved, opening and closing as if testing itself, and I saw the remnant of his upper lip retract in a strange and particular smile, his teeth working their way forward. It was more a grin than a smile, or at least it seemed to become that as he winked, just the one lid lowering, then raising itself. He looked at me as if I knew something that he knew, as if we shared some common history, and I recognized him for the first time I think. His pupils were contracted and focused. His jaw vibrated, then dropped open, and I leaned over to listen, but he said nothing, and when I looked up his lids had lowered, covering his stare, and he was gone somewhere.

I left early. It was the man dying and the man in the solarium rising and then going, and it was word that the lighthouse had shifted, the weight of equipment on the cliff side behind it and the digging beneath it, just an inch or two, measured only by instruments and a faint rumbling in the Manor’s foundation, something I may only have imagined, but I called Carolyn, and she came in early, and I called Arthur at the house, and when Frank shuffled down the ward to check things out, I told him nothing. Why worry an old man?

Arthur drove slowly and carefully, and I could feel the branches of the scrub oak brushing the fenders as we headed down into the meadow. The curtains were drawn, and I could see nothing of the darkness around us, and that was helpful. Then I felt the nose of the car rise a little as we left the meadow and heard gravel under the tires as we entered the drive leading up to the parking area. I was waiting for the brakes then, and gathering myself, and when the car stopped I turned in my seat to face the door, knowing its opening would for me be a closing. I pictured the gravel, the steps and porch, the screen at the entrance. Then the door swung away into cold moonlight and its ominous potential, and Arthur was a guarding shadow in the frame. I climbed out into that shadow, and he took my arm and held it awkwardly, as we staggered toward the house and safety.

BOOK TWO. Philadelphia

Peter

Charlie was playing piano at the Key West, a few doors up from a place called the Venture Inn on Comac Street, and when we hit the warm air at the door he glanced out over the white Steinway, then smiled as he moved into “Imagination,” the last tune I’d heard him working in Province-town in what seemed the distant past. He was expecting us, and once we’d settled on stools he looked up from the song’s extended prologue and said, “Peter,” then nodded to Carlos. There were two older men across the piano from us, both grey at the temples and dressed in similar silk shirts, and a young man sat near Charlie’s elbow, beside a woman in linen pants. He was lean and hard and wore a thin silver choker, and she was bending toward him, listening to whispered gossip. Charlie looked the same, his barrel chest and a thickness in his arms and neck, all those years of heavy work, and lounge light filtered through exotic Florida flowers, bouquets spilling from tall white wicker at his shoulders, bathing his bald crown, more like that of a milkman than a singer. He fingered a cloudy day, then sunny, and we waited for our drinks and entered into the sweet foraging and whispered words, the tune constructing itself, echoes of others folded in, here’s that rainy day, on old Cape Cod. It wasn’t nine yet and the place was almost empty, voices and the quiet laughter of a few men and a tinkling of glass and metal at the bar behind us.

It had been over a year since Strickland’s crash. The plane had yielded nothing, and the FAA had finally named the cause as pilot error. I’d thought the matter was behind me, though it had never actually been my case, until Charlie called. Work had come my way. I’d had a day job watching an errant husband, another one through Warren again, some organized pilfering at a few stores in Hyannis. I’d stopped touching my mother’s money and was getting along meagerly on fees, and there’d been that party of my imagination, women in furs and jewels in Boston, and I’d brought a suit. It had been a long time since Plummer had come through the door. He and his friends were out on bail, awaiting trial and bargaining down to lesser charges, and they were staying clear of Erica. She’d found an apartment in Providence, and I stayed in touch through her lawyer. I’d been easing my way into a new life, one with Carlos, and he’d been setting my house in order.

He’d started out on the windows on mild days, caulking and resetting a few panes. Then he’d painted the baseboards and trim, weather-stripped the doors, and when the new year came he got to work in the attic, hauling out rotted lumber and boxes of junk that had been there for many years. He dropped a new bed of insulation between the floor joists and repaired the broken exhaust fan in the eave. He had plans for gardening in the spring, and in the evenings we sat and talked about that and about the possibility of some fishing when it warmed up. We listened to music and watched television and played cards, and once Carlos hauled out books and showed me etchings and engravings, illustrations of skeleton figures who were dancing and gesturing and stood in poses that were stories. All were renderings by the Mexican artist Posada, and we sat at the kitchen table, shoulder to shoulder, and studied them.

Our talk was easy and casual, and when it dipped down into the personal, that was easy too. He had a matter-of-fact way about the past, as if it were a story only of what had been, which it is, and I soon felt I could tell him anything that came to mind. He told me stories of his early life, each one like an anecdote, though without judgment or lesson, told for the pleasure in the savoring, just something to say. One was about his father and a truck and his first blow to the head and how he’d come back from it and into his mother’s death. Then one day he went to watch the excavation at the lighthouse, and when I got the call I realized how much I’d come to count on him. There was a week of bad days, and on one of them Charlie called. Then Carlos was okay again and so was I, at least temporarily.

There was a smell under the smell of Florida flowers at the Key West. Charlie was playing “Nancy,” whispering too bad for you, and the flowers were rustling in their wicker in the warm air of the heating system, forming a garish Mardi Gras hat for the man who sat before them, his face wasted and skeletal, lips lifted to salmon-colored gums as he mouthed the words. I saw his cane handle at the piano’s bar rail, the profile of the man beside him. The smell of subtle cologne? There were others at the Steinway’s edge now, men and a few women, and drifts of laughter and talking coming from the bar and tables behind us as the Key West was filling. It was something under the perfume, a medicinal smell guarding something deeper, a faint scent of rotting. I turned to Carlos — he was singing along, she has no sister—then caught it near my shoulder, the smell of dried sweat under my shirt collar, faintly rancid, unhealthy as the start of invisible mold on turning cheese. I glanced from Carlos to the young man with the skull face, and he grinned at me and nodded as if we shared some secret.

Then it was “Laura,” footsteps in the misty gloom or something like that. I was watching Charlie and the way his head came up into the refrain, the bright look of his dead daughter in his blue eyes, that woman I had thought to love, whose death had sent me into the Combat Zone, to drugs and alcohol and HIV. I heard a weak cough, saw the man lean his face into the handkerchief, wisps of thinning hair and the hand of the other on his shaking shoulder bending in to tend him, only a dream, and Charlie was turning from that tune, a house, a showplace, bending into no place, coming to the set’s end. “I Can’t Get Started,” he said, sang with you, then led us all carefully through a few verses, and there were laughter and applause at the final punctuation, and a woman leaned forward on her stool and slid a five-dollar bill into the big brandy snifter on the Steinway’s wood above the keys.

We sat at a table in the corner, back behind the flowers and away from noise. Men were dancing now, slow tunes on the stereo, and waiters in tight black T-shirts slipped among them, carrying trays of drinks. Carlos sat beside me, Charlie on the other side. “Carlitos,” he’d said, when they were introduced, and Carlos had said “same name.”

“Friday night. Sad winter tunes and nostalgia.”

“Is that it?” I said, wiping the sweat away with a paper napkin.

“Are you all right?” Charlie said.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s hot in here.”

“Or the difference,” Carlos said. “Between outside and in.”

“It’s been an incredible winter,” Charlie said. “The storms and ice. I’ve only one more set to go, but I’ll hang around. Friday’s slow dancing. I do the weeknights late. There’s show tunes on Thursdays. Tonight was standards.”

“I got that,” Carlos said.

We were taking our time and we both knew that, little bits of information sliding in. Charlie had been in the city for a year now, moving from job to job. He’d been at the Key West for six months. It was a good place, quiet enough, and some were serious about the music. I told him I’d checked the cemetery. They were tending her grave. He was living alone, between things, but maybe, he said, there is this man. He grinned at me, then glanced at Carlos in curiosity.

“You know better than that,” I said, and he laughed, and I told him about Carlos and Gordon Strickland.

“That’s what got us together.”

“Do you think so?” Carlos said.

“No,” I said, and the three of us laughed, then sipped our drinks, and I lifted mine to cool my brow with ice.

“Strickland,” Charlie said. “There really wasn’t much to know. I mean, of intrigue. He seemed wide open, very public and active. You could even say he was beloved. His death was quite a blow here. He’d started free clinics, even hospices. As to his lovers, I don’t know. I think we could find out though, if there’s anything there.”

“What about those lists?” I said.

“Well, yeah, that’s it. They were doing an inventory, both at the Cape house and this one. He’d left it all, you know, for the AIDS work, hospices and such. There was no family. They thought they probably had it all. Then they found the lists and saw there was stuff missing. Possibly valuable, but that part’s only rumor.”

“He could have sold it,” I said.

“That’s true, of course, but not likely. He kept very good records. You mentioned the plane was clear?”

“Seems so. According to the FAA at least.”

“You said we could find out,” Carlos said.

“You mean about his personal life? We can sure try.”

Charlie got up from the table then and went around the wicker, and once he was out of sight I turned to Carlos.

“It’s stuffy in here,” I said. “Too much heat.”

I saw him looking at my brow.

“You’re sweating,” he said. “Are you all right?”

I started to answer, then saw Charlie’s bulky figure moving slowly past the flowers once again, the skeletal man I’d seen at the bar beside him, leaning on his cane, his feet in slippers.

He shuffled toward the table, his friend slightly behind him, watching him, and I fought an urge to rise as for a woman, then saw Carlos rise at my elbow and move around the table and pull a chair out. Then I was on my feet too, my arms awkward at my sides. I’d risen too quickly and felt dizzy, and I touched the table with my fingers to steady myself.

The two young men looked nothing alike, though they were both tall and thin. The one guarding the other, sitting back from the table just a little near his shoulder, had thin blond hair and a mustache and his arms were tan, under a lamp I thought, his wrists thick, and there were calluses on his fingers. The other one had a dark complexion, but his face was pale. He was clean-shaven, and I saw an ashen hue in his hollow cheeks, a light dusting under his chin. When his arms moved, his fingers curling round his glass, I could see the bones in his forearms working. He had a large nose, thin and parchmentlike, and when I looked to the other I saw something similar and realized that the nose didn’t shrink, but grew prominent in contrast, as if a last aggressive statement of personality, ironic in what it presaged, the skin falling back behind it, until the skull came through into the common face. The darker one had arrived somewhere and was beyond bewilderment, but the other was still moving in his potential and I could see that in his eyes, the way they turned in their bone chambers, healthy and alert and a little desperate in being trapped there. The eyes of the darker one were milky, but focused in the resignation of his body, just waiting, and I saw them in my own eyes then, then glancing to my nose. We have all the time in the world, they seemed to say. Then he lowered the glass and cleared his throat.

“Gordon was a saint,” he said.

“You knew him that well?” Carlos said, and the blond one laughed, then reached to the other’s shoulder, kneading it. His name was Andy and his friend was James.

“He’s prone to exaggeration,” Andy said.

“I am not,” said James. “Well, maybe just a little.”

“You can talk,” Charlie said. “It’s okay.”

“It’s about his private life,” I said. “We’re looking into his death.”

James was looking at me, wondering, I thought. I hadn’t told Charlie about the HIV and didn’t plan to yet. Then James spoke.

“I can’t tell you specifics. Gordon was a private man, though public about his AIDS. It was political for him, and he was respected. There wasn’t much gossip, something about his place near Provincetown as I remember, maybe a man there? And there was talk about Boston too, though it was vague. But I know someone who can tell you, if anyone can.”

I looked over at Carlos to get his eyes, but he was watching them, and then he spoke.

“In what way did you know him?”

“He was my doctor, our doctor.” James nodded toward Andy. “First at the free clinic, then privately.”

“We don’t have any money,” Andy said. “Not that kind.”

I wondered about their parents. They were in their mid-twenties only, but I knew not to ask.

“You’re wondering about our parents,” James said. “Andy’s have been okay and mine haven’t. But there’s no money there.”

“I was wondering more about Strickland and his money,” Carlos said.

“That was pretty clear,” said Charlie. “He seemed to have some. Inherited I think. He lived well, but not ostentatiously. He was always busy, with patients, fund-raisers and such.”

“Except when he split,” Andy said. “He’d disappear for a week. Then he’d be back in action.”

“I doubt there’s anything there,” Carlos said, and they both looked at him.

“Look,” I said. “Can you think of anyone who had it in for him? Who might have been after his money?”

“God, no!” said Andy. “He may have been a saint.”

“A martyr?” Carlos said.

“Paradise would know, if anyone would. He’d be the one to ask,” James said. “You can ask him. We can’t really get you beyond gossip.”

“Can you set it up?” I said. “A number? An introduction?”

“Sure,” Andy said. “You don’t need a number though. We can do it in person.”

“Where?” I said.

“Why, right here, of course! I know he’s in.” He looked over at Charlie. “Didn’t you tell them?”

“Didn’t quite get to it,” Charlie said.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Come on,” James said.

He struggled up out of the chair, hands gripping the table’s edge. Andy had his cane, and he slipped it into his palm when he was standing. It had taken effort and he seemed unsteady. We had all risen, and we stood and watched him, his bird chest fluttering under his loose shirt as he sucked in air. His head hung down, his mouth open, and I could see the salmon-colored gums below his teeth. I thought he might fall down, and I reached for my handkerchief and dabbed my sweaty brow. Andy was ready at his shoulders, careful not to touch him. Then James settled into his breathing and in moments his hanging head came up and he was grinning, the skin pulled tight over the bones of his high cheeks. His fingers touched the table as he turned, and I could hear the shush of his sliding slippers. Then he shuffled toward the edge of the dance floor, Andy at his elbow, and we followed behind. They were playing “These Foolish Things,” Art Pepper in that mellow and toughened mood, just moments in the music before his death, longingly, but there finally.

We reached the crowded dance floor and the dancing couples turned and parted in their dancing and made way for us. I saw a man in the arms of another, his gaze upon us in guarded recognition for a moment, then lost back to the dancing as he turned away. I could smell cologne and sweat and that other scent, my own, as the dancing couples closed behind us and drifted away in slow spinning as we reached them.

“They’re all dead.” It was James or Andy up ahead, and I thought I heard dancers groaning in their dipping when they heard the words.

“He means the music,” Carlos said.

“A perverse choice, but the right one. We only play the dead on Fridays.”

It was Charlie behind me, and I could hear the echo of his daughter’s voice.

We came to the end of the bar and stood there in a cluster. The bartenders were busy, pulling taps and spraying soda into glasses. One lifted a mixer and shook it theatrically, then poured a margarita. Then he saw us, and he was smiling as he came down behind the bar toward us, then lifted a section of the slick wood surface and let us through. Charlie stayed behind, and I heard him ask for tonic and bitters. It was almost time for his last set.

We went through a narrow storage area to the right, cases of beer and liquor stacked to the ceiling on either side. At the end was a door, and Andy reached around James’s shoulder and pushed it open. It entered into a small room, not much bigger than a closet, light from a dim yellow bulb bathing another door, a heavy metal one, a few feet off. There were hooks on the walls of the room and white cotton robes and clothing hanging from them, and I stood and watched as Andy helped James into one of the robes, holding the shoulders up into points as a screen to guard him from our sight as he removed his shirt, then slipped his arms through the sleeves. Andy stepped ahead then to the heavy door and turned the handle and leaned his shoulder against the metal. It opened without sound, and he stood aside as James shuffled through and we followed in behind him.

We were standing in a chapel, on a stone floor over which tattered rugs had been laid. There was stone between the rugs’ frayed edges, rock worn smooth by the passage of years of feet, and the lines of grout where the stones joined were as clean as the stone and married to it, and there was a faint scent of wax in the air, and a variety of other scents — soap and isopropyl alcohol, musk over cleaning solvent, charcoal, and the sweetness of marijuana insinuated and moving through them, then drifting up into the high arching ceiling, where stained glass held the vague figures of saints and animals in various engagements.

I heard a faint cough, its echo close to my ear, and looked to the far end of the chapel where the altar had been. The elevated stage still held pews to its sides, those seats for minor clerics and altar boys, and a life-size crucifix hung on the back wall, the figure draped over in purple cloth, but evident in its contours. The cloth had slid from the fingers, and the white hands holding the spikes and the blood in the palms were vivid and it was hard to look away from that, down to where the men sat on the stage at a large wooden table in their white robes, playing cards. The one who had coughed held a handkerchief, and was bending away and coughing into it, and the three others held their cards still in the air and seemed frozen there as they waited. Their faces were as white as the robes were, and behind them, to the sides of the crucifix, high shelves had been constructed to hold white sheets and towels, and a white dog, a Saint Bernard, lay on the floor at the table’s edge, massive and panting and like a snowdrift. I saw his head come up, his red tongue and black eyes, and the men lowered their cards, their skull faces lifting and turning and looking down the chapel toward us as the music drifted in from the Key West. It was Coltrane now, faint strains, “The Shadow of Your Smile,” and I heard Andy grunting as he leaned against the heavy door, closing it behind us. Then the music was gone away, and I saw the other men, two dozen or more, sitting on stone benches and sarcophagi under archways along the chapel’s sides. Some were together and talking softly. Others sat alone, reading newspapers and books. I saw a man with earphones and a small cassette player. Another held a piece of wood and was whittling into a basket at his feet. They all wore the white robes, and each face was a skull or becoming one, and one was bald and his eyes were closed, and only when his head turned on his neck to look at us did I know he was still among the living.

“Calacas a todas partes.“

It was Carlos, whispering, and when I turned to him and looked past him, then beyond the men, I saw the doors in the carved sections of wooden walls fitted into the stone wall at the chapel’s sides, entrances to those small votive chambers I didn’t know the names of. One across from us stood open, and I could see the edge of a bed, a table, and a vase holding cut flowers, limp roses, a dull dusty purple in the dim light.

“Down at the end, next to my place,” James said, then turned in his robe, and I heard the rubber tip of his cane squeak and echo softly on the stone floor, then felt Andy passing from behind me and coming to his side. He was carrying his silk shirt and held something else, a small plastic cup, in his other hand.

“Medication,” he said brightly, and James looked at him, hollow-eyed and grinning, then looked at us.

“Such a cheery fucker,” he said weakly, and Carlos laughed, and I saw a man at the high table pause as he fanned his cards.

“Come on,” James said, “it’s time for rest now,” and he turned and shuffled off across the carpets toward the chapel’s end, Andy behind and watching him, and we followed, and when we reached his carved door, he opened it and stepped inside the dark room and we saw his palm over his shoulder, his fingers waving, as he said good-bye. Andy reached in front of us and closed the door, then held his hand up, indicating that we should wait there, and moved to the next door in the wall and knocked softly.

“The players,” Carlos said. “Maybe there’s something there?”

I nodded, and he stepped away from me, and I watched as he angled off toward the altar. The men saw him coming and lowered their cards to the table. Their eyes in their skull faces were on him, and I saw the dog looking too. Then Andy was motioning to me, and I moved along the wall to the open door where he was waiting, and when I turned in the frame he touched me lightly on the arm, then was gone.

There was light in the room, frayed shafts of filtered street light coming through panels of stained glass and pooling in dim rainbow colors on the stone floor, and through the dust motes in the shafts I could see a bank of file cabinets on the far wall under the windows rising to chest level and the wavy images of objects on the metal, coffee cups and trays, a stack of game boxes, the half-finished model of a clipper ship. The floor was bare stone, no rugs, and to the left, in front of stacks of metal chairs against the wall, I saw the dull surface of a large wooden table, chairs around it, and a water cooler off in a corner. The open door blocked my view of the right side of the room, but I could hear a faint metallic whistling beyond it, could see evidence of another light source, the edge of a dead white crescent on the floor, and could smell coffee and hear the pot coughing. Then I heard another cough, a gurgling in some mechanism, and words forming within it, “Come in, come in.”

I stepped into the room, beyond the door’s edge, then came to the pool of colored light and stepped into that, then turned and saw the arms and hands of the figure and his torso. The hands turned a deck of cards, then shuffled them over the typewriter table at the end of which was a small lamp and a coffee cup and an ashtray holding a half-smoked joint of marijuana. He was leaning back slightly, his head in darkness, and I could see the robe like a white skirt hanging from his knees and his thin bare shins and ankles and the white cotton slippers on his feet on the stone floor. His hand turned, the deck in his palm, and I heard that gurgling again. It was coming from his thin chest, and I thought I could see his heart beating close to the surface, pushing through the robe at the side of his sternum. Then the words were in the air and his hand was gesturing toward a metal chair across from him, “Sit down,” and I moved to the chair and did so. Then I could see light on his neck and chin, the hole in the tracheotomy tube in his throat, and then he was leaning forward and I could see his face constructing itself as it came into the light, a bony armature over which skin had been stretched, then some abstraction of planes and angles, then the common face of an old man and the specifics of personality in the thin mustache and lips, the deep blue of his eyes, and the lowering and slight cocking of his chin as his words came up from that controlled belching.

“Larry Paradise,” he said. “And you?”

“I’m Peter Blue,” I said.

“And you’re here about Gordon, I understand. That’s what Andy said. Some coffee? A little dope?”

He gestured over his shoulder to where the pot was, on a table back in the darkness. My eyes were getting accustomed to the dim light and I could see the thin cot now, a legal pad and pencil on the pillow. I started to refuse, then realized he wanted coffee, and I got up and moved around him and stepped to the table and the pot, and when I turned, holding it, I could see his scapulas through the white robe, and the thickness of his brown hair.

“Not for long,” he said, his voice muffled, the words half formed.

“What?” I said, pouring the coffee.

He gestured for me to leave the pot, and I lowered it to the table beside the lamp, then sat down across from him again. He lifted the cup and sipped from it.

“My hair,” he said. “I’m on the chemo just a few days ago.” His eyes were lowered to the cup when he spoke again. “You’ve got it, haven’t you?”

I knew exactly what he meant, though I couldn’t figure how he could know, and I was more curious about that than about his asking.

“Yes,” I said. “For a year and a half now as I figure it.”

“I haven’t,” he said. “But what the fuck difference does it make now? I’m an old man. I’ve had it in the throat, now it’s in the liver. They seem to like to find it. Their profession? But it’s still just the common cancer. Not Gordon. He wasn’t like that.“

“But this place,” I said. “Isn’t it a hospice?”

“And you’re wondering why I’m here,” he said. “But I worked with Gordon, and people know about that. I’m only here temporarily. Just for a week or so.”

“You were his lover?”

“Christ no!” he laughed, his thin shoulders shaking. “But that’s an idea. I could have been his grandfather. I had forty years on him.”

“But was there a lover?” I asked.

“Look,” he said. “You’re going to hear that everywhere. Necessary rumor. He was a very public man, and he was gay, and he had AIDS. But there was a good, hefty policy, you know, and there was the manuscript collection, what was left of it. I was executor, and I turned it all over. I turned the job over too, when they found the cancer. But it wasn’t really the money. He was a force you see, and that’s the loss.”

I told him about the job, that Strickland had hired me for that museum trip to Boston, a sale of his materials.

“That’s certainly probable,” he said. “You see, that’s where the money came from. He wasn’t really all that rich, but he had that collection. And he was selling it, bit by bit. He’d work up some matching grant or other, then he’d sell something and donate the money as a gesture. And that would lay some guilt on the others, politicians and the wealthy. He was strategic about it. He had some choice stuff in Orleans.”

“Were you ever there?” I said.

“In Orleans? No. No, I wasn’t. And when he was there he didn’t visit me either. It was our agreement. And he was ill and needed that rest. His work was very important, and it gave me something important too for a while. I’m an old man now, and meaning comes hard.”

“He didn’t visit?” I said. “How could that be? Don’t you live here, in Philadelphia?”

“Fuck no,” he said. “I live at the Manor.”

“You mean, in Provincetown?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “In Truro.”

“Of course,” I said, thinking of Carlos and how close I’d been to this man, just a few yards beyond the solarium screen when I’d visited.

“The lists,” I said. “The missing stuff. Can you tell me about that?”

It had grown chilly in the room, and I pointed to his cup as I spoke. I wanted coffee myself now, and I rose and went back to the table near the bed. I could feel a dampness at my collar, a breeze blowing in from somewhere, and I buttoned the top button. He was talking, filling in the background of his time with Strickland, that he had been his secretary, just for the AIDS patients, a traveling secretary, on hand for house visits and for the setting up and administering of hospices around the city. He spoke of the irony of this one, a chapel connected to a bar, of the Catholic Church and of condoms, needle exchanges and Strickland’s involvement in the writing and dissemination of information about safe sex. I thought he might be getting to the question of the lists, and I was thinking of Sara, my lost wife, and about Beth, Charlie’s daughter, who had died before love, and I found myself standing at the table behind him, holding the cup, his voice muffled as it drifted back over his shoulders. I think I turned then, and I can remember my body shaking, just the skin and muscle, as if I were the bones inside my body and the covering flesh were garments. They seemed to swell out from the bones as I stepped around him and moved back to the chair. He was still talking, of Carlos now and the table in the kitchen in Provincetown, and of the lighthouse, and I was sitting down at the table and he was holding the pot, and I held my cup out for him to fill it. But the cup was lowering in my hand, and I couldn’t hold it up, and I was watching my extended arm and my hand and the cup as I sat down. But the chair was gone and I was falling and the cup was falling and I saw bands of filtered light, colorful, then fading as I continued to fall. Then darkness was coming in over me, and he was speaking of manuscripts and of the smell of something clotted in the room and of Tampico and a plane lifting up from a dirt runway, and I was falling back in the seat as the plane rose, entering into a night of a thousand bright stars, and someone was reaching out for me in some vague sexuality and I was warning them away, and we were going somewhere.

Carlos

He could see the grill of the ruined truck and the sandblasted fenders, hear the gearing and the farts of the gutted muffler, and then the cab was up beside him, shaking on the dirt street at the gate, and he saw the pyramid of cannibalized engine parts above the rails in the long bed, and then he was climbing the metal running board and reaching for the handle.

His father was spiderlike behind the circle of the wheel, his bare arms thin and corded, and he wore a cowboy hat, and as he worked the gears and hit the pedals he leaned into the wheel and almost stood, and Carlos saw a translucent drooling at the corner of his mouth as he grinned at him, his teeth horsey under rheumy, sleep-starved eyes that blinked in sweat that flooded from his brow.

Up out of Tamaulipas and Veracruz, back to the Rio Grande and home to pick up Carlos, they were heading northeast from Matamoros to a wrecking yard in the foothills near Nueva Rosita. There was a buzzing in the primitive cab when they got going and the biting scent of scorched oil coming in through vents and holes in the metal floor, and there was something rancid, and his father was talking, but Carlos couldn’t get his language through the grind of gearing and the engine noise, and he knew he was there for work and not fellowship, and he turned away from his father’s groggy gestures and kept his eyes on the road.

They stopped once at a place near Anáhuac, wooden picnic tables under a greasy awning beside gas pumps, and something under thick brown gravy, carrots and corn bread, and real truckers calling out the names of destinations, Chihuahua, Juárez, Hermosillo, and Carlos watched them rise and stretch and head for their massive rigs, and others replaced them, and these looked at the two, wondering about this gringo traveling with an Indian boy, and his father couldn’t find it in himself to eat and only sipped coffee and sweated and stuck cigarettes into his mashed potatoes, then rose finally into the curse of his Mexican blood, that frustrated anger Carlos recognized as who he was, and they were out of there, and in two hours or more had dumped the parts and loaded the bed again, industrial sewing machines, bobbins and thick spools of thread for delivery to a warehouse in Valle Hermoso on the return trip home.

They were on the road again and descending, geared down to fight the heavy load behind them, and it was late afternoon and the clouds of insects came in against them and they couldn’t see, and his father fought the gears and brought the truck to the dusty shoulder and leaned back in the pelting and said he needed some rest. His eyes were milky, his words muffled in the dirty towel he lifted and pressed to his face, and Carlos felt a humming in the seat and saw him vibrating, his hat and then his arms, and there was a certain yearning in his face when he lowered the towel and looked at him again, and Carlos knew right then that he’d be leaving.

They were in the foothills still, but had moved down to the higher desert, and once the plague passed over they climbed down and below the shoulder and through the dry gulch and headed up the low rise among prickly pear, wildflowers and stones, to where the oak cast shadows out over an oasis of thick grass, and his father lay down in the grass and rested his head against the tree’s base, his face under his hat, and Carlos stood over him, below the branches.

They were high enough, not far from home, and Carlos could see out over the desert plains, the dusty, earthen buildings of Matamoros, and beyond that sad clustering, the blue gulf and even a hint of whitecaps he thought, as he stepped forward squinting, then heard his father groan in sleep and turned quickly and struck his head against a low limb. He was quaking, slipping from himself, falling to a hazy ground and into a posture that was not from falling, but for sleeping, and when he awakened it was dusk and he was looking up through the skeletal figures of the oak’s branches and could see the first stars, blocked then by his father’s hat brim, and could hear the urgency, “Carlitos! Despiértate! Carlitos!” Then he was awake, and rising, his father pulling him and pointing, and he saw the flames, and it was as if the whole city of Matamoros was burning, below in the distance across the desert plains, and he felt the fire of the blow in his temple and the swelling, and he knew it was his mother burning and that his father knew that too and that he would soon be leaving, and he couldn’t look into the blue of his gringo’s eyes.

All remnants of a recent sudden rain were gone, and he tipped the visor down against the cold sun and drove in the slow lane, thinking back to the death of Gordon Strickland as he headed for Orleans.

The letter had been propped against the sugar bowl, a white envelope with his name written across it. Much like a letter in a story, it could have been on a mantel. There was one in the living room, holding photographs of Strickland’s parents in antique frames, snapshots of a few men standing together, hips slung in swimming suits with towels hung from shoulders and arms touching on a sandy beach, one of a woman in a broad, theatrical hat, her face unrecognizable in shadow under the brim.

It was seven-thirty when he found it, having slept through Strickland’s leaving. A suicide letter, nothing less, and Carlos had read it with great care, then read it again, and though it was that, it held no despair, but a certain reasoning and a plan for the future. Yet it need not have been written, and before he took it to the sink and burned it, he read it once again.

It was the AIDS and a certain insurance policy. Strickland wrote that he was failing now and the policy had a rider that wouldn’t cover that. But it would cover accident, and the beneficiary was the hospice movement, in the name of a certain man involved with him in that, a Larry Paradise, and there would be no note for him, but he would see to the use of the money properly. He’d sold most everything of value now, and he’d no longer be going to Boston with his New England materials.

There was two thousand dollars in the envelope, wrapped in a sleeve of paper with his name and the words severance pay written across it, and Carlos folded the money neatly and put it in his pocket. Then he drank his coffee and sat at the table and looked out the salt-stained windows. Sparrows danced on the deck rail, and when they left he got up and filled his cup again, then went to his basement room and dressed himself. He worked around the house for the next four days. There was cleaning to be done, tile work in the shower in one of the bathrooms, and in the evenings, when the work was done, he listened to Ives and to pieces by other composers. He went to bed early. The phone rang a few times, but he didn’t answer it, just left the calls to the machine. Then Peter Blue arrived and said the words and Gordon Strickland’s death became actual, and Carlos swallowed up that relationship and the contents of the letter too.

He’d called from Peter’s house before leaving.

“Still completely out,” Charlie said.

“What are the doctors saying?”

“What they’ve been saying. Pneumonia. The fever at least. They say it’s too soon for HIV symptoms, so it isn’t that.”

“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.

Gino

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.”

“But if you get sick,” Frank said.

“Oh, fuck that,” Gino said. “I’m sick already. I’m a very old man. I want some life now while I have it. Not this waiting around to die.”

Frank started to say something, to bicker, then he smiled faintly and said something else.

“Well, I must admit, I think of it too.”

“Have you?” Gino said.

“No. Not really. But I can understand the rest. This place I mean. It’s not exactly wholesome.”

“I have,” Larry said. “Especially since this chemo. I can go back to Philadelphia, actually do some work again.”

“The fucking chemo,” Gino said. “Just another instance. They’re not treating us here. This is a holding tank. They only do it because of the contract. Like that useless speech therapist. Legality, not medicine or ethics. Nothing like that.”

“That would close the place,” John said.

“But for the guy out there on the ward,” said Gino. “I hope he lives to be a hundred and ten. Fuck these doctors, these businessmen.”

“You’re serious about this, aren’t you,” Larry said.

“You bet your ass I am.”

He shuffled off to his locker to get the Chicago papers and his ledger book, and Frank set the chessboard and pieces to the side and got a yellow pad and a pencil and began making lists. Larry shuffled the cards absently, thinking about the uncertainty of endings and of beginnings, more difficult for Frank he thought than for himself. He wasn’t sure about Gino, even when he returned and showed them the ads he’d carefully marked, describing the various locations with a quiet enthusiasm.

“If only there were decent relatives,” Frank said.

“Why?” Gino said. “It could be the same as this, just different furniture.”

“I have a son,” said Frank. “That could be even worse.”

They heard the sound of sucking from the ward, and Gino looked at each of them, then turned back to the window.

“Maybe I could go to Tampico once again.”

It was John. He held his cigarette in the air, poised there, and there was something in his tone that got to each of them, both fantasy and possibility in the words. Then Gino coughed and lit his pipe again, and they could see the smoke rise, puffs disintegrating into a wispy haze above his shoulders at the window.

He turned then and began talking, picking the words carefully out of memory, telling the story in a formal way, as if he had no care or part in it, as if it were someone else’s life in the balance there, for he had come through it all and was here now for the telling and was only the messenger of his past. John adjusted his wheelchair and faced him and tapped a cigarette on his can, then lit it, the smoke flooding from his tracheotomy tube, and settled in with the two others to listen.

“… and Ramona was born in the tenth year of our marriage, my wife desperate for her in the lost romance of her own childhood, that she would join a company of virginal lovers and study her posture standing in the doorway, makeup and fine clothing, candlelight and flowers. But it was always Gino coming, the little guy in work clothes, and with the birth of a daughter the romance changed for her — image of the perfect mother, sister and confidant — so when Ramona pinned her tongue with the fake diamond she was accepting of it in bewilderment, and when she brought the tattooed boys around, ominous but manipulated, it was no last straw for her, though it was for me.”

High school, 1950, held back a year for truancy, his wife was giving her secret money, she was nineteen and hysterically theatrical, and he was already sixty, the ancient dull-witted father, but his wife was only a child for her, and Ramona was no fool about that until she was.

Sitting in the living room in the suburbs, wanting money, that dark boy in his mid-twenties on the couch beside her, carefully groomed, but dirt at the cuticles of his pared nails and in the wings of the hair he’d greased and combed, a thick hanging chain, and the black ironed shirt he wore, those stains at the pockets’ edges, and those tattoos.

When I get a proper life! When I get some decent clothes! Spark of the diamond on her tongue flicking in the red wound. When I get out of this shit hole!

Why not now? he’d said. And that stopped her, and the diamond disappeared behind her teeth, and she dragged the useful boy up out of the couch and slammed the door behind them as they left.

“We thought it was temporary of course. My wife died in 1962. She was just fifty-nine, my child bride. Have I mentioned her name yet? It was Mona. And in the days of the twelve years of her daughter’s absence she was getting ready to die, though I don’t think she knew that. It was a cervical malformation that caused the stroke, and I think it came from her hanging head, lifted only when she looked through the window, as if the physical gesture of anticipation could produce the desired object, Ramona on the sidewalk, coming home. I was retired then and seventy-one, and I thought I might be dying too, for I was some malignancy in the household, reminder in my presence of the cause of our daughter’s leaving, and it was true that I never loved Ramona, felt her absence only as relief, and I think my wife saw this, and I walked the suburban streets and read books in the evenings, and we both waited for something, but not the same thing. Ramona was a late child for us, and the only one. No excuse of course for her failed parents. But I think she held a pathology that we didn’t bring to her, though I accept responsibility for a certain coldness.

“But I didn’t die, and Mona did, and then I made my one pathetic move. I bought an isolated house near Cairo, on thirty acres, and set myself to gardening and fussing with repairs, and waited absently for death.

“I said I traveled to Tampico once, but that wasn’t true. It was only conversation in this place, part of our useless joking and badgering, and that’s why I’m leaving. I never traveled, or took pleasure in places or people, nor did I have the warmth of a woman in my bed beyond my early fifties. I worked and had a wife and daughter, and then the one left and I retired and the other died, and that was my life. I walked the streets like a man whose days were over, when they were only half over, and then I set myself to mindless tasks, and when I wasn’t mindlessly doing them I sat at a kitchen window smoking a special blend, gazing out vacantly at the possibilities of life there, with no heart for them at all.”

He does look like Harry Truman, John thought. They’d be of a similar age had Truman lived, and those pixie ears would have thinned by now to the same parchment. He wondered if Truman had such small hands, had lifted them to touch his brow and nose with the same vacancy. Gino’s robe had fallen open at his chest, and moonlight washed over his ribs, and his dark nipples in that variegated bony field were gemlike, black pearls in mottled alabaster, and John thought of the men he’d seen at the roadside near La Loma, traveling up to Matamoros with Chepa, so many years ago. They were baking, shirtless, in the sun, sitting at the ditch they’d been digging, drinking water that ran in rivers down their dark leathery chests as they lifted glass jars, and there was one to the side, and when he saw them passing he lowered his jar and looked at them, and quite suddenly it was he who was the subject, and they were only the world passing for his interest, and John had imagined he had been there before anything had. He would have thought, before the start of all living human commerce, but he was too young for such thinking.

Now he saw the same thing in Gino, but only as a similarity of knowledge in his blue eyes. The gestures that surrounded them were searching in the story for his body in its age, and he was getting there, but it was a long and difficult journey because he was a hundred years old.

The moon was bright in the windows above the radiator, and Larry still held the cards. John had reached up to the IV pole and turned off the light, and Larry could hear his breathing in his nose and the faint whistle in the suck of the cigarette in his tracheotomy tube. Frank leaned back in his chair across the room. He was watching Larry’s hair fall, but absently, giving himself up to the story now and the lesson of its apocalypse.

“And could this time be only moratorium, hospitals and rest homes, a delay of grafts, and medication and months in metal tubs and debridement turning into eighteen years, and certain moments of potential passing by in bewilderment, and then this cancer really only an excuse?

“I was eighty-two years old, and she came in a camper and with two others, and the camper’s wheels guttered in the gravel drive and sprayed stones, and the other two climbed out. They were like her boys in the past, but older and foreign in some way, but they never spoke and I got no sense of their origins. They wore jeans and light leather jackets, and one had a ponytail tied up in a greasy knot, and the van’s panels were painted with vague images of adorned skeletons and women in white robes attending them in swirls of mist and sun rays. Then Ramona climbed down to the gravel and came up to the porch where I was sitting and stood in the stones and looked up at me.

“It was money, but at first it was the mechanics of greeting, the empty awe of the years. She came up on the porch in her tooled boots and sat down in the wicker chair, and I told her her mother was dead, but she seemed to know that, and I had nothing else to tell her, so I told her the details of my moving and living there. But that was over in moments and the force of the vacancy of my life came down on me, and I asked her about her years, but there was little that she could find to say. She mentioned places I’d never been — Las Vegas, New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, Mexico. I said, ‘But you’re forty now.’ ‘Not quite,’ she said.

“She was dressed in leather, though it was summer and very hot, and I saw sweat beading on her brow and soaking into the ludicrous headband, and I looked for the diamond in her tongue, but it wasn’t there, and she’d shaved her eyebrows now and drawn a black line to replace them matching her lipstick, and I saw flecks of the lipstick on her teeth and a scar running from her eyebrow down her cheek and the lines of middle age at the corners of her eyes. I said, ‘I hope the traveling’s been in style,’ and she was still theatrical in the way she tossed her hair above the band, but she didn’t answer and just stared at me, and I saw a hardness in her eyes and behind it a certain hysteria of desperate need, and in her posture and her glancing down to the men at the camper’s doors the wherewithal to satisfy it.

“‘I’m your father,’ I said. ‘Fuck that,’ she said. ‘I need money!’ And I could see her need was for more than that in the way her nostrils flared, her chest under the leather lifting in energy toward some vague action she was unaware of, and I looked down to the men poised at the camper’s doors, then back to her face now set in a fixed clown’s grin and without expression. ‘I can give you a thousand dollars,’ I said, and I got up and went into the house and closed the door and bolted it. Then I went to the back door and locked that, then checked the windows on the first floor. She was still sitting on the porch when I got back, and she caught me looking at her through the window, and I saw the wetness of hard tears in her eyes and on her cheeks, and she kept sitting there, grinning still, for a quarter hour.

“I watched her, and I could see the camper in the drive, and the men were gone now and it was dusk, and when I tried, the phone was dead, and I went to the basement and got the.22, and while I was down there I heard her banging on the door, and when I returned to the window she was gone and so was the camper.”

He had no money. It was in the house and land and in the small pension and social security, and in tobacco and the seed and food, and in a few bottles of liquor. He had shells for his.22, and plenty of coffee, and he roamed the house and checked the windows and watched out for them, but nothing happened. Then it was night.

He went to a dusty room on the unused second floor and pulled a chair up to a window and covered his knees with the blanket he’d brought along and placed the rifle across them, and in a while he fell asleep and was awakened by the hammering. They were boarding up the windows and the doors, and when he opened the window he sat before he could hear hammering below and the ripping away of siding from the old barn in the distance, and he fired a shot into the starry night, but it was like a popgun. Then he got up out of the chair and went downstairs again and fired into a window and the wood covering it, but the hammering continued and the sound of the gun and shattering glass was inconsequentially lost in the banging.

He went to the basement again and got a box of shells and when he passed up through the house it was darker than night was and the hammering had ceased, and once he’d barricaded the door at the top of the stairs with furniture and gone back into the room he saw light at the window. It was dawn and the last stars were fading, and there was a sliver of moon still risen over the low hill in the distance, and as he watched, the branches of the tree upon the hill materialized in the morning and the dew, hanging in their weeping like a willow, but it was an oak tree, and there was something in a crotch in the branches, and then he saw that it was her and saw the camper under the branches at the tree’s base.

“I went to another dusty room and dug in a box and found the binoculars, then I went back and lifted the window and raised and trained them until I could find her in the tree. Then I did find her. She was sitting still in the crotch with a limb rising from her own crotch, her legs hanging down like stovepipes in the wet leather. She was soaked through, her head among leaves, strands of her hair lifted wildly on twigs and branches, and the wet oak leaves had brushed her painted eyebrows, smearing the paint up into dark feathers on her brow, and her shirt flowed like black water over her breasts, and she was leaning forward among the limbs and leaves, gazing toward the house like some deranged wood nymph, the limb in her crotch a massive vegetable member growing from her.”

He saw her shoulders tilt, her extended leafy arm, then saw the man on the camper’s roof reach up with his binoculars. Then he heard a huffing below the window and lowered the glasses and when he looked down he saw the shadow of the other man, running away across the yard and through the plot of staked tomato plants, vines and dark dirt flying, and then he lifted the glasses and smelled something and looked to the tree again. Her own glasses were lifted now, “and she might have been looking directly at me, but I couldn’t tell, and in moments there was a cloud of smoke in the dawn between us, obscuring her as she climbed down through the limbs and into the man’s extended arms, and I lowered the glasses again and leaned out the window and saw flames crawling up the clapboards toward me, and when I turned back into the hazy room my legs were in a foot of smoke and I stumbled to the hall and saw it seeping through the door frame at the barricade, flames eating at the panels, and as I watched, the easy chair I’d pushed against the knob came suddenly alive like a bloody throne in flames, and I turned and opened the bathroom door across the hall and stepped inside and closed it behind me, then crossed among cardboard boxes and broken screens to the old claw-foot tub and turned the handles, but there was nothing.

“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.”

Kelly

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.

The woman was at the stove baking. The farmer had lifted a block of wood and was carving the face of a man into it, shavings cast in the fire, and the children sat on the floor, a few feet from the fake bishop’s hem, fitting paper clothing on small anonymous figures. All faces were lit in the wavers of candlelight, and the calavera watched them dissolve and reconstruct as heads turned on their axes and words drifted in lazy half sentences across the room. And in a moment of silence he saw the mother’s face pause in its animation, her hands sunk deeply in dough. She was looking out the window and her gaze was vacant where it met the glass, and the calavera was stunned to see that same look of longing in life that he was aware of in his own face in death, and he recognized it was an avenue of possibility that she was looking down. It was as if between her and the window were actions and the meaningful assumption of actions, but at the glass itself was nothing, just her desire for a place beyond where the terms of her longing ended. And when he saw the same vacant look in the farmer’s face, as he glanced down to the floor in his whittling, he found he was seeing into the human condition with a new understanding. He sat in his robes in the chair watching its manifestations as he mulled it over in his mind. He thought of life as a central artery, running parallel to the spine, and each vein and capillary, extending out along bone to the exuberant extremities, as those possibilities of alternative bloody avenues down which one might glance but never go. He thought of his own life, before he was a calavera, and its necessarily stunted quality, though it had been a life of satisfaction and fullness, and he had walked its broad and easy causeway free of any care.

He’d been a journalist, this calavera, privy to the hidden corruptions of government, present at the forefront of shipwreck and devastating fire. On his bicycle he’d ridden to the brink of individual illness and family difficulty, often into circumstances of possibility where he might have stepped from the saddle into another life. He’d seen a boy he’d desired, saved from the roots of a tree. He’d seen women whose lives were frustration, wife, daughter and nun. Each had been ripe for engagement, but he had simply written their stories and moved on, life’s longing recorder. Now his bones shook under his bishop’s garment as he silently articulated his proposal.

All men and women long for the might have been, those avenues of life they didn’t take, and in the recognition that each one was a possibility, held in the memory as vision grown hazy at terminals beyond all bright beginnings, longing becomes empty nostalgia as the veins dry and collapse along the bones and the broad gestures of the body wither at the outer reaches. Devoid of the animation of living, all come narrowed and regretful to their deaths, since of the many possible lives, only one was lived.

He saw it in the look of the farmer’s wife and in the farmer, and though the children glanced up from their play and down those first narrow byways only with bright eyes and curiosity, he knew their time too would come.

And he knew now that the living he’d longed for again as a calavera held its own profound longing, and that when he reached a new circumstance the force of his look would be doubled in the intensity of its longing, drawing the eyes of the viewers to a bloody familiarity, and would overwhelm the dry extravagance of the dancing bones.

There was no sound, but the children turned to him as he fell down, the dark robes of the bishop collapsing to a pile of dusty fabric on the chair’s wooden seat. It was bone dust, and it puffed through the weave, then settled into a haze, obscuring the chair’s legs. And the farmer was rising, his wife turning, and the children’s faces were invisible behind their heads. But the face of the farmer was intense, as was that of his wife; their jaws creaked open, the blocks of their teeth visible to the pink gums. All paused as they reached the chair, as if gathered around the last event in an old story. A wind came in at the window. It blew the door open and blew the fine dust of the dissolved bones of the calavera out into a final burial in the night.

I no longer think of my condition. I’ve grown thin, and the bones press out at my clavicles and the points of my hips, and even my own clothing hangs loose on my body and is blown against my thighs and bony shoulders by the wind leaking in at the tortured frames, all the doors and windows now, and there’s a place where the roof has twisted and torqued shingles free and the rain comes in. I’ve had to place pots in the bedroom and move the rifle, and I can see the lighthouse from the window there. Its tilting is perceptible now, and I wonder when it will fall and if my house will follow or precede it. No longer. Because a condition is something separate and discernible, and though I remember my father and mother and Tampico and the days before my agora, I’ve come to distrust that sweet nostalgia. I was someone else then, and memory’s world belongs only to the dead.

Arthur is gone. He took the last load. There was a truck at the barricade when he came through, and they told him it wouldn’t be safe to return again, and he told me this when he’d finished loading and that they’d asked if I’d be coming out with him, and he smiled when he told me he’d said he didn’t think so. He paused at the foot of the steps and looked back, and I thought of my last lover and that going, though they are nothing alike, but his hair in the wind, that moment of hesitation before the finality of turning.

It’s night now, and the gas is gone and they’ve shut the power down again and I’ve lit the candles. The lights are on at the barricades, and there’s no storm, but a star-filled night, and I’ve left their calls on the answering machine and pulled the plug on the phone. I’ll handle all that in the morning, figure a few more excuses to put it off. I can see the shadows of the Manor across the meadow, a slice of white wall lit by the light on the ambulance dock, but there is no light in the solarium, though it’s early, and I wonder where the old men are and I wonder about the other, deep in his dreamless coma, out on the ward. Is it Saturday? The house is quiet now, no hum of pump or appliances, no radio, and what I hear is the drone of a plane, and when I get to the cliffside window I can see it clearly. It’s a small plane, and it’s flying low out over the beach and the edge of sea. Then it’s climbing up into the sky and banking away, and I can see the numbers and letters on the undersides of its toylike wings as it rises against the stars in a world that seems quite impossible, and horizonless, heading for places I will never go.

BOOK THREE. Tampico

The House

When the breeze came up and lifted the desert sand into a veil that set the few remaining derricks in the distance shimmering, Carlos turned his head and tipped his hat and looked down at the door’s sill, seeing once again those shallow scratches. He was standing at the veranda’s rail beside the stairs, and once the breeze fell and sand no longer showered against his sleeve and he could turn, he saw the two surveyors, one standing at the tripod of his spirit level, peering into the telescope, the other far off to the right, holding a bright yellow stick. They’d finished both sides of the property and would soon get to the back. He’d been there and had seen the rusted iron cauldrons, too large and heavy to be hauled away by scavengers. Inside, they’d taken most everything, if there had been anything, though they’d left the sink and hand pump and the brass bed, which seemed odd, since it was valuable. As the only imposing object in the single open room, it seemed significant somehow, as if it had been readied for some special occasion. There was a rod too, a piece of wooden doweling affixed where walls joined in a corner, a place for hanging a few pieces of clothing.

This is mine, he thought, as he headed along the broad veranda to the house edge. There was another veranda there, one on the other side as well, and to the rear of the house was a porch and a brief yard that ended beyond the remnants of a ruined chicken coop where the foothills began. He’d never owned a thing, beyond his tools and clothing and a few books. He had new clothes now, fine western boots, twill pants and a tooled cotton shirt, and he’d worn his new fedora and a cotton sports jacket, after he’d had a trim and otherwise prepared himself, when he’d gone to the government records office in Tampico.

He paused at the house edge and looked off to the side, a few yards of once-cultivated land there, but a strip of barren ground now covered by the house shadow, and he too was in shadow, cool under the veranda’s eaves, and beyond the shadow strip and still in the sun was a rusted metal fence, freestanding, ten yards or more to either side of a gate. The fence may once have gone around the entire place, but he couldn’t be sure of that. Maybe it was just a formal entrance, since beyond the gate was where the path began, meandering away through scrub, to where it broadened and became the narrow dirt road, which disappeared in the near distance at a turning, the mouth of which was like another gate, a canopy formed by tall, gnarled bushes into which wild bougainvillea had wound its tendrils. The mouth was bloody in the sun, startling in its green branches and red blossoms, the only place of strident color, no matter where his eyes rested.

They’d put him in a waiting room with others. He had the deed and some documentation, his driver’s license and the creased and often folded birth certificate he’d managed to carry along through the years. The others were businessmen, and they wore suits, and he sat away from them and near a window and could see down into the square, the stone fountain at its center, and across on the other side a row of public buildings that pressed against the old church. The square was empty, but as he watched it began to fill as siesta ended, people crossing with purpose, entering the mouths of invisible shopping streets at the corners, carrying fabric and paper bags, in sun hats of no use now as afternoon shadows covered them. Then he heard his name, and someone came for him and took him into another room and sat him down on a bench at the room’s side, where he waited again.

The room was large and full of rows of desks, computers and typewriters upon them, and people sat at the desks and rose from time to time and went to search in the file cabinets that lined the walls, and while he waited he thought of Peter in his coma and of the deed in his pocket and of Strickland and the note and money he’d left for him. Had he left the deed too, purposely, in that hiding place behind the books? Strickland knew his documents, had studied them, though some had moved through quickly, bought and sold again in a matter of weeks only, and he might have missed Carlos’s name in his perusal. It was the history that held value, the official seal of Obregón, and not the ownership or legal responsibilities that the deeds and contracts, the letters and the other documents, noted. Still, Strickland was a careful reader of his possessions, and he might have seen his name there and not mentioned it, though that would have been a strange violation of their relationship. The nature of our being together in that year, Carlos thought. He couldn’t get it to add up, recognizing that he never would, and he turned from it, slipping in the mild exhaustion caused by his travel, and was thinking then of the city beyond the room’s walls, nothing he really remembered. He’d been too young for that, or too desirous of forgetting it, and yet there’d been a familiarity to the streets and shops, at least something in the attitude of the people he’d passed by and engaged with, a certain reserve that was comfortable. Even on the rickety bus trip down from Reynosa, peasants and merchants, two dogs, chickens in wire cages, boxes of fruits and vegetables, a special corazón. Then a woman came and asked for his papers, and she and a few others gathered at a desk, their heads close together, and in a while she took his papers into another room, then came back with copies and the originals and asked him to return again the next afternoon.

That night, after he had bathed and rested, he walked the streets of the city, finding nothing that was familiar, but for the language he’d not spoken fluently since childhood and the postures and gestures of the older inhabitants, the few he found among the tourists. He sat on the bank of the Panuco. He entered a few shops, but he had nothing to buy. He ate his dinner, an ancient taste of tamales, at a stand on a busy street. He entered and sat for a while in the dark church. Then, on the way back to his hotel, he passed into a side street and came upon the lights above the door at the Lluvia del Oro and went in and crossed the dark crowded room and sat at the bar and ordered tequila. There were women in the place, prostitutes, but none approached him. They were there for the tourists and they thought him a local Mexican. He liked that, and only had to turn his head away when the eyes of a man fell on him, another kind of prostitute, in loose linen slacks and a shirt opened almost to the navel, whose lids had been darkened slightly with makeup.

The next afternoon he was back at the office again, this time ushered immediately into a room where a middle-aged man sat in his suit behind a large wooden desk. His hair was greased back in an older fashion, and Carlos could see the glint of wax in his thin mustache. The man rose from his chair and nodded, then pursed his lips, pointing to the chair across the desk, and Carlos sat down and the man settled into the leather of his own chair and swiveled slightly, glancing out the window to the side of the room. Carlos could see the copies of the deed and his documents and some other papers on the desk pad, the man’s fingers at the edge of them, a diamond ring in gold setting and carefully pared nails.

“English or Spanish?” the man asked, then sighed when Carlos answered, and tapped his fingers on the papers.

“This could have been so difficult,” he said.

“¿Por qué?” Carlos said, and the man smiled.

“Porque the Revolution. Muchos presidentes, generals, bandits, et cetera.”

“¿Pero?” Carlos said.

“Pero for this one, this Joaquín Sánchez.”

He lifted up a sheet of thin paper, and Carlos could see the formal handwriting through it and the impression of the seal under the signature.

“This letter, and these other documents he filed, perfectly executed. And your deed holds the impression of Obregón, who may well have been a pendejo, but the president of the country then, nevertheless.”

“Who is this Sánchez?”

“I don’t know nothing about that,” the man said. “Why he might have been involved in this. This is ancient material. I had to search it out. Lucky for you there was another one here. I didn’t have to look for it this time.”

“What do you mean, another?”

“I mean just that. Another person with a claim. Lucky for you it was a bad one, no damn good at all.”

“When was this?” Carlos asked.

The man swiveled in his chair again, looked at the wall, then out the window. Then he swiveled back.

“Well, you know,” he said. “I can’t say nothing about that. Who, and when it was. But it was recently. It was no damn good at all.”

“And Sánchez?”

“Of course,” the man said. “That’s how I searched out these papers. He’d filed all the proper references. In the files, you know? Even through the Revolution and after, the files are good, if you knew how to file things.”

“And Sánchez did.”

“That’s right. He was a gentleman of connections and influence back then. There were few like him. His name is on papers here frequently from those times. I’ve come across it. Very lawyerly. Though he was not a lawyer I don’t think. Ironclad, do you say?” He waved the letter between them. “This is very good stuff.”

“What does it say?”

“Says you are the owner of a house once owned by Roberto Menéndez, also known by Calaca in other papers, transferred to him in 1920, the deed then transferred to you in 1961. The house and whatever objects are within the house that remain, and the land, once surveyed and the survey officially recorded here in this office. And I rise now and offer my hand in congratulations.”

The land seemed to amount to a good number of acres, four at least to the front and sides, maybe even five, and Carlos wasn’t sure of the rear of the house yet and the foothills, how far the land might extend up into them. He’d hired surveyors who worked for the government and would handle the recording of their results officially, and when he turned from the veranda railing and looked out over the baked clay again to find them, they were gone, most probably working in the back now, he thought, and their truck was gone, a dull green Range Rover he’d ridden out in with them. He’d brought a sleeping bag, a canteen of water and a bag of food. He’d spend a night at the place, at least that, when they were gone. He didn’t know what he’d be doing after that.

It was late afternoon now, and the sun was sinking, and the breeze came up and stirred his sleeves, then receded and fell away and the air was still, and he saw the sand dust settling over the ruined causeway that had once been a crude landing strip, and the rougher ground and low brush beyond it, until the earth took on a clear solidity and ceased its shimmering, and the cloudless sky hardened into a deep blue, and he saw a few stars in the sky, though it was still day and bright under a milder sun. A man of property, he thought, his fingers stroking the weathered wood of the railing. Then he heard something. He thought it might be the surveyors, their voices and the sharp clack of their instruments in the clear air, the closing of the truck’s door, but it was not coming from the rear of the house, but from the side, and he turned back toward the fence and looked out beyond the gate and down the pathway toward the road.

He thought at first he was some aged peasant or an injured one, the shuffling of his feet in dusty huaraches, though they were not that, but boots, and his loose pants were conventional khakis, his brief-brimmed straw hat new and domed like a derby, a short, colorful feather in the decorative ribbon at the crown’s side. The hat hid his face, his fingers gathered in the vines and tendrils at the archway’s side, and the flowers shook and petals rained down over him as he shuffled through, and another man, even shorter than he was and wearing a large sombrero that looked ludicrous atop his small frame, came up from behind him and into the archway at his side, gripping his biceps, helping him and shuffling too, and the first shook free of his grip and said something, sharply, and a third man, heavier and lumbering, wearing a new Stetson and a white Mexican shirt, came into the space beside them, and the three were caught there for a moment, as men in a doorway in some old comic movie, their shoulders shifting, hands flailing at the bushes. Then they were through and standing side by side in the dirt road, brushing the petals from their clothing, reaching up to adjust their headgear, and Carlos saw a sort of cart come up to the side of the heavy man, someone behind it, holding handles. He thought it might be a wheelchair, but it was hard to see, so loaded as it was with objects: sleeping bags and a plastic cooler pressed together on the seat, pots and pans, canteens, coats and blankets, woven satchels, small leather purses, cases, all piled on top, or strapped or hanging loosely from the chair’s metal arms, some bouncing against the wheels. The man pushing it was dressed in garments that looked Japanese, some loose linen nightwear, tan, as were his tennis shoes. He had a thin mustache and wore a beaded skullcap covering what looked like a bald head. He, like the others, was squinting in the sun.

Carlos was under the eaves in darkness of shade, and they couldn’t see him, and he stood still and watched them. The man in the straw hat was pointing at the house, his fingers wiggling and gesturing toward the ruined causeway. He held his other hand at the edge of his hat brim, fighting the sinking sun. Then he was pointing toward the rear of the house, then turning toward the smaller man at his side, his hands striking the large sombrero brim as he was forming shapes in the air, and the small man pushed his hat away. It fell down over his shoulders to his back, the cord at his throat, and Carlos could see his face then, the features of someone historical. Then the four men were moving, jostling for position as the road narrowed and became the path, until they were two abreast, the heavy man helping the one in the beaded skullcap with the chair, the two smaller ones in front. They had almost reached the gate when they entered the house shadow and the sun left their eyes. The two paused when they saw him, and the chair banged into the legs of the one who had gestured and he fell back to sit upon the sleeping bags and cooler, swearing through a groan. The one beside him had screwed his sombrero back on his head, and Carlos couldn’t see his face anymore, but he could hear the words as they flew out under the brim. “Christ save us all! It’s the little guy!”

He had never seen them, but he had heard them, and though it had been in delirium, that occasional waking to metallic voices in which dreams were part of coma and sentient awareness indistinguishable from dreams, he’d had a picture of them, in stories and the muffled talk that proceeded from them and was joined to the sounds of motion, the creak of furniture and that shuffling of slippered feet through doorways, all of it like an audio shadow play, heard from behind a screen. And he may have somehow counted them, for he was not surprised that they were four. Harry Truman, he thought, World War II and The Bomb, as he lay in the crease where the veranda joined the railing in his sleeping bag. He could see stars between the worn, wooden uprights, and the air was cool and fresh. He’d given them the house, the bed for John and Larry, the other two on the floor in corners, and he could hear their voices, almost as before, that metal quality no longer part of a dream image, understood now as infirmity, their tracheotomies and the effort and the whistles in their breathing. Larry in his skullcap and linen and trimmed mustache, stylish even in chemotherapy; Frank, heavy and disheveled, that slightly protruding upper lip he’d pictured, receded now, replaced by the jutting of his lower jaw, slightly bulldogish, skin veined and stretched tight at his sinking cheeks, jowls hanging down below his chin. He wondered if anyone would recognize them in youthful photographs. And at this different desert, though it was not really that, but scrub and ground where crops had been traded in for oil near the sea, he thought of T. E. Lawrence: “The living knew themselves just sentient puppets on God’s stage.” It was the way he’d imagined them, the textures of their lives only in their told stories, voices flat like silhouettes behind them. But what he saw in them was faces animated in the present, for they were in a story now and not telling one.

The surveyors left shortly after their arrival. They’d managed to lug the chair up to the veranda, then had wheeled it right through the house and out the back door to the porch. They’d seen the cauldrons in the yard then, and Carlos had seen John grip the metal handle, and once they’d unloaded the chair, he’d settled himself into it, and Larry had covered his knees with one of the blankets. The surveyors eyed them as they packed up their gear, then handed Carlos some sort of document and left.

There was so much to say that there seemed nothing to say, and only after they’d unpacked and negotiated places for themselves and Larry and Frank were carrying buckets from the pump out to the cauldron and filling it and working at a wood fire under it, did Gino turn from his place on the porch steps to watch Carlos remove the deed from his pocket and hand it to John, who sat in the wheelchair looking out at the beginning of the foothills and the oak tree Chepa had planted at the property’s perimeter. A yellow wooden stake stood beyond the trunk, still under the spreading branches, a red plastic ribbon fluttering in the light breeze at its tip. The tree had grown into a massive stateliness over the past sixty-seven years.

“This isn’t it,” John said, holding the deed out at arm’s length to study it. “It was a letter. Corzo had signed it. Chepa too. It had a seal. What’s this name here?”

“Roberto Menéndez,” Carlos said. “The previous owner. The man mentioned an alias, Calaca.”

“You’re shitting me!” John said. A cigarette hung from his lips, bobbing as he spoke. He’d tilted his derbylike hat back, and wisps of grey hair poked out at the crown above his bushy brow. Carlos saw the angry scar, running from eye to chin.

“And you?” Gino said. “For him it was Chepa. How did you get there?”

His wrist rested on his knee, one leg lifted to a higher step. He’d found a thin weed somewhere and it dangled from his mouth, and in his boots and sombrero, he looked like a wiry old Mexican farmhand, but for his face and that Truman brow.

“I don’t know,” Carlos said. “But it was you then? At the records office?”

“Just about three days ago,” John said. “They were no help at all.”

Carlos looked down at him and at the deed. “What about a man named Joaquín Sánchez? Do you know that name?”

Gino had talked them into it, inducing a little guilt and a little promise. They’d been talking about Chepa again, her leaving and her letter, and about Joaquín and John’s days in Tampico. The doctors had brought another group of potential buyers to see the Manor, and they’d stood in a tight cluster in the solarium, speaking about the potential for renovation, ignoring the men who sat in their chairs, smoking, huffing through their tubes, and when they’d left Carolyn had come in with their dinners, and Larry had tried to joke with Gino, yet again, when she had shushed away in her starched A-line and tennis shoes. Kelly was gone now, permanently, and Gino was at the window, looking out across the meadow and up to Kelly’s house. He could see dark places where clapboards had torqued and fallen away, and he thought he saw a slight sagging in the roof. The yellow lights on the barricades were blinking.

“Fuck that,” he said. “Enough with sexual fantasy. It isn’t even that, just a lame joke for the lame.”

“You’re right,” Larry had said. “Just something to do.”

“No,” Gino said, turning to look at the three of them. “It isn’t even that. We’re not doing anything. We’re hardly even living.”

He got them to get their bankbooks and insurance policies. Then he went to his own bedside locker to get his, and when he came back, and they were all gathered again, he produced a number of maps and brochures, various routes to Tampico and places to stay and see there. One of the hotels was the one John had lived in over a half century before. It had changed, renovations and ownership, but he still recognized the façade, and the picture even showed the very window he’d looked down from, and the picture made a promise real, and he was drawn into Gino’s talk as more than talk, and it was not long before Frank and Larry could imagine the place too, beyond those stories of it, as something concrete, really down there in Mexico, a place to go, and maybe be alive in a way different from this inertia in the going. They found they had a good deal of money between them, given negotiables, enough at least, and John thought he might have a house, and the others thought they might share in that for a while, and if not, so what, and the next morning Gino slipped out and went to a travel agent and in the afternoon was back with the tickets and reservations.

“I am fucking beat,” Frank said.

He sat on the steps near Gino’s knee, looking out to where Larry poked at the brush fire under the cauldron with a stick, still in his linen outfit. Steam was rising at the broad mouth, dissipating in the dusky air a few feet above it. Beyond the shadows of the oak’s branches and the ruined chicken coop, the foothills rose up darkly, then brightened into a golden glow where the sun bathed the last visible ridge. Larry was cutting carrots and celery now, and onions, casting them into the cauldron to join the three chickens. They’d brought a portable barbecue, and he’d settled it on a log and was using it as a table.

“I could use a little help,” he said, his voice like crystal in the clear evening air, and Gino pushed up stiffly from the porch steps and ambled out to the yard.

They’d eaten their dinner on the porch, watching the foothills darken and disappear, listening to the night birds singing above their quiet talk, no extended stories now, just light laughter and gentle joking in this new circumstance together. And they found ways to bring Carlos into it, for he had lived at the Manor too, for a while at least, just a few feet from the simple textures of their lives. They spoke of their few days in Tampico, the Panuco and the square, places John had taken them, to tell bits of his story once again. Carlos had nothing to add to all of this, but when they spoke of the lighthouse he joined in, telling his own story, that one about the fallen timber that had gotten him to the Manor. John spoke of Chepa, her house here, and the dogs dyed in the cauldrons, and Gino said he thought he’d tasted yellow in the chicken.

Carlos could hear their stertorous breathing through the crickets, the squeak of the bedsprings as they shifted, occasional groans. He started to think of the morning, though they’d not spoken of any plans, then he stopped doing that. This night, he thought, my house, but maybe it isn’t really mine, though I have the documents. He started to think of something else, the fire and his mother, but the crickets joined the breathing, indistinguishable from it, and he joined the old men in exhaustion and fell into a sleep that was empty of any concern.

The Foothills

This is his story.

Carlos awoke to the sound of activity, the screen’s slap at the rear of the house and a constant, monotonous clopping, and wondered if he could turn. He was wedged in on the veranda’s boards at the rail in his sleeping bag, and in his night’s turning had become a tightly wrapped mummy. He heard a hacking cough, somebody spitting and the shuffle of feet, and then rolled over, struggled to get his arms free, and found the zipper.

John was on the back porch in his wheelchair and straw hat, a bowl of steaming farina held in his cupped hands over the blanket that covered his legs, and he raised it in offering as Carlos passed Larry, who was tending the fire under another cauldron, one that had slipped from its stone foundation but would still hold water, and came up the porch steps. He’d walked over the baked clay at the house side, not wanting to disturb the men’s ablutions by entering.

“Sitting,” he said.

“Until I stand up,” said John. “There’s hot stuff inside.”

Gino was at the sink, ladling the cereal into bowls. They’d brought powdered milk and sugar, and there were spoons on the drain board. Frank was tidying his sleeping bag in a corner, and Carlos saw the two others, lined up side by side on the bed’s springs like body bags for skeletal remains.

“You found the toilet?”

“The shit house? Yeah. Such as it is. It’s tilted,” Gino said.

“Most everything is,” said Carlos, accepting the bowl Gino handed him.

When he reached the porch again, the chair was empty, and John was standing beside Frank at the railing. Both were rolling their shoulders, extending their arms and legs in odd gestures, as if ordering their bones again in their skins.

“We were just saying about the houses,” Larry spoke from his place at the cauldron.

There had been no buildings at all on the few-mile trek from the main road to the house, not when John had been here with Chepa, but they had passed many on their way out. They’d taken a bus from Tampico, then had managed to hook a ride in the bed of an old half-ton, a farmer returning from market.

“But the thing was, they were ruins. They’d been built after I left here, then had gone through a lifetime.”

“History,” Frank said. “Something else when it becomes real.”

“As with the bed,” John said. “It was very strange to be sleeping there again.”

“Especially with him.” It was Gino. He’d come out on the porch to join them, and Larry grinned at the cauldron’s side when he heard him speak.

The sun rose over the house and lit up the foothills, low scrub and rock of various colors, and even the sand was various, darkly coarse in shadows the rock cast, subtle striations of color in the alluvial spills. There were flowers here and there, delicate desert bloom in reds and yellows, and a few patches of moss where rock under the surface held moisture.

John was speaking about the landing field, the bed, and the outhouse they could see from the porch off to the left near the ruined chicken coop, all parts of a story they had heard before, even bits of it remembered hazily in that past delirium by Carlos. But they were there now, and things were real and without anchor, and needed to be gathered again into a history. The oak tree stood at the edge of the yard and the story, massive and unconcerned. It seemed the machine of time, a perpetual calendar. It had been a sapling, and John spoke of its planting, and of Joaquín again, and the blood and the bullet holes in the house floor and the carvings of the names of revolutionaries in the walls. They’d made no plans for leaving, not just yet, and Gino shushed Frank when he wondered about things at the Manor.

They had turned toward each other, John in his chair again, Gino perched on the steps, Larry and Frank leaning against the porch rail, and were listening to Carlos tell bits of the tale explaining his arrival, mentioning Strickland and his manuscripts and death, Peter in his coma, his own days as a child in Tampico and later near the border. Then they heard Gino, a quick sucking of air whistling in his tracheotomy tube, and when they turned to him, he was pointing, a finger near his chin, and they all followed his gesture to the brink of the foothills just beyond the shadows cast by the oak’s branches and saw the man and the animals.

He sat the horse so comfortably in stillness, body slightly slouched and wrists crossed on the horn, that it seemed he might have been there all along and they’d not noticed him, but for the movements in the string of donkeys and the other horses, saddled and bridled, as they turned their lowered heads, pulling grass from the spare tufts, and lifted them to quietly blow and scent from time to time. He wore a hat, a sombrero with a brief brim, and most of his face was lost in shadow under it, but they could see his broad, flat nose, the slabs of his cheeks and his thick neck above the collar of his heavy cotton shirt, one stitched in rectangles in various patterns, the colors muted in reds and greens. The shirt matched his pants, in color and material, though the latter featured broad horizontal stripes of color, and his shoes at the ends of his short, thick legs were homespun too, something made of a dusty brown leather, loose-looking and comfortable, like sturdy slippers where they hung free of his stirrups. His horse’s head lurched up from the ground, catching something, and they saw his hand slip from the horn, a finger trace a vein in the animal’s shoulder where the saddle ended, and the horse quieted and went back to its cropping. There were five other horses, and three donkeys, their wooden racks loaded with blankets and cloth-wrapped bundles, and clay vessels were tethered to the wood with leather thongs.

Carlos pushed up from the porch floor, where he’d been sitting to the side of John’s wheelchair, leaning against the house, and went down the steps and across the yard and under the shadows of the tree’s branches at their edges. He reached the horse and the man perched upon it, and they saw the man’s face, his broad forehead and the shadows of his dark eyes, as he tilted his hat back and looked down at Carlos and spoke to him. They spoke for a while, and the horses and the donkeys were constant in their cropping, their heads moving aimlessly in infinite patience, as if they had all the time in the world. Then Carlos had turned and was heading back across the yard toward them, and in moments he was climbing the porch steps, and then he was speaking.

“I think he says if we want to know about ownership, or about the oil, we might want to come with him.”

Gino was sitting at the side of the porch steps, much as he’d sat at the window in the Manor, watching him, his back to them.

“What oil?” he said, his voice muffled in his throat. “Does he speak English?”

“No,” Carlos said. “And very little Spanish either. He says, under the tree, on the far side.”

Gino climbed up in his place, pulling himself by the railing, then limped down to the ground and started across the yard, his legs stiff, tugging and adjusting his clothing as he went. They saw the man in the saddle beyond him, maybe watching him, but they couldn’t tell.

“This is not in the plan,” Larry said, and Frank laughed, and John took a cigarette from his pack and tapped it against his can and lit it.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Well, I do,” Frank said. “We don’t have one. But we didn’t come this far to do nothing. I didn’t. I feel pretty good this morning.”

“Shit,” Larry said. “So do I.”

“I think he says it’s a way. Two days, maybe three,” Carlos said.

“I don’t feel too bad either,” John said. “I think I can walk a bit. Maybe even ride.” Sparks fell to the blanket covering his knees, and he brushed them away absently.

They were sure about Gino and none of them needed to speak of him. But they were lying to one another, and Carlos could see that in the way they tested their bodies, then turned away from that, as they spoke. Pretty good meant waking alive once again each morning, not ready to ride out on horses into the wilderness. But they were watching the horses and the donkeys and the man, and Carlos saw Frank tug at the brim of his Stetson, much like a cowboy might on the plains watching cattle on a windy day. He saw John look over at Larry, who winked at him like a boy, then made a muscle in his thin biceps and pointed to it with a finger. His cap had slipped to a rakish angle, and his baggy, pajamalike pants were crossed at the ankles, seductively. He’d turned to face them, and was leaning against the porch railing, smiling, and John laughed and puffed at his cigarette. Then Gino was climbing the porch steps, his body loosened and almost supple again after his short walk. He lifted his black palm and showed it to them, the oil running in a line over his wrist and down his arm.

* * *

It took the rest of the morning and a good part of the early afternoon to get ready. Carlos insisted they eat lunch, and Larry wanted a bath, and the others thought that a good idea too, and Gino and Frank got fires going under the cauldrons, and Carlos and the man who’d come down out of the mountains worked at the pump and carried buckets. He was not really a man, but a boy of no more than seventeen, or eighteen, Carlos thought, but he couldn’t find words to ask the question. He was respectful of the men, treating them as equals, but attentive to their ages and infirmities. He carried the buckets to the cauldrons’ edges, but handed them over to be poured in, and he watched and didn’t help as Gino crawled under the house to hide away the bundles of gear they’d not be taking with them. They laid out efficient clothing, and Larry traded his cap for a water-shaped straw cowboy hat, fine and tightly woven, that the boy produced from a bundle on one of the donkeys. He was pure Indian, Carlos thought, and felt strangely comfortable in the presence of his stolid demeanor. Their eyes met from time to time, without expression, enigmatic to Carlos, but soothing. Frank helped John into a cauldron, then climbed into one himself. Larry sank in the other, his head resting in steam against the rim. Gino waited his turn, and Carlos and the boy too, after hand gestures and urging, took theirs. The old men watched the bodies of the younger men as they climbed in, then turned away from that useless yearning.

By three they were in their saddles and headed up into the foothills. The young man, his name sounded like Alma, was at the head, and Carlos brought up the rear, the donkeys tethered behind him, their line tied to his horn. It pressed against his leg when the donkeys tarried, but tugging it was familiar, some vaguely remembered gesture. He’d ridden when he was young, with his father. When he looked back, he could see John’s wheelchair strapped to a wooden frame. Larry road in front of him in his new cowboy hat, then Frank and John. Gino was lost to sight from time to time, but his broad sombrero marked him, where he bounced along behind Alma, and they’d barely climbed the initial incline and started up the next, when they heard him call out. “Are we almost there yet?” And Carlos heard John laugh up ahead, and saw him cast away the dead butt of his cigarette. The men had put folded blankets over their saddles, protection for their bony asses. Still Carlos saw their hips shift, their free hands working at their thighs, and saw Alma turn and look back when the horses broke into jarring trots, somehow knowing that, then slowing their procession down to a comfortable walk again.

The ground was desert sand, rocks and shifted slabs of shale, and they meandered, no pathway at all, and after each incline they reached a stretch of level ground, but with another incline just past that to negotiate, and they couldn’t see beyond it until they had climbed it and were confronted with another. Then they came to a rise that was a cliff’s face, an escarpment running up into the sky for a good hundred feet. They saw clouds above it and birds floating under them that may have been vultures or hawks, and Alma turned in his saddle and gestured to the right, and they headed along the escarpment, under its cool shadow, until they reached an arroyo that turned as they ascended, the horses slipping and kicking for purchase in loose shale, until the sun was blocked by a cliff face on their right as well, the air cooler, still, but growing bone-wearying.

Carlos saw John struggle to get at the blanket tied to the saddle behind him. He managed to free it. Then it was over his shoulders, his hat brim touching it, and he looked like an old Indian. They came to a turning, and light broke out again ahead, the sun shimmering in blown sand at a distance above the escarpment’s lip, a dust devil in sun, as if an animate figure standing in the air, and nothing beyond it that they could see, until they got beyond it, pressing handkerchiefs and hats into their faces against the blown grit, and their procession had paused and turned and they looked back over the plains of the state of Tamaulipas, and could see the city of Tampico, parts of it between clouds that were now under them, and beyond it the Gulf of Mexico in the far distance. They heard a slap of leather, and Alma turned them, and they saw what lay before them.

They were at the edge of a high plateau, the ground very much the same as what they had, in the last hours, passed over, stone, sand and shale, tufts of rough grass and low cactus poking up in places. The plateau seemed perfectly flat to the left and right, and ahead of them it was flat too, extending out for what seemed miles and only ending in the far distance where foothills began again, and above these foothills mountains rose, jagged and colorless, disappearing in mist and coming dusk at their upper reaches. They saw something in the distance, on the rough plain between themselves and the mountains, animals possibly, moving from left to right, but they were no more than tiny dots, blinking through cones of sand stirred up by capricious wind gusts.

“Good Christ,” Frank said. “How far do you think that is?”

“I don’t know, but we won’t get there tonight,” Carlos answered.

They made camp in the middle of the plain. It could have been anywhere on the plain. It was just rock and cactus and flatness, and the wind rose and began to blow constantly as the sun sank. Alma circled the animals, their heads facing into the circle, muzzles touching and brushing against each other, their lids half closed, approaching sleep already, and staked them there. Then, while the men sat slumped in the sand and Carlos worked to unhitch needed belongings, he went to the water and feed that was a donkey’s burden and removed pottery vessels from the wooden rack there and went back and fed and watered them. Then he stepped away into the growing darkness surrounding their campsite, and in a few minutes came back, arms loaded with sticks and bleached branches that he had found somewhere. Then he got to work on the fire.

It was later. The fire had flamed high into the night at first, but then had settled into a bright, hot glow that was circumscribed, like a fire in a hearth, bright enough to bathe their faces where they sat in a circle facing in at the fire and across it at each other. Alma had set a stone vessel in the embers, and in minutes there was steam rising from it. It was a kind of stew, delicious and warm in their bellies, spicy and sweet, and they ate heartily. They’d cast away stones and dug the trenches in sand in the way Alma had demonstrated. They’d lain in their sleeping bags in them, to test them, finding them comfortable and deep enough to break the wind. They were behind them, still in the fire’s light, and they each knew they’d just have to roll over and crawl in, not much effort and unexpected pain.

“This is some fucking thing,” Gino said, smiling at Alma, who sat beside Carlos beyond the embers. Alma smiled back, as if he understood.

“Does he say we’ll get there tomorrow?” Larry asked.

Carlos shook his head. “I don’t know. I can’t quite get that out of him.”

A breeze blew at the blanket at John’s shoulder, and Frank reached over and pulled it and tucked it under his arm. John was smoking again, and he passed the pack and saw Alma tear the filter away before lighting up, using a stick with a glowing tip.

“Should we talk?” Gino said.

“About what?” Frank said. “Our fucking aching bones?”

“Could be it’s a good hurt,” John said. “Like work? Remember that?”

“I don’t know,” Larry said. “But it could be a comfort, to think of it that way, I mean.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Frank said.

Carlos was watching them, in their hats and blankets in the fire’s glow. The light from the fire bathed their cheeks and brows, and shadows cast by their noses caused angular planes, reconstructing their features. Heads turned and mouths opened on dark holes, and their hair was invisible in darkness above their bone-hard and receding brows. Calaveras, he thought. They’re even dressed for some historical occasion. But they were not that. In the firelight, in expression, they were animate and particular. Only when they were poised and listening, or falling asleep with their eyes open, as was Gino now, did they seem part of that other life.

“Shit! I’m falling asleep here like a horse!” Gino said, and they all laughed. Then they ordered their clothing and rolled over and crawled into their sleeping bags. Alma went into the darkness again for more wood, and when he returned they were all sleeping.

The Mountains

They spent another day and night on the barren plateau, and when they awoke near dawn on the morning of the second day they found they were under the mountains and that the wind had died. The men were slow and heavy-footed, blankets over their shoulders and their hats screwed tight, and in the first dawn shadows they looked like old tintypes.

Larry turned, and Carlos saw his hollow cheeks across the coffee fire, grit now in the creases near his eyes and a dark hue, like old blood, where sand had blasted his brow. His face had hardened into a fixed expression, as if a clay casting had replaced it, and he was looking to where Frank sat on his sleeping bag, tending to Gino, who was coughing. His tracheotomy tube had gotten clogged with sand, and he’d removed it, and Frank was reaming and washing it in water in a clay bowl. “The fucking thing,” Carlos heard, and then more coughing. When they were finished and the tube was back in place and Gino had blown through it, Frank rose and hobbled off beyond the staked animals, to relieve himself in privacy on the plain.

The mountains started up in slabs of rock and low growth, much like the ground they’d left behind, but by mid-morning they had come upon a distinct trail. Two horses wide, it moved through sand and shoulder-high rock at first, then, when the rock fell away to either side, they found the ground had turned to dirt, the rock become pine and honeysuckle, and they were in a small fertile valley, densely populated with trees of various kinds, birds flitting in them, and singing, and they were in cool shade, protected from a sun that had heated up as they ascended. They could smell the horses now, and the donkeys back behind them, and they could hear them blow and wheeze.

“Pollen.” It was Alma at the head, the first word they’d understood, and Gino looked back and grinned, his sombrero tilted, and Carlos thought he saw weak laughter in John’s shoulders.

They ate lunch in the saddle, just bread and a tepid fruity brew produced by Alma, and by early afternoon they could see the valley narrowing, dark rock escarpments rising to either side, spied through the trees, and when they came to the valley’s far end, what seemed at first an impenetrable rock wall gave way where the trees ended, and they found themselves in a narrow arroyo, pebbles and petrified wood, and were climbing once again, single file.

The arroyo twisted and turned, clearly a snow runoff river that coursed quickly in winter, and at times Alma and Gino were out of Carlos’s sight up ahead. The horses kicked and shuffled in the uncertain footing, fighting for purchase, and Carlos saw Frank’s legs gripped tight to his animal’s barrel, saw John ahead, his hand come up to hold his threatened hat. Then the arroyo straightened, ascending even more steeply, and by the time they’d reached the place where it ended and there was firm ground again, the horses were lathered and blowing and the men were too, sweat-soaked and shaking. Alma reined in and pulled up there, and they all sat in their saddles, wheezing through their tracheotomy tubes and pulling at their clothing.

They were standing in a quiet glade, tall pines rising around them and dark green moss under the horses’ hooves. Larry coughed and seemed ready to speak, but Alma’s hand was in the air, gesturing for them to get going. There was light up ahead where the glade ended, and he kicked his horse gently and started them off in that direction, and when they got there and the trees fell away behind them, they found they were out under a cooler sun, high above a broad open valley that sloped up in the far distance, becoming another mountain, but a verdant and low one, a kind of broad dome under the sky, and they heard water off to the right, the gurgling of a small stream or quiet river. Alma turned them away from the edge of the steep descent, rock and twisted scrub and pine running down the slope to the valley’s floor, and they moved back from it and along it, heading toward the sound, ghost figures in their dusty clothing and sweat-stained faces. Then the sun left, blocked by an outcrop of massive rock, and Alma led them back into the trees and shade and around the rock that increased the shade, and when they could see the lip of the steep descent again and were back in sun, they came to the source of the water sound.

They were in a small entranceway. The rock rose up to their left, just feet away, and in its face hung iron rings, and when they looked down to the horses’ hooves and saw the prints of many previous horses, they knew the rings were meant for tethering. Off to the right, the trees were thin, and through their branches they could see more rock and what seemed man-made things, and they could hear the water there. Alma climbed from the saddle and tied his horse’s reins to one of the rings, then gestured for the men to do the same. Carlos could hear their joints creak as they struggled to the ground and knew some of the sounds came from his own body. Alma waited patiently to the side as the men stretched and groaned, and only when Gino said “All right, all right” did he head into the stand of trees, looking back to see that they were following. Their destination was no more than thirty yards away, and when they got there they all stood in a certain wonder and immediate anticipation at the brink of it.

It was a hot spring, a bowl carved out in a slab of ground rock over many years, fed by a steaming rivulet behind it where the rock ascended in natural steps into the pine forest. What they’d heard was the run of the watercourse as it gurgled down many stone steps, flowing between shelves and washing over rounded boulders, until it fell for a few feet, a solid cylinder, as from a massive faucet, stirring the pool’s surface turgidly, then running out in gentle waves to wash over at the bowl’s perimeter. And there were stone and pottery planters on the shelves beside the course of the descending stream and small fruit trees growing in them, green leaves, oranges and pomegranates, and beyond the pool’s lip, to the sides of the water’s fall, stone seats had been fashioned, heavy rock blocks, and there were clothes trees behind them, actual trees, ash or hickory, thought Carlos, stripped white by age and weather, staked firmly in the mossy ground beyond the rock, trimmed branches like hooks, for hanging shirts, pants, and underwear.

Gino was the first in, naked at the edge, still wearing his sombrero. Carlos could see the purple scar tissue covering Gino’s back and running in serpentine lines down his knotty arms and legs. He sat on the stone at the pool’s edge, his feet in the water, then slipped in and disappeared, his hat left to float on the surface, and when he appeared again he was across on the pool’s other side, his head and shoulders, grinning and blowing through his tube. Then they all were in, even Alma, who entered in a shallow dive, making no splash, like a dark dolphin. Carlos saw Larry’s bald head, dust washed away at his mustache, Frank’s heavy chest, thick with brittle grey hair.

They were in the pool a long time. There was no soap, but there was sand at the bottom and they used it to scrub themselves. The water was hot and soothing, and in a while they were just bobbing in their places, Larry at the pool’s rim, his head rested against rock, possibly sleeping, the others moving slowly into various engagements, speaking softly, then moving on, arms in lazy waves across the surface. Carlos hung in the water beside the falling cylinder, feeling the pleasure of its massage, and looked out beyond the pool and down into the valley and across it to where the mountain’s dome rose up in the bright sky. There were a few thin clouds above it now, almost touching it. We’ll be going there, he thought. Then he looked back to see the way they’d come and spied out the twists and turns in the ascending arroyo. They were high above it now, and though it was lost to sight where the rocky walls containing it rose up in places, he could see the course of its meandering, its bed of brush and stone, and that it forked off at a few turnings where other dry rivers joined it. It was a maze, unseen in their ascending, for Alma had known the way, and he could see a double forking near the top and that it rose to level ground in a number of places in addition to the one they’d used. He was looking down a brief pathway through the trees, branches waving slowly across his vision, and beyond the pathway he could see a space of open ground, rough earth where he thought a river fork might empty as it finished its ascent. He lifted his eyes beyond the lip to trace the arroyo’s branchings as it twisted down. Then he saw something, a trace of movement in a declivity in the rocky wall. An animal, he thought, but it bobbed oddly, and when it appeared again he thought it was the crown of a hat. And then the arroyo turned and the rock fell away for a moment, and he saw the head below the hat and the horse’s head and the other rider moving up to the side in the tight passage.

He climbed out of the pool and went naked around it and entered the pine stand, then went to the horses and searched through the packs and bundles until he found the binoculars. They were Gino’s, a fine old pair, and he went back to the pool with them, chilled a little in the dry air, and climbed back into bubbling warm water beside the falling cylinder. Then he lifted the glasses and searched the arroyo once again. The men were dreaming in the pool now, eyes closed, Larry asleep at the rim, the others listlessly bobbing in place, their arms hanging suspended below the surface, and only Alma was aware of the tenseness in Carlos’s shoulders as he concentrated.

Then he found them again, two riders, faceless at this distance, but he could see their hats and leather-dressed bodies and the scabbards strapped to the horses’ haunches at their legs and the butts of the rifles in them, and he thought he could see the shine of a pistol in a holster at the hip of one rider. They passed out of sight at a turning, then appeared again, their horses pressed together, slipping on the uncertain ground, and he thought he saw one reach across and touch the other. Their hats tilted back, and they seemed to be gazing up the arroyo to where Carlos was watching them, naked in the pool. Then they were entering an edge of shadow under the rock wall and soon they were out of sight. Carlos lowered the glasses and looked across the surface of the water to where Alma was, watching him, then he climbed out of the pool again and moved down the brief pathway through the trees and across open ground until he was standing at the edge of the arroyo’s emptying. He could feel a breeze at the lip. The hair at his groin stiffened, and he lifted the glasses again and found them immediately. They’d reached a place where the arroyo opened and the ascent was less steep, and their horses stepped ahead with more certainty, though slowly, and their figures were distinct in the glass as he spied them passing among branches of scrub oak and poplar, leaves casting mottled shadows over their clothing and faces. They seemed much closer than he would have imagined, and when he lowered the binoculars for a moment he found he could see them quite well without them, no more than two hundred yards away. Then he looked back through the tree-lined pathway to the pool. The men were there as before, but Alma was nowhere to be found, and he turned back and lifted the glasses once again.

The one on the left wore a leather vest over a dark shirt buttoned at the wrists and a stained Stetson, and when they came out from under the leaf shadows and into a brief clearing, Carlos saw him reach among objects tethered to the saddle and find the scabbard. He pulled the weapon free, its barrel glinting in the sun, and Carlos saw his fingers near the chamber and trigger housing, checking or arranging something. Then he was working to get the rifle back in place and was having trouble, and Carlos saw the other figure, in leather shirt and breeches, fringe along the sleeves and legs, listing to the side, his body shaking, racked by some malady. The one holding the rifle had his head down, face invisible under his hat’s dark circle, as he struggled, the barrel hitting among hanging objects as he searched for the scabbard’s mouth. There were pots and pans there, sacks and awkward satchels, some thick and quilted, and Carlos saw what he thought was a pink cosmetics case, square and made of plastic, and behind the saddle, over the bedroll secured there, other objects were tied with leather thongs, a set of skewers and a cooking grate, what might have been the sections of a fishing pole, a bundle made of wood utensils, a black skillet, and a net bag full of what seemed dirty laundry.

The rifle barrel disappeared as he found the sheath, and his partner must have called out then, for his head jerked in that direction, and Carlos saw his hand reach out and grasp the listing figure’s arm. The horses pulled up, almost touching, and the falling figure leaned into the other, who put his arm around him and reached across with his free hand and fumbled with the straps of a beaded purse that hung from the saddle horn beside a long machete and what may have been a short shotgun. Then his hand was in the purse up to his forearm, rummaging around in it. He didn’t seem to find what he was looking for, and Carlos saw the hand of the other come up to his own throat. He wore a Stetson too, sweat-stained at the brim, which vibrated in his coughing or choking, and the other, in seeming desperation at their travail, leaned to the off side of his horse, dragging his partner from the saddle, across the rump of his own mount, legs tangled in fishing pole and laundry, until they both slipped, gathered in one another’s arms, down along the loose and flapping stirrup strap, and fell to the rocky ground.

Their progress had slowed dramatically, and though their dark dress remained ominous and their weapons, slung among the various burdens their horses carried, were serious ones, they now seemed harmless and ineffectual as they rolled in the rocks and pebbles, working to disentangle themselves and gain footing, and Carlos lowered the glasses for a moment and rubbed his eyes, then lifted them again and searched them out.

Once again, they were mounted and moving up the twisting riverbed, and Carlos saw the wave of the red bandanna as it was handed across and coughed or sneezed into, and then the figure was falling again, this time to the far side and they were pulling up, the man lifting his leg and throwing it across the horse’s rump while they still moved, then hopping around at the horses’ heads, which lurched up in surprise at his quick passage, and he was reaching out to catch his partner before he reached the earth, and once again they were tangled together, then were sitting at the horses’ feet, and the one was tending the other, rubbing his back and dabbing at his brow with the red handkerchief. Then, in a while, they managed to mount up again and then were moving, their horses tightly pressed together, and were coming up with a different urgency, though slowly, the coughing and retching continuing, as well as the listing, as the one held the other’s arm firmly, keeping him somewhat steady in the saddle.

Carlos lowered the glasses and turned back to the pool and saw the men stirring. Larry was at the edge still, but his eyes were open now and he was standing, chest and shoulders in the air, water cupped in his thin hands and lifted up to flood over his bald head and down his neck. Frank and John were beside each other, near the falling cylinder, only their heads above the water, disembodied, as they watched Gino, who was showing them the dead man’s float, lying face down on the surface, knotty arms and legs extended, the splotches of scar tissue on his back like red lichen, still as some drowned animal after a flood. Carlos heard a shuffling, and when he looked up and to the pool’s left, he saw Alma in the higher branches of an oak tree, above the descending watercourse. He was standing in the branches, leaning out and to the side for good vantage, sighting down the arroyo, and Carlos saw the primitive club strapped at his naked waist.

Then he heard the coughing and wheezing, the slow shuffling clop of the horses’ hooves, and the men heard them too. They were poised for a moment, the water’s surface still, then John pushed away from Frank, sending out ripples, and Gino was lifted on the wake, and Carlos saw Frank’s hand reach for his floating foot before he turned back to see the riders as they emerged around the last turning, their horses climbing the few remaining feet of stony ground, until they were standing before him, stomping and blowing on the mossy carpet between the pool and the tree-lined pathway and the arroyo’s lip. He looked up at the rider, the one sneezing and shaking, gasping in stertorous gulps of air, face hidden in the red bandanna held at the mouth, then saw the figure begin to list and fall again, the arm of the other reach across, inadvertently hitting the hat brim. The Stetson tipped away, tumbling over the horse’s rump, and the hair followed it, black and grey-streaked, falling to the rider’s shoulders. Then the hand holding the red cloth sunk to her saddle horn, he saw the blue mascara running down her cheeks from rheumy eyes. Still gasping and falling, fringe shaking frantically at arms and legs, she looked around wildly, up at Alma in the tree, then down at Carlos, then over his head toward the pool. He heard a splashing and another gasping. It was Gino, his voice crooked and his tracheotomy tube whistling in it as he called out, “Ramona!” and when Carlos saw the stricken gringo face of the other rider, the set of those horsey teeth, he knew he’d found his father too, though he’d not been searching for him.

Gino passed him, naked on the mossy carpet, the others splashing out of the pool and following, and Carlos was heading for his father, who had tipped the pink cosmetics case and spilled its contents on the ground, when he heard the voice call from the tree, “pollen,” and then their hands were brushing against each other as their fingers slipped through lipsticks, eyeliners, various rouges and compacts, and his father lifted his head once and looked at him without recognition. Then Carlos heard the woman crying out, through congestion and wheeze, “the fucking inhaler!” and when his eyes moved to her, he saw her face through white and knotty legs, her frantic painted brows and the start of a scar there, below wrinkled scrotums.

Gino was a naked child, leaning over her; “Ramona” again, this time plaintively. His mouth moved down to hers for artificial respiration, and Carlos saw her head turn desperately. Then his father was on his feet and stumbling toward the cluster of old men, the tube in his hand, and was pushing among their bony bodies, his arm extended and reaching down to her, and he saw her hand brush ruby scar tissue on Gino’s inner thigh as she struggled through the thicket of their legs, reaching for momentary salvation.

There were eight of them in their saddles when the sun came up. Ramona rode to the side of Gino, and Carlos could see the various accoutrements set to bouncing on her horse’s rump between the figures of the men ahead when they separated, pulling their mounts away for better footing as they descended the escarpment, heading for the valley floor. He rode beside his father, the donkeys on the rope line behind them, and at times they looked at one another, still trying to find a way to be together. John’s hat was tilted forward on his brow to fight the rising sun, and Frank and Larry were nodding, high on their folded blankets, sleepy after the long night of talking.

They’d set up camp in a clearing behind the rock pool, and smoke had risen from their fire, then filtered through the high branches of the pines surrounding them, until the fire was proper and the smoke was gone and they could see each other’s faces across the red embers in which the cook pot rested, steam and the scent of rich stew at its mouth. They ate, and drank Alma’s brew, and only when they were settled among blankets and sleeping bags in the coolness of the deeper night did they attempt explanation and the necessary reordering of their places among each other, and it was only when John had spoken Carlos’s name and Ramona had named his father, calling out Manuel and asking him to fetch something, that the two of them could look steadily at one another in acceptance of their relationship. Ramona sat at Gino’s side, and he was watching her, and on occasion they could hear the huff of her inhaler, not unlike those familiar sounds that issued from their tracheotomy tubes.

They’d been at the house before Carlos had arrived, and that wasn’t coincidence, since they had been there even earlier, scavenging. And Manuel had been there, too, many years before, when he was a child and his own father had taken him there and they had sat on horses and looked the place over. It was empty then and starting to run down, and his father had told him it might have been his, still could be, but he had been a child, anxious for other places, and the words had meant little to him, though he had not forgotten them. And then he was there again, with Ramona, to see about the cauldrons, if there was any possibility of moving them. They’d found the oil too, under the tree, but there was nothing in that for them, not until Carlos came with the surveyors, and they had hid themselves up in the foothills and seen the men arrive. Then they had begun to think there might be something, because Manuel remembered his father’s words and they were desperate now.

They had come to Tampico from the States a year ago, Manuel thinking they could make a new start there. It’s a long story, Ramona said, but in the States it was always difficult, because Manuel was a Mexican. Then in Tampico, with his gringo look, he was mistrusted. Gino huffed at the explanation, not buying it, but when she looked hard at him in a certain sadness he had bowed his head for her forgiveness, and she continued.

In Tampico there was nothing for them and they were growing old. She was fifty-nine, Manuel sixty-seven, and the money they had brought with them, a good deal of it in fact, was running out, and they were living carefully, though at a decent place still, not far from Chepa’s house, going out to find odd jobs and whatever else they could find that they could sell and thus replenish their money. They’d found deserted houses they could break into. They knew how to do that, and in some of the houses they’d found things of value. They’d found little at the house in question, but there were some things, and they had plans to return for the brass bed, and they were considering the cauldrons once again when they heard the sound of the Range Rover. “So many years,” Ramona said. “There were times we hoped for the future. But that was long ago, and now we’re old.” “Not really old,” Frank said. “Enough,” Ramona replied.

So they had watched the men, vague ideas blinking in their minds, and when Alma had come and the men had bathed in the cauldrons and then set off, they had returned to their own house and quickly loaded up their horses, then had followed their trail, and in a while there had seemed no way in which they could stop doing that. They had entered places that were infected with pollen, and they realized there was no turning back, not alone, and that those they followed might now become their saviors if Ramona’s asthma and allergies continued to affect her. When Carlos watched them through the glasses they were attempting a desperate assault. They had lost them, then had found them again, spied through their own glasses. But in the arroyo the pollen was thick, and halfway up Ramona had her attack, and their assault had turned away from aggression and into a search for help. “We were about halfway up,” Manuel mumbled, and Carlos looked over at him, vaguely remembering his passivity. “I’m too fucking old for this kind of thing,” Ramona said, and Manuel dropped his head to his chest, nodding deeply in agreement. “What about the fire?” Gino said, and Ramona looked at him in desperation once again. “Lord, father. I must have been someone else back then. Remember the jewel in my tongue? Someone else entirely.” “Are you married?” Gino asked, gently now. “Yes,” she said. “And he has been my savior.” “Coincidence,” John said. “There’s no accounting for it.”

They reached the valley floor, then found themselves in trees, taller and more shade-laden than they had pictured from above. There were animal trails, winding off in various directions through grasses and hard-packed dirt, and the one Alma led them down seemed no different from the rest. It too turned and twisted, and branches brushed against their legs as their horses followed the rumps of the ones ahead, in single file now. Ramona coughed and sputtered and lifted her inhaler to her mouth, and Gino turned in his saddle to look back at her. Carlos was in constant awareness of his father, and Gino’s turning seemed a presage of his own, should he too turn to face into that past, strangely erased by the present.

They came into small clearings, and sun warmed their heads and shoulders, and there were places where the trees thinned and they could see ahead for a good distance. It was close to ten by the time they saw through to where the trees ended, and when they reached that place and forest was behind them, they were standing at the brink of an open plain, a shallow bowl of breeze-wavering grasses, at the far edge of which rose up the first stones and rocks of the mossy foothills, and they could see a causeway where the foothills started, a broad trail that ascended gracefully, up through a rocky passage toward the domed mountain. Heavy trees hung languidly in mist, and the trail disappeared in mist before it reached the top, but there was sun above the plain, and Carlos thought the mist was really low clouds and that they’d come to brighter air above.

The Village

Mountain flowers grew where veins of moss joined the rocks like green mortar at their creases. There were bees in the flowers at head level, and Ramona was sneezing occasionally. The trail was broad enough to ride two abreast, and Gino was beside her, attentive in his sombrero. He leaned into her, talking. Carlos thought, all these years, but he had not turned to his father yet for such conversation. They rode beside each other, the donkeys hitched to that line behind them. The horses’ heads were up, scenting, their ears rotated to catch the breeze. They seemed expectant, legs lifting, hooves digging into the trail’s hard dirt with increasing energy, which the men lacked. John nodded off in his saddle, and Larry leaned over to touch and awaken him from time to time, to steady him, though he too was fighting sleep, and Frank rode singly ahead of them, constantly shifting his weight on the blanket and rotating a stiff shoulder. The soothing heat of the pool and the redemption of night’s sleep had worn away now, and they were dead tired in their bones, though the sun they could see through mountain mist above had not yet reached its zenith.

Then the trail climbed out of the bordering rocks and they entered onto a plateau that was a meadow, and they could see ahead, a quarter mile off, where the mountain rose up again in oak and ironwood, thick grasses at their bases, and honeysuckle too, and mountain aspen, white trunks like marble pillars in the greens and russets, and above that the misty blanket, lower now and impenetrable, a cloud layer, though luminous as sun filtered through it. Then they were crossing the meadow.

“Do you ever think of your mother?”

His mother had worked her fingers to the bone. He had thought of that sometimes, the actual words, because the garment factory in Matamoros had been a sweatshop and she had come home bleeding at her fingertips and once her finger had been caught in a machine in sewing, and he had seen the actual bone. His father had been younger than he himself was now, desperate in his gringo paleness, and while his mother had gotten a light-skinned Mexican for herself and a charming and handsome one, there’d been only a dull turmoil below that skin, and she was as poor and dulled in spirit as she had been before, once she had gotten him and then a child too, himself back then as he thought this, to press her down harder in the grinding.

But now his father was an old man and asking plaintively, and though he thought of the fire then, and blame, and his father leaving him, and his own first years of difficult bewilderment in the north, it was long ago and he’d not really thought of it with any feeling in many years. Forgiveness was beyond question now and even a little silly he thought, but his father was asking him for it here, though really for release from it as possibility, and as he looked over and saw his milky eyes, the same, he thought, as he had seen in his awakening to the fire after he had hit his head and fallen so many years ago, he hesitated to speak the real thing, so impossibly complicated, and only said, “Sometimes. She was a good woman. But it was the lunch hour, wasn’t it? And she was probably talking with her friends.”

“I don’t know,” his father said. “But I, too, think of her.”

Alma paused at the meadow’s edge, then turned to move along it for a few yards, until he found the trail again, and they started up the mountain among the trees. The trail was narrow, and they were in single file, branches hanging over them, sometimes low enough so they had to duck their heads. Carlos saw a branch brush against John’s hat, waking him, and saw him shift and settle on his saddle blanket, kick free of his stirrups and stretch his legs. The others were all attentive now, like the horses, no one beside them to infect them with a borrowed exhaustion, each in his own thoughts. Even Ramona seemed completely recovered behind her father, and Carlos saw her reach to the pink cosmetic case hung from her horn, remove a tube of lipstick and a small mirror, which sent a dim disk of light into the trees as she raised it to her face. Then he looked beyond her and saw mist in the trees, and soon they were climbing into it and Alma was no more than a misty shadow up ahead, and Carlos felt the moisture soaking through his pants to wet his legs and groin. They were in it for a good half hour, the horses blowing steam, and Carlos could see his own breath on the air. They were soaked through to the bone before they left it and climbed up into sunlight, which brightened over them as they moved out from under the canopy of branches and leaves and came into a small, mossy clearing, beyond which, just a few yards ahead, was the gateway to another world.

They were sitting their horses near the mouth of what had once been a street, and that city name seemed appropriate to Carlos because of the remnants of actual curbing he saw to his left and right, stone that had obviously been cut and polished and though broken in places now and twisted from its mooring still marked the course of a concave gutter where rainwater had run off. And the street itself was slightly domed for the purpose of drainage, and in the hard packed earth at the horses’ hooves he could see leavings of cobblestone, places where the dirt had washed away in rain. To either side of the street and above the curbs were a few half-ruined planters, massive low rectangles of stone holding dark dirt that had been turned and mulched recently, and growing in the dirt were small tight roses of various rich hues, above which he could see the dark doorways and thatched roofs of a meandering row of huts to the left, a wooded hill rising beyond them, the trees smaller but heavier in rich green foliage here in sun and light air at the mountain’s top.

Alma touched his horse’s flanks with his heels and it dipped its head and started off immediately, as if it had waited for the touch as signal and not urging, and Carlos could hear the horses’ hooves click on the stone leavings as they formed into pairs again and followed Alma’s lead, riding only a few dozen yards until they reached the mouth of the street and the large square opening before them and Alma pulled up again, motivated, Carlos thought, by occasion rather than pragmatic end. They were at the formal entrance to the city, and while there was no gate, he could see in the way the large rectangle presented itself, at least three hundred yards in length and gracefully wide, that they had come to the place of arrival and needed a moment to absorb the architecture.

Off at the sides of the space, which Carlos immediately thought of as an agora, were rows of low public buildings. They were fashioned in stone, and though for the most part their façades were intact, he could see places where the fluted carvings above doorways at roofline had broken away and fallen, and some walls had collapsed too, vacant spaces at a few buildings’ sides, as if fitted pieces from a jigsaw puzzle had been lifted away. There was no rubble in sight, and fronting the rows of buildings, these structures that had obviously been designed and built to make a pattern, he could see what remained of a broad sidewalk, sunken now, yet bordered on the near side by a low stone wall, and he could see breaks in that wall, places where people and vehicles might enter. In the distance, on the left, was a building that was wider than the rest and with a wider entranceway, a stone arch, the mouth of which was high enough to allow a man on horseback to ride through in comfort, and Carlos saw motion in a square stone window to its side. Then a horse’s head appeared in the window and his own horse lifted its head and whinnied softly, and Carlos knew this was not some makeshift stable, but a structure planned in recognition of the importance of animals, for their care and use, and for convenience, as important as the building he noted to the far side, beyond the animal watching them, a bank he thought, or at least a commercial exchange of some kind. There were figures carved in the stone above the double doorway, possible letters of some alphabet, but too far away to make out.

Manuel’s horse moved to his side, and he felt his father’s fingertips on his thigh and looked over to see him pointing toward the agora’s far end. Carlos noted the low fountain complex near the square’s center, then picked up the distant building his father had indicated. It was there at the very end of the public space, a modern glass-and-steel affair, a house he thought, but completely out of place here among these ancient structures. He could see sun shining in the broad glass windows, the graceful curve of a wide deck fronting it. A glass house, he thought, trying to locate it, make it stick here where it did not belong.

Alma turned in his saddle then and beckoned to them, and each urged his horse ahead behind him, Ramona’s touching its muzzle into the flank of Gino’s familiarly, and they rode in at the mouth of the square, then headed off to the right, where up ahead and beyond the fountain in the distance, Carlos could see a lower structure in the line of structures there and could see a squat chimney above it and wisps of smoke floating up into the clear sky, and on the low hill that rose beyond the square’s perimeter above the chimney, he could see a meandering flow of cultivated fields, broad ribbon swaths where dense ground cover had been uprooted and plowed under, and a crop growing there and waving in the light breeze.

Then he saw a few people, a woman in a woven poncho that fell to her bare thighs, her hair gathered tight against her scalp and very dark, and two men, scantily dressed in loincloths, or shorts of some kind, their chests bare and smooth and glistening in the sun. Unlike the woman, their hair hung to shoulder length, one raven and thick, the other’s head framed in blond ringlets Carlos thought might be the product of some vegetable dye. Alma was guiding them there, moving toward the building they stood before, one in the line that formed the square’s southern side, and as they got closer, Carlos saw the jewelry the men wore, looping stone necklaces and rings in their ears. They stood before the building’s open doorway, and another man came out to join them and took the reins of Alma’s horse and stood at its head and patiently waited for the others to climb down from their mounts, their careful actions accompanied by groans and bone clicks and those wheezing whistles and sucking sounds that issued from the old men. Ramona stood at Gino’s side, and he held her arm to keep his balance as he lifted his leg, kneading his cramped calf. The others were shaking themselves, turning in small, awkward steps, working the kinks out, and Carlos stood silently at his father’s side, waiting respectfully. Alma waited too, and only when they were steady on their feet did the man lead Alma’s horse away, the others following without prompting as they headed toward the structure where Carlos had seen the horse’s head in the window at the other side of the square.

The building had no solid door, just a piece of heavy fabric that had been hooked to the side to allow passage, and once they were all inside, crowded together in a dim foyer, Alma went ahead with the three attendants, and the old men touched the cool stone walls and leaned against them. And in moments light flooded into the foyer from beyond, and when they stepped in they saw the blond man pull aside the last cloth window covering, and they found themselves in a large open room with a low ceiling, square window openings lining the back wall. The light brought shadow figures into the room, patterns of leafy branches that danced over the dark dirt floor and shimmered near the mouths of interior entrances to other rooms beyond. A low wooden table sat at the room’s center, ceramic bowls containing fruit upon it, and there were twisted wicker chairs surrounding the table, four of them, and a few wooden stools against the wall below the windows.

The men had sat too long, and now they hesitated, though Carlos could see they were still wobbly on their legs. “Fruit,” Gino said. He still wore his sombrero, and his face was lost under the brim. Larry held his straw hat in his hand, no hair at all visible now, and just as Frank crossed to the table for a fat orange, they heard a creak of metal at the house front. Then the man who had taken away the horses returned, wheeling John’s chair through the doorway and into the room. John turned and saw it, and when the man had pushed it close enough, he backed into it, then sat down with a deep sigh. “Just like home,” he said.

Then the two men came in from another room, their chests dark now in the shadows, and moved to where Larry stood. Carlos had thought them younger than they now appeared, shadows accentuating age lines in their flat faces. They were as old as the old men themselves, almost that, and Carlos saw that the formal stiffness in their gestures came as much from a carefulness with sinew and bone as it did from occasion. They look like me, he thought, and when they reached Larry’s side, the blond one turned and stared at him, as if in recognition of some brotherhood, and Carlos could see the light downy patch of hair running from his navel to disappear under his garment above his crotch, and he wondered if that too was the product of some dye or was natural. Each touched Larry lightly on the shoulder, beckoning, then led him through a doorway to another place. The men were gone for a few moments only, then came back with the woman, and soon all were led away, Manuel and Ramona together beside one of the men, the three old men with the woman, and Carlos, alone now, by the blond man. Alma had left quietly, and no one had noticed his going.

The room the man led him into was a small bedroom, a table holding a fruit basket, oranges and bananas, and a narrow cot against the wall. There were two windows in the back wall, and a stone stairway leading down a few steps at the room’s side. Carlos could see the still pool there, a few leafy shadows on the water’s surface. The man saw him looking and lifted his hands and touched his bare breast and shoulder in a gesture of bathing, then moved to the cot and pulled the light woven coverlet to the side. Then he moved to one of the windows and lifted the hooked-up blanket and let it fall across the opening. He gestured toward the stack of rough towels on a shelf beside the stone stairway leading to the bath and nodded to Carlos and smiled a little coyly and turned, his blond ringlets bobbing at his shoulders and his necklace clacking softly and brushing his nipple, and left the room.

He awoke to the faint sound of laughter and splashing and turned his head on the pillow, still half asleep, and thought there might be someone in the bath off in the dark, but the sounds were more distant than that, and as he returned to wakefulness he knew they were coming through the rock that formed the bath’s far wall and from another bath beyond. He rose and sat at the bed’s edge and rubbed his eyes. He could feel grit in the creases, and when he lifted his head again and gazed into the room, he saw that it was darker now, not night yet, but surely dusk. The silhouettes were gone from the floor, but he could see the descending steps that led down into the bath, the towels on the shelf, and the table to his right. The fruit basket was gone, and in its place someone had set a pitcher and a mug. He rose and stretched, then moved to the table and poured from the pitcher and drank deeply, cool water, then filled the mug and drank again. Then he was peeling his clothes away and dropping them to the floor, and once he was naked he moved to the bath’s descending steps. He saw his pack and the cloth satchel he had brought along, off in a corner as he stepped down, his feet entering the water, and in a moment he had sunk in up to his neck and could hear the faint splashing and a few satisfied groans through the thick stone wall.

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.

“My, oh my.” It was Gino once again, and Carlos saw his father’s face and the recognition in it when he looked at him across the table.

They sat there, all of them, for a long time, trying not to watch John and Chepa. It was hard to do, as in their slow turnings in the chair and their whisperings they were much like lovers in some private bed. It was Gino who disengaged them when he reached over and took Ramona’s hand. She still held Manuel in her arms, but she surrendered to her father’s touch, and Carlos saw her finger move along the dark tissue at his wrist. Then Larry stood and stretched himself and touched his lips with his fingers, then placed his hand over his heart. He was looking beyond the couple in the wheelchair, out into the darkness where the men sat, and though he gave no other sign that Carlos recognized, the two men rose beside the women as if at his beckoning, and Larry started toward them. They were smiling as they came into the light, and when Larry reached them, the blond one touched him lightly on the arm, then on the shoulder, and the three of them moved off, passing the women and the chairs and heading into darkness toward the buildings at the square’s side.

Then Gino was rising, and Ramona too, releasing her husband to go with her father, hand in hand, to the far side of the fountain, where they sat at the broad stone edge, their heads close together. Frank remained seated, his back to the table now, hands folded in his lap, dreaming again, or looking off vacantly into the darkness. Then Alma rose and moved around the table and headed for the wheelchair, and Carlos heard a quiet yipping, and when he looked to the fountain’s broad edge he saw a chihuahua standing there, squat and very still, as if a sculpture, her yellow body turned to terra-cotta in torchlight. Then he heard the squeak of the wheelchair, and when he turned he saw it moving from behind the table, Alma pushing it, the two figures folded into one as they passed him and headed beyond the guttering candles on the serving table and into the moonlight that guided their way toward the square’s end.

He could see the glass house clearly in the distance now, the strict, geometric lines of its metal skeleton, its veranda awash in light, a shine of silver, much like that seen on shore, phosphorescent in the full moon, and then he heard his father cough, and when he glanced at him, he saw his dark, watery eyes, then looked beyond him to the fountain’s edge and saw the dying torch and that the chihuahua that had stood there, so silently, was gone. He could see Ramona and Gino, sitting close together at the fountain’s other side, and when he brought his eyes back to his father’s face, he saw that he was weeping quietly as he fumbled with his pipe. Then he looked beyond him and found them again.

They were moving down the square’s center, Alma leaning forward at the chair’s handles in the effort of pushing them. And the dog went before them, prancing and leaning ahead too, as if she were tethered to the chair and was pulling it, dragging a weight as heavy as all Mexico behind her, though really quite easily, given her strength and resolve.

His father sat at the table across from him, stuffing his stone pipe carefully with tobacco, and when he was finished and looked up at him he was no longer weeping, though his eyes glistened in the recognition that passed between them. Carlos lifted his own pipe, urged to a taste for it by his father’s actions. Between them, facing away from the table, Frank sat with his head in his hands, his elbows on his knees, an image of exhaustion in surfeit or the despair of the empty observer left only with the vision of what has passed.

Carlos looked at his father, then beyond him to the now vacant square. Then his father lit his pipe, flame rising up at the bowl, and he lit his, and they both smoked in the moonlight, their hands on the white cloth among the guttered candles and the leavings of their fine dinner, while the oldest generation took part in the pleasure of each other, off in the distance in their private world.

Epilogues

Kelly

Iguess it’s left to me to straighten out the story, though I was absent for most of it, wandering through the tilted rooms of my house and watching the lights blink at the barricades when there was no illuminating moon and a secret approach might be possible. I’d gotten rid of everything important, and I’d been going through memories of my mother and father and my times with them, in order to put the past behind me and to know for sure I couldn’t find the cause of my malady there, even though I knew ahead of time I wouldn’t. It was just something to do, as were the treadmill and the weapons placed at the windows and my changing into what I called my battle garments, just an old pair of Levi’s and my father’s warm hunting jacket, made with pockets and fabric loops for holding shells, comfortable against the night’s chill and the rain that leaked in through the roof to form puddles on the carpets and floors when it missed the pots I’d put out to catch it. The house was torquing and twisting, the hardwood lifted to waves in the kitchen and hallway, and though I looked out the same windows for the framed views I had in mind, I kept seeing something else.

My father killed a man with fingers around his hat brim, and this brought him north from Tampico. I’ve come to think of that man as death’s image, though thwarted, since the fingers must have shed their flesh, until the bones clacked against each other as he moved in the world in search of his next victim, announcing him, his brim like the clock of a grim reaper, messenger of mortality.

The papers were original deeds and other documents, the ones my aunt gave us in Chorreras, hidden assets of a General Corzo, spread around in the names of his men to avoid taxes and confuse the government and whatever other interests might be out to get him. The general was meticulous and so was Joaquín Sánchez, and the two had constant business together and needed to remain on firm and congenial footing, and when Chepa decided to remove her lost lover’s name from the contract she’d had drawn up for the house, shifting ownership to her grandson, Joaquín filed those papers officially and changed the deed itself and returned the original to Corzo and my father’s files. And when my father left Tampico in the wake of the killing he left the papers behind. That’s how they came into my hands. And once both my father and mother were dead, I managed with the help of Arthur to sell them to a man named Strickland. I didn’t really need the money, but Arthur needed the commission, and I needed Arthur.

Frank was deep in a funk when they returned, and even after the negotiations and the sale, when renovations began, I’d see him sitting in a chair in the grass at the edge of the meadow, the contractor’s trucks passing on the stone drive behind him, hands limp on his knees. I could see the lighthouse too, from my bedroom window, each day in a slightly different location, and soon it was no longer the local police who were after me, nor even the Coast Guard, but the National Parks Service itself. The shapes and colors of the barricades kept changing, and it became less danger than unsightliness that was at issue. They wanted my house out of there, before they finished the move and the new parking lots and bathrooms and opened the lighthouse to tourists at its new location. They’d solved the problem of the underground river and the soil shifts, and then they got after me. But I still had my well, and Arthur had rigged up the hand pump, and I had canned goods and various trail mixes and my weapons at important windows, and I thought I could hold out indefinitely, at least as long as the house did, though the cliff had fallen away only two feet from my foundation, and that might not be very long at all.

Carolyn called me on the cellular phone she’d smuggled in, leaving that last patient in coma and coming across the meadow in the dead of night when there was no moon. She let me know that Frank had gone, then returned again with his daughter-in-law, a woman named Erica Plummer. She said he seemed happier now and that the two were making plans, and she kept me posted on most everything else that was going on at the Manor, and I needed to hear these things, to keep in some human contact in my isolation. I had no Arthur coming anymore, and no Manor, and I was sick to death of walking through my tilted rooms, napping fitfully in daylight so I could keep watch at night. Once a reporter from some national exploitation journal made it almost to the porch, and he was insistent until I showed him the rifle. The porch itself had sunk a few feet, really to my advantage, though the constantly bursting water pipes in the basement had kept me down there and vulnerable to quick assault. I had to keep going up and checking, but there’d been nothing for quite a while. They’d concentrated their efforts on the lighthouse move, once they’d gotten the go-ahead. Then the men had returned from Tampico, and I had something else to keep me occupied.

“Oil,” Carolyn said, her voice so squeaky through the awkward instrument that I thought it might be someone else.

“What?” I said. “Who is this?”

She told me of the man then who had been in the solarium, behind the screen, that one with the stony face that I’d been interested in. His name was Carlos Ébano, and he’d come back with the men from Tampico, and she’d found out he was John’s grandson. Others had come back with them, Gino’s daughter and her husband too, who turned out to be John’s son. Larry was there, the only one unattached once Frank had returned with Erica, and he’d left for a while to go to Philadelphia, then had come back again, and it was he who had told her about the oil and the money that had come from it, enough to buy the Manor and to support all of them in it, and enough left over to help in the AIDS projects he was involved with in Philadelphia. And there was enough too to keep the last man alive, and to tend to him, and this was part of the negotiations with the owners and with the Veterans Administration, funds set aside for doctors on call and professional around-the-clock care, and she told me this was where I might come back into things. I knew, had the man died while the others were away, the doctors would have been freed from their contract and would have sold the place. Thus the man was a kind of savior in his longevity, my savior, and I’ve been careful and gentle in the tending of his skeletal body now that I’ve returned to my place at the Manor once again.

Carlos has had a room built on the sunny side, windows overlooking the lighthouse on its new cement pad, and could the man awaken, free of his deep coma, he could see the tourists walking the road toward it and climbing up into it, their shifting images in their colorful clothing through the glass tower at the light itself below the witch’s hat. I see that, and so does Carolyn at the beginning of her evening hours. Theresa, the old woman hired for the graveyard shift, sees nothing beyond the room itself, but it’s a beautiful room, the medical properties of the hospital bed hidden by a dust ruffle, hardwood floors and historical pictures on the walls, and even a canopy, and she’s thoroughly intent on the care of the man anyway, and wouldn’t notice. She was a nun, back in her past somewhere, and the uniform she wears looks like the undergarments of a nun and may well be that. I see her in the early morning, when I relieve her, bending over the man in the white skeleton emerging through his skin, she too in white, but for the grey-flecked and still raven hair gathered in a bun at her neck. She’s looking down into the face of impending death already resurrecting into the calavera, curious, I think, as she herself approaches that, and sometimes Larry passes the room, up early, and looks in at her with his own curiosity. Larry will be leaving soon, after the party, and so will John, and I can see that Gino is getting itchy.

It was a month ago, and early morning, and I was sitting in my kitchen drinking herbal tea. The sun was coming up into a clear June sky, but the barricades were still rainswept after a night of heavy weather, and I could see the drops falling in a slant in the wind, rosy red in the blinking lights, and could hear drops tapping on the floor in the hallway and plopping in the full metal pot I’d placed on the carpet in the living room. Then I couldn’t hear that, and when I rose and limped across the tilted floor to the screen door, I saw the rain had stopped, and so had the wind, and I could see the blanket of shine on the meadow disappearing in a broad moving wave as sun dried the grasses and bearberry and the meadow darkened into its variety of subtle color once again. And then I saw a spot of yellow in the grasses, and it was moving, and behind it, on the roadway that ran through the meadow from the Manor to the barricades, I saw Arthur’s dark limousine, and could see the window shades were up and that there were people in the backseat.

The spot of yellow was a dog, but I could only recognize that in her gait once she had left the meadow and slanted to the roadway, then trotted up in front of the limousine to reach the barricades ahead of it. A very small dog, and she walked right under the wooden sawhorses and headed toward the porch without hesitation, and by the time she had reached the first tilted step I had pulled the screen open and was standing in the doorway holding the rifle and looking down at her.

The dog looked up at me, a Chihuahua dyed yellow, identical to the one that had tapped on my knee in that agora in Tampico years ago, and I felt myself tilting more than was necessary in the twisted doorway and had to reach out for the frame with my free hand to steady myself, though the dog seemed to take nothing from this possible cue and just stared up at me, her head cocked to the side, eyes full of expectancy and resolve. Then she climbed up the porch stairs, slowly, and once she had reached me and had looked up my leg and into my face again, she rose on her hind legs and placed her paws on my shin, then stretched her body, bowing her back and yawning, then kicked gently away, turning, and came down to the sill beside me, facing out to the drive as I was, one forepaw planted on the toe of my tennis shoe, and when I looked up from her and out toward the barricades again I saw the man I’d been interested in, months ago, in the solarium.

Arthur stood at the limousine’s open door, and I saw him touch his hat brim and saw Gino at the fender on the other side, grinning at me, as the other passenger stepped between the horses of the barricade and started up the drive. The breeze had died completely, and the sun was coming up over the far rise where the meadow met the escarpment that fell down to the sea, but it was a soft sun and I was not blinded and could see the buttons on his linen shirt and the edge of the thick knot of ebony hair, and might have seen all of it had he turned his head.

He didn’t turn his head, though he lowered it from time to time to watch his footing in the stones, and when he raised it again his brow was broad in shadow as I remembered it, looking down at him in his bed, and I was nervous in the doorway, wondering about the reason for his coming, though when he reached the bottom step and then looked up and spoke to me I found there was no reason for concern.

He offered me the job and housing too, right there, and I accepted it, and though he gave me time, I didn’t want any, and when I felt that early warning derealization creeping up in me at the prospect of the open meadow and my passage, I looked out at Arthur at the car door and knew he would be back for me and that he’d pull the shades.

Carlos Ébano was half turned in his leaving when I felt the absence of the dog’s paw on my foot, and he paused there for a moment, waiting for the bright yellow animal to skip down and join him in the stones. Leaves had blown across the porch steps in the early wind, oak leaves, a little wet and glistening still from the rain, and when I looked up from them and saw his posture I thought of the last leaving of my lost lover, so far in the past. I’d wished it a posture of hesitancy and indecision, but I knew then it had been no more than a final sighting of what had been put behind out of complete resolve and recognition of the impossibility of relationship with someone such as I, with my malady, which was itself impossible. This one though was leaving only temporarily, and I’d be following, and would soon see him again. I looked up at Arthur then and thought he was smiling. Then I watched the man, the dog prancing before him, as he headed back toward the barricades and the limousine, and before he got there I had turned and entered my ruined house for the last time.

Peter

When someone called at the house those days, there was a ring in Sara’s sewing room, my half-finished office. I’d been sitting in there a lot, working on the civil service examination, and just that morning it was Warren, phoning to buck me up.

“You’ll do okay,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

And he was right, nothing but a little embarrassment and chagrin, but thoughts of freedom also from the private life. Soon the tourists would be gone and the summer cops too, and if the promised vacancy held up and the exam went well, I’d be on the force again by fall, and I could edge back into the job and forget my civilian failures.

It was raining earlier, a soft August rain, and I was working on Miranda and those odd situations when it’s difficult to give it, a dry run through a series of multiple-choice questions in the prep book, and I remembered it was raining too when I woke from that coma in Philadelphia to find Charlie standing over me at the bedside. He was smiling, then he was speaking, having to repeat himself to get the words down into the last fading of my delirium. “It isn’t the AIDS,” he said. “Not yet.”

I’d been out for more than a week, and it took me a few days to get my legs again when I awakened and another few before I was able to fly back to Provincetown, where I went the very next morning to see Doctor Minten, who gave me a clean bill of health and her usual warning. “You’re still HIV positive. That doesn’t change.”

“Just a good hard whack dentro de la cabeza,“ Carlos said, the next time I saw him. He was dressed in rich casual clothing, an indulgence I hadn’t expected, linen shirt and tooled leather cowboy boots and a fine, recently brushed fedora he’d bought for himself in Tampico. He’d called as soon as he and the men got back to the Manor, but he’d been busy and so had I, and it had been a while before he’d come to the house for drinks and a good long talk in the evening. He placed his hat carefully on a chair, and we sat with our elbows on the bare porcelain, the same kitchen table at which we’d eaten our Thanksgiving dinner more than a year ago.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “How did she know enough to find you?”

“She didn’t. She’d gotten a call from that guy at the records office, telling her John and I had been there and that I was headed out to the house for the survey. Then she sent Alma down with the horses.”

“She had a phone?”

“Oh, hell yes, a cellular. She had a gas generator too, at that glass house. A TV and a radio, a very comfortable setup. It was hard to pull John away from there. He’ll be going back pretty soon in fact, my grandfather.”

“Christ,” I said. “But the house. How in the hell did she get the materials up there, get it built?”

“Well, you see it was a little theatrical, the whole thing. Maybe even a hoax, if you don’t think kindly. There’s a good sized village, a town really, just over the hill from there. Paved streets and a good road in. Department stores, markets, lumberyards, you name it. It’s only a quarter mile away. Some of that light, moonlight, the torches and all? A good deal of that was electrical, flooding into the sky from there.”

There was nothing much to be said about that, so I let it settle and tried something else.

“And why didn’t she leave the place to your father? The house in Tampico, I mean.”

“That’s a whole other story,” he said. “The village was decimated by disease, and when she found out she was pregnant and then had him, she put him out for adoption, both because of the disease and his gringo blood. Then I was born and was an Indian, and she knew about that and took my grandfather’s name off the document. He was gone, you see, she thought permanently, maybe even dead, and it was after my mother died and my father left for the States, just a brief period when I was alone there. And it seemed right to her. Then, of course, I was gone too. There was no reason to change anything after that. She had her position in the village, what was left of it then, and she just went on with her life.”

“Did she every marry?”

“No. She became a public person, a kind of matriarch. Most of the men her age had died, and she took charge of the younger men and women. She kept busy with their economy, in touch with Joaquín Sánchez on the legal-political side of things. It’s a wonder the village lasted at all. But she managed it, and it did.”

“Such a simple story,” I said, laughing lightly, knowing it was only the bones of the matrix.

“Yeah. But in the spaces,” Carlos said. “That’s where the real thing got played out.”

Renovations at the Manor were finished in the second week of September, and I received my formal invitation to the open house and lawn party on the Monday before the Saturday of the event. Carlos had called earlier with the date, on the very day I received notice that I’d passed the civil service examination and had heard from the chief that I was reinstated and could start work on the first of October.

They’d repaired the rutted road that ran in from the highway, and when I reached the last rise and entered the stone parking area I could see balloons bobbing at the railing of the wheelchair ramp leading up to the ambulance dock. Carlos was there, in the doorway in his fedora and a white summer suit, and I saw him touch his brim, then wave, as I pulled in beside the other cars, two with MD plates, Cadillacs, and a half dozen more modest vehicles lined up to the side of them. I saw the pickup truck with the PAL sticker on the back window, and knew Warren was already there.

I’d been in the Manor only once, years ago when I’d been called there officially about some disturbance or other, and I didn’t remember the layout of the place, but once Carlos had handed me a glass of champagne and I’d followed him in and across the short hallway and into the small doctor’s office, I thought I remembered being there. It was still a doctor’s office, though they’d replaced the asphalt tile with hardwood, and where diplomas had hung behind the desk was now a large painting of the lighthouse at the cliff’s edge, and I recognized the work of a local artist. There was a glass instrument cabinet against the wall, gussied up with a Mexican serape that hung down into fringe at the cabinet’s sides, and Carlos told me it was the best they could do. The room was for the on-call doctors, when they came to see the one remaining patient, and they thought they’d continue to leave it this way, even after he was gone. “For the rest of us,” he said, “if necessary.”

Once we had left the room and stepped down the hallway, I could hear voices that grew clearer when we made the turn into a broader hallway and were heading for what had been the Manor’s central spine.

“The place is shaped like a cross,” Carlos said. “The long part’s the solarium and ward, with the nurse’s station, bathroom, storage closets, and a kitchen at the end. Well, they were that, but we’ve made changes, added another crossbeam and a few rooms.”

He was whispering, though there seemed no reason for it, leaning close to my shoulder, and the wine sloshed in my glass as he brushed against me. Then we reached the small foyer at the building’s center, open doorways to the left and right, and when we turned into what had been the solarium, I saw the profile of Erica Plummer as she looked out the row of windows and down into the meadow beyond. A heavy, old man stood at her side, the face of a bulldog when he heard us and turned around, and I soon found out he was her father-in-law, a man named Frank. Erica had heard us and turned too, smiling, and she came across the room to join us, reaching up to kiss me on the cheek. She looked fine. The frosting on her hair was gone, as well as the heavy makeup, and she wore a flowery summer dress, light and loose, that allowed for a freedom of movement that was evident in her quick steps and broad gestures.

“That’s where I lay,” Carlos said, pointing to the room’s side, but I could see no evidence of a place for him. The space was decked out as a kind of game room or lounge, hardwood tables, one with a chessboard set into its laminated surface, another holding a carousel of poker chips and decks of cards. The chairs were soft recliners, end tables beside them, and a refrigerator and sink and bar, all in a dull, brushed stainless steel, lined the wall where Carlos had pointed. The room had been painted in a warm, dusty grey, and the window frames were bright white, announcing the view, and a couch had been placed before the windows, and there were bowls of dips and chips on the new ledge that covered the cold radiators below the frames.

“You had to see it before,” Frank said, as we shook hands. Then I saw him take Erica’s hand, and she smiled up at me.

“We live here now!” she said.

Her face held the pleasure of a teenager, and I thought at least I’d done something right as a private citizen detective, though I knew I’d had only a small part in her redemption, and that just at the very start of it.

“You’ll see,” she said. “Everything’s open today.”

I could see out the window beyond them, the play of wind in the yellow canopy tent near the meadow’s edge, tables under it and a few people standing and talking beside them. I saw men in white uniforms, carrying platters heavy with food, and a photographer in strange clothing working at his tripod, out under the sun to the tent’s side. Carlos touched me on the arm then, and we turned, and the four of us left the room and headed through the doorway and into what had been the open ward.

It was still open, a long graceful rectangle, but there were no beds now and what had been a low ceiling had been cut away to show the freshly sanded beams that rose in the cathedral space. Couches and easy chairs rested in various arrangements, and there were rich oriental carpets in the spaces between them, and at the end of the room a large stone fireplace had been constructed, a heavy brass fender and a peacock screen on the brick apron before it. The room had the feel of a hunting lodge or a common room in some hotel. There was even ash wainscotting along the walls, a dozen or more tall brass urns holding cattails and thin, feathery reeds.

“It’s a little weird,” Carlos said, and Frank laughed and said, “a community effort,” and Erica laughed too and said, “but we like it.”

“That’s Carolyn, and the suits are two of the asshole doctors,” Frank said, almost loud enough for them to hear.

“Easy,” Carlos said, and Erica laughed uncertainly, and when I looked over at her I saw she was blushing.

The men were small and soft, both balding prematurely, and the woman in the crisp white A-line was at least a head taller than both of them. They were standing beside the fireplace, talking, and I could see her white stockings and tennis shoes and the black pager hung at her hip and thought I could hear a faint shushing as she turned in conversation and her thighs brushed against each other. She wore a little white hat, pinned at the top of her head, holding her blond hair up, and I could see wisps of it that had fallen to brush her neck, and when we reached them she turned and grinned at us and the two doctors smiled and lifted their glasses and complimented Carlos and Frank too on the renovation. One of them was slightly fish-eyed, a pupil dancing and distorted through his thick glasses. We left the transformed ward then, glanced in at the modern kitchen, then came to the new wing, a row of rooms off a gracefully curving hallway, all the doors, but the one at the far end, open.

“This is mine,” Erica said, when we got there, a quiet and spare little room with windows looking out on a field of wildflowers and scrub oak, light flooding in to bathe shapes in the wallpaper, a geometric mural of open fans and fabric swatches like figures in a New England quilt.

We looked into other rooms, each with its own private design, homey and particular, and across from the closed door at the end of the hall, we entered a large shower room, sauna and hot tub to either side, and beyond that an exercise room, a large one, full of mats and machines, weights and stationary bikes and treadmills, and when we left there, Frank and Erica smiled and said good-bye, see you soon, and then went out the glass door leading to a small patio at the wing’s end, and Carlos and I stood before the closed door and he explained that the pager on Carolyn’s hip was a monitor.

“That way, she can get out and around on her shift and still be vigilant.”

The bed sat in the center of the room, a dust ruffle hiding the fact that it was a hospital bed, and the canopy that hung high over it was attached to the ceiling and allowed free access to both side of the bed. There was a row of machines against the wall, an oxygen unit, heart monitor, and a suction pump, each dressed in a cloth covering that rendered it more like a piece of furniture than a medicinal station, and the sounds of our feet were softened by modern Scandinavian carpets that covered the wooden floor. I could see the lighthouse on its new cement pad through the windows as we crossed to the bed. It was September already, but still there were tourists visible through the glass cupola, others waiting in line near the base.

“I want you to look up into the canopy,” Carlos said, as we approached the bed’s side. “It was Larry’s idea, and it’s something special.”

And it was that, and it was only after I had looked up for a long time and my neck grew stiff that I lowered my eyes to see the figure in his repose, head on the pillow in a position where he might look up too, though more comfortably than I had. I put my fingers on the bed, touching a coverlet made of the finest woven cotton, soft as a diaper, and could feel the embossment of leaf and flower figures in the stitching, and I could feel the faint beat of the man’s pulse at the bones of his wrist through them. I leaned in over his chest, expecting the medicinal, but there was nothing, no issue of breath, though my head was near his chin when I turned and looked up.

The hanging canopy was like a large open umbrella or the dome of the sky, and it was lined in a dark blue fabric the color of night’s sky, figures of stars sewn in at the circular border and in what seemed strategic places in the blue field that was otherwise empty in the spaces between the photographs, and I saw immediately, in a faded ferrotype, that the man had been born in Idaho before the turn of the century: a newborn in a quilted crib, head framed in a white bonnet, and the stiff figures of a mother in bell-shaped dress, his father wearing a stovepipe. They were standing before a sign announcing a granary and its location, and the date of birth had been penned in the vacancy at the building’s side.

There were dozens of photographs, and most were in black and white, though a few color snapshots, more informal, punctuated the field like fading planets, and I knew as my eyes roamed through the field that I was seeing the history of the man’s life there, in a patchwork, much like real life, the narrative in the empty spaces between memory-evoking images and in the matrix that they created. There were farm pictures, a boy standing in a fenced enclosure among pigs, then high on the seat of a horse-drawn reaper, and war pictures, young men sitting on blasted stumps beside a trench, eating K-rations from metal bowls that looked like emesis basins, photographs taken at country lawn parties and at funerals and those that commemorated marriages and other, obscure occasions. There were pictures, too, of lovers, in chaste poses near lakes and in gardens, one child only, a thin sickly girl in a loose dress, born to them, and the grandchildren of others possibly, a sister or a brother, in the few colored ones. His wife seemed to be fading already, at his side in their wedding picture, heading toward her invisibility, and surely his daughter was too, and since he was well over ninety now, all must be dead but for him. And still the pictures raised up the past again, though not in regret or accusation, but simply to establish that it had taken place and that its story was not in the pictures themselves but in rearrangement, something he might take on in fancy or the listless moments near the end of his own passage, should he awaken and look up again.

There was a photograph of a boy on a pony wearing a cowboy hat. It was tied on with a string under his chin, and he wore a leather vest, ill fitting, that had obviously been provided for the occasion. He looked pleased in the saddle, tentative as well, and though he held up the reins and his other hand rested familiarly upon the horn, his pose was a little wooden, though he seemed anxious to please both himself and the photographer he was smiling out at. Maybe he was six years old. There was something odd about the picture, though just a stolid pony, a boy riding him as if he were a spirited horse, the split rails of a corral fence behind him. Then I found the odd thing, the dark trouser legs of the man holding the pony steady, seen through the pony’s thinner legs, his heavy dark shoes behind the hooves.

He was meant to be out of sight, not part of the photograph at all, the invisible mechanic of the pose, guardian of the life situation in which the photograph was taken. The boy might imagine himself a cowboy in the future, and not a farmer, but the man was there to prevent him from stepping into that future too soon. But it never is too soon, I thought, and of course the boy didn’t make that move, or any other provoked by imagination, and I wondered about myself then, and about Carlos standing beside me as I turned my head, feeling a stiffness in my neck from long looking, and gazed down into the man’s face, my own face only inches away.

It was a skull face, skin like parchment over bone. His lips were flat and almost gone, his teeth like those of a horse, visible to the gums, and I could feel no breath against my cheeks. Only his nose still held his personality. It was a flat workman’s nose, broken many times, but it too was beginning to fade away, collapsing down into the caves of his bony nostrils. His eyes were closed, and I wondered if he’d ever seen that panorama of his life above.

“Through the lids, maybe?”

It was Carlos at my elbow, and when I looked closely at the man’s eyes I could see the lids were thin now as waxed paper, and I thought I could see the outline of his pupils there, small circles pressing up like some official seal embossed in a document.

It seemed impossible, but so did everything else just then, even that this veteran should have stayed alive through a killing cancer long enough to save the Manor for others old as him, so they could keep on living, even that he should linger on, if no more than a monument to that achievement. Maybe he had finally kicked the pony, stepped away from those dark trouser legs and become a cowboy, soon to be a skeleton riding a white horse.

I could see the photographer standing near the meadow’s edge, his camera pointing in the wrong direction, as we approached the company under the umbrella awning at the food tables. It was a large box camera, on a heavy tripod, an eight-by-ten I thought and very old, and there was even one of those dark hoods hanging down limply over the viewing apparatus. And the photographer’s hair hung down as well, black and thick to shoulder length, and he was wearing a kind of blocky suit of woven fabric, rectangles of color sewn together.

“That’s Alma,” Carlos said. “He seems to like the lighthouse. He’s here as a kind of escort, to accompany my grandfather when he goes back. It’s his hobby, taking pictures I mean.”

We were crossing a space that had been a stone drive before, but now sod had been set in, and the lawn ran all the way from the meadow’s edge to the wall under the old solarium. Clusters of people were gathered to the sides of the awning, out in the sun, and I saw someone approaching the photographer, then pointing off at the lighthouse where the camera faced, the loose sleeve of a garment, a shirt or blouse, hanging down from an arm in the still air, and Carlos told me that was Kelly, the practical nurse who had moved in with him. He’d been a little sheepish in talking about their arrangement earlier, but then he’d shrugged his discomfort away through a sweet smile.

“Maybe it’s about time for me,” he’d said, and I’d nodded, wondering if there would be any time of that kind available for me too in the future.

“But what about the agoraphobia?” I asked, seeing his lover out in the air and free. “Did you cure it?”

“Hardly!” he laughed. “The building still has to be in sight, with no intervening obstructions. All return routes open. If you watch Kelly long enough, you’ll see the careful checking. But it’s much better than it was.”

We reached the awning then and stepped under it, and Carlos took my arm and guided me to one of the tables and introduced me to Larry, and I complimented him on the photographic arrangement. Then Carlos introduced me to his father, who looked nothing like him, though he too wore a white suit, and to his father’s wife, who was bending at the table’s other side, lifting cold shrimp onto her plate, delicately, with a pair of tongs. A little man stood beside her, but disengaged from her and looking off across the meadow toward the sea, where a structure at the edge was being dismantled. I knew it was Kelly’s house. I could see scaffolding rising up to the level of the chimney, the top of which was jagged where bricks had fallen away. The man wore a visor, and I saw the ragged hem of his baggy shorts at the table’s edge, knotty sinew pushing through at his thighs, and the splotches of dark scar tissue, serpentine, on his forearms. His T-shirt read TAMPICO.

“That’s Gino,” Larry said, and the man turned and looked at him, then at me, then touched his brim and smiled, his daughter glancing over at him affectionately, her hair falling in dramatic action across her rouged cheek. She was close to sixty and looked it, lines free of makeup at the corners of her eyes. She wore a long party dress, loose and flowing as a nightshirt, much like the lounging suit that Larry wore, though richer in its deep blue color than his more fashionable earth tone. I looked down and saw Larry’s woven sandals, then glanced up to his beaded skullcap, African I thought, new hair curling thinly at the edges.

“And that’s my grandfather, over there,” Carlos said, pointing with his chin, and I saw a man standing beside the two doctors, his empty wheelchair off to the side behind him, sunlight in its metal spokes. He stood erect, his shoulders back, hatless and unwavering in the sun. He had come to his sexuality again, and it was visible in the confidence of his posture, though when he shifted on his feet the frailness in his stiff legs was evident. Erica was there as well, and Frank stood beside her, though a little back from the small gathering.

There were others there, workmen and their wives, the contractor and architect, and a few I’d seen quite often in my days in Provincetown, a pharmacist and a locksmith, even the mailman I recognized without his uniform. Warren was there, his wife beside him, and I caught his eye and waved to him.

“And what about these others?” I said. “Your crew? What’s going to happen there?”

We had moved beyond the awning and into sun, and I saw Alma, the photographer, squatting down to rearrange things in his camera bag. Kelly was standing over him, and when I looked back to see the gathering at the tables and the others I was asking about, I caught sight of the old nun marching across the Manor’s lawn, then stepping into shadow under the still umbrella and reaching for a plate. Carolyn was there as well, her starched uniform like a cutout dress for a paper doll, brighter and more severe than the nun’s soft, dingy cotton. Larry had moved between them, a wraith in night clothing, and the three were talking, looking very much like maskers in some ancient miracle play.

We were standing at the meadow’s brink, and I looked out at Kelly’s ruined house, half dismantled in the time since I’d arrived. I could see a green, official truck, off to the left at the barricades, men in uniform carrying sawhorses and blinker lights. The barricades were coming down as well, and I saw a dark car, moving slowly through the meadow toward the Manor. I knew it was the man named Arthur, Kelly’s chauffeur, and that he was making the trip for the last time.

“It’s pretty simple,” Carlos said, “and not unexpected. Larry’s going back to Philadelphia and his AIDS hospice work. Frank and Erica will stay here for a while, getting used to each other, then maybe even staying on. I can’t be sure. As for my father and Ramona, they’ll stay too, at least for a while. John’s heading back beyond Tampico, in a week or so with Alma, to the village and Chepa. He says he’ll be there permanently and we can visit if we want. The only one to wonder about is Gino. He’s been talking about Chicago, but then he speaks of the West Coast, even New Mexico and Arizona. The only sure thing is that he won’t be here for long. Says he has some wandering to do.”

“And what about you?” I asked. “And Kelly.”

“We’re staying put,” he said, smiling up at me. “You can come over for dinner anytime.”

By the time the party was drawing to a close, the sun had dipped down in the sky behind the Manor, and the few remaining elements of Kelly’s house, a vacant doorway of studs, scattered clapboards, and a pile of chimney bricks, were silhouette figures at the escarpment’s crest, the flat sea visible beyond. Months of wind and shifting ground had loosened every nail and mortar line. They’d had no need for heavy equipment, and the dismantling had been easy and quiet and had gone unnoticed as the party progressed. Even the lighthouse was silent and inactive now, its beam dark under its black witch’s hat, all the tourists departed. And all the guests at the party, but for the principals, had departed too, and I turned from the meadow and saw the empty tables under the awning, a few remaining champagne glasses and soiled linen napkins on the white tablecloths. Then I saw Alma. He was adjusting his tripod, settling the legs down in the lawn, the large camera tilting above. It was taking him some time to get it right, pointed toward the edge of the Manor’s property, the lens aiming out into the meadow beyond. We were alone out there for a moment, and I caught that acknowledgment in his enigmatic smile once the camera was fixed in place and he looked up from his work to see me watching him. Then we were no longer alone.

They were pushing the narrow ambulance stretcher unsteadily through the grass newly grown above the sod, its spongy softness grabbing the wheels and causing all four of them to lean into the task. Carolyn and the nun flanked the temporary bed, and Kelly pushed at the foot, while Larry pulled at the handle near the man’s bald head. I saw what looked like a bowl of fruit resting on the prone figure’s chest. Then it moved, and I knew it was the yellow chihuahua, then saw her head and saw the sun shining transparently through her broad ears. The others were to the side and behind the conveyors, watching out for them, and I started across the lawn, then thought better of it and pulled up at the canopy’s edge. He’ll get there eventually, I thought, and he did, much quicker than I’d imagined, and I saw them turning the stretcher to face into the camera when they reached the meadow’s brink, then saw the nun cranking a handle to the side near the figure’s chest, until he had risen and was resting as if sleeping in a lounge chair, at the beach or at a resort in the mountains, his small, vibrant pet alertly curious on his soft lap.

Alma stood at the tripod, waiting, long hair glistening in the sinking sun, the black hood hanging, graceful as a veil on a mannequin, ready to be lifted up and put on, and when I looked back to the man in the stretcher, I saw the others gathering around him, getting ready for the picture.

John stood beside his wheelchair, fingers touching the handle above the leather back, his scar an emblem of that sweet, youthful impetuosity below his bushy brow, and Carlos had climbed into the chair, switching generations. He’d tilted his fedora back so that his broad forehead was a stone slab in the sun, and Kelly stood to the other side of him, hand on his shoulder in certain possessiveness, looking down at his profile, face expressive in the grin of a lover who has found a good cowboy or politician. The man in the stretcher was flanked on the other side by Frank in his white shirt, his bulldog face fixed in formal expression reminiscent of a general standing for a portrait to be hung in some official place, and Erica stood at his elbow, the light frosting her blond hair and casting shadows that looked like heavy makeup into her angular features. It was as if she were posing in a parody of her former self, that beleaguered woman dragged by the hair to a toilet, and her broad smile was making a proper joke out of it.

Gino was beside her, at the tableau’s perimeter, shorter even than she was, but taller in the broad sombrero he’d donned for this occasion, a miniature revolutionary in a cartoon etching of Zapata’s army, and I saw the V shape of Ramona’s fingers above his hat’s crown for a moment, then saw her nudge into Manuel beside her, laughing and shaking her loose hair. Then her fingers were gone, and she had settled in against her husband, behind her father, and was looking out at the camera smiling, one in a satisfied family at the end of reunion, waiting for the commemorative moment. Carolyn, in her little white hat, stood behind Carlos in the wheelchair, the nun beside her, and beside the nun was Larry in his African skullcap, and I thought he was looking over at me and not at the camera. The three were those maskers once again, this time the resurrected after the magic pills, ready for a curtain call. Then there was Arthur, in his dark chauffeur’s uniform, his look hid under his hat brim, standing at the stretcher’s head, the skull face of the citizen who had saved the Manor below the shadow of his chin.

Still, the man’s eyes were closed, that skull shadowless and without particular expression, and I knew his was the eventual face of all of us approaching our final repose, and I thought of the Mexican etchings and engraved prints Carlos had displayed for me on my coffee table close to a year ago.

The sun disappeared behind the Manor completely, just as Alma crawled under the black hood. He raised the metal T holding the explosive up above the camera at arm’s end. Then he said something, in Spanish or another language, that I didn’t understand, though the others did.

They moved in their bodies for a moment, adjusting their bones under their skins. Then they stood perfectly still in the picture that was the picture before it was taken. The last rays of the sun faded from their attentive faces, shadows falling in complex patterns among their gestures and expressions, and I could read parodies of stories and engagements in their postures, the way they touched and turned toward each other. Only Arthur, the chauffeur, stood alone and uninvolved. Then I saw the eyes in the skull face opening below his chin, the last remnants of lips pulled back from the white teeth, and I wasn’t sure whether this was the man still alive or the calavera awakening for the dance.

I saw the yellow chihuahua, stretching in the man’s lap, and I thought I saw the bare finger bones of a skeletal hand, stroking her vibrant body as she turned and settled down on her haunches on the soft white sheet and faced the camera. A dull thud of explosive then and a brief white light, and for a moment all their faces were illuminated skulls, eyes empty in dark sockets, but their teeth in those perpetual and wise grins. They had joined the vibrancy of the living to the dead’s parody, as if the photographic image were an etching, or an engraving, and was fashioned in homage to the great Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada.

Content

Toby Olson
Tampico

BOOK ONE. The Manor

John

Frank

Kelly

Carlos

Peter

Carlos

Larry

Kelly

BOOK TWO. Philadelphia

Peter

Carlos

Gino

Kelly

BOOK THREE. Tampico

The House

The Foothills

The Mountains

The Village

Epilogues

Kelly

Peter