Toby Olson - Tampico

“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.