Toby Olson - Tampico

“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.