Toby Olson - Tampico

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.

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.