Toby Olson - Tampico

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.

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.