Toby Olson - Tampico

“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.