Toby Olson: Tampico

My father killed a man with fingers around his hat brim, and this brought him north from Tampico. I’ve come to think of that man as death’s image, though thwarted, since the fingers must have shed their flesh, until the bones clacked against each other as he moved in the world in search of his next victim, announcing him, his brim like the clock of a grim reaper, messenger of mortality.

The papers were original deeds and other documents, the ones my aunt gave us in Chorreras, hidden assets of a General Corzo, spread around in the names of his men to avoid taxes and confuse the government and whatever other interests might be out to get him. The general was meticulous and so was Joaquín Sánchez, and the two had constant business together and needed to remain on firm and congenial footing, and when Chepa decided to remove her lost lover’s name from the contract she’d had drawn up for the house, shifting ownership to her grandson, Joaquín filed those papers officially and changed the deed itself and returned the original to Corzo and my father’s files. And when my father left Tampico in the wake of the killing he left the papers behind. That’s how they came into my hands. And once both my father and mother were dead, I managed with the help of Arthur to sell them to a man named Strickland. I didn’t really need the money, but Arthur needed the commission, and I needed Arthur.

Frank was deep in a funk when they returned, and even after the negotiations and the sale, when renovations began, I’d see him sitting in a chair in the grass at the edge of the meadow, the contractor’s trucks passing on the stone drive behind him, hands limp on his knees. I could see the lighthouse too, from my bedroom window, each day in a slightly different location, and soon it was no longer the local police who were after me, nor even the Coast Guard, but the National Parks Service itself. The shapes and colors of the barricades kept changing, and it became less danger than unsightliness that was at issue. They wanted my house out of there, before they finished the move and the new parking lots and bathrooms and opened the lighthouse to tourists at its new location. They’d solved the problem of the underground river and the soil shifts, and then they got after me. But I still had my well, and Arthur had rigged up the hand pump, and I had canned goods and various trail mixes and my weapons at important windows, and I thought I could hold out indefinitely, at least as long as the house did, though the cliff had fallen away only two feet from my foundation, and that might not be very long at all.

Carolyn called me on the cellular phone she’d smuggled in, leaving that last patient in coma and coming across the meadow in the dead of night when there was no moon. She let me know that Frank had gone, then returned again with his daughter-in-law, a woman named Erica Plummer. She said he seemed happier now and that the two were making plans, and she kept me posted on most everything else that was going on at the Manor, and I needed to hear these things, to keep in some human contact in my isolation. I had no Arthur coming anymore, and no Manor, and I was sick to death of walking through my tilted rooms, napping fitfully in daylight so I could keep watch at night. Once a reporter from some national exploitation journal made it almost to the porch, and he was insistent until I showed him the rifle. The porch itself had sunk a few feet, really to my advantage, though the constantly bursting water pipes in the basement had kept me down there and vulnerable to quick assault. I had to keep going up and checking, but there’d been nothing for quite a while. They’d concentrated their efforts on the lighthouse move, once they’d gotten the go-ahead. Then the men had returned from Tampico, and I had something else to keep me occupied.

“Oil,” Carolyn said, her voice so squeaky through the awkward instrument that I thought it might be someone else.

“What?” I said. “Who is this?”

She told me of the man then who had been in the solarium, behind the screen, that one with the stony face that I’d been interested in. His name was Carlos Ébano, and he’d come back with the men from Tampico, and she’d found out he was John’s grandson. Others had come back with them, Gino’s daughter and her husband too, who turned out to be John’s son. Larry was there, the only one unattached once Frank had returned with Erica, and he’d left for a while to go to Philadelphia, then had come back again, and it was he who had told her about the oil and the money that had come from it, enough to buy the Manor and to support all of them in it, and enough left over to help in the AIDS projects he was involved with in Philadelphia. And there was enough too to keep the last man alive, and to tend to him, and this was part of the negotiations with the owners and with the Veterans Administration, funds set aside for doctors on call and professional around-the-clock care, and she told me this was where I might come back into things. I knew, had the man died while the others were away, the doctors would have been freed from their contract and would have sold the place. Thus the man was a kind of savior in his longevity, my savior, and I’ve been careful and gentle in the tending of his skeletal body now that I’ve returned to my place at the Manor once again.

Carlos has had a room built on the sunny side, windows overlooking the lighthouse on its new cement pad, and could the man awaken, free of his deep coma, he could see the tourists walking the road toward it and climbing up into it, their shifting images in their colorful clothing through the glass tower at the light itself below the witch’s hat. I see that, and so does Carolyn at the beginning of her evening hours. Theresa, the old woman hired for the graveyard shift, sees nothing beyond the room itself, but it’s a beautiful room, the medical properties of the hospital bed hidden by a dust ruffle, hardwood floors and historical pictures on the walls, and even a canopy, and she’s thoroughly intent on the care of the man anyway, and wouldn’t notice. She was a nun, back in her past somewhere, and the uniform she wears looks like the undergarments of a nun and may well be that. I see her in the early morning, when I relieve her, bending over the man in the white skeleton emerging through his skin, she too in white, but for the grey-flecked and still raven hair gathered in a bun at her neck. She’s looking down into the face of impending death already resurrecting into the calavera , curious, I think, as she herself approaches that, and sometimes Larry passes the room, up early, and looks in at her with his own curiosity. Larry will be leaving soon, after the party, and so will John, and I can see that Gino is getting itchy.

It was a month ago, and early morning, and I was sitting in my kitchen drinking herbal tea. The sun was coming up into a clear June sky, but the barricades were still rainswept after a night of heavy weather, and I could see the drops falling in a slant in the wind, rosy red in the blinking lights, and could hear drops tapping on the floor in the hallway and plopping in the full metal pot I’d placed on the carpet in the living room. Then I couldn’t hear that, and when I rose and limped across the tilted floor to the screen door, I saw the rain had stopped, and so had the wind, and I could see the blanket of shine on the meadow disappearing in a broad moving wave as sun dried the grasses and bearberry and the meadow darkened into its variety of subtle color once again. And then I saw a spot of yellow in the grasses, and it was moving, and behind it, on the roadway that ran through the meadow from the Manor to the barricades, I saw Arthur’s dark limousine, and could see the window shades were up and that there were people in the backseat.