Toby Olson: Tampico

The spot of yellow was a dog, but I could only recognize that in her gait once she had left the meadow and slanted to the roadway, then trotted up in front of the limousine to reach the barricades ahead of it. A very small dog, and she walked right under the wooden sawhorses and headed toward the porch without hesitation, and by the time she had reached the first tilted step I had pulled the screen open and was standing in the doorway holding the rifle and looking down at her.

The dog looked up at me, a Chihuahua dyed yellow, identical to the one that had tapped on my knee in that agora in Tampico years ago, and I felt myself tilting more than was necessary in the twisted doorway and had to reach out for the frame with my free hand to steady myself, though the dog seemed to take nothing from this possible cue and just stared up at me, her head cocked to the side, eyes full of expectancy and resolve. Then she climbed up the porch stairs, slowly, and once she had reached me and had looked up my leg and into my face again, she rose on her hind legs and placed her paws on my shin, then stretched her body, bowing her back and yawning, then kicked gently away, turning, and came down to the sill beside me, facing out to the drive as I was, one forepaw planted on the toe of my tennis shoe, and when I looked up from her and out toward the barricades again I saw the man I’d been interested in, months ago, in the solarium.

Arthur stood at the limousine’s open door, and I saw him touch his hat brim and saw Gino at the fender on the other side, grinning at me, as the other passenger stepped between the horses of the barricade and started up the drive. The breeze had died completely, and the sun was coming up over the far rise where the meadow met the escarpment that fell down to the sea, but it was a soft sun and I was not blinded and could see the buttons on his linen shirt and the edge of the thick knot of ebony hair, and might have seen all of it had he turned his head.

He didn’t turn his head, though he lowered it from time to time to watch his footing in the stones, and when he raised it again his brow was broad in shadow as I remembered it, looking down at him in his bed, and I was nervous in the doorway, wondering about the reason for his coming, though when he reached the bottom step and then looked up and spoke to me I found there was no reason for concern.

He offered me the job and housing too, right there, and I accepted it, and though he gave me time, I didn’t want any, and when I felt that early warning derealization creeping up in me at the prospect of the open meadow and my passage, I looked out at Arthur at the car door and knew he would be back for me and that he’d pull the shades.

Carlos Ébano was half turned in his leaving when I felt the absence of the dog’s paw on my foot, and he paused there for a moment, waiting for the bright yellow animal to skip down and join him in the stones. Leaves had blown across the porch steps in the early wind, oak leaves, a little wet and glistening still from the rain, and when I looked up from them and saw his posture I thought of the last leaving of my lost lover, so far in the past. I’d wished it a posture of hesitancy and indecision, but I knew then it had been no more than a final sighting of what had been put behind out of complete resolve and recognition of the impossibility of relationship with someone such as I, with my malady, which was itself impossible. This one though was leaving only temporarily, and I’d be following, and would soon see him again. I looked up at Arthur then and thought he was smiling. Then I watched the man, the dog prancing before him, as he headed back toward the barricades and the limousine, and before he got there I had turned and entered my ruined house for the last time.

When someone called at the house those days, there was a ring in Sara’s sewing room, my half-finished office. I’d been sitting in there a lot, working on the civil service examination, and just that morning it was Warren, phoning to buck me up.

“You’ll do okay,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

And he was right, nothing but a little embarrassment and chagrin, but thoughts of freedom also from the private life. Soon the tourists would be gone and the summer cops too, and if the promised vacancy held up and the exam went well, I’d be on the force again by fall, and I could edge back into the job and forget my civilian failures.

It was raining earlier, a soft August rain, and I was working on Miranda and those odd situations when it’s difficult to give it, a dry run through a series of multiple-choice questions in the prep book, and I remembered it was raining too when I woke from that coma in Philadelphia to find Charlie standing over me at the bedside. He was smiling, then he was speaking, having to repeat himself to get the words down into the last fading of my delirium. “It isn’t the AIDS,” he said. “Not yet.”

I’d been out for more than a week, and it took me a few days to get my legs again when I awakened and another few before I was able to fly back to Provincetown, where I went the very next morning to see Doctor Minten, who gave me a clean bill of health and her usual warning. “You’re still HIV positive. That doesn’t change.”

“Just a good hard whack dentro de la cabeza ,“ Carlos said, the next time I saw him. He was dressed in rich casual clothing, an indulgence I hadn’t expected, linen shirt and tooled leather cowboy boots and a fine, recently brushed fedora he’d bought for himself in Tampico. He’d called as soon as he and the men got back to the Manor, but he’d been busy and so had I, and it had been a while before he’d come to the house for drinks and a good long talk in the evening. He placed his hat carefully on a chair, and we sat with our elbows on the bare porcelain, the same kitchen table at which we’d eaten our Thanksgiving dinner more than a year ago.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “How did she know enough to find you?”

“She didn’t. She’d gotten a call from that guy at the records office, telling her John and I had been there and that I was headed out to the house for the survey. Then she sent Alma down with the horses.”

“She had a phone?”

“Oh, hell yes, a cellular. She had a gas generator too, at that glass house. A TV and a radio, a very comfortable setup. It was hard to pull John away from there. He’ll be going back pretty soon in fact, my grandfather.”

“Christ,” I said. “But the house. How in the hell did she get the materials up there, get it built?”

“Well, you see it was a little theatrical, the whole thing. Maybe even a hoax, if you don’t think kindly. There’s a good sized village, a town really, just over the hill from there. Paved streets and a good road in. Department stores, markets, lumberyards, you name it. It’s only a quarter mile away. Some of that light, moonlight, the torches and all? A good deal of that was electrical, flooding into the sky from there.”

There was nothing much to be said about that, so I let it settle and tried something else.

“And why didn’t she leave the place to your father? The house in Tampico, I mean.”

“That’s a whole other story,” he said. “The village was decimated by disease, and when she found out she was pregnant and then had him, she put him out for adoption, both because of the disease and his gringo blood. Then I was born and was an Indian, and she knew about that and took my grandfather’s name off the document. He was gone, you see, she thought permanently, maybe even dead, and it was after my mother died and my father left for the States, just a brief period when I was alone there. And it seemed right to her. Then, of course, I was gone too. There was no reason to change anything after that. She had her position in the village, what was left of it then, and she just went on with her life.”