Toby Olson: Tampico

Calaca was on the slope now, stepping down sideways, boots and spurs digging in, Dagoberto behind him, and I could see out above them into the driving rain and over the surface of the turbulent Gulf, the ship tilting and fading as the fog came in. It was sinking. Its prow stood straight up in the rain, touching the black, low clouds. Its wheelhouse broke free and tumbled end over end into the sea. Joaquín was beside me and I saw his stiff arm as he pointed. There were people among the objects in the waves, arms flailing, some stroking toward others, reaching out for a purchase on any jetsam. I saw a man snatch a broad red ribbon out of the air, its tips disappearing like snuffed flames in the incoming swell that covered him. It was as if the remnants of a sunken city had risen and were drifting, storm-tossed, toward shore. Then I saw Calaca hopping as he reached firm footing on the rocks below. His chaps had fallen to his knees, and he was dancing and kicking into the leather to free himself. His hand was in the air, waving us down.

The rocks were slick with rain, and up ahead I saw Sosa grabbing at the general’s clothing. He was slipping and falling constantly, and the general kept reaching back to slap his hands away. Calaca was nimble, toe stepping over crevices and moss, his arms waving in the rain delicately for balance, and Dagoberto had screwed his sombrero down on his head and tightened the string up under his chin like a tourniquet. His face had turned purple. He was above Calaca, where the rocks descended steeply, using both feet and hands, and I suddenly realized the two were no older than I was, no more than twenty, though possessed of a certain adulthood I had not reached.

I stepped on a medal, its colorful soaked ribbon, and I saw a spur. Joaquín was ahead of me now, his raincoat flapping at his calves, and I passed the documents, wet paper sucked to the rock’s surface like skin. Up ahead General Corzo was moving down carefully to the beach, Sosa bumping and touching him, and in moments, as Calaca descended, I saw the two facing each other on the sand. General Corzo was leaning forward into Sosa’s face, dressing him down, his words lost to me in the wind and rain but not, I supposed, to Sosa. Then we had all climbed down to the storm-narrowed beach, and standing in a line we looked out into the waves but could see nothing.

The waves were high and whitecapped and the rain beating against our faces came in almost on the horizontal. We had to guard our eyes with our hands, turn away and spit out sea foam that had choked us. It was the general who made the decision. He looked sharply at Sosa, then sent Calaca back up as lookout. We turned and followed his climb, the rain more bearable as it beat into our shoulders and calves, and when Calaca had turned and was standing high above on the rocks we watched his face and hands for any sign, and one came immediately.

He pointed out over our heads, his fingers waving frantically, and turning back we saw the wooden crate above us on the incoming surf, the skeleton riding it, his bony fingers gathered in the straps. He was on his knees, leaning like a masthead before the wind on the wave’s crest, and his skull face held no expression whatsoever, until we could see his eyes.

The wave broke and the crate was lost in foam, only the bony torso hazily visible in spray. Then the foam melted and the horse’s head rose out of it, its insane eyes, and we looked back to the skeleton on the crate and saw that his eyes were the same, the pupils impossibly dilated, gazing into some other world. The crate hit the beach, sliding in surf and sand, the figure upon it still as a statue in the rain, and as its edge dug in it began to tilt and Dagoberto was rushing toward it, legs up to his thighs in surf, his boots filling, then leaning his shoulder into it, waving back for help. Then I was in the water too, pressing up beside Dagoberto to keep the crate right, as the horse came out of the wash behind it, fighting to stand, sunk in sand and surf up to its withers. It struggled free, nipped vacantly at my shoulder as it passed, then farted in the wind and whinnied weakly as it staggered down the beach and disappeared in mist.

Dagoberto climbed the crate and pried the man’s hands from the straps, then lowered him into the waiting arms of General Corzo, who fought the water sucking at his legs and carried him beyond the surf up to the wet beach where Sosa was standing close to the rocky incline. Sosa held the shoulders of Joaquín’s heavy raincoat, its body flapping on a level in the wind, and was lowering it to the sand to make a bed. Calaca had stepped down from his lookout on the rocks, and once General Corzo had settled the man on the coat, Calaca bent over him, dos calaveras, pero Sosa edged him aside, then worked to loosen the Day of the Dead costume and get him air.

The crate creaked against my shoulder then settled. Dagoberto was sitting at the edge of the surf, now pouring seawater from the mouth of a boot, and though wind whipped his hair the rain was gone, and when my eyes found Joaquín I saw light in the soaked sleeve of his cotton suit coat where the woman’s head rested. The two were sitting in the surf, foam lapping at their chests. An empty dress drifted beside them, as if a thin woman in dead-man’s-float were looking down, and a broad brush at the end of a thin stick bobbed toward them on the crest of a low wave, as yet indistinguishable objects following, and down the beach beyond them I saw a man with a small child in his arms kneeling in the wash, then saw General Corzo, his heels kicking up sand spray as he ran toward them. He passed Calaca, who was standing kneedeep in the water and gazing out over the waves.

I pushed away from the crate and looked up. The dark clouds had receded into the sky and there were rips in the blanket now, shafts of light coming through. I heard something thump into the crate, then tap along its far surface. It was a small box of wood and wire, two white chickens inside, looking at me and clucking as they came into view. I grabbed the wire mesh, the spongy handle of the leather suitcase that bobbed behind, and lugged them both out of the water and up to the beach. I saw Joaquín lower the woman to the sand, then cover her body with the dress. He stood over her for a moment and I thought he was speaking, then he turned and headed for me. The general was in the water with Calaca now, and the man holding the child and another man, in skeleton legs and wet shirt hugging the bones of his thin chest, were gathered around Sosa as he knelt in his tending of the prone calavera. I heard Sosa cry out, his words distinct, and realized that the wind was dying, and when I turned back to the sea the general and Calaca were standing among bobbing objects in calmer water. Then Joaquín reached me.

“It’s the calentura ,“ he said. “What Sosa was yelling. It’s malaria.”

A woman rode in on the side of a wagon on a low wave. The wagon’s wheel was spinning above her head, and Calaca was lifted out of the water as he grabbed it, then tossed into the wake. General Corzo had hold of her arm. Then the wagon was turning and they disappeared in the sea under it and Calaca was diving.

People were staggering in the sand. Half-dressed skeletons struggled against objects in the surf all along the beach. I saw a wooden chair, a green painted table with a pig sitting on it, a floating harness, a rat on a stick. And there were dead fish in the water, kelp, and sea lettuce ripped from its mooring, marzipan bones, dozens of wooden hangers, some dragging dresses and costumes, papier-mâché figures, a lamb and a deer painted for the Day of the Dead and bobbing high on the undulating water, their distended rib cages swollen with the sea, the hat of the ship’s captain, a guitar, a devil’s head, his red shoulders visible through foam, a fork sticking up in the spray, hundreds of onions, purple and yellow squash, and the transparent balloons of Portuguese men-of-war. I saw gulls coming down, hovering over the dead fish, saw a tall and beautiful woman, dark twisted hair falling like a dirty mop as she reached under the water, then lifted a straw basket in the air, the sea flooding from it catching a rainbow as the sun broke through completely and sparkled in the wake and sand. And I could hear talking, some laughter and crying, and a dull, constant moaning.