Toby Olson: Tampico

Then we were in the water, together with Calaca and General Corzo, Joaquín and me. We went to help those who were still foundering both in the sea and malaria. Some were delirious, absently searching among floating objects, but they gave in easily when we touched their chilly or hot arms. A young man looked in my eyes, knowing me, sweat flooding down his cheeks. “ ¿Es aquella Cardel?” he asked weakly, gesturing toward the shore with his chin, then fell against me, his thin body light as a bag of feathers. The general and Calaca had a large man between them and were leaning against a receding wave, and Joaquín went to help them. Calaca smiled at me, his free hand raising a thumb. His sombrero was back on his head at a rakish angle, as if he were drunk in some bar and getting ready to sing. The general swore, “ ¡cabron! ,” spitting out spray sent up by a donkey fighting for footing beside him, then bucking its rump as it splashed at the surf line and climbed to the beach. I heard voices, and when I lifted my head from the young man’s sweaty brow I saw townspeople and oilmen climbing down the rocks, carrying blankets, canteens and canvas bags, and a man in a white coat, gripping what I thought was a medical case, as he slipped on the last rocks and fell down on the sand beside Sosa, who turned to him and said, as if in professional consultation, “ Es calentura. ” Dagoberto covered a seated woman with a blanket as others plodded in the sand, heading toward me or down the beach. Then there were dozens of helpers gathering up objects and people, dragging everything across the beach to the rocks and where the rocks met the beach. I saw a man holding the donkey’s halter, unaware of the activity around him, his hand stroking the animal’s muzzle to quiet its shivering body.

Calaca, Dagoberto, and I climbed on the rocks, heading for the brush above and beyond them to gather wood. Clothing was draped over boulders now, coming back to vivid color as it dried in the last rays of sun, and there were furniture, open suitcases, crates and other tilted objects as far as the eyes could see. And there were people moving on the rocks also, those shipwreck survivors free of malaria, touching things, smoothing out wrinkles, searching for what was theirs. We had to step carefully, check for clear footing as we made our way up. The sun was sinking now, and when we reached high ground, the wagons hauling those with malaria were dappled in shadow beyond the scraggly trees where the road was as they creaked slowly toward Chorreras a quarter mile off.

We built a huge bonfire in the sand, but only after a half hour of panic in which children were lost, five girls and a boy, in the accounting done by the ship’s clerical mate as he moved among groups of blanket-draped survivors, a clipboard holding the records he’d managed to save in his hands. But then we heard faint voices, words of that song about a rancho grande , and when we crowded down to the surf’s receding edge and looked out over the still and darkening Gulf waters, we saw the raft, one whole side of the ship’s wooden wheelhouse, and the children sitting cross-legged in the dusk upon it, singing, as it drifted in. Then mothers and fathers were in the water, gripping the raft’s timbers, reaching up and petting the children’s bodies.

The captain sat in a lawn chair beside me. Calaca and Dagoberto had retrieved them from the rocks below General Corzo’s house when they went there to get the case of tequila and the lemon. Calaca had filled his pockets with salt, and he sprinkled it carefully into people’s palms as he circled the fire. Some sat on crates and suitcases, and I could see others lounging on blankets through the smoke and flames. The captain was talking and gesturing, tapping his chest with a finger. He’d found his hat, and though it was still wet he was wearing it. He was a small man, compact and vibrant, and his thick mustache twitched at the corners as he spoke. He leaned close to me at times and almost whispered, as if we were involved in some conspiracy. Joaquín was on the other side of him, the bones of a chicken leg on a page of newspaper in his lap, and he was smiling as he worked bits of skin from between his teeth with a small gold pick. He’d lost his suit jacket but still wore his fine tie. Boxes of fruit had been carried to the beach and there were fried chicken, tamales, jugs of wine, and baskets of fresh bread.

“He’s telling about the shipwreck and his mates and about the contract. He would have stayed with his ship to the bottom, he says, but for the pendejo owners. He says they knew about the storm coming ahead of time and said nothing.”

“How could they know?” I said.

“He doesn’t say that. But he will go soon to find them, and he will straighten things out then,” Joaquín translated.

Sweat was beading on the captain’s brow, and we both saw it, and Joaquín pushed up from his chair and headed toward Sosa and the rocks to find the doctor.

And before long it was night on the beach and the sky was filled with stars and the fire was fed with dry wood brought from Chorreras. Others fell into sickness of the calentura , shadow figures helped or carried up the rocks to where the wagons waited, family members and close friends following. The ship had carried sixty souls, dancers and musicians and their children, all sailing north from Cardel for the Day of the Dead fiesta in Tampico, and though not a soul was lost, only twenty-five remained in good health on the beach once activity of the aftermath was declared over. An old man, leader of a mariachi band, declared it, the neck of his guitar at his cheek as he began to strum. He’d found the chest holding the skeleton costumes and both he and the one remaining band member, a young, quick-fingered boy with an accordion, wore the bones. Calaca and Dagoberto had given up their sombreros, and the two calaveras moved around the fire playing ballads and border polkas, their singing punctuated by quick calls and high squeaks. I saw a woman dancing in a long dress, then turning a cartwheel in the sand, her legs gleaming in firelight as the singers strutted by, and I thought of Chepa’s legs. Hers were thicker, her muscles longer and smoother, but they were just as agile. Women and men danced to the music now, wearing their bony costumes. I saw a boy throw a pelota , a young girl catch it. Some roasted ears of corn in embers at the fire’s edge and the sweet smell drifted on the smoke to us.

I was tired in my skin, the fire hot on my face, but my bones felt hard and oiled at the hinges as I lifted my hand and sucked the lemon, then swigged from the full bottle Calaca handed me and passed it on to General Corzo. The five of us were seated in chairs in a half circle facing the fire. Only Sosa was absent, still playing doctor, though there was no longer any need for it.

“Well, I suppose this means we are all settled up, ese. ” The general spoke to Joaquín in perfect English after lowering the bottle, passing it on to Dagoberto, then wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

Joaquín answered in Spanish, his eyes sparking in the firelight, and Calaca laughed.

“I said, ‘For the time being at least,’” Joaquín told me.

“ Sííí ,” said the general, in a mimic of The Lazy Mexican.

Calaca grinned his skull face at me, passing the bottle, and I could tell it was okay with us for the time being also. Then General Corzo was speaking again, Joaquín translating softly for Calaca and Dagoberto.

I leaned back in my chair, lifted my face from the fire’s heat, and gazed up into the sky’s broad dome. There were thousands of stars there, and in the general’s soft talk, the singing and quiet laughter that edged into it, I felt I was rising up toward them, just a little, until I couldn’t feel the chair under me anymore and was floating in the world of what he was saying. Well, it was close to that kind of thing at least. But I was tired, right at the edge of exhaustion, a state where one can feel suspended and be where the real world is, just too worn out for anticipation, or thoughts of the past behind it.