Toby Olson: Tampico

“Ah, the revolution, articles of the constitution, and that pendejo Obregón. And smoke rising from gas fires, and the drilling, and a bone caught in the throat eating, and cauldrons for the scalding of chickens, music and dancing, tribute, and the turn of a card in the thick fingers of Chepa, the nose of Calaca whistling in his laughs, tobacco and tequila.

“I have a man wearing a ring of fingers around his brim, a good man, each cut and counted. One wears a ring still that I recognize, onyx, who was a good man too. The fingers jiggle when the man walks, and there are those who fear him, though it’s the counting that concerns me. One and two, a dead mother and my father, your father, the painful permanence of the onyx, for solitude, peace maybe, after shipwreck, after sabotage, just after some moments with a woman before starting again.

“I tell you, this life means nothing to me, because anything can happen, and if you try counting it out it surely will. I said shipwreck, who could imagine it, and all souls saved, so pass me the bottle, my dear skeleton, and the cigar and a chicken leg, pass over the tribute money and the pleasures it can buy me, one of which is help easily given to survivors, another just good fellowship, here, under the stars.

“It’s the Dead’s Day. There are stories. Don Lupe has told some in pictures, his calacas dancing: businessmen, housewives and journalists, bandidos with weapons clacking against their ribs, even a priest, el presidente even, that maridillo, putas , and young girls too of the purity still of the Virgin. All gone into the company of the dead, our reminder, most purely secular, since only the bones are the souls, their dancing and commerce. And thus do I fancy the ancients, dressed in the skins of the dead, as irony. And now I’ll tell the story of two calaveras.

“An old woman was dying and her husband, feeling death at his door also in anticipation, went to her bedside to soothe himself. One might expect wisdom in the aged, but the man was a politician and as such was without it. Always he was counting, accumulating, while his wife had been living in the pleasures of sewing and cooking, in cleaning, and in walking the street and in shopping in the sweet and sour presences of the here and now.

“The man touches his wife’s fingers where they rest on the coverlet, as close to her bones as is possible, and when she looks up, hollow-eyed and smiling, he recognizes he doesn’t know her and never has.

“‘Water,’ she says, her voice brittle. ‘Could you bring cool water?’ And he goes to the pump and draws it, but when he returns to her bedside she doesn’t need it, since she is dead.

“If only, the man thinks. The water. If only the votes and the counting. Only that summer, in youth and forgetfulness. If only singing and dancing. Only fishing the Panuco River for tarpon together. If only the pleasures of children. If only for memory. And he sits alone at her grave, weeping tears of regret, but she is not there.

“Mystery of the unlikely. A ghost story. But we are all ghosts apparently, hidden from life in our soft coverings, only shadow figures, until flesh falls away and we are skeletons, calacas clacking as they join the dance.

“At least, so this story goes, in which an old woman has risen up into hard bone and the common skull, who now wears her personality in action rather than appearance, but for clothing as mocking costume, our serious lives in exaggerated burlesque, that comedy of complete wastefulness now celebrated.

“She wears a business suit, hiding the bone girdle of her gender, her husband’s hat, and she minces among politicians, poses in conversation with Obregón, that lechoncillo , and finds her way into the art of Don Lupe.

“One day the man has recovered. He sits in his office. He’s reading the paper, and there, above an article exposing petty corruption, graft, vote fixing, betrayal of the people, he sees the calavera , himself in his wife in his fine suit, talking to el presidente , his jaw flapping, his big teeth, symbols of words vomiting out, splashing on his wife’s shirt. The man dies then, right there in his chair, and those who come to the funeral speak softly as they divide his constituency among them.

“The story might end here, a lesson, but you know, he too is the skeleton. He rises up as his wife did, wears her dress, her high shoes, is found cooking, steam billowing from the pot so skillfully rendered in the etching. He’s shopping, sitting at a window sewing, while outside the skeletons are dancing in colorful costumes in fiesta. There is no comedy, nor irony, in his activities, yet he is at peace and happy, if such can be said of calacas. This is the man’s paradise, but he has paid for it with the other, and one might notice that his wife had both.

“Paradise. This fire, this chicken, these mariachis. Survivors dancing, smell of dead fish, and whispers of jetsam from shipwreck in this quiet sea. This good fellowship and the presence of women in memory in this talking. It’s Chepa for you John, Theresa, a woman with a beautiful saint’s name, for me. Pass over the bottle now and the lemon. Calaca, pinch me a pinch of salt. We have nowhere to get to, nothing to do. And this is paradise.”

There were four tattered easy chairs in the solarium and Larry and Frank sat in two of them and John sat in his wheelchair. Gino’s folding chair was pulled up at the windows, and his fingers tapped the metal cover of the radiator below them absently as he gazed out. Even from the back he looked like Harry Truman, and Larry turned and smiled at John in that recognition, already a worn joke among them.

It had rained for a solid week, but then a cold March wind came out of the northeast to blow the storm away, and now a full moon hung in the sky above the sea near shore. Its light washed over the men’s legs, and a dim wash rose to their faces from night-lights, pearlescent through polished seashells plugged into sockets in the baseboard, and glowed in their metal flanges. The end of the room was screened off, and above the screen the rods of the steel hanger and the words on the bag of glucose were distinct in the moonlight. John held a cigarette in his throat, its tip swelling to a red glow as he drew, smoke leaking around the flange, then streaming from his nose. A door closed, and they heard the rumble of a car’s engine and one of the windows hummed briefly.

“Kelly.”

It was Frank. He’d belched up the word, his lips barely moving, then shifted his heavy body in the chair, and Larry and John turned too and followed his look.

They could see all the way out to the crest, the shadow of a cut through beach grass and bayberry that was the road descending from the Manor into the broad moonlit meadow, then rising up to where the house sat in layers of silhouette against the sky, one dim lamp in a window.

“Chicken light,” Frank said, and Larry sighed, huffing through his tube.

“All right,” he said. “It’s about time, isn’t it?”

“In good old Indiana,” said Gino, his voice muffled behind his bony shoulders.

“It’s Kentucky!” Frank barked. “How many times do I have to say it, you old fart?”

Gino lifted a leg and farted, a quick dry explosion, and the cigarette popped from John’s throat and tumbled into his lap.

“Christ, Gino!” he croaked, brushing sparks of fire from the blanket that covered his knees. A trail of smoke rose from the fabric, an acrid smell, and he slapped his palm down into it over and over as he shook. He was a little taller than Gino, but very thin, swallowed up in the poncho that brushed his arms, and his face was angular and hard beneath bushy eyebrows, a broad old scar running down from his left eye to his chin. They all wore pajamas, and Frank wore a tweed jacket, and Larry’s hair curled up at the edges of his black watch cap. A door opened, a click of metal at the far end of the ward beyond.