Free Tampico (James A. Michener Fiction Series) by Toby Olson Page A

before, just left the Manor for a walk, once even for a drink in town. They’d be coming back, or she’d get them back. She’d give them a little time.
    Frank was working at the gate, having no luck, and I saw Gino head around the fence, the others following. Then Frank followed, and in moments they were standing shoulder to shoulder pressed against the fence and looking under the lighthouse, pointing and gesturing, and I could see their steamy breath on the night air.
    I heard the sound of a motor, and when I looked up the road to where the houses were the police car was coming. It flashed to its high beams, and the men in their coats and woolen hats and bare ankles below pajama legs were caught in the bright light. Then the car stopped and the men turned and the officer climbed out of the door and strolled along the blacktop toward them, leaving footprints in the silver frost behind.
    At times I can hold a tissue, still as a piece of heavily starched fabric, in the breeze in the hallway between the open doors, one looking out along the crest to sky and sea, the other down into the meadow and up to the Manor on the hill, and I leave the windows open in most weather, at least a crack in winter, to get some of the outside in, because I can’t go there, but for Arthur and the dark car he calls his limousine.
    Last night John was sleeping in his bed early on in my shift, and when I passed the foot of the bed I heard him call out softly, “Chepa” in some dream, as if he were speaking to me. It was later that he told his story, and after I’d sucked the men on the ward, I’d gone behind the screen in the solarium to tend the one I’ve come to have feelings about. His face is oddly beautiful in its repose in his coma, and when I dab the sweat from his brow and cheeks I usually linger over him. His eyelids are utterly unwrinkled, long curling lashes, and he responds to my touch sometimes, coming up to a shallowness in delirium, and I feel I can almost reach him.
    And I was tending him and John was telling his story, and though the circumstanceof the story was beyond my experience in time and intention, I was provoked at his mention of that square in Tampico, the place I’ve come to call my agora, and the old images came up to me again, the man leaving me to sit on a bench there, buildings pressing down over me, and the yellow chihuahua that came up to my knee and sniffed it.
    I felt my stomach turning and I stepped out from behind the screen into the early stages of the story, interrupting it for a brief moment only, and went to the instrument room to clean the tubes and cannulas, to get my hands into alcohol and sputum and my mind free of memory.
    My mother died in Tampico. I was eighteen years old and a licensed practical nurse and my father had died, and we went to Tampico to see his family and to give them money. My father was a fisherman, like his father before him a Mexican who had married an Indian woman, who was herself the product of a marriage between a Spaniard and an Indian before the turn of the century. My father left the fishing village of Chorreras when he was twenty-seven and had come up to the northeast without English to make his fortune. It wasn’t much of a fortune when he died at sixty-seven, but there was the house and boat and money in the bank, and he’d set aside money that my mother didn’t know of until the will was read, a few thousand dollars for his sister and brothers, those Mexicans that neither my mother nor I knew existed. He’d left money for air fare and hotels and a codicil that would tie the rest up if my mother didn’t go there.
    It was a bus that killed her. It was full of chickens, and the chickens flapped at the windows and flew from the doors with the people when the bus slid to a stop in the muddy street over her.
    I was helpless before it, hugging my raincoat in the rain, my umbrella skidding away, and it was only the old man’s arm around me that steadied me as he turned