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

me away from the sight and led me through the doorway of a bakery at the corner.
    His name was Joaquín Sánchez, a businessman of some kind just passing by, and he made arrangements with the coroner and for shipping the body back. Then he took me to dinner, spoke to me like a grandfather, and in two days came to get me at the hotel. I stood in shade under the awning while he spoke to the driver who would take my suitcases and my mother’s suitcases out to the airport and put them in a locker, then return and leave the key at the desk. I had a book and my toothbrush and some underwear in a bag over my shoulder. He said I shouldn’t be carrying anything heavy, not right then, andhe walked close to me as we headed up the street and into the square, where he sat me on a bench and went into one of the public buildings to finish up the paperwork.
    It was early afternoon and the square was crowded with people. Vendors were busy at their carts, and I watched men passing in business suits, women strolling together, hand in hand, carrying shopping bags and large purses. The doors of the public buildings were heavy and windowless, and when people entered in through the dark spaces at their openings, they were closed tight again and looked like smoky paintings on the façades in which they were set. The places where the edges of buildings met at right angles, forming the square’s corners, were, I imagined, narrow passages, streets winding in from the serious industrial back streets of the city, transformed into shopping and business avenues as they spilled into the square, but I couldn’t see their mouths, and the buildings seemed butted together at their edges there, as if there were no entrances at all. There was only the street we’d walked down from the hotel. It entered at the side of the square, and I could see into it for a good distance to where it turned, shops and offices, people crossing in traffic and exhaust smoke, and could imagine the hotel beyond the turn and on the second floor my room there, and my mother’s full suitcases and my own, standing in a bulky gathering on the carpet beside the bed. Then I remembered the driver and thought the room would surely be empty now.
    I felt something, a light pressure and a wetness, and I looked away from the street and down into the shadows the leaning buildings cast over me and saw the yellow Chihuahua, her paws on my leg, snout reaching up and touching the edge of my hand where it rested on my knee. I jerked my hand away, a little shocked by her presence and her color, and she looked up at me curiously, then kicked from my knee, turning before her feet hit the ground, and trotted off across the square. Beyond her and above her I could see a fire escape, no more than a steep vertical ladder climbing up the edge of a building’s front, and I found myself thinking of it as a way out of the square, but then I looked to the building’s base and saw that its first rung was too far up to be reached. The dog disappeared into a crowd. There seemed to be more people in the square now, and I looked quickly to the place where Señor Sánchez had entered, but the door was closed tight and I couldn’t see a handle, and I felt my stomach tightening, a rush of blood at my temples. I reached for my wrist and found my pulse. It was racing, and when I looked down at my hands, the one holding the wrist of the other, it was as if they were someone else’s hands, there in my lap.
    And I was hearing things, a motor and laughter, a flapping in the breeze, and when I looked to the one remaining exit from the square I could see it was closing, a truck was turning, edging ahead, then back, coming horizontal at the mouth, blocking the street off.
    And people were climbing up on the truck’s long bed, and I saw that many were skeletons. Some wore sombreros, serapes draped over their bones, some were in business suits, their skulls chalk white under fedoras, derbies, and cowboy hats. And there were