“The older one in the center is General Corzo,” Joaquín said. “And the woman standing, the one you are interested in, she’s pure Indian and not to be trifled with. She and the other one weeping, they work this place. It’s not Corzo who seems to be the problem for them. It’s the one on his right, Calaca. They call him that because he’s so thin. He’s a sneaky bad customer.”
And now the standing woman was talking to him. Her hands had moved from her hips and she was gesturing. Calaca had tipped his hat back and was looking up at her, grinning, his face a skull’s face, weathered skin like parchment stretched over bone. General Corzo had turned a little in his chair and crossed his legs and raised his palm to the one sitting on his left. That one had seemed to be rising, but then settled back. The woman had stepped forward now and raised a finger and was waving it in Calaca’s face. She was short and just a little stocky, but her hips swelled out from a delicately thin waist, and I’d been watching the backs of her beautiful legs, her calves, as the black spiked heels she wore pushed them into definition through her red stockings. Her dress too was black, a clinging silk worn off the shoulder, and I could see the tendons lifting her scapulas, the beginning of her straight and stationary spine as she gestured, the bounce of her coal black hair.
Calaca was laughing now, watching her finger, and just as he leaned forward and opened his mouth as if to bite it, she hit him, her fist flattening his nose and two arcs of blood squirting out to either side of her knuckles.
General Corzo looked down, curious, as Calaca lurched back and fell over in the chair, his head hitting the wood floor with a dull thud, hat bouncing away. He rolled and tried to rise but she was on him, hitting him in the cheek this time, then sitting astride him, one hand gripping the greasy hair on the top of his head as she pounded him in the face one last time. General Corzo watched patiently until she was finished, and the woman across from him had risen and leaned over the table for a better view.
And so it was, only four days after my arrival in Tampico, that I met Chepa and fell in love with her. She was a mother to me and a sister and a perfect lover for a young man of little experience such as I. My mother had died when I was just fifteen. I’d had no father that I knew of, and I’d been on my own since then, a roustabout, and finally with the help of a fatherly man from Texas Oil I’d become a pilot. Then he too had died. I’d had no social life to speak of, a few cool prostitutes and rum and Coke across the border in Matamoros and once an older woman who had taken me under the stars on Padre Island for her brief pleasure. It had all been thoroughly mechanical, until Chepa, and though ours isn’t the story I set out to tell, I’m going to tell some of it anyway.
At first it was clearly the money and that I was a young and innocent man. I went back to the Lluvia del Oro, bought her the grenadine syrup and water she drank to stay sober there. I asked her about Calaca and why the general didn’t intervene. She seemed both charmed and annoyed by the question but wouldn’t answer it. We spent the night together at my hotel, and the next morning Chepa insisted on showing me the sights of the city, though they were few. Bars and offices had invaded historic public buildings and old haciendas, and refinery pollution had eaten away at façades and outdoor statuary. But there were a museum and a few churches, lagunas and parks, and places where the shores of the Panuco were unsullied by terminals and tank farms. We spent the day together, and in the evening we ate dinner together at the Louisian. And the next night, after a day of fishing the Panuco for tarpon, we dined at the Ciudad de Pekín, my first taste of Chinese food. Then I slept in her arms in my hotel room, our bodies glued together in sweat under white sheets through which occasional mosquitoes stimulated us.
Then it was Monday, and I was off with Joaquín on our reconnaissance flights. We flew each of the camps, both north and south, and Joaquín waved his arm in the open cockpit in front of me, pointing down at the Texas Oil flags waving from the highest derricks. There were buzzards too, descending in slow and symmetrical spirals, then rising up from the smell and movement in the living flesh below, then trying it once again.
I had the maps and the places they represented, which from the sky were very much like the maps, and in only a few days Joaquín was grinning and shaking my hand vigorously and I was on my own, carrying mail, valves, and other replacement parts, north through the oil fields of Tamaulipas and south through Vera Cruz.
I never found out how Chepa came by the hand roller, a fifty-gallon oil drum filled with cement. She would hitchhike from her house to the city, but only after a walk of five miles to the main road, which out there was no more than a dirt track. Wednesday, when I returned to the hotel in the late afternoon, she was sitting at the foot of the bed, my open and neatly packed suitcase resting on the coverlet behind her.
“Dónde?” I said. I had this little bit of Spanish and she a good, though often crude, English she had learned from oilmen. I hasten to say she was no prostitute, though she drank grenadine syrup and water and sat with men for money at the Lluvia del Oro. Some there were, but she told me she made her own choices and they didn’t include that.
“A mi casa,” she said, pointing over her shoulder to the open suitcase on the bed behind her. “Joo close now?”
She was smiling, but her broad brow and cheeks were expressionless, her face still as a face carved in a block of dark wood. A small and smoothly hooked nose, lips full and cut straight across below it, and above, her large eyes, pupils black as her hair and penetrating. Often she held two expressions, mouth saying one thing, eyes another, the latter both intimate and impenetrable. Her words were as much an order as a request, and I’d been taking pleasure in her aggressiveness so I did what I was told.
Later, in the de Havilland, it was Chepa and not Joaquín who was pointing down, and as I banked low over her house I saw the oil drum at the edge of the new landing strip she’d rolled. The strip was narrow and short and at the end of it she’d positioned two huge potted plants to either side as warning beacons. She turned around in her seat and grinned at me as I brought the plane down, rocking the wings to make sure of the wind.
The house was elevated a few feet off the ground on pilings, and Don Lupe liked to take the shade at the edge under it, Estrella, with her thicker coat, back behind him deep in shadow. But Rata had no care for the heat and she danced near my ankle, head high and sniffing, as I crossed the clay yard and climbed the steps to the veranda, Chepa slightly behind me, lugging my suitcase.
The house held one large room, an iron stove and an icebox and a sink with a hand pump at the rear, a few crude chairs, and tables with kerosene lamps and candles in onyx holders resting upon them near the walls. There was an open closet in a corner, just a wooden pole upon which were hung the dark and colorful clothing Chepa wore. I saw the black silk dress I remembered there, on a wire hanger beside others. And carved into the boards of the wall beside a window was evidence of the previous residents: VIVA VILLA and ZAPATA. Pencil-thin shafts of light came up through bullet holes in the floor, and in one corner there was a large faint stain that I imagined was blood. The bed was brass and double, its head against the room’s left wall, and at its foot, defining its space as separate, was a beautiful silk screen.
“China Boys,” Chepa said, as I studied the road, the bridge, and the elegant figures caught in their various gestures moving from top to bottom. Most cooks at the camps were Chinese, and there were some who had set up stalls in the square.
“So this is why,” I said, “at the bar, the general didn’t interfere?”