Frank had awakened from his reverie, and he too now turned in his chair to watch them, his back to the table. Larry sat only a few feet away from them, awkward there, and Carlos saw him turn and cross his legs, then look off to fix his gaze on those seated in the line of chairs, moonlight in the beads of his skullcap.
“My, oh my.” It was Gino once again, and Carlos saw his father’s face and the recognition in it when he looked at him across the table.
They sat there, all of them, for a long time, trying not to watch John and Chepa. It was hard to do, as in their slow turnings in the chair and their whisperings they were much like lovers in some private bed. It was Gino who disengaged them when he reached over and took Ramona’s hand. She still held Manuel in her arms, but she surrendered to her father’s touch, and Carlos saw her finger move along the dark tissue at his wrist. Then Larry stood and stretched himself and touched his lips with his fingers, then placed his hand over his heart. He was looking beyond the couple in the wheelchair, out into the darkness where the men sat, and though he gave no other sign that Carlos recognized, the two men rose beside the women as if at his beckoning, and Larry started toward them. They were smiling as they came into the light, and when Larry reached them, the blond one touched him lightly on the arm, then on the shoulder, and the three of them moved off, passing the women and the chairs and heading into darkness toward the buildings at the square’s side.
Then Gino was rising, and Ramona too, releasing her husband to go with her father, hand in hand, to the far side of the fountain, where they sat at the broad stone edge, their heads close together. Frank remained seated, his back to the table now, hands folded in his lap, dreaming again, or looking off vacantly into the darkness. Then Alma rose and moved around the table and headed for the wheelchair, and Carlos heard a quiet yipping, and when he looked to the fountain’s broad edge he saw a chihuahua standing there, squat and very still, as if a sculpture, her yellow body turned to terra-cotta in torchlight. Then he heard the squeak of the wheelchair, and when he turned he saw it moving from behind the table, Alma pushing it, the two figures folded into one as they passed him and headed beyond the guttering candles on the serving table and into the moonlight that guided their way toward the square’s end.
He could see the glass house clearly in the distance now, the strict, geometric lines of its metal skeleton, its veranda awash in light, a shine of silver, much like that seen on shore, phosphorescent in the full moon, and then he heard his father cough, and when he glanced at him, he saw his dark, watery eyes, then looked beyond him to the fountain’s edge and saw the dying torch and that the chihuahua that had stood there, so silently, was gone. He could see Ramona and Gino, sitting close together at the fountain’s other side, and when he brought his eyes back to his father’s face, he saw that he was weeping quietly as he fumbled with his pipe. Then he looked beyond him and found them again.
They were moving down the square’s center, Alma leaning forward at the chair’s handles in the effort of pushing them. And the dog went before them, prancing and leaning ahead too, as if she were tethered to the chair and was pulling it, dragging a weight as heavy as all Mexico behind her, though really quite easily, given her strength and resolve.
His father sat at the table across from him, stuffing his stone pipe carefully with tobacco, and when he was finished and looked up at him he was no longer weeping, though his eyes glistened in the recognition that passed between them. Carlos lifted his own pipe, urged to a taste for it by his father’s actions. Between them, facing away from the table, Frank sat with his head in his hands, his elbows on his knees, an image of exhaustion in surfeit or the despair of the empty observer left only with the vision of what has passed.
Carlos looked at his father, then beyond him to the now vacant square. Then his father lit his pipe, flame rising up at the bowl, and he lit his, and they both smoked in the moonlight, their hands on the white cloth among the guttered candles and the leavings of their fine dinner, while the oldest generation took part in the pleasure of each other, off in the distance in their private world.
Epilogues
Kelly
Iguess it’s left to me to straighten out the story, though I was absent for most of it, wandering through the tilted rooms of my house and watching the lights blink at the barricades when there was no illuminating moon and a secret approach might be possible. I’d gotten rid of everything important, and I’d been going through memories of my mother and father and my times with them, in order to put the past behind me and to know for sure I couldn’t find the cause of my malady there, even though I knew ahead of time I wouldn’t. It was just something to do, as were the treadmill and the weapons placed at the windows and my changing into what I called my battle garments, just an old pair of Levi’s and my father’s warm hunting jacket, made with pockets and fabric loops for holding shells, comfortable against the night’s chill and the rain that leaked in through the roof to form puddles on the carpets and floors when it missed the pots I’d put out to catch it. The house was torquing and twisting, the hardwood lifted to waves in the kitchen and hallway, and though I looked out the same windows for the framed views I had in mind, I kept seeing something else.
My father killed a man with fingers around his hat brim, and this brought him north from Tampico. I’ve come to think of that man as death’s image, though thwarted, since the fingers must have shed their flesh, until the bones clacked against each other as he moved in the world in search of his next victim, announcing him, his brim like the clock of a grim reaper, messenger of mortality.
The papers were original deeds and other documents, the ones my aunt gave us in Chorreras, hidden assets of a General Corzo, spread around in the names of his men to avoid taxes and confuse the government and whatever other interests might be out to get him. The general was meticulous and so was Joaquín Sánchez, and the two had constant business together and needed to remain on firm and congenial footing, and when Chepa decided to remove her lost lover’s name from the contract she’d had drawn up for the house, shifting ownership to her grandson, Joaquín filed those papers officially and changed the deed itself and returned the original to Corzo and my father’s files. And when my father left Tampico in the wake of the killing he left the papers behind. That’s how they came into my hands. And once both my father and mother were dead, I managed with the help of Arthur to sell them to a man named Strickland. I didn’t really need the money, but Arthur needed the commission, and I needed Arthur.
Frank was deep in a funk when they returned, and even after the negotiations and the sale, when renovations began, I’d see him sitting in a chair in the grass at the edge of the meadow, the contractor’s trucks passing on the stone drive behind him, hands limp on his knees. I could see the lighthouse too, from my bedroom window, each day in a slightly different location, and soon it was no longer the local police who were after me, nor even the Coast Guard, but the National Parks Service itself. The shapes and colors of the barricades kept changing, and it became less danger than unsightliness that was at issue. They wanted my house out of there, before they finished the move and the new parking lots and bathrooms and opened the lighthouse to tourists at its new location. They’d solved the problem of the underground river and the soil shifts, and then they got after me. But I still had my well, and Arthur had rigged up the hand pump, and I had canned goods and various trail mixes and my weapons at important windows, and I thought I could hold out indefinitely, at least as long as the house did, though the cliff had fallen away only two feet from my foundation, and that might not be very long at all.