Excerpts from “Tampico”

 by Jeffery White           

           This may never find you, but I’m bound, it seems, to write if for no other reason than to relieve a chronic, low-order nagging. It’s been nearly eight years since we last spoke or saw one another. I’m afraid I don’t remember the details, but maybe you do.
            I write you while working on my first drink in just over a year–probably not a good idea. I’ve got an oddball form of Hepatitis and have been told that if I’m not careful, I could have less than five years. It seems my filters are shot, can’t strain the toxins. My blood fills with the stuff of daily life that most people dispose of without a thought. But I no longer can, due to something I exposed myself to in Mexico, where once upon a time, you may recall, we lived a fairy-tale.
         I dreamed of you again this afternoon. It doesn’t happen often. Once a year. The first time was about five years ago—the first part of November. You appeared here, in this apartment, in a storm of sunlight and wind. And then you were gone without word. I woke to the dying echo of a half-spoken sentence fluttering in my skull, refusing to light.
            You appeared again the following year, and again.
            Today, I was taking a nap and I’m dreaming and I’m dreaming in my sleep, too. In the dream, I feel the pressure and warmth of another body along mine, a thigh cradled in mine, ankles woven and the ebb and flow of a sleeping breath drawing me in its wake. That’s how I know it’s you. All I’ve salvaged from those months together is the visceral memory of holding you, losing myself to the sound of your sleeping breath washing in and out of my skull. It filled my head again today as the afternoon light played out and I was sunk deep in the sofa, cleaving to someone I knew to be you.
            And then another world fluttered at the edges of our sleep, bleeding into and dissolving your body and your insistent, whispering breath. I was drawn as from a depth of water to wake into a raw, slipping twilight.
            As I mentioned, most of the time I’m fine. But November is unsettling. I wake from dreams that empty the months of meaning. My heart beats at my ribs like a moth at the window.
            I don’t remember, was there ever a good-by?
            Sooner or later I tilt back a bottle and spin into the past. We last saw each other in Mexico. I’d like to think it was at our place, but it may have been on the streets of Tampico. I obviously didn’t grasp the gravity of the occasion and lost you. What I search for now, though, is simply the memory of that final meeting. It’s like returning to the ruins of a house a decade after a fire to look for a photo tucked into the charred pages of a book. I spend my search swallowing gin and trying to tilt back into balance. All the while, time has slipped and nothing seems to be where I left it. Memories, real or imagined, solidify and become impenetrable.
            We first meet in the kitchen of the Santa Fe Hilton. I’ve been on the grill for a month and you are a new waitress hired to work the summer café. We have our first conversation a week later at an after-hours party. I step out the back door to clear my head. The yard seems empty–gravel and weeds running to the low concrete-block wall that borders it. The night sky faintly lit over the Jemez range to the west. And then a voice, my name. A lighter flairs and you appear in its nimbus, sitting in a white plastic chair a few yards away. I walk over without knowing what to say. We make small talk about the noise and heat inside and wide-open night outside. Neither of us wants to go back into the house, so we take a walk, smoke a joint and talk some more about the places we’ve lived. We do a quick inventory of what we’d like to recover from our past lives. Very little, it seems, except you miss your dog. We stop under a street light and you pull from your back pocket a narrow leather credit card sheath. You take out a picture and show me what looks to be a battered tan sofa cushion. This is Charles, you tell me. Actually this was where Charles slept when he was home. You explain that Charles was a wonderful dog and you were hopelessly devoted to him. But he had a problem finding his way home. He’d take off for days and then appear at the door reeking of whatever he’d found to roll in. A friend gave you the picture when you were about to leave to help you remember the real dog, not the imagined companion. This is Charles, she said giving you the picture, and he breaks your heart over and again. You confess to me then that you still love Charles, real and imagined. You pause, take back the photo and look at it. Just as the light starts to thicken around your eyes, you catch yourself, laugh and say, I doubt he even knows I’m gone. As you put the picture away, I watch you remake yourself into the woman I met earlier. But I’ve seen something that hints that I may be able to draw you from my half-formed fantasies into my ill-prepared arms. If nothing more, a kiss, some necessary awkwardness, an excuse and the impossibility of the whole affair made explicit.
                                    *                                    *                                    *
            Sometime in mid-October Mullen hears from his friend, Nic, who’s got a salvage business in Tampico, which, we’re told, is somewhere on the Gulf Coast in Mexico. Nic’s found Mullen a job on a sightseeing boat. Mullen has a car, a beat, pale green Ford station wagon, but no money.
            A bottle of Pisco and five small ceramic cups. Mullen pours and begins his appeal: Have you ever been to Mexico? No? Me either, but there’s the incentive. Cross the border and start again. Mexico, the refuge of outlaws, artists, missionaries, embattled lovers–a Disneyland for the deluded. Mexico: over the border it’s another story.
                                    *                                     *                                     *
            I realize now, as I write this, how such journeys are exercises in faith and imagination. I live on a fixed income, a disability check that arrives magically every month. My indulgences are the occasional dinner out, a book, some music, food for the dog. If once a year I leave it behind to sooth an ulcerated past with a bottle and my imagination, so what? I’ve spent some time around the unwell and I’ve noticed that we’ll swallow about anything if we think it will cure us, washing it down with a healthy dose of verisimilitude.
            The story of us, how true was that? We believed it and it came to life. Our exodus to Mexico begins on the Day of the Dead just before noon with the echo of Halloween parties still clattering in our skulls. Mullen’s behind the wheel and Debbie passes around cinnamon rolls that she’d made the day before. We stop for large cups of coffee and bottles of orange juice. There’s no radio so we take turns trying to kindle a sing along, but memory and enthusiasm flag after only a few miles. Soon, Mullen’s humming a melody to the tire drone that coaxes us to sleep and into murky hung over dreams: It’s the night before at a hotel room crowded with drunken ghouls and painted celebrities. I’m talking to someone it seems I’ve known a long time. He explains how hard it is to tell the dead from the living. “They’re just like everyone else, you know, only there’s a piece missing.” “How do you mean? Like an arm or a heart?” “Well, you just never know, until, of course, you find out; but by then it’s too late.” And then he laughs out loud and I realize that I can see the people behind him through his open mouth.
            I wake to cheers when we cross into Juarez without incident. We drive through the night, rising into the mountains to wake again when we see the glow of Chihuahua in the southern sky. We drive between the hills into the flat plain that holds the city and stop for gas and to change drivers. Debbie drives us down side streets searching for the way out of town. It’s near midnight and the sidewalks are alive with the dead–dancing Calaveras moving in groups–dark-eyed skulls, florescent ribcages and staggering femurs conducting songs with plastic cups and bottles. They wave from both sides of the street and call us to join them. Mullen wants to pull over, insisting it will be a grand cultural exchange. Debbie hears none of it and drives on. I look out the window and feel drawn to these people, these spirits singing to us from just out of reach.
            We drive out of Chihuahua, hills rising up on all sides cutting lumbering shadows out of the heavens. We pass on through the night switching drivers every few hours. Mullen’s back behind the wheel at dawn as we come down into the orchards and farmlands. Exhausted and elated we cover the flats that take us to Tampico just as the sun’s spilling up over the gulf. The air’s thicker, humid. We arrive and discover we’re lost.
                                    *                                     *                                     *
            The weeks wash by: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years. Easter fast approaching. Late one night, you and I are walking home from Tres Peso Paco’s. There’s a beer-bellied moon tangled in the wires at the roofline; the air is thick with cumin and roasting beef; the breath of a breeze and our love unnerves Rilke’s angels. I stop and turn you to me. Your face, an unearthly hue in the streetlight, shimmers; your eyes wide, dark. I fold you into the hollows of my shoulders, your stomach tucks into my pelvis. Every rise and shadow of my body has a part of you to fill it. I empty into the kiss we share. A battered station wagon, muddied and dark, turns down the street and taps its horn as it approaches. We move out of the way, press up against a wall as the driver, a pale face beneath a hooded sweatshirt grins and nods to us. We watch as the taillights dissolve. A dog barks, breaking the spell, and I bark back.
                                    *                                     *                                     *
            Humming in the background is a familiar collection of folks from restaurants and bars, edgy tourists, gregarious locals and the semi-professionals like Mullen. We attend expansive and vaguely unmoored events. The host might be an absent Norte Americano; the venue, a house of glass and steel and art filled with beautiful sun-and-wind-burnished men and women in bright, transparent fabrics. After a few drinks, I’m convinced that an unknown opportunity might flare and in a bird’s breath be extinguished. I move from room to room.
            In the hours between midnight and dawn, you find me and say that it’s time to go. I don’t hear you. I’m wide-eyed and euphoric. I tell you that I am young and in love and that makes me damn near deathless. I invite you to kiss heated lips of a demi-god.
            You tell me, Everyone is deathless in Mexico in spring.
            As morning grows imminent, you catch a ride home with a vague acquaintance. I find my way back to the house and our bedroom at dawn. As cautiously as a sodden soul can, I move into the sheets and insinuate myself into your arms, and with one lonely thigh tucked snuggly between yours, I dissolve in your sleeping breath.
                                    *                                     *                                     *
            We take a tour bus to the El Tajin ruins. It’s an ancient compound of mounded and crumbling pyramids and vaulting stairways brooding in the jungle. We shuffle along the walkways with the other visitors to rest near a wall of stones the size of small cars. I ponder what we had been told about these ruins. The inhabitants were already gone when history arrived. It was originally dreamed into being by the priests, and generations of children became women and men carving and assembling the earth into these giant totems. They are gone, dissolved into another world. Now we dream the dreamers into being.
            We hike to the top of one platform and look out across the ruins and wonder what to make of the breathtaking debris devotion leaves in its wake.
            It becomes overwhelming—the implications, the heat, the tour buses filled with chubby explorers in primary colors from St. Paul. Out by the entrance to the grounds, we pay inflated prices to a vender and drink nearly warm beer in the shade of his van until our bus arrives. On the trip home, we’re worn out, dusty, faded drunk and tired. I try to snooze, but you bring up rumors you’ve heard. I deny everything. You ask about what Mullen and I do everyday. I shut my eyes and let my head fall to the rattling, dust-tarnished window. You wrap my wrist in your cool hand and tell me that you’re as sad and lonely as you can ever remember being. You don’t know what to do about it except leave and try to mend yourself. I protest and defend, but I know, for I can feel it too. I know that I love you and nothing has changed that. But I also know that I care less and less about the little events that compose a day. And I find it hard to locate the wealth of affection I had stored up for you over the passing months. I am moved by very little except escaping the heat and bugs and the nagging sense that there was a something else I meant to do. The daily duties of life create too much static, are much too distracting and aren’t nearly as significant as what I suspect will be revealed at a dusk, down a sand blasted ally of rats and rust, where light whispers through a crack in the door.
                                    *                                     *                                     *
            Here’s where you get lost in this history. I have an image of coming home late in the morning–I don’t know if this is a drunken memory, dream or pure fiction–and you’re at the table slipping something into the pages of my journal which I haven’t written in or even thought about for months; your backpack is at the door. You walk past me, ignoring my greeting and my questions, and leave. I’m so indignant I simply mutter and fume, looking through the cupboards for something to drink. I know that something of substance has happened but I can’t cut through the static in my head to locate it. After a while, I forget what I’m looking for and wonder down the street for a drink.
            Another memory I have is of gradually realizing that you’re not there. I go to bed and rise and there’s no trace of you and I tell myself that you’ll return when you get over whatever’s sent you off. I preoccupy myself with making enough money to get through the night. When I finally hunt you down at the restaurant, you tell me you’re too busy to talk. Javier shows up, tells me to leave. Marco walks me off the grounds. I go back the next day and Javier pulls me aside and explains that you no longer work there. You have returned to the States. I don’t know how this could be. Maybe the days drop out between events.
            One night I sit at the kitchen table. I don’t know where you’ve gone. And while I suspect that you’re not coming back, I don’t remember a good by. I collect beer bottles from the counter and sink. I find a gin bottle and a tequila bottle. I circle the table with them and go into the bedroom, which is dark and sour with sweat. I gather the candles still lining the windowsills and headboard and take them into the kitchen where I use a butter knife to whittle them to fit into the mouths of the bottles. I light the candles and sit. I’m glow golden from the flickering bottle light. There’s a deck of cards on the table and I try over and again to build a house. Eventually, I manage to construct a level and add a second, slightly smaller, and then a third. I stop when I realize it looks like something from the ruins. I see my journal then. It’s been there all along but I had simply ignored it until it disappeared. I pick it up now and thumb it open to the last entry. I find a photo of a brown sofa cushion on a floor. I put the photo back and push the journal across the table. I sit with my head down on the table edge. I close my eyes and listing to the whisper of candle flame.
            I wake to Mullen yelling my name and dragging me by my shirt across the floor. There’s smoke and I’m coughing trying to yell. Then I’m on my hands and knees in the gravel of the driveway outside. Mullen and some neighbors are beating at a fire in the kitchen. I turn to see people collecting along the street. I hear a siren and I pull myself up. Someone tries to help me but I push away and stagger into a jog down the street.
            Mirimar Beach is empty and dark when I arrive. I plod through the sand to the edge of the water and listen until I grow dizzy; then I walk back to the high tide mark. I’ve no idea what time it is, but I’m exhausted and lie down in the sand. I listen to the waves. I’m no longer scared. I listen to the waves and imagine your breath in my ear. I sleep until dawn when my dreams dissolve with the arrival of the authorities.
            What follows is a slow, painful surfacing akin to what it must feel like to be menaced back to life from drowning. The world insinuates itself in raw and merciless terms, roiling in from all sides.
            The fire was minor, ruining only the table, a patch of floor and ceiling; but without a job or place to stay and obviously sick, I was deported. Mullen put me on a bus to Santa Fe where Debbie and Mark agreed to put me up while I convalesced. I was delusional, they were distant. My brother wired money from Maine. After a few weeks, I took a bus to Portland where I stayed with him until I found work. But I couldn’t hold a job. Even though I was relatively clean, I was depleted, exhausted, could never seem to get out of bed. Finally, I was diagnosed with this disease and exiled from the service industry.
            I sober up as a naked act of survival. I disappeared to my acquaintances. I ate real food, read books, walked long into the evening, looked out the window. The doctors told me that I was as well as I was going to get. One evening, a dog found me and followed me home. The months turned to years.
            A disability check comes. I’m better in many ways. Occasionally, life trickles in at odd moments. I can finally sleep once again, and again it is something of a refuge.
            But for the dreams: We are together again, sitting at this very table. There is sunlight washing us from all sides. We talk of surviving the past and having the strength to begin again. But I see that your eyes are empty. I look through them to the wall behind. I try to find words to fill in the blanks. You speak of having to leave. There’s a knock on the door. You say, My ride’s here. I say your name and you’re gone. Out the window I see your shadow wave from the window of a car driving up the street.
            I marvel, when I wake from these dreams, at how they can conjure such a tangible absence.         
            I go out and buy a pint of gin and sit and stare out the window. With the first couple of drinks sounding in my skull, I’m back in Tampico, waiting at the table for you to come home. And all around me the wind blows and the night falls and the fire that anchors me scuppers and fails.
            Tonight, I take some gin and consider the yearning that flutters about the room like a burning moth. Each year I follow it to the end of the story, but the end of the story is lost. I will never salvage our final moments together.
            But I can imagine:
            I am waiting on a bench by the beach for a connection. In my pocket, money from an errand I ran for Mullen. A few benches away, a man and woman’s conversation turns heated. I hear her voice plaintive growing bitter. His, coaxing at first then hard, cold. She shouts, exasperated and swings at him, but he catches her forearm and stares at her, grimacing, moving his face closer, and as he does it grows softer. He lowers his head and rests it against her chest. He places her hand gently on his thigh. He begins speaking to her softly. He lifts his face and it’s red and anguished. She begins to cry, turning away but he gently holds her shoulders and leans her into him. She sobs into his shirt and he continues to speak in low soothing tones. After a time, he pulls back a bit and kisses her forehead, her temples, her eyes. He kisses her cheek and mouth and she kisses him lightly. They rise from the bench and walk wrapped tightly in each other down the shore. They pass a man I recognize walking this way. I get up and walk away. I hear what might be my name, but the wind from the surf blows it away.
            I have decided that I’m going to take you to dinner. And throughout dinner I will not drink but I will explain to you that it’s time to leave Mexico. There’s no happily ever after anywhere near here and we need to return to Santa Fe. We need to find a home. I walk back to our place rehearsing my promises. There’s a car in our driveway and Carmelita’s at the wheel. You come out the door just as I walk up the driveway. You’ve got your daypack and some clothes on a hanger. You stop on the steps when you see me and wait. I say, How about some dinner? You say, I don’t think so Jess. I’ve got to get to work. I ask you about the clothes. You nod at Carmelita and say that you’re going out after work and have an early shift in the morning. You’ll stay with Carmelita tonight. I look at you for a long time. I feel every cell in my body drain into the gravel at my feet, washing away all I was going to say. My eyes sting, your face blurs. I stand there paralyzed by loss. You begin to cry but then shake your head while wiping your cheek with your wrist. You say, Okay then. Good by. And you get in the car. I follow it to the street and watch it grow small and turn the corner. The glare of the sun on the rear window washes out any shadow of you inside, but I’m sure you wave and I wave back.
            Then I just stand still, afraid that if I move, I’ll turn to ash. What remains of my love for you flutters from the weeping hole in my heart and, burning, flies after you.
            It returns every year to unsettle my sleep with the promise that if I follow it through the walls and out over the water back into the past, I’ll find myself holding on to you. But not tonight. Tonight it has settled on the windowsill before me. Its ashen wings folded and fading in the growing light. Tonight I see that it is what I imagine and that it will simply dissolve if I let it. It is love. It is beauty. It is the conviction that buried in the holy brow of night a light waits to whisper me home.