The surveyors left shortly after their arrival. They’d managed to lug the chair up to the veranda, then had wheeled it right through the house and out the back door to the porch. They’d seen the cauldrons in the yard then, and Carlos had seen John grip the metal handle, and once they’d unloaded the chair, he’d settled himself into it, and Larry had covered his knees with one of the blankets. The surveyors eyed them as they packed up their gear, then handed Carlos some sort of document and left.
There was so much to say that there seemed nothing to say, and only after they’d unpacked and negotiated places for themselves and Larry and Frank were carrying buckets from the pump out to the cauldron and filling it and working at a wood fire under it, did Gino turn from his place on the porch steps to watch Carlos remove the deed from his pocket and hand it to John, who sat in the wheelchair looking out at the beginning of the foothills and the oak tree Chepa had planted at the property’s perimeter. A yellow wooden stake stood beyond the trunk, still under the spreading branches, a red plastic ribbon fluttering in the light breeze at its tip. The tree had grown into a massive stateliness over the past sixty-seven years.
“This isn’t it,” John said, holding the deed out at arm’s length to study it. “It was a letter. Corzo had signed it. Chepa too. It had a seal. What’s this name here?”
“Roberto Menéndez,” Carlos said. “The previous owner. The man mentioned an alias, Calaca.”
“You’re shitting me!” John said. A cigarette hung from his lips, bobbing as he spoke. He’d tilted his derbylike hat back, and wisps of grey hair poked out at the crown above his bushy brow. Carlos saw the angry scar, running from eye to chin.
“And you?” Gino said. “For him it was Chepa. How did you get there?”
His wrist rested on his knee, one leg lifted to a higher step. He’d found a thin weed somewhere and it dangled from his mouth, and in his boots and sombrero, he looked like a wiry old Mexican farmhand, but for his face and that Truman brow.
“I don’t know,” Carlos said. “But it was you then? At the records office?”
“Just about three days ago,” John said. “They were no help at all.”
Carlos looked down at him and at the deed. “What about a man named Joaquín Sánchez? Do you know that name?”
Gino had talked them into it, inducing a little guilt and a little promise. They’d been talking about Chepa again, her leaving and her letter, and about Joaquín and John’s days in Tampico. The doctors had brought another group of potential buyers to see the Manor, and they’d stood in a tight cluster in the solarium, speaking about the potential for renovation, ignoring the men who sat in their chairs, smoking, huffing through their tubes, and when they’d left Carolyn had come in with their dinners, and Larry had tried to joke with Gino, yet again, when she had shushed away in her starched A-line and tennis shoes. Kelly was gone now, permanently, and Gino was at the window, looking out across the meadow and up to Kelly’s house. He could see dark places where clapboards had torqued and fallen away, and he thought he saw a slight sagging in the roof. The yellow lights on the barricades were blinking.
“Fuck that,” he said. “Enough with sexual fantasy. It isn’t even that, just a lame joke for the lame.”
“You’re right,” Larry had said. “Just something to do.”
“No,” Gino said, turning to look at the three of them. “It isn’t even that. We’re not doing anything. We’re hardly even living.”
He got them to get their bankbooks and insurance policies. Then he went to his own bedside locker to get his, and when he came back, and they were all gathered again, he produced a number of maps and brochures, various routes to Tampico and places to stay and see there. One of the hotels was the one John had lived in over a half century before. It had changed, renovations and ownership, but he still recognized the façade, and the picture even showed the very window he’d looked down from, and the picture made a promise real, and he was drawn into Gino’s talk as more than talk, and it was not long before Frank and Larry could imagine the place too, beyond those stories of it, as something concrete, really down there in Mexico, a place to go, and maybe be alive in a way different from this inertia in the going. They found they had a good deal of money between them, given negotiables, enough at least, and John thought he might have a house, and the others thought they might share in that for a while, and if not, so what, and the next morning Gino slipped out and went to a travel agent and in the afternoon was back with the tickets and reservations.
“I am fucking beat,” Frank said.
He sat on the steps near Gino’s knee, looking out to where Larry poked at the brush fire under the cauldron with a stick, still in his linen outfit. Steam was rising at the broad mouth, dissipating in the dusky air a few feet above it. Beyond the shadows of the oak’s branches and the ruined chicken coop, the foothills rose up darkly, then brightened into a golden glow where the sun bathed the last visible ridge. Larry was cutting carrots and celery now, and onions, casting them into the cauldron to join the three chickens. They’d brought a portable barbecue, and he’d settled it on a log and was using it as a table.
“I could use a little help,” he said, his voice like crystal in the clear evening air, and Gino pushed up stiffly from the porch steps and ambled out to the yard.
They’d eaten their dinner on the porch, watching the foothills darken and disappear, listening to the night birds singing above their quiet talk, no extended stories now, just light laughter and gentle joking in this new circumstance together. And they found ways to bring Carlos into it, for he had lived at the Manor too, for a while at least, just a few feet from the simple textures of their lives. They spoke of their few days in Tampico, the Panuco and the square, places John had taken them, to tell bits of his story once again. Carlos had nothing to add to all of this, but when they spoke of the lighthouse he joined in, telling his own story, that one about the fallen timber that had gotten him to the Manor. John spoke of Chepa, her house here, and the dogs dyed in the cauldrons, and Gino said he thought he’d tasted yellow in the chicken.
Carlos could hear their stertorous breathing through the crickets, the squeak of the bedsprings as they shifted, occasional groans. He started to think of the morning, though they’d not spoken of any plans, then he stopped doing that. This night, he thought, my house, but maybe it isn’t really mine, though I have the documents. He started to think of something else, the fire and his mother, but the crickets joined the breathing, indistinguishable from it, and he joined the old men in exhaustion and fell into a sleep that was empty of any concern.
The Foothills
This is his story.
Carlos awoke to the sound of activity, the screen’s slap at the rear of the house and a constant, monotonous clopping, and wondered if he could turn. He was wedged in on the veranda’s boards at the rail in his sleeping bag, and in his night’s turning had become a tightly wrapped mummy. He heard a hacking cough, somebody spitting and the shuffle of feet, and then rolled over, struggled to get his arms free, and found the zipper.
John was on the back porch in his wheelchair and straw hat, a bowl of steaming farina held in his cupped hands over the blanket that covered his legs, and he raised it in offering as Carlos passed Larry, who was tending the fire under another cauldron, one that had slipped from its stone foundation but would still hold water, and came up the porch steps. He’d walked over the baked clay at the house side, not wanting to disturb the men’s ablutions by entering.