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

women too, in loose flowered dresses and blond wigs, and I thought I could hear their joints grinding and clacking as they reached their skeleton arms and hands down, their teeth grinning under the dark holes of their noses, and lifted up streamers, piñata pigs and skeleton horses and instruments. Then the skeleton band was playing, under the flowered archway they’d constructed on the truck’s bed, and the women and the small skeleton children were dancing, and streamers stood horizontal in the breeze above them, elevated on the pitchforks of horned devils.
    I thought of my mother in the crude and efficient Mexican casket the old man had arranged for, saw her pushing then pounding at the wood above her as she shed her skin and tissue and became joints and bones and banged her way up through the splintering wood. She was coming for me, and I felt myself giving in to the suicide that would join us and thought I was going crazy.
    I turned away from the dancing skeletons blocking the exit. Only I had been watching them. Everyone in the crowded square had paused and was looking at me, at my scarlet face, my hunched body and my hands clutching my chest. I tried to rise, imagining escape from that place, the hotel and the suitcases and the bed, and a place under the blanket and between the cool white sheets. But I was falling, knowing that the pounding in my stomach and chest was heart attack and that I would soon be dead. And I was embarrassed in my panic and falling, to have all these people watching me, learning of my single most shameful secret, the one that must be kept, lest they find out who I really was.
    And that was the first time, but it was not the only time. In the second I was in the meadow on my way to the Manor. Fog had come in, and when I looked up the Manor was lost in it, and when I turned around the house was gone. Then that fist was closing in my chest again, gripping my heart, and I was falling to the ground.
    The policeman stood among the old men at the fence. John had climbed into his wheelchair and was rocking it back and forth on the blacktop, and Isaw Gino step away from the others and head around the fence toward the side of the lighthouse. The policeman went after him and Frank took the opportunity and turned to the gate again and rattled it on its hinges. Then Gino and the policeman were back and Larry was shrugging his shoulders and stepping toward the car. The others followed him, though haltingly, and when they reached the car door John climbed up out of his wheelchair, Frank holding his arm, and the policeman folded it and went to the trunk and opened it and put it inside as the men climbed in through the doors. Then the car was turning, its headlights washing across the beams, and once it had gone back up the road, the lighthouse and equipment were left in moonlight bright enough so that I could almost read the stop work order sign so recently attached at the gate’s side.
    They’d come upon a river in their digging, unknown to them though they had made test borings, when they were putting in footings for the second set of hydraulic jacks. They’d had to work in winter, pushing their spring schedule back because of recent erosion caused by serious winter storms. They’d dug deeper then, under the lighthouse itself, and sand had fallen down into an old watercourse, threatening firmer ground near the lighthouse base, and they’d had to shore up the perimeter with heavy timbers and more footing and reconsider things. Engineers and politicians had come out, and the word had gotten back to Washington and the funding was put on hold, as was the project itself, though the crest behind the lighthouse was in increasing danger of further erosion should there be more storms. Now there were considerable rage and frustration on all sides. The project was lost in politics, and those concerned could only keep their fingers crossed and wait it out.
    I cannot get to the Manor on foot anymore, though I can