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

waist is thick, his stomach flat and hard, and below it his penis and small scrotum rest on a slight mound at the center of the broad girdle his hips make, womanish again, but not really that. There’s no woman’s fat, but smooth sinew and the bulge of tendons running out into his legs from their insertion in his groin.
    He’s a small man, no taller than I, and his brow is broad and unlined, like smooth stone, and below the lids of his deep set eyes, his nose thick and slightly flattened above the line of his thin lips, his chin is small and rounded, what’s called a weak chin, though there’s power in the flat slabs of his cheeks above it.
    I know his eyes are black eyes, because I’ve lifted his lids. And his hair is black too, each strand like a small braid, rich with natural oil where it lies shining on the pillow. He’s forty-three years old, but his face shows nothing of the wear of experience. It might as well be a child’s face, or the face of a very old man who has gotten beyond any care for experience. It’s a face like ones I think I saw in Tampico, but only in glimpses in reflections in store windows, and like those of children gathered in the skirts of their mothers passing on the street in my brief stay there. And I wonder about the ways his face might move when he awakens and what his voice will sound like beyond the deep sighs and groaning I’ve managed to draw out of him in our time together.
    The other night in a dream in which my mother was rising through a fissure caused by natural eruptions in the earth’s crust, her rotted wood casket riding on a river of mud, coming down to where I stood in panic in a meadow out of sight of the house, I felt a constant pulse of water under the dream’s textures and the spongy ground below my feet was sinking and I woke up shaking, thinking it was the house, but it was me, my heart racing and a flush and tightening at my temples. I lay there, looking up into moonlight and shadows on the ceiling, and in a while I was beyond the aftermath of the dream, and I slipped out from under the covers, searched for my slippers with my feet, then put my robe on and stood listening, watched the betta circle under the dim fluorescent, searching the tank for his mate, thin as a knife blade whenhe faced me. I listened to the gurgling of the circulating pump, then noticed a sound under that sound, as in the dream, something below the bedroom floor, a pulse of water, faintly percussive, and I took my robe off and kicked my slippers away and dressed myself in jeans and tennis shoes and a loose sweatshirt and headed for the cellar stairs.
    There are lights in the cellar, bulbs hanging from electrical fixtures, each with its own chain, and once I’d felt my way down to the foot of the ladder and pulled the first one, I saw that the floor was dry, a dirt floor, black soil over hard clay a few inches down. I went to other lights and pulled the chains, and when there was enough light I moved along the stone walls on both ocean and meadow side, but could find nothing. Bits of mortar dissolved under my fingers, fans of sand falling to my tennis shoes, but that was all. Then I looked up between the joists in the low ceiling, places where my father had hung boat and fishing gear. I saw a bargepole, paint worn away on a string of lobster buoys, and I saw the members of my mother’s dismantled quilting frame, the nails in rusty rows at the edges. But I could find no water, and when I went to the boxes sitting on wooden skids on the dirt floor, I found only the dampness of humidity in the cardboard. I was tempted to open a box, one marked with the first letter of my father’s name, but as I bent over it I heard a trickle and a quiet splash. It seemed to be coming from the end of the room, down in the old wine cellar under the building’s ocean side edge. My father had bought the house from a man who had owned it most of his life. He’d bought it, in turn, from an old sea captain, a