The Last Karankawas(14)

That makes me cruel, doesn’t it. I felt bad for them, but I no longer wasted time on grief. Another thing my father taught me with his fists, between the skin on my back and the buckle of his belt.

An electric squawk ripped apart the night: a radio. Immediately an owl hooted, an owl that was not an owl but instead a coyote crouched behind the tree next to me. Then a responding yelp, a cry that could have been a real coyote this time but was the two-legged kind. We ran.

I knew where my tío’s truck would be, where he’d said over the phone it would be. I sprinted in that direction. Around me the silence became a thunder of footsteps, heaving breaths, bodies slamming into one another, babies howling, men’s voices yelling Alto alto. The darkness shattered into beams from flashlights and headlights that bounced off us, our sodden clothes, onto them, their green and tan. I kept my eyes on the far brush line where I knew the blue pickup would be, and as people one by one dropped away from me, I didn’t look back until I was there, until I lifted one foot onto the bumper and hurled myself over the tailgate. Screaming Go Tío go go. And like magic my mother was next to me, facedown in the bed of the truck with her hands wrapped around my baby sister’s head to protect it. The truck squealed and bounced beneath us, picking up speed. I pressed my face into my mother’s neck so the tears she cried mingled with mine; we laughed together. It’s a rare story, I know now, how we crossed—as if the violence and rape and death decided not to touch us, as if it could sense we had seen enough of them in the house we left.

We had family throughout Texas, as far as Galveston Island up the coast near Houston. But my mother chose to keep us in the Valley. We moved into Tía Flor’s house in Mission for a couple of months while we settled. Really, there wasn’t much to settle. We were from Matamoros, border twin to Brownsville, a grand total of 1.45 hours away. I spoke English—Mama insisted I learn—but I hardly needed it. Here we walked on streets like those from home, christened with names like Allende and San Juan, narrower in some places, wider in others, only slightly better paved. Buildings with bars on the windows and the red-white-green flag of Mexico pasted on the doors. Signs reading Cristian Ortega, Abogado. Ydania Gonzalez y Cruz, Médica. Se Aceptan Cash. Se Habla Espa?ol. Norte?o music blasting from old Chevys: horns triumphant, the barrump-barrump of the bass and the cumbia throbbing a heartbeat in the pathways of our bodies.

We moved to Brownsville, joined up with my other aunts and uncles and cousins there off Rentfro Boulevard. Tía Medora threw us a party and invited most of the neighborhood. Spanish all around me with the music I’d known my whole life in a new place that was not new at all. I sulked in the front yard, picking at the grass poking through the sidewalk. Through the press of bodies and the smoke from the grill and my uncles’ cigarettes, a boy my age eased over, sat down beside me on the sidewalk, and offered me a Coke. Beads of condensation like diamonds on its side. When he smiled, he flashed a missing incisor, dimples in his cheeks sweet as my baby sister’s. I’m Luis, he said. You play ball?

I borrowed my cousin’s glove and spent the rest of the day playing catch with Luis. He’d learned the curve, but his would hover and hang too long; mine, on the other hand—yeah, I’ll say it—mine had the nastiest 12–6 drop this side of Sandy Koufax. I said, Let me. And he did. I showed him the grip on the seams, the arc of the elbow, the way the palm turns inward as you snap your wrist, as my father had shown me a year before. I didn’t tell Luis that he’d shown me one week, then broken my arm in a drunken rage the next. That it was still in a cast when Mama made the phone call to her sisters in Texas about crossing.

Luis came again the next day, bringing his old glove for me to use. We played catch in the street to work on his distance. I knew his fastball would really be something. He’d throw and I’d think putamadre, like my father would say when Nolan Ryan took the mound for the Rangers. When Luis was ready to go home, I offered him his glove and he said, You keep it. For tomorrow. I set the glove on my nightstand; the part of my heart that cried constantly for something strange and unfamiliar quieted a little.

Some days, Luis took me to the international bridge and we watched the cars cross. Gasoline and scorched asphalt and humidity weighing the air heavy. I could see the city from there, the curls of smoke and exhaust rise above the streets. One day, I brought the baby; I was watching her while Mama worked at the convenience store. Look, Celia, I said, there’s the shitpile where we used to live. And here’s the one where we live now. I lifted her chubby arm and used her fingers to point across the water, and back again.



* * *



For months we moved carefully, fearing not INS but the hulking shape of my father. We looked over our shoulders in the driver’s seat of unmarked vans, over the top of Celia’s head in the grocery store. He knew where my tías lived; when the phone rang, the skin on the backs of our necks itched. We waited for shadows, movement in the corners of our eyes, but there was nothing. He never came after us.

I couldn’t have been happier, and I searched for that happiness in my mother. Mama’s bruises faded; the cut above her eye fused back, though she’ll bear a rift in her left brow forever, a lilt upward that even today makes her look slightly surprised. I wanted to see relief on her healing face, radiant beams of joy and recognition that we were free, that the river we’d climbed out of and the ground we stood upon had provided that for us. I saw it some days. Others, I recognized disappointment when she looked around and he wasn’t waiting there, tears in his eyes, wildflowers in his fist.