The Last Karankawas(27)

Yes, Luz agrees. She thinks of the Fourth of July, her head on Carlos’s shoulder, her lover a few yards away, and the moment when the grainy strains of Sousa pushed through the park’s speakers and the first crack of a rocket echoed. How as one the whole park lifted their faces and watched the streak of light rise higher, waiting for the burst they knew was coming.





THE LAST KARANKAWAS


Carly

Carly finally admits something is wrong the day her grandmother brings home a whole pompano and tries to eat it raw. She walks in off her night shift to find Magdalena crouched on the living room floor, tearing strips of fish flesh with her fingers. The linen pantsuit she wore to six a.m. Mass bunches at her crotch, her waist, and tightens at the thighs and hips. Juice worms down her hand; bone and meat snag beneath her manicure. She looks up and with her mouth full says, “This is the way of our people.” When Carly snatches up the newspaper-and-fish bundle, Magdalena sits back on her haunches and hisses.

Carly drops the thing in the kitchen trash, then leans against the stove and presses the heels of her hands into her eyes. She waits a few moments, until she no longer feels the burn of tears threatening, or the urge to scream churning in her throat.

Weeks, months, they blur together; how long Magdalena has been this way. Signs recognized and ignored, perhaps denied—Carly has worked only NICU in the two years since graduating from nursing school, but some things you don’t forget, like a rotation at a nursing home in Texas City. Even Jess senses it on the nights he sleeps over (“Babe, your grandma called me Lando today”—the name of his father, years gone—“that’s weird, right?”). The slow but steady trudge into dementia—she can deny it no longer. Her grandmother is moving away from her, as surely as if she were crossing the causeway.

Carly opens her eyes, and the pompano stares back up at her from the open trash can. Its face is ravaged—Magdalena likes the head best. Still, one eye is intact, black as a piece of tar, Gulf-polished. Fixed on the fragments of a life she can’t see anymore.

Carly slams the lid down, bracing herself as her grandmother storms into the kitchen.

There have been bad days in Magdalena’s decline, but none like this. Today Magdalena thrusts her face into Carly’s and battles. Her breath smells of brine and coffee still warm in the pot and the Listerine she gargles each morning before Mass. In her anger, she slips fully into Spanish. Carly stays motionless, recalling the training from that one rotation, when she thought she would never need it. The aggression is coming from a place of fear or physical discomfort. She doesn’t mean it. Don’t touch her. Relax your face; keep your hands loose and nonthreatening in front of you even though they want to rise up, fist. Accept the flecks of spit on your chin. Translate. Imagine the words as toy blocks, the ones kids in the hospital pedi wing play with—turning over from Spanish to English. One side A, one side a. One side yo sé lo que piensas de mí, one side I know what you think of me. Ni?a ingrata: you ungrateful child.



* * *



Carly can’t blame the dementia. Well, not for all of it. For the vitriol, yes, her grandmother was always firm but not hateful, has never been hateful. But not for the fish, not for eating it raw. Magdalena thinks it the way of their people. Their people, the Karankawas.

Her grandmother has believed they are descendants of the vanished Texas tribe since before Carly was born—long before she grew old enough to witness the threads of Magdalena’s mind fray, then fuse again in the wrong places. She offered up her musings as fact over breakfast (“Our people went days without food, and look at you, wasting scrambled eggs”); at Mass (“Sí, somos católicas, ni?a, pero it’s not sacrilege to offer prayers up to the wind and the sun. It’s hurricane season”); walking around Galveston (“Oleanders, yes, they are dangerous, but our grandmothers wore them because they are dangerous”). Her own father told her they had Karankawa blood, Magdalena claimed, and his father before him, and she came from a tradition where elders were believed.

So as a child, Carly believed, too. In the stillness before bedtime, soothed by the humming of the window AC, she listened to her grandmother’s murmured tales. Their Karankawa ancestors were as real as Lafitte, as steeped in legend as his buried treasure, the one tourists search for but none as yet have found. They became real to Carly, real as the uneven brown coils of her hair and the freckles that fireworked her shoulders and cheeks. She sensed centuries of stories running in her veins: a presence of secrets that the body and not the mind could remember.

She believed. Even when her mother scolded her. “Don’t be silly,” Maharlika said, hands planted on hips, whenever Carly walked into the house with mud smeared across her cheeks or white oleanders twined into the band of her ponytail. She snapped the words at her, not caring if her mother-in-law could hear. “Your grandmother’s people are from Texas, from Mexico. I am from the Philippines. You have no Indian in you anywhere. And the Indians left anyway. They could not last here.”

As it turned out, neither could Maharlika, who one day packed a small bag and left without any word. They assumed she returned to the Philippines, to her island just south of Manila and the extended family they had never met. “Some people are not fighters,” Magdalena had said, stroking six-year-old Carly’s hair where it lay tear-tangled in her lap. “For some people that is not their way. Ya. Enough crying, Carly Elena.” Carly wiped her face, thinking for the first time, People run away. I could, too.