The Last Karankawas(29)
The great thing about Jess is that if he doesn’t know what to say, he doesn’t say anything. He laces his fingers through hers as they drive. Keeps quiet the whole way back down I-45 while she leans her face against his shoulder, tears and snot soaking into the sleeve of his Astros T-shirt.
* * *
Jess never minded the lies. Even now that they are older, now that Carly recognizes how absurd the idea is that she comes from a long-vanished tribe, he shrugs off her bitter rants. Shrugs off whether Magdalena’s theories are dropped into conversation offhandedly (“Put on your shirt, Jesusmaría, only my people could walk around the beach naked”) or with the detail of delusion (“This is the spot, here, míralo, Jess, this is where my fathers made landfall when they arrived, here is where they sacrificed a sea turtle they’d found on the journey across the bay”). When Magdalena uses his full name, which Carly knows he hates, he always smiles. He has delighted in Magdalena’s stories since he and Carly were kids, running wild from Trout to Tuna or playing pickup ball in Lindale Park with the rest of the Fish Village children.
Stories, he calls them, but Carly knows them by another name.
She did a history project in seventh grade on the Karankawas. She stood in front of the class and restated what her peers—most of them BOIs like her—already knew: that the tribe of Indians had inhabited the swath of coastline from Galveston to Corpus Christi; that they’d broken up and dissolved long ago; that no one really knew what had happened to them. Some historians theorized they’d joined up with the Tonkawas, abandoned the Gulf, and moved farther inland. Or they’d migrated down to Mexico and the Coahuiltecans. Or they’d died out, killed or driven away by white settlers. Or they were everywhere, looking brown and black and white, their Native blood running beneath the skin.
Her teacher smiled indulgently at the presentation, until Carly added, “That’s what I think. My grandma says we are descended from the Karankawas, too.” She looked over as her classmates began to giggle, and she caught the disappointed frown on Ms. Morton’s face.
Afterwards, Ms. Morton pulled Carly outside. “I want you to know that it’s a tale—a nice tale,” the teacher said firmly. “And I’m sure it’s fun to believe as a kid. But history class is not the place for wild theories.”
Through the glass window of the door, the rest of the class watched.
“She’s a bitch,” Jess said valiantly, kicking strewn palm fronds out of her path on the sidewalk as they walked home after school. “It could still be true. Your grandma wouldn’t lie.” He thought Magdalena’s belief about their ancestry was wonderful, that Carly was rooted here in a way he, the child of Valley Mexicans, wasn’t. He was jealous.
“Hey, Carly!”
They turned to watch Carlos Saldivar jogging past them.
He grinned, pointed. “You’re so stupid. Who’d ever think something dumb like being a Karankawa when everyone knows they’re dead? You’re just Mexican like the rest of us, Castillo, and a chink, too, ’cause of your mom.”
“Shut your fucking mouth, Carlos!” she hollered, and Jess threw off his backpack to chase him, but Carlos was the third-best sprinter in their grade, and he was well down the block laughing, calling “Estúpida” over his shoulder. “No, screw it, Jess.” Neither of them aware yet that Carlos would apologize a day later and Carly would forgive him, that he would play catcher for as long as Jess was shortstop, teaching him how to spot and hit a slider.
They neared Jess’s house on Dolphin, but Carly knew he wouldn’t turn—he’d walk her to Albacore first, then backtrack the two blocks. He could be a good boyfriend, she realized. He’d been a steady best friend all these years.
“Carlos is a piece of shit.”
“Yeah, but he’s right. That’s what Ms. Morton was saying.” A dark heaviness settled in Carly’s chest. “That my grandma’s just making it all up.”
Wild theories, Ms. Morton said. The same thought that had crept in on the night Carly’s mother left, a thought piercing as a knife: We are wild. Wild things run away.
Jess shook his head. His cheeks were flushed, his face sorrowful. To comfort him, as much as herself, Carly slipped her hand into his. Held fast.
* * *
Sad as she still feels to look around the Galveston house, to not see Magdalena chattering on the phone with her comadres, sipping her daily Coke on the overstuffed sofa or emerging from the bathroom with her shower cap in place, having Jess move in helps. The studio apartment he rents on Mackeral is a half step up from shitty, but it is his—the first place he’s called his own—so it matters. He stays in the apartment for a few weeks after Magdalena moves into Bay Pines, and then he moves into the Albacore house, choosing to pay out the remaining four months on the lease rather than give it up just yet. The shrimping has been good so far, and what is left of his earnings after he drops some off to his mother helps. When oyster season starts in the fall, the boat will be going out regularly, and he is counting on more.
This is their first time sharing a room, a home, for real. Carly imagined it would be gleaming and new to combine their things, to make space in her closet for his jeans and superhero T-shirts, to have one nightstand for her lip balm, one for his glasses. But they have been together so long they already feel broken in. She knows how far left in the driveway she must park her Corolla so she won’t clip his truck leaving in the morning; he knows that on days she trains a new nurse she’ll be too annoyed to cook and they’ll order pizza that night.