The Last Karankawas(30)

In high school it was different, wasn’t it? He was the ace shortstop, a crappy student in everything except history, popular in every circle. But quiet, more comfortable sitting with her on a tailgate than tapping a keg somewhere. Their date nights usually ended on the western stretches of the beach, past the city limits, parked on an access point only islanders knew about. He opened every beer bottle for her, even the twist-offs. He still does.

Back then he was getting scouted by schools, big schools like UT and Tech. And though Carly was pushing for them hard, Jess started working weekends out on Mr. Pham’s oyster boat. If he wasn’t there or playing ball, Jess was talking about oystering. He told her how they tossed shells and too-small oysters overboard, back into the bay, where maybe, just maybe, some alchemy of salt and spore would help them find one another. They might fuse to a sunken car or ship and form a new reef. Jess never spoke so much as when he spoke of working the bay. “I can do this full-time once school is over, be out every day during the oyster season. Get work on Mr. Pham’s shrimp boat during the summer. Why would I go anywhere?”

She’d smile, but what she really wanted to do was shake him. He could have left the island for a place as far away as Lubbock, as exotic. Could have driven north on 45 or west on 10 and kept going, going, couldn’t he see that? She pictured it countless nights as she crossed the causeway to take nursing classes inland, fantasized about driving between the fringe of tall trees north of the loop, flanking the interstate like guardians, welcoming her to Something Else. Anything Else.

The Karankawas had been built for moving. Expert swimmers and lithe, powerful runners, they would wait for a clear day, load their lives into canoes carved from the hollows of a large oak, and paddle into the shallows off the coast. Make their way from one craggy pile of Texas sand to another, season by season, chasing the food sources and the weather. On these solo drives to and from the mainland, Carly wondered if this was how her grandmother saw their past: as something shaped from delusion.

She’d return from classes and turn onto Albacore to see the drapes her grandmother hung. Usually there was Jess’s truck in the drive, tires coated with the grit of the docks, beside the space where Carly should be.

A churning in her blood would start, an urge branching like lightning through her muscles: to wheel, to paddle, to sprint. Between the Karankawas and her wayward mother, wasn’t she built for moving, too? She had always thought so.

But she imagined her grandmother behind those curtains stirring chicken and rice. Jess, practicing his rusty Spanish with her, pouring Carly’s beer into a glass because she liked it that way. She would remind herself that her people were here, were here, were here, open her car door and step out.



* * *



The hurricane—a real one—begins taking shape in August, a few weeks after Magdalena is situated in Bay Pines. On the overhead TV in a patient’s room, Carly marks its projected path across Haiti, Cuba, the Gulf, to Galveston and nearly drops her blood pressure cuff, hearing her grandmother’s voice. It’s out there, on its way. Storms are typical, she reminds herself. No need to worry yet, to fret. Until days later, when the weather service replaces its number with a name: Ike.

Jess has heard an Ike Turner joke somewhere, naturally, and he repeats it for Magdalena during their visit to Bay Pines that afternoon. She cackles while Carly rolls her eyes. They eat cookies she has brought from Magdalena’s favorite panadería. A good day, she notes. Her grandmother’s clothes are pressed and clean, her hair neatly pinned back. Her eyes are sharp, lighting on every movement Jess and Carly make, a bird hopping from branch to branch.

“Tell me about this Ike,” she says with an encouraging smile. “Will he be big?”

“They think so.” Carly flips the TV to the Weather Channel. As one, they watch the swirl of silver out on the Gulf, far from them, still a screen’s worth of space between it and the crescent curve of the coast. “They say it’s headed our way.”

“Gonna hit Cuba first,” says Jess, “do some damage there, then pick up speed in the Gulf from the air. It’s been damn hot on the water this summer.” He snatches the last of the macadamia nuts.

Magdalena nods thoughtfully, eyes fixed on the wind and water that has been named. “I’ll need to find some palm fronds.”

“For what?” asks Jess.

“My blessing. For protection. I need to burn them, we always burn them. But they don’t have palm trees here, do they? Ni?a, bring me some from home, next time you come.”

Carly feels her face settle into hard lines, as it always does when the delusions come on. “You don’t have a protection blessing, Grandma. You never have. You usually just light a candle and pray.”

Magdalena clucks her tongue dismissively. “Well, that won’t do any good. I need to burn the palms. They need to be ones from the island. You know this.”

I don’t. None of this is real. “You’re not allowed to burn things here. Not even candles. They catch you burning a candle here, you’ll be in trouble.” Carly presses her lips together, wills her rising frustration to slow. “I’ll go to Sacred Heart and light one for you, if you want.”

“Yes, you’ll be on the island, that’s good. You won’t leave, will you? Not like last time, look how that turned out.”

Two years ago—only a year after Katrina and her devastation of New Orleans, evacuees flooding the Astrodome and the word hurricane instilling a new, healthy fear in even the hardiest hunker-downers—Hurricane Rita appeared and veered straight at Galveston. Carlos Saldivar invited them to stay with him and Luz at their new place in the Hill Country, and they had not hesitated—for once, not even Magdalena said a word against a plan of her granddaughter’s. Fish Village scattered: Carlos’s parents went to his brother in Katy; Ram and his boyfriend crashed in Sealy with Hector’s family; Jess’s mother and sisters and cousin Mercedes stayed with his tío in Pearland. Only some of the lifers—like Mr. and Mrs. Alvarez across the street, or the Phams on Marlin—remained.