The Last Karankawas(35)
Jess’s phone buzzes, and he glances at it, sighs. “I should go. My girl’s off work.” A nurse, Schafer knows, at UTMB. They stand and brush the sand from their asses. “You got a girl or anything back home?”
“I did. We were engaged.”
“No shit?”
“She cheated on me while I was gone.” Unlike the truth, this lie falls easily from his tongue. He has used it for so long.
Jess stops, stares with his mouth slightly agape. “Seriously? Bitch.”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry, man.”
“It happens.” They walk back to the parking lot of the bar.
“What about family? You got parents?”
“We’re not that close. We didn’t keep in touch much while I was gone, and they don’t really care that I’m back. I didn’t have a lot to keep me home, you know? So I lit out. Just the way it is.”
Schafer likes the way it sounds. He has said this—some version of it—many times at this point, in many places. Marfa, Odessa. Houma, Biloxi. Corpus Christi, Carrizo Springs. Better to focus, he decided, crafting the story he would tell, on the lack of roots. Better not to open up and reveal the inner guts of it: the restlessness, ever-present, sparking through his bones and muscles, urging him to move and keep moving. The way his stomach dropped when he looked around at his home, the sight of his parents, brother, and Laurie, every hair in place, every part of them unchanged as if he had sketched them from memory before he enlisted. The way picking up his life in Kerrville felt like another kind of mission, requiring training he hadn’t received. With every H-E-B shopping trip, or Sunday barbecue at his father’s grill, or night with Laurie’s hands on his shoulders and her mouth on his, he felt only adrenaline rising up. Run. Take cover.
Jess hums sympathetically. “Are you glad to be back?”
Schafer flicks the butt of his cigarette away; it arcs like a tiny red drone, hits the gravel, and goes out. “I don’t know yet.”
Back in the apartment, he closes the door, deadbolts it. As always, he paces quickly through the rooms, scanning the corners, behind the stained shower curtain, stilling to hear the sounds of any breathing or footfalls. He sits with one of the Bud Lights in a lawn chair and flicks on Jess’s TV.
A weatherman in Houston is pointing to his green screen, to a white spiraling swirl on the Gulf. Hurricane Ike, the text reads. Schafer watches the swirl’s projected path swoop out, a cone of purple, over the word Galveston.
* * *
Vinh sends them to stock up on extra lines. The marine store is about cleaned out, so Jess and Schafer have to head inland to find supplies. Bay watermen of all kinds crowd the aisles, clearing the shelves of rope, rigging, cables, plywood, buoys. They grab what they can and bring it back to the island. Schafer asks why boats on the bayside should fret about a Gulf hurricane. “The surge,” Vinh says, “is what to worry about.”
The news reports make it sound like a nasty one heading their way; whoever named it Ike was, Schafer thinks, a genius. He makes a crack about Ike Turner, and Jess laughs so hard he nearly swerves off the causeway.
They pull up to the marina and begin unloading supplies. Schafer has his arms full of extra rope when he hears someone call out his name—his first name, not the last, which he has preferred since the Army—and his spine instantly stiffens. He turns. Laurie stands on the pier.
She has cut her hair; now it skims her bare shoulders, a golden-brown sweep. She wears a blue dress and strappy shoes that are all wrong on the gravel and the wood. A purse is slung crossways over her body, and she grips it tightly with both hands, so tightly that the ring he gave her at nineteen flashes in the sun.
“Adam,” she says again. She is not smiling.
He freezes. Ahead of him, on the Cig, Rey and Vinh have stopped working. Jess is behind him, and he hears the slam of his truck door.
“What are you doing here?” It is all he can ask. Looking at her makes him ill, reminds him of home, family, duties he has shirked. Run, he thinks again. Take cover.
“Your dad told me where you were. On a shrimp boat in Galveston, all he knew. I’ve been circling the parking lot for hours.” She straightens her shoulders, and he recognizes her fighting stance. “A hurricane’s coming and—and we were worried. Your mom is a mess.”
Jess clears his throat, and Schafer is sure he’s recalling the story—the lie—about not speaking to his parents. Fuck fuck fuck. “So you just, what? Figured you’d drive over and visit every shrimping boat until you found me?” His tone is harsh; he wants it to be. Wants her to leave, to not have been here at all.
She raises her chin. “If I had to.”
“I’ma give y’all a minute.” Jess tries to move around Schafer, toward the boat, but Laurie turns sharply to him.
“No, it’s all right. You can stay. I won’t be here long. I just came to say something.”
“What do you want, Laurie?”
“I had a different plan, you know. Driving down here. All those hours, I thought about it, getting here and seeing you and begging you to come home. That it’s been five years. Enough already, Adam, I would say. But I changed my mind. I’m not going to beg anymore.”
When she laughs, bitterly, watery, it stings. He isn’t a complete monster.