The Last Karankawas(37)

Her brother, Pete, has his Oakleys on—Kristin sees them as his truck pulls into the Bay Pines Care Center parking lot, where she’s been waiting for ten minutes. Through the windshield, light glints off the titanium rims, the polarized lenses he’s replaced so many times. They were his first sunglasses that weren’t two-for-$10 off some cart in the San Antonio mall, affordable only because of his active military discount, special.

Across the way, Mrs. Castillo is watching the parking lot from her window of Room 21, as she usually does in the afternoons, before dinner and whatever evening entertainment Mrs. Reyes has planned. Tonight is a Rummikub tournament, but Mrs. Castillo hates the game, so she will skip it. Kristin has learned her routine these past months. When she waves goodbye, she sees the old woman hesitate, then lift a hand in return. Her hair is pulled back, the two French braids Kristin did for her still tidy down her shoulders, strands of white and black woven together like a basket. She’s watching Pete with trepidation, like he’s driving a chariot of death instead of a newish Silverado that their mother scraped up the money to pay a deposit for. Kristin wonders what Mrs. Castillo sees when she looks at him. Dementia—such a sad thing.

Her brother pulls to the curb. She spots where the red paint of the truck is already raked with scratches from mesquite and huizache and prickly pear. Texas pinstripes, their father calls them. The marks that say Pete’s been out in the monte, some land like back home in Uvalde. She doesn’t know where he would’ve found brush and mesquite out here on the coast or up in Conroe, where he says he’s been for weeks. Perhaps he’s lying to her again.

The truck smells of Febreze trying its damnedest to cover the weed smoke; Miller cans lie crumpled on the floor. Kristin tries to ignore them as she rolls down the windows and kisses him on the cheek.

“Nice pajamas,” Pete says, nodding at her scrubs. He reaches out and fingers the silver lanyard and ID badge with her name and title. “I’m so proud of you. K. Caballero, Registered Nurse.” Though he doesn’t look at her as he shifts into drive, the softness in his voice tells her he means it. She basks in it for one moment—her big brother’s pride.

“So where’s this boyfriend?” he asks.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” she says, blowing out an embarrassed breath. “We’re just dating. Kind of.”

“Rudy something, right? What kind of name is Rudy for a Chinese guy?”

“He’s Filipino, Pete, Jesus Christ.”

“I’m kidding, kid. There was a Filipino dude in my unit. Jun. He was cool. So where’s Rudy?”

“He’s working, I think. He can meet us later at my place, if we still need help.”

“We won’t. You’re in a second-floor apartment. How long could it take us to prep it for a hurricane? An hour or two? It’s not like you can board your windows.”

He eases onto the freeway, merges with evening traffic heading south. They begin the crawl through the Bay Area back to Galveston. He uses one hand to fiddle with his phone, then tosses it in her lap. “Take a look. You’re going to be impressed.”

She doubts it, but she looks at the photos on his phone anyway. They’re of some ranch—Pete wants her to see the new job he’s lined up for next month, the one he heard about from a buddy back home. He must have taken photos the whole drive down (dangerous, she thinks with some weary anger, reckless). South on 83, she sees, and doesn’t need the phone to picture the highway she’s known all her life, snaking through farmland past neat, even rows of cotton or cabbage or winter oats, depending on the season. Winding through ranchland, past Beefmaster and Santa Gertrudis steers and the occasional longhorn, until the hills thick with nopales and scrub brush settle into prairies and waving grass hip-high.

Just past La Pryor, before the turnoff to Eagle Pass and the border, a picture of a side road and a gate more rust than anything. Nailed to one of the witchy-looking mesquites, a hand-lettered sign: El Dorado Ranch. A caliche road ahead, pitted with holes, throwing up clouds of dust gone white in the September sun. And a video: Pete carries the phone through the brush, casting it down at his feet, picking his way as he goes, watching his step, and Kristin has to swallow hard. She does that, too: Even now on Galveston, hours away from the nearest prickly pear, she walks the way they both learned as kids running wild through the brush. Eyes trained on their feet for mesquite thorns, horse-cripplers, rattlers. Eyes always looking down.

The camera pans up: a cabin in a slight clearing, all but buried beneath weeds and gray-spined branches. Kristin sighs, seeing as decrepit and sorry a structure as she could imagine. Here, the thing he’s going to fix up, pin the rest of his hopes to. “What do you think?” Video Pete asks, turning the camera toward his smile, then waving his hand at the cabin in a grand gesture. As if he hasn’t already made up his mind. Beside her, Real Pete is tapping on the wheel along with Kenny Chesney. He does want her opinion—that’s the thing. He wants her to tell him it’s wonderful. That he has made the right choice taking this job, that more than the others he’s left behind, this is the one for him; this is the right first step on the path to the man he wants to be. He’s got that romantic cast to his face that she’s come to recognize, to dread.

He catches her eye and smiles. “What do you think?”



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