The Last Karankawas(38)

They are children, Pete and Kristin, fourteen and eleven respectively, and their father is telling them another story about their name. They are sitting behind the register of their family’s general store, and he is speaking loudly, in his historical voice, about how la familia Caballero can trace its roots to the days when Texas was Mexico. Before the border crossed them. Pete loves the stories—he calls them “the electric years,” charged with danger and disease, lands wild and complicated. You could ride days without encountering another human, except maybe the Comanches, who roamed the South Texas plains taking scalps. (“They weren’t so bad,” he says. “In Galveston Bay, the Kronks ate oysters and their own men.” His little sister gapes, delighted. She has a fascination with Galveston; though she’s only visited once, she imagines herself one day moving there.) Their family had land back then, Dad continues. Acres of ranchland that was theirs from Spain long before the whites took it, backed up by racist laws and the ever-loaded pistols of the Rangers. Pete has known this a long time, but since she is a girl, it will be many years before Kristin learns exactly why her father spits when he says “los Rinches.”

He tells them how, in the electric years, the name Caballero meant something. Still does, but now it’s an antiquated title, rarely used. Horseman, literally. In truth, gentleman. A name given to nobility, men who sit tall and straight in the saddle. Men with honor. “Eres un Caballero,” Dad says, over and over. “Act like it.” He means Pete—his son, the man—but his daughter hears the stories, too, and she will fight for honor, try her damnedest to hold herself as high as any man of Old Spain. They are children now, sitting at the register, chins on their fists, eyes alight. Their years of trying lie ahead of them. Succeeding only sometimes.



* * *



It is 2001, and Pete sits in his senior year homeroom, legs sprawled, leaning back to toy with the long dark braids of a smiling girl who is not his girlfriend. Kristin is a freshman, a few hallways over. No boys play with her hair; she has cropped it short this year, and anyway she would have punched any boy who tried. Her brother taught her how. Pete drops the girl’s braid when the principal comes on the overhead, makes the announcement; halls away, Kristin gasps as one with her class. Pete straightens in his seat when his homeroom teacher wheels a TV into the room and turns on CNN; Kristin’s teacher does the same. In separate rooms Kristin and Pete watch for hours, the same looped clips of the planes hitting the towers, rising plumes of smoke, people caked by concrete pulverized into dust. Eventually Kristin turns away. Pete does not.



* * *



She remembers the box, then. Lists the contents she packed herself:

Leftover Halloween candy—heavy on the Twizzlers and peanut M&M’s. Long-distance calling cards. DVDs of action movies starring Jason Statham and Vin Diesel on the covers, long-legged girls hovering behind them. Photos of Kristin in her sophomore year soccer and volleyball uniforms. Greeting cards with cartoon pictures of dogs and silly puns about Pete turning nineteen signed by her, Mom, and Dad. From his girlfriend at the time, envelopes stuffed with handwritten pages and a necklace she’d bought him during a vacation to Cancún. The necklace strung with blue and black beads, suspended about a silver charm of a dolphin—his favorite animal. Three copies of the Uvalde Leader-News. A poem Kristin wrote for English class called “What Do the Sand Dunes Say Over There?: A Sonnet.” Too much postage on the package, but then again, they weren’t sure what was enough (“Quién sabe with those trucks and IEDs,” Dad says, making Mom cry). Two rosaries and a scapular, all blessed by the bishop, bought from Mom’s last trip down to the Basilica in San Juan. A letter from their grandmother in the Valley: Te amo mijo, ten cuidado, ten mucho cuidado. Spare lenses for his new Oakleys.

Now: a different box, this one resting on her kitchen counter. Two brand-new rolls of duct tape. Extra towels and washcloths swiped from Bay Pines. A case of bottled water. A printout of a FEMA webpage: Hurricane Preparedness for Apartment Dwellers. On her phone, a text from Rudy saying he got called in to work so not to wait on him; he’d check in with her later.

As they drove, she told Pete how she met Rudy at a bar with mutual friends—all nurses, the medical community a small, incestuous one. She didn’t mention how she took him home that same night, admiring the spread of his narrow shoulders and his graceful hands. How they spent two dates comparing patients—he works intensive care at UTMB while she drives inland to Bay Pines.

“He’s got a brother, too,” she said. “Well, a cousin, but they grew up together.”

Pete had grinned. “His cousin as cool as me?”

“As annoying as you. Like all brothers.”



* * *



Near the end of Pete’s first tour in Iraq, she starts taking driver’s ed classes. By the time he comes home, she is good enough to drive them both up to the Frio. Kristin eases his truck out on 83 north, and when he buckles into the passenger seat with a thermos full of vodka between his knees, she pretends it doesn’t bother her.

He lets her pick the radio station; they both sing along to Garth Brooks. Pete sips from his thermos as she navigates the winding roads. He laughs when she squeals at the sudden dips and rolls where the highway follows the foothills; he adjusts her grip on the wheel. “You’re doing so great,” he says with pride, and she feels more like a grown-up than ever before, flushed with her brother’s delight. The brush and the live oaks zipping past in a green blur, summer sunshine beating down; he is humming.