The Last Karankawas(41)
She heaved the rock off her chest and kicked, hard as she could, against the river bottom. Arrowed through the water, reaching up at the dark shapes hovering above. Her hand broke through.
Pete grabbed it. This was the first she had seen of him, that he was treading water beside the spot where she emerged, that he had been waiting there for her to rise.
She coughed out water and drew breath in long, wheezing pulls. Their parents were on the banks shouting. “I’ve got her,” he called out to them, but she thought, He didn’t save me. He didn’t.
“Breathe. You stupid fucking idiot,” he hissed. He called her stupid and dumbass and idiot over and over as they both swam back to land. Water streamed down his face. She thought it was just the river, but then she saw his eyes were red, that as he called her names his voice choked, that he was sobbing.
* * *
“So what do you think?”
“Of what?” It is two hours later, evening, and they are driving back over the causeway, the prep finally finished, her suitcase and supplies loaded into the back of the pinstriped truck. Headed north to Conroe, where Pete has been staying in a short-term efficiency while he works a construction job. Where they will ride out Hurricane Ike, barreling toward them, with another of his Army friends.
Kristin grimaces at the thought. She hates these men, the few of them she’s met. Bolillos, all. The same upward tilt to their jaws, as if they’re saluting in formation, the same cowboy-with-a-badge tone when they address her as “ma’am” even though she’s years younger. The way they reject Caballero and its beauty—its echoes of an Old World that will outlast them all—because it asks too much of their gringo tongues, and so they call Pete “Cab” instead. But his friend has been working on the island, Pete says, a boat crew. A new islander—like her. He has heard and is heeding the same evacuation orders she is. Around them the freeway is clogged, Galveston emptying, bleeding out to the north. Not everyone is on the road, she knows, not even with a hurricane bearing down. She’ll give this Schafer a chance.
Pete nods at the phone in his cup holder. “The cabin. Remember? You said you’d tell me what you thought. I start in two weeks.”
“Oh, yeah.” She has forgotten already, so she pulls up the video again. This time she studies the cabin closely. The wood exterior is weathered a sickly gray. Potholes riddle the road like so many moles on a complexion. Overgrown brush chokes the screen door and windows so they are barely visible, so thick, so hidden she would believe a curse is bent on keeping something within locked away. She tries not to curl her lip.
“Needs work,” Kristin says with some disdain. From the corner of her eye, she sees Pete’s face fall. “But it’s not bad.”
The lie is automatic—to reassure, to soothe. All these years and she can’t stop lying to him. Her brother beams as if she’s just gushed praises. She has to blink because when he smiles, he dazzles, such joy and delight in his teeth, his eyes, bright in the dark skin their father gave him. When he smiles, she still believes anything he says.
“It’s really something, kid.” He gestures in the air around him, building shapes with his hands as if they are standing in the monte, horse-cripplers all around, instead of on a coastal freeway outrunning a storm. He points right: the main lodge, the guest cabins, and the bunkhouses for the vaqueros. He tells her about the job—that he’ll be repairing the corral and stables so the owner can house his quarter horses, that he’ll be building a deer blind from scratch and installing salt licks and water troughs. Over there, not a strip mall with Deb’s Nail Salon and a Pizza Hut, but the sunflower patch he wants to quietly plant, to draw white-wings for the fall shooting. Over there, not a Pappadeaux Seafood but a garage to house all the four-wheelers the vaqueros want for herding cattle. Further still the gun lodge, where his military background and the fact that he is a man in Texas will lend him authority as he maintains the firearms purchased for hunters and pleasure shooters. Kristin looks down at the video. Nothing anywhere, nothing to see except a cabin, a peeled-paint-and-scrub-brush shack where her brother will live and be fulfilled for a time, at least.
“That’s the place,” Pete says. “It’s going to be perfect. That’s where it’s all going to happen.” She can tell that he’s looking at the twenty-two acres of thorns and rattlers outside La Pryor, brush in need of clearing, work in need of doing. That light to his eyes like stargazing, like he’s found a new, unnamed constellation that for now is his alone. And she turns in the direction of his gaze, trying to see it, too.
VOLVER
Magdalena
The thing you should know, about this story, is that it starts with daily Mass at Sacred Heart and una se?al. A sign from the saints and spirits. I blame myself for missing it. Father Reynaldo’s homily focused on how that June day was the feast of Saint Anthony de Padua, patron saint of lost things, and when Father started reciting the prayer, the one my mother taught me and that I taught you when you were small—Tony, Tony, look around, something’s lost and must be found—I felt it. A tingle at the base of my skull, a surge in the channels of my veins. I heard something like a whisper from my mother, from the saint and the ones who have gone before me: Pon attention, Magdalena, somewhere a lost thing is turning up. So I did, and I would have been ready for it except a blue car cut me off on Broadway and 10th on my way home, and I pushed the brakes and screamed Hijo de la chingada out the window. I was distracted, ves, all the way back to Fish Village. I forgot about the tingle and the surge, the whispered warning. Until our little yellow house on Albacore came into view and Marcos, the son I had not seen or heard from in seven years, was sitting on our front steps.