The Last Karankawas(48)
Her breathing slows, eases. “It was?”
“Yeah. It was the bigger city, but then they wanted something more central, maybe.” She senses rather than hears his shrug. Another rumble of engine, male laughter in the distance. “He was a senator or a governor, I think? Maybe both? I can’t remember exactly, but he was some kind of politician after we became a state.”
Carly lowers herself to the grass, ignoring the damp, and sits. Stretches out her legs and looks up at Sam, and listens. Jess speaks in her ear, over the whine and whir of cars zipping by, heading north. Comforting. She leans backward until she is flat on her back. Closes her eyes. Grass beneath her hair, the roar of the road.
This. This is what she has always loved. Sitting quiet in her own bubble—but with people around, family, not strangers. Carving a pocket for herself in the noise and the movement. She falls asleep deepest when her grandmother murmurs or laughs in the other room, when she hears Jess breathing.
She listens to him. She doesn’t want to think about the decision she is afraid she is making, the direction of her car turning in her mind with every rise and fall of his voice.
“What else?” she asks quietly.
“He voted against Texas seceding, during the Civil War.”
“Outvoted, obviously.”
“Duh.” He chuckles. “But at least he opposed slavery.”
She sighs. Jess. “Or else he just didn’t want to leave the Union.”
“Yeah, maybe.” His voice bristles. Her reality checks, her questioning of the myths, never sit right with him. She shakes her head. He can be so romantic about the history of the state he loves, wanting the Texas story to be simple, straightforward, a gold-plated narrative. Carly knows the ugliness, what Magdalena never lets her forget. They hurt us, beat us, killed us. They took our land, the home right out from under us. But she questions that, too. Who are they? And us? A place like this can never be so simple. They: people who hurt and killed, and people hurt and killed. Us: the conquerors and conquered both.
She wonders about the fully formed future she is running from. If, in that version, she and Jess will keep balancing each other: one telling tall tales, one picking them apart. It doesn’t sound so bad when she thinks of it that way. He would remember them all, keep them close. His stories, hers, where they diverge and where they wind together. He would pass them down, even if she wouldn’t. He would tell them again and again.
“What else?”
“He lived with the Cherokee for a while. The Indians called him ‘the Big Drunk.’”
“Stop it. That’s not true.”
“I swear.” They are both laughing now, rising above the sounds of Huntsville, of the Gulf. They laugh together until Mr. Pham says something in the background, and Jess affirms. “Got it. I’ll be right there.”
“Go ahead,” she says. A long sigh, the prick of tears again. “It’s okay. I know you have to go.”
“Yeah. Sorry.” He pauses. “You’re going to tell me later what this is about, right?”
“No real reason.” She fingers a knob of grass, twists it into a coil. “I just went for a drive and started thinking.”
“Mm-hm.” He doesn’t sound convinced. “I’ll see you later, though?”
“Yeah, I’ll be home.” The weight, spilling out of her chest, settling into her bones. Gravity, where she had felt so light just an hour ago. She is going home. Sorrow in that knowledge, but a comfort, too. “Thanks, Jess.”
“Anytime.”
“I didn’t know any of this stuff.” She rises, swiping grass off her shorts and hair. “About Sam Houston. You must’ve read more books than me.”
“We learned it together. You just don’t remember.”
* * *
A gray road, studded with vehicles, snakes through tall green trees. The sun rises higher in the sky. A black Corolla heads south, the girl at the wheel brushing away tears as she merges onto the freeway. A white man of white stone stands, staring west.
Six years pass, the girl and the Corolla gone. The white man unmoved. Blind to the scene behind him, how in the east, in the water far at his back, wind is swirling, gathering warmth and water, growing in pressure. Look, look. A storm is coming. A storm is here.
GOD OF WIND, STORM, FIRE
Ike
Ike is leaving. Just for breakfast, an egg sandwich that does not taste of plastic wrap and chemicals; he has told Catherine he will be right back. He steps through the sliding doors, out of the cool of the hospital, and the first thing he notices is the air—the way it cinches around him in a fist. The pressure a threat, a chord played wrong. When he was seven, his tío tried to teach him the accordion and Ike pressed every key he could reach at the same time. The discordant notes hung around him, hovered; that’s the way the air does now. Everyone senses it, he can tell. The looks of the doctors and nurses, walking across the parking lot to start their morning shifts, patterned scrubs and crisp white coats and stethoscopes slung about their necks. Their mouths drawn, eyes squinting through the sunlit haze to find the source of the note, the energy. The source is the hurricane still miles away on the Gulf. Its name is Ike, too.
He felt it coming weeks ago, before the weather reports began, the constant radio announcements and TV updates cutting through his KHOU shows. Every islander worth his salt knows how to recognize the nuances of the air on skin, how the pressure seeps into the cavities of a body and aches. Storms are nothing new. He has lived through too many to count. Tropicals, depressions, hurricanes; names like Danielle, Josephine, Alicia, Jerry. But this one felt different from the beginning—he thinks he always knew, down in the pit of his belly, the moment it formed far out of the Gulf and, weeks later, when it crossed Cuba and pivoted toward Galveston. When he told Catherine as much, she laughed at him. She doesn’t believe in things like this, elemental things without explanation, but then again she grew up white and atheist in Denton County, so he supposes she wouldn’t. When the newscasters said the storm had formed enough to be named Ike, even Catherine had to pause and squeeze his arm affectionately. I suppose the storm really is yours, she said, coughing as she had been for days. Or maybe I am the storm, he added. He meant it, though when she blinked at him he wiggled his brows to make her think he did not. The next morning her coughing was so bad he finally drove her to the John Sealy emergency room. She was admitted for pneumonia; he has been there, at her side, for three days.