The Last Karankawas(49)
Ike likes the idea of himself as a hurricane. At seventy-four, he knows he has not been remotely formidable in decades. He was a tall man in his twenties, narrow-waisted, powerful in the chest and arms. But in the forty-odd years since he traded the pitcher’s mound for the driver’s seat of a Trailways bus, the top of him has deflated while the bottom of him has plumped. He walks out of the hospital into the humid air and feels himself stooping, the upper part of his spine bowed, his shoulders shrinking inward where once he had to turn sideways to fit through doors. Catherine keeps a photo of him from his softball days tucked into her vanity mirror at home—the corners curl around his serious stare, the sharp line of his jaw. His jaw has not been sharp in many years. In the photo his Toros de Monterrey cap is on, but beneath it his hair is thick and crow black—that, too, no longer so.
Someone calls his name; he sees Catherine’s night shift nurse emerging from the sliding doors. He has long, shaggy dark hair, with the tilted eyes and broad face of the Filipinos Ike now recognizes, having spent so long in Fish Village. They are like fleas here. No, he thinks as the nurse approaches. That is rude. He never liked it when white men called him spic, wetback, beaner. They do so less these days because of his age, but he remembers the scald of anger in his young throat, the crunch of his knuckles against a cheekbone or a gut. And yet—there really are so many Filipinos here, in this corner of the island, working in the hospitals and clinics, handing out lottery tickets at the gas stations, reading the prayers of the faithful at Sacred Heart. So many.
He nods at the nurse—Rudy, the ID dangling from his lanyard reads—and tries to listen.
They believe the hurricane will make landfall tomorrow morning, Rudy is saying. They predict the storm will be very destructive. The hospital has been ordered to evacuate all patients, including Mrs. Alvarez. She will be sent to another hospital: Parkland, up in Dallas. The day nurses will begin preparing her for transport this morning. Mr. Alvarez, Rudy asks in that singsong accent, do you have an evacuation plan?
He does not. He is seventy-four, after all. His family is long dead, his friends gone. Catherine is everything he has. When he says this to Rudy, the nurse shakes his head. The mayor has issued a mandatory evacuation order for islanders, but the hospital can only transport patients, not family. Ike will have to make other arrangements. There are public buses from the city that will take people inland; Rudy can look into that for him. He could even drop him off at a bus, Rudy says—he may be heading that way, too.
Ike considers this, standing in the hospital parking lot, the September sun throwing weak light but still enough warmth to draw sweat. Yes, he could go. He has been retired from Trailways and Greyhound for fifteen years, but he finds comfort in the thought of a long-distance bus: the scratchy vinyl cushions, the murmurs of passengers and the current of the air-conditioning, the rumbling cadence of the tires. A trip to Dallas or Austin or San Antonio after he has been island-bound for so long. But the romance of the road is for a younger Ike, a firmer body, sturdier bones. He is too old to sit for eight hours in a bus seat, only to sleep on a cot in some school gym. He thinks of his and Catherine’s small house on Albacore Avenue, where they have ridden out every storm for three decades. He casts his mind to the knot of wind and rain that bears his name out on the Gulf, on the water that shivers with heat. He wants to see it roll in. He feels he ought to, somehow. Ike thanks Rudy politely and says he will make his own evacuation arrangements.
* * *
Ike walks along the Seawall to watch the storm surge. He has already been to the Walmart off 69th; the shelves were mostly picked clean, but he scrounged up canned salmon and two jugs of water. He was in his truck heading back up the boulevard when he spotted the first waves.
He stopped and stared. After a lifetime in Galveston, he understands the dangers of the surge that is the hurricane’s harbinger, water thrust forward by the force of the storm winds—but these waves are unlike anything he has known. They engulf the beach sands and hurl against the concrete of the Seawall with such muscularity they seem to climb the air, leaping high over the seventeen-foot barrier. Ike was so mesmerized he pulled over, parked, climbed out. Joined several other islanders doing the same: a woman in jogging pants and a University of Houston shirt; a couple with a Labrador yanking on its leash and whining; a man and his teenage son struggling down the steps for a better (stupider) look. The wind whips at them, pushing Ike with such force that he staggers.
The bright midday sky shimmers like a glass dome, white-gray clouds stretched thin, curving above and around him. When he was driving down Seawall looking at that sky, Ike felt the pressure of the trapped, and for a blinding instant he wanted to step on the gas, or rip the shirt from his chest, fling rocks at the invisible glass, roar. The instinct startled him. It has been years since he felt anything stronger than mild annoyance.
The waves—crashing into the wall with a noise like thunder, one after another, sending sheets of foamy brown water high above him to splatter in his hair—calm him somehow. Ike sees his rage, so familiar to him as a younger man, echoed there. They rip, fling, roar at his whim.
Thinking like this is foolish. Catherine would laugh, as she already did, as she has so many times in their marriage. His wife of fifty-two years, who is being given a nebulizer treatment in the back of an ambulance headed to Dallas, has the brain of a pragmatist. When they met in a Houston bar in their twenties, she was a math teacher and he was playing softball for Monterrey, driving from Texas to Mexico each week, only to drive back across the border on his team bus to play against American teams. Catherine chuckled at his rituals—when he pressed his face into his glove for ten seconds each morning, tapped both sides of the doorjamb before leaving for a game, touched his fingers to first the brim of his cap, then his silver crucifix, then his tongue before every pitch. Silly baby, she would say. But because he knew they made a difference, she laid out his uniform in the pattern he liked and poured his coffee into the same brown mug each game day. How she came to love Ike, with his ballplayer superstitions, the child of Mexican immigrants who breathed curanderismo and Catholicism, he would never understand. They were married in the Denton courthouse; Catherine would sooner swallow dirt than be wed in a church.