The Last Karankawas(51)
He drives the last nail home, and the plywood stays in place over the windows. He moves slowly, carefully down the stepladder. His softened, fragile body and its limits frustrate him. Across the street lies the pale yellow house where Mrs. Castillo—as he has tried to call her in his private thoughts, afraid of the power her nickname holds over him—lives with her grown granddaughter, the husband peering from the window long dead. They must have evacuated, too: the windows are boarded, and only one car sits in the drive. He listens for the coming rain and hears it whistling, snatched up in the wind. The surge has grown. Inches of water slink atop the street.
* * *
Ike is waiting. Candle flames quiver in the darkness and he feels as though he is in a séance. He has never been in one, though, so he does not know what he would actually do. He switched off the power hours ago, and he glances at the leather wristwatch that was his father’s to see it is 10:28 p.m. That glass dome of the sky darkened swiftly after the rain came, only a few hours after he headed inside and locked up. In the wavering candlelight he wrapped furniture legs in plastic, moved boxes of Catherine’s jewelry and family photos and bank statements to upper shelves, lifted potted plants off the floor to the counters, stuffed towels beneath the front and back doors. All the while dazzled by the wailing of the wind, the way the house moans and leans into it.
In the guest room, he is stretched out on the lower portion of the bunk bed that was given to them in Year 9. The bed is made of oak, sturdy and shining. Catherine’s brother in Houston gifted it to them after her third miscarriage, when the sight of the crib Ike had assembled made her wail—not unlike the wind now, shrill and dark, a frenzied sound.
He wonders what a séance is like. He flicks the lighter—though he has not smoked since Year 39, he still carries it—and touches it to the unlit candlewick beside two others on the dresser. If he knew more about séances, he might try to summon the heart of the hurricane. Speak, Ike to Ike. He flushes a little at the thought. He is sure he is being ridiculous, and if Catherine could hear his thoughts from Parkland Hospital in downtown Dallas, she would laugh at him. How mystical you’ve become in your old age, she would tease. And though she wouldn’t say it, he would hear in the air between them: How Mexican. How Galveston. Perhaps he is, this Ike. Perhaps he regards the handful of years he has left like seashells in his hand, wanting to hold them gently and turn them over, marvel at their beauty and cruel unknowability. Grief, bitterness, romance, all around him. Catherine would scoff, but he is no longer afraid to feel wonder.
The hurricane draws nearer; it must be close to landfall. He thinks a more reckless version of himself, that angry, strong-armed man he once was, would have thrown open the doors and stood in the storm. Screamed into it. He could have used this storm in Year 9. In those days after the last miscarriage, when he spent every morning pushing the tear-and-mucus tangle of hair out of Catherine’s face, coaxing her to sit up in bed and swallow food the way he coaxed softballs and women into motion. They had named the first—Arturo, after Ike’s father, who wept into his bottle of Tecate when they told him the name—and thought nothing would match that wild sorrow when it died. Ike had not named the next two, not even to himself; when he eyed Catherine’s expanding belly, he forced his mind against a blank wall. To name it would be to end it. Look what happened last time. For the third pregnancy, Ike created his own gestures of protection. He placed a trinity of kisses around Catherine’s navel every morning, slipped a drop of holy water from the Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle into her orange juice. When the woman from the bar invited him to her hotel room, he should have said no; he had slept with others during the last two pregnancies. Yet he could not say no, he never had been able to say no, and besides, he did take care to make love to her only in positions Catherine disliked; in this way, he reasoned, he kept his wife and child separate, whole, untouched in his heart. Create a ritual, respect it, and all will be well. He had believed that. Years away from a field and he was a ballplayer still.
When the third one died, too, the devastation arrowed deep, coursing through his every vein. But Catherine was worse. He took unpaid leave from Trailways and held her to his chest and shoulder and lap for hours, days. After she emerged from the worst of it, she borrowed books on physiology and biology from the library and pored over sections about infertility. She stayed late at work or at the coffee shop on Broadway she liked; several times he saw her simply sitting in her car in the driveway, the engine idling, staring out the windshield at their garage door. At home he felt like scraping the heel of his hand against the walls or smashing his foot through the nightstands—he had a throttling urge to make something bleed. So he went out and stayed out. Signed on for the longest routes Trailways would give him, spent nights in strange women’s beds, or swallowing well whiskey in smoky bars, or shifting gears on dark interstates, passengers snoring behind him, the blinking lights of some distant town his only companions.
He and Catherine kissed, held each other in the day. But at night she rammed her fist into his shoulder or kneed him hard in the thigh, shoved him away so he nearly toppled off the bed. Every time, she had been sound asleep. He did not mention this in the daylight, nor did he ask her why. He didn’t defend himself by revealing to her how he had tried, how he had not named the last two, how he had honored every superstition he could think of or invent, how for months after he dreamed he was lifting a crying child to his chest, a different child every night. She knew, in the depths of her she knew, and blamed him. As he did himself. The rituals had not failed him—he had failed the rituals. His own weakness. Her anger aimed outward in the dark; his aimed inward.