The Last Karankawas(53)

Nena pressed her fingers to his mouth and shook her head. Her ancient eyes cool and firm. I will not leave, she said. Tenemos ahorita, no más. Lo sabes. And he did know. Like her, he understood the pattern of their lives, the shape of the path God or the gods or her Karankawa ancestors had laid out before them. Her restless bartender son and indifferent husband across the street, his lonely wife somewhere on the mainland—they would return to them, honor the bonds fastening them tight. But this was not nothing. These months with her had been special to him. When he murmured so, she nodded. And to me, she said, before sliding her thigh over and rising above him in the dark of his bedroom.

There—the yowling. Keening pitifully from the oleanders to his right. Clutching at the branches there, angry and wild-eyed and drenched, is a striped gray cat. He recognizes the cat of the woman who lives two homes down, an indoor-outdoor pet. Once, it approached them in their yard and he bent to stroke it, but Catherine, who is allergic, hissed and kicked at it until the cat ran. Now, before he can register his actions, he is moving, pushing toward the oleanders. When he reaches out, the cat leaps on him frantically; its claws rip into his skin, his sodden windbreaker, and it clambers up his back to his shoulders, where he uses one hand to force it in place, wincing and swearing. Easy, cat, damn it, cat. Its howls like sobs and pleas at once, make it stop, make it stop. And it does, for just a moment: The wind quiets fractionally; the rain slaps with a bit less bite. I made it so, Ike thinks. Shh, he whispers to the cat and the storm both.

The cat struggles and yowls all the way back to the house, and only quiets once he sets it on the kitchen counter and begins drying it with a dishtowel. With its fur spiked and damp, not sopping, he sees it has white paws and a metallic tag on its collar: Winifred. Winifred, he says aloud. Shh, Winifred. Want some salmon? The water steadily licking at his legs, his jeans soaked through. By the time he wrangles the can open and scoops the salmon chunks onto a plate, Winifred is yelping eagerly and the water reaches his knees.

In their little galley kitchen, the sounds of the hurricane amplify; they must be in a tunnel as a train rushes through it—or at least Ike imagines so, as he has never been on a train or in a train tunnel. He has heard something like this sound before. Only once, Winifred, he says aloud. Year 7. He was driving his bus on a stretch of I-27 outside Lubbock when the dispatcher came through about a tornado spotting near them. Ike pulled beneath the next overpass, as close to the curved wall as he could, so close he could have leaned through the driver’s side window and licked the concrete had he wanted to. The passengers ducked down beneath the seats, huddled together; a few wept, a baby cried, some held hands and prayed.

We never saw the tornado touch down, Winifred, but the wind was enough. The wind. He remembers the way it barreled past them, around them, through the half-moon tunnel beneath the overpass; started first as a low grumble, then a roar, built to a high-pitched whine. Nothing like it, Ike thought then, a young man still but beginning to soften from two years in the driver’s seat. There could be nothing like this sound anywhere in nature, he told Catherine when he made it back to Galveston the next day and she hugged him, kissed him frantically. That night, she told him she was pregnant, and for the first time in their marriage, Ike felt fear. He has felt fear many times since. He feels fear now, stopping his heart like long fingers reaching in.

I’m afraid, he says, but Winifred just buries her nose in the salmon and keeps eating.





IN THE EYE


Yvonne, Mercedes

“Shit, fuck, shit.”

“Yvonne, you sound like such a lady when you talk like that.”

“Leave it, Mama.”

Yvonne is praying or, more accurately, trying to. She can’t exactly recall the words to the Memorare. She reaches for them, but they dance out of her memory as if she hasn’t spent the last twenty-three years saying it over and over, as if every Sunday of hurricane season she doesn’t recite it from memory along with the rest of the Sacred Heart congregation. The Hail Mary, the Our Father, the Apostles’ Creed—those she can say in her sleep, in English or fumbling Spanish, feeling the pinch of her mother’s fingers on her inner arm when she or Jess or any of her sisters don’t enunciate clearly. But the Memorare is the one she needs to say, for all this to be over, for them to be safe. Yvonne has been a poor Catholic in the few years since she married and had her baby, but she is sure of this.

She could ask her mother for the words—Eva is sitting beside her in bed on the second floor of Yvonne’s Pompano Avenue house, worrying rosary beads and murmuring. But Yvonne hesitates. She has not asked her mother for help since she was fifteen, and she sure as hell doesn’t want to start now. If her little sisters were awake, she would ask them, though when she last checked they were snoring in the guest room double bed, a pile of blankets and gangly tanned limbs and Sarita’s stuffed elephant, which she sleeps with every night despite just starting high school.

“So many hurricane seasons—we pray the Memorare, and we’ve always been okay,” she leans to her left and whispers to her cousin.

Mercedes nods. It isn’t that she doesn’t believe Yvonne; it’s that she knows better. Prayers, Christian or otherwise, Catholic or otherwise—they are feelings, at their heart. They are just requests made of the gods. They fall on deaf ears.

They have been sitting, the four of them, in Yvonne’s upstairs bedroom, for hours now. They moved when the water started trickling in, the surge reaching long brown tongues beneath towel-lined doors and up through the floorboards. Fearful, she bundled Aaron in his baby blankets and carried him up the stairs, followed by Mercedes, guiding Yvonne’s mother carefully. When she last went down to peek at the damage, Yvonne saw the water had risen several feet, submerged the lower level. Oily brown water in her beautiful house, the one she and Russell bought last year after she found out she was pregnant. While she was sobbing, talking about how she’d have to quit nursing school, he had laughed and said, Let’s get married, yeah? Outside the eternal crashing of rain and wind, as if something were colliding over and over, endlessly.