The Last Karankawas(61)
“Dad.” Jess’s voice, he is proud, doesn’t break or waver. He steps closer, shaken and trying not to seem so. “What are you doing here?”
“Your mom told me where you would be. Said you’re helping fix everything around here.”
“Yeah, I am.” Dad. Dad is here. “I thought—I thought you weren’t in town. You were out east.”
“I was,” Lando says. His hands rise again, fall again. “She told me what you all were going through. So I figured I’d come down here.”
“Why?”
“Thought you could use some help.”
He smiles a little. Tentative, hopeful. They both stand, stare, take each other’s measure. After a minute, Jess smiles back.
EAST ANYWHERE
Pierre
He bends his knees to lower the tray of drinks from his shoulder to the tabletop. Not smoothly enough: Lone Star spills from the glasses, sloshes down. Pierre grimaces. He shakes his head and apologizes, but Table 10 smiles, tells him not to worry. Nice people, this group of three, so he jokes with them, deepens the lilt of his accent as he confesses that he has only had a few weeks to master the technique. They laugh, though it is a lie. Pierre lacks upper-body strength; he always has.
This kind of thing would come so naturally to Rudy. The two of them had run around every day back home, barefoot despite the debris and the jagged palm bark strewn about the beaches of Lumangbayan. Whenever Rudy spotted a girl, he would drop and count push-ups to make her giggle, to make the pubescent muscles on his arms look ropy in the light, while Pierre stood and kicked sand at the chickens that roamed the beach. But Pierre’s hands are careful, graceful—superior to even Rudy’s mother, Tita Grace, Pierre’s aunt who is like a mother to him, the midwife whose stitches are better than the village doctor’s. When Tita Grace wanted fresh buko juice, Pierre’s were the hands she trusted with the coconut and the machete, saying her son would slice off his fingers and then they would have to sew them back on.
Pierre uses his hands in this new job, distributing bottles of beer and ladling salsa into small cups, mixing margaritas and tequila sunrises in the Sand Crab, this bar and grill off Pier 21 in Galveston. He does not split coconuts anymore. Does Rudy still do push-ups to impress girls? He has no way of knowing. The worry for his cousin hums steadily under the skin; like a chronic illness, it has flare-ups.
Table 10 is ready to order. Pierre scribbles down their meal requests, trying not to squint as he translates the Texas drawls—into unaccented English, mostly, and occasionally even further into Tagalog. He tucks the pencil and notepad into the pocket of his jeans, promising that their shrimp nachos and jalape?o poppers will be out soon. The jukebox chooses that moment to launch into “Jessie’s Girl.” One of them asks over the wailing, “What’s your name again?”
Pierre is ready. He has been thinking about a name since the three of them walked in, sunburned even though it is April, their shoes caked with sand from walking along the beach, a few of the rare visitors brave enough to stroll Galveston seven months after The Storm—day-trippers, he thinks, from Houston, most likely. Who aren’t put off by the debris that still drifts in the bay, the construction trucks and repair crews that line the Gulf beach, the Seawall, the Strand—the tourist areas—thick as fleas. He likes that he can recognize them after only a few months here himself.
Their eyes had been sharp as he first approached their table, then friendly, with the too-bright smiles that said they were trying hard not to say something insensitive. He felt their gazes land purposefully on his face, away from the shape of his eyes, his black, coarse hair that sticks out like feathers, his skin shades and shades browner than their darkest tan. This week he has been leaning toward the exotic—Federico, Isaiah—but today he thinks all-American. Joey, Christian, Kyle. Something to make them comfortable. Help them negotiate the alienness of him.
“Kyle,” says Pierre, and he hefts the empty tray onto his shoulder.
* * *
He asked Tita Grace only once why his mother named him Pierre. He was seven; his mother had been dead for six years. At the question Tita Grace didn’t turn from where she stood over the stove, using both hands to toss a mountain of rice noodles. (She always made enough pancit for a crowd.) She said Pierre had been the name of a Catholic missionary in their village when the sisters were young. The missionary was very tall and had yellow hair. They’d never seen yellow hair before, and he knelt down so they could touch it. He was the most beautiful man Pierre’s mother had ever seen.
“Where does my name come from, Inay?” Rudy asked.
“My ninong,” Tita Grace said tartly.
Though it was still too hot Pierre bit into a lumpia roll and burned his tongue for his awkwardness, his desperation. He knew Rudy would ask the question despite knowing better. As if by filling his own mouth Pierre could stop Rudy from opening his.
But Rudy could never resist. “Why didn’t you name me after Tatay?” he asked, belligerence casting a dark edge to his voice.
In the silence that ensued, Pierre felt the air freeze; he saw it in the shape of Tita Grace’s back, a bow in her shoulders that made him sad. It had only been a year since Tito Eusebio had run off, but Pierre had noticed the way his aunt’s mouth twisted in anger when they spoke of him. She would be happy if Tito Eusebio’s memory stayed locked outside the walls of the house.