The Last Karankawas(62)
“He didn’t like his own name,” Tita Grace said after a very long, furious session of noodle tossing. Her back projected so much anger Pierre wanted to cry. “Rudy, you are blessed you are not named after him.”
“Lucky, you mean,” Rudy muttered, here at last lowering his voice so she couldn’t hear. His mother—so devout a Catholic she was just a wayward husband and two small boys away from being a nun at some iron-ruled convent—hated that word. “Not lucky, blessed,” she would say whenever someone used it. Both boys thought it was stupid. Tito Eusebio used to hate it, too; Pierre remembered suddenly.
To cut through the tension, Pierre leaned over with a grin and whispered, “Pinsan, you’re a ninong like Godfather Marlon Brando!” Rudy nearly spit out his food laughing. At the stove, the line of Tita Grace’s back eased.
For the rest of the week, Rudy insisted that the barrio boys call him Godfather. They did it, too. People listened to Rudy almost always. His plans—to stand in one spot and see who could throw a stone closest to the stray cats at the end of the alley, or who could run the fastest in the low surf, where the sand was wet and flimsy beneath their feet—were followed without question by the other boys. Pierre was the only one who could put him in his place, and that was because they were closer than brothers. Tita Grace had been the one to deliver Pierre, during a particularly bad storm, and two months later she had delivered herself of Rudy, with the help of Pierre’s mother.
The boys were inseparable, as opposite as sea and land. Pierre let Tita Grace cut his hair short; Rudy’s was always falling into his eyes. Rudy was taller and broader; Pierre was wiry as a palm trunk. Rudy could scurry up trees and run across the dry sand of the beach as if rocket-propelled; Pierre bore scars all over his body—scabbed across his knees and elbows, carved in the palms of his hands—where he had tried and failed to keep up. When he lost a race or faced a task, Rudy plopped on the sand, complained, threatened to quit. Pierre ignored the scars and kept collecting them because he never stopped trying. In the quality of persistence, at least, Rudy was the one trying to keep up with him. As adults, they had both graduated at the top of their nursing class in Manila, but Rudy was the first to receive his placement at a hospital in the States. The two read his letter together in the bedroom they shared when back on Mindoro.
“Galbeztown?” Rudy looked at Pierre with bewilderment. “Where is that?”
“Galveston. It says Texas.”
“Texas? They’ll probably make me wear a cowboy hat.”
“And boots,” Pierre added. “And a gun!” They both laughed because Rudy was pretending his mother wasn’t in the next room weeping; that instead of clutching at his face and begging, “Don’t leave, Rudy, don’t go,” she had been happy about his placement in America.
“Are you scared?” Pierre asked, unable to stop himself.
Rudy bit his lips, then shrugged. “Anywhere is going to be better than this. And if it’s east, even better.”
Pierre smiled. It was a joke they had shared in school, the scorn for the American textbooks that regarded Asia as the East. “Which way do they travel to get here?” Rudy had sneered. “Which way do we go to cross the ocean?” East Anywhere—their answer for every question about where they would travel, where they would move at the slightest opportunity.
Pierre moved to Manila—north—while Rudy went east. Rudy wrote in his first letter home that he loved the place. That Galveston had a beach similar to the beaches of the northern islands—brown sand, murky water, trash, seaweed—yet the brand of trash, the shape and elasticity of the seaweed, was different. That people flocked to the sand to sunbathe, the jetties crowded with fishermen. That the buildings all had air-conditioning, and in the hospital, where he worked in ICU, the air was not only cold but clean, often too much so, lemon-scented chemicals stinging the fragile insides of his nose. That there was a sizable Filipino population clustered together in a neighborhood called Fish Village (mere blocks away from the hospital, obviously), and he had been told that in January they even celebrated Santo Ni?o. That he had two roommates from the islands, Lorenzo and Reg; they spoke Tagalog in the apartment off Ferry Road, but Rudy’s English was the best. That he had been offered drugs but no guns yet. That Texas girls were beautiful. That he missed them both.
He sent three more letters after that, called once a month for the next five months. He booked his flight to come back starting in the American Thanksgiving, he promised, and made his mother ecstatic. The last call, in late August, was the first time he mentioned the name Ike.
Pierre sat in the quiet darkness of the kitchen with the phone in his hand; it was three a.m. in Lumangbayan, where he was spending the weekend visiting Tita Grace. Her door was closed, so she was either asleep or looking at the old pictures of Eusebio that she had saved and thought Pierre didn’t know about.
“Bagyo?” Pierre asked, his voice quiet.
He knew Rudy was shaking his head over the line, smiling an American-citizen smile. He responded in exaggerated English. “Here in the States, we say ‘hurricane,’ bro.”
* * *
Pierre places the empty tray on top of the stack near the kitchen, punches Table 10’s order into the computer as Mercedes strides through the doors. He didn’t know she was working that night, and he waves at her.