The Last Karankawas(63)
“Oye, primo.” She stretches to give him a fist bump. When he started at the Sand Crab eight weeks ago, Mercedes was his first friend. She volunteered to train him, and she had not batted an eye when he introduced himself as Pierre looking like the antithesis of a Frenchman—short, dark, unkempt. People thought her name was French, too, she said with a grin, but she was Mexican, from a place called Matamoros and another place called Brownsville.
“We mojados have to stick together,” she told him as she pulled her masses of dark hair off her neck with a baseball cap that read Vaqueros. Pierre had never heard that word. Later, at the apartment, he asked Lorenzo and Reg what it meant, and they said wetback, a term—Reg said with an arrogant curl to his mouth—for “the aliens who swim across the river.” Pierre thought the word odd, mean even, but the way Mercedes said it, with that big smile, almost made it make sense. The tie between them, the migration that linked them. Between her once-great river and his miles of blue salt, they both had crossed water to get here.
Mercedes ties her waist apron. Pierre refills the water and sweet tea pitchers while she does. “So, what name are you using tonight?” she asks.
She, along with the rest of the staff, know his ritual. They think it is funny. When he runs out of ideas, they delight in compiling a list of options. “Lawrence!” “Cesar!” “Fabio!”
He tells her and she grins. “Kyle sounds like a quarterback. Or a rich lawyer’s son.”
He laughs.
“Look out, Kyle.” She nods her head to indicate something behind him. “People waiting at the bar.”
“I’m not at the bar today.”
“We’re doubling up, Jules just said. He can’t hire extra help until the tourists come back, which isn’t…” She trails off. Pierre knows what she isn’t saying: Until the city gets back on its feet.
He nods, wipes his hands, and heads to the bar without complaint.
He is lucky to have this job as it is. Jules has a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy for undocumented workers. Mercedes claims it is because Jules’s parents were undocumented themselves and he has a soft spot for immigrants looking for work. INS has cracked down a few times, but somehow Jules always slips, quicksilver-smooth, out of real charges.
Pierre only has this job because of Jules, who is friends with Lorenzo, Rudy’s roommate. Lorenzo, who sat in their apartment living room patting Pierre on the back while he cried, while he wondered aloud how he was going to stay here with no Rudy, no work visa. Lorenzo, who had an answer: his friend Jules is a manager at a bar and grill.
Jules understood Pierre’s reluctance to use his name at work. “It doesn’t fit,” he agreed in a Texas drawl, a lithe Vietnamese man whose own name was a new one to Pierre, one he thought only women could have. “Nah, you just don’t look like a Pierre, you know?”
“What do I look like, then?
Jules shrugged. “You look like you.”
Pierre poured himself another Jack and Coke. He, Jules, and Lorenzo were drinking at the bar that day, not working. It was March, the six-month anniversary of Rudy’s disappearance. Pierre was getting very, very drunk.
* * *
Rudy didn’t have a cell phone, and Tita Grace didn’t own a TV, so Pierre called in sick to work and stayed on Mindoro. Every day that September week he escorted his aunt the half mile through the neighborhood to sit in the church rectory and watch the news footage from the States. It was all anyone over there could talk about. The slow stain of silver across the weather maps was massive at first, but it shrank as it approached the strip of island where Rudy lived. Still, reporters cautioned about the swell of water pushed forth by the winds, and once the storm finally hit, that was the word spoken with force. Surge. The surge was devastating.
They sat together when the aftermath footage finally rolled.
Pierre honestly didn’t think the damage seemed worse than any bagyo here. Houses buried in sand, knocked into piles of scrap wood as if an invisible fist had smashed down. Trees toppled. Furniture submerged, swollen with salt water and splitting in the heat. Men on army trucks distributed food to barefoot, weary-eyed people. This all could have been Mindoro two summers ago, or Luzon just last year.
The Galveston citizens who had evacuated began to trickle back. Pierre and Tita Grace watched them on the news, carrying ice chests, pickup trucks piled high with cans of food and cleaning supplies and containers of gasoline. Rudy had said in his last call that he would evacuate, so they waited a week. Then two.
As soon as the phone lines were restored, Pierre called Rudy’s apartment twice a day, every day. He didn’t get through until Lorenzo finally stole away for a nap between shifts. (The hospital had slashed their staff down to a graveyard crew.) Tita Grace held the phone between her head and Pierre’s, angling it so they could both hear the tinny voice speaking Tagalog. Lorenzo said he and Reg had stayed at the hospital, but Rudy was nonessential personnel, so he’d evacuated. They arrived at the apartment after the storm to find minimal damage, Rudy’s bed neatly made, his toothbrush in the bathroom, his suitcase gone, and the closet empty of even the wire hangers. “He was planning on going back to the Phils in a few months anyway, so we thought he went home,” Lorenzo said. “We haven’t seen him.”
Tita Grace crumpled like a coat slipping off a peg, all at once, folding as she hit the ground. She still held the phone in one hand, so Pierre took it from her and raised it to his ear. Lorenzo was talking, his voice becoming panicked. “We thought he went home, po. Po, he went home, didn’t he?”