The Last Karankawas(64)
* * *
Table 10 has moved on to tequila shots. Pierre slices limes behind the bar counter where he is now splitting his duties, and when the woman speaks, he almost doesn’t turn because the name she says isn’t Kyle, or Pierre, but Rudy.
His hands, his breathing, his expression freeze; he feels them harden in place. He whirls around. She says it again—“Rudy?”—and he is looking, wild-eyed, into the equally wild face of a dark-haired girl he has never seen before.
Her smile fades. “You’re not Rudy.” Her voice sounds dense, weighed down by sadness.
“I’m his cousin,” he says, and she blinks.
“Oh. Oh. You’re Pierre?”
Hearing his own name is another jolt. “You know Rudy?”
“He told me about you. I didn’t know you worked here. That you were here. I thought just—you look like him from the side, and the way you move your hands. I’m sorry. I’m sorry—I just thought—”
Questions swarm his mind. On the other side of the room, Table 10 is waiting for their shots. Lime juice seeps into cracks in his cuticles. He ignores it as he stares at her. “How do you know Rudy?”
“We were dating—kind of.” Splotches of red begin to crawl over her light nose and cheeks; her eyes well with tears. He can’t tell what color they are. “I don’t know.”
“Have you heard from him?”
“No.”
“Do you know where he is?”
She shakes her head.
“When’s the last time you saw him? What happened to him? Where would he go?”
“I don’t know.” She raises her chin. His hand darts out, snatches hers in a tight grip.
“Tell me what you do know.” He must sound crazy, must be scaring her. His voice is ragged, the words pouring fast as water from a faucet, but he can’t stop. She has the answers. She knows things he does not, and it has been seven months without the slightest sign of Rudy. “Tell me. I came all this way and I can’t find my cousin.”
“I don’t think I know any more than you do.” She glares. “Let go of my hand.” No longer teary, no longer panicked.
He releases her. “Sorry.”
She has straight dark hair cut short as a man’s, a fringe of bangs that nearly hide those big eyes. Brown, he can tell now. “I don’t know where he is. Do you?”
“No. And I’ve been looking for him for months.”
“So have I. Well.” She pauses. “Mostly. I’ve mostly given up now.”
His stomach clenches. She does know something.
“When does your shift end?” she asks.
“Eleven.”
She nods and gathers her purse. “I’m Kristin. I’ll come back then.”
* * *
Pierre has heard her name before.
After he hung up with Lorenzo and soothed his aunt (“He wouldn’t leave,” she kept saying, “he wouldn’t leave us, would he?”), they agreed that he should head out as soon as he could get a tourist visa. He would go back to Manila, start the process. Tita Grace gripped his hand as he walked onto the ferry to Luzon. When he took his hand away, he found her rosary pressed into it. “He would not,” she said again, eyes clouded. “Find him.”
In November, Lorenzo picked him up at the Houston airport and drove him back to their apartment on the island, navigating streets mostly cleaned, a few piles of trash and scrap wood still in places on the sidewalks. Pierre’s eyes were red and crusted from the twenty-two-hour trip, and he didn’t glance around, take it in—his first time in the US. Rudy’s apartment was thick with the scent of chicken adobo. A rice cooker steamed gently on the kitchen table. The Filipino flag hung above the TV. He could have been home, in the living room of any of his friends in Manila. After he ate, Reg and Lorenzo showed him his cousin’s room. He set his bag on the dresser and looked at the fragments of life Rudy had left behind: a half-full Ozarka bottle; dog-eared copies of Texas Monthly and Rolling Stone swiped from hospital waiting rooms. In the living room some framed pictures of his—amid the snapshots of the two of them, of his mother, of Mindoro, were others: Rudy and his roommates in the apartment, Rudy struggling with a surfboard in the brown waves, mid-laugh.
“None of Kristin, though,” Lorenzo said idly from the door, and Pierre turned. “Who?”
Kristin was a girl Rudy had been seeing. She lived in an apartment on Whiting Avenue. Sometimes she spent the night. She was dark-haired and Mexican, they thought, an RN at an upscale nursing home in League City. They had no idea where to find her. Pierre filed the name—Kristin—but he didn’t have the energy to start searching for her, too.
His tourist visa had only been approved for fifty days, so he wasted no time on jet lag or culture shock. He spoke to Rudy’s coworkers in the ICU; walked across the UTMB campus with his picture in hand; knocked on doors from Coral to Mackeral and every corner of Fish Village. Nothing. He broadened the search to other pockets of Galveston, teaching himself the phrase ?Ha visto este hombre? and struggling with Texas or Spanish or Vietnamese or Black accents. He used Rudy’s room as a home base, sleeping there at night and walking around by day, forcing his body to adjust to the time difference.