The Last Karankawas(65)
He was one of many searching for the lost. Ike had displaced dozens—mostly low-income, he learned, non-white. So many immigrants. He noticed this when he walked into the police station with a flyer he had made of Rudy and the desk sergeant pointed him toward the lobby’s bulletin board, awash in Missing posters. Beneath images of two Black men and an elderly white woman, he pinned Rudy’s face. Whenever he remembered it had been two months since the storm, nearly three, he fought to keep from weeping.
Even though he told her he was hopeful, Tita Grace cried on the phone. So to please her, Pierre made his way to the crenellated towers of Sacred Heart Catholic Church. He found it easily; amid the dead palms and dark-bricked buildings of Broadway, it glowed pearl white like a beacon. The floor was bare, stripped. The kneelers and some of the pews were gone, waterlogged, he assumed, and metal folding chairs had been arranged in rows. It still smelled of salt water, the air heavy as he stepped inside. He pinned another flyer—RUDOLFO “RUDY” PI?EDA LAST SEEN SEPTEMBER 15TH IF ANY NEWS PLEASE CALL REWARD!!!—on the board next to the holy water, lit a candle beneath the statue of the Virgin Mary, and watched the flame flicker as he silently said the Chaplet of Divine Mercy.
He was halfway through the second decade before he noticed the sign asking for a two-dollar donation per candle. His wallet was empty.
Pierre bolted out into the watery sunlight, clutching his rosary, tears throwing a haze over the street. He should have blown out the candle; instead he had stolen from the Church. Look what Rudy had made him do.
* * *
The village said Rudy was a good boy but a bad influence on Pierre. Of the two of them, Rudy was the troublemaker, snatching wallets from tourists—rare in Lumangbayan—or losing hours at the neighborhood cockfights. This was all before he went to nursing school, but people kept whispering that Rudy seemed directed that way, a train on a track, his long-gone father the conductor and Pierre the caboose, poor baby, poor pinsan. Doomed to bring up the rear.
Pierre found himself following Rudy even in Galveston, even after he had vanished. He traced his steps, wandered across the neighborhoods he frequented, stopped in his favorite haunts. Walking in his path, he seemed to hear Rudy urge him to be reckless, to break rules, as he had when they were boys. First the church, the two-dollar candle. The second when he violated the terms of his tourist visa.
He was fast asleep when he became illegal—facedown on Rudy’s bed—and when he remembered his visa had expired and he had not booked a return flight to Manila, he wasn’t quite sure what to do. Should he feel different? Heavier, somehow, beneath the weight of criminality? He searched the corners of his chest and gut for a feeling, something dark and jagged that might be guilt. It was there, but smaller than he expected, so tiny he could tuck it away and ignore it when speaking to Tita Grace or passing a policeman on Broadway. He was here illegally. Breaking the rules. What would Rudy say?
He fried eggs and Spam with rice for Reg, Lorenzo, and himself. “I got an extension,” Pierre said later that day when Tita Grace called, frantic. “Don’t worry.”
“Don’t lie to me,” she said, and over the miles and ocean of distance her voice felt like a slap. “Not you.”
* * *
Kristin is waiting for him in the parking lot, sitting on the hood of a Toyota with peeling gray paint, when his shift ends. Mercedes walks out with him, lingers as she sizes up Kristin.
“Want me to wait with you, P?” she asks. “Give you a ride home?”
He looks at her, the shadows in her eyes beneath the Vaqueros baseball cap. Between work and babysitting her nephew and coaching her little cousin’s softball team and only just now starting to take phone calls from her ex, she hasn’t been sleeping well. He squeezes her shoulder, grateful.
“No, it’s okay. I’ll see you later.”
“Yeah, all right.” She is still giving Kristin the eye. “Let me know how it goes.”
Kristin pulls a cigarette out of the pack she holds and offers it to Pierre. He shakes his head, taking a seat on the hood beside her. “I shouldn’t smoke,” she says around the cigarette as she lights it. “I’m a nurse, I should know better, I know.”
He agrees silently but says nothing. She breathes in, then begins.
“The last time I saw Rudy was a few days before the hurricane. We’d gone back to his apartment, and I thought I was staying over. I planned to.” She looks uncomfortable, biting her lip.
“Were you and Rudy together?”
“Sort of. I met him at a bar. I’m new to the island, just moved here last year. I work at a nursing home in League City, but I live out here. I like it out here. I have friends at UTMB, so we hang out at the bars nearby. I met Rudy in July. We started dating. I wasn’t dating anyone else. I don’t know if he was—I guess he could’ve been.”
Pierre takes a deep breath. The night air is cool but balmy, not sticky the way it is back home. There it engulfs him, throttles him. Here it whispers salt over his skin, snuggles close. He has started to prefer it.
Kristin goes on. “So, we’re seeing each other. I thought it was going well. We talked a lot—how we were both new here, how we liked Galveston. I told him that my hometown is close to the river area of Texas. He said he’d never been to a freshwater river before. He told me about the Philippines, your island, his mom. You. It sounded really nice,” she says in a gentler tone, as if she can see Pierre’s throat working, hear him holding back tears. “Different. I told him no one in my family had ever traveled out of the country before—my brother was in Iraq for a while, but…” She waves in a vague gesture, trailing smoke.