The Last Karankawas(67)
On that night, this night, before the vents of cold air and before she opens her wallet and laughs, I stand at the port of Galveston with my mother beside me. Her hand firm around my elbow, we walk through the parking lot on Harborside, gravel crunching beneath our tennis shoes, the ramp before us. Anak, Inay asks, anong tingin mo? and gestures at our destination, the Lone Star casino boat.
What I say: Very nice, po. What I think: Ang cheap naman. The three-level boat is tall, already busy. A rooftop deck with twinkling lights; people move across, drinks in hand. Light spills out of the windows on the lower levels, and a band I can’t see is playing an ABBA cover. Inay loves ABBA; she told me three years ago the surgeons were listening to “Take a Chance on Me” in the operating room during her oophorectomy. (I reminded her the tumors came back months later, spots on her liver, but she still listens to “Waterloo” each morning in the shower.) Rust like old blood stains the boat’s portholes, and the gold-buttoned uniforms fit the workers poorly. Perla, Inay says. But I think, if the Lone Star is a pearl, it is fake, like the ones kids back home sell at tourist beaches—This very real, ma’am, this a beautiful local pearl, touch it feel it lovely so lovely—the rest of us laughing when someone pays too much.
We step aboard into voices, the band music, alarm-bell rings of slot machines that are ready and waiting, but we are still in Texas and not allowed to play until the Lone Star leaves the state boundary. Cigarette smoke curls on the air. Familiar, all familiar, ang mga tunog, ang mga amoy. That year we visit Coushatta, Shreveport, Eagle Pass, even travel as far west as Ruidoso. In Coushatta, Inay earns four bonus spins on a leprechaun machine and wins $300 ten minutes after we arrive. In Shreveport, she holds my hand while we play nickel machines beside each other, and when she says, Bet the maximum on this one, Maharlika, I can feel it, I win $205. In Ruidoso, we watch horse races, the first for us both. While I scream at the thundering hooves, dazzled by the streaks of color whipping past, Inay screams because she picked a black horse with braids woven into its hair she thought were beautiful, and we take home $1,177.49.
Makinig ka. This is what I forget: How that year we take so many bus trips the Trailways driver in Galveston learns us by sight, helping Inay up and down the stairs carefully every time, calling her se?orita and me mijita. How my mother’s cheekbone digs heavily on my shoulder on the long rides, how chemo affects her taste buds so she no longer hates bagoong but craves it, scoops the pungent shrimp paste onto any fruit I can find. And this is what I remember: Her slipping me the winnings after each trip, the teeth marks imprinted on my lips where I bite down to keep from crying when she does, because we both know she is dying and this is the only inheritance she believes in—what she has passed down to me since I was eight and she left me with her sisters so she could go to America, to earn money for me even though I wanted nothing but her. How she said in one letter that she found a $50 bill under a chair and used it on a machine in Oklahoma and won $800, and when I told Tita Bel I thought Inay was very masuwerte, I did not understand why Tita cried at the word for lucky; I did not know yet the chair had been in the waiting room of a radiology unit where Inay had also found a lump in her breast.
The boat lurches, and a voice over the intercom announces we have begun our journey, and it will not be long before we are in federal waters. Inay wants to look at the machines first, so I move alone, curling around the empty tables, remembering to smile when someone looks at me because my skin and nose and eyes mark me as an immigrant, and Inay taught me in America an unsmiling immigrant is a dangerous one.
I turn a corner and spot the bar, catch the eye of the bartender. What I will remember: that his hair is too long, falls into his eyes; that he looks my age and just as unhappy. What I will forget: almost everything else.
Like how as I approach he puts on a wide smile that fits the planes of his face badly—a face brown as mine, though he is probably Mexican—and behind that false smile I see myself hiding. How he pours me a rum and Coke as the band starts “You’re So Vain” and I sing along under my breath, and when I admit I love this one, he says Me, too with a smaller, dimmer, genuine smile. His voice is light and rumbling with the accent Ate Beeb and the other Sacred Heart ladies hate but I think sounds beautiful, a purr like a car engine, a rhythm like the sobbing ballads Tito Boyet plays back home. He waits a full five minutes before he asks where I am from; he says he has Filipino neighbors and knows the Tagalog words patay (dead) and beer (beer). He tries to pronounce my name, but it comes out Ma-hair-lika, and when he tells me his, I snap Like the president? before I can stop myself. (Our own names—that should have been a sign, di ba?) He looks confused, so I say Never mind and It’s nice to meet you, Marcos, transform into a smiling immigrant once again.
Marcos pours drinks as we talk. His attention and the rum heat my cheeks, make me brave, stir a desire in me to tell him true things. I talk about Inay and her chemo. He tells me his father is dead and his mother is complicated. He is from Galveston. I say, I live here, too, and his eyes light in a way that warms me even more. I explain our gambling trip; he asks how I’ve been doing.
Can I tell you a secret? I stretch over the bar; he leans in to hear my whisper. I have won almost $1,800. I’m trying to get $3,000.
He whistles softly. Why $3,000? Ticket to Vegas?
A ticket home.
He opens his mouth, but an announcement sounds overhead: Welcome to federal waters. The tables and machines are open for business. People cheer and clap; beyond them, through the open windows, Galveston has disappeared in the twilight haze. I look at the gray waves, trying to spot the boundary that must exist somewhere, the invisible line drawn by Texas and America separating the waters. No buoys, no markers; no passports or green cards or visas. Paano—how would we know we had crossed a border? That we had left something behind and arrived elsewhere?