The Last Karankawas(69)
The colonel’s wife wants stained glass. If the Texas sun is to be a part of her future, she wants it stripped—filtered at the very least—of its current brutality. Broken down into manageable, pretty pieces, shafts of sunbeams dyed crimson, cerulean, purple cool and dark as a bruise. The colonel shrugs and turns away, but the architect smiles at her. Says, “Of course, of course.”
The colonel’s wife will wait five years before the house is finished. Her husband will cofound a major railroad slicing through the region. He will serve on the state legislature. The architect will design dozens of churches, buildings, and houses for this stretch of Galveston; marry a local woman and make love to the colonel’s wife on a settee in her parlor while the colonel and her children are away. When she kisses him, she will taste salt and dust; he will leave damp streaks from his fingers on her wrists and eyelids and thighs. He will install the stained glass she wanted in the sitting room windows, the front and rear parlors, even flanking the octagonal mahogany stairwell. She will think of him each time she sees them, each time she paints in her third-floor studio, each time she looks up at the skylight he sketched for her. It will not be long before she hates them—and him—but that is another story.
Years from now, there will be a bishop named Byrne living here, donating his title and ownership to the structure itself like a gift, like something to be proud of, until the house seems utterly his and the names of the colonel and his wife and the architect are forgotten. A Catholic church will sprout next door like a white oleander amid the mud of the thoroughfare. The Gresham House/Bishop’s Palace will come through the hurricane of 1900 virtually unscathed. The windows will not.
BOI
Acronym: “born on the island.” Designates who belongs and who doesn’t, who has staked their claim here and who has not, who is an islander by blood and who is a tourist in all but address.
May not be used to refer to Vinh Pham, no matter how much he wishes it, no matter that he has been here since he was eleven and played varsity tennis and junior varsity offensive tackle for Ball High and married an islander and had two children born at John Sealy and fishes the bay for shrimp and oysters and lives in a Fish Village bungalow with a porch swing and a four-foot-high watermark of where the surge from Ike rolled in. No matter all that. Vinh Pham’s birth certificate reads H?i Phòng and marks him eternally as a transplant. This does not stop his wife from buying him a white ball cap with BOI emblazoned in green letters, the I shaped like a palm tree. Vinh wears it every day he goes out on the bay, until the white is no longer white, smeared instead by years of sweat and salt and grease and mud.
On September 13, the sweat-salt-grease-mud cap is snatched off the pilot’s bench of La Cigüe?a by 110-mile-per-hour winds and hurled nearly a mile away into the Gulf. The same winds yank at La Cigüe?a, but the double lashings and extra ropes applied by the strong hands of the two youngest men on Vinh’s crew hold it fast to the fixed dock. So the winds and the surge take the dock, ripping it up in pieces, casting ragged planks of wood like broken teeth across the marina. On September 15, Vinh walks from Fish Village down Harborside and finds his shrimper, Miss Saigon, thrust halfway up the dock and listing on its side, the barnacles scabbing its flat bottom drying in the sun. But the Cig sits tight, strewn with debris and spilled diesel, bobbing gently on the water.
Six years later, when Vinh sells the Cig, the new owner will slap a green bumper sticker with the same BOI logo on the back window of the pilot house. “Because we’ve earned it,” the owner will say, and Vinh will smile and remember how the two of them worked their hands bloody scraping off debris in the days after Ike, patching holes, running new lines through both boats. How the first day they got Miss Saigon out and hauled up the dredge they found tree branches, a Louisiana license plate, a mangled beach chair, two mud-clumped long-sleeved men’s shirts, and no oysters. How the bay reeked of salt water—too much salt, too much surge—for months, and the only work for immigrant fishermen left behind was loading garbage from the parking lot scrap heaps. How they thought the delicate balance was drowned, but Vinh knew the bay would come back, the oysters and shrimp would come back, the island would come back. “Yes, Jess,” Vinh will say to the new owner, smoothing his hand over the palm tree I.
Broadway
Main thoroughfare. Halves Galveston city down the middle, like the seam of a zipper. Becomes the causeway over the bay, and on the mainland Interstate 45.
Look closely. Can you see the tread scored into the layered asphalt? There: Those are the tire marks of a Greyhound bus on a steamy day in September 2008 carrying evacuees, those who heeded the hurricane warning (Editor’s note: See definition 4). The tread sinks heavily, bearing the weight of the people and their possessions, backpacks and suitcases and garbage bags stuffed with T-shirts, underwear, waterproof ponchos, framed wedding photos, baby toys, heirloom jewelry. In the left window seat, fourth row from the back, beside a woman holding a crying child, Rudy Pi?eda watches the live oaks lining the avenue hurry past. He holds in his lap a bus ticket to San Antonio and a backpack containing a week’s worth of clothes, his work visa, the credit card he opened after receiving his first UTMB paycheck, two cans of Spam, and an issue of Texas Monthly with the photo of a tire swing suspended over a green river and the words Concan: The Cancún of Texas on the cover. He holds in his mind a cousin he loves and a woman he likes just fine, the one who first told him about this place he is headed, and that green river unfurling between tall trees. A place to be alone, to be anew.