The Last Karankawas(7)
Jess rolled his eyes at Mr. Collier’s assigned reading, carelessly flipping through pages with boring kings and queens of varying shades of white. But he paused at the portrait of William the Conqueror. Something intrigued him: how the crown rested in an arrogant tilt on the man’s brow, the longsword propped against his shoulder (Jess liked his style, liked the kind of guy who would insist on holding a sword in a royal portrait). The way he faced left but aimed his eyes boldly to the right, directly at the viewer, as if he had overhead Jess muttering an insult and cut sharply back to confront him. Jess went to the Galveston library after practice that week and checked out a biography on William the Conqueror. When the other guys teased him about reading for fun, he said it was for a paper.
He reads until the bus lurches to a stop in front of the school, near the team’s collective pickups and sedans; then he steps off into the slanting rain, carrying his duffel in one hand and the book in the other, tucked close to keep it dry on the quick jog to his truck. He takes Avenue O, then cuts over 33rd to Harborside, a slight detour but worth it. He prefers the bayside to the Gulf, the scrolled-up sails of yachts and the occasional hulking mass of a cruise ship more interesting to him than the brown-sand beaches or the San Luis or the Seawall.
Jess spots the smoking engine on 16th before he sees the small man leaning over his open hood. The bend of his back, the stained gray hoodie, look vaguely familiar. Jess slows to a stop and lowers the passenger window, already knowing how Carly would mock him, say it was cold out, and raining, and fucking late. And she’d be right. He is tired. He should go straight home. But he knows this guy, he thinks.
“Hey, man, you good?”
The man turns, looks out from within his soaked hoodie, and Jess sees he is right. A neighbor from one of the houses near where Carlos Saldivar lives, next to the Black family with two Chihuahuas. He is Vietnamese or Korean or something.
“Don’t you live on Marlin?” Jess calls out, squinting in the cool rain.
“Yes,” the man says. “I know you?”
“Jess Rivera. I live on Dolphin.”
“Ah.” He nods. “Yes, I’ve seen your sisters running around.”
Jess has four younger sisters, energetic, social. “They like running around.”
“And a mother, right?”
“She doesn’t really leave the house.” Jess clears his throat. “Look, you need to use the phone? A ride or something?”
“I’m on my way to work, I can call to get this towed when I get there. I’m going to the pier.”
Jess sighs. It isn’t too far, and this late, there is almost no one else on the road. “I can take you.”
The man nods again, as if deigning to accept this favor. He leans into his car to grab a black backpack, then locks it and climbs into Jess’s passenger seat. He shivers the wet off him, quick like a dog. “I’m Vinh,” he says. “Pham.”
They shake hands; the man’s palm is calloused, rough, and Jess wonders how his own palm feels to him. Soft? Should he tighten his grip? He pulls a U-turn.
“So you work at the pier?” he asks.
His radio is set on 97.9 The Box as usual. A Bone Thugs-N-Harmony song kicks in and Mr. Pham grimaces. Without a word he reaches over and turns the knob, spins to a country station, then, satisfied, leans back again. Jess doesn’t know if he should be offended, insulted, angry—he settles on amused. Mr. Pham gives him a sidelong glance and smiles.
“I’m a fisherman,” he says.
“Oh.” Jess went fishing with Ramiro and Carlos once, years ago; Ram’s dad had a buddy with a boat they borrowed. They took it out on the Gulf and caught nothing but sunburns. “What do you fish for?”
“I have two boats, a shrimper and an oyster boat. But right now is oyster season.”
Jess knows nothing about oysters, other than he likes them fried and in po’boys, while Mrs. Castillo and Carly prefer to slurp them raw. “Cool.”
He pulls into the pier where Mr. Pham says his boat is moored. Casts an eye over the one he points out. A wide, flat-bottomed, squatty-looking vessel—almost like a houseboat. Dingy, stained with rust and grime. The roof is wide and flat. A faded Miss Saigon script on the side of it. “That’s yours?”
“Yes. Thank you for the ride.” Mr. Pham gathers his backpack and glances back at Jess critically. “You’re on spring break?”
“School got out yesterday.”
“And you are a strong boy. Athlete, right?”
Jess wonders where this is going, tightening his shoulders slightly. “I play baseball.”
“Have you ever worked on a boat?”
“No.”
He nods. “You decide you want some extra money, you come see me. We are going out every day this week. We could use you in dredging.” He nods again—a man of few words, Jess is learning—and slams the car door.
* * *
Jess expects everyone to be asleep when he pulls into the house, but the light in his mother’s room is on. He closes the front door carefully, steps into the Pine-Sol-and-old-carpet smell. Hints, too, of whatever his sister Yvonne cooked for dinner, something spicy enough to lace each breath you took with tears.
He moves quietly, but not quiet enough. The bedroom door creaks—he has time for a quick inhale to brace himself—and his mother steps out. A mug of coffee in one hand, her hair loose and waving around her shoulders, the brown shot through with gray. As always, she wears the same robe, the green-gone-gray one Dad gave her long ago.