The Last Karankawas(70)

Another tread, if you lean in closer. This one: headed north as well, tracing back and forth, scar tissue burned into the gray. (Editor’s note: Belongs to a young BOI who is a sometimes-devoted granddaughter; an abandoned daughter with issues; a pretty-OK girlfriend; and a future mother of two, though she will not know that until three years after she has sold the Corolla.) The tread is lighter going north, heading to the causeway and the mainland. This is speed; the car is rushing excitedly on its way. On the southbound stretch, the tread slows, clings, drags. Does not want to return home.

Look again. See another set of tire marks. Southbound this time, heavy beneath a Toyota Tacoma loaded down with suitcases of men’s clothing, boxes of track awards and Ball High yearbooks, of realtor-license documents and photo albums of a wedding in Concan, at a chapel where the groom’s family drove seven hours from Galveston and the bride’s parents drove fifteen minutes from Uvalde, where the bride wore her mother’s lace dress—altered, updated with coral ribbon and a sassy short veil—and in one photo she beams between the groom and her mother, unaware of the decade to come when she will lose them both. (Editor’s note: The albums and the boxes and the truck belong to the groom, a young BOI who lived on Marlin, took district titles in the hundred-meter dash and the relay where he ran anchor, once called a dear friend a chink and regrets it every day, and later met a girl at a party on a river who dazzled him before she broke him, is still dazzling him with her capacity to break.) See tread marks of a truck that never thought it would be back on this ribbon of road but picks up speed like a horse that feels the familiar, that scents home.

Recognize the marks buried in the asphalt, seeping in the heat: those who have wanted to go and keep going, and those who have wanted only to return, to stay. Many stay forever (see: Cline, Isaac M.).





Cline, Isaac M.


(1861–1955) Chief meteorologist, US Weather Bureau, Galveston office. A Tennessee native, Isaac transplanted to the island in 1889 and helped found the Texas branch of the bureau. No storm, he believed, could do serious damage to Galveston—simply look at the unique geography of the Gulf, its inlets and its valleys, the mud muck at the bottom; look at the way the wind circles in patterns, waxing and waning like cycles of the moon. Predictable. Measurable. Such as he wrote in an 1891 editorial in the daily newspaper: The opinion held by some who are unacquainted with the actual conditions of things, that Galveston will at some time be seriously damaged by some such disturbance, is simply an absurd delusion. He paused in his writing of this, searching for stronger words, ones he could pressure into conveying the severity of his stance. Absurd, yes. Impossible—ah. Better. Isaac lifted the pen once more. It would be impossible for any cyclone to create a storm wave which could materially injure the city.

He remembers little of what came before the storm. But he always remembers what came after. The vitriol from his brother and fellow meteorologist (You could have stopped it, you should have seen it coming, Isaac), and the publications one after another after another (The deadliest weapon of a hurricane is the surge, the wind-driven tide, and it is this tide in which we gather our most important warning signals), and the grief—for his wife, for his unborn child swept away in the salt water—a wave edged with glass that slices, keeps slicing.

Now, decades since his own death, Isaac wanders. Like a splinter shard that has come off in the skin, coaxed the tissue of its host to grow and seethe around it, he is part of this place; he is here to stay. Instant by instant he opens his eyes and finds himself somewhere else—sprawled on the roof of the Bishop’s Palace, broiling like a shrimp under the August sun—the next moment tangled up in fishing wire off the jetties in the bay—the next strapped into a bumper car beside a screaming teenager on Pleasure Pier—the next facedown in horseshit on the Strand, left behind by one of the horses pulling an old-time carriage during the Dickens festival. His mouth blistering in the heat, or his skin plumped by humidity, or perhaps it is sweat rolling down his back, or ice gathering in the spaces behind his knees. Always changing, the next and the next and the next. If he believed in a heaven or hell, Isaac would wonder which this is.





Elissa, the


Sailing ship. Three-masted, iron-hulled. Constructed in 1877 in Aberdeen, Scotland, by a boatbuilder who loves the Aeneid, whose eyes sting with tears when Queen Dido of Carthage appears on the page. She fled from Tyre to Africa, founded a city, her tragedy taking shape as inevitably as the hull appearing in the iron arc before him. Her Phoenician name Elissa.

Pete Caballero read the Aeneid in high school, but it was assigned the month he enlisted so he does not remember this, and when he looks at the Elissa’s nameplate, he thinks instead of the girl he sat behind in homeroom with that name. She was the drum major, with long hair in braids that, if he smiled charmingly enough, she would let him play with. He does not mention this to Adam Schafer, standing beside him on the pier, though he could. They talk about most everything and nothing at all, as only men who have shared dust and blood and bullets can. Men of honor, Pete thinks.

As Schafer leans in closer to admire the Elissa, Pete remembers Elissa, how she pronounced it Eh-lee-sa, which is how Pete says it now, peering against the bright sun casting sparks into his eyes.

Schafer shakes his head. “It’s Uh-liss-a,” he corrects him. “The guy I worked with last year, out on the boat? That’s how he said it’s supposed to be said. And he would know—he was big on Galveston history.”