Uncertain Ground (10 page)

He looked up, waved, and in a moment I joined him. Picking our way carefully, we stepped around a confusion of buckets, lines, bait, and people; whether sitting or standing they leaned out following the angles of their poles. I stopped to stare out past them to the open sea, so green and rough in the distance. When I turned back to look toward the beach, I saw two boys around seven or eight playing with two club-shaped gray fish, flipping them over by their tails in the sand, letting them struggle toward the water and pulling them back again just as they reached it. Tiring of this, they jerked the fish up and swung them heads down in the air watching them writhe. When they hung still, the boys slapped their bodies together until they wriggled once more.

I watched amazed at the toughness of the fish and wanting to yell at the boys to stop torturing them.

Luis hadn’t noticed, so I asked, “What kind of fish are they killing?”

He looked toward the boys. “Horrid, aren’t they. Those are small sharks. Someone up here probably caught them. Everything’s hauled up on a jetty—sheepshead, smelt, sharks like those kids are beating up, crabs, sting rays. People here call the rays devil fish.” He made a wide diamond shape using both his thumbs and forefingers. “This is what they look like, and they have a long whiplike tail with a barb in it. Most of them are poisonous. Hurts if you get stung. On the Mexican coast they’re called mantas, I guess because they can get as big as blankets. I’ve seen old pictures of huge rays like that caught in Galveston, some of them bigger than the men who caught them.”

I thought I’d never want to swim in the Gulf again and said so.

“Don’t worry. They post warnings when schools are sighted.”

“What about the ones nobody sees?”

“You don’t see all the cars when you cross a street sometimes.”

In front of me a man pulled what looked like a catfish off his hook by gingerly placing his finger around the fins on the side and back. “You got to watch how you do this,” he said while looking up at me from under the bill of his cap. His teeth were brown with tobacco stains. “My wife stepped on one yesterday, and it sliced her instep. She’s sick all over today. Poisons the whole system.” He pulled up a stringer full of fish and laid his catch on the black asphalt-covered walkway. They stayed still while the catfish was attached. Lowered to a bucket in the water, the whole silvery bunch wriggled and pulled against the hooks.

My father hunted and fished. So did Kenyon. I couldn’t say why I cared about the boys on the beach and their mindless cruelty or the fisherman brutally saving his catch. It was a puzzle to me, for nature alone could be just as aimless, just as cruel. Luis agreed although he didn’t seem to mind the doubleness of things the way I did.

We walked on toward the open sea side by side. He seldom touched me, nor did he look for excuses to hold onto me either, a relief since Emmett was such a grabber. Had someone hurt him terribly, or was he a person who simply didn’t need to touch others often? Tony … with Tony it had seemed natural to hold hands and just as natural for him to put his arm around my shoulders. Looking down I saw the tar had been worn away toward the lower end of the jetty. The concrete we were walking on was partially covered with patches of slippery green moss. My sandals were already wet. Automatically I reached for Luis’s hand. Water dashed up against the walkway, and quickly oozed out again. A misstep could send us sliding down to enormous black-speckled pink rocks haphazardly piled on both sides. They didn’t look like any other rocks I’d seen in Galveston.

“Where did they get all these?”

“The granite? Those are ten-ton blocks of it. They were dumped here before the seawall was built. I’ve forgotten where it’s from.” Luis shouted above the crash of the waves.

By now wet almost to my waist, I was hypnotized by the dizzying, curling waves smashing against the rocks. Every step we took, even the most tentative one, seemed to me to be in opposition to their tremendous force.

I looked over at Luis who was ignoring the spray. Of course he was taller.

“The water—” I shouted and gestured toward the spray with my free hand.

“Look up. Keep your eyes on the signal light out there.” He pointed to a stubby piece of dark metal poking up at the end.

“We aren’t going to walk out all the way, are we?” I wanted to turn and run to shore, but warned myself not to. Slipping on the oozing moss would be so easy. I grasped his hand harder.

“Afraid?”

“Yes,” I didn’t mind admitting. “Have you walked out there?”

He nodded. “I like to go to the end. The surf’s too high today though.”

I turned back gladly and let go of his hand as soon as we reached the dry section of the jetty.

The car’s black leather seats looked so hot I half wondered if steam would rise when I sat down. Luis slid under the wheel without comment. The old black MG with its storage box on back collected sun and held it even though the top was always down. Heat didn’t bother him. Cold did. It was cold in the mountains in Mexico in the winters, he’d said. We drove away from the jetty past the ferry landing where a single black and yellow striped wooden bar marked the abrupt end of land. One ferry was being loaded. The other would be coming from the opposite shore. Shifting gears down, Luis made the MG climb the slanting seawall. Behind it there was a bit of lowland where remains of World War II gun emplacements were standing on high ground. Uncle Mowrey told me they were built to guard the sea approach to Galveston Bay. Their jutting gray cement shafts and empty rectangles of long gone doors were slowly being camouflaged by grass. Luis stopped without explanation,
as he often did, and we pushed ourselves up to sit on the backs of the seats.

Past the fortifications the bay circled around the island. Where I could no longer see water, a few tall masts and smokestacks indicated wharves. Straight ahead rose the white dome of the Church of the Sacred Heart. “Harbor the Homeless,” I thought. “Instruct the Ignorant.” What I needed was instruction on breaking silent barriers between people and I could find none. I had to feel my way with Luis, to trust intuition. By my side was the beach sweeping back in a curve waiting to meet the sea. I looked once more at the mass of concrete with its grassy green cover.

“Do you suppose they’re like that all over the world … wherever there’s a beach?” I asked.

“Something like that. The D-Day beaches must be full of old wrecked bunkers and barbed wire rusting.”

I tried to imagine soldiers in other beach outposts waiting to meet invaders, the menace of quiet while men crouched in the earth, their eyes straining toward sky and sea. “Did you know anybody in the war?”

“My brother. He was killed on Guam.” He looked down at his hands lightly folded in his lap.

“I’m sorry.”

“He was a lot older, and I didn’t know him well except he … he was a kind of hero. I wanted to be like him when I grew up. He loved this.” He leaned his head toward the beach. “Sometimes I think of him out in the Pacific … on that other beach. He was buried there. My mother couldn’t stand it. She wanted him brought back home. For a long time she wouldn’t believe he was dead, even after the official notice came, she wouldn’t believe it. When she started believing— She had cancer when she started believing.” He stared straight ahead over the small windshield. “And I didn’t grow up to be like him in the least.”

I was reminded of a small boy on-stage reciting something he’d learned by heart, fearful of stopping for a second, fearful if
he did, the next line would be forever lost. At the same time I felt the next line was well learned, and he would know it all of his life. The way his voice fell told me he wasn’t simply mourning the loss of his brother and his mother. He was trying, in an oblique way, to tell me about himself … that he wasn’t in the least like his brother. … Why did he think he should be?

I started to say something about Korea, that everybody knew it wasn’t at all like World War II, that he hadn’t missed an opportunity to prove himself there, then said nothing. What did I really know about him and his missed opportunities? He wasn’t talking about not being a soldier. There was something else, but I couldn’t ask, couldn’t say “What is it, Luis? What is wrong?” He didn’t want me to. I was certain of that.

“What about you?” He asked shaking his head a little as if beckoning another child to come out of the wings and take his place.

“There was my father, but he didn’t go overseas. They kept him in the U.S. to train troops. One aunt had a husband stationed in India with the Air Corps. He caught lots of strange fevers but he came home. None of my Texas uncles served. Too young, too old, or busy raising cattle. My family’s totally divided, half in Tennessee, half in Texas.”

“Mine is simple here … just me and my father. There’s all my mother’s side. They live in Houston. In Mexico all my father’s family is scattered around.”

“Near Guanajuato?”

“No … over closer to Guadalajara most of them. I see them on holidays mostly. Mexicans are like southerners a little … all those connections. They keep up with each other. I have more cousins than I can count.”

“Well, at least you don’t have an Emmett.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t mind somebody looking after me.” He smiled.

“Oh yes, you would, Luis. You’d mind if it were Emmett. I’m so glad you’re here. If you weren’t I’d probably have to spend
more time with him. You—” Sensing I was about to say too much, I stopped myself.

Both of us had stretched our arms out when we’d held onto the back of the seats to hoist ourselves up. Now, leaning back on the soft tops of the leather seats, we sat an inch apart from shoulders to wrists. The underside of my forearm was pinkish white next to his tan. Our veins, those miniature inner maps of rivers, ran side by side. Why was it impossible for him to touch me? I looked over at him, but his attention seemed to be elsewhere. The moment had passed. He would say nothing more. Who could I ask about Luis? Who would really know?

A breeze blew in from the water. He slid down in his seat. “Come on. Let’s go over to the port. I want to see what’s arrived today.”

I could have said, “No, I need to get back home.” I could have lied about a promise made to Aunt Bertha to do something or go somewhere with her. I didn’t. If I had, I might never have seen him again, and I wanted to go on seeing Luis. He had a compelling charm that drew me to him, sexual yet not sexual, an easy acceptance of another person. Emmett had taken to him immediately. Now his jealousy and his stupid prejudice ruined any chance of their friendship. Aunt Bertha was always genuinely pleased to see Luis. Everyone seemed to be. He was usually talking to some stranger when I went to meet him … some fisherman, or a tourist, or someone else he’d just met before he broke away to greet me. He worked at a beach house in the afternoons and at night. What were his paintings like? He saw his father some nights. What was he like? His mother had died of cancer three years ago. His brother was killed on Guam. Most of the time he lived in Mexico. Other than these few facts, he was a mystery. Perhaps that was part of his charm also, and he was so different from the boys I’d known. Was I falling in love with Luis? I didn’t want to. I wanted relief from the yearning I felt for Tony Gregory, the compulsion to be with him all the time, to hear his voice, to know his body. Every move I’d made, everything I’d done the
whole time I was in Colorado was governed by desire. I wanted to avoid that, not to avoid desire entirely but to escape its total rule. Was that possible?

On our way to the docks we passed an old weather-stained house that stood by itself facing the bay. Luis told me some people thought it was Laffite’s. There wasn’t a bit of red on it, not the slightest tinge.

“I thought he destroyed his house. … Uncle Mowrey said—”

“Yes. People just want to go on believing something’s left. Actually he set fire to the whole town. I hope he did it at night.”

The reflection of fire in the bay’s calm water, smoke rising against a darker sky, ships’ sails beginning to unfurl, and on the shore an abandoned dog howling while houses crackled to charred logs—that was what I saw—followed by dawn and wind pushing at smoking piles of ash.

“I wish he had left something.”

“I’d rather imagine it than see it. I’d rather imagine Laffite swaggering down to his ship, his men running through the town carrying torches—”

“And the women?”

“On board the ship already, wouldn’t they be … if they carried any?” He drove on obviously thinking about something far from a pirate village. Restlessness sometimes moved him from one place to another, from one thought to another. I didn’t mind; I was often restless myself.

A guard, an old man with a big belly drooping over his belt waved when we stopped at the wharves. “Put it here where I can watch it. Them winos will take anything.”

“You think they could carry this little car away?” Luis asked him in Spanish.

The guard grimaced, scratched the back of his neck and answered him rapidly.

I waited beside the car looking at the rows of warehouses wishing they weren’t there. I’d expected to see ships right away; instead a long expanse of gray buildings blocked my view. In front of the warehouses ran train tracks, and beyond them stood
a deserted granary where pigeons still fluttered from a sagging roost. The granary’s gray plastered walls were marked with star shaped pieces of steel rusting in long streaks down its sides. Up near the roof a faded sign read LONE STAR FLOUR MILLS.

“Want to walk down and see the ships?” Luis asked.

“Okay. What did the man say?”

“He wanted to know why I was bringing a beautiful young girl down to this old place.”

I looked up at him and laughed. “You lie. Oh, how you lie! He said no such thing. He said he was bored to death with this job, that nothing ever docked here any more but shrimp boats and—”

“I forgot you knew Spanish.”

“Not really.” I shook my head. I understood more than I could speak and often I barely understood at all.

We moved slowly down the wharf passing doors open to dark warehouses partially filled with bales of cotton and bright orange and white barrels labeled
Paraffin
. Once we’d gotten by all the warehouses I could see an immense freighter. Looking three times as large as the ones out in the bay, the ship floated high above its cargo line. I stopped to touch the taut ropes securing it. Murky brown water reflected scaling metal below the cargo line, and when I stared up, the smokestack was nothing more than a small black cylinder against the sky. Luis wished for a liner because, he said, they were so much more graceful. We walked the length of the freighter. Big as it was, it also looked like a giant toy which, when pushed, would gently float away.