Uncertain Ground (9 page)

Emmett said he didn’t care where we went as long as we stayed away from saltwater. It was one of the few remarks he made that afternoon. He meant for us to believe he didn’t want salt on his cuts, but I began to wonder if he didn’t know how to swim and was embarrassed about it. Mullin was large enough to have a high school but too small to have a swimming pool. He hadn’t been to any of the summer boys’ camps on the Guadalupe though he might have at least learned to dog paddle in one of the ranch’s tanks. They were all dry now. Even during ordinary weather they dried way down, were apt to be infested with water moccasins, and rimmed with cow plops. The only other large wet places were windmill water storage tanks, too small to do anything except float. If Emmett couldn’t swim, I doubted he could float and if he couldn’t do something, I was beginning to learn, he usually scorned it. That afternoon, without saying much, he established himself in a deck chair with a drink then fell asleep under a wide awning near the pool. He looked out of place there with his hat half over his face, his legs stretched out in jeans when the rest of us had on bathing suits.

“Hard night?” Roby nodded toward him.

“I guess so. He got involved in a rodeo somewhere outside Texas City.”

“I’ve never been to one.” He looked as if I’d just given him a gift he couldn’t wait to open.

“I haven’t been to one either,” Jane said.

“Let’s go!” Roby’s voice rose.

Marion agreed immediately.

It was such a dumb idea I stared at the three of them, got up, and jumped into the pool.

Leslie was already in. “What was Roby saying?’

“He wants to go to a rodeo. I don’t know why. Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.”

“I’ve never seen one,” said Leslie.

“Oh God!” I did a surface dive. The water was almost as warm as the Gulf ’s. The hotel, covered with pale orange stucco and a darker orange tile roof, faced the seawall. It had an air of twenties opulence. Waiters in white jackets carrying trays with elaborate care brought drinks. Though he was obviously the youngest one there, Marion signed for everything. No one else came to the pool. It was like being at a country club only less crowded.

I wondered at this and asked Leslie if everyone staying at the hotel had gone to the Gulf to swim.

“I don’t know. I guess so. Or maybe Marion had them put up the sign saying
CLOSED
. He usually does when he’s here.” She laughed and swam across the pool.

What did the people who’d paid to stay there do? They were strangers, tourists on vacations, unaware that an owner’s sons took special privileges. Wouldn’t the manager, when somebody else wanted to swim, move the sign finally? Or was the hotel’s staff accustomed to Marion’s pushy habits? Maybe he, like Emmett, was trying to cover up a weakness. Emmett didn’t want anybody to laugh at him. I flipped over on my back to gaze at the blank blue sky. I liked that pool, liked its quiet emptiness, the breeze blowing in from the ocean just across the street. There weren’t many cars on the boulevard that day, so there was little traffic noise. Drifting aimlessly I raised my head now and then to hear gulls’ cries, wind-rattling palm leaves, clinks of glasses on heavy glass-topped tables. Many of the hotel’s windows overlooked the pool, yet they were set back so far there was
no feeling of intrusion. Slowly I began to hear the murmur of surrounding voices and began swimming again. When I reached the side of the pool near him I heard Roby chanting, “Let us arise and go now!”

Jane sat on the edge nearby, her legs in the water, a Tom Collins in hand. “Roby,” she said in a lazy drawl, “you are too much! We just got here.”

I pulled myself up out of the water and sat down beside her.

“He’s ready to go?”

“Roby likes to do things, likes for us all to do things.” She raised her eyebrows and drank.

Marion, standing directly behind us, pushed me into the pool. I wondered why he’d bothered and decided he must be bored. Swimming to the opposite side, I climbed out, walked over, and sat down by Roby to tell him there was no use carrying on about the rodeo. We couldn’t arise and go to one since they were held generally at night in the summer and usually on weekends.

We went to the rodeo the next Saturday—all of us together—because Roby wanted go. No one but Emmett wore boots. None of them owned a pair, and I’d left mine in Leon. Everybody had on blue jeans and loafers except Marion who’d stuffed himself into a pair of white cotton trousers.

“He never knows what to wear,” Leslie said. “Most of the time Roby has to tell him. Otherwise he’d wear a derby hat and a bathing suit to a football game. Wouldn’t you, Marion?”

Everyone laughed, even Marion who evidently didn’t like it but was used to being teased.

We drove across the causeway to a dusty little arena outside Texas City, arrived between events, and found a small crowd scattered over sagging gray bleachers. The Galveston group laughed at the sight of these people gazing so intently toward the empty space in front of them. They laughed at everything. We climbed on the bleachers and found seats. Emmett sat apart again, his elbows on his knees, his hat on his
head. We were all steadily drinking beer from big paper cups.

“Oh, my God!” Roby exclaimed when the barrel races began. “What are they going to do now?”

“They ride around the barrels in figure eights. Girls do it. They ride for time.”

“Have you ever—?” Roby asked.

I looked over at Emmett wondering if he was thinking of Doris Lacey. He was staring blankly toward the arena. He wasn’t missing anybody.

I shook my head in answer to Roby. “Emmett’s the one that rides, remember?”

“Yeah. What does he ride?”

“Saddle broncs.”

“And falls off.”

“Sometimes.” I almost felt sorry for Emmett although he wasn’t really paying attention to any of them. Every once in a while Jane would take his cup and refill it with beer when she was refilling hers. Roby had stowed a cooler full of cans in his car’s trunk.

“What a lot of dust!” Marion, sitting by Roby’s far side, coughed.

It was a scruffy little rodeo. There was no band, no real announcer, just a man with a mike, and not many people watching. The bleachers were so full of splinters they must have been sitting out in the rain for years. Where did they get the stock? I turned to ask Emmett. Where had he gone? He’d promised me he wouldn’t ride, had complained he was still too sore.

I stood up and stared toward the pens where the horses and bulls were kept. Yes. There was Emmett in his green plaid shirt, his straw hat which, like his winter Stetson, had been steamed and shaped according to his instructions. Shaping a hat was a ritual performed in the store every time he bought a new one. He took better care of his hats than he did of himself.

Jane eased over next to me. “He’s going to ride, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s just looking at the stock. He’s still pretty sore from riding last weekend.” I sat back down. It looked as if he was going to ride after all, and if he’d decided to, there was no way I could stop him.

He was the third one out of the gate.

“My God, what is he doing to the horse?” Roby asked.

“Spurring him. It’s part of it. They have to rowel the horses to make them buck.”

He clung to a small dun-colored quarter horse that was doubled up under him. The number 251 showed black against a square of white on back of his shirt. The dun jolted up, then down, and up again. Emmett lasted one minute, forty seconds according to the man with the mike. “Too bad, Buddy,” he added in the off-hand way rodeo announcers generally did.

Emmett lay sprawled in the dirt. I hoped he was conscious.

Marion said, “Is he going to get up?”

Roby looked at him with his mouth open mocking him. “Of course, he is! For God’s sake, Marion!”

Leslie handed me another cup of beer. “You want to save this for Emmett? I bet he’s really going to be sore now.”

I was furious at him for hurting himself again, for being such a willing fool.

“No,” I said, “I don’t want to reward him.”

“Here,” said Jane in her lazy voice, “give it to me. I’ll save it for the boy.”

The two of them spent the rest of the night getting drunk together, first hilariously—Jane wore Emmett’s hat at this stage—then sadly. She sat in the back seat on Emmett’s lap and cried while Roby drove us all back to Galveston.

He seemed to be sober when we all knew he wasn’t. He drove almost normally, a little too carefully, the way old men drive—sitting up straight, shoulders slightly hunched—staying well on his side of the road. Sitting beside him, I could see how far away he was from the dividing line. Occasionally, when he wobbled toward it, I poked him gently with my elbow as Leslie had told me to.

“You’ll have to do it, Celia. Whoever sits next to him has to. It’s the only way we ever get home alive.”

Marion, only a little tight, was on my other side looking out the window most of the time. At least Emmett hadn’t insisted on driving.

I could hear him patting Jane’s back and murmuring, “S’s all right.”

“No,” she sobbed, “It’s never going to be all right!” and cried some more.

“Why is she crying?” I craned my neck to ask Leslie in the back seat beside Jane and Emmett.

“I don’t know. I never know.” For once Leslie wasn’t laughing.

“She’s just a crying drunk,” Marion said, as if repeating a judgment he’d heard before.

By the time Roby stopped at Jane’s house, Emmett had grown morose, and she was trying to comfort him. We left them sitting on the curb together.

“It’s where she generally wants to be left.” Roby said.

“Outside?” I asked

“Her parents drink an awful lot. They don’t think she should.” Leslie answered.

“You mean they drink all the time?”

“Weekends mainly. They’re weekend drunks. How will Emmett get home?”

“Somehow,” I said. “He always gets back somehow.” I was only pretending to be blasé. I wondered how he’d get home too.

On the way to Aunt Bertha and Uncle Mowrey’s Roby drove by the seawall. When we passed the shell shop, the Jamaican was out front playing his tall steel drum. The zigzags he’d painted round it showed in the dim light.

“Do you know him?” I asked.

“Tom-Tom? He’s been here every summer the past few years,” Roby said. “He comes and plays. People give him money. He’s just one of the people who float up now and then. We get lots of floaters.”

A fast beat rose and faded as we went by. No one was standing around him. He seemed completely absorbed in the rhythm. Behind him a quarter moon sailed the horizon above the sea.

A
unt Bertha,
watchful at first, hadn’t even wakened when I came in that night late from the rodeo, nor did she seem to notice that Emmett didn’t get home until just before sunrise. She merely nodded and asked no questions when I left to meet Luis. Often he came by for me and delayed leaving to sit in the kitchen, drink coffee, and tell us both about Mexico, or to talk to Aunt Bertha about food. There were so many different kinds of peppers, he said. His mother had used some, jalapenos and serranos mainly, but he’d had to learn how to cook others after seeing them in the market. Food in the interior was nothing like Tex-Mex. Aunt Bertha got so interested I thought she would make him recite recipes before we could go. Around most people, but particularly with the older ones, Luis listened intently as if he really wanted to learn anything they might tell him. And it seemed to make no difference if they were old fishermen or my family. Watching him with Aunt Bertha, I felt my own impatience fade a little.

This time I decided I’d walk to meet him. The seawall was only five blocks away, so I went past all the little raised cottages standing on tall beams, hopefully above water level during storms. Their porches, empty in the mornings, would be filled after five—with men mainly since the women would be inside cooking supper. When Uncle Mowrey and I passed by, he’d nod and the men, sometimes holding children in their laps while talking across their porches to other men would say, “Evening,” and nod back. Framed by curling gingerbread trim or plain white square posts, they were snapshots of other lives.

Their wives worked in smaller hotter kitchens than Aunt Bertha’s. They had no time for strolls to the beach, nor, except for weekends, would they be sitting on their porches when we came by. Were they at home all day, or did they work somewhere
else—in other people’s houses, in stores downtown? Mother stayed at home and liked it. But she was in her fifties and had moved so often, she was happy to be in her own house. I meant to have a career even though I didn’t quite know how. I’d just begun working on the
Daily Texan.
Someday, if I stayed with it, I might be a full-time reporter on a big city daily.

Walking along I stopped now and then to slide bits of oyster shell out of my sandals. I’d gotten used to meeting Luis at his favorite points on the beach. Aunt Bertha would have loaned me her car, I knew. I wanted to walk, to know the place better, I’d told her. What I didn’t tell her was I wanted to keep Emmett away from a chance meeting with Luis. He wouldn’t walk anywhere. If I borrowed the car, he might say he needed a ride some place and insist on going with me. Depending on his humor, Emmett acted some days as if he’d decided he needed to follow me everywhere.

Once when I was leaving to walk to the library, he insisted on driving me and waiting outside in the car while I went in.

“You could come too,” I offered.

“What for?” He stayed in the car and complained when I returned, “Why do you have to read so much?”

“Why do you have to read so little?”

He shrugged. Silently staring forward, he drove me back to the house. I gave up trying to get him to say a word the rest of the afternoon.

Luis was never sullen, seldom irritable. As I approached the jetty near the east end of the island, I picked him out, sitting slightly back from the rows of men and women fishing off either side. As usual he was a part of a scene yet isolated within it while sketching some seemingly insignificant element. I found he would draw anything—shadows, two upturned cockle shells full of sea water, a pile of trash washed ashore, bones, people’s backs, hands, buildings under construction or being demolished. He seldom drew faces, not because they didn’t interest him, but because he didn’t like to stare at people he didn’t know. He would draw figures from a distance and he’d
used models, as every student had, in art school.