Hetty turned left onto Preston Street to head over the bridge. Above the truck, high up in the humid air, Houston rose into a crimson sky. The sun smoldered in the west like a fire that refuses to go out. Down Travis, she glimpsed the cupola of the Esperson Building floating over the town like a temple in the clouds. She couldn’t believe such a magnificent edifice was up for auction. She thought for a moment about stopping by the bank and giving Kirby one last visit with his grandson but remembered that the bank was closed. Even if her father were still there, she would be locked out. She gassed the truck onto the bridge.
Hetty lugged Pierce up the worn carpet on the stairs of the old Victorian mansion that had been parceled off into rooms. She always knew what the boarders would be served for supper—the smells collected up here in the stairwell outside Pearl’s room. Tonight the table would be spread with meat loaf, cabbage, and—Hetty sniffed again at the mouthwatering aroma of piecrust baking—probably cherry pie. Pushing open the door to Pearl’s room, Hetty found her scrunched up on the bed pulling thread through the hem of a faded housedress.
“Come on in, y’all, I’m trying to get some mending done here.”
The room was dim, curtains still barricaded against a barrage of afternoon sun. A circulating fan droned on the dresser, but still, the room was stifling. Hetty sat on the rumpled davenport and cuddled Pierce in spite of the heat.
“I found the envelope,” Pearl said.
“You weren’t supposed to find it till we left.”
“I was looking for my sewing kit.”
“I hope you’ll keep it this time.”
“Only ’cause of the other thing you said.”
“About Odell?”
“I won’t let myself believe it’s true.” Pearl talked through pinched lips, holding straight pins. “Is he really coming back to me?”
“Looks like it. Save the money for a down payment on the house you two will need.”
Pearl took the pins out of her mouth. “All right. You know best, hon. How did you find out?”
“There’s so much I haven’t had a chance to tell you.” Hetty caught Pearl up on her trip into the brush, the meeting with her mother, and Cora’s advice about finding Garret. “ ‘Call him to you,’ she said. ‘The universe is run by intention, not chance.’ ”
“Have you tried that?”
“Yes. I keep whispering under my breath, ‘Come find me, Garret. ’ Has he called here?”
“No, hon, I’m afraid not.”
“He’d know to call here or at Ada’s.” Hetty glanced at the black telephone beside the bed, its silence falling into her heart like a chill. “I guess it’s not working. Cora must be wrong.”
“Now hold on. You ain’t done what she said.”
“Yes, I have. I called to him.”
“No, I mean the second part. The universe is run by—what did she call it?”
“Intention.”
“There you be. Intention. Don’t sit around waiting for him to call. Go find him.”
“But where?”
“Well, I don’t rightly know.” Pearl thought for a moment. “I reckon you got to guess his intention.”
“You mean why he left me and where he would go?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, let’s see. He’d be thinking about the future, about what he was going to do next. Maybe he’d go back to Electra or Desdemona.”
“Old girlfriends?”
“Oil boom towns. Or maybe he’s just off somewhere, drinking himself into a stupor.”
Ouch! Pearl sucked on her finger. She had pricked herself on the needle. “My God,” she spoke out of the corner of her mouth, “I know where he is.”
“You do?”
“When you said drinking, that reminded me.” Pearl took the finger out of her mouth and examined it for bleeding. “He used to go off for a week at a time. Said he had to do some thinking—I figured that was an Irish expression for a binge.”
“Where would he go?”
“To The Hammocks.”
“Oh . . . your place on West Beach.”
“Would disappear there for days. He still has a key.”
Hetty felt a surge of hope. “Can you show me how to get there?”
“No. But I can tell you. I think you should go there alone. You and Pierce. Take Garret’s son to him.”
Hetty wanted to leave right away. She longed to escape Pearl’s stifling room and drive south until the Gulf breeze streamed in gusts through the shattered window of the Wichita. But Pearl talked her out of it.
“You’ll never find The Hammocks in the dark.”
“I can’t bear to spend another night away from him.” Hetty felt the blood blossoming in her cheeks.
“You must be coming into season.” Pearl laughed. “Go take a cold shower. Y’all got plenty of time to paint the front porch.”
Once it had cooled down and Pierce had fallen asleep on the davenport, Hetty finished reading the letters from Garret’s mother. Pearl continued her mending on the bed. In a letter dated February 14, 1929, Hetty found the reason he’d been hiding the correspondence from her.
In receipt of your money order for $500 sent January 23. No doubt you have worried about me, having heard of the great blizzard in mid-December. For us it was a thrilling spectacle, but a bit of a trial for my poor old boiler, which started dripping water in the cellar. Your generosity afforded me a new Hercules that was just installed last week. I have also put in enough coal to last until summer. You have saved your mother from a dire fate, I fear, as it is still forty degrees below zero today. Please know that in Senator MacBride’s house all is now warm and bright!
And in a second letter dated April 25, she read:
You cannot imagine how elegant my parlor is now. The new French wallpaper I awaited so anxiously arrived, after five long weeks, in late March. It is a delicate shell pink with gold stars twinkling over it. The Aubusson carpet is cream with roses. My new davenport and wing chairs are upholstered in gold damask. Thanks to your last money order of $400, I finally have a suitable sitting room for guests. My mahogany whatnot displays your photograph and the handsome likeness of Senator MacBride, as well as the shells and butterflies from long-ago days by the sea.
Other letters acknowledged receipt of additional money orders from those spring months of 1929, totaling over two thousand dollars. Hetty crumpled the pile into her handbag and lit a fag. “Pearl,” she said.
“Yes’m.”
“I’m just heartsick.”
“Bad news in them letters?”
“I’ve misjudged my husband.”
“I told you Mac was good as gold. I always said that.”
“I thought he gambled away thousands of our mescal money. I was wrong. The whole time he was sending it to his mother, Arleen.”
Pearl chuckled out of the corner of her mouth. She removed the pins. “That’s an Irishman for you. More loyal to his mother than his wife.”
“I don’t care. This makes me want to see him all the more.”
Hetty could hardly wait to get off the next morning. She spoon-fed cereal to Pierce while she ate breakfast with the other hand, then slapped on a diaper and dressed him in his sailor suit again. “We’re going to the sea,” she said. She loaded all her possessions on the truck with Pearl’s help and gave her friend a warm hug, patting her spectral arms. “Thanks for telling me where my man is.”
“You brung mine back to me, too.”
“No more thorns, okay?”
“Don’t worry about me.” Pearl pushed her into the truck. “Go on now. You know what I always say—you got to live it up to live it down.” As Hetty drove away, Pearl was there in the rearview mirror, waving all the way down the block.
Hetty was on the causeway by ten a.m. As she left the mainland, the haze of morning evaporated into a sky turning a deep tropical blue. The bay waters under her lapped with loneliness. She rolled out onto Galveston Island, where rows of palms had been planted to welcome tourist
s to the Playground of the South. Their fronds billowed like women lifting their skirts. Here in the subtropics, everything simmered with yearning and heat.
Then she noticed something she’d never seen before. On West Bay, canvas tents had been pitched along the shore. A few makeshift houses had been cobbled together out of cardboard boxes. She stopped for gas at a Texaco pump on 61st Street and asked the attendant who was living in them.
“Unemployed,” he said. “Migratin’ here for winter.”
“Like birds,” Hetty said, pulling out two dollars. She paid for the gas and bought a few apples from a basket on the counter. As she set out to West Beach, more tents appeared on the roadside. The nomads camped wherever they could along the inlets. Each ramshackle camp looked like the debris left by a tidal wave. And perhaps it was. A great swell had rolled across the country, sweeping everyone up in a surge of glittering success that had left them unprepared for its inevitable crash. Here were the homeless it had left in its path. She wondered how long they would be forced to live like this and how people would ever begin to patch their lives back together.
As far as her own life went, all she could do was keep driving westward, following Pearl’s directions, past the Catholic cemetery and the white arches of the Hollywood Dinner Club. As she rumbled by Greens Bayou, teeming with cattails and crocodiles, she found her mind swimming with questions. Had Termite really accepted bribes? Was he just another corrupt politician? Did that explain Mac’s connection to the Maceos? Is that what brought him to Texas? The only way to find out was to keep going—past the crooked oaks forever bent in the direction of the winds, out to where the pavement gave way to a dirt road that wound its way through the dunes. On her right, sea grapes twisted through patches of sedge grass, while on her left, laughing gulls soared as the water opened up, steel blue and calm, all the way to Yucatán. The Gulf of Mexico. She’d come to the very edge of America, to its rippling fringe where the sky fell into a different hemisphere. She wasn’t even sure if she’d find her husband out here on this final finger of land or if he’d want her back when she did.
Then she spotted it. Like a tangle of driftwood thrown up on the shore. Pearl’s family beach house, worn to a nub by the salt air. This was squatter’s land that Pearl had said her uncles had fenced off and claimed as their own “against the entire world.” No one else seemed to want to live on this desolate stretch of the island. It was the only house for miles. Hetty could see the hammocks slung like shaggy hair across the brow of the front porch and the wooden storm windows lifted like half-opened eyes. The old place huddled there on its spindly legs, drowsing in the September sun, lifted up on stilts. She half expected it to rouse and scuttle into the surf as she approached. Her heart lifted with the laughing gulls when she spotted the Auburn parked in the shade under the rafters. He was here.
She pulled next to it and set the brake. She carried Pierce out from under the house, showing him the snails that slid up the stilts. She walked around to the front porch and knocked on the battered screen door. There was no answer. It was unlocked, so she opened it and went in. Someone had been sleeping in one of the hammocks. Its ropes were covered by a rumpled sheet and two pillows. The house looked like a monk’s cell, everything sandblasted to a gray simplicity. An open can of beans yawned on the stove; a bottle of milk and an iron pot of fish stew lurked in the icebox. Garret’s luggage was there, open and overflowing with clothes, but no sign of him. She picked up one of his shirts and smelled it.
Hetty took Pierce out to the beach to look for his father. Sand crabs shuddered away to avoid being crushed underfoot. A tattered beach chair sat crookedly in the sand, a white beach towel tossed close to the surf. Off to the side, boulders jutted out into the water. She walked over. A lot of brown liquor bottles had been smashed on the rocks. She could still catch a faint whiff of whiskey. Some of the shards had been picked up by the tides and were being washed out to sea. She imagined that they would end up on another shore as sparkling pieces of sea glass, worn smooth by the waves.
Her eyes followed them oceanward . . . and saw him. A tiny head bobbing in the water, out by the sandbars where he liked to swim. He was cutting through the water freestyle, kicking up spray. Closer in, fish were jumping: little flashes of silver in the waves. Walking back, she stripped her son naked and sat him in front of her on the wet sand like an offering.
After a while, Garret rode the waves in and waded toward them, salt water streaming off his black tank top. His hair was slicked back, his cheeks rosy from his run in the ocean. He picked Pierce up and held him high in the sun with both hands. He nestled the child in the crook of his elbow, little white buttocks spilling over his bronzed forearm. Hetty thought she’d never seen anything so beautiful in her life, her husband and her naked baby standing in the sea in front of her. And this is what I gave up so carelessly!
Garret set his son down on the sand and picked up the towel to dry himself off. White surf came bubbling around them. Hetty waited with her head bowed, blushing deeply, unable to speak. She didn’t know what she could possibly say to make Garret forgive her, to ask him to take her back. Words would sound shallow at a moment like this. She might as well write Forgive Me in the sand and let the waves wash it away. Her presence would have to speak for her. She had solved her aunt’s enigma of intention. She had made the effort to hunt him down. She had brought Garret his son. The rest was up to him.
The sea breeze cooled her cheeks. She overcame her shame and lifted her eyes. He had finished drying off and stood there with the towel draped over his shoulders, like a priest in a white robe. He was watching her, studying her face for clues. She tried to let her eyes say what her lips couldn’t. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Finally, without a word, he opened the towel and invited her to step inside. She stood up and moved forward. His skin was cool to the touch; his hair smelled of salt water. When he kissed her, Pierce hugged their legs, looking up and babbling.
Then he said one word clearly in his baby talk: “Beso.”
Hetty drew back. “Your son just said his first word—in Spanish!”
“What does it mean?”
“Kiss.”
They lifted him up and planted so many besos on his bare belly that he squealed with delight.
Pearl had been right. Garret seemed completely charmed by the presence of his son. He had rarely fed him in the past, leaving such chores to Hetty. But when noon came, he insisted on holding Pierce in his lap and spooning fish stew into his mouth at the rickety table in the kitchen. Hetty sat opposite them, sopping up her portion with stale white bread and feeling awkward. She longed to speak but didn’t know how to break through the heaviness of the salt air.
Garret sat Pierce on the floor and watched him play with seashells. The only sound, other than a constant plashing of surf, was the hiss of matches being struck. They smoked in silence until Garret asked, “How did you find me?”
“Pearl figured it out. I thought I’d have to sober you up.”
“I did get ossified the first few days, till I spent a whole night vomiting. The next day I smashed all the bottles that were left around here.”
“What have you been living on?”
“I dig clams. And buy trout from the fishermen. Mostly I just sit in the beach chair and watch the sea, thinking.” He looked at her across the table for the first time. “What have you been up to?”
“Oh, I’ve kept busy. I sold the well, Mac.”
“Why?”
“I realized you were right.” That’s all she could bring herself to say at the moment. She explained the details of the contract and reminded him who Mr. Kozak was.
“Did you pay off the interest owners?”
“Yes. The money’s all been returned.”
“Good.” He nodded. “That’s what I wanted us to do.” Garret hoisted Pierce up and took him outside to play in the surf for a while. Hetty watched them through the screens of the porch, her heart sodden with all she had to say. That urge was coming b
ack, the need to tell the whole story again to release the pressure dammed up inside her. When it was time for the baby’s afternoon nap, she asked Garret to lay him in one of the iron beds at the back of the house. While he was gone, she stripped all her clothes off and stretched out on the hammock with the sheet thrown across it.
He looked surprised when he came back out.
“Mac, do you remember how we used to get naked when we had a confession to make?”
“So that’s what this is about. I was hoping you were trying to seduce me.”
“This is no time for joking. I have some bad news to tell you. Something happened to Pick.”
“Oh, God, not Pick.” The earnest tone in Garret’s voice brought tears rushing to Hetty’s eyes. “What?”
“He’s dead, Mac.” Hetty watched as a look of stunned grief gripped her husband’s face. That cut her to the bone, fearing that Garret would blame her for their friend’s death. She tried to explain what happened but could hardly talk for the sobs that came with the words. She finally got the whole story out but cried so hard, he crawled in beside her and took her up in his arms.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” Garret said, holding her and letting the hammock rock her guilt away.
Hetty shuddered. “Now I understand why you left Kilgore. You were right, Mac. I should have gone with you. I hope you’ll forgive me.”
“It’s all right,” he said, stroking her. “It’s not really your fault. Poke obviously decided to make an example of Pick because he was colored. And by the way, that’s not why I left Kilgore.”
“It wasn’t?” she asked tearfully.
“I guess it’s my turn to get naked.”
“Okay.”
He stood and peeled off his still-damp one-piece bathing suit. She relished a brief glimpse of his body before he rolled back in and pressed up against her. “Remember when I said we had to leave before we got swallowed up by an anaconda?”
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