What My Last Man Did

by Andrea Lewis

  Iris turns back to me. “The babies will fledge in five weeks,” she whispers. “Tell Carrington she can fuck it up for good after that. But not before.”

  Carrington

  Our mother, Carrington McAuley Delgado, must have looked very foreign indeed to Ramiro’s family when she arrived here in 1949 with her pale skin and fair hair, her alligator shoes from Selfridges and her tailored, fawn-colored jackets from Kenneth Durwood of London. It didn’t matter. She fit in like a long-lost sister with the entire Delgado clan, even the remote second cousins in Sinaloa and Jalisco, partly because she tried to speak Spanish, but mostly because she, like all of them, stood fast on one implacable value: family is everything. Not simply caring about family and loving family, not simply being prepared on holidays for however many of them might show up—prepared with dinner service for twenty-eight, walk-in freezers stocked with great shoulders of beef, linen closets stacked with Egyptian cotton sheets and Merino blankets from Cornwall, much too warm for Galveston, but so lovely—not simply accommodating family, but organizing family, governing them, really, through an invisible and relentless system of checks and balances, spies and manipulations, kindness and ruthlessness, in order to keep the entire organism healthy, aligned and functioning. In all these endeavors, Ramiro was the undisputed leader and Carrington was his first lieutenant. Family problems—alcoholic uncle, inappropriate fiancé, business failings, teen rebellion, ill-timed pregnancy, property disputes—were settled with anything from a raised eyebrow at Easter dinner to a lawyer with a bank draft in his breast pocket, but they were always settled by Ramiro and Carrington.

  Two years ago this month, my father died on his Sea Ray fly-bridge cruiser in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and the linchpin fell out of the Delgado dynasty. They scattered like tropical birds released from cages, free now to follow their repressed longings for autonomy, setting up minor fiefdoms on either side of the Texas border, happily engaging in disputes, power plays, fresh alliances and old acrimonies. Carrington, for all her good instincts, never knew, or never wanted to know, how much of Ramiro’s wealth stemmed from shaky enterprises built around borrowed money, fickle politicians, and under-the-table agreements with family members and their friends. By the time she and Louis unraveled everything, paid the lawyers, paid the hush-money, and paid the indignant uncles and cousins, Carrington was left with Rancho Cielito, resentment, the always-stubborn Iris, and the ever-faithful Louis. I don’t count myself in this equation, having fled to New Mexico, believing, as twenty-four-year-olds will, that I could leave them all behind and start my own life, which I’ve managed to botch fairly well to this point.

  Louis and I go in through the kitchen, shadowy and cool. Heavy stockpots and fry pans hang from wrought-iron racks above the two big stoves. I breathe in the smells of my childhood: tortillas and onions, cilantro and jalapeño. Our family cook, Pilar, turns from one of the sinks and bursts into tears when she sees me, exclaiming in Spanish over how thin I am. She breaks three huge eggs into a copper bowl and whisks.

  Through the dining room, past the gleaming cherry-wood table, across the Saltillo tile and Navajo rugs on the living room floor to the other side of the house where Ramiro’s—now Carrington’s—office occupies the front corner.

  At six in the morning, my mother is dressed in a beige linen suit, her coral lipstick and brown eyebrow pencil carefully applied, her still-naturally-yellow hair in a short, curly cut. She sits straight up in Ramiro’s black leather chair, talking on the telephone in her slow impeccable Spanish. Something makes me look at Louis. His whole face, maybe his whole body, changes in the presence of Carrington. I see his chest rise and fall in a deep breath. The papery skin around his eyes twitches. In an unconscious gesture, he rubs his palms against the sides of his work pants, doing what he can toward a hasty transition from hired hand to suitor of the mistress of the house.

  My mother hangs up the phone and looks me up and down. “You’re so skinny, Hannah. Have you fallen in love?”

  The answer is yes, and miserably so, but I’ve never told her about the affair with the married man who is my boss.

  “How can you leave Iris out there chained to a tree?” I ask.

  “Darling, I haven’t left Iris anywhere. She is there by her choice.”

  “But you could call this off.”

  Carrington rests her hands on the cracked leather desktop. In front of her fingers, arranged like a shrine, are an old photo of Ramiro in a silver frame, two red-carbon TWA airline tickets, and a pale aquamarine check from a Bahamian bank for 1.8 million dollars. Carrington, with her instinct for the dramatic, taps a short buffed nail on the check and says, “This is my life, Hannah, right here, my past and my future, condensed down to this.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I say.

  “She’s not,” Louis puts in with surprising force.

  “Where are all your lawyers? That land doesn’t have to be graded today.”

  “But it does,” Carrington says. “It’s a chain of command. It goes from Houston to New York to Frankfurt. Interest rates change, you know. Currency fluctuates. They say, ‘Finalize the sale or cancel it.’ They can always build their resort somewhere else.”

  “So let them.”

  Carrington holds up the check. “And trade this for two pelican eggs?”

  “Daddy would.” I’m not sure this is true, but Ramiro did occasionally have a flair for championing the underdog. “He’d at least call their bluff.”

  Carrington looks at the black-and-white picture in the silver frame: Ramiro, age thirty. He’s wearing a loose white muslin shirt and has a thick dark moustache. He stands next to a short Mexican fan palm and one succulent frond bisects his chest. With his heavy eyelids and satiny dark skin, he could be a jungle cat that is almost asleep or about to kill an antelope. This two-sidedness was always what made him so attractive. But Carrington’s slit-eyed gaze at the photo makes me realize how betrayed she feels.

  “Carrie,” Louis says. The word hangs there—the first time I’ve heard Louis call my mother anything but Mrs. Delgado. All the roles rearrange. I realize how far it’s gone between them and who will be with my mother on TWA. I was so naïve; I had thought the other ticket was for Iris. My mother lets it sink in. Louis waits for my reaction. I’m too proud to give them one. Instead I return to the kitchen for my breakfast.

  Pelicans

  After Pilar stuffs me with huevos rancheros, tortillas, sliced peaches, and a reheated chili relleno she found in the fridge, I fall asleep on the porch swing for a few hours and wake up hot and disoriented. The heat of Galveston hits me as a thing measured more in memories than in degrees. Whenever I come home I find myself gauging heat and humidity by how much childhood grief they churn up. I never manage to separate the measurable from the immeasurable, the atmospheric from the melodramatic, the actual density of the air from the scents and sounds and sights it carries. The cicadas are my mother telling me to make up my mind. The cloud streets—high bands of cumulus stretching to the sea—are Louis and the way he loved us when we weren’t looking. Honeysuckle is the hum of bees, which in turn is Iris screaming she’d been stung. Her cries were so maniacal they brought my father to the porch with a shotgun. But it was Louis who dressed the wound. The damp packed earth beneath the magnolias was our playground, but even when I was small I watched the middle distance, as if my destiny might arise from the grooved line where the mangroves met the sky. Sometimes a pelican would appear out of the haze, six horizontal feet of pterodactyl in an effortless glissade, cruising just above the treetops, riding down the long, drawn-out minutes of the morning.

  I walk back out to Iris’s camp. Both pelican parents are in attendance now. The father struts back and forth on his black webbed feet, policing the perimeter of the nest. The mother still rests on the eggs. The two of them exchange low throaty noises and occasionally spread their vast wings almost in anger, but they resettle companionably.

  Iris is asleep inside the pup tent, lying flat on
top of a sleeping bag, her mouth open. When she wakes up I ask her what’s with the chain. “Louis could probably break that with his bare hands,” I say.

  “I know,” she admits. “I wanted them to see I was serious.” She sits next to me on the ground, and I feel like we are back at Brownie camp.

  “Look. Why don’t you come to Las Cruces with me? You’ll have to pass on the pelicans, but the place is rife with Conquistadors.”

  Iris begins to cry. She never was much of a crier, so I figure it must be the hunger breaking her down. “How long since you’ve eaten?”

  “I don’t know. A week.” She sniffs.

  I put my arm around her, but it’s too hot and sticky so I drop it. “Are there any more nesting pairs now? Since the ban?” DDT, which weakened pelican eggshells, was banned four years ago. Since then, Iris and a few thousand other Gulf Coast birders have been praying for a pelican comeback.

  “This makes three on the island.” Iris scratches at a puffy red mosquito bite on her arm. “The same day I discovered this nest she told me she was selling everything.”

  “Has anyone been out?” Sometimes a state or university naturalist will come to gauge the porosity of the shells.

  “No. They’re all in love with Louisiana right now.” Iris twists the clamp she has rigged around her ankle. The only clean spot on her bare leg is where the shackle has rubbed the dirt off in a pinkish white ring. “Anyway, it isn’t just that. All kinds of crappy stuff will get built here and crappy people will come and dump their crap all over, and then what happens to all the animals?”

  With a few soft squawks, the pelican parents trade places. The male climbs on the nest and covers the eggs with his broad feet. The female mutters what sound like instructions to him before lifting off and flapping hard toward the Gulf.

  “I think she’s still mad at Daddy for dying,” I say. “She feels like she doesn’t have a choice. There’s not much cash left.”

  “She could live here forever. She wouldn’t have to do anything. Louis and I would take care of the place.”

  “I don’t think you can count on Louis anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  At the same moment it dawns on Iris she has no allies left we see Louis and Carrington come out of the pecan orchard and start across the turfgrass. The tractor takes a longer route on the road, but I hear it coming too. Louis carries something in his left hand. I finally make out the long-handled bolt cutters. Carrington is still in her beige suit, complete with jacket, but she has put on short yellow rubber boots.

  Neither of them will look at us as they tromp through the field. Louis squints at the horizon. Mother keeps looking over her shoulder for the tractor.

  Louis says nothing as he approaches, stoops down, and cuts the chain. After he cuts it, he busies himself with unhooking and collecting loops of chain from around the sabal.

  Iris sits, eyes closed. The tractor has begun grading the field on the far side. The low whine of the engine rises and falls as Plaid-Shirt shifts gears. The bulldozer blade methodically pushes heaps of dirt and grass forward and off to the side.

  To my surprise, Carrington sits next to Iris on the muddy ground in her beige suit. She tries to take Iris’s hands. Iris pulls them back and hides them in her armpits.

  “I’m sorry, Iris.”

  “No you’re not.” She sounds about four years old.

  The tractor grinds to within fifty feet of the little camp, uprooting the first of the fan palms and shoving them aside like toys. It stops and backs up for another pass. The noise unnerves the male pelican. He flaps and lifts off the nest. The panicked female returns with a clumsy landing. They both waddle about furiously and tilt their long curved heads at the eggs. The mother climbs back on the nest.

  “It’s my fault,” Carrington says. “I didn’t watch out for what Ramiro was doing. I trusted him too much. I loved him too much.”

  The tractor approaches again. The whine of the engine sounds different this time. I realize the difference is Iris emitting a sound that is part moan and part scream. This keening rises and sustains itself, seemingly without a breath for an endless minute, maybe two. Carrington leans closer, her head almost on Iris’s chest, as if to absorb some of this grief. When it ends, she and Louis, one on either side, try to gather Iris up and lead her off. Iris twists and jerks her way out of their grasp, all sharp elbows and tangled hair. For some reason, she grabs the water jug and holds it in front of her like a shield. Trying for a proud, defiant walk and trailing a short length of the broken silver chain, she goes to stand in front of the nest. But something about the way she purses her lips—just the way she would when she was losing at Monopoly—tells me she knows it’s over.

  The bulldozer blade scrapes closer to the camp, which now looks like something abandoned by kids who slept outside on a lark. It stops again and Plaid-Shirt, expressionless behind mirror sunglasses, sits in the cab over the idling engine, waiting for a sign from Carrington. Carrington gives a sign, but it is to Louis. Louis gently takes Iris’s arm. With his other hand, he again pushes hair from her face. He says something into her ear. In response, she tries to hit him in the stomach with the water jug. Louis picks her up and carries her to the side.

  Carrington points at the tractor. Plaid-Shirt works the lever to lower the dozer and more earth folds and buckles before the blade. The little perimeter of sticks that Iris planted is scattered and plowed under. The tent canvas twists beneath the concave blade, the nightstand rolls over and breaks apart. Everything is scraped aside along with big clots of grass, their network of root threads turned to the sky. As the tractor closes in on the nest, the male pelican flaps up and down in high, frantic hops, squawking above the engine noise. I can feel the gritty air stirred up by his immense wings. The mother sits as long as she can, stretching her neck out to its longest length and coiling it back. Finally she staggers backward off the nest, emitting shriek after shriek of high-pitched anguish.

  With surprising accuracy, Iris throws the Coleman jug at the tractor. It dinks off one wheel cover. Both pelicans lift off heavily in a low flight toward the mangroves as the blade flattens the nest. The eggs roll off, only to be quickly plowed under by the mound of earth building behind them. Plaid-Shirt throws it in reverse. The jug is flattened under a tire as he backs up. Both birds return immediately and land. They waddle across the sterile square yard of earth that held the nest, tilting their heads as if the eggs might reappear if they can get the focus right. The tractor moves in again and the two pelicans, after a wobbly running start, flap hard and fly, much higher this time, into the humid haze over the mangroves.

  Queen Juliette

  Iris never spoke to Carrington again. She wanted never to go into the house again, but she had to rescue hundreds of books and file folders from her room upstairs. She had to rescue the twenty-pound Underwood typewriter with the aqua-green keys, her antique Zeiss-Ikon binoculars, her Sibley’s Birds of the South Gulf Coast, her Leica with all its telephoto lenses packed in foam-lined metal cases, and the eight-volume leather-bound set of Conquistador chronicles she stole two years ago from the City Library of Houston’s Special Collections. She had to rescue books in French, books in Spanish and huge art-photography books in German, which wasn’t even one of her languages. She had to rescue files with labels like “Anhinga, juvenile plumage” or “Coronado/syphilis” or “Cichoriaceous plants/TX & LA.”

  When she realized Louis had moved out of the garage apartment and into the house, Iris carried every box of books and armload of folders herself, down the curved mahogany staircase, across the driveway and up the rusty metal stairs to the apartment. She refused to let me help, even though she was down to 97 pounds after her hunger strike. In the apartment, she reshuffled and repacked everything according to an organizational voodoo only she could comprehend. Then she decided to move back to Las Cruces with me, so it all had to be carried back down the metal stairs to my car. I rented the smallest U-haul I could find, hoping the Falcon could still m
ove with the weight of Iris’s life and fury hitched behind it.

  Over those last few days, I’m not sure Iris ever slept. She was in a fever of obsession—eyes crazy-bright, forehead shiny—protecting and preserving her possessions. She rarely stopped moving except when some beloved book caught her attention. Then she’d sit cross-legged on the floor, engrossed in its pages for a minute or an hour before springing back up with new, frenetic energy. She was eating again, but she never finished anything. Little crusted-up, half-full bowls of applesauce or limp Sugar Frosted Flakes in separated milk lay all around the apartment.

  Except for Iris’s clutter, the place still held the few furnishings Louis had collected over the years: single bed, two threadbare easy chairs, a little table. He also left behind his four most prized possessions. I could understand why he left them. To be with my mother, it helped to leave your prized possessions or your ego or your essence elsewhere. So Louis’s blue metal-flake Fender guitar was still propped against the windowsill that held the Sitting Liberty silver dollar Ramiro gave him as his first day’s wage, a blue-and-white checkered poker chip from the Crystal Palace Casino that he often said reminded him of his checkered past, and his grandmother’s small ivory pelican with its black-dot eyes.

  The night before we left, Louis came to say goodbye. It was dusk. The only light in the room was Louis’s ancient brass floor lamp with the coral paper shade. Iris sat in its circle of light, reading. I was half asleep in the other chair. Without saying anything, Louis went to the windowsill. I thought he was going to claim his prized possessions after all, but he turned and looked at Iris with a sad pleading of fatherly love. For her part, Iris clapped shut her copy of Le Bleu du ciel and glared at him. His chest in its pressed white shirt rose and fell in shallow breaths. He picked up the little pelican. It was only three or four inches of polished ivory, not even carved in much detail, but the long flat bill had a realistic sepia tinge and the eyes, just tiny dots, were expertly placed.