It had been hot on Galveston beach yesterday, hotter than many summer days I’d known, but the sea was fresh and clear, the tides so slight when I was there that, despite the long slow slope of the continental shelf, the water had hardly roiled the sand. Other days near the shore the little waves would be light brown. I’d seen it that way before. Yesterday the Gulf had been perfect, and lying on a big towel on the blistering sand, wearing over my bathing suit a soft old cotton shirt that Mother had insisted I bring, I’d slept for a few moments in silent animal comfort, undistracted by anyone, hearing only distant voices of children playing and the quiet shush-shush of waves drowning traffic noise on the seawall above. Once I heard gulls cry, but that was all. My legs, unprotected by the shirt, were slightly burned. I’d keep off the beach today. Late in the afternoon I might walk back over to the boulevard to see if I could hear the man playing. He wasn’t exactly black but deep brown, the color of strong tea. Yesterday he’d stationed himself on the steps of one of the piers, the one where all the giant conch shells were sold. Next to him was a barrel painted in wild zigzags, yellow, red, black, and white.
“A drum, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. I play most times in the night. You never hear me before?”
I shook my head.
“You come here this night or the next. I be here then.” He was speaking with an accent I’d never heard.
“Where are you from?”
“Another island, child, in another sea.”
“Which one?”
“Jamaica. Far out in the ocean.” He exaggerated o-ce-an making it sound as wavy as water.
I tried to imagine it then, another island far out in the ocean, but I couldn’t remember where oceans stopped and seas began on any map. Who decided that kind of thing anyway? Who drew those invisible lines? Aunt Bertha had an old atlas somewhere. I could at least look up Jamaica. After all I was a journalism student, uncertain as to whether I’d stick with it, but already trained to make sure of locations.
Remembering I hadn’t looked for Jamaica yet, I stared toward the little alcove dividing the dining room from the kitchen, a place where things and people seemed to collect. I thought I’d seen that atlas bulging out of a shelf back there.
On my way through the room, the phone rang. I hoped it wasn’t Emmett in trouble already. He hadn’t wanted to go to the beach yesterday, and I didn’t know where he’d gone that morning.
“Celia, get in the car and come on down here and get me.”
“I can’t get you unless I know where you are.”
The receiver on the other end fell with a clunk against a wall or the floor somewhere. I could barely hear a country-western wail over the murmur of people talking. A motor started and sighed dead then started again. I sat down on the floor wondering if somebody had to go and get him all the time when he was exiled to Laredo. Probably not since he was with Alex, Uncle Blanton’s son. Blanton lived in town with his wife Ellen, Alex who was Emmett’s age, and a daughter, Marie. Evidently Emmett was kept busy all week at the ranch then turned loose with Alex to roam on the weekends. There were no rodeos nearby, but there were plenty of bars and boys’ town in Nuevo Laredo, with its shanties full of prostitutes, was more interesting—he’d let me know—than any particular girl.
“I’m at West Beach.”
“How far down?”
“Damned if I know.” He laughed.
I was sure he was drunk then. When he drank he had a half crazy kind of laugh, a low chuckle that reached higher and higher. I’d heard it before in a honky-tonk cafe near McGregor, the first wet town across the line from Leon where everybody came from all the dry counties around to drink beer. I cringed inwardly when I heard Emmett’s whoop across the room. Getting drunk was all right; showing it wasn’t. He didn’t seem to know it that night in McGregor and he hadn’t learned it yet. Still waiting on him, I watched the slits of sunlight poke through the dark shutters on the west side and fall across the carpet’s mass of faded blue flowers to my feet.
He coughed into the phone.
“Don’t do that.”
“Always saying ‘don’t’.”
“Wonder what the name of that place is?” I spoke slower than usual, trying not to show concern.
“No name … no name atall. This is the No-Name Bar.”
He seemed to be losing interest in going anywhere.
“I’m in this no-name place and I like it.” He was almost singing.
“What does the outside look like?”
“Great big red sign says beer.”
“And what else?’
“Flags … little bitty pieces of things blowing.”
“You mean pennants? You be out front, okay?” I didn’t want to have to go inside and try to drag him out.
“Celia?”
“Yes?” The phone fell again.
From a little distance, as if he’d fallen on the floor and the receiver was dangling beside him, I heard him laughing. Useless as it was, I wanted to shout at him.
“Celia? You still there?”
“No. I’m somewhere else.”
“Bring a beer when you come. Better bring two.” He hung up abruptly.
Probably they wouldn’t sell him anymore. There was usually some beer in Aunt Bertha’s refrigerator. I found two cans and put them in a sack telling myself it was part of the placating a drunk routine, then I turned on the gas under a pot of water on the stove. As soon as it boiled, I threw in a couple of tea-spoonfuls of instant coffee that would taste terrible. Somewhere amidst the clutter of Bertha’s shelves I found a thermos. It was better, I decided, to keep the daytime drinking secret. I knew the Chandlers already had one alcoholic—Uncle Blanton’s visits to Leon were infrequent mainly because he drank too much to suit my mother—and I’d noticed the whole family was on the lookout for another. It was as if they had decided one had to turn up in every generation.
In my parents’ house, in Earlene and Estes’s, and at the Mcleans,’ the rule was no drinking before five in the afternoon. Anybody who had to have a drink before then was in real danger. Rules wouldn’t keep Emmett sober. Rules were only temptations to him. Yesterday he’d managed to lose a hundred dollars playing slot machines, he’d already told me.
I closed the kitchen door behind me carefully, caught the screen so only a single low ting could be heard and walked across the back porch through the yard, through a tropical world of deep shade, pink, red and yellow hibiscus, magenta and white oleanders, their lush fragrance mixed with smells of mold, rotting wood and iodine tinged salt spray. My feet crunched the crumbled gray and white oyster shells strewn on paths and used for sidewalks all over Galveston. Behind me was an old oak water cistern, there since the sea captain’s time, and still used to catch rainwater; behind it the house rose on its stubby brick-covered piers. On the second story Bertha still slept. I’d left her a note on the kitchen table.
By the gate I picked a red hibiscus and stuck it over one ear. I’d cut my hair so short that the stem of the flower poked through it reminding me of the picture of the Balinese woman on the over-sized menu Bertha had shown me yesterday. The Balinese Room, way out on a private pier, showed its guests a portrait of a brown-skinned woman with a red flower tucked behind one ear; her glossy black hair fell in a luxuriant wave around the flower. The image, especially the flat planes of the woman’s face, must have been taken from something by Gauguin. With my short blonde hair, blue eyes, rounded cheeks and a slightly burned over summer tan on my legs, I looked nothing like that ideal South Sea Islander. Aunt Bertha meant to take us to the Balinese Room. She had a lot of plans for us, she said, as soon we got our sea legs. Emmett hadn’t understood her. Most of the time he didn’t listen well when his mother or his aunts were talking.
“She wants us just to sit around here?” He asked.
“She just thinks we need to get used to the island. Old people always talk like that. Don’t you know? They think it takes time to adjust.”
“I’m already used
to this place,” he insisted.
“I can’t help that.”
Out on the pavement, heat struck. My first impulse was to turn and run toward the steamy shade of the backyard again. We had a morning and an evening breeze, but in the afternoons all the winds blowing over Texas seemed to die there before the oncoming sea. Once the sun hit my head at the same time heat rose from the asphalt, a siesta seemed the best, actually the only sensible way, to endure a Galveston summer.
Emmett had left Bertha’s car parked in the sun. He hadn’t thought to find a tree to put it under. I reached for the keys under the seat. He didn’t believe someone else might look there, and if I hadn’t insisted on him hiding them, he would have left keys dangling in the ignition. Emmett had never had anything stolen from him in his life. He could walk off and leave a horse ground-tied and expect to find it waiting for him for hours. I kept telling him he wasn’t in Mullin.
Circling the block, all the windows down, I headed for the seawall. It would be cooler there despite the glare. By the time I found Emmett the afternoon would be almost gone. With one hand on the steering wheel, I lit a cigarette. I still didn’t smoke in front of my parents. Although my father smoked, he didn’t approve of me doing it. Mother had escaped the habit after trying it. Emmett smoked too, which didn’t keep him from telling me not to stick cigarettes in one corner of my mouth.
“It makes you look tough.”
“So what.”
“It makes you look like a whore.” Except for fighting over the pillow, that was the only argument we’d had so far on this trip. I didn’t think it would be the last one. Though I had a bunch of second cousins in Tennessee on my father’s side, I had only one other first cousin, Gene Walker. We never argued. He was too much older and had gone off to prep school then to Yale to study architecture. I doubted Emmett could even imagine someone like him. The idea of them meeting made me laugh out loud.
A breeze pushed smoke in my eyes. I threw the cigarette out in front of the Amusement Pier. Emmett wouldn’t go out there. He thought it looked too healthy. “A nice, clean place for the kiddies to go for good, clean fun,” he’d said, nor was he interested in going to the movies. He’d only have to see them again when they finally arrived in Leon, he said.
Mainly it seemed he was going to go to joints and get drunk or to other joints where he would play slot machines, lose, and then get drunk. I didn’t want to spend the whole month going after him. We might be cousins, but he didn’t feel like one.
The road slanted down from the seawall to the beach turning from cement to hard-packed sand. Before he was born, before cars had been invented, Uncle Mowrey told me, stagecoach drivers had used the beach to carry passengers and mail from Galveston west to San Luis Pass. A coach boarded two ferries during the trip, one to San Luis, another at the mainland where it traveled south to Matagordo. There were no ferries there now. Galveston Island’s western tip ran out toward San Luis pass and that was the end of it. The westward mainland towns on the other side of the pass still existed. San Luis was gone, he said. Mowrey was a patient teller, an easy one. He knew I wouldn’t know the names of any of those places, so he added compass points, giving me a notion of how to chart my way across his well-known world.
“Tell about Jean Laffite,” Emmett interrupted. “And the red house. That’s what he called it, the house he built here and painted red all over. Old Jean Laffite.” He shook his head in silent admiration as if he would have happily joined Laffite’s band of pirates.
“Are you going on another hunt?” Uncle Mowrey turned to me. “When Emmett was eight or nine … another time when he was down here, Bertha kept him busy digging for Lafitte’s treasure in the backyard.” He smiled.
Chagrined by this memory, Emmett wandered off leaving me to talk to Uncle Mowrey who wasn’t in a talking mood often. I asked him what had happened to San Luis.
“Washed away. I don’t know which storm. It usually takes more than one to wash a place out. People are stubborn. They keep trying to hold on. It was like that here after the l900 storm. This house rode it out, but most of the rest of Galveston was a pile of boards after. We built it back. I was five then and I still remember that storm. Everybody who was here does.”
I wanted him to tell me more about it, but he wouldn’t. He was ready to take his evening walk.
Driving west along the end of the boulevard and down the ramp to the beach I tried to imagine it without umbrellas and pop bottles and people in bathing suits, tried to see it with nothing but sea and sand, a stagecoach and horses’ manes rippling in the breeze while gulls circled above. There would be no sea wall, only dunes covered with rough grasses, and there would be no marks on the sand other than the imprint of horseshoes and thin ruts cut by coach wheels winding toward San Luis Pass. Years ago I might have been riding in that coach myself, riding somewhere further west to meet someone, some man who was expecting me. The wind blew my veil, my long skirt was tucked around my high-buttoned shoes, and my stays held me erect.
I left my romantic past, let it go curving on before me while slowing to look for a beer sign and red pennants. After passing two shacks, I saw the pennants and found Emmett slouched on some steps, his elbows planted on the porch, one boot heel resting in the sand, the other on the second step. They were his fancy boots, the ones with double row stitching outlining tan eagles on dark brown polished calfskin. His hair fell across his forehead. A little breeze pushed against his straw hat lying on the ground beside him. He didn’t look unhappy, just lazy and drunk, completely drunk. He waved one arm in my direction as if to point me out to the tall man standing beside him.
I stopped at the steps. The man who had been waiting with him met me as I got out of the car.
“Hi. I’m Luis.” He was the same height as Emmett, but his skin was darker, and he wore nothing but a swimming suit. Around his neck, on a thin gold chain, was a St. Christopher medal.
“Your friend—”
“He’s not my friend.” I waited twisting a sandal in the packed sand. Just seeing Emmett had made me angry. The hibiscus slipped lower over my ear. I pulled it free and let it fall.
Luis looked down at the crumpled red flower blowing away from us, then up at me.
“He’s my cousin. Right now I don’t much want to claim him.”
He laughed. “Somebody needs to.”
I climbed up the gritty steps, stooped down, and touched Emmett’s shoulder.
“Celia, honey.” He opened one eye. “You bring the beer?”
“You need some coffee. I can’t take you home like this.”
“Not going home.” He wagged his head. “Going to Aunt Bertha’s,” he said with drunken exactitude, a strange reaction, but by insisting on certain details, he must have believed he remained in control when he was practically helpless. I’d seen other boys react the same way after drinking too much at fraternity parties.
“You know you can’t go to Bertha’s drunk.”
“Who’s drunk?” He peered down at his boots as if admiring them. “Feet sure are hot.”
“Take your boots off.”
He leaned over and began tugging at the heel of his left boot. “Let’s go wading in that big old Gulf. Let’s you and me go wading.” He smiled at me as innocently as a spoiled child who’d decided he wanted to please himself in a particular way.
“Luis,” he shouted, “come help me with these damned boots.”
Luis didn’t move. “I thought cowboys took off their own.”
“Yeah.” Emmett started laughing and pulling off the second boot. He threw them both toward the car where they landed in front of the fender, eagles nose down.
I got the thermos out of the front seat.
“Where’s the beer?”
“I bet they already told you inside you had enough of that.”
I looked up at Luis and he nodded.
“Come on Emmett. We’re going wading.” Luis, standing on the far side of him, put Emmett’s arm around his neck.
&nbs
p; I grabbed his other arm.
“Hey! I can do that.” He lifted his arm slowly and let it fall around my neck.
Together Luis and I half carried, half dragged him to the sand’s edge.
He was laughing to himself. “You know what, Luis? I like getting drunk just so I can hang around her neck.”
“You’re too heavy to hang on anybody.” I kicked at him sideways to make him straighten up, but it was no use. He still lolled against me. We eased him down so the surf hit his feet.
“We should have put him the other way round. I ‘d like to drown him.” I looked down at Emmett. He seemed to have passed out. “Drunks are so boring.”
“You have to do this a lot?”
“No … not really. He lives out in the country. His parents keep a pretty close watch on him except when he’s off at school. I brought beer with me in case I had to lure him home. I wasn’t sure how far gone he was.” I looked back down at Emmett. He seemed content; his arms were outstretched where we’d let him fall.
“He needs to be out of the sun. I’ll get an umbrella,” Luis said. “There are some around here.” He pointed toward a heap of poles and canvas stacked against the far wall of the bar, and before I could say don’t bother, he’d walked away. I pried the thermos cap off, poured myself some coffee, took a few sips, and began trying to pour the rest of it in Emmett’s open mouth.
He coughed and sputtered. “Goddamn! What are you trying to do, strangle me?”
I pushed the cup toward him.
“Hate coffee.” He shoved it away with one hand.
Uncertain Ground Page 3