Uncertain Ground

by Carolyn Osborn

  Standing on top of the seawall by the souvenir shop, I stared at the swimmers and sunbathers spread out on the gray-brown sand below. No cars were allowed on this part of the beach. Umbrellas and floats had to be rented. Cold drinks could be bought from vendors. People arrived with nothing on but bathing suits, sandals, and shirts. Most carried towels, lotions, books, sunglasses. Down on West Beach where cars were allowed some families planted poles, erected tents, and, when everything had been unlocked and put in place, recreated houses without walls where their dogs ran gleefully in and out. Whether they went to little trouble or a lot everybody got tanned or sunburned during the day and went home with a little sand in their shoes. They were all unknown, unnamed to me, and in that private yet public place, to each other, and all of them were playing peaceably at the water’s edge, or so it appeared from the top of the seawall.

  A little boy dressed in blue shorts and a red striped shirt ran in front of me pushing a stroller.

  “Wait, Henry!” called a young woman in a white uniform behind him.

  He waited till she caught up with him then climbed in the stroller backward so he was facing her.

  I laughed. I could stand on top of walls, lean over balconies, look out of towers, but I couldn’t remain at a distance long. There was always something, or someone who caught my eye; a woman passing by in a yellow hat so large it flapped around her face, a boy whistling a tune I recognized. Even the most naked of bathers had some distinguishing mark; an old lady going in the water wearing her pearls just as Bertha wore hers when she went swimming because, she maintained, it was good for them to return to their natural element, a man whose eyebrows met in the middle of his forehead, a small girl about nine proudly wearing a new two-piece swim suit although she had no reason to wear anything on top. I saw them all and wondered about them as I would probably wonder about strangers the rest of my life.

  Luis found me there. Bertha had told him she thought I was at the beach, so he’d come to search for me.

  “What are you doing here this late in the day? Don’t you know you’re too young and tender to stay out in the sun?” He smiled as he repeated the phrase used by the old guard we’d seen at the wharves.

  It was as if we’d spent all the days before together. I noticed he usually reacted this way. Absences were barely acknowledged, excuses seldom made. Life flowed on; he and his friends would eventually catch up. Then everything would go on as it had before. Luis might sometimes say he missed me, but the fact that I was present was more important.

  Early one morning Leslie came by with an extra bike she’d borrowed on a carrier with hers. We went riding west toward San Luis Pass, past the farms, past a couple of old camps on our right, a few beach houses on our left. She stopped at the road to Luis’s.

  “You want to go down and see him?”

  “No. He paints a lot at night, sleeps late most mornings. It’s only nine now.”

  “You like him, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everybody seems to.”

  I sensed she was being careful not to say too much. She was looking directly at me, her eyes on my face, so I admitted I didn’t know about him, not yet.

  “The thing is— Nobody really knows him since he’s only here in the summers, and he spends so much time by himself or with his father—”

  “I met him the other night at the Balinese. He can’t seem to give up his grief, can he?”

  “I guess. Everybody just watches him gamble. That’s what he can’t give up. It’s strange. People here— Here everybody bets on horses maybe, plays the slots a little. There’s always a poker game going on. Nobody plays like he does. Even the Maceos have tried to discourage him.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. It’s the truth. My father told my brother they talked to him.”

  Remembering the money Emmett had lost to him at the roulette table, I wondered if Mr. Platon stuck to only one kind of game. Leslie said he played craps too. She didn’t play anything. She’d lost her allowance in the slots when she was eleven. Since then she’d stayed away.

  “I don’t have money to spend like that. And that’s what you’re doing really. In the end they win, or they wouldn’t stay in business.”

  “What about luck?” I was thinking of Emmett’s belief that his chances were always changing that he might be the lucky one.

  Leslie laughed. “The lucky ones quit while they’re ahead. I didn’t ever get there.”

  She’d been lucky in a way, I thought, to know she had to quit before she was seized by the fever Emmett had caught, but I didn’t mention him. Emmett had been drunk on chance. He was lucky he ran out of money. I’d never played anything except a few slot machines, and I’d found I didn’t like being drunk. That was my luck.

  We finished eating our sandwiches while sitting on the beach and threw crusts to gulls that plunged after them like zany acrobats.

  “It would be harder to ride all day somewhere else. It’s so flat here.”

  “In Europe everybody rides bicycles,” Leslie said. “You can take them on trains when you get tired of riding.”

  The idea of biking around Europe appealed to me though I wasn’t certain I could do it. Leslie assured me I could if I rode some every day before going. “European bikes have gears. That makes it easier.”

  A lot of people in my family had already been. One aunt who had only gone to England and Ireland was dying to go to the continent; my father, though he had a dim view of foreign travel, had wandered through France and Spain; Aunt Bertha, mainly interested in finding the best stores to buy linens and china from, had gone to Cuba with Mother, and to England, and to France. The Chandlers’ greatest traveler, she could have easily shopped at home but preferred to buy abroad. There was more to choose from there. So far Uncle Mowrey hadn’t gone with her; he hated shopping.

  I wasn’t interested in shopping either. I started wondering about places I’d only seen pictures of, about different languages, about going to the great museums to look at real paintings instead of reproductions, about history written in stone buildings. To me Europe had begun to mean authentication, and the more I talked to Leslie, the more I wanted to know. We both had all sorts of questions about what was beyond the sea’s flat horizon.

  Emmett, Aunt Bertha discovered, wasn’t seeing anybody but Jane. One evening she wouldn’t let him have the car. From that time on, Jane arrived in her own car, which Emmett always drove.

  “Out of the frying pan …” Aunt Bertha murmured.

  “I don’t know about that. Doris Lacey is altogether different. She might marry him. I don’t know that Jane would.”

  Bertha, busy defrosting the refrigerator, jabbed at the ice with a butcher knife. She hadn’t bothered to take the food off the shelves though she’d removed the ice trays. They were melting in puddles on the kitchen table. I watched her narrowly miss slicing through the eggs in their cardboard box when she suddenly turned to talk to me.

  “He’s out with her nearly every night.”

  I nodded. Emmett tended to concentrate on one girl at time.

  Aunt Bertha poked away at the ice. “His mother isn’t going to be happy about this.”

  “We’ll be gone in a week. Luis and I run into them together some nights. I don’t think— Aunt Bertha, doesn’t your maid come tomorrow?”

  “You’re right.” She scraped a small pile of ice shavings into her hands and kicked the refrigerator door shut.

  It wasn’t that Emmett refused friendship with others. There was just no one as easily available to him at that time but Jane. Roby and he had too little in common. As for Marion, he was too much of a baby, and he’d left for Canada with his family anyway. Sometimes when I was with Roby and Leslie or with Luis I would see Emmett at a table with Jane, his hat on the table, his legs stretched out before him relaxing like a cowhand who’d just ridden into town.

  Jane leaned forward listening to him, nodding now and then, her honey colored hair gleaming in wha
tever light was shining. She could make Emmett laugh. Something about her, her slow but insistent disbelief in whatever he was trying to talk her into, her quick affectation of ignorance delighted him.

  She would draw me into a conversation almost as soon as she caught sight of me. Luis too. We ran into Jane and Emmett at The Pirate’s Den often.

  “Where have youall been?” She asked as if she was dying to know. “Where have youall been all night?”

  “Nowhere … the movies.” I said.

  “Nobody goes to the movies.”

  “We have been.” Luis grinned. He liked teasing Jane.

  “Lu-is! I can’t believe you took this girl to a movie! Emmett, what do you think?”

  “She goes to them in Leon.” He pulled out a chair for me, something I couldn’t remember him doing before.

  I looked up at him thinking it was the first time I’d seen him really awake in days.

  Luis sat across the table from him next to Jane.

  “But you don’t spend your time going to movies in Galveston, do you, Celia?”

  “We were just at the Martini,” Luis said.

  “I thought you’d be showing her the sights, Luis. Emmett always says, ‘Show me the sights, honey.’ But he only likes the inside of bars. I can’t remember what the inside of anything else looks like except maybe a swimming pool.”

  Emmett touched her shoulder before interrupting, another small gesture new to him. “What are youall drinking?”

  His mother would have been proud of his manners. He seemed to have forgotten he’d ever quarreled with me about Luis or called him a spic. He watched Jane, kept his voice low, and appeared to be listening to the singer if there was one. There would be a piano player, or in some bars, a three man combo—sax, bass, and drums. Mostly though lone piano players sat in dark corners playing to themselves.

  To a majority of the customers music was strictly background noise for drinking or gambling. Unless there was a fist-fight or a knifing, nobody was going to interrupt that, and in the bars we went to, there were no knifings or fights. They had elaborate names, but plain interiors. There was nothing piratical about The Pirates’ Den, nothing harem-like about Omar’s. The Balinese Club was an opulent island; the places we went to were places anybody could go to for a drink. Nobody carried whisky in paper sacks in Galveston. No waitress ever asked me my age. I passed for twenty-one easily, however I still had an explorer’s taste for exotic cocktails and seldom ordered the same thing twice. Luis, though he ordered for me, never drank anything but bourbon and soda. At The Pearl Diver one night I drank a Brandy Alexander served in a large snifter. At 88 Keys I asked for something called a French 75 which arrived in a tall fluted glass carried by a curious waitress who hung around to watch my reaction. I offered her a taste, but she said she couldn’t drink while working. Another night at The Carousel I sipped a Moscow Mule from a copper mug. I tried all these after reading the recipes in Aunt Bertha’s Old Mr. Boston Drinkbook, which I found poked between cookbooks in her kitchen. I must have stumbled across a classic, for the bartenders in Galveston evidently used the same book.

  Luis thought I liked the names of drinks and shapes of containers better than the drinks themselves. Emmett and Jane kept to bourbon and water, however Jane—whenever we joined them—would demand, “Oh, please order something with a parasol in it, Celia.”

  That night at The Pirate’s Den I ordered a Pink Lady.

  “There’s no parasol in one of those,” Jane wailed. “I know. My mother drinks them. Oh, here’s Roby. He’ll know what comes with one. He knows things like that.”

  Roby followed Leslie to our table. I glanced over at Emmett who moved his hat off the table and got up to get a chair for Leslie. His glass was still almost half full and it was eleven already. Was he learning to pace himself? I’d discovered I could have one, maybe two drinks if I drank slowly. The night I drank three I was disgustingly sick in an equally disgustingly smelly filling station ladies’ room. Emmett had terrible hangovers. So did I until I decided to drink less.

  Roby couldn’t think of a drink that came with a parasol except a Singapore Sling, and I wouldn’t ask for one of those. There were too many different kinds of liquor in it.

  I wondered sometimes if Luis, older than the rest of us, might be bored sitting in bars while I tried different drinks, however he seemed pleased to indulge me when he wasn’t working, or—more frequently lately—when he decided he wouldn’t go with his father to the Balinese Club.

  There was a woman, Mrs. Finley, a widow Luis’s mother’s age, who went out with Mr. Platon some evenings. She was a secretary, accustomed to other people’s whims, Luis said. Obliging. Yes, Mrs. Finley knew how to cater to people. He spoke of her in a dry manner as if merely reporting what his father had been doing lately. When I asked if he liked her, he refused to say. She was an old friend of his parents, he commented. He didn’t talk about people much. Those his age, friends he’d had in high school had long since dispersed; only a few of them came back to the island to live.

  Roby was the one who kept us occupied, the one who decided we should all ride the roller coaster at the carnival across from the seawall or the bumper cars in the amusement park at Stewart’s Beach down on the east end of the island. None of them went to the beach otherwise. I could talk Leslie into going swimming with me occasionally, but Jane wouldn’t, nor would have Marion, and Roby wouldn’t consider going in the Gulf unless he was fishing or crabbing. The beach had always been there. They had grown up on it. Two or three times we all drove out to the country club to swim. But that had always been there too.

  Roby decided we needed to go somewhere else one night when we were all in The Pirates’ Den. Everyone went with him for a walk on the seawall. Emmett and Jane lagged behind. They caught up at the steps in front of the souvenir shop where the conch shells were displayed in the daytime.

  Cal was there, his fingers lightly tapping his drum, its yellow, red, black, and white zigzags gleaming in the moonlight.

  “Tom-Tom!” Roby shouted. There were times his exuberance overflowed, and he’d holler people’s names. No one ever minded. Roby knew people liked to hear their names; it made little difference if they were murmured or shouted.

  “His name is Cal.” I whispered to Luis. “Why does Roby call him Tom-Tom?”

  Luis shrugged. “He makes up things, I guess.”

  Cal grinned at us. He’d quit playing and pushed the drum aside. The moon was coming up late.

  “You going to sing for us?” Roby asked him.

  “Why not you?”

  Roby shook his head, then turning as if he’d just seen him, said, “Emmett will sing!”

  Emmett staggered up the steps to the souvenir shop, his boots making a loud clonking sound on the wooden boards, and sat down hard. I hadn’t thought he was that drunk.

  Cal rolled the drum over toward him.

  Holding onto it with one hand, Emmett wobbled to his feet, looked up as though he needed to be sure where the light was coming from, and sang:

  Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight

  Come out tonight, come out tonight?

  Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight

  And dance by the light of the moon?

  He let go of the barrel and lifted his chin to sing in a clear light tenor that carried well. The moon shone in his face, and the waves lapped the sand below the seawall behind him, but he might as well have been in the middle of a corral at the ranch for all he seemed to care.

  Cal rolled the barrel closer to himself, and began beating it in time to the tune Emmett had chosen.

  “I didn’t know he could sing,” Jane said.

  “I don’t think he can, not unless he’s drunk,” I warned her.

  With the sea breeze ruffling his long hair, Emmett sang the same verse again.

  We all applauded.

  “It’s the only verse he knows,” I said to Jane. “You’d better turn him off.”

  Buffalo gals— Emme
tt began again.

  Jane reached for his hand. “Come on.”

  “I’m singing for you.”

  “Yes,” said Jane, “you’re singing for everybody.” She led him down the steps.

  Roby handed Cal some money. Other people had gathered around us, some of them just as drunk as Emmett was. A man behind me was arguing about the words to The Streets of Laredo and getting them wrong. The woman he was arguing with was getting them wrong too, and the man on the other side of her kept agreeing with both of them.

  “This going to be a good night.” Cal threw back his head and laughed.

  Leslie pulled Roby by the hand and whispered something to him. We all started to walk to a cafe for coffee.

  “I hate coffee,” Emmett complained loudly.

  “Oh, hush!” Jane began singing in a wavering soprano, Shine on. Shine on harvest moon.

  Leslie joined in, and so did I. We walked in a straggling line to the cafe singing all the moon songs we knew. People driving by honked and waved. It was one of the most peaceful nights we spent on the island.

  Chapter Ten

  There were signs of a storm beginning the afternoon I drove out to see Luis on a whim. I hadn’t seen him in two days. Someone else’s red sports car, an Austin Healey, was parked next to his black MG in the garage provided by the tall pilings under the house. I ran up the side steps to the deck and found his front door closed which was odd. It had been open every time I’d been there. He disliked carrying things in his pockets so generally left the house unlocked. There was little in it he minded losing. Big canvases were hard to haul away; if anyone wanted a picture badly enough to steal it, they were welcome. I knocked and tried to peer in the broad front window. His bamboo blind had been pulled down. Perhaps he was still asleep. No, not by three in the afternoon. I couldn’t hear anyone moving around inside. Was he at the beach? He didn’t usually swim at that time. Early in the morning or late in the afternoon after four—those were his choices. But maybe … maybe he went for a walk before the storm. He liked the Gulf’s dramatic weather. I went to the deck’s railing to stare up and down the beach. Of course I couldn’t really see far. From there people were just figures, small dark moving shapes, but surely I could discern his. I would recognize him anywhere. Running back to the door, I knocked again. Again there was no answer. This time I thought I heard something, some small movement. I became utterly convinced Luis was in his house … Luis and someone else.