“What’s happening?” Luis asked quietly; most of his attention was still held by his canvas. He poked through the collection of stuff on the table beside him searching, perhaps, for a certain color among the half-empty paint tubes.
“Nothing. This demands a talent I don’t have and a lot of patience. I might learn to draw in a hundred years, but I believe I’d be tired of these pots by then.”
Lights, framed for a few seconds by the open windows, flashed past the house. Not many people drove on that part of the beach at night. I could hear a car’s motor. Running out to the deck, I caught sight of the MG. Emmett hollered as he drove down the beach and made a wide looping turn.
“You were right. He’s back,” I called to Luis.
He kept on painting. “Yeah. Well, he’ll find us.”
Again I heard the car’s motor. It was odd recognizing it above the sound of the surf. I thought of my parents waiting up for Kenyon late at night, how the colonel knew the sound of his old pickup’s motor just before my brother turned into the driveway.
Emmett drove back in front of the house. One hand grabbing air like a bronc rider’s he zig-zagged the car from beach to dunes to beach again. Moonlight outlined the pattern of his tracks.
“He’s … he’s— I guess he’s drunker than ever.”
Luis joined me at the deck rail. “He’s going to get stuck. Hey, Emmett!” He shouted.
“What’s he trying to do?” I stood at the rail trying to imagine where he would go next.
We could barely see the car beside a dune but could hear Emmett revving the motor and shouting like a rider coming out of a chute. As we watched, the car shot out headed straight to the water. This time he didn’t cut back to the beach He drove straight into the Gulf yelling as he went.
I ran barefooted after Luis down the stairs and across the beach. Small waves fell against the car. Its motor dead, it rocked slowly almost floating. Emmett slumped forward over the steering wheel as if he were urging the MG on.
We waded in after him.
“He’s all right. It’s too shallow for him to drown,” Luis shouted above the surf.
“That’s good. I don’t think he knows how to swim. Emmett, get out!” I screamed. Waves lapped my legs; though the water was only slightly cool, I was shaking.
“Watch out!” Luis warned from the opposite side of the car. “It could turn over.”
I grabbed the top of the driver’s door. “Are you all right?”
Emmett gazed silently out to sea as if he were dazed or dreaming.
“Luis, help me. I think he’s knocked out.” I felt his shoulder. It was wet, but warm as any living body’s. “Maybe he’s hurt inside.”
“Nah!” Emmett snorted and looked at me as if he didn’t quite know who I was.
“Well get out of there. What do you think you’re doing?”
“Always wanted to see how far—” He grinned. “Wanted to see how far a fellow could take a car out on this sand.” He laughed. Then with a drunk’s quick mood change, he sighed.
A wave sprayed over the windshield. Drops ran down my arms and Emmett’s face making him look like he could be crying even though he wasn’t. He just sat there glaring at the wet windshield.
“Come on.” Luis had waded around to my side and was standing next to me.
“Youall, let me be!” Emmett shouted.
I grabbed him by the shoulder again. “You’re stuck, aren’t you?”
“Tide’s rising,” Luis said. I could feel his legs in the water beside mine.
Emmett slowly pulled himself up out of the seat and tried to shift his body around while at the same time shoving the door open. He fell headfirst out of the side of the car into the oncoming waves.
We caught him under his arms and, with the help of the tide, pulled him to the beach.
“Wouldn’t you know! He’s got his damn boots on!” The wind plastered my wet shirt and shorts to my skin.
“Wait here. I’ll get some blankets.”
“Luis, your car—”
He shrugged and ran to the house leaving me sitting on the wet sand pushing Emmett’s hair out of his face.
“Agaah!” He rolled his head away.
“Stupid!” I was so angry I felt I could spend a whole night calling him names.
“Yeah.” Slowly he dragged his hand across his face. “I’m a worthless son-of-a-bitch.”
“Sometimes.”
He struggled to sit up, and when he’d managed to, stared toward the sea. Slowly he began pulling his boots off letting the water dribble on the sand while he held onto the heels shaking them.
“I don’t know why … why she wouldn’t tell me— Why in the hell she— Doris.” He said her name in a wondering way. “Why wouldn’t she tell me?”
I watched him emptying his boots, setting them straight up the way he put them in the closet when he was being careful.
“Maybe she didn’t want to face anything. Maybe she’s mad at you. I bet you haven’t written her a word. She probably guessed you were sent down here. Doris isn’t dumb, you know.”
“She ought to have told me.”
“That’s your idea, not hers.”
“She’s a good little old girl.” He peeled off his socks and threw them toward the incoming tide.
I could still smell whisky on him—bourbon mixed with sea water—though now he seemed sober.
Luis had come back with an armload of old army blankets.
Whenever I saw them I thought of the ones my father had brought home. They were everywhere. Most of the world could have been covered with olive drab wool.
We wrapped ourselves up in the blankets, and all three of us sat on the beach watching the waves pushing against the MG as if we were the three wise monkeys cast in bronze, unhearing, unseeing, unspeaking. The waves kept battering at the car’s small, rakish frame. Moonlight bounced off its windshield. We were so quiet we could have been admiring the view.
Emmett got up, walked over to the Chrysler and found a chain in the trunk. I remained huddled in my blanket. Luis took the chain from him, carried it to his car, and attached it to the rear bumper. They did this almost automatically, walking back and forth without saying a word to each other. Emmett, at the wheel of the other car, pulled the MG to safety. All three of us stood in a line silently watching saltwater slide down the sides and over the fenders to disappear in the sand. I wondered if little specks of salt would show when the car dried.
“If you can get it fixed, Luis, I’ll pay for it,” Emmett said.
Luis looked over at him for a long moment. “Yeah.”
How much did that car still matter to him? It had been his mother’s. He drove it every summer when he came up from Mexico to visit his father. I was almost sure it couldn’t be fixed. Salt air wore Galveston cars away. Uncle Mowrey had talked about bicycles, apparently in perfect order after the l900 storm, falling to pieces when they dried out. The old MG had been half submerged in salt water.
Early the next morning Emmett, without asking anyone’s help, arranged for Luis’s car to be towed to a garage. Around nine I went with him to the place where a mechanic was already bent over another car’s open hood when we drove up. On the opposite side of the building I could see the MG looking quite dry as if it had never been soaked in the Gulf. Full of tools and automobiles, the shop had a greasy metallic smell; a dangling light bulb showed its blackened floor.
I leaned against Aunt Bertha’s car waiting in the morning sun while Emmett walked into the cave of the garage and got the attention of the half hidden mechanic.
When they had finished talking Emmett, with a disgusted look and one wave of his arm, motioned for me to get back in the car. He walked slowly looking down at the ground, pulled the door open, got in, and stared out the windshield blankly for a moment.
Still looking straight ahead, he said, “This guy says they could clean it up, strip all the upholstery out, replace it, and coat all the metal parts with oil, but something would always go w
rong. His idea is for me to take it off the island and sell it to someone else on the mainland, pass it off as used maybe once it’s cleaned up. I don’t know what kind of crook he thinks I am. I want the damn thing fixed.” He looked over toward the little car before we pulled out to the street.
I had always thought if you totaled something, the insurance would be enough to pay for a new one, but Uncle Mowrey, trying not to smile, told me that morning you only get the price the old car would bring. For all my ignorance about insurance, I was sure Luis wouldn’t be paid enough to replace it. So was Emmett.
“You know Luis wouldn’t want a new MG, Emmett. Maybe you could find another old one.”
“No. … That old one he had was the one he wanted. Anyway, Celia, you don’t know much about cars. Cars like that— The older they are, the harder they are to find. And that one is nearly a antique.” He kept his eyes on the traffic flowing by the sea wall. It was one of those Saturdays when it seemed everybody on the mainland had decided to go to the beach.
“I guess I better go tell him,” he said.
We drove out to Luis’s house. It was almost noon by then, and from the deck I could see the harsh sun shining on Emmett’s tire tracks carved in the sand the night before; some of them were high enough to have escaped the tide’s reach.
Luis was laconic about his loss. “It was about to fall apart anyway,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” said Emmett. He was morose by that time.
“I can use my father’s until I leave. It’s stored in the Galvez garage. Every Sunday I take it out, take my father and his car for a drive.”
Emmett groaned and sat down on the steps with his chin in his hand. “I totaled your car, and I—” He looked up at Luis. “How can I do anything—?”
He seemed more worried about Luis’s car than Doris Lacey’s pregnancy at that point. One worry displaced another maybe, shifted attention from the uncertain future to the certain present. In the end Mr. Platon’s insurance company paid him a small sum for the old MG, and Emmett borrowed money from his father to add to that. Guilt money, I thought, but I didn’t mention it to Emmett. By then there was no need to.
Chapter Eleven
When her mother called her to come to the phone, Doris Lacey hung up the minute Emmett said her name.
He stomped out of the room to the back porch and began pacing it. After a few minutes, he banged the yard’s gate closed then evidently changed his mind, as he wheeled around, swung the gate open, and came back inside.
When he started toward the phone again, I shook my head.
“Well, how am I going to get her to talk to me?”
“Emmett, do you think all you have to do is to say ‘toad’ and she’ll hop?”
“This baby—”
“It isn’t with us yet. Maybe she’s decided to do something else. Maybe she called those people, the ones at the home Aunt Bertha was talking about.”
“I don’t think Doris would do that.”
“Maybe it isn’t even your baby.”
“Celia! She’s my girl! If it’s anybody else’s baby, how come her daddy was talking to my mama?”
“I bet you she didn’t know he was going to.”
“Well, what if she didn’t?”
We weren’t getting anywhere, so I suggested his real problem might be guessing what she had in mind.
“Yeah. Well how do I do that?”
He chewed his bottom lip and looked at me as if I might be refusing to tell him what he most needed to know. The only thing I knew was Emmett had to discover Doris’s needs himself.
We’d disagreed with each other daily, but for the first time, we both tried to work something out. That afternoon he sent Doris a postcard with a picture of the Gulf on front—too blue, stretching out to nowhere. Before going out to mail it, he flashed it in front of me. On it he’d written, “I’ll be home on the 2:30 train Thursday.”
Though I’d wished his message had been longer and I’d hoped he might send her a letter, the card was Emmett’s style. Now he’d have to go back to Mullin, back to the dusty little settlement near the ranch, and I would have to go too. We had been in Galveston almost a month, nearly as long as our parents had planned, and it was just as well since Aunt Bertha wasn’t sleeping any better at the end of our stay than I had been at the beginning.
After I looked at Emmett’s card, I told him he might as well ask to be met by a brass band because the postman on the Lacey’s route would, in his neighborly way, undoubtedly spread the word. What was more, people in Mullin might even guess exactly why he was coming. He knew as well as I about the way everyone loved to jump to conclusions.
“Fine with me,” he said. “Maybe she’ll speak to me when I get there. She might as well, don’t you think? If we’re going to get married—”
“Emmett, what if she won’t?”
He looked at me as if I’d asked him something so fundamentally dumb he might ignore the question. “She may not want to,” I added. I didn’t think he’d even considered such a possibility.
“It’s my baby!”
“It’s hers too. It’s her life.”
He gave me another long look and stalked off to the mailbox like a man overlooking a small pebble he’d just stumbled across in the street.
Whatever Ed Lacey had said to Aunt Earlene, I still didn’t think he’d told Doris before he went. Or maybe his wishes didn’t carry the same weight with his daughter. It was a sad plan for a shotgun wedding, a demanding father and a reluctant bride, the same result I’d so often dreaded.
Luis laughed at my assumptions and suggested that Doris simply didn’t want anyone to know it was a shotgun wedding.
I wasn’t sure. Doris was pretty straightforward. She might really not want to marry Emmett. I was sure she hadn’t been interested in him just for the sake of the ranch. If she was simply greedy, there were other boys around who’d inherit land in counties nearby. She could have known some of them. I never thought Doris or her parents—for that matter—were so conniving. Aunt Earlene’s exaggerated notions of the importance of her own social standing led her to make foolish accusations. Doris would marry someone she loved, and I desperately wanted to believe she still had a choice.
“It’s hard to tell who does the choosing sometimes, isn’t it?” I said to Luis. “Maybe they both choose and they don’t know it.”
He looked puzzled for a moment then shook his head, “I think one of the two always knows, Celia.”
He’d dropped by the Mcleans’ late in the morning for coffee. Bertha had been working her way through a long list of ingredients in a gumbo recipe and seemed pleased to see him. They discussed the merits of browning fresh versus frozen okra until I thought I might go out and wait on the steps. In the middle of comparisons of Louisiana and Texas gumbos, Aunt Bertha, in her usual abrupt way, interrupted to ask about his father.
“He’s …” He paused as if he were having second thoughts. “You haven’t heard?”
Bertha flicked the heat down under the gumbo, moved the coffeepot to the kitchen table, and turned back to him slowly.
“He and Louise Finley. They’re going to marry.”
“Really?” I could hear my Tennessee aunts’, my grandmothers,’ my mother’s voices, a chorus of women dissembling, speaking in the same expression of polite disbelief. There was nothing in her tone implying either pleasure or regret. I knew she thought Mr. Platon should remarry. As far as Luis could tell though, she was only receiving information. Then she added, “She’ll be a good companion for him.”
“You think so?” Luis asked as if he were merely inquiring.
“Oh, I actually don’t know her that well, but at least he won’t be so lonely any more.” She poured more coffee, led us to the back porch where she promised to join us—her usual method for getting people out of the kitchen so she could concentrate—and left us sitting there.
Luis stretched his legs out in front of him, stared at the small yard where the red and yellow hibiscus w
ere still in bloom and sighed as if he couldn’t stand the sight of them.
He looked so unhappy I said, “Maybe it’s only strange at first. Later you’ll—”
“I doubt once I’m used to the idea I’ll like it. I doubt I’ll ever get used to it and even if I do….” He shook his head.
Emmett and I took a morning train from Galveston. Aunt Bertha, Uncle Mowrey, and Luis came down to the station to see us off. Emmett and Aunt Bertha withdrew to argue quietly, Bertha doing most of the talking. She wouldn’t give up her arguments against his marrying. Most of all, she was sure he was too young. She was also afraid of an early divorce. Emmett nodded now and then politely, not really hearing. He was as good at this sort of pretense as he was about slipping out of a house quickly without anyone noticing. Beginning with his mother, he’d been practicing all his life on ways to avoid bossy women.
For a while Uncle Mowrey paced between two posts; after watching them from a little distance for a while, he walked over to take Aunt Bertha by one arm, Emmett by the other.
Beyond them the Santa Fe, steaming and hissing, glistened in the sun while Luis and I waited further down on the platform beside a high flatbed wagon heaped with gray canvas bags labeled U. S. MAIL. From now on the mail would carry my letters back to Galveston just as it had carried my letters to Tony, to friends, to my parents in Leon. I was continually saying good-bye to one set of people, and hello to another. There would be someone else to write now, Luis in Galveston or in Mexico.
He wished I could stay longer, he said, and I believed him; both of us were adrift that summer. I reminded him he was older, freer to come and go, especially since his father had decided to remarry. My parents wanted me to come home, and I still had to do as they wished.
The porter emerged from the car ahead of us. While talking to Luis, I watched him place the shiny metal auxiliary step in front of those leading to the train, then he picked up Emmett’s and my suitcases and carried them inside. After wearing only shirts, shorts and sandals all day for weeks I felt uncomfortably bound by my dress, stockings and heels.
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