Uncertain Ground (12 page)

“Everybody knew him. He was a lovely boy. Handsome. Popular. Played football when he got to high school.”

“And Luis?”

“I’d quit teaching by the time he came along.”

Drying the silver, sliding the wet knives through the towel, I could almost feel evasion in the kitchen. It was as if some kind of ground fog drifted between me and Aunt Bertha.

“Their father— You know him too?”

She let the water out of the sink, then rinsed her hands carefully under the tap. “We all tried to help him after Maxine died, introduced him to other women. He wouldn’t have anything to do with anybody except one old friend of hers. This friend of mine, Eleanor Phillips, lived in the Galvez too. Mowrey said I was meddling. I guess I was. I got Eleanor and Alberto together for dinner here. He spent the whole evening talking about Maxine as if she’d come through the door any minute!”

I laughed when she gestured toward the kitchen door.

“Retired men!” She picked up a dry towel to help me with the glasses. “I don’t know what I’ll do with Mowrey when he retires! Alberto Platon has nothing to keep him busy. He was a cotton factor and had to retire way early. Not enough to do here.”

“So … Luis … do you know if he has a girl in Galveston?” I finally asked what I’d been hoping to find out.

“I doubt it. He lives in Mexico most of the time, doesn’t he?”

The fog I’d almost seen before thickened and billowed between us. I finished polishing glasses and began pushing a towel round and round a plate trying to remember what my
father had said about Randy Wells, the guy all the girls in Leon dated and never married. “Something wrong with his hormones.” If that was true, it one of the kinder ways of putting it. Most of the words we had—“queer,” “fag,” “fruit,” “fairy,” “homo,”—were meant to hurt. Was Bertha trying not to say one of those?

I dropped the plate and made a lot of apologies while standing above it noticing the flower pattern still evident circling its edges. It was old china, everyday stuff, Aunt Bertha said. It had belonged to her mother-in-law. She was glad to get rid of it. Now she had a good excuse to buy some more sooner. I picked up the fragments. The subject was changed. Bertha and Mowrey would take us to the Balinese Club on the weekend, on Saturday night.

“Mother told me about it. She loved going.”

“Did Emmett bring a coat and tie?”

“Aunt Earlene packed one I think. He won’t like wearing it.”

“I know. I’d just like to see him properly dressed once while he’s here.”

Nothing was mentioned about getting him a haircut. Bertha might tell him to do it. She knew making Emmett go to a barber was beyond me.

Nothing more was said about Luis either. I wasn’t sure she knew what I was asking, and I couldn’t question her outright. She was agreeable, but she was older, and perhaps she preferred to avoid the problem altogether. I told myself I was being unreasonable. After all Bertha traveled and, for God’s sake, she lived in Galveston. She’d spoken of him kindly. There wasn’t a hint of disdain in her voice. She’d been truly glad to see him when he came to the house. I still couldn’t ask her. There was nothing effeminate about him. There hadn’t been anything effeminate about Randy Wells. He’d kissed all the girls, kissed us all goodbye. And what about Emmett? He was the one who’d met Luis first, and he hadn’t said anything. The only fault he’d found with Luis was he was half Mexican. “Meskin,” that was what he’d said. Half or whole, it was all the same to Emmett.

B
ecause of you
the sun will shine, the moon and stars will say you’re mine, forever and never to part. Be-cause of yo-o-u.” The voice on the record wailed on while I tried to lead Emmett around the back porch. Against the wall the white wicker chairs sat like a row of fat old ladies interrupted by stands of Boston fern. The straw rug had been rolled up, and at the edge of it Aunt Bertha watched with the portable phonograph at her side.

“Emmett, try to lead.” I was tired of the lesson. All morning Aunt Bertha and I had been trying to teach him how to dance.

“If youall will just change that moony record and get some real music, I’ll lead you right off this old porch.”

While we were in high school I’d seen him two-stepping around in Leon’s VFW Club where the men drank whisky from bottles wrapped in paper bags outside and in the honky-tonk-beer-cafe in McGregor, our nearest wet town, where everybody drank beer inside. Since we’d both gone off to college, I hadn’t seen him on any kind of dance floor for a while. He was so stiff-legged and draggy now I wondered if he’d taken Doris Lacey dancing anywhere in the past year. I thought nobody forgot how to dance. It was like bicycle riding. Once you knew, you knew. Emmett clumped around as if he’d never known, and his only excuse was he couldn’t two-step to
Because of You.
Surely somebody had taught him more than that, if not his mother, then Doris or one of the whole string of girls he’d dated before meeting her.

Aunt Bertha had already told him this was the only halfway new record she had. “It’s not going to do you any good to learn how to keep time with something like
Alexander’s Ragtime Band
, is it?”

“Could you?” He asked as if he really thought she might get up and show him. He was ready for any excuse to stop.

“Maybe I could and maybe I couldn’t. I’d need your Uncle Mowrey, and it wouldn’t hurt if I was twenty pounds lighter and ten years younger. The point is you’ve got to know how to dance to this kind of music. They don’t play western songs out at the Balinese Room. I don’t know what they teach you up at that cow college, but you ought to learn to dance to civilized music.”

“Cow college!” Emmett howled and dropped my hand. “Why do people who don’t know anything about A&M—”

Aunt Bertha grinned. “Texas Agricultural and Mechanical. I know that much.”

I backed away from him laughing. Though my university was A&M’s oldest rival, I knew real loyalty to his school wasn’t behind his anger. He certainly wasn’t a member of the ROTC corps whose giant marching formation of the school’s initials across the field in step behind the band playing the
Aggie War Hymn
brought students and alumni screaming to their feet. Emmett hated uniforms and drills. He went to A&M only because he had to go somewhere. College kept him out of Korea. His mother meant for him to finish. Somehow, just by doing that, she felt he would put aside his cowboy tendencies. Uncle Estes, as far as I could see, neither agreed nor disagreed with this plan. He seemed to be waiting to see what happened. He wasn’t in the least like my father who was usually impatient. Estes, my father said, was a good trader.

I asked him what he meant. His opinions about people were important to me although his ways of judging others were sometimes strange. To him one of the boys I’d dated “looked funny out of his eyes.” Though he was a nervous boy, I ignored this remark; on the whole my father usually was a fair judge.

“Estes knows what he’s doing, knows livestock well, cattle, sheep, horses. He’s got a trained eye, learned it from his daddy. And he’s a good businessman, doesn’t jump into anything too fast, always knows the important things about people he’s
dealing with. Oh, he can be fooled. We can all be fooled.”

Except for knowing about livestock Emmett had none of the other skills, so while waiting for him to grow into them, Aunt Earlene selected suits at Neiman’s, had Emmett’s dress shirt pockets monogrammed and ordered low cut shoes as well as silk ties for him. They were—anyone could see—the same sort of clothes Uncle Estes wore when he had to go to a wedding or a funeral.

I’d seen Emmett in a suit only once; at dinner on Christmas Day he wore charcoal gray wool flannel and a new pair of black boots, a compromise he’d made with Aunt Earlene. After dinner he’d mumbled something about scratchy britches, changed back to jeans, and charged out of the back door of our house to the pick-up he’d parked in the drive. He could get out of a house quicker than anybody I knew. I envied him that.

Aunt Bertha’s offer of the Balinese Club and her insistence on dancing lessons were maneuvers toward getting Emmett into the summer suit his mother had packed for him. The Chandler women put too much faith in clothes, I thought, as well as too much faith in ways college might change people.

Emmett, quickly tired of defending A&M, fell into the nearest chair.

“Because of yo-o-u,” the tenor wailed nasally.

“Cut that thing off, can’t you, Aunt Bertha?”

Bertha switched off the phonograph.

“Emmett, you said you wanted to learn.”

“Well that was before I got started.”

I sprawled on the porch swing. My feet hurt even though I’d insisted on Emmett practicing in his socks. The swing rocked with a reassuring creak, a higher note joining the deep locust hum from the yard. Bertha went inside to bring us iced-tea. Emmett, who looked hungover, sat in his chair, one hand loosely covering his eyes. Why did the simplest kind of dancing seem so hard to him? I stared at the porch’s blue ceiling. Aunt Bertha’s swing creaked rhythmically; a slight breeze stirred the listless ferns while I daydreamed.

In Leon the Baptist dominated school board hadn’t allowed dances. My friends and I had to organize our own outside of school. Maybe Emmett acted like he did because he hadn’t gone to any of those. I thought of the long afternoons we’d worked hanging spiraled crepe paper from wall to wall and running to the dime store to buy candles for our mothers’ card tables in futile attempts to fill the cavernous VFW Hall we’d rented.

Aunt Bertha handed me a glass of iced-tea.

“You’re going to spill it down your neck,” Emmett warned as I lay back down in the swing.

I pushed a pillow up behind my head.

“Drink up and let’s practice some more.” Bertha said.

Emmett shook his head, “No ma’am. It’s too hot.”

Bertha looked at him closely, judging his tolerance. “All right.”

Emmett frowned. His dark hair fell in curls over his forehead. Nobody was even trying to make him get a haircut.

“I just hope they play that song tonight,” he sighed.

“Which song?” Bertha studied the circles of water on the tray in her lap.

“
Because of You
.”

“You can always request it.” Bertha smeared the water over the tray with a paper napkin, put it down on the nearest table, and walked into the house. We could hear her turn and go upstairs.

She was abrupt like that at times. Perhaps she was tired of both of us, or just tired of trying to make Emmett act right. She would, when her patience wore thin, or when she felt enough time had been spent in argument, simply walk away from a disagreement. This made Emmett furious. In his family, he was the one who stalked off leaving people fuming. Today, however, he ignored Aunt Bertha’s exit.

He eased out of his chair and came over to the swing. Pushing my legs over, he sat down.

“You were late getting in last night,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“How’s Jane?”

“Okay.”

“I thought maybe she and Rob—” I was trying not to say too much about her. I’d seen so little of him the past few days I didn’t know if he was still interested in her or not. I hoped he was. If he was busy chasing Jane, I could continue to see Luis without interference.

“They just go around in the summer when they’re both home. They all go out with each other. Rob brought Leslie last night.”

“And Marion?”

“Gone to Canada, thank God, with his family. We went to a couple of clubs.”

“Anybody ask for ID?”

“In Galveston?”

“Okay! Okay!”

“She drinks too much.” Emmett stared out over the back yard in the direction of the magenta oleanders.

“Jane? I thought you were the one who did that.”

“I’m not an alky. Once she gets started, she won’t stop. I have to take her home just before she passes out.”

“I’m impressed.”

“Goddamn, Celia, don’t be sarcastic.”

“Emmett! It’s just— It’s funny, you looking after somebody else.”

“I don’t know about that. Drunks aren’t any fun, are they?” He laughed. “This is a hell of a vacation. Here I am running around with an alky and you with a spic.”

He didn’t really know anything about Luis. Why would he? Luis was older, and he was— What was he?

Sometimes Luis painted late at night, working against the dark, he said. I’d been to his studio, the living room of a small house way down on West beach. Perched on stilts, wind battered, stained gray by salt air, it looked like it might be carried
away by the slightest wind. Inside during the day, light poured through windows overlooking the Gulf. Lack of north light apparently didn’t concern him. The studio was crammed with things. There were jars and boxes full of paint tubes, seashells, an old white kitchen table covered with splotches of paint, topographical maps of the Galveston quadrant of Texas, and maps of Mexico City rolled into tubes stuck in an old crate hanging on the wall. Over it hung his mother’s Panama straw beach hat. An empty luggage rack was propped against the same wall next to a bookcase full of skeletons of fish heads, bones—cows’ I guessed—masks he’d brought from Mexico, stones and a row of rusty metal cans of all sizes that had washed up on the beach. Somehow these looked far more interesting in an awkward line with every dent showing than they might have looked on the beach. Above the clutter or sometimes tucked within it, were pictures, old photographs of his parents and his brother Rico.

It was all random and hodgepodge. He had to have a lot of things, he said, a lot of angles to catch the light. All of it was used—in a way I couldn’t actually understand—in his work. Perhaps the things he’d collected from the world around him curled, pushed, sometimes shattered and fell into his pictures combined with a vision he had, or one he made up as he went along, something he didn’t know he had until he saw it on canvas. I wondered aloud about what he called the work he was doing.

“Abstract expressionism maybe. Call it that if you want. Most people have to call it something, have to have names for things.”

“Does that bother you?” I asked.

“Not really. I’d go on painting no matter what it’s called. One of my teachers, the best one, was an expressionist. I’m still, I guess, trying to paint my way away from him, away from his way of looking. He taught me a lot. Now I have to teach myself.”