Uncertain Ground (7 page)

When I stood beside him interrupting his gaze, he said, “Well, here you are,” just as if he’d acknowledged Emmett or anyone else who came along. Putting his sketchbook aside, he looked up, “Come sit down.”

“In a minute.” I peered over his shoulder to see what he was drawing and found he’d been working on a picture of a water-soaked tennis shoe at the edge of the tide line. Everything seemed to wash up on Galveston’s beaches. Sometimes there were clots of tar tangled in the seaweed, bits of net, cans and other debris.

“All this stuff. … Is it thrown overboard from ships or what?”

“Some of it floats up in the Gulf Stream all the way from Mexico. We get coconuts from beaches there or further south.”

“From your part?”

“No. Guanajuato’s in the mountains, near San Miguel, west a little. It’s a colonial town. The Spanish mined silver there. It’s built on the sides and in the valley of a deep canyon.”

“It must be a lot cooler. Don’t you hate to leave it in the summer?”

“It is beautiful. My father lives here though. I come up to see him.”

“Where does he live?”

“In the Galvez.”

“The hotel?”

“Yes.”

I wanted to ask why, but something about the way he replied stopped me. He didn’t want to talk about his father perhaps. “I think I’ll get in,” I said.

“Watch for jellyfish. They’re out this morning.” He got up. “I’ll come with you.”

I shuddered when the cool water lapped around my ankles but was determined to get wet all over at once so kept moving across the long shallow shelf out to the waves. Luis, much taller, stepped ahead of me. I couldn’t catch up with him until we reached higher water. Even then he was a foot or so away. We rode the waves silently, purposefully, careful of the surf rising and falling, sometimes high, sometimes in quiet slow swells, varying without apparent pattern. It was easier to swim in the Gulf than in the Atlantic. Though cool in the morning when it hit the beach the water stayed fairly warm overnight, and the waves rocked gently.

“Look out!” Luis shouted.

Soft blobs of clear white bubbles drifted by my side. Luis caught me around my wrist with one hand and pulled me over next to him. He let go as the wave receded. Looking back I saw the white shiny mass lifted over a wave just behind us. Shaking a little, treading water, I wished I could be carried back to shore.

“I hate those things.”

“Were you scared?”

“I can’t stand to brush against jellyfish. I don’t think I’d mind the sting as much as I’d mind the feel of them. Slimy!” The possibility of touching one made me shiver again. I started swimming in as fast as I could. Soon the long slopes of sand made it impossible to swim at all. Everyone save the smallest child had to walk a long way to get out of the Gulf.

Once back on the beach lying on a towel in the sun, conscious only of the warmth of the sun on my back and of Luis a few inches away, I forgot about the threat of jellyfish. Sitting up and pulling my feet under me, I looked over at him. His back
was smooth and evenly tanned down to his waist; a pale line showed slightly where the elastic gave. Shifting my gaze to the water’s edge, I watched a sandpiper tracking the ragged end of a wave, pecking now and then at pieces of seaweed. Further down the beach a woman began taking food out of a basket and piling waxed paper covered squares on an old army blanket. It was so early for lunch I wondered if she’d brought sandwiches for breakfast. I would like to know her, I thought. I would like to know anybody who preferred sandwiches to eggs and bacon.

Luis was so still he could have been asleep. I turned to him. “Don’t you wish you could live on the beach with nothing but a pot to cook in and a spoon to stir with?”

“Two spoons,” he said as he sat up and pulled the towel across his shoulders. “And an umbrella.”

“You’ve got such a good tan I don’t see why you have to worry about sunburn.”

“It’s inherited,” he smiled slowly. “Partially.”

“Well that’s a help.” I grinned at him and pulled my wildly clipped bangs down over my forehead. “I have to use my hair to keep the sun off, or I’ll have terrible freckles.”

“I’m half Mexican … on my father’s side.”

All I could think of was my father’s reaction after we first met Uncle Blanton whose skin was even darker than Uncle Estes’s or Mother’s. I’d asked if he thought he looked Mexican, and my father had agreed he did. He’d warned me, however we’d better not mention it. Living mainly in Tennessee, I saw Mexicans only as people from Mexico, that exotic unknown country next to Texas. Prejudice against Negroes—I’d known since childhood—filled the air everyone breathed although some of that had worn away during the war. His service stripped my father of much of his. “We all have the same color of blood,” was his final pronouncement on the subject, and I heard it young, years before I came to Texas. I knew he was right, but his view wasn’t shared by all of the Chandlers or by many of the people we knew in Leon. Although there were few Negroes in
Colorado University’s summer school, I’d worked with one who was reporter on the student newspaper and was relieved no one there mentioned his skin color.

Alone with Luis all I could say was, “You’re lucky, you know. We have my father’s side … back for generations, but I don’t know much about my mother’s family. Maybe somebody kept up with them, but nobody I know.” I stopped myself, aware that I’d been chattering idiotically, filling in space in case I’d embarrassed him.

Luis looked at me in an amiable way as if he understood I was trying not to pry. “I don’t mind being half Mexican. It gives me two countries.”

“Don’t you have to choose?”

“Citizenship? Yes. I chose the U.S. But I’ve still got two countries.”

“Sometimes I think I do too. I was born in the South, and moved to the West. My parents decided it was time to try out Mother’s state.

Luis laughed.

The West was still a foreign country, I felt, no matter how long I’d lived there … seven years, long enough for some people, maybe not long enough for me although I knew I felt at home in Galveston. It was a lot like the South because it was old and slightly worn. A lot had happened here; the houses themselves told you that.

For some reason, just as we’d discovered a small likeness I grew wary and wanted to get away. Until then Luis was only a boy, somewhat older than I, that Emmett had met on the beach, someone he’d stumbled across and introduced to me. The idea of simplicity was so seductive. My own life was a jumble, and here was Luis, the American-Mexican with a father he didn’t seem to want to talk about and a mother too, no doubt, and his two countries. Everyone came with something, with strings, with ties. Tony carried all the Gregorys with him everywhere; I knew them in some ways better than they knew themselves though we’d never met. A girl friend gets all sorts of privileged
information. Luis’s, I sensed, would be even more complicated than Tony’s. I could have excused myself. I could have left. But I didn’t want to spend the rest of the day with Emmett, nor did I want to be completely alone. A part of me was already running through Bertha’s and Mowrey’s back gate, brushing past the white oleander bush, turning on the hose attached to the oak cistern, rinsing salt off with soft rain water. Then up the steps I would go and into the confusion of Bertha’s kitchen. It would be hot; she’d probably already be cooking, getting something ready for supper ahead of time. I knew exactly what was waiting there. I chose Luis.

We spent the rest of the day together after taking Bertha’s car back. He used the rainwater and shared the towel with me in what could have been one of those peculiarly public moments of intimacy. With Luis it was merely the usual necessity of getting rid of salt before going in. He picked up a neatly rolled bundle of clothes, and I pointed him toward the downstairs bath. Emmett, thank God, had gone out somewhere.

When I introduced Luis to Bertha she immediately said, “I know your father,” she said. “Alberto … Alberto Platon. We see him out at the Balinese Room often.”

“Yes. He likes going out there.”

He said nothing more just then, but as I ran upstairs to change, I could hear their voices.

We ate lunch together at one of the piers near the shell shop. I looked for the Jamaican with his drum. He wasn’t in sight. Where did he go when he wasn’t on the seawall?

“He has a place,” Luis said. “Three blocks or so back there’s a house his relatives live in, I think.”

“Is that a section for Negroes?”

“No, not in this older part of town. They’re all scattered in with everybody.”

I was so astonished I blurted, “That would never happen in the South.”

“Really? It’s been going on here a long time. Maybe because it’s an island.”

He folded himself back into his old MG. It was his mother’s car she’d used only in town. She was dead, had been for three years. “Cancer,” he said, just the one word, then added, “Of course she was too young. Anyone’s too young to die of that.”

‘I’m sorry. It must have been … must be a terrible loss.”

I wanted to comfort him and didn’t know how. Why were there so few words to do this, especially when you haven’t known the person who died and barely knew the person you were trying to sympathize with?

I brushed away the sweat running down the sides of my face. It was hot in the car on top of the seawall.

“I mean…you get over the worst but you do remember.”

“Yes.” He looked out toward the water glittering in the noon heat.

“It must be hard to be here, to be in Galveston without her.”

He still wouldn’t look at me.

“Sometimes it is.” His voice was so low I could barely hear him.

He wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his arm and began pulling out in the traffic along the seawall. Turning away from me, he scanned the street behind us.

Had I said too much? He’d trusted me enough to let me know about his mother. Could I know him better now?

He started driving toward the east end of the beach where we were going to catch the state ferry to Bolivar. We would ride over and back because, he insisted, we needed to get off the island for a while.

“Why? You leave Galveston, drive to Houston sometimes, don’t you?”

“Sure. Over the causeway. I’d rather leave in a boat. What’s the use of an island if you don’t use the sea around it?”

Though I had crossed and re-crossed parts of the U.S., I’d never thought of an island that way. For me an island was a place removed, a place one could flee to, not a point of connection. I’d never been anywhere by sea. We climbed to the second
level passenger deck above the cars. The ferry, an old one smelling of grease and gasoline fumes, rocked slowly across the bay accompanied by rattling ropes and metal pulls clanking against poles. Franklin gulls followed shrieking above us. They dipped to the water, skimmed the surface, then rose again filling the air with their greedy cries. Below the ferry’s engine thumped like an overloaded old washing machine’s. The water grew choppy, full of little upstart waves that made the ferry shudder as it moved in a long curving passage to the opposite shore.

Luis, in a soft white shirt and a pair of old jeans he’d pulled on at the house, leaned against the rail in front of me. The white shirt accentuated his darkness, his distance. At times anyone, even those who were close to me, seemed unknown. I’d caught Tony Gregory like that, looking away, cut off from everyone, a person totally apart, so separate he couldn’t be reached. My father, Kenyon, Emmett, any man would, for minutes, become completely alone, completely themselves. So could any woman; men only seemed further away. Watching others, I would notice my own loneness. It came to me then that we all lived in small spaces, little territories which others occasionally crossed.

A sudden stiff wind puffed the back of Luis’s shirt. He nodded toward a freighter weighted to the halfway mark on its waterline. From where we were, it was huge, its formidable black hull pointed to the open sea.

“They always look mysterious, don’t they?” he said. “Probably carrying something like sulfur mined over in New Gulf. It’s only going about the business of the world as usual.”

The crossing from Galveston to an unknown coast made me long for a real ship, a real sea. These longings overtook me more and more lately. The most eventful trips I’d made had all been from one house to another, from one set of people to another set that had to be adjusted to. Even my trips to and from universities were necessary ones as were the family vacations I’d finally escaped and the obligatory trips back to Nashville. My mother and father returned infrequently now. Kenyon never wanted to go back, so I had been sent instead. Mother had traveled for
pleasure, had taken off to unknown places, before the war. She and Aunt Bertha had been to Cuba and to England. My father poked around Europe for a year right after he finished college. Like them I wanted to know more of the world.

At the Bolivar landing we waited listening to motors turning over and watching cars plunging toward shore like awkward turtles. Children walked on a fragile looking pier near the landing, a dog lingered behind them to roll in the sand. At the end of the pier a group of men fished silently. One of them pushed his hat back on his head and studied us for a moment before turning his eyes back to his pole again. The rest, sitting two or three together, or standing almost motionless their heads bent toward the water or staring out to sea, made a jagged frieze against the sky.

After the last car was off and just before the others started on, there was a moment of calm broken only by gulls’ screams and waves slapping. Bright sun fell on the gray beach, on the asphalt road leading past a grove of trees, the landing, the lighthouse at the other end of the bay. The two of us, dangling over the water, were suspended in light. I waited, happily dazed by heat and sun, content to be taken back to Galveston.

Emmett was away when I got home late that afternoon. Bertha didn’t know where he’d gone. He’d borrowed her car and taken off.

“Maybe he went looking for you. He was upset about you being out with Luis. I wish youall would quit wandering off. I can’t seem to catch the two of you together, and I want to introduce you to some young people.”