Uncertain Ground (11 page)

At the end of the wharf we looked out across the bay where other ships waited in dry dock. The narrow end of the bay was lined by the causeway and the railroad bridge Emmett and I had crossed to the island from the mainland. On the opposite side water circled round to the sea.

One other freighter was in port as well along with a coast guard cutter painted a clean gray and stuck with snooty guns pointing high, looking efficient and warlike. A woman in a red
and white polka dotted dress chatted with an officer on deck. I glanced up at her face and decided she was too happy to be saying goodbye. Around the corner at another dock we found a line of tugboats with cheerful names like Daisy, Betsy and Sal rocking in their berths.

Walking back to the car I was startled to see Uncle Mowrey standing at the far end of the freighter. From that distance he was so small, a little fat man wrapped in a sagging suit peering up at the mountain of the ship.

Why was he at the wharves? He was usually at his office this time of day. Though I’d never seen it, I thought of the office as a small dark place piled high with dusty ledgers and curling papers. Among them he would bend over rows of tiny figures checking sums, stopping now and then to place faint pencil scratches next to the figures. His sums looked something like the market reports in
The Journal,
indecipherable except to those who knew about the stock market and understood why, for instance, the price of beef was so far down during a drought that was lowering the number of cattle daily.

Except for the brief meetings when he was coming or going from the house or taking one of his short walks to the beach, I had seldom seen him outside. Uncle Mowrey’s natural setting was inside, a wall at his back, a newspaper in front of him.

“My uncle—” I gestured toward him.

Luis smiled. “I see him here often.”

Intent on the freighter, he didn’t notice us. I called to him, and he turned toward us blinking. “Ah.” He sighed and bobbed his head in our direction. When he’d shaken Luis’s hand he asked, “How’s your father?”

“All right. Last night he was winning. Tonight, who knows?”

Mowrey removed his straw hat and wiped the reddened crease on his forehead with a handkerchief. Returning his hat carefully to his head, he lifted his glasses and wiped his eyes. “It’s a harmless pastime, Luis.”

“I’m afraid it’s more than that now.”

They talked to each other as if they had met outside a hospital door to discuss the health of a mutual friend who lay just inside helpless in bed.

Mowrey peered out from under his raised glasses. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Stuck in an awkward silence, they stood facing each other. I’d hoped to hear more about Luis’s father, so I waited shifting from one foot to the other. Neither one of them could seem to break through the stillness that lay between them like a large invisible boulder. Water lapped at the wharf, metal rigging pieces on the freighters clinked and gulls screamed over an incoming shrimp boat. Finally I asked Uncle Mowrey what he was doing at the wharves.

“It’s my pastime, my secret vice. I come down now and then to see what’s in port. My father sailed into Galveston Bay on a ship he’d watched being built in Glasgow. Now I come and stand on shore.” With one arm he pointed to the warehouses, the decayed buildings, the docks. “I stand here and watch the place rot.” He shook his head slightly.

“Come.” He waved us over to an open door. “Look in there. What do you see?”

I searched the dark interior of the warehouse behind us. More than half of it was empty. Against the dockside stood bales in orderly rows with metal bindings gleaming faintly against protective burlap covers.

“Cotton,” I said.

“That’s what made Galveston. Cotton. We had a good natural harbor, one we’ve made even deeper.”

“But you’ve got cotton still.”

“Very little compared to what used to be here. There’s the channel to Houston now. People used to say it would never work, no one would want to go that far inland. But they did. Now the trade’s gone, has been gone for years. Galveston’s hardly a port any more. Now it’s the place the whole state runs off to when they want to do what they can’t do at home. It’s a fine place to raise cain. We’ve got the medical school and a good hospital, so
it’s a fine place to be sick. But it’s no place to do business. You can go downtown and look at more empty buildings.” His voice dwindled away. He looked over at the ship again.

“I planned to get a ship here … when I retired, I guess. I wanted to leave from this harbor and to come back here, to come into homeport. I don’t know if that will be a possibility. I’ll probably have to get in a car and drive over to Houston if I want to go anywhere on a ship.” He ducked his head.

I ducked my own. It was embarrassing to hear a quiet man talk so much. It was a little like overhearing something I wasn’t supposed to know, and at the same time, I couldn’t think of any encouragement I could give him. It was hard to think of something cheerful while standing in the middle of ruin.

“Don’t ships still leave from here?” Aunt Bertha, in need of a traveling companion, had taken Mother on a cruise to Cuba in the twenties. She still spoke of dancing with the ship’s officers on moonlit decks. The trip had made her a hopeless romantic about traveling anywhere by sea. If she’d been there, she would have talked about how much fun catching a freighter bound for a foreign port would be, an idea my father discouraged whenever she voiced it.

Uncle Mowrey smiled faintly and said cruise ships still sailed from Galveston but not often.

“You’ll go someday,” I promised lamely.

He nodded, took off his glasses, and wiped his forehead again. “Yes … I’ll go.” He turned away from us taking slow, short steps, stopped, then said if I meant to come home for lunch to bring Luis.

He couldn’t come. He had to meet his father.

Mowrey went on to his car. We followed at a distance.

“He’s sad, isn’t he? An old man with a dream.”

“I don’t know,” said Luis. “He’s not so terribly old. He’s still got his wife, and he can travel. My father won’t go anywhere. I’ve tried to get him to come back to Mexico with me. He refuses to. He’s afraid if he dies there, no one will bring him back here and put him beside my mother. That’s all he wants,
he says, to lie in a grave beside her. While he waits he gambles. It makes no difference to him whether he wins or loses. It’s just something for him to do. Last year he sold our house and moved to the hotel, the Galvez. It’s close to the Balinese Club. I stay at the beach house. I hate being closed up in a hotel, but it’s what my father wants. All he has to do is walk across the street to the club, and when the night is finished, he comes back again. They all know him there. They know his routine, and everybody does exactly as he wants. The maids don’t sweep the hall where his room is till after noon. He can’t stand the sound of vacuum cleaners. When he goes downstairs to eat, the headwaiter makes sure he gets his favorite waitress, the one that doesn’t talk much.” He stopped abruptly and stared up at the sky as if he were searching for the exact position of the noonday sun.

“Can’t anything be done?”

Luis bent down so close I could see a flicker of pain in his eyes. “Nothing! I hate all the closed doors and dark corridors. He might as well be living in a mortuary. What can I do about it? Nothing! I come to see him. I wait with him a few weeks. I leave. When this month is over I’ll leave him again. I can’t stay here with him and force another kind of life on him when he wants to die.”

His anger washed over me like a sudden wave I hadn’t seen rising. I felt like a child crying for the moon, for all the ice cream I wanted, for everything to be all right. Headed toward the car, we’d stopped at the end of the wharf where there was no shade. The warehouse’s metal siding reflected heat. A stench of rotting fish and dank water rose in the still air. Sweat ran down our faces, glistened on our necks, wet our backs. Hot, shaken by Luis’s insistence on hopelessness, I swayed on my feet. I’d never heard him be so vehement. He sorrowed over the loss of his mother and his brother. He would shake his head over Emmett’s failings. But his father’s refusal to go on with his life made his voice harsh and his facial muscles harden into a reproving mask.

“Are you okay?” His voice softened.

“I just felt funny for a minute. I didn’t mean to— I guess I shouldn’t have asked—”

“It’s all right. I get … I get mad because there’s nothing else I can do. That’s all.”

The guard waved at us from the door of his shack. “Go now,” he shouted in Spanish. “Take your girl to a cool place. She’s too young and tender to stay out in the sun.”

I pulled a beach towel over the hot leather seat. I should have eaten more breakfast. Hunger was making me dizzy. I slid back in the seat watching Luis down shift gears as we rattled across the railroad tracks.

When he dropped me off at the Mclean house I ran up the steps two at a time, slipped quietly around the umbrella stand and through the hall’s welcoming darkness. At the door just outside the alcove to the dining room, I peeked in to find Uncle Mowrey, his newspaper already open before him. In another corner Emmett sat glaring at his boots, one heel balanced on the toe of another. Aunt Bertha came in from the kitchen to put plates on. The chandelier tinkled in the door’s quick draft.

“My Lord!” A plate rattled on the table as she put it down. “You scared me half to death.” She came over to me and stopped short. “Child, your eyes look like two holes burned in a blanket. You’ve got to watch the sun down here!” She gave me another appraising look. “Come. Take these plates.”

When we sat down Emmett pulled out my chair for me, then stepped over to my side, shoved his hands in both pockets and brought them out full of quarters.

“Finally found me a machine that pays off.” He grinned, and I imagined him standing in front of slot machines all morning, standing in dark rooms in front of whirling pictures of fruit—apples, oranges, lemons, cherries.

“You got to kick them now and then.” He began piling quarters in symmetrical heaps in front of his own plate.

Forgetting my disgust at the rotting fish smell by the wharf,
I speared cold pink shrimp with a fork and dipped them in red sauce.

Uncle Mowrey consulted his pocket watch, snapped the lid of it shut making a tiny final click, sighed and began eating lunch.

It was like that all month. I’d leave the house, learn something appalling, return and it would be as if nothing had happened. Aunt Bertha’s serenity could be easily shattered by Emmett’s various disasters—as it was the first time he came home drunk from the rodeo—yet whatever the trouble was, it was absorbed, overlooked, or else, soon forgotten. Perhaps it was because Mowrey and Bertha were older than our parents and, at the same time, we had the privileged standing of visitors. Our parents had to worry about our ordinary lives and their future hopes for us while Bertha and Mowrey weren’t inclined to discipline in the first place. Aunt Bertha might worry about Emmett, but she hadn’t tattled to his parents. In his case, she chose to be indulgent. As for mine, I’d had long lessons in how to act in other people’s houses. Manners, I’d been taught, meant accommodating others. There were times I wished I wasn’t the one required to suit everybody else. My brother talked back to our father, got in fights at school. He might be punished, yet he was often silently pardoned and so was Emmett, Mr. Trouble himself wearing noisy boots. I watched him, kept quiet, and minded my manners. But I was tired of doing it sometimes. Why did boys get to be the difficult ones?

One afternoon late Emmett told me, “I found myself a little low-stakes game.”

I couldn’t imagine anybody playing cards all afternoon, mainly, I guess, because I didn’t like sitting around in a darkened room fiddling with pieces of cardboard, but when I said so Emmett only gave me a scornful look

“Poker is a damn fine game!”

“Where are you getting the money?”

“I win sometimes, Celia. God damn!” Glancing toward the open kitchen door he lowered his voice and cocked his head in that direction.

I nodded. There was no need to tell Bertha and Mowrey everything.

So far my own rebellions had been the same small ones of the girls I’d grown up with in Leon. We smoked, sometimes we stayed out too late. The girls we knew who’d resisted their parents most got pregnant. We had no intentions of doing the same. At the university I drank. Jane’s crying drunk wasn’t the first one I’d ever seen. I’d eventually decided drinking night after night was ultimately silly. The results were always the same; I’d have a hangover compounded by nausea and a headache every morning. And I saw what sometimes happened. Patricia, one of my roommates, had a steady boyfriend, Henry Cale, who used to pick us up and take us to class in his car full of beer cans—there were so many of them rolling around on the floor they fell out when the doors opened. He had already flunked out, gone home to his little town in East Texas, gone home to have nothing to do but drink. I hoped his parents were able to help him. When I asked Patricia, she only shook her head and said she didn’t know.

“Celia, Henry … he’s— I tried to get him to cut down some. He’s a lost cause if I ever saw one!”

“Can’t he be sent somewhere, you know, some place that will—”

“Yes, but he has to want to go.” She shook her head again, and in a week, began dating other boys.

Now and then I thought of Henry Cale driving us down the drag with all his empty beer cans clanking. And I wondered still if he ever did quit drinking.

After lunch a few days later I asked Aunt Bertha if she’d seen Luis around Galveston before I’d brought him to the house.

“I knew his mother, Maxine. His older brother, the one who was killed in the war … Ricardo, we called him. Ricky …
was one of my best students.

“I didn’t know you taught.”

She lifted a handful of wet silver from the hot water and dropped it quickly on a dishtowel to drain. “I came down here from Mullin to teach school. That’s how I got away. I taught the fourth grade. After Mowrey and I married, I quit teaching.”

“So … Ricky—”