Uncertain Ground (21 page)

“It looks like fun.”

“Other people’s work usually does, doesn’t it? If you want to try, I’ve got another easel and some boards. They have a texture a little like canvas.”

“I … I don’t know. I can’t draw.”

“Most of the painters I know had to learn how to. You have to learn how to see first. You have to keep looking. Then the hands, the muscles somehow begin to know what your eyes see. Here—”

He walked over to the kitchen, pulled out a tall stool, reached up to a shelf behind me, selected two clay pots, and put them on the stool. From a pile propped against the wall, he took a white board covered with something, some sort of fake canvas. Then he rummaged through drawers until he found a drawing pad. Tearing a sheet of paper off, he clipped the whole pad to the board. In a hall closet he found an extra easel and propped the board on it. He handed me a skinny black stick.

“Charcoal. Here’s your first lesson. Draw those pots.”

I’d never seen such a blank piece of paper, such a white,
empty rectangle. The longer I looked, the blanker and whiter it seemed. It was a whiteness that would show the smallest mark, a blankness that would surround a speck, and it waited on me to do something, to make something.

“The pots,” I said. “They’re … they’re sort of dull.”

“What do you want to draw?”

“I don’t know … flowers maybe.”

“Too complicated. Start with something simple.” Luis hardly looked around to speak to me.

First I tried to draw the outline of each one. The charcoal was so soft I broke the stick immediately. When I tried to place the stool under the pots, it wouldn’t come out right. Instead of a stool, there was only part of a circle. Nothing was in perspective. I could see that much. The paper was already smudged with lines I’d tried to erase with my fingers.

“Luis, how do you— These things are flat. I might as well have laid them down and traced around them.”

“Look.” He tore my sheet off, took the longer half of my charcoal, and made five lines with it. The circle was well on the way to becoming a stool. He handed the charcoal back to me. “Stare at the pots until you don’t have to look at them. What makes them round, low, or high? Where is the light coming from? Search for the shadows. Try to draw the lines you know are there even if you can’t see them.”

I stared at the ochre yellow pots. Tentatively I sketched shadows, changed more lines. The pots still looked flat to me. I tore the sheet of drawing paper off the board, crumpled it, and let it fall to the floor. Another sheet followed, then a third and fourth. I glanced around Luis’s shoulder to his canvas. He was adding blobs of rust colored paint to his blue canvas although he seemed to be scraping off more than he was putting on. Maybe it was more fun with paint. At least I’d have color then. I looked at the blank page and the dumb pots again and thought about how I needed to learn how to take news photos. I needed a course in press photography, and could probably take one the next semester.

“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 wrong. 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.

W
hen 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.