What My Last Man Did Page 2

  “You seem like a brother, Quen.” I pushed the ring back at him. “I’m sorry.”

  “Was the sex brotherly too?”

  “Of course not.”

  “What if I beg you?”

  “I just can’t.”

  In truth, I wasn’t sure why. I feared growing old in Galveston, having children with a man I used to play doctor with, having plenty of money but wondering forever what was over the horizon. The only Galveston person I missed was Louis Paradiso. I wanted the rest of them to leave me alone.

  Quentin didn’t give up. He even asked my mother and sister to help persuade me. That was when I saw the lab instructor job listing and ran.

  * * *

  The next day was Saturday and I had an afternoon lab. We were oxidizing copper with nitric acid and I needed to pay attention. But for most of the three hours, I was in a fog. When the lab ended, tables were strewn with dirty glassware, broken rubber stoppers, pieces of tubing, scraps of paper and copper plating, bottles of reagents, spills that could have been water or acid. The students were supposed to clean up, but there was a football game and everyone left in a hurry. I didn’t care. I wanted an excuse to hang around in case Charles tried to find me.

  I had just grabbed a broom when Rudy came in from across the hall. We had barely spoken since our stilted date at the steakhouse. Over his jeans and brown shirt Rudy wore a droopy lab coat with streaks of amber grime descending into the pockets on either side. He seemed not to notice he still had safety goggles on. He picked up the black wastebasket by the door and started sifting through the junk at the first lab station.

  “You don’t have to do that, Rudy.”

  He shrugged and tossed some scraps of rubber hose into the basket. He looked even more awkward than he did on our date. His hair—a mass of sandy curls—was bisected in back by the elastic band of his goggles. He had a big, shiny forehead, so broad that the rest of his face seemed to diminish under it to a dainty chin. He wore laced, brown leather wingtips. I wondered if he were the only man on campus, including 80-year-old professors emeriti, with shoes like that.

  “Really, Rudy. You can go.”

  He held up a bottle labeled HNO3. “So, once again, we escape death and destruction at the hands of undergraduates.”

  I swiped debris from a table with my open hand—never a good idea—and felt the unmistakable pinpricks of glass.

  “Damn.” I looked at my palm. Five tiny specks of blood appeared where shards had pierced my skin.

  When Rudy tried to look closely at my hand, he realized he was wearing the goggles. He blushed and took them off, raking some of his curly hair straight up from his bulging forehead.

  “Ah. Surgery required.” He grabbed the nearest first-aid kit and clanged open the metal lid.

  “I can do it,” I said.

  He ignored me and took out a magnifying glass and tweezers. Even as he tugged out the first piece of glass, I watched the door and wondered if Charles would show up.

  Rudy angled my hand into better light. “I wanted to thank you for being so kind the other night.” He pulled another splinter out. “About my mother.”

  I tried to remember what I had said on our date about his mother’s death.

  “It meant a lot to me.” He removed the last of the shards and rubbed my hand with a maternal touch. “I haven’t told anyone else here about it.” His eyes filled with tears.

  “Believe me, I understand,” I said. “My father died a year and a half ago.”

  “Oh—I’m sorry.” He started to say more, but began crying instead, arms limp at his sides, shoulders shaking. For an awful moment I watched him, panic-stricken and guilty over how much I wanted Charles to appear and Rudy to get out. Finally, I put my arms lightly around him. He clutched me in a fierce embrace. “I’m such a wreck right now.” He sniffed loudly into my ear. His lab coat smelled like sulfur.

  At last he pulled away, embarrassed. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “Want to do something tonight?” he asked. “There’s a talk on uranium fission.”

  I looked at him, his raked-up hair and trembling chin and brown wingtips.

  “I know,” he said, “boring.”

  I kept looking past his shoulder at the doorway, expecting Charles to appear. But it was getting late. Charles was probably at home with his wife, dressing for an evening out.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I’ll come by for you. Seven-thirty?”

  “Okay.”

  Before I left, I went upstairs to Charles’s office, hoping his secretary, Dorothy, wouldn’t be there, but sure enough, there she sat, at 5:30 on Saturday afternoon, her smeary glasses making her look put-upon and angry.

  “I was just wondering—” I rummaged in my bag as if I had papers for Charles.

  “He’s not here. I’ll give it to him.” She held out her hand.

  “Never mind.” I felt my face grow hot.

  Dorothy removed her glasses and stood up. “The building’s closed now.” Of course that didn’t apply to her. She probably lived there, guarding the door against girls who threw themselves at Charles.

  I ran downstairs and outside. Charles was turning his car into his parking space in front of the building. We walked toward each other, but stopped an unnatural distance apart. “I thought I’d get here earlier,” he said. “My wife had me at one of her charity things.”

  “I waited for you. I even went to your office. Risked having Dorothy kill me.”

  The gulf of sidewalk between us felt like an impenetrable barrier. Charles looked as if he would devour me if only he could cross it. “Are you walking home?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll take the car in a few minutes. I can be there soon.”

  I hurried home, wondering if I could find Rudy’s phone number in the university directory. Wondering if I had a university directory. Wondering if I cared. When I unlocked my apartment door, the phone was ringing. It was Iris. Quentin Boudreau McKenna, III had been asking where I was, how to find me.

  “Did you tell him?”

  “Of course I told him,” Iris said. “The poor boy is in agony.”

  “He’ll get over it.”

  “You’ve got to talk to him at least. Even Louis says you should talk to him.”

  She would bring Louis Paradiso into it. The sure-fire way to get me to do anything. “Is Quentin going to call me?” I asked.

  “No. He’s coming there. To Las Cruces. I think he left earlier today.”

  “Iris.”

  “You should come back with him, Hannah. Whatever you’re doing there, it’s no good.”

  Through my front window, I saw Charles park and get out of his car. “I have to go now.”

  He came in and he closed the door and he pulled me to him. He kissed my neck and started undressing me. We dropped our clothes where we stood and fell on top of them. Charles was a lot wilder in lovemaking than he had been at Tierra Blanca. Maybe it was my irresistible powers. Again I had what I wanted. But now Quentin was in his little blue MG, probably doing ninety up state road 181 toward Las Cruces.

  My apartment was hot. The sweat and the daring of being on the floor made everything sexier. Through most of it, I tried to banish images of Quentin proffering his poor diamond ring. Then Charles and I lay back, sated, but unwilling to move from the heat and exhaustion. Eventually Charles lifted up on one elbow and looked at me. “I can only stay another hour,” he said. We started again, much more slowly.

  Charles dozed afterward. When the knock on the door came, he startled awake.

  “Who is that?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know.”

  A louder knock. Charles looked at me, puzzled. I shook my head as if mystified.

  Rudy called my name once, twice.

  “Is that Rudy?” Charles asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Poor kid. He’s probably madly in love with you.”

  I waited. Rudy’s footsteps eventually faded away down
the sidewalk. Charles fell asleep again and my arm was stuck somewhere under his ribcage. My hand went numb. Maybe he’d sleep beyond the next hour, get in trouble with his wife, divorce her, and marry me.

  He snored softly for twenty minutes before the next knock came.

  “Now what?” he mumbled.

  I stayed curled against him and pretended to sleep.

  2

  Rancho Cielito

  Postcard

  Only Louis Paradiso would send a postcard in a crisis.

  Dear Hannah, it opens in his block-print hand. I fear for the life of your sister Iris. She guards a nest and refuses food, even the filé gumbo she always loved, remember? Will you come? Louis P. April 30, 1976.

  I can see it now—the pelicans and their shit-smeared eggs, exposed and vulnerable in a messy nest on the muddy ground. Defying DDT, diving gulls, and developers. Depending on a few millimeters of calcium carbonate and Iris’s protection to carry on the line.

  I leave a note and skulk away on a hot Sunday afternoon. My job, which is hanging by a thread now that I’m no longer sleeping with my boss, will no doubt be terminated by the time I return. I drive my Ford Falcon station wagon from Las Cruces, New Mexico, to Galveston, Texas—reversing the trip I made just eight months ago—and arrive at 5 AM in front of our black grille security gate just as Louis unlocks it for a boxy yellow tractor fixed with a clay-caked bulldozer blade.

  Louis

  Most people, when they meet Louis Paradiso, assume he is Mexican. He often lets the misconception ride, but if you ask him, he’ll ramble on forever about his heritage: octoroon prostitute grandmother from New Orleans, classical musician grandfather from the Austrian Empire, mentally unbalanced father of pure Chickasaw blood, and his beloved mother, Cate, who was fifteen and feral as a wildcat when Louis was born.

  I don’t remember the day my father hired Louis, but I know the story well, as it remained in Louis’s repertory of morality tales taken from his life, the Bible, Jack London, and Have Gun Will Travel. I do remember evenings on the porch swing with Louis, the smells of mildew and DEET on the cotton cushions and Bugler tobacco from Louis’s hand-rolled cigarette, listening to his gravelly voice, not caring that my sister was upstairs reading J. D. Salinger or making pencil drawings of an elephant beetle she trapped in a jar. I preferred the rectangle of stars above the porch rail and Louis’s tales: the first time he bumbled down our driveway, gambled-out and hungover, and my father walked out of the rising sun like Paladin down Main Street and offered him—on the condition he stop drinking—the handyman job, beginning with Wheatena that morning and including meals and accommodation thereafter in the tiny apartment over the garage; or his grandmother Queen Juliette, who once owned a brothel in New Orleans called El Paradiso; or his mother Cate, who “lived high and died low,” which was all he would say about her suicide. Louis adored her, even though she stuck the brothel name “Paradiso” on his birth certificate out of craziness induced by the early death of Louis’s father.

  In the twenty years he’s worked for us, Louis Paradiso tended our land, repaired our house and turned himself into a minor legend on Galveston Island. He knows every tree in our pecan orchard, every anhinga in the freshwater pond, every palmetto, pepperbush, and Mexican plum along the driveway. He can read the weather from bruise-colored cumulus roiling up in the southeast or from a rustle of magnolia leaves in the yard. He can sense a freak blue norther when it’s still in Kansas or a tropical storm when it’s still off Florida. He had no family left, so he adopted ours. Before my father died, Louis helped him with his businesses, the semi-legitimate Bolivian silver mines, the Mexican sweatshops, the cousins and uncles who needed money, and the Gulf Coast shrimpers with chunks of opal hidden in the holds. He sang “Baton Rouge Blues” at my father’s funeral, accompanying himself on his Fender Stratocaster. Louis Paradiso has always been the center strand in our family’s frayed skein of love.

  “One hundred dollars an hour,” Louis tells me, cutting a glance at the plaid-shirt cowboy, who has his boots up in the tractor cab while he sucks slow drags on a cigarette. “It’s a Fiat-Allis 16-B and the blade’s a little too heavy for the job.”

  “Too heavy for what job, Louis?”

  “Carrington can’t have the money until the engineer says the land is okay. The engineer won’t say the land is okay until everything’s graded and he can fool around with his bullshit tests. He thinks Iris is out there to trick him.”

  Iris

  My sister, Iris Benicia Delgado: at twenty-six, two years older than I am, but living in another century, the seventeenth perhaps. Dropped out of Sam Houston High in the tenth grade because the teachers were “Philistines.” Took up self-study of subjects she considered vital: natural history (specialty in Gulf birds), Southwest US history (specialty in Conquistadors), French literature (specialty in Georges Bataille), ecology (specialty in early eco-terrorism). Refuses to drive, refuses to eat or wear parts of animals, refuses to be wrong, and refuses to leave home even though our mother is trying to sell it out from under her.

  Louis leads the way through the pecan orchard, which is dying from fungal leaf scorch, making it easy to glimpse our house through the stripped, black branches. My father, Ramiro Delgado, bought the place thirty years ago after he sailed home on the SS Pretoria Castle with his British bride, Carrington. It’s always been called Rancho Cielito even though it’s not a ranch. But the opulence of Rancho Cielito—its name, its mansion, its size and situation on the northwest coast of the island—was meant to show all of Galveston that Ramiro’s branch of the Delgados were Mexicans to be reckoned with.

  Still grand from a distance, the house sits like a dowager princess amid her fading court—encroaching salt marshes, some spindly yuccas and two morose magnolias in the yard. A deep veranda with eight brick archways runs the length of the front. Above that, two more stories of ivory stucco and red-framed windows, with improbable turrets at the top front corners. Terra rosa tiles from Oaxaca cover every peaked or curved or dormered roof section.

  We come out of the orchard and start north across the flat four acres that run between the pecan trees and the hazy mangrove coast of Bayou Oviedo. Usually this ground is covered in crown vetch and St. Augustine turfgrass, but now the eastern half has been graded to a dried-mud crust, presumably by Plaid-Shirt and his Fiat-Allis 16-B. Louis avoids this section, as if the newly graded ground is contaminated or forbidden. Instead we walk through shin-deep yellow grass, still laden with dew. The sun is an ovate blob of ocher, stashed in one corner of the east. It looks squashed and bloated, too huge to overcome its ponderousness and rise much farther. Still, the heat of the day is gathering. Every few yards, a snowy plover startles up in a tan and white flapping arc, whistling a shrill turrweet and disappearing a few yards away. I can smell the low-water salt smell of the bayou.

  As we near the mangrove marshes, the grass gives way to stubby fan palms and big clumps of asparagus fern. I don’t see Iris until we’re almost on top of her. She is sitting on the ground in front of a pathetic pup tent. She has marked a perimeter for her little camp by jamming broken sticks into the ground to make a circle maybe twenty feet across. She has binoculars around her neck, a fat black pencil behind her ear, a cloth-bound notebook in her lap. Propped on a little fake veneer table that I recognize as the nightstand from her bedroom is our old green Coleman jug with the copper spigot. At least she’s still drinking water.

  Behind the tent is the pelican nest, just as I pictured it: a low mound of wet dirt, hollowed down the middle and roughly outlined with a mess of twigs and feathers, reeds and refuse. In the center are two chalky-white eggs, each as large as my closed hand.

  By way of greeting, Iris stands and asks, “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, nothing. I just came to watch Mother bulldoze you into the bayou.”

  She ignores me and turns to Louis. “What’s happening up there?” Always thin, Iris looks emaciated now. Her legs are like soda straws in her baggy brown shorts
and her shoulder points jut from her white sleeveless shirt. Her eyes, set back in bruised-looking sockets, are glittery and wild.

  “Iris, honey, you have to come in. You have to eat.” Louis pushes her tangled hair back from her face so lovingly I am reminded of our father, Ramiro. Iris and I adored Ramiro so passionately that for most of our lives we were locked in competition for the slightest sign of favor from him. He could be affectionate in small bursts, which we anticipated the way other kids might wait for Christmas morning, but mostly we loved him from afar. If he wasn’t traveling or in Houston, he was working at home. Even the parties he and Mother gave were part of his career plan, going after politicians and con-men, socialites and celebrities. We never noticed, really, that Louis was our on-the-spot dad, the one who taught us how to roller skate, to name the birds and plants, to pick pecans. Yet he also seemed to be one of us kids. While we longed for our father, he longed for our mother.

  Iris turns her face away from Louis’s loving hand. “I thought you were going to stop her,” she says, her voice trembling with fatigue. Only then do I hear a metallic clink and notice Iris has shackled her ankle to a Texas sabal, the chain snaking twenty feet away to the short, fat palm tree. As eco-terrorist measures go, it’s a rather feeble chain. It reminds me of the kind that used to connect our tetherball to its pole.

  “Sweetheart.” Louis says, “It’s your mother’s land. I can’t stop her.”

  “Yes you can. You and I are the only ones who care about it.”

  A shadow flickers and we all look up to see one of the pelicans circling overhead. It makes an angled glide toward us on its six-foot wingspan, flaps heavily to turn and climb a few feet before gliding round again. Iris tells us, “You have to leave. The mother won’t come down with all these people.” But the urge to protect the eggs is too strong. The pelican skids to a landing a few yards off and waddles up to her nest. She tilts her great, narrow head to look at us with one purplish eye, then climbs on top of the eggs, settling the heavy bulk of her dark brown body on the nest. After stretching once the long white S of her drainpipe neck, she folds it in on itself and rests her yardstick of a bill on her chest.