Magnolia City (52 page)

Then she noticed something she’d never seen before. On West Bay, canvas tents had been pitched along the shore. A few makeshift houses had been cobbled together out of cardboard boxes. She stopped for gas at a Texaco pump on 61st Street and asked the attendant who was living in them.

“Unemployed,” he said. “Migratin’ here for winter.”

“Like birds,” Hetty said, pulling out two dollars. She paid for the gas and bought a few apples from a basket on the counter. As she set out to West Beach, more tents appeared on the roadside. The nomads camped wherever they could along the inlets. Each ramshackle camp looked like the debris left by a tidal wave. And perhaps it was. A great swell had rolled across the country, sweeping everyone up in a surge of glittering success that had left them unprepared for its inevitable crash. Here were the homeless it had left in its path. She wondered how long they would be forced to live like this and how people would ever begin to patch their lives back together.

As far as her own life went, all she could do was keep driving westward, following Pearl’s directions, past the Catholic cemetery and the white arches of the Hollywood Dinner Club. As she rumbled by Greens Bayou, teeming with cattails and crocodiles, she found her mind swimming with questions.
Had Termite really accepted bribes? Was he just another corrupt politician? Did that explain Mac’s connection to the Maceos? Is that what brought him to Texas?
The only way to find out was to keep going—past the crooked oaks forever bent in the direction of the winds, out to where the pavement gave way to a dirt road that wound its way through the dunes. On her right, sea grapes twisted through patches of sedge grass, while on her left, laughing gulls soared as the water opened up, steel blue and calm, all the way to Yucatán. The Gulf of Mexico. She’d come to the very edge of America, to its rippling fringe where the sky fell into a different hemisphere. She wasn’t even sure if she’d find her husband out here on this final finger of land or if he’d want her back when she did.

Then she spotted it. Like a tangle of driftwood thrown up on the shore. Pearl’s family beach house, worn to a nub by the salt air. This was squatter’s land that Pearl had said her uncles had fenced off and claimed as their own “against the entire world.” No one else seemed to want to live on this desolate stretch of the island. It was the only house for miles. Hetty could see the hammocks slung like shaggy hair across the brow of the front porch and the wooden storm windows lifted like half-opened eyes. The old place huddled there on its spindly legs, drowsing in the September sun, lifted up on stilts. She half expected it to rouse and scuttle into the surf as she approached. Her heart lifted with the laughing gulls when she spotted the Auburn parked in the shade under the rafters.
He was here.

She pulled next to it and set the brake. She carried Pierce out from under the house, showing him the snails that slid up the stilts. She walked around to the front porch and knocked on the battered screen door. There was no answer. It was unlocked, so she opened it and went in. Someone had been sleeping in one of the hammocks. Its ropes were covered by a rumpled sheet and two pillows. The house looked like a monk’s cell, everything sandblasted to a gray simplicity. An open can of beans yawned on the stove; a bottle of milk and an iron pot of fish stew lurked in the icebox. Garret’s luggage was there, open and overflowing with clothes, but no sign of him. She picked up one of his shirts and smelled it.

Hetty took Pierce out to the beach to look for his father. Sand crabs shuddered away to avoid being crushed underfoot. A tattered beach chair sat crookedly in the sand, a white beach towel tossed close to the surf. Off to the side, boulders jutted out into the water. She walked over. A lot of brown liquor bottles had been smashed on the rocks. She could still catch a faint whiff of whiskey. Some of the shards had been picked up by the tides and were being washed out to sea. She imagined that they would end up on another shore as sparkling pieces of sea glass, worn smooth by the waves.

Her eyes followed them oceanward . . . and saw him. A tiny head bobbing in the water, out by the sandbars where he liked to swim. He was cutting through the water freestyle, kicking up spray. Closer in, fish were jumping: little flashes of silver in the waves. Walking back, she stripped her son naked and sat him in front of her on the wet sand like an offering.

After a while, Garret rode the waves in and waded toward them, salt water streaming off his black tank top. His hair was slicked back, his cheeks rosy from his run in the ocean. He picked Pierce up and held him high in the sun with both hands. He nestled the child in the crook of his elbow, little white buttocks spilling over his bronzed forearm. Hetty thought she’d never seen anything so beautiful in her life, her husband and her naked baby standing in the sea in front of her.
And this is what I gave up so carelessly!

Garret set his son down on the sand and picked up the towel to dry himself off. White surf came bubbling around them. Hetty waited with her head bowed, blushing deeply, unable to speak. She didn’t know what she could possibly say to make Garret forgive her, to ask him to take her back. Words would sound shallow at a moment like this. She might as well write
Forgive Me
in the sand and let the waves wash it away. Her presence would have to speak for her. She had solved her aunt’s enigma of intention. She had made the effort to hunt him down. She had brought Garret his son. The rest was up to him.

The sea breeze cooled her cheeks. She overcame her shame and lifted her eyes. He had finished drying off and stood there with the towel draped over his shoulders, like a priest in a white robe. He was watching her, studying her face for clues. She tried to let her eyes say what her lips couldn’t.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
Finally, without a word, he opened the towel and invited her to step inside. She stood up and moved forward. His skin was cool to the touch; his hair smelled of salt water. When he kissed her, Pierce hugged their legs, looking up and babbling.

Then he said one word clearly in his baby talk:
“Beso.”

Hetty drew back. “Your son just said his first word—in Spanish!”

“What does it mean?”

“Kiss.”

They lifted him up and planted so many
besos
on his bare belly that he squealed with delight.

Pearl had been right. Garret seemed completely charmed by the presence of his son. He had rarely fed him in the past, leaving such chores to Hetty. But when noon came, he insisted on holding Pierce in his lap and spooning fish stew into his mouth at the rickety table in the kitchen. Hetty sat opposite them, sopping up her portion with stale white bread and feeling awkward. She longed to speak but didn’t know how to break through the heaviness of the salt air.

Garret sat Pierce on the floor and watched him play with seashells. The only sound, other than a constant plashing of surf, was the hiss of matches being struck. They smoked in silence until Garret asked, “How did you find me?”

“Pearl figured it out. I thought I’d have to sober you up.”

“I did get ossified the first few days, till I spent a whole night vomiting. The next day I smashed all the bottles that were left around here.”

“What have you been living on?”

“I dig clams. And buy trout from the fishermen. Mostly I just sit in the beach chair and watch the sea, thinking.” He looked at her across the table for the first time. “What have you been up to?”

“Oh, I’ve kept busy. I sold the well, Mac.”

“Why?”

“I realized you were right.” That’s all she could bring herself to say at the moment. She explained the details of the contract and reminded him who Mr. Kozak was.

“Did you pay off the interest owners?”

“Yes. The money’s all been returned.”

“Good.” He nodded. “That’s what I wanted us to do.” Garret hoisted Pierce up and took him outside to play in the surf for a while. Hetty watched them through the screens of the porch, her heart sodden with all she had to say. That urge was coming back, the need to tell the whole story again to release the pressure dammed up inside her. When it was time for the baby’s afternoon nap, she asked Garret to lay him in one of the iron beds at the back of the house. While he was gone, she stripped all her clothes off and stretched out on the hammock with the sheet thrown across it.

He looked surprised when he came back out.

“Mac, do you remember how we used to get naked when we had a confession to make?”

“So that’s what this is about. I was hoping you were trying to seduce me.”

“This is no time for joking. I have some bad news to tell you. Something happened to Pick.”

“Oh, God, not Pick.” The earnest tone in Garret’s voice brought tears rushing to Hetty’s eyes. “What?”

“He’s dead, Mac.” Hetty watched as a look of stunned grief gripped her husband’s face. That cut her to the bone, fearing that Garret would blame her for their friend’s death. She tried to explain what happened but could hardly talk for the sobs that came with the words. She finally got the whole story out but cried so hard, he crawled in beside her and took her up in his arms.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” Garret said, holding her and letting the hammock rock her guilt away.

Hetty shuddered. “Now I understand why you left Kilgore. You were right, Mac. I should have gone with you. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

“It’s all right,” he said, stroking her. “It’s not really your fault. Poke obviously decided to make an example of Pick because he was colored. And by the way, that’s not why I left Kilgore.”

“It wasn’t?” she asked tearfully.

“I guess it’s my turn to get naked.”

“Okay.”

He stood and peeled off his still-damp one-piece bathing suit. She relished a brief glimpse of his body before he rolled back in and pressed up against her. “Remember when I said we had to leave before we got swallowed up by an anaconda?”

“I finally found out what that means. Lockett told me. It’s the name of a mining company! But what does it have to do with your father? I thought he had his own mine.”

“I think it’s time you heard the whole story.”

“It might help me understand you better.”

“First, you need to understand my dad. He was a man who worked in the mines all his life. He had a natural nose for ore. No one knew the business better—how to blast through rock, build tunnels in the deep. He was always down there burrowing, my dad, which is why they called him Termite. He was an earnest man, hardworking. He wanted me to have a better life than he did. He wanted to send me to college. He kept on learning more about the business. He even picked up enough surveying skills to make the discovery that turned him from a miner to a mine owner. This was where all his problems started.”

Garret sat up in the hammock and steadied it with his foot while he tried to explain the technicalities of the mining business. There was a small triangle of land that remained unclaimed at the heart of the Anaconda holdings where Termite worked. It wasn’t very big, less than an acre, Garret said, but a rich vein of copper apexed within the boundaries, giving his father the right by law to mine the vein. He filed patent upon it and began digging out his fortune. But his ex-boss, Marcus Daly, the owner of Anaconda, wasn’t about to let him get away with such audacity. He filed a lawsuit to stop Termite from mining the claim, meanwhile sending crews underground to steal the ore right out from under his feet.

“Daly took almost a million dollars’ worth of copper ore from the MacBride mine. That’s money that should have come to my family,” Garret said.

“No wonder you were upset when you found out that Lamar was stealing our oil. Talk about déjà vu.”

“It brought it all back. I knew we couldn’t win because my dad hadn’t. They found a way to rob him of his Senate seat. They broke him in court. They would have done the same to us. They always do. That’s why I gave up. That’s the only reason. I probably shouldn’t have left you, but I just couldn’t stay.”

“So your dad never took bribes?”

“He didn’t have to. He made his own money. The miners loved him.”

“Speaking of money . . .” Hetty showed him the wad of cash in her purse and described where it came from. She explained how she got the bruise rouging her cheek. Garret kissed it and acknowledged the risk she had taken to pay off their debts.

“Now I feel bad that I left you. But I had to clear out of there in a hurry. I was really afraid I’d end up like my dad.” Garret lay back down on the pillows.

“What happened to Termite?”

“When they took his Senate seat away and people stopped believing in him, it just crushed him. He ended up drinking himself to death.”

Hetty lay on her side and watched him as he talked, studying every nuance of regret on his face. His long eyelashes were at half-mast, his crystal-blue eyes darkened. His lips didn’t smile, and he had a scruffy growth of beard. But still, she found his uncertainty irresistible, something broken she could mend with her love. The first night she met him, she hadn’t been able to get a good look at his face, and now she wondered if she’d ever really seen him clearly. She’d fallen in love with his fearlessness, his courtship of chaos. Now she needed to embrace the faint heart that also quivered in his breast when he was afraid.