Near the middle of the bridge we had to halt behind a short line of cars while the lift span rose to let a large ketch go motoring through. Its sails were furled and it trailed a small wake in the light of the pale half-moon just above the water to the west. Even though the calendar said it was winter and we had recently had a brief cold snap, the evening was warm as spring. The breeze was gentle, the air moist and smelling of tidal marsh.
I’d never seen the ocean until I came to Galveston. The first time I stood on the beach and stared out at the gulf it struck me as beautiful, but also damn scary—and I detested the feeling of being afraid. I couldn’t remember having been truly frightened before except for one time when I was fourteen. I’d been beating the brush for strays all morning when I stopped to eat the lunch our maid Carlotta had packed for me. It was a heavy meal and made me sleepy, so I lay down for a nap in the raggedy shade of a mesquite shrub at the bottom of a low sandrise. The shrilling of my horse woke me to the sight of a diamondback as thick as my arm and coiled up three feet from my face. The horse snatched the reins loose of the mesquite and bolted over the rise. If the damn jughead hadn’t spooked so bad the snake probably would’ve slid on by with no trouble, but now it was scared too and ready to give somebody hell for it. I figured if I tried to roll away it would get me in the neck and that would be all she wrote. Its rattle was a buzzing blur and I could see its muscles flex as it coiled tighter. I knew it was going to strike me in the face any second—and I was suddenly afraid. And then in the next instant I was furious at myself and I thought, To hell with it—and made a grab for the snake. It hit my hand like a club and I rolled away hard as the rattler recoiled. I scrambled over the rise on all fours and whistled up my horse and got the Winchester out of the saddle scabbard. The snake had started slithering off but then coiled up buzzing again when I ran back to it. I admired its courage even as I blew its head off. The bastard had nailed me on the bottom edge of the hand, and I cut the wound bigger and sucked and spat for a while, then tied a bandanna tight around my wrist. I draped the snake over my neck—I later made a belt of the hide—and mounted up and headed for home. I was sick as hell for three days, but I promised myself if anything even came close to scaring me again, I’d go right up to whatever it was—man, beast, or bad weather—and kick it in the ass. But nothing had ever really spooked me again, not until I saw the Gulf of Mexico.
The day after my first look at the gulf, I bought a swimming suit and returned to the beach. I watched the swimmers carefully for a while and then started imitating their techniques in water no deeper than my hips. And I taught myself to swim. I practiced and practiced over the next few days until I could swim parallel to shore in shallow water for a steady hundred yards.
Then one bright noonday I swam straight out from shore until I was gasping and my arms were heavy and aching. I clumsily treaded water and looked back at the tiny figures of the people on the beach. I must’ve been out two hundred yards. The dark water under me seemed bottomless and I couldn’t help thinking of all the shark stories I’d so recently heard. The most fearsome were about Black Tom, a hammerhead more than twenty feet long that they said had been prowling the waters around the island since before the World War. They said its top fin was as big as a car door and spotted with pale bullet holes.
I’d been terrified by the thought of being so far out in the water, which of course was why I did it. It would be better to drown, better to be eaten by sharks, than to be so afraid of the sea—or of anything else. So I’d made the long swim. And it worked. I was still a little scared, sure, but not as much as before, and I’d proved I could beat the fear, that was the thing. As I started stroking back toward the beach, I didn’t know if I’d make it, but I was feeling great. When I finally tumbled up on the sand, I sprawled on my back, my chest heaving, and stared up at the dizzy blue depth of the sky—and the people sunning themselves around me must’ve thought I was a lunatic, the way I broke out laughing.
Ever since then, I’d made the same swim once every two weeks. And after I found out that sharks fed mostly at night, I’d always made the swim after dark. Always a little tight in the throat at the thought of what might be swimming close by.
The causeway melded into the island and became Broadway Avenue. We drove through the deep shadows of palm trees and live oaks lining a wide grassy esplanade that separated the opposing traffic lanes and held the tracks for the interurban, the electric passenger train that ran back and forth between Galveston and Houston.
We stopped at a red light, and a Model T sedan started laboring across the intersection, its motor rapping in the distinct Model T way. The old Ford was missing its left front fender and had received a splotchy handbrush coat of green paint as pale as lettuce.
“Look at that rattletrap,” LQ said. “Thing could use a pair of crutches.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure,” I said. “Some of those old T’s don’t look like much but they run like a Swiss watch.”
In the glow of the streetlamps I saw that the driver of the heap was a Mexican with a drooping gray mustache and wearing a straw hat. A burly guy sat beside him but his face was obscured by the shadows. Another passenger sat in the darkness of the backseat.
As the Model T passed by directly in front of us, the passenger at the near window leaned forward to look out and the lamplight fell full on the face of a girl. Blackhaired, darkskinned. Our eyes met—and for that brief instant I felt naked in some way that had nothing to do with clothes. Then the old car was clattering away down the shadowed street.
“Whooo,” LQ said. “You see that?”
“What?” Brando said from the backseat. His attention had been elsewhere.
“That was some finelooking chiquita,” LQ said.
I busied myself lighting a cigarette. I wasn’t one to get caught off guard by things, including some dopey sensation I didn’t understand, and it irked me that the girl’s look had ambushed me like it did.
The light turned green and LQ got the Dodge rolling, looking to his left at the fading single taillight on the Model T. I took a look too—then told myself to cut the crap. The world was full of goodlooking girls.
“You shoulda hollered something at her in Mexican,” LQ said to me. “Maybe get a little something going.”
“It’s Spanish, not Mexican, you peckerwood,” Brando said. “How many times I got to tell you?”
“And how many times I got to tell you,” LQ said. “Spanish is what they talk in Spain. Let me ask you something: what do they talk in Germany? German, aint it? And in France? I do believe they call it French. In China they talk Chinese. Get the picture? Anybody’s a peckerwood in this car it’s you.”
“You are one ignorant hillbilly,” Brando said. “What do you call what we talk in America, for Christ’s sake—American?”
“Goddam right,” LQ said. He gave me a sidelong wink.
“Jesus Christ,” Brando said.
“You shoulda seen her, Ramon,” LQ said, grinning at Brando in the rearview. “Finelooking thing. I always heard them young beaner girls prefer doing it with Americans on account of we know how to treat their hairy little tacos so much better than you boys.”