Page 52 of The Crush
“It was late, but Tadeo answered. And he showed up. Danny, too. They picked me up along the side of the road before I even made it halfway back to my truck. Helped me get it out of the ditch, taught me how to not get itquiteso stuck next time.”
He smiles, and I smile with him, but I feel like I’m still missing something. “The deer…that doesn’t sound like it was your fault. Why would you have been in trouble?”
Gabe swallows, once again turning his head to stare out at nothing.
“Gabe? What aren’t you telling me?”
“I—uh—I wasn’t by myself. I had someonewith me.”
Wekept trying to get the truck out. He’d saidwe.
“Like a date?” That still didn’t explain it. All my brothers had been allowed to date before they even got their licenses, and with far less required supervision than I was, so if the fact that he was on a date wasn’t the problem then…it waswhohe was on the date with. “Oh.”
“Yeah,” Gabe says, likely seeing the understanding set in. “If you can count driving on back country roads as a date.”
I laugh, tears stinging my eyes again as more pieces click firmly into place. “Well, I mean,Iwould, but…I’ve had some pretty great times on back country roads recently.”
I bump him in the side with my shoulder, and he gives me a tentative smile before nudging me with his in return. “Too much information.”
A few minutes pass before either of us speaks again, and he clears his throat before continuing, “I don’t want you to think it’s because Danny has something on me or anything. Even before that night, Danny was always good to me growing up. Still is now. And after…neither of them ever said anything or treated me any different. I was still just Gabe.”
“JustGabe is pretty great.”
He smirks, some of the usual confidence back in his face. “Lucky for you.”
I rest my head against his broad shoulder. “Lucky for me, hermano.”
Gabe doesn’t stay too long after that, telling me as he gets up to leave that he doesn’t want to miss out on the house potentially being so quiet. He’s halfway to his truck before I sprint after him, nearly tackling him to the ground with how hard I hug him.
“Jeez, fine, I love you, too,” he tells me as he hugs me back.
By the time I let him go, my tears are falling again, and I don’t even try to hide them as I watch his truck until it disappears out of sight.
The Water
Once upon a time in Texas, the sky refused to rain.
A dry spell turned biblical plague, “the drought of record” spanned seven seemingly unending years, marking the 1950s as the hottest and driest ever known in my home state. Years when crops withered and pastures turned to dust, when cattle cried from hunger and thirst, when a way of life seemed destined to die.
By the time it was over, tens of thousands of farms and ranches had disappeared from the rural landscape, and all but ten of Texas’s 254 counties had been declared disaster areas by President Eisenhower. The government aid that came with that distinction, the plans to expand the state’s reservoirs, and the promises of “never again” were of little comfort. After all…all it takes is one time for you to lose everything.
Many farmers and ranchers, particularly hard hit by a combination of skyrocketing feed costs and plunging market prices, hadn’t been able to hang on until the rain returned, and generations of hard work and tradition were lost as people fled to the cities and their water. A mirage in the desert that they crawled to with promises to themselves that they’d return.
They didn’t.
My family had been one of the ones able to remain…though perhapsunwillingto leave would be a more honest way to put it. My father’s father held the reins of his home in an iron grip, deeply resentful that Mother Nature would burn the land so soon after he and his fellow veterans had returned home from the hell of World War II. So much for peacetime.
By June of 1953, just three years into the drought, things had gotten so bad in Laredo that even the river went dry for the first time in recorded history. A fact that made it all the more surprising when it flooded one year later as Hurricane Alice dumped more than thirty inches of rain north of Del Rio, the water rising so high that the bridge connecting Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico was swept beneath the current.
More devastation on top of devastation, the return of water enough to drive even more people from their homes on both sides of the river. Enough to drown you when all you needed was a drink.
At seventeen years old, my father had fought floodwater to get from his ranch in La Orilla to the small restaurant in Laredo owned by my mother’s parents, had sat on the roof with her and watched the water slowly recede over the coming days.
At least now, the drought will end, he thought.At least now, things will get better.
They didn’t.
The drought would last for three more years until April of 1957 when a storm would unleash tornadoes, hail, and rain over Texas in a matter of hours. Only a few days shy of the duration of Noah’s flood, the rain kept falling for more than a month, the very definitionof too much of a good thing as every river in Texas overran its banks.
