“Did you get a dog today?” he asks.
“I went for a walk. He followed me home.”
“I saw you feed him. He’s not leaving now.”
“I don’t mind.”
Samson eyes me for a moment, then wipes sweat away from his forehead with his arm. “What are Sara and Marcos doing tonight?”
I shrug. “She said something about a cookout.”
“Good. I’m starving.” He goes back to tacking shingles onto the roof.
“Who is Marjorie?” I ask.
“She owns this house. Her husband died a couple of years ago, so I help her out every now and then.”
I wonder how many people he knows in this neighborhood. Did he grow up in Texas? Where did he go to school? Why is he going to the Air Force? I have so many questions.
“How long have you had houses here?”
“I don’t have houses here,” he says. “My father does.”
“How long has your father had houses here?”
Samson takes a second to answer. “I don’t want to talk about my father’s houses.”
I chew on my lip. It seems like a lot of questions are off-limits with him. I hate it because it makes me even more curious. I don’t come across people who hoard secrets like I do. Most people want a listener. Someone they can spill everything to. Samson doesn’t want a listener. Neither do I. Which probably explains why conversations between us feel different than conversations I have with other people.
Our conversations feel splotchy. Like globs of ink and lots of white space.
Samson begins putting all his tools back in his toolbox. It’s still light out, but it won’t be for much longer. He stands up and comes back up to the top level, then sits down next to me on the roof.
I can feel the heat from his body, he’s so close.
He rests his elbows on his knees. He really is a beautiful person. It’s hard not to stare at people like him. But I think his charisma comes more from the way he carries himself than how he looks. He may have an artistic side.
There’s definitely a quiet aspect to him that makes him seem introspective. Or maybe he’s just guarded.
Whatever it is that makes him up as a whole, I find myself viewing him as a project I want to take on. A challenge. I want to crack him open and see what’s inside him that makes him the only person on the planet I’m genuinely curious about.
Samson runs a thumb across his bottom lip, so naturally I’m already staring at his mouth when he begins to speak. “There was this fisherman who used to come around a lot,” he says. “His name was Rake. He lived on his boat and would go up and down the coast from here to South Padre. Sometimes he’d anchor his boat right out there and swim up to the beach and join random people at their cookouts. I don’t remember a whole lot about him, but I remember he used to write poems on scraps of paper and give them to people. I think that’s what fascinated me the most about him. He was this fearless fisherman who wrote poetry.” He smiles when he says that. “I remember thinking he was some kind of untouchable mythical creature.” Samson’s smile fades, and he pauses for a moment. “Hurricane Ike hit in 2008. It destroyed most of the island. I was helping with the cleanup and I found Rake’s boat toward the end of the peninsula in Gilchrist. It was in shreds.” He fingers his necklace, looking down at it. “I took a piece of the boat and made this necklace out of it.”
He keeps his fingers on his necklace and looks back out at the ocean, sliding the piece of wood back and forth through the cord.
“What happened to Rake?”
Samson faces me. “I don’t know. He wasn’t technically a resident of the area, so he wasn’t counted among the missing or dead. But he never would have abandoned that boat, even during a hurricane. I don’t know that people actively searched for him, to be honest. I’m not even sure anyone noticed he was missing after the hurricane.”
“You noticed.”
Samson’s expression changes when I say that. There’s a sadness in him and a little bit of it seeps out. I don’t like it because apparently sadness is what I connect with. I feel like he’s tugging at my soul with that look.
Samson isn’t at all who I thought he was when I met him. I don’t know how to process that. Admitting he’s nothing like I assumed he was makes me disappointed in myself. I’ve never looked at myself as judgmental, but I think I am. I judged him. I judged Sara.
I look away from Samson and stand up. I step down onto the lower level of the roof and turn around when I reach the window. We exchange a stare that lasts for about five silent seconds. “I was wrong about you.”