Lone Star

by Mathilde Walter Clark

  Later, when I told my dad what I’d felt behind each door, a fear so thick you could slice it, he said: Of course they were afraid. They have no right to defend themselves.

  His point was that in New York state, gun laws are more restrictive than in Texas, where you can shoot anything that moves on your property. I said nothing to that. I honestly didn’t know to say.

  But here. Here, for as long as there have been white people, people have sat inside their houses gazing across the plains in anticipation of approaching dust clouds. The man in the brown boulder has spotted me long before I reach the door. He curves like the tip of a banana from the sliver-thin door crack. You lookin’ for somethin’? he says. From the lawn I shout that I’m searching for … 25048. I have to consult my notebook first, the street numbers here are so high I can’t memorize the number, but the man in the doorway doesn’t know which direction I should take, whether up or down. This is 25354, he calls back.

  Do you know the Jungermans?

  I have no idea who they are, he shouts. We don’t know any of our neighbors …

  Back the way I came. A few miles away, a man and woman in their seventies stand waiting at the gate as if for a homecoming relative, Ginger and Ben. There is waving and excitement as I roll up toward their ranch while they walk alongside the car.

  I tell them about the episode with their, what to call him, neighbor, who lives a couple of miles up the road.

  We would be on edge too, Ginger says. Because of the special occasion, they have turned off the invisible alarms that surround the property. You have to be vigilant about home invasions, she says, then goes on to explain how normal it has become for criminals to show up with some kind of excuse, only to take possession of the house and subject its residents to extreme violence.

  What about getting packages in the mail?

  Yes, it’s a problem, Ginger says. The delivery people don’t like it either. Makes everybody feel unsafe. It’s best if we know beforehand.

  Ginger only comes up to my chest, as I come up to most others’ chests. Her silver-gray hair is close-cropped like an elf. She looks like an elf. Oh, good, she says, eagerly, about most everything, the drive, the roadside flowers, Lockhart, my appetite. My dad has said that Ginger was like a little sister to him and Peggy. I practically grew up with Gussie, she says. When her mother was busy, my grandmother took care of her. She flaps her invisible wings. She jingles her bells. I’m still the little one, she says.

  Hovering above the bar in the center of the room, assisted by a pair of heavy chains mounted to the ceiling, is a voluptuous, slightly astonished mermaid carved out of wood. Perhaps she once viewed the world from the bow of a ship, but now she surveys what seems to me the main room of a typical ranch, an enormous, rectangular living room-kitchen-dining area leading out to a terrace. Three stuffed deer heads with antlers hang next to the terrace doors. Arranged on the adjacent wall is a row of rifles fastened in a pattern. Behind the mermaid, on a half wall in the center of the room, is a collection of Danish Christmas plates that have no connection to me.

  The house is filled with people. Their daughter and her husband have driven down from Dallas along with their two children, a boy and a girl, to celebrate Easter. There’s also a man in his forties, whom I’m never introduced to, who slinks around in the background in oversized shorts, T-shirt, and baseball cap. He grabs his own beers from the fridge and moves casually in and out of rooms, but there’s something evasive about his body language that means I don’t really notice him until half an hour after my arrival, and by then it seems too late to be interested in his connection to the family.

  He must be a neighbor, I think, or maybe a handyman on the ranch.

  Maybe he came with the property.

  Maybe he lives in a trailer behind a row of trees …

  From the terrace there’s a view of a bone-dry ravine. I consider the geologic phenomena that Texas is known for, and which I don’t know the names of, either in Danish or English, what such a ravine actually is. At the bottom of the ravine, which cuts through the landscape, grass and trees grow in bunched tufts between a scattering of low, square wooden houses. On the other side of the ravine are ranches like Ginger and Ben’s. What do you call such a clay hollow? I ask. Or is it a gravel pit? Are they in the process of digging something out? I think of the Buda-people’s quarry, hammered into the earth like a heavy stone pot.

  Oh, that’s the river, Ben says. You know, the Pedernales River?

  The river. I’ve seen it on a map, one of Colorado’s tributaries that flows through Austin, and the road they live on also happens to be called River Road. Is that really a river? I ask. Where is the water? And what are the trees doing down there?

  The water just disappeared, Ben says. The riverbed simply dried up, and the weeds’n stuff just started growin’ outta the bottom of it. Ben glances over at me behind his gold-framed glasses. A wry little fox smile. He has plenty of time. He talks to me as if we’d had this same conversation since the beginning of time. If anyone interrupts to add to the conversation, complete Ben’s sentences or make a suggestion for what he should say next, he just waits and finishes what he was about to say with the same indomitable patience as a centipede crawling across a leaf.

  The river has looked that way for four years now. I used to fish, but there’s just no water.

  People have already built houses, I say. At the bottom of the ravine.

  Ben smiles his little fox smile.

  That’s boats. He points at the houses on the other side of the ravine. You see: The houses are up higher, and below are the docks with the boat houses. Patience, patience with the Dane.

  It strikes me that what I’m seeing is directly connected to what Celia and Mel told me the day before. Overdevelopment of the earth creates droughts and floods. Ben says that aquifers, like the one under Gay’s property, are a vital reservoir, and they are enormous. They begin fifty miles north of Austin and run all the way down to south of San Antonio. You know, it’s a big, big area.

  There are two dining tables in the kitchen-living-dining room, one formal and one less formal, just a few feet apart. The formal table has been set, and Ginger has laid out the Easter meal on the kitchen counter so that people can serve themselves, ham and corn and baked potatoes sprinkled with brown sugar. A baking tray filled with sweet rolls smeared with butter and a bowl of Ben’s homemade black-eyed peas. There’s more caster sugar, Ginger says. It’s perfect the way it is, I say. Oh, good, she says eagerly.

  The man in the baseball cap and oversized shorts grabs another beer from the fridge and joins us at the table. It’s the first time I see his face close up, he wears small, round metal glasses, and his short hair, whose color and texture reminds me of ginger peel, is tucked underneath his hat. The daughter’s husband works for Lufthansa and knows a little about Germans. He wants to know what I’m actually doing here. I don’t really know the feeling of belonging to a particular place, I say. To take a place for given. And then I sing my little song about being half-Texan. I’ve heard all the stories, read all the letters. Now I’ve come so far to poke my own finger in the ground.

  Well, you said it correctly, the daughter’s husband says. You’re not half-American, you’re half Texan. Two ve-ry different animals.

  I would like to hear more about that.

  Well, you have to experience it.

  Texas is the only state that used to be its own country, he says. We still see it like that.

  The man in the baseball cap now interrupts in a thick Texas accent. We’re kinda like the Germany of the United States, he says, only friendlier. We think our way of life should be pushed upon other people. Not militantly. Just—suggestively.

  It’s the first time he’s said anything.

  As we eat, I gather from the conversation that he must be Layne, Ben and Ginger’s son, whom I know is about a year older than I am. I have a vague recollection of my grandmother once sending me, when I was a child, a few photos of him and his sis
ter, he was a boy with shiny, copper-red hair, and at the time I didn’t know who he was. Unmarried, no children. On Fridays, he drives up to his parents and spends the weekend. During the week he works for the irs in Austin.

  irs, I say. To me, those three letters have always seemed to conceal an impenetrable mystery, the American tax service. I picture him sitting in a room the size of a basketball court with row after row of tables, where he and his colleagues scrutinize American citizens’ tax returns with a scratchy pencil. But I learn nothing. It’s clear that Layne’s work is off limits; he might as well work for the secret service.

  It’s just accounting, he says. Just numbers’s all.

  A warm and ordinary light pours into the room. Ben makes coffee and tea at the bar underneath the galleon figure using a special machine that makes me feel as though we’re cresting on civilization’s culminating wave. Ginger pulls out the family photo albums. On the way into the room with the albums, she plucks a photo off the hallway wall, a framed shot of Poppa that must have been taken when he was around thirty. I study it, the light from the window reflecting off the glass. Standing tall, he’s turned toward the camera with a face that could belong to a violinist or lion tamer. He’s wearing a leather apron, and his fist is balled proudly to one side, his wrist, he has my dad’s wrist, I think. He has my wrist.

  We read a few faded, photocopied obituaries of people I’ve never known.

  We leaf through the photo albums to prove that we’ve risen from the same dust.

  We have, it swirled away long ago, but we are here, and the glassine sheets crinkle as if alive.

  Before I go, Ginger wants to show me Uncle Gene’s dolls. In addition to his four daughters, Poppa had two sons. The eldest, my dad’s favorite uncle and the one meant to inherit Poppa’s shop, died at age thirty. The other son was homosexual, and although everyone knew it, this fact was never revealed. He had his own hair salon and didn’t care much for children, but he spent most of the energy others use raising children on collecting antique toys. Windup tin things, porcelain figures with loose heads, dolls like the ones Ginger has saved in a box. Itty-bitty, she stands in the closet underneath the swaying light bulb and holds up a doll with a painted porcelain face and clothes from the nineteenth century, like a grotesque baby that the ancestry have delivered in a joint effort across generations.

  I put the car in gear, and Ginger, standing beside Ben at the gate, says: Come back. They have a room that I can use. You are welcome to stay any time. They become two small waving figures in the rearview mirror. Sunset falls over the dry expanse, the light pulling the entire scene backwards to a lost time. A sensation of unreality, to drive through someone’s oblivion. I space out on dusty roads.

  Before I turn onto the first paved road, I glance to the left. Far, far away I can see a dot of a car, enough time, I think, and make the turn. But the car is already at my fender, a pickup truck it turns out, with two rednecks. Furious speed, furious rednecks who are even more furious now that I’m in their way. Their bloodshot eyes fill the entire rearview mirror, not a car to see for miles around, I squeeze the wheel and drive as slowly-quickly as I can, as quickly-slowly, all the way to the right side of the road to give them space. To make me and the white Hyundai as small as possible. But they don’t seem to be conciliatory, they rumble toward me, their grill claws threateningly at my fender. Oh God, I think, maybe this will be the end of me. Then they get tired of me, honk and rage, speeding up and leaving me in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

  i could write an entire thesis on arriving in foreign cities of a certain size, entering them, moving around in them, making them mine. Every big city contains other big cities within them, kaleidoscopic, endless. Buenos Aires has a little of Prague and New York City, Hanoi a little of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires a little of Paris, etc. A small remnant is inscrutably its own. People organize themselves surprisingly alike when they cluster together. I feel at home in cities. When I come to a new city, I know exactly how to move around in it. It’s instinctive, I walk through it so convincingly that locals stop me to ask for directions. Then I have to admit that I’m not from here. I open my mouth, and my accent instantly gives me away. Where are you from? And I tell the truth: other cities. I will always be from other cities, always be searching for the familiar in the strange.

  For the fourth year in a row, Austin is the usa’s fastest-growing city. It’s like showing up at a party one hour before it is to begin, everywhere people are putting the finishing touches on something. The bus I’m waiting in front of the Capitol for is late. Sitting next to me on the bench is a woman with two plastic bags filled with toys. Each time the bus turns out not to be ours, she sighs. She wears a brace just like mine on her knee. She nods at mine. Where did you get your knee brace?

  In Denmark.

  Aha.

  She doesn’t care to know more.

  She explains how she dislocated her knee two years ago. As a waitress. I sense that in the meantime she’s found a new identity in her injury, and that she bears the brace like a badge or medal in memory of the ceremonious day she was reborn.

  On the curb in front of us, a man in his thirties, clean and neat, squatting like a small bird, is shouting bitch at passing cars. Sometimes he turns and looks at us with eyes gentle and innocent as a dog’s. I swear, he says, if I had a gun, I would blow my brains out. That’s what they’re telling me.

  That’s scary! Clearly, the woman with the toys believes she’s less crazy than the schizophrenic on the curb. I believe I’m less crazy than either of them. In every encounter you find the potential to confirm your own civilized forms. He seems as harmless to me as the leaves on a tree. He can do nothing more than sit there and shout, I say.

  That’s scary! And in front of the Capitol? The woman with the knee brace opens her eyes wide. That’s doubly scary.

  Downtown I eat a po’boy with crab meat. On a gravelly construction site, a young woman sits at a desk casting a long shadow on the sidewalk. On the desk is an old typewriter.

  Care for a poem? Her hair glistens. The sheet of paper is already in the roller. Twice a week she sits here whirling poems from the darkness to passersby for a small fee to help her pay rent. Out of politeness I turn and stare at the traffic as she bangs on the keys. I don’t like being watched when I write.

  May I read it to you? I nod, and she reads the poem as if she’s blowing smoke rings into the light-yellow Austin air.

  i’ve received a text from Layne: He is inviting me to dinner. He wants to show me Austin. A turtle swims in the Colorado River. I stand on the bridge above the river, the afternoon traffic dense with bicyclists and cars and joggers in nylon in the noise from the skyline that’s under constant development, and observe the turtle’s little plum-shaped head emerge from under the surface of the water as if searching for something, as if it only recently swam in the Mekong or Ganges and now can’t reconcile itself to all the skyscrapers that have sprouted up on the banks of the river. Its small peg legs paddle through the dark green water. It’s a calming sight. Then the turtle disappears under the bridge, and I head to the bookstore on the other side of the river.

  Layne is late. It doesn’t matter, I was almost hoping he would be. The bookstore was my idea, the perfect meeting place, several floors of books. I lose track of time as I wander about among the shelves, happy, drunken. Maybe he can’t find the store; he’d never heard of it, though it was supposed to be famous. Perhaps it’s only famous among people who, like me, can spend hours running their fingers across covers, skimming, forgetting, remembering. Then I catch sight of him between shelves, for a moment he reminds me of the turtle I’d seen swimming under the bridge, even with his small, wire-rim glasses he looks as though he has to strain to see the world around him, he wanders about as if he’s just misplaced it.

  Layne, I call out. I wave, he blinks. Oh, good, he says, just like his mother.

  •

  I am wearing my red skirt and a blouse with the silk bow. Layne seems satisf
ied to have invited his cousin in the red skirt out to dinner. His car is as tall as a ship, we idle on the bridge, the captain and his passenger, gazing out across the horizon. He rarely drives downtown, he says. Every time we veer too close to something, other cars, the curb, an alarm beeps. He shows me the city as people do here, in motion, through a car window. Here on this stretch was Uncle Gene’s hair salon, here was a bar that brewed its own beer, and here was a supermarket that’s now closed. That’s where I used to take my clothes to the dry cleaners. That’s where Uncle Gene was hit by a car.

  On the bridge the turtle swam under, people have gathered in great flocks to gaze over the river. I ask Layne if he knows what’s going on.

  Oh, that’s just to see them bats.

  A colony of bats live under the bridge, shuttering in the cool darkness of the day, and at twilight, when the degree of darkness, maybe even the moisture in the air and other factors, is just right, they fly out from under the bridge in flocks of hundreds of thousands. People travel from far and wide to watch the sky darken with bats.

  I ask if we can park on one of the side streets up ahead, the sun is setting, the moment can occur at any time, we roll slowly past the waiting masses in rush-hour tempo, but my suggestion makes Layne’s eyelids flutter behind his glasses. The thought of spontaneously parking the car makes him nervous. He can’t parallel park. It’s a disruption in the plan. We’re on our way to dinner at a particular restaurant, a real Austin classic. Used to be a gas station. Used to be that Janis Joplin play’d there almost every night. The bridge is several streets behind us now. Layne wants to do everything right. He researched the menu in advance and confirmed a selection of seafood and vegetarian dishes.