by Herocious
air conditioner. We put on our socks and shoes and turn off the lights and bolt our front door.
In an effort to maximize space in our 523 square foot apartment, we chain our bikes outside our building, underneath the stairs. We’ve seen other bikes secured this way, so we don’t think anything of it other than the clutter it spares us from storing them on the balcony.
But when we’re opening the combination lock, a carousing Mexican stops to offer some sagacity. Beginning in broken English and then sliding into the Spanish of Mexicans, which is choppy and hacks off final syllables, he tells us we need to be careful with our money. He tells us there are bike thieves around here. Ladrones. Even last night he saw some carry off a couple bikes like ours. He tells us the chain we have is as good as shit for these professionals, who come prepared with scissors and saws. Then they ride off into the darkness.
Poof!
I nod, my arms folded across my chest, my outlook on life grave. The old Mexican lifts the sombrero on his head to scratch a few gray hairs. He tells us again these are times when we have to be cautious with our money, and he walks away.
His dusty boots resound on the concrete pathways that wind through The Oaks. I listen to their clip-clop and pedal, a few feet behind Bridget.
9
Dogs with underbites are funny. Today Bridget made an appointment with a hack vet who advertises in the Austin Chronicle, and while Honeyed Cat is probed and analyzed in one of two examination rooms, there’s a dog with an underbite waiting in the lobby with me.
She weighs 11.2 lbs and has white hair. Her owner, dressed in pink, finds a mysterious pustule on her dog’s back.
“What’s that?” she bemuses with bated breath.
She parts some white hair and gasps. I take a peak to see the damage. It looks bloody and irritated. I imagine the dog is experiencing some pain due to this skin lesion. She might even be screaming on the inside.
Pets: they say a lot about human nature. Why do people like to be in the company of pets? Why do we feel it’s our duty to take care of a cat that comes back for more food? Why do we cuddle with dogs and gaze into their nearly blind eyes? Why do we speak to a living creature that cannot understand or speak back? Why do we endure their attacks? Why do we attempt to train and domesticate?
I can name people who care for their animals with more love and lucre than some families give to their children.
I can name people who laugh when their dogs growl and bark at strangers.
What happened to innocent until proven guilty? For these people, their pets are the most reliable judges of character.
I want to know how vets feel about pets. I want to know what this racket of affluent animal doctors thinks about the flood of people who seek their advice and treatment on a regular basis because they want their pets to live forever in resplendent health.
The dog with the underbite is thirteen years old. I overhear her pink owner say this to the vet, who seems crazy on the other side of the counter. He has eyeglasses on the tip of his nose and the widest eyes I’ve ever seen. He looks hopped up on a bit of cat cocaine. He doesn’t have a problem telling the pink owner her dog is dying. She can try to keep her alive a little longer, but these are her last weeks.
Bridget exits the examination room, Honeyed Cat alert and childlike in her cradled arms, and Bridget is crying. I’m alarmed. I think the worst: that Honeyed Cat is going to die of feline leukemia.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
Bridget doesn’t answer. She wipes away a fallen tear, sets Honeyed Cat on the seat next to me, and says, “Can you take her?”
I close my netbook, which is the sole carrier – stupid me! – of my memory, and look at the jade eyes that have come to mean so much.
Bridget walks across the tiled waiting room to the counter, where she foots the bill.
$115 to learn that Honeyed Cat is FIV positive. That’s what the cracked-out vet did. Never again is Honeyed Cat going to be the same in our minds and hearts. She’s infected. If she gets sick, her immune system could falter and she could die.
Feline Immunodeficiency Virus isn’t the worst possible news, but it isn’t the best.
I carry Honeyed Cat to our car. I speak to her in gentle whispers. There’s a word for what I’m doing: anthropomorphism.
On our second drive from South Florida to Austin, this tiny cat coped with the exhaustion and ruggedness of 1,420 miles on the road. She was healthy then, at least in my mind and heart. She was Super Cat. There was nothing wrong with her apart from the occasional flea or tape worm.
Knowledge may be power in some instances, but it’s also helplessness.
“Do you have any other cats?”
That’s what the wide-eyed vet asked Bridget after taking longer than usual running the tests. She must’ve been a wreck in that examination room.
“No,” she said. “Honeyed Cat is the only one.”
“Good.”
“Why is that good?” asked Bridget.
“Your cat is FIV positive. We ran the test twice to make sure. Both times it came out positive.”
“Okay. What does that mean?”
“Don’t worry, Honeyed Cat isn’t in pain. But she can infect other cats. And if she gets sick, as with HIV, her immune system won’t function normally. You can think of it like a sleeping alligator.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Feed her a high-protein diet. If you see her sneezing more than normal, take her to the vet. A simple Cold could weaken her enough to be fatal. Other than that, your cat should live for another ten, maybe even fifteen years.”
“How old do you think she is?”
“Well,” said the vet, “was she smaller when you found her?”
“Yes.”
“Then she’s probably three.”
3
“Hey,” I say to Bridget, “remember that caffeinated clerk in the Louisiana Kangaroo Express who kept nodding and shaking his head?”
“Yeah.”
“I think the ephedrine he sold me fucked me up.”
I’m sitting on our new balcony with the sun shining on my left shoulder. I go ahead and try again to determine whether anything is wrong inside my chest cavity.
After unloading our home from the Silverado, my armpits smell like bacteria. Maybe if I used deodorant with aluminum and parabens in it, my bodily stank wouldn’t be so offensive. But, to preserve the health of my memory when I get to be an old man, I refuse to lather my armpits with anything other than natural deodorants. And this is the price I have to pay after 24 hours of no shower and no bed: effluvia.
“What do you mean?” asks Bridget, more ragged from the road than concerned.
“I don’t know if I should’ve taken those pills,” I complain. “The box didn’t even list all the inactive ingredients. Whatever else was in them fucked me up.”
I stretch my left arm far over the wrought-iron railing to illustrate my pain.
“When I do this,” I explain, “my heart feels like it’s being compressed.”
“Maybe you have heartburn.”
“I don’t know.” I stretch and have trouble breathing, “Does heartburn feel like your ribcage is suffocating your heart?”
Bridget doesn’t answer. I think she recognizes the alarmist in me surfacing.
She goes about unpacking the boxes I finished unloading while I wonder about the inactive ingredients – Yellow 5, Red 40? – that are squeezing my heart pulpy.
9
Outside in the parking lot, my other neighbor, not the crazy girl, is cleaning his car. I spy on him through the drawn blinds of our kitchen window. My car is much dirtier than his and still I haven’t thought about a carwash.
“What’s he using there?” I ask Honeyed Cat. “Is he using a special blue cloth? No, he’s using a blue towel. There’s no way he bought a special blue cloth to clean his car. He isn’t the kind of person who’d buy a special blue cloth to clean his car.”
He holds the towel at shoulder heig
ht, spreads it as far apart as it’ll go, folds it in half, and then in half again, and wipes the hood clean. He moves to the roof of the car. I’m surprised at how well his blue towel works. No water, no soap, just a dry towel.
Here in Austin, there’s a lot of pollen riding the springtime air. If you don’t give your car due diligence, it’ll soon be brushed yellow, like mine.
And after it rains, the pollen becomes even more unsightly.
I decide right then and there to clean my car with a dry towel once Bridget gets back from work at the Children’s Autism Center in Round Rock. But I probably won’t.
I leave for the Twin Oaks Public Library. On my way down the flight of stairs, I think about stopping to chat with my neighbor, whom I’ve only said hello to once before, but once I reach the parking lot asphalt I’m only able to smile and admire his work.
On Congress Ave, the maintenance man for the adjacent complex looks up from a doorjamb he’s working on and sees my eyes on him. I nod and say hello. He doesn’t nod back, or acknowledge me in any noticeable way.
“Fair enough,” I say. The next man coming my way is Mexican. He wears a black baseball cap and smokes heavily on a cancer stick. I decide right then and there I’m going to say hello to prove to myself the people around me are friendly. But as we pass, he turns his head in the other direction and blows cancer, his eyes never meeting mine, so I stay quiet and don’t even manage a nod.
A busload of people gets off the 1M at the HEB grocery store that I love so much. It’s interesting to see how some walk quickly and others take their precious time. One of the busiest
