by Herocious
9
Somewhere in the Florida panhandle, Bridget notices my slack jaw.
“Aye Viejo,” she says, “I don’t want you driving anymore.”
We pull into a rest area with nighttime patrol. The last image I have before trying to sleep is of a portly security guard wearing a green windbreaker and a brimmed hat. He’s standing malignantly by a picnic table. He reminds me of a murderer surveying his prey from a mountaintop somewhere in Oslo.
I take off my eyeglasses and get underneath the blanket with Bridget. We attempt to spoon.
“Wait,” I say, and lock my door.
The cab isn’t dark owing to the yellow lights shining down on the rest area. And the grounds are noisy with the diesel purr of semis. To make matters worse, I can’t keep the middle seatbelt buckle from knifing my loin.
Bridget is no better off. Half her body hangs off the seat. Still, we press into one body and somehow find the land of nod.
At 7AM, I jolt awake and have a pressing need to hit the road posthaste. Bridget isn’t ready to travel yet, but the road summons. I rub the little sleep I got out of my eyes and look around to see this place I’m about to leave behind. Then I turn the engine over and merge onto I-10 West.
CHANGE ENGINE OIL
By no means am I wise. I wasn’t born wise, and the world hasn’t had enough time to make me wise. But the world is trying. Like this morning, at 7AM, the world wants to show me the soft pink hues of a foggy sunrise.
I feel like I’m driving above everything around me. All I can see are treetops and this sky washed out in pink. To think this happens every day.
Unearthly, that’s the word that comes to mind as I drive across the land. The earth is unearthly. My heart grows light and playful. There’s gentleness in the new morning. There’s growth, ripening, and maternal protection in the new morning, but before every new morning comes the end of deepest night.
I ask Bridget if she can record this scene on her iPhone while the radio plays Under the Bridge.
3
Of the many amenities society offers, public libraries sit at the top of my list. I have two library cards on my key ring: Miami-Dade and Austin. Both are predominantly green, which I like. Green is a good color.
The Miami-Dade card is flanked with palm fronds. A slice of blue heaven crowns the Spanish roof of some building. A vibrant sun shines down on a tiled courtyard. I love Miami’s sky.
The Austin card has a field of grass leaves, wheat chaff, dandelions, and a butterfly in the foreground. Stars pop. One flies above the rest: the Lone Star. In the background, the Congress Ave Bridge leads to downtown. Sunrays shoot from an invisible sun.
There’s no blue sky on Austin’s library card because the sky in Austin isn’t blue. It’s a white sky here, white and vast in every direction. When the time comes, I’ll use my local library’s Wi-Fi to find employment.
When will this be?
A perfectly reasonable question that deserves an answer considering I’ve holed myself up in our apartment every day for the past two months while Bridget jumpstarts what will prove to be a thriving career in the booming field of autism.
Again I’ve let myself become a lowlife. Even though I have a readership of only family and friends at best, I’ve decided to write another manuscript, a follow-up to the zeros and ones of my unpublished Ernest Pipe manuscript, which I wrote in Chicago under the working title:
C R A S S I T U D E
While the race for a career goes on relentlessly around me, I sit inside, out of contact from the rest of us, I lag, I fall to the bottom of the ladder, and I do it writing. Someday, the world is going to go on without us. How we spend our limited time on earth, how seriously we seek and care for a job, is up to you and me. The older I get, the more I’m convinced writing is what I’m supposed to do with my finite time here. It’s through writing that I will make the most of my life. I understand the beauty behind marriage and family. I, too, want to ramify the tree of humanity, but words will be my legacy. However trifling, my legacy will be a creation of love and honesty. It’s only fault, if any, will be that it’s all too human.
7
In Texas, there’s a city in the middle of nowhere and it’s the state seat. Once called Waterloo, the Texas capitol was renamed Austin, in honor of Stephen F. Austin, who, standing by a live oak, signed an important treaty with the Native Americans in the early nineteenth century. The live oak that helped establish the first boundary line in the Lone Star State still lives on Baylor St and 6th St despite recent vandalism.
Some people believe Treaty Oak is ~500 years old.
In Texas, there’s a natural spring that, three centuries ago, Native Americans visited to mend their wounds. The site became part of Zilker Park, cared for by Austin in the heart of the city, and it took the name Barton Springs Pool. Old Pecan trees guard the 1,000 foot long swimming hole dammed off on either side. When I do my rendition of a swan dive into the year-round chilly waters, I can feel the water piped up from what I imagine is the center of the earth. This is the mother spring. My scrotum tightens. I surface for air and look around me at the sunbathers on the hill.
It’s no ocean, but it does the job pretty decent.
In Texas, there are at least three Austin transplants. Few people know of them, but if you rummage in their pockets, you’ll see their mugs staring out of Texas drivers’ licenses, and you’ll scan their zip codes as AUSTIN TX 78704 because they were forced to surrender their previous state IDs.
One of these transplants, however, doesn’t have a license at all.
She doesn’t need one because she doesn’t drive a vehicle. As a matter of fact, she never leaves the house.
5
Honeyed Cat has turned our concrete balcony into hunting grounds. She crouches in the corner, behind a green potted plant, and waits for birds to alight on the wrought-iron railing.
Grackles with yellow eyeballs preen their feathers, unaware of the tiny cat not more than five feet away.
Honeyed Cat’s tail, curled like a candy cane, freezes one inch above the concrete. She readies her tensile muscles, locks her eyes on the quarry, and, when I least expect it, bursts into a choreographed pounce.
The grackles squawk. Their feathers explode in a chaotic flurry until flight is found. I’ve seen this happen with Honeyed Cat’s retractable claws dangerously close.
But she isn’t discouraged. There will be other birds. In this way, the hunt continues, except instead of using the green potted plant as cover, she’ll move to the carpet of our bedroom and sink into alert repose by the sliding glass door, which we leave open at all hours of day and night, at least for now.
This keeps her life interesting. It gives her purpose through recreation. But there are times when I consider closing the sliding glass door, like this morning at 7:13AM.
Somewhere deep within the folds of sleep, I hear a bird alight unknowingly on our balcony. When the bird settles, our tiny tiger breaks through the vertical blinds with grace and fury. I don’t hear the typical escape from the bird, so I take it that Honeyed Cat sunk her claws before flight and is feasting on warm blood.
I shut my eyes, happy with our tiny tiger’s victory. I don’t think about cleanup, but I do have trouble falling back asleep, which is why I think about closing Honeyed Cat’s fun at nights, so she won’t startle me awake again. It’s also not safe, leaving the door to your bedroom open for anyone to break in while you sleep. Plus, it’s noisy as hell outside.
Nearly three hours later, Bridget bestirs, and I open the vertical blinds.
No carcass, but there is a shiny black feather. I tickle Honeyed Cat’s tiny white chin. She has a blackhead. Cats are prone to getting blackheads on their chins.
In the near distance, three discharges sound. Bridget asks, “What’s that?”
“Gunshots,” I say.
Then a lone bugle touches the elegiac notes of Taps.
1
Jon asks if I want to go count tools in the shed. I l
ook at Bridget and ask if she wants to come, too.
“No thanks,” she says.
But I should’ve known my question was rhetorical. Bridget rarely wants to count tools in the shed.
I follow Jon out the back door, across the artificial turf of his screened patio, and out the creaky-hinged door that slams behind us.
This is Hollywood. I look up at a cut of the bluest sky and feel maudlin. This is the last day I’ll get to enjoy the coast. After today, Bridget and I and Honeyed Cat will hop into the red Civic and return to Austin more permanently. As expected, I had to purchase two new tires and change the oil. I also had to get a new battery, which I didn’t expect.
The car is ready now, and Honeyed Cat is as ready as she’ll ever be to drive cross-country to landlocked central Texas.
But for today, the water sparkles as it laps against Jon’s boat.
“Have you gotten the bilge pump working again?” I ask.
“Not really,” laments Jon. “The other day I had to rush home from work when it started raining. I almost lost the boat.”
Stretched languorously between two generous palms: a hemp hammock. If the shed weren’t so inviting, I would’ve spent more time on this hammock, swinging with the book of some great writer in my hands.
Jon unlocks the door. “I’m working on building a ramp here,” he informs me. “These steps get pretty slippery when it rains.”
I look at the stack of cinderblocks leading up to the slightly elevated shed. One of the blocks is missing
