Austin Nights

by Herocious

entirely.

  “Yeah,” I say, “these steps definitely seem precarious.”

  Jon grins and yanks the door open. The inside of the shed is exposed wood. The roof beams show. One windy night, with the palm fronds smacking the aluminum siding, Jon decides to build a tri-tiered shelving system to maximize surface area inside the shed. He doesn’t sketch a blueprint. He doesn’t even follow a preexisting diagram on the internet. But that’s the way to do things when the spirit strikes and you have a world of tools and materials at your disposal. Jump right in and have fun with it. Build things.

  Jon shuffles to the back of the shed. That’s where he hides his weed, in a file cabinet. He asks if I can twist one up for us.

  “I think you’re more efficient at rolling,” I say, remembering how long it takes me to cull the seeds from the good stuff. I say, “I’m an impractical perfectionist.”

  “Yeah,” he says, “but yours burn better.”

  He turns on the battery-powered radio, finds an AM station playing dub reggae, and looks into his dorm fridge.

  “Want a beer?” he asks.

  “Sure,” I say.

  He reaches down and pulls out two Heinekens. He uses the bottle opener next to the door. I remember the day when he attached the bottle opener into the doorframe of his shed. He used his cordless power drill. It happened in a matter of seconds.

  That’s all the time it takes for a lifetime of functionality.

  “Thank you,” I say. I make sure to look at his eyes when I say this because I really am grateful. Beer and weed in the party shed, what a luxury, what a setup. I look out the small picture frame window and see sunlight radiating off the canal. Bridget comes in to see what we’re up to. Dear Lord, what did I do to deserve this wonderful place and this wonderful company?

  “Want to sit down with us, Babe?” asks Jon.

  “No, Father,” says Bridget, “but I’ll take a beer.”

  Jon grins. “They’re in the fridge there,” he says. “Help yourself.”

  I pinch the paper and start the upward roll. When I reach the adhesive strip, I lightly use the tip of my tongue and set the joint down to ossify.

  “Do you want to sit?” I ask, standing to let Bridget take my seat. I didn’t hear her say no to her dad’s offer already, and it turns out to be a good thing.

  To my surprise, she sits down, and Jon picks up the joint, reaches into his pocket for a yellow lighter, and starts things off without asking permission. His eyes wrinkle at the edges, and the air in the shed is aromatized.

  The joint makes its first round. It’s burning slowly. Resin seeps into the gum paper.

  Bridget shakes her head sweetly and takes her leave. “I’ll be outside,” she says. I say we’ll be a little longer, and she closes the door behind her.

  Jon takes a hit of beer. I take a hit of weed. We continue like this for several minutes, listening to dub reggae and enlightening our sensory organs, before Jon picks up a red plastic funnel.

  “You know what this would be good for?” he asks.

  I take my time to guess what he’s driving at, “Not really.”

  “Well,” he says, “hand me that power drill behind you with a quarter-inch bit.”

  Again, without any kind of preliminary sketch or preexisting diagram, he presses the drill perpendicular to a spot of floor off in a corner of the shed and drills through the wood. He then plugs the tip of the funnel into the hole and watches for my reaction.

  When I begin to laugh, he knows I understand what he outfitted his shed with in a matter of seconds, for a lifetime of functionality.

  “The only problem is the grass underneath. If I don’t want to kill it, I should make

  a little PVC drainage pipe that runs off to the canal.”

  “You think your neighbors would figure out what’s going on after a few uses?”

  Jon pensively tilts his chin. Then, “It would be a conspicuous trickle.”

  The dub reggae cuts for a quick traffic update. A Jamaican comes on air to tell us I-95 is glacial. A semi jack-knifed at the Golden Glades Exchange. Expect serious southbound delays.

  “Listening to traffic reports isn’t so bad in the shed,” I say.

  Jon grins. “It sure sucks when you’re driving in it though.” He pulls, “By the way, did you change the oil in the truck?”

  I press my lips, wishing I were more of a man. “No,” I say. “The light never came on.”

  “What do you mean? The light was on before you drove to Austin.”

  “I don’t know, Jon” I say. “I guess I was waiting for another warning light.”

  “Well,” says Jon, passing the joint, “there goes that engine.”

  He measures my worth with an unnerving stare and concludes he isn’t happy with me. I didn’t change the Silverado’s oil after driving over 2,700 miles on its wheels and the dashboard telling me the whole way:

  CHANGE ENGINE OIL

  This is a fact. I feel deeply ashamed. I feel pointless.

  0

  I drink a lot of tap water even though some people think it’s dirty.

  No private sector company has persuaded me that their bottled water is any better than my tap water, or that my tap water is bad for me.

  I’m not saying that cancer clusters aren’t a direct result of contaminated tap water. It happens, and I’m sad and concerned when it does.

  We place a certain degree of faith in public sector companies, but when these start failing us, we begin to ask ourselves, Who can we trust?

  In this way, living in civilized areas becomes more like living along the untamed waters of the Amazon. Each step in the rainforest is a giant leap of faith. Which reptiles lurk beneath moist foliage? Which schools of fish await bathers? Who will watch us sleep?

  Pythons. Piranhas. Panthers.

  If we don’t trust the waterworks, why do we pay a premium to live in civilized areas, why don’t we adapt to the wildness of jungles, or the jaggedness of mountaintops, or the aridness of deserts, and rely only on ourselves?

  Why subject ourselves to the wide spectrum of pollutants created by cities and pay for something like bottled water when we can slake our thirst with perfect water, breathe clean air, and eat unprocessed foods elsewhere?

  There are times when I feel like civilization is killing me and charging for it. Driving through east Texas doesn’t help.

  The sooty skyline of refineries and chemical plants begs me to wonder what I’m doing living here, not off the land, but off the products and byproducts of a greedy and ambitious Collective Mind.

  5

  Honeyed Cat comes to life the second Bridget and I turn off the light. In the dark, she watches us in bed and then heads over to the kitchen for a little snack. The last thing I hear before falling asleep is Honeyed Cat steadily crunching dry food with her incisors.

  After her meal, I don’t know what she does. Bridget and I fall asleep spooning. I smell her nape. My breath sways her peach fuzz. My forearm sits between her breasts. Our toes sometimes wiggle.

  Sleep unwinds us. Dreams begin moving our eyes. I don’t mind being woken up by a storm or some other natural occurrence. But when Honeyed Cat rasps her retractable claws against the sliding glass door to be let out, I grow frustrated and very mean.

  Honeyed Cat is keen on communicating. Although she has a limited vocabulary, she’s a glib talker when she tries. Mostly I find her talking cute. I like when she demands something, and over the years we’ve become fluent when it comes to expressing what we want of each other.

  But this incessant scratching has got to stop. I know her ultimate goal is to force me to keep the sliding glass door open again, however, a return to those lax days simply can’t happen.

  The safety of our home comes first and foremost, not the unimpeded freedom of Honeyed Cat. I decide this after multiple brushes with the leprechaun elf. He looks at Bridget with limp lips of lechery. It’s perhaps cowardly to go out of my way to avoid the leprechaun elf and throw him off track with cir
cuitous routes home, but it’s in my best interest to preempt any situations that might force me to act like a man.

  I try to ignore Honeyed Cat. This is foolish. Honeyed Cat can be ignored only if she wants to be ignored. Once she has it set in her tiny head to be heard, she always wins.

  Her nails might as well be clawing a chalkboard. I burst out of bed, and Honeyed Cat hunkers down to hold her ground. I see her even though it’s dark because she wants herself to be seen.

  Instead of admitting defeat and opening the sliding glass door, I shoo Honeyed Cat in the direction of the bedroom door and shut her out. She’s spry on her tiny feet. But it’s no use.

  After enough time passes to let me find sleep again, she paws the door. First a civil paw, like one gentle knock, then things augment into cacophony. I curse and open the door. She slithers past my feet and stands at the sliding glass door.

  You’ll never win, she thinks.

  Her head is turned toward me. Her dilated pupils reflect darkness.

  Let me out, she thinks, we’ve been through these antics before.

  I meet her halfway. I open the sliding glass door to let her out and then I shut it.

  You wanted to be let out, I think. Now you can stay out till I feel like letting you in.

  For several hours I’m able to get quality sleep. REM makes my eyeballs fidget as I dream the craziest dreams. Dreams I’d rather forget. But Honeyed Cat makes sure this doesn’t happen.

  Right in the middle of REM, when my breathing is heaviest and slowest, Honeyed Cat starts rasping the glass. She quickly transitions to the metal frame.

  I try to ignore her pestering, but she doesn’t