Austin Nights

by Herocious

Silverado’s return trip, partly because she worried they’d wilt inside our non-air-conditioned cab, and partly because she forgot. However, on the last leg of our epic cross-country move, driving the Civic, she does remember the hillsides of wildflowers along Route 71, and she pulls over multiple times to construct her bouquet for our new home.

  Honeyed Cat is curled at my feet. Her eyes are closed and her coat is dusty from lack of preening. Somewhere around central Florida, while waiting for Bridget to get her espresso in a Wal-Mart with a Dunkin’ Donuts, Honeyed Cat realizes she’s in it for the long haul. If she is to survive this trip, she must recede deep into herself. She must become Buddha.

  Bridget skips out of Wal-Mart with an espresso and – what’s this? – a pound of bulk sesame sticks. I immediately shove my hand into the bag and surface with a mouthful, which I saddle onto my tongue. Bridget, on the other hand, takes one sesame stick, nibbles away half of it, stares at its nourishing beauty, takes another nibble, leaving only 1/3 of the original stick, looks at me, rolls her tongue around her mouth, and finishes the stick after a short pause and long blink.

  We eat differently. This difference has made me appreciate food even more. Bridget’s approach is more like a surgeon dissecting a frog. She takes food apart in ways that never occurred to me. I, on the other hand, eat for survival. I’m more like the pioneer who needs to get sufficient calories for tomorrow’s work in the fields. Bridget hasn’t made me refined. I still think of food in terms of fuel. But what my lover has done is shown me there’s an anatomy to food. Peeling away layers to suck at juice in cherries, biting halfway through blackberries or blueberries, staring at their whitish meat, and biting again, or taking your sweet time with a wonderful chip rather than shoving three into your mouth at once. Because of Bridget, I get more mileage out of food, more enjoyment out of a kernel of popcorn, or a single sesame stick. I’m all about getting more out of the same quantities. Having said that, sometimes I have to be reminded.

  Honeyed Cat is still withdrawn when we reach Ben White. Bridget pulls the Civic over, engages the hazards, and walks straight into a hillside of wildflowers.

  I eat the last sesame stick.

  “They’re hard to pick,” she says, very nearly defeated. “Really hard.”

  “I have a pocket knife,” I say, masticating. I say, “It should do the trick.”

  I search in the armrest compartment that divides driver seat from passenger. I find a pocketknife with an ergonomic handle. Bridget gallops through the wildflowers, and I decide I need to take a few pictures with her iPhone of her frolicking.

  All of a sudden, Honeyed Cat is sharing her space with a bouquet of every variety of wildflower in central Texas. Bridget is proud of her assortment. Honeyed Cat comes out of her Buddha trance to sniff indifferently at Texas pith. Then she shuts her eyes, and the next time she opens them we’re parking the Civic for good in The Oaks.

  9

  Michael doesn’t have to commute anymore. He has a strong aversion to cars when in the city. Cross-country driving is enlightening to Michael, but city driving is draining. He’d prefer to work a slacker job within walking distance rather than drive to a job with upward mobility. Now that I’m commuting every day, I don’t blame him. I can see his point. Driving is a drag. That’s why I take the bus every chance I get. Like today, instead of driving from my job in Round Rock to my lab at UT, I drive home, which is about four miles south of UT, park the car, and hop on the 1M bus back north to my lab. Riding on the bus is so much easier than driving. I can read on my commute rather than steer clear of slow Austin drivers. I can also look at all the stores and people on the street.

  Michael is home when I get back. He opens the front door. I smell the pinto bean tortillas he had for lunch. Personally, I think it’s better for him to get out of the house every day, but I know there are some days when he doesn’t. Like a hermit, he writes and does whatever else he normally does to pass the time while I’m away. On these days, I think he’s more irritable. He doesn’t treat Honeyed Cat as gently as he should, and he’s moody.

  “Michael, you should get out,” I say, when he opens the door and squints at the sun. “Why don’t you come to UT with me?”

  “The bus costs a dollar,” he says. “If it were free like it is for you, fine, but it isn’t.”

  I begin gathering my stuff. I’m late for my lab meeting.

  “Maybe I’ll take my bike to the central library,” he proposes.

  “You should do that.”

  He packs his netbook and brings his bike in from the balcony. He starts to whistle a merry tune. Michael needs a little coaxing, that’s all.

  On the way out, we pass Sara’s place. The door is open. We haven’t seen her in a few days. We haven’t heard any of her episodes either. I look in and see a gaping hole in the foyer wall. I guess all the pounding we hear is from Sara kicking in the drywall. I look in a little more and see an older woman packing some cardboard boxes.

  “Who do you think that was?” asks Michael, once we’re out of earshot.

  “Her mom,” I say. “Who else could it be? I think she’s moving Sara’s stuff.”

  “Poor girl,” says Michael. He tragically shakes his head. “I wonder where they’ll put her next?”

  8

  Five months after Granddad takes Paul’s hand in his own and declares, “Once I leave here, I’m not coming back,” Mamma holds my hand on what will prove to be her last bed on earth. Rather than issue an ultimatum, she says, “You’re so cold!” Even with ebbing energy, she manages these emphatic words. Her voice is feeble through toothless gums.

  Mamma follows on Granddad’s heels, but I think she never admits Granddad is really gone. After hearing Paul, her youngest child, tell her Bus – that’s what she calls her husband of over 50 years, Bus – passed away in the hospital, she cries out on her bed, cries into an unbearable emptiness, and denies the truth. Bus isn’t dead. Bus can’t die. He wouldn’t even think of leaving her by herself. Not Bus. He’s a gentleman. He’s a loyal man. Bus is still with her even though Paul comes with the news of his death.

  This is what Mamma thinks the first time she wakes after Granddad’s departure. She isn’t going to listen to Paul. If she’s alive, Bus is alive, too. That’s how it must be. Inside the fog of her dementia, she carries on conversations with Bus. She’ll ask if he’s still taking out the trash or getting the mail. She’ll say he’s snacking in the kitchen on his favorite, peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She’ll talk in hushed tones to Bus, who listens on the other side of the shut door. In this way, Mamma and Granddad never pass the ghost. They go on living forever in their happy little love.

  But it isn’t this way for the rest of her family, us with excruciatingly sober heads, us doomed to real reality, a reality based on common consensus, on a universal code of cause and effect created and defined by rational people with rational senses. We’re only too aware of their absences.

  Mamma dies on the Tuesday following the Superbowl. On what will soon prove to be her deathbed, after she tells me how cold my hand is, she drifts off into reverie.

  Paul says, “Stay awake, Mother. You have a visitor and you keep nodding off.”

  “Oh,” says Mamma, “I can’t help it!”

  These are the last words I hear her speak.

  2

  My other neighbor, not Sara, is tending to his car again with the blue cloth. I get the feeling that in his mind his car is alive like a horse. He’s in the stable with a bristly brush, smoothing out the sinuous hindquarters after a full day of plowing his field of wheat. He chats and coos with his horse as he strokes the star running down the middle of his head. My neighbor hears the clop of horse hooves and thinks there’s no truer sound in the world. His horse whinnies and tosses his mane and stares at him lovingly, batting his eyelashes.

  Yes, I think, he believes in this horse so much that if I were to stick a mirror under its grill it would fog over.

  My neighbor gets on his haunches and cleans hi
s car’s rims, which are horseshoes in his mind, and I understand this man is missing something large in his life. He gets out of bed every day and feels an emptiness that’s deeper than morning hunger.

  Whenever I’m using our bathroom, I can hear sounds coming through the thin walls of The Oaks – his apartment. There’s always a TV blabbering Spanish noticias, trying in vain to fill his solitude. He takes long steamy showers. I never hear him talking or singing. I think he’s retired, living from month to month off his meager social security check.

  Today, when he’s out tending to his horse on the asphalt parking lot, someone tries calling him. I hear his landline ring several times before falling silent. He doesn’t have an answering machine. Why should he if he’s always home?

  When I hear his landline blow up again, a second later, I want to run out and tell him someone is calling. It’s probably important. I even unbolt both locks on my front door, start for the stairs, but then I notice my neighbor sitting on his high horse, which is to say, buckled in the driver’s seat. He rubs down his horse’s thick neck and steadies both hands on the reins. He stares at the vast openness that lies at the edge of continental cliffs everywhere. His horse clops in place, shoots plumes of warm air out of its nostrils, rears back its majestic head, and neighs. My neighbor