Deep in the Heart of Texas

 I've been hanging at the downtown Senior Citizen writing class these last few weeks and this is what I came out with:

Deep in the Heart of Texas – Ken Schadt.

 

I was standing right across from the train to Texas and suddenly it hit me.  I didn’t have to do this.  I could cross the street to the Greyhound station and go right back to Champaign where all my beer drinking friends lived.  They were probably beginning to drop by the Esquire this very minute.  I could take the bus back and I would be sitting at the bar before happy hour was over.

Sure I could do that, but I would have to bum beer money  off of  one of my pals, because I didn’t have any money, because I didn’t have a job.  And that’s why I was taking the train to the boomtown.  I got on the Texas Eagle.

By midnight we were crossing the Mississippi River at St Louis with the gambling boats gleaming in the night.  I dropped off to sleep after that and then it was a misty dawn when we were passing through Little Rock, then we went west for most of the day, miles and miles of miles and miles of Texas as the songwriter wrote.  At Dallas we went south until we hit Austin about the time the bars there were closing. 

I was up first thing in the morning, waiting for my cat to arrive. The day before I took the train I took my cat to the vet’s where she would be given a sedative and then Don would pick her up and take her to the Emery office to begin her long ride by plane and truck to Austin and now she would arrive at my apartment in one of those red and white trucks, which were driving up and down Lamar, but none of them pulled into the driveway in front of the apartment and then it was dark and there were no more trucks.

I went down to the payphone with a pocket full of quarters and called up Don.

“My cat’s not here.”

“No, no she is not.”

“Where is she?”

“Detroit.”

“Detroit?”

“Detroit Michigan.”

“What?  How?”

“Didn’t I warn you about your dumb scheme to send a cat by delivery truck?”

“What?  You never said a word.”

“Oh, well I meant to.  Anyway don’t fret, they are driving her down hear even as I speak.  I will be at their office later in the morning and I’ll bring her back here so don’t you worry.”

“What is she doing in Detroit?”

“Oh that.  I talked to the guy and he said they put her in the plane here and the plane flew to New Orleans and Baton Rouge and everything was fine, but then when they stopped in Austin they forgot to take kitty out of the airplane.  Then there were a few more stops and when their trip ended she was still on the plane.”

“How was she?  How is she”   

“Well she was hungry, but they got a can and she ate it all down,”

She didn’t talk much but she always cleaned her bowl.  “Well, so, wow.”  Can they send her back here tomorrow?”

“No they can’t.  I asked.  It’s winter now you know,  no more cats in the air by themselves from now until  Memorial Day.”

“What can I do?”

“Nothing.  But I’ll tell you little buddy, sometimes it gets a little lonely out here in the trailer court, maybe I could use a little buddy myself for company over those long winter months.”

“She doesn’t talk much,” I warned him.

“Neither do I,” he answered.

I was 40 years old.  I had never been married or had any kids.  Didn’t even have a job.  All I had was the cat.  And now she would be a thousand miles from me in a stranger’s trailer until  spring.

 

That was my first morning in Austin and in my second I met my white winged warrior.

I was leaning over my railing looking east towards the dawn, over the honking revving traffic of Lamar.  On the other side and maybe half a block up there was a little patch of live oaks where I saw a sudden flash of light and then it was moving.  It was a bird, a large one, a pigeon, a great big white pigeon, broad wings stretching out as it rose in the sky,  rising higher and coming across Lamar and setting down right on the railing a few feet from me, where he tucked in his wings and looked at me, like specifically at me, like he wanted something from me.

Well peanuts of course.  Isn’t that what brought them down from the cliffs to our rooftops, from scrounging for seeds to accepting a friendly handout from those humans?

And I had nothing.  I wasn’t expecting a guest.  “You wait right here.” I told him and dashed down the stairs and across the street to the Safeway and came back with a little bag of dry roasted peanuts.

But he was gone.  Well shit.  I shook the bag in the air but nothing, but when I turned around there was whoosh of feathers and there he was giving the peanut bag the eye.  I shook one out of the bag and then another and it was looking like the start of a beautiful friendship.

 

In my third morning in Austin I met my next door neighbor.  Her name was Mona, but she liked it if you called her Mona Lisa.       

Mona Lisa wanted to know if I had a girlfriend.  I said I had a cat, she smiled.

“Want one?”

“One what?”

“A girlfriend?” she answered  pointing her thumb at herself.

Well what guy doesn’t want a girlfiend? I looked for words.

But I was too slow, she was laughing, “Just a joke,” she said.

And then she wanted to know if she could see my cat, and so I had to tell the story.  It was a little bit comical and I told it like it was some kind of joke,  but she wasn’t laughing.  She was wondering when they discovered that they had a cat on their plane.  Well I didn’t know, maybe she was under some other box.  Well wouldn’t they have heard her?  I told her that she was a quiet cat, which she was.

Mona looked up into the sky.  “They could have dumped her, “ she said, “They could have not  wanted anybody to know that they messed up and gotten rid of her.  Maybe they just didn’t want to do the paperwork.”

“ Oh I am sure she was on some other list, and anyway nobody would just dump her, people don’t do shit like that.”

“Some do,” she answered.

When I left Champaign I had to get my cat to the vet’s by four.  I had been kind of putting it off all afternoon, but then it was four o’clock, and I had to do it right then.  She was a quiet cat and she didn’t say anything when I lifted her up and put her in the cat carrier and then closed the transparent top above her.  She just looked at me from inside the carrier.