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.
