Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  *

  When he and Alex got home on the second Monday in March, Cole made his usual beeline to the stack of mail on the hall table. He grabbed the two #10 envelopes from ut, handed one to Alex, and ripped open his own. He scanned it, and then he closed his eyes and let the tension ease out of his solar plexus. Not only accepted into ut, but into the Plan II Honors program. He’d had little to worry about—they were both Texas residents with good sats and solid grades and the prestige of St. Mark’s behind them—but anxiety was Cole’s second nature.

  He looked at Alex. “You?”

  “Yes!” Alex said, and they did an Indian war dance in the hall.

  They called Al Montoya at work, and he immediately proposed a trip to Austin for the three of them, to scout for apartments and give them a taste of the city.

  They had a gig Saturday night, so the timing was tricky. Montoya arranged for them to get Friday off and they drove down in Montoya’s Cadillac after school on Thursday. Interstate 35 was still not finished, leaving them with state highways and stoplights all through Waco, the halfway point. The landscape was as dull as any Cole had seen, flat and featureless except for prairie grass and stunted mesquite bushes. Cole nodded off after dinner at something called the Turkey Shop, and he woke up in darkness as they passed through a set of filling stations named Georgetown.

  From there south, a giant hand had crumpled the flat surface of the earth, and by the time they arrived in Austin proper, the highway rose and fell with a pleasant regularity. They passed suburbs and shopping centers and the airport and, finally, the ut practice fields as they took the Manor Road exit. Alex, who’d learned his way around on trips to visit Susan, informed Cole that it was pronounced may-nor Road, one of a dozen idiosyncratic pronunciations intended to betray interlopers, including man-shack for Manchaca, gwad-a-loop for Guadalupe, burn-it for Burnet, and Miller for Mueller.

  They turned under the freeway and into the parking lot of the Villa Capri Motor Hotel. Cole was charmed by the 1950s freestanding neon sign, the flying buttresses, the breezeways, the palm trees. The quintessence of every motel that he had longed for as a child and his parents had driven past, put off by the flash and expense.

  By the time they checked in and unpacked, it was nine o’clock. Alex was tired but Cole was restless, and Montoya offered to drive him around. Cole was glad to have Montoya to himself. They cruised downtown with the windows open and the heater on, past the State Capitol and ten blocks of two-story office buildings and department stores, and then they took the Congress Avenue Bridge across Town Lake. Reflections of streetlights dancing across the dark water. A powerboat idling next to the bridge. Montoya parked on the south side and they walked back to look. Cole saw the lights of the Capitol and, above it, an airplane descending toward the airport.

  Montoya explained that they were looking at the third in a chain of lakes on the Colorado River, fed by Lake Austin to the west of the city and Lake Travis to the north. Not far from where they stood was Barton Springs, a natural swimming pool that covered three acres. “It’s like an oasis here,” he said. “All this beautiful water.”

  They both had their hands in their pockets and their shoulders raised against the chill. Cole had no desire to move on. Being alone with Montoya made him feel grown up.

  “I’m thinking of moving into Austin,” Montoya said. “With the distributing company, I mean.”

  “Does that involve tommyguns and hijacked trucks and payoffs to the cops, like on The Untouchables?”

  Montoya laughed. “Not my style. This would be more about getting in on the ground floor. People graduate from ut but they don’t go home, they stay in Austin. You kids, with all your groups and music, when you’re twenty-one there’s going to be nightclubs to play in and the nightclubs are going to sell beer.

  “I would need somebody to be in charge of things down here. I’ve talked to Alex about it, about learning the business during the summers, and stepping in after he graduates. He’s not sure if he’s interested.”

  Not interested was an understatement, Cole thought. But he heard the disappointment in Montoya’s voice and tried to protect him. “We’re only in high school. We don’t have all that stuff figured out.”

  “I know,” Montoya said. “I mean, that’s what we wanted for you kids, not to have to go to work full time as soon as you were sixteen, like I did. For you to go to college, to have the freedom to make your own lives.” He considered his own words for a minute and said, “It’s hard to live up to that in real life.”

  “Sure,” Cole said. “Of course you want him to be part of your business.” A hint, perhaps, for Cole to intercede. Not likely, Cole thought.

  “What about you?” Montoya asked. “Still thinking about Russian for your major, not something in music?”

  “Russian, I guess. It’d give me something to fall back on. Besides, they don’t teach the kind of music we play in school.”

  “Something’s happening, isn’t it?” Montoya asked. Cole immediately thought of Dylan’s Thin Man. “There were those motorcycle gangs in the fifties, but this is something brand new. That Human Be-In out in San Francisco, the music, the hippies, the drugs.”

  “That hippie thing, that’s a stereotype the tv news came up with. The bare feet and fringed jackets and headbands and all that.” Cole paused. Montoya had taken his words as reassurance, and now Cole had to let him down again. “But the rest of it, yeah. Something’s happening. It’s a brand-new world.”

  As he said the words, Cole realized for the first time that he wouldn’t be able to last at ut. Wherever the world might be in four years, he would have to be out in the thick of it, not watching it happen from the distance of a college campus.

  “Did you tell your parents you’d been accepted?” Montoya asked.

  Cole shook his head. Montoya had brokered a deal whereby Cole’s mother would call him on Sunday afternoons at 1:00. Cole had come to dread those conversational minefields, where every possible subject, from his father’s health to Cole’s life with the Montoyas to school or the band, had the potential to reduce his mother to a miserable silence. The calls made Cole feel heartless, yet the only alternatives were to cut her off entirely, or to go back to living with his father. “I’ll call her when we get back.”

  Montoya didn’t say anything, leaving Cole’s guilt to do the rest. Montoya never held onto things the way Cole’s father would have—within a few seconds the conversation had moved on. Still Cole felt left behind, unable to be the son his mother wanted, unable to be the student that Montoya was financing.

  At the Villa Capri, Cole said, “It’s early yet. Want to look at some cards?”

  Montoya so loved poker that he was happy to simply deal out hands of seven card stud, no chips, verbal betting only, and Cole knew there would be a deck of Bicycles in Montoya’s suitcase. “Are you sure?” he asked, a childlike happiness already spreading across his face.

  “Of course,” Cole said. It was the least he could do.

  *

  Early the next morning they drove to Susan’s house, a tidy postwar bungalow full of sunlight a few blocks from campus. Susan fixed migas, eggs scrambled with cheese and tortilla strips and green onions, plenty of hot sauce on the side. Susan’s roommate, petite and blonde and silent, joined them. Cole’s attention was fully occupied by Susan, who seemed older and unexpectedly elegant as she presided over the table in jeans and a loose white Indian shirt.

  After breakfast, Cole and the three Montoyas drove to ut and parked a couple of blocks off Guadalupe Street. Cole’s first view of the campus was a cluster of yellow-white stone buildings with orange tile roofs, and, in the near distance, a high tower with a dome on top.

  Suddenly the memory of that tower hit him hard enough to make him queasy. He remembered cameras pointing up toward a glint of metal where Charles Whitman stood on the observation deck, the pop of the rifle shots, the stretcher bearers hunkering down as they carried away a body. August 1, the day that Cole mangled his
hand. He saw Jerry’s body on the derrick floor, saw his own hand with the button sticking out of the bandages, felt a needle slide into his buttocks and the Demerol haze come down, saw Corrina’s mouth say “Dream about me.”

  He was so unprepared for the vividness of it that he had to stop and grab a light pole. Susan, the first to notice, came to ask if he was all right.

  “Just… a weird moment.”

  “Goose walk over your grave?”

  “Something like that. I’m okay now.”

  He wasn’t, quite. He’d popped out of the chronological continuity and now bits of him were scattered across the previous year. He tried to pull himself together as they crossed Guadalupe and Susan pointed out the student union and the Turtle Pond behind the biology lab. Under a cluster of trees, a bare-chested guy in jeans tossed a Frisbee with a girl in shorts and a bikini top. A dog wearing a bandanna leapt and sprinted between them. Another guy in jeans and tennis shoes and a faded red T-shirt sat in the grass and played “House of the Rising Sun” on an acoustic guitar. Cole remembered the smu students at the Dylan concert in their white shirts and ties only a year and a half before, and his sense of time distorted even further. His past was present and his future was rocketing away.

  They turned south at the Tower and walked down the South Mall, a paved walkway as wide as a four-lane highway. Live oaks lined both sides and beyond them were classrooms, housed in identical pale stone buildings with tiled roofs. The mall ended in steps that led down to Littlefield Fountain, where three bronze riders emerged from the water on creatures with the heads and forelegs of horses and the tails of fish, while a winged goddess and wwi soldiers looked on.

  ut had 30,000 undergraduates, one of the highest enrollments in the country. Cole had expected giant multistory containment facilities for the students and was relieved to see the human scale of the campus. Of the entire city, for that matter, which lacked skyscrapers, or any tall buildings other than the Tower. A bell rang somewhere and within seconds a flood of students filled the mall, few of them in any great hurry. A succession of girls walked by that made Cole’s heart ache.

  They saw the library and the gym and saw Memorial Stadium from a distance. Cole began to understand that the campus was as large as a medium-size town, and that the shuttle buses they saw on every corner were not just to get students to and from off-campus housing, but from one end of the campus to the other.

  They ate lunch at a hamburger joint named Dirty’s, near where they’d parked. The food was greasy yet oddly compelling, and though the Lone Star longnecks they all ordered reminded Cole of Tyler, he thought he was mostly over his temporal vertigo.

  “What do you think?” Montoya asked Cole when most of the food was gone. The question seemed more than casual.

  “I like the vibrations,” Cole said, which prompted Alex to make his “hippie bullshit” face. “If you’re still willing to help me, yes, this is where I want to go to school.”

  Montoya visibly relaxed and his smile was radiant. “Good. Good. That’s settled, then.”

  Cole felt like a liar, believing as he now did that he wouldn’t last. He would give it a shot, he told himself. That was all, in his heart, that he’d agreed to.

  Susan looked at her watch and stood up. “I have to get to class. Daddy, you can finish my burger.” She kissed them all on the cheek. “’Ta luego.”

  As Cole watched her walk away, he wondered if he had the discipline to get up from a table of Dirty’s hamburgers and longnecks to go to class. He supposed he would find out.

  That afternoon they saw Barton Springs and the huge expanse of Pease Park, full of dogs and college-age kids flying kites. The west side of the park bordered a high ridge with an actual castle on top. The neighborhood, Montoya said, was called Castle Hill in its honor. They drove up the steep incline of 12th Street and found the Castle at the singular address of 1111 West 11th Street. What they saw through the black wrought-iron gates looked like the corner of a medieval fort—one crenelated, three-story turret and an attached wall that extended 50 feet behind it. Montoya said it had started out in the late 1800s as the Texas Military Institute, a boy’s school.

  They checked out the neighborhood. Older, slightly run-down houses on small lots, many carved up into apartments or rented by the room. Cars parked on both sides of the narrow streets.

  On Castle Hill Street, which overlooked Pease Park, Montoya pulled up in front of a two-story stone house, empty and starting to deteriorate, for sale according to the realtor’s sign in front. Montoya told them to get out and look it over while he parked the car.

  A cracked and buckled sidewalk led past blown dandelions and stalks of Johnson grass. The house looked to be from 1900 or so, oblong, with a wraparound porch and steeply pitched gables. One of the boards in the porch was broken and a front window was cracked. Cole saw wood floors and textured plaster walls inside, crumbling in places.

  “Fixer upper,” Cole said, glancing at Alex, who surprised him with a look of naked longing.

  “Can you imagine?” Alex said. He looked up the street to the slice of Austin laid out below the cliff like an aerial photograph, then held out his hands, palms up.

  Cole could indeed imagine. With some work it would be a party house for the ages, a house that would seduce women by their very presence in it, a place to stand from which they could lever the world. What Cole did not understand was how it had become a possibility so quickly. His father had never made an impulsive decision in his life, had never bought a house without the certainty of selling the one he was in. Yet Montoya was clearly thinking the same thing that he and Alex were.

  Cole watched Montoya climb the sidewalk—alert, in his element, taking inventory and tabulating the results—and felt a helpless love for him. From their first handshake, Montoya had seen through Cole’s bullshit and liked him anyway. Not merely liked him, had taken him in and taken on Cole’s father to do it, and now was prepared to put him through college. It was more faith than Cole had in himself.

  “How does it look?” Montoya asked.

  “Looks like mostly superficial damage,” Cole said, remembering the many houses he’d looked at with his father. “The foundation has shifted some.” He pointed to a hairline separation between a massive piece of stone and the brownish mortar next to it.

  “Good eyes,” Montoya said, and squatted down with a characteristic tug at the knees of his slacks to preserve the crease. “Any house this old is going to move around. As long as the foundation itself is solid, it should be all right.”

  The three of them walked around to the back. Among the oak and sycamore trees and the brick barbeque pit and the dying St. Augustine grass, the yard held a stretch of sagging white plastic clothesline strung between two T-shaped metal poles. It gave Cole a pang of nostalgia, though he no longer remembered where the yard had been that had poles like these. The membrane between past and present was thin in Austin, and powerful emotions, sometimes unmoored from their origins, kept breaking through.

  A flagstone patio, a low ornamental wall. Alex found a three-pronged outlet by the back door. “It’s been rewired, and recently.”

  Montoya pointed to the massive air conditioner near the back door. “Window units look fairly new.”

  Alex tried the back door, then they all stood side by side and looked in the floor-to-ceiling windows, hands shading their eyes. A long, naturally lighted room and a pass-through into a big, tiled kitchen. Hardwood floors, dusty and scratched, a stain here, a cigarette burn there.

  Montoya kept a poker face, but he wrote down the realtor’s number from the sign, and later, as they drove around the small mansions north of campus, he stopped at a pay phone to set up an appointment for the next morning.

  At four they picked Susan up at her house and she directed them up Mount Bonnell Road, two lanes of winding blacktop that took them north and west of the city, the scent of the furiously blooming oak and mimosa trees stoking Cole’s already full-blown spring fever. Susan called out a
s they drove past a beat-up two-story beer joint that looked like a bait shop and turned out to be the Dry Creek Café and Boat Dock. Montoya parked on the side of the road and they walked back.

  A middle-aged woman with badly dyed hair sat behind the bar watching tv. She wouldn’t sell them more than two Lone Star longnecks, and that was only after scrutinizing Susan’s id. “Them boys ain’t legal age. Y’all finish them two beers, bring the empties back, and I’ll sell you two more.”

  The downstairs featured a pool table and a jukebox playing Jim Reeves’ “Welcome to My World.” The upstairs felt like a tree house, with screens for windows and sections of tree trunks holding up the roof. Round tables and odds and ends of chairs. A floor that a determined couple might dance on, if they were careful about where the linoleum was worn through. Susan led them onto a deck that faced the afternoon sun. Two distorted speakers relayed the music from the jukebox, and a weathered wooden railing provided dubious protection against a long fall down to Lake Austin.

  Giving plenty of leeway to two men in tractor caps who were smoking at one of the tables, Cole approached the railing. The lake was little more than a wide spot in the river. A boat dock on the far side, possibly the one referenced in the Dry Creek sign, interrupted an otherwise unbroken wall of green.

  Susan appeared next to him. She offered her longneck and Cole took a grateful swallow. “You like it here,” she said. “Here, specifically, but Austin too.”

  “Yeah. I mean, this place has a great vibe, even if it is a dive. Peaceful. The whole town feels that way. It feels like home.”

  “I’ve seen that happen to more people than I can count.”

  “But not you.”

  “I’m a big city girl. I like Neiman Marcus and garden parties and charity balls.”

  Another obstacle between them. “Why didn’t you go to smu, then? Or Rice?”

  “Too much money to waste on educating a girl. At least this girl, the daughter of the wrong wife.”

  “Your father said that?”