Austin Nights

by Herocious

spray over the cracks in our bathtub, and they asked all pets to be removed from the premises.

  But the spraying was earlier this week, and after keeping Honeyed Cat outside until the toxic fumes dissipated, which took all day, I don’t think I’ll ever lock her outside again. After that day on the balcony, trying in vain to hide from the sun, she has been inside mostly and a little under the weather, doing lots of sneezing, taking sprawling naps on her back that seem troubling, and using her litter box less. She hasn’t taken her usual sprints back and forth either, and she isn’t eating much, but she’s drinking a lot of water, like a dehydrated lion lapping from a lake. And she vomited again, not a hairball.

  Sometimes I catch myself hoping she isn’t dying. After all, getting too much exposure to the sun probably isn’t the best thing for a tiny cat with FIV.

  When Bridget comes home, I tell her I won’t exile Honeyed Cat to the balcony again, even if they have to re-resurface the bathtub.

  3

  The second logical alternative would have been to rent a moving truck, which would save us a return drive. The problem with the moving truck is the following: after gas and taxes and insurance, it would’ve cost no less than $1,400. Plus, we’d have to drive separately – one in the truck, the other in the Civic – and this would mean a hotel room and nothing but straight business on the road.

  Jon’s Silverado, on the other hand, would only cost gas, which we figured would run us no more than $400 if we didn’t crank the AC, and we could take shifts driving, so any sleep we needed could be gotten while the other drove. No hotel room would be necessary.

  Q: Was shelling out $1,000 – in addition to forfeiting the $810 we’d get from selling our furniture – worth not having to drive an additional 1350.8 miles, between us?

  A: Hell no.

  4

  On my father’s side, I’m part Scottish. The Davidson clan tie hangs in my closet, a reminder of my stock. Granddad gives me the green tie before I leave for the University of Chicago. Bridget’s watercolor of him hangs highest on our Wall of Awesome, very close to touching the ceiling. He passes the ghost a few days after my birthday. September of 2009, I think it was the twelfth day of my birth month, right around midday. I don’t even know he’s in the hospital, let alone about to permanently leave us, at least in body.

  Everything happens so quickly.

  He’s having a lot of difficulty at home. His youngest son, Paul, has been taking care of him so he doesn’t have to live in the old people’s home, but, after a little while of this, the basic things get too hard.

  Paul should be the one writing this part of my memory.

  He knows how to tell it better than anyone.

  But I’ll do my best.

  The day after Granddad passes the ghost, we drive up to Boca Raton to join Paul in a kind of intimate mourning. We want to spend the night. Although Uncle Paul refuses to admit it – he is a man, after all – we know the loss is difficult on him, and he still has to break the news to Mamma, who has been sound asleep in her bedroom for an unusually long time ever since Granddad left the house.

  I ring the doorbell. Hanging on the front door, a wooden sign with a Shih Tzu done in acrylic. In simple cursive:

  THE DAVIDSONS’

  Paul opens, says hello, and invites us inside. He offers Bridget and me cold beer. We ask if he’s having one.

  “Sure,” he says, “I’ll drink a beer.”

  Stoli does a regal walk-by to discover who’s visiting his inner sanctum. Finding it’s nobody he particularly likes, he slowly returns to his post on the windowsill, his tail pointed skyward. What a gigantic cat! He must weigh 32 lbs.

  We follow Paul’s lead and sit on the three-bolster sofa in the living room.

  I look at Granddad’s velvety green chair and see a ghost.

  “Stoli has been acting weird all day,” says Paul. “Really weird. He knows Father isn’t coming back.” Paul combs his left eyebrow. “Yeah,” he confirms, “Stoli knows.”

  Paul tells us Granddad’s cynicism got really bad near the end. He didn’t want to go on living. He didn’t want to hang in there anymore. He didn’t want to. The library of colorful pills he swallowed in the morning to borrow more life from western medicine didn’t strike his fancy. He didn’t see the point in living. He lost his purpose.

  Paul says, “He didn’t want to live.”

  Paul tells us Granddad wouldn’t even support himself in his final days. The man fell many times even with Paul helping him stand.

  “But I couldn’t help him,” says Paul. “He had to work with me, you know, he had to help me help him. But, honestly, his cynicism got to be so bad.”

  Paul tells us Granddad fell in the shower. He fell on his walk to the velvety green chair. He fell getting off the toilet. He fell and had so many gashes and bruises on his arms and knees, and with that anticoagulant medication they had him on, it seemed like he was slowly bleeding to death. The nerves in his feet were shot. His feet got to be so swollen he couldn’t even wear slippers.

  Paul tells us he had to call the paramedics to take him to the hospital. He says he didn’t want to call the paramedics, but Granddad wasn’t helping him.

  “He was fighting me,” he says, “he was fighting me all the time. I would tell him, ‘Stop fighting me, Father. You know I cannot do this with you fighting me all the time.’ But he didn’t listen.”

  Paul tells us Granddad was vehemently against going back to the hospital. Paul didn’t want to see him go either, but he didn’t know what else to do.

  Paul tells us on the day the paramedics were coming to pick Granddad up:

  “That day, my father cooperated with me. He was a different man. All of a sudden he didn’t fight me. He helped me help him. That day, he wasn’t a cynic. He wanted to prove he didn’t need the hospital. He wanted to show me we could do it together. He took his pills without being asked. If I didn’t know any better, I wouldn’t have recognized the man. But the paramedics came,” Paul tells us, ignoring his beer. “It wasn’t smart to keep him here with his self-injurious behavior.”

  Paul says, “They came and sat him in his wheelchair and didn’t say much. I stayed so close to him. I didn’t feel good about them taking him away.”

  Paul says, “On the way out, my father grabbed my hand and said, ‘Once I leave here, I’m not coming back.’”

  “Well,” continues Paul, combing his left eyebrow. “I guess he kept his word.”

  2

  For the weekend, Bridget and I journey north to Dallas. We get a later start than planned, but at least we have avocado burritos from Taqueria Arandas ready for nourishment whenever hunger strikes.

  The drive takes three hours. We pass cultish Waco on the way and stop in a deserted parking lot that overlooks the plains of central Texas. It’s already past sunset. All we see are silhouettes of hills and leaves and red-antlered communication towers blinking as we masticate avocado. I look in the rearview mirror at a strip mall and see Czechoslovakia. There’s the Czech And Go gas station, the Czech In hotel, the Czech Kolache bakery, and the Czech Yourself insurance agency. It turns out we’re north of Waco, in a town called West.

  The Dallas skyline welcomes us around 11PM. The red horse with wings is on top of a building that doesn’t quite deserve to be called a skyscraper. Larry McMurtry, in a non-fiction book I finished the afternoon before leaving for Dallas, wrote about the Pegasus. So, I know this neon horse has been in place in Dallas since at least 1968. It’s belittling, the unstoppable passage of time that stains all things.

  Cody, my friend, meets us outside his house on La Vista Dr. I go to shake hands, but I soon see it’s all right to hug. We haven’t seen each other in almost two years. He’s married to Carla, who hails from Paris, Texas.

  “What’s up, Bum?” greets Cody.

  “Bum,” I echo.

  We’ve called each other bum since high school. I think we first started calling Cassie, his awesome golden retriever, bum after it became clear all she
did was wag her tail happily when we walked through the door, or whenever we called her to be with us, and then she’d settle into a divine drowse. I’m not sure how the name got applied to us, but each time it’s mentioned the memory of Cassie is invoked, like Beautiful Anne, like Monk.

  I could write a whole book about that dog. She’d wake me in the morning with a sock in her mouth. She’d get on my trundle bed and position her head directly above mine and nudge me with her sock. She did this until I wrangled the sock from her and tossed it through the door and down the hall. Then she’d run off, chasing it golden.

  There’s a photo of Cassie and me. I’ll always love that dog. She kept me light and carefree in those years when everything was oozing apathy and angst and acne vulgaris.

  “You didn’t tell me you live on a compound,” I say.

  “Compound,” echoes Cody, trying to gloss over the non-insignificant detail that he does in fact live on a compound. He redirects, “Have you ever heard of mulberry?”

  Although I hear Cody ask me a question, I’m distracted.

  His house, built in 1936, has a Mediterranean aura. Its white stucco walls and brown window frames place it somewhere along the cliffs that surround the bluest body of water – Homer’s world. The detached two-car garage and vegetative courtyards and the ancient cedar in the middle of his driveway and the 2,500 square feet of gross living area in the main house are some of the reasons why I call it a