Austin Nights

balcony, I think we heard your music, but it wasn’t loud.”

  “That’s what I thought,” says the mindless Mohawk. “I’m just letting y’all know I’m this close to reporting your neighbor. She’s a nutty bitch. Keep an eye on her.”

  Bridget notices the tantrums the next day. We’re in the kitchen, talking about Austin, when she hears a piercing scream. For some reason, I don’t hear anything until the banging starts shaking our common wall. My ears tune into the disturbed noises and I imagine Sara going ballistic on a futon mattress. The screaming is bad enough, but when it’s punctuated by bouts of intense sobbing I begin to wonder what the hell is wrong with this bespectacled girl who seems so harmless.

  “I’ve got to get you a new front door,” says the woman with purple boots. “How have you been sleeping if you can’t even lock your front door? I’ll get maintenance to install one first thing tomorrow. It’s not safe to sleep here with your front door unlocked.”

  “Thank you,” says Sara.

  “What happened the other night?” asks the woman with purple boots. I’m impressed by how smoothly she slips this question in, as if she doesn’t have the slightest clue.

  Sara’s answer, however, is indistinct.

  “Well,” says the woman with purple boots, “is everything okay now? ‘Cause there are some people in the building concerned about you.”

  Sara mumbles something. She’s talking softly, cutely. You’d never know the rage she can work up on the spot. That’s what schizophrenia does to a person.

  “I need to know,” says the woman with purple boots, “I need to know there will be no more incidents like this.”

  Whatever Sara says, it’s enough to assure the woman with purple boots she won’t escalate again. Building Nine will have nothing to fret over.

  “You’ll get your front door tomorrow,” says the woman with purple boots. “If anything happens again, Sara – and I know it won’t, but if it does – I’ll have to call your mom.”

  “Okay,” says Sara. “Thank you.”

  The busted front door calmly closes and the woman in purple boots clops back to the management office. Around noon, unlike every day before the emergency fleet came and had a talking or two with her, destructive outbursts don’t come from Sara’s apartment. I can’t believe Sara is suddenly better. She’s so far gone. It’s disbelief that makes me open every window, turn off the music, settle next to the wall we share, and listen for the nervous breakdown that has become a staple in my life here at The Oaks. But Sara’s completely silent. I imagine her sitting with her back against the wall, her hair quivering from the concentration it takes to control her fragmented mind. In a way, I miss her wicked romps.

  Poor Sara, I think, lonely Sara.

  The paramedics must’ve given her the medicine she so desperately needs. But there’ll be times when she forgets to take her dosage, or she’ll intentionally neglect her dosage because she can’t stomach the side effects.

  3

  Honeyed Cat comes with Bridget. Wherever Bridget goes, Honeyed Cat goes. They are an inseparable item, and I’m there when the two join forces.

  The occasion is commonplace as far as lovable street cats go. We pull nose first into our parking space in North Miami Beach after dinner, and a scrawny cat looks at us from the second floor fire escape. Bridget immediately recognizes her tiny face, which really is quite fetching, and she informs me she has seen this same cat twice before and she’d love to give her a home.

  “Don’t scare her away,” she says.

  She opens the passenger door and starts clucking the tip of her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Honeyed Cat makes a dash for the forest on the other side of a barbed wire fence. It’s instinct. It’s survival. In this swampy forest she’ll find cover from the big world of unpredictable elements, like cars and people, but tonight Bridget seduces her away from the wild and into our home. The process involves water and flash-frozen salmon.

  She’s so tiny the first time she steps paw inside our home. I’ll always remember how tiny, like a miniature cat, probably malnourished, but beautiful and tiny. She has the same jade eyes she has now, as she preens her wild coat on the brown carpet of our new home in Austin. This is the third place she has lived in with us. North Miami Beach was where we found her, at the end of a cul-de-sac street. From there we moved to Miami Beach, and now Austin.

  She survives the 1,420 miles in between Miami Beach and Austin. It could’ve been 1,350.8, like on our first trip in Jon’s Silverado, but I have the impulsive idea to switch things up and follow Alligator Alley to I-75 North, visit Jack Kerouac’s last house on earth, instead of taking the turnpike through central Florida. Even with the superfluous 69.2 miles, Honeyed Cat pulls through this epic cross-country transplant. She curls into a ball on the floor, rests her tiny face on one of our ankles, and recedes.

  Every now and then I check on her and stroke her tiny chin and profess my love. But I don’t tell her we’re almost there. There’s no point in lying to a cat.

  4

  It’s only been several days after the law busted down Sara’s door and she’s at it again. I’m asking Bridget questions about early diagnosis of autism in children. We’re sitting on the micro-foam sofa. Austin radio plays on my twelve-year-old stereo. Once upon a time a commendable system, now there’s a short in the amplifier, rendering one speaker mute.

  “Do you think it’ll ever become common for parents to bring in their newborns to be diagnosed for autism,” I ask, “like detecting Down’s, but directly after birth?”

  “Not really. Eighteen months is currently the earliest people are comfortable diagnosing a child as being somewhere on the spectrum.”

  Bridget asks for the remote. She changes the station to something less twangy.

  “A year and a half!” I shout. “What’s the margin of error at that age?”

  “Pretty small. A big indicator is lack of speech.”

  “What if they’re slow learners?” I ask. “Isn’t that possible? Certainly at that age an incorrect diagnosis must be documented somewhere.”

  I always play devil’s advocate in any kind of discourse. Bridget has had enough of these talks with me to know I don’t have an actual opinion. All my opinions are temporary and developed on the fly, to get a rise, and they’re often ignorant and against the grain of traditional thought.

  “I guess that’s possible,” she says, “but research has shown that a lack of speech at eighteen months, in conjunction with other indicators, is reliable.”

  Bridget uses the beat-up remote to lower the volume. All of a sudden, our apartment is quiet. With her index finger she signs shh. I know she hears Sara.

  “She’s outside,” says Bridget.

  On the parking lot, I hear some guy’s voice, “Take it easy, Baby.”

  Then I hear Sara unhook and scream, “Don’t call me fucking Baby!”

  The guy sounds like he’s being attacked. Bridget runs outside to see what’s awry. I’m behind her. On the parking lot, one floor below, in the yellow glow of a street lamp, Sara grabs a vagrant’s shopping cart and slams it against the asphalt. The bum isn’t prepared for this assault. He tries to break away from her arms.

  That’s when Bridget yells, “Stop it!”

  Sara glowers our way, adjusts her eyeglasses, and stabs everyone with her acne.

  “She must be off her meds,” I whisper.

  The mindless Mohawk, equally concerned, comes outside with his three-legged dog. He looks up at us on the landing, pulls on cancer, and, as if responding to an unspoken request, blows carcinogens in the opposite direction. He makes the tally three against one. Defeated, Sara punts some of the vagrant’s belongings for good measure and steams toward Congress Ave. Bridget asks the vagrant if he’s all right. He doesn’t have anything to say, nothing except for a few aggrieved grunts. He only wants to set his HEB grocery cart aright, gather his strewn stuff, and shuffle off.

  The mindless Mohawk sarcastically says, “He shouldn’t have cal
led her Baby.” Then, to his dog, “C’mon, Bear, let’s get inside.”

  The three of us acknowledge each other and then return to our separate apartments, one stacked on top of the other. I notice the mindless Mohawk linger on Bridget, as if they shared a secret between them, or wanted to share a secret. I don’t tell her about the green pellet of jealousy that catches fire on the hearth under my heart. But she smells the stink in my breath.

  It’s nothing, I assure myself. You’re inventing things.

  8

  Gloria is manning one of the fire pits in the courtyard. It’s Memorial Day. She has her sauce and bucket of water right next to her feet. Two bags of HEB charcoal, a plastic blue bottle of lighter fluid, and a tray of marinating chicken breasts and racks of ribs make up the rest of her barbecue archipelago.

  “How y’all like the pool?” asks Gloria, silver tongs crabby in her hands.

  “It was really nice,” says Bridget. Her Irish nymph body is wrapped in a green towel, but underneath she wears a mismatched bikini, and underneath that is her tater tot. She says, “You look like you know what you’re doing over there?”

  Gloria grins. She has a spandex brace on her knee. She wears a purple cotton tee and a pair of Reebok walking shoes. Her hair looks burnt under the noonday sun. Taking her time, she says, “I do. I know what I’m doing.” She wets her lips, “I got five chicken breasts and two racks on there. I’m gonna feed these guys