Travels with Lizbeth Page 14

  I could not believe it. Fire ants are very small and I had to light several matches before I saw one. Then I saw many more than one. Sure enough, fire ants came in a line, across thirty yards of slab, right at us. Indeed, hundreds of them already had reached the freshly laundered towel I lay on.

  I supposed I had settled us by chance on an ant trail. I got up, shook the towel, and moved about ten yards on the perpendicular to the line of ants.

  This time Lizbeth ate the first scouts that approached us. But it was hopeless. The ants followed their old line, turned, and came directly at our new spot.

  The next night I tried sleeping on a flat rock in the middle of another creek. We were surrounded by water. I never understood how the fire ants got at us, but get at us they did. I doubted my sanity. Surely nothing in nature could be as malicious as the fire ants seemed to me to be. The fabric of reality seemed to take on the ominous shadows of a cheap horror movie. Tiny creatures out to get me? Only psychotic patients think such things. Yet the ants were real enough or else Lizbeth had become my partner in a folie à deux.

  By the third night I had found some household insecticide in a Dumpster. A fire-ant colony cannot be destroyed with ordinary insecticide. Even when the mound is located and sprayed directly, the queen will be removed to safety before the vapors penetrate her chamber. What is worse, the colonies now have several queens—the experts once supposed this was impossible—and the chances of eliminating all the queens in one stroke are vanishingly small. But, as I discovered, insecticides can be used to discourage the ants from adventures in a small area.

  I took Lizbeth to Adams Park. Austin had a park curfew. But several parts of Adams Park are not visible from the surrounding streets. I knew no Austin cop would put down his coffee and doughnuts, get out of his car, and come wandering through the park unless there was some complaint.

  I hoped there would be no complaint. Adams Park is fairly obscure. How to get into it, or even that there is anything to get into, is not readily apparent from the streets. The park had a water tap and failed of being the perfect place only in that it had no rest rooms. But until I found the insecticide, the fire ants made sleeping there impossible.

  I secured Lizbeth upwind and sprayed a ten-by-ten foot area until it was wet. The toxic vapors gave me a sick headache, but it did the trick. With only a little touch-up spraying after heavy rains, the area remained free of fire ants so long as I did not bring food into it. However much this procedure may offend wild-eyed ecologists, I do not know how Lizbeth and I might have survived otherwise.

  Lizbeth and I slept in Adams Park when the weather was fair. As our spot was quite in the open, we could not stay in the park in the rain. Nights that it rained we sat up under the awnings of stores.

  We had a spell of intermittent rains late at night. We would go to the park several times, only to be driven out by renewed rainfall. These storms often cleared at three or four in the morning, by which time I would be exhausted from all the packing and unpacking. Sometimes I overslept. Although in our bedroll we were quite invisible from the streets, by daylight we were obvious to anyone entering the park afoot. At first I was worried that my oversleeping in the park would result in a complaint that would lead to our eviction from the park or my arrest. The park curfew expired at 5:00 A.M. and I thought by first light we were within the law. But I was afraid if I were observed too often in the park in the morning, the police might look for me there at night.

  I did not then know there was an ordinance against sleeping at any time in any public place. I did not know it because, of course, the ordinance is never enforced against picnickers or sunbathers, but only against those who have no better place to sleep. I often heard from attorney friends that the law in its majesty forbids the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges. In truth I saw that the rich—or at least the middle class—slept in public places, unmolested by the law.

  But for a long while, Lizbeth and I did not come to the attention of the law. We came to know, or at least to recognize, most of the morning visitors to the park. Lizbeth charmed several of the women who came in the morning to walk their own dogs. Strangers in the park were rare.

  One morning I slept a little later than usual and was much alarmed to wake to see a green Parks and Recreation Department vehicle jump a curb and drive into the park on the grass. I thought we were discovered, and of course we were. But the truck merely pulled into an inconspicuous spot, where the driver fell asleep. The park, it turned out, was a favorite hideout for city workers of various departments. Whole crews came to the park for three- or four-hour picnics, and individuals often slept in their trucks through the whole workday. None of them would complain of me, for of course they did not want the park to come under scrutiny.

  Eventually, as the Dumpster harvest was coming to an end, my bicycle was stolen. I had left it only so long as it took me to run into Sleazy Sue’s with a bag of canned goods for the food bank. Because it was raining I had not gone directly to Sue’s door, but left Lizbeth, the bicycle, and a small backpack under the awning of an abandoned taco stand that was attached to Sue’s. I was out of sight of the things for less than a minute, but in that time the thief determined Lizbeth was harmless and made off with the bicycle and the backpack.

  While I was collecting canned goods for the food bank, I reserved the perishable food I found for Lizbeth and me. All that was in the backpack was our dinner—some boneless chicken breasts for Lizbeth, some Velveeta and candy corn for me. Later I found the food scattered in the street and run over. The backpack would be easy to replace because backpacks are common in Dumpsters, but we missed our dinner. We came to miss the bicycle more, for it was taken just as good finds in the Dumpsters became scarce and we most needed to range widely. Hungry and not entirely sheltered from the blowing rain, Lizbeth and I sat under the awning until long after dark.

  Soon after the bicycle was stolen, Dan Archer’s wife finally succeeded in persuading him to return to Mexico so that she could visit her relatives. Dan wanted to lock his storage closet while they were away, which would be for an indefinite period, and I was told I ought to remove whatever I might want before they returned. I left my cold-weather gear and my books and papers. I took most of my clothes. I seldom had the money to do laundry and so I wanted as many changes as possible. Stung by the loss of my bicycle, I tried to carry everything for several days. That proved impractical. Reluctantly I began to stash most of my gear where I stashed the bedroll, in a clump of bushes in Adams Park.

  Two or three times I returned to discover my gear dumped out and scattered. But except for a Walkman I had put together from Dumpster finds, nothing was taken. A group of white can scroungers and a group of black can scroungers came through the park regularly on their rounds. I believed the black can scroungers were the ones dumping out my gear. At least they had the sense to see whether I had anything worth having before they removed it. My stash spot was in an uninviting brushy area where no one would go except to look for things. I kept my gear in garbage bags, like the ones can scroungers used to carry cans. Stealing another’s cans is an occupation of certain can scroungers, and I suppose the can scroungers first looked into my gear with the thought that the garbage bags might contain cans.

  Fortunately I was in the park one day when the white can scroungers came through. I was writing a letter at the picnic table at the far end of the park and took little notice of the can scroungers. Presently Lizbeth began barking and straining at her leash. This was remarkable for we were not less than a hundred yards from the gear, yet Lizbeth perceived the thieves were at work. I looked up and saw the bushes shake. Then I saw the white can scroungers scurrying up the bluff beyond the bushes.

  I only managed to catch up with them because they did not know I was after them.

  I found them sitting under a tree, still going through my rollbag. As I approached them, the nature of my errand must have been apparent. The able-bodied ones scattered, leaving a single old lame wino who
could not have escaped me in any event but who was especially immobilized because he would not let go of the group’s can collection. The collection was the size of a water bed and I do not know where the can scroungers found a plastic bag so large.

  All that had been in the rollbag seemed to have remained under the tree, but my new backpack was missing. I questioned the old man. He denied having been in the bushes, but I recognized his cap. He denied going through the rollbag, although I had seen him in the thick of it. Mostly he denied knowing where the backpack was. I had not seen any of the others run off with it. Once I determined I could get no useful information out of him, I ripped his can bag open and scattered the cans on the street.

  Early in the day as it was, the old gimp was already quite intoxicated. He tried for a long time to gather the cans up in his arms, not seeming to notice that he dropped as many as he picked up. He continued to live his miserable life only because I thought of Lizbeth and that she would not fare well if I were arrested.

  I repacked the rollbag. Of course nothing was missing from it because there was nothing of value to anyone else in it. I was desperate to find the backpack because it contained Lizbeth’s heartworm prophylactic and we were living quite exposed to mosquitoes.

  I had a flash of insight. The thieves were can scroungers, after all. I looked into the nearby Dumpsters and, sure enough, found the backpack in one of them. The contents had been scattered and it took me awhile to fish everything out. But I ended that day with as much as I had at dawn.

  I still could not carry everything with me all the time. But I began to carry always a day pack containing the most essential things, such as Lizbeth’s medication and a day’s supply of her food, with the few small items of value, such as the Walkmans I found.

  I tried to keep at least one functioning radio, and usually I had to keep a large collection of batteries, for I discovered I could get an hour or so of play out of otherwise dead batteries if I allowed them several days of rest between uses. I tried to hear the National Public Radio news in the mornings and in the evenings. When I could not find one, I sometimes spent five dollars on a digital watch. As I made my Dumpster rounds I always picked up the discarded newspapers and newsmagazines.

  When each day was so much like any other, I had to make an effort to remember the day of the week and the date. I sometimes went for weeks without speaking to another person. I sometimes caught myself losing touch with reality. Material reality, the fact of a day, I never had trouble with. But social reality, the convention of a date, sometimes eluded me.

  As I was sleeping under the stars, my lapsed interest in things celestial renewed itself. For a time, however, this served to further disorient me.

  I had known for a long time that the local daily was far from accurate in reporting local politics. But then the events of local politics were occasionally less certain and less predictable, and certainly always were less harmonious, than the motions of the spheres. When I found the local paper I usually discarded the city-state section after I read the obituaries to assure myself that most of those dying were considerably older than myself. I turned my attention to the weather page, which had recently been made over in imitation of USA Today with a four-color map and various sorts of graphic excesses. I discovered about every other day that the paper’s report of the times of moonrise and moonset and the phases of the moon were contradictory of my own observations.

  I knew the paper was perfectly capable of concealing the true dimensions of some real estate development that was being proposed for an environmentally sensitive area. But I found it hard to believe they would misrepresent the moon, which anyone might see for himself. I began to wonder whether I really made my observations or merely dreamt them, or if something was wrong with my basic observational faculties.

  Eventually I discovered that the paper was, apparently, lifting the times of moonrise and moonset from the Old Farmers’ Almanac and that the times were quite correct for observers in Boston. But many days whoever prepared the weather page failed to enter the corrections necessary to make the predictions answer for Austin. How the paper went wrong so often in reporting the phases of the moon, I never discovered.

  I gleaned information on the present positions of the planets from astrology columns. These too seemed at odds with my own observations. I did not then know that astrologers who pretend to consult an ephemeris at all most often use one that long ago ceased to be useful in accounting for the motions of the actual planets. Fortunately when I remembered to listen to the radio at nine in the evening I could receive Stardate, a little sixty-second program from the McDonald observatory, and it proved infallibly accurate.

  * * *

  TWO OR THREE times a week we went north to a park that had a public pool. Usually Lizbeth and I arrived at Shipe Playground between 7:00 and 8:00 A.M. depending upon the condition of the Dumpsters along the way. I liked to brush my teeth and shave in the restroom before the park became crowded. Whether the light bulb in the restroom had been stolen or not, there was not enough light for me to see my face in the little mirror I had taken from a discarded compact. Nonetheless I discovered I had to set the mirror on the hand-drying machine. Due to some psychological quirk, I could not tell the right side of my face from the left unless I imagined an image in the mirror. I do not know why, if I had to imagine the image, I could not have imagined the mirror as well.

  Unlike Adams Park, Shipe Playground was not a bit obscure. The swimming pool was well attended. But I rarely saw other homeless people there. While swimming was not as satisfactory as a real shower with hot water and soap, if I stayed in the water long enough and toweled off vigorously afterward, I could get reasonably clean. Since the pool authorities accepted any cut-off jeans as a bathing costume, I do not know why the expedient of pool bathing did not occur to more homeless people.

  I could not always stay in the pool as long as I wanted because Lizbeth continued to regard bathing as an inherently unsafe activity—or at any rate, she would bark at the water until I got out of it, and sometimes she became agitated enough to annoy other people. After my swim, Lizbeth and I would picnic in the park if I had found lunch on the way. If I had not found lunch yet, I would tie Lizbeth and the day pack in the park while I went to the Dumpsters at the surrounding apartments. I saw Clint at Shipe Playground many times.

  Clint was the last roommate I had at the shack on Avenue B. As I remembered it he had promised to contribute a hundred dollars a month toward the rent when he moved in in August. I had never seen a penny of that money. As we fell further and further in arrears, I explained the situation to him many times, but he never gave any sign of appreciating the seriousness of the matter. I had left him a very bitter note when I took off for California.

  In truth, Clint’s share of the rent would probably have only postponed the outcome. He made only a little money as a kitchen worker in a vegetarian restaurant. He did some of the pointless running around to the various agencies as we tried to get some assistance. When he did no more, at least he provided for himself. In many respects he was much more mature and responsible than I had been at his age—he was nineteen when he moved in. We never did have hot water or electric power while he lived in the shack, and for little rent or none, as he well knew, he might have found a much better situation.

  He seemed to be the leader of a little group of other young people who hung out at the park. I did not speak to him at first, for fear of embarrassing him in front of his friends, but any observant person would have seen that Lizbeth knew Clint very well.

  One day when we stayed in the park late into the afternoon, Clint followed us when we left and stopped me to talk as soon as we were out of sight of the playground. I learned that after he had left me off by the side of the road, Billy had visited the shack and added a few of his own remarks to the note I left. Still, Clint evidently had not absorbed that the landlord meant to repossess the property. He had stayed in the shack another week or two until he returned to find that al
l of his belongings had been removed.

  He told me he was living on a deck he built in the limestone hills west of town. He had some hopes for his latest get-rich-quick scheme and he said if things worked out he would get a house and I could stay there.

  Clint was obviously starving. That he was a bodybuilder made it all the more obvious that he was consuming some of his own muscle mass. I gave him the canned goods I had collected as Lizbeth and I walked to the playground that morning. After that whenever I found a T-shirt or a pair of shorts that would fit Clint, I would take it to the playground when I went and would leave it on his bicycle. Although he told me he was not ashamed for the others to know he knew me, he never acknowledged my presence when the others were around.

  The rumor went around the park that Lizbeth was a pit bull and even the most macho of the other boys gave her a wide berth. Clint was regarded as incredibly brave because he did not dodge her.

  Pit-bull hysteria was then in full bloom. I never saw Lizbeth’s resemblance to a pit bull, but the issue was raised many times. I suppose many people were terrified of pit bulls who would not have known one if they saw it. The pit-bull phenomenon was at least the third avatar of the Killer Breed to occur in my lifetime. When I was a child the Killer Breed was the German shepherd. By the time I was in college it was the Doberman pinscher. I imagine it is a chestnut that journalists dust off on a slow day. Of course there are many dog attacks every day. Without too much trouble a single breed can be implicated in several attacks and a new Killer Breed is born.

  Lizbeth’s supposed likeness to a pit bull was not the only troublesome aspect of her appearance. In the summer in Austin she developed a scaly dermatitis on her back and hindquarters. This had been diagnosed as an allergy and there was considerable evidence to support that diagnosis. But she looked flea-bitten or otherwise infested in the summer.