“Marie! Marie!”
We shouted into the muddy crawl space under houses, in the damp chink between garage doors, under peeling plaster and boards loose as rotten teeth. We sent our voices in places too dangerous to go ourselves. Beyond fenced driveways, into dark crannies sticky with cobwebs, between the floor planks of porches, into the mouths of scary hallways. But nothing and no one answered.
On Cedar six bossy Pekingese dogs and one rat terrier with sad, watery eyes threw their bodies against the chain-link fence in a fury.
“Have you seen Marie?”
But they just barked above our voices, except for the rat terrier, who said nothing, too ashamed to disagree with his friends.
At a freshly painted house on South Saint Mary’s, an old man in painters’ whites pumped my hand and smiled at my teeth. “I lost my wife a while back. Pardon me for asking, but do you have a husband?”
A teenager working at the Ay Tu Car Wash said he hadn’t seen our Marie, but asked if we could be on the lookout please for a white cat named Luna. We promised to let him know if we ran into his cat.
Roz and I wedged flyers on doorknobs, tucked them inside the curlicues of gates, clamped them beneath the mousetraps of windshield wipers, stapled them on telephone poles and fences.
We stopped a bearded man in his wheelchair collecting empty cans from the recycling bins of houses on Mission Street. He took our flyer and said, “Man, I’m sorry about your cat. I lost my own cat once and cried like a baby.” You only had to look at his faded blue eyes to see that this was probably true.
“Isn’t it a shame to lose the one you love?”
Luli asked.
“Yes it is,” I agreed, and
when I said it,
my heart felt as if someone
squeezed it.
The day grew hot. The top of our heads felt soft as tar. On San Arturo Street a grandmother watering her thirsty roses told us, no, she hadn’t seen Marie.
“Would you mind watering us please?” We pointed to our heads.
She did, laughing as she sent a lazy jump rope of water toward us.
At a lacy Victorian on Barrera Street, we stopped to chat with a woman pretty as a mermaid. She was swinging on a porch swing knitting something purple.
I thought about my mother and how she used to knit ugly scarves no one wanted to wear.
Now I wish I had one of those ugly scarves, and my nose started to tingle.
Under the shadow of the Hemisfair tower, at a wooden house off Refugio and Matagorda, a nice couple dining on their porch invited us to look into their bamboo. There was a family of wild cats living there, but the cats wouldn’t answer when we asked about Marie, except for a fat gray one with eyes like hubcaps who curled its tail into a question mark. We left with paper plates of brisket, beans, potato salad, and cups of iced tea.
Outside the doors of the Torres Taco Haven, we caught up with John the mailman, who knows everything about everything in the neighborhood. John let his mailbag slide off his shoulder, readjusted his cap, and then announced, “Nope. Can’t say I’ve seen any black-and-white cat … But I know a lady over on Beauregard whose cat just had kittens.”
“Have you seen Marie?”
Anne the artist lives next door to the gas station. We found her planting paperwhites in her front yard in memory of her mother. We didn’t say much to each other, but that said everything.
“Marie, Marie!”
We called up to trees. We crawled on our hands and knees and peered under parked cars. We walked behind houses and into scratchy, deserted gardens.
But there was no Marie to be found.
At a tiny house on Claudia Street with a Virgen de Guadalupe
nicho in the front yard, silver women in their silver years laughed like bells.
I felt better for a little while.
“May La Virgen look over you, honey bunnies, and your kitty cat, too.”
“Marie, Marie,” we shouted. But, inside, my heart wheezed,
“Mama, Mama.”The sky let out a sigh and soured into a bruise. Wind whirled the flyers we had left in dry hot circles, and big, sad drops of rain began as if to say, “Despair, despair.”
“Oh, Marie,” Rosalind said out loud, “I miss you.”
I said nothing, but swallowed.
A woman named Beverly called out to us from the corner house on Crofton, the one with the five palm trees. “Hey, I think I’ve found your Marie!”
“Hallelujah and amen! Bless the Reverend Chavana,” Rosalind said.
But when we went to look, it was a big male cat with a white face and black body. Who knew there were so many tuxedo cats in the neighborhood?
“Aw, sweetie,” Beverly said, “I’m so sorry,” and hugged Rosalind. I felt like asking for a hug, too.
The evening smelled of skunk and jasmine. Rosalind let out a “Have mercy!” We walked and walked and said nothing, our long shadows dawdling behind us as if they were tired.
A house like a black eye, haunted with rusty vines, a pickup sagging beneath refrigerators. The door opened a crack and a voice behind a raggedy screen said, “Can’t help,” slamming the door before we could say what we came for.
A girl in a fiesta dress and sleeves of tattoos got out of her pickup and said she’d give us her landlord’s number so we could look in the back shed. “I have his phone number on a magnet on my fridge. I’ll be right back.”
She disappeared into the sad apartment house on South Presa, the one with a light-bulb always on, and the front and rear door open like a mountain tunnel. But she never came back, and we didn’t know which apartment door to knock on.
On Wickes Street, my friend Craig came out in his plaid boxers, his pale chest sprouting white hairs, the blue light of the news in the living room, the smell of fried pork chops.
“I’m having my supper, sweetheart. I’ll come and help you look later.” But later came and went and he forgot.
We consulted with the wise neighbor-lady Blanca on Barbe Street.
“Well, I haven’t seen a cat, exactly, but I dreamed just this morning of a black iron fence. Does that mean anything to you?”
We shrugged and said thank you.
Clouds dark and in a hurry swept past. Wind chimes rang. The trees shook their wild, loose hair. Rosalind and I agreed to split up and meet in an hour before it grew too dark to see. Rosalind went upriver toward the flour mill. I went downriver toward the Big Tex granary and the old Lone Star Brewery.
The sun was already behind the freeway. Grackles gathering in the trees called out,
“Marie? Marie? Marie?”
I asked the river,
“Have you seen Marie?”
River said, “Mamita, you name it, I’ve seen it.”
“Do you mean you’ve seen her?”
“I’ve seen everything, corazón de melón. Everything, everything, everything, everything, everything…,” River continued.
“But I don’t understand what you mean.” There was a something in my throat. I felt like I’d swallowed a spoon. I put my face under the water and cried.
River said, “Don’t you cry,
mamas. I will take your tears and carry them to the Texas coast where they’ll mix with the salty tears of the Gulf of Mexico, where they will swirl with the waters of the Caribbean, with the wide sea called Sargasso, the water roads of the Atlantic, with the whorls and eddies around the Cape of Good Hope, around that hat called Patagonia, the blue waters of the Black Sea and the pearl-filled waters around the islands of Japan, the coral currents of Java, the rivers of the several continents, the Aegean of Homer’s legend, the mighty Amazon, and the wise
Nile, the grandmother and grandfather rivers Tigris and Euphrates, the great mother river the sandy Yangtze, the dancing Danube, and through the strait of the Dardanelles, along the muddy Mekong and the sleepy Ganges, waters warm as soup and waters cold to the teeth, waters carrying away whole villages, waters washing away the dead, and waters bringing new life, the salty and the sweet, mixing with everything, everything, everything, everything.”
I raised my face from the water and shivered.
Along the river there are skunks, raccoons, and possums, snakes and turtles, cormorants, cranes, butterflies, fire ants, and snails. There are hawks in the sky, and beetles in the earth. But no Marie. Timid stars came out one by one and stared at me.
Over at the bend where the river snakes into an
S there is a muddy puddle. A little underground spring bubbles beneath, feeding into the river. I sat on the giant roots of an ancient Texas cypress wider than thirteen people holding hands, grander than all the fancy mansions in the neighborhood, wiser than any ancient
casita with its lopsided tin roof, prettier than any house in San Antonio.
A tree so old it had been there since before Texas was Texas. Since before Tejas was Tejas. Since before me and my mother. Since before before.
And when the swirling inside me grew still I heard the voices inside my heart. I’m afraid. I’m all alone. I have never lived on this earth without you. Then I really felt sorry for myself and began to shake like branches in rain. Mother, Ma, Mamaaaá.
After three days, when her heart was smooth as river stone, Marie came out from under the house where she’d been hiding, and said, “Here I am.”
