It was predawn, just when the rim of sky in Austin went that violet crown attributed by O. Henry, (Does this matter, Mr. English, the color at dawn? Sometimes I just want to describe the beauty and the horror because that’s what life is. Guess that’s why you said I’d make a better poet than a novelist. I remember asking, “Can I tell them what happens next but with lyrical writing?” You smiled so big and your eyes shined.) I saw their bellies, all of them together in total synchronization, of course, swelling and deflating rapidly though they’re asleep. Maybe they’re having bad dreams in that deep REM sleep?
But what would they dream about?
Anyway. Enough of this. Let’s start from the beginning.
Okay. Deep breath. Here goes…
To be truthful, when I first heard the sounds, I was lighting a bowl of pot.
Most of the western hemisphere lay gripped by predawn sleep, and there I was, sitting cross-legged on a boulder at Mount Bonnell, overlooking Lake Austin. Yeah, that’s me there in your mind’s eye, the silhouette of a young man holding a blue finger of flame in the dark.
The bowl blooming orange, that’s when it happened. Holding the smoke in my lungs, I hear this… sound.
Sure, I’d be thinking it, too, if I were you: the guy’s a burnout, he’s hearing stuff. Yeah.
But if you’re reading this, the very fact that you’re reading this, you know exactly what I’m talking about and so you know a couple of hits of low-impact smoke had no role to play in what I was hearing at dawn of that morning, the morning of the day of. So let’s move on.
But just so you know, no, I am not a pothead, a burnout. Not being defensive, but I’m not. In fact, I was still new to the whole smoking-pot thing. Sure, when you’re waking and baking alone at an urban overlook, you’ve moved out of novice territory, but still.
Really what I was on that morning was a heartbroken and stressed-out trombonist.
So, I keep holding it in. I stifle a cough, feel my face go red, ropey veins popping out on my neck. I’m listening, lungs full of smoke, eyes toggling.
At first, I thought they were testing the tornado sirens. The sounds started with this low shuddering boom, then came a wailing siren. A bomb blast followed immediately by sirens? Something over at the military installation, Camp Mabry? They do battle reenactments over there. But at dawn? Couldn’t be. No storm, no bomb, no war games. Had to be a test. But why at the stroke of dawn, waking up the city? Can’t be.
Within seconds, the sound became so loud that I coughed out the smoke and stood up on the boulder. Smoke wisped above my head. I faced west, looking out over Lake Austin. What was called Lake Austin was really the dammed up Lower Colorado River. Moving south beyond Lady Bird Lake, the river flowed southeast through LaGrange, Bay City, to the Gulf of Mexico, dumping into the Matagorda Bay between Corpus and Galveston. The sound came from the downriver direction, my left. And the sound now, though constant and siren-like, was the deep and mournful tone of what I thought were the sounds made by whales. Whales in extremis.
Whale sounds. In Austin, Texas.
More than whale sounds. Otherworldly sounds; countless whales not just moaning and sighing and singing, but crying out.
Screaming.
I heard a distant tinny crash. To the upriver right, on the Pennybaker Bridge, this big rust-colored double arc, there are flames. So far away that it looks like an orange wink between two dots. The dots were cars and the fire bloomed. Had to be a big wreck to create a fire I could see from miles away. The sounds waned then fell off as quickly as they had come. The arc of first light was just up in the east, soon to be a red ball hanging next to the University of Texas clock tower like a counterpoint. Muscles in my shoulders relaxed from being hunched against the sound. I looked at the pipe in my hand, incredulous. What am I smoking, my God?
I closed my eyes and shook my head with vigor to clear it. Surely, I was hearing and seeing things.
Kept my eyes closed for a beat, another.
A hawk cried down in the valley. I felt the breeze on my cheeks. I heard the whelming hum of a waking city. With your eyes closed you can really hear it all. The metallic clacks and low roar of a city all around you.
I opened my eyes. Down on the bridge there was a line of smoke rising to the sky and in the distance I heard emergency sirens. Car and home alarms everywhere.
Now something caught my eye to my left. It looked like a ripple coming up the river.
Slowly fetching upriver, maybe five feet high, stretched entirely across in an even line. Weird because the Colorado is dammed in several places between here and Matagorda, including the big one right down there, the Tom Miller Dam. I’d kayaked around Red Bud Isle often with Martin and Johnny. Tom Miller is pretty high, maybe one hundred feet.
Coming. Close, close, close.
Trying to beat it, I jumped down from the boulder and ran up the rutted stone trail to the limestone overlook and watched it come. Riding, gliding on top of it was a large, pointed shadow. I glanced up to see what kind of cloud made that shape, moved that fast. Nothing in the sky but dawn’s blue.
The wave rolled past. It lapped up onto the straight-edged shorelines. The water swept over jutting docks, leapt up and collapsed onto the golf-green yards, the water’s-edge swimming pools, the driveways and outlooks where cocktail parties were had.
It just rolled by—so quiet. The shore got wet, the docks rose and fell, nothing broke, no noise.
On it went toward the bridge with the line of smoke fingering the sky like calligraphy.
As that wave came, I noticed a balding man across the lake walking out in his tighties. Skinny guy, knobby knees and elbows with a pot-belly. Stood out in his yard with his arms crossed. The water spread across his grass and must have inched to his toes because he backed up a step.
Here’s where my heart begins to race.
I’m really wishing I’d not come up here to toke as I told myself I needed to stop doing. Mr. English knew I was habitually smoking. He brings out the truth in me, even now, as I talk this book out, the very act of doing this the only thing keeping me sane.
His body looking the size of an apple stem from way up here, the man lifted his chin to look up at me. When his face locked on to mine, he waved at me real excitedly like a little kid who recognized me and was about to go down a big slide. Kind of a hey, watch me! I could just make out his smile. It was grotesque and wild and I turned my face away.
What I saw fifty yards up the path was what looked to be a purple-green (scaly?) firehose being pulled into the brush, a hose that tapered and ended in a black tip that swayed and flicked before it disappeared. Much like a tail.
I blinked. I swallowed hard.
When I looked back down at the man, he was returning to his house. I’m staring down at his yard and thinking, what the hell have I just seen? when I hear a pop and see a flash in the grass. A firework-sounding pop that echoes up the ridge. I know it’s a gunshot, having been out with Martin pheasant hunting twice, neither time liking it.
That flash in the grass, that faraway pop. It came from that guy’s house.
Granted: a little high, but not stoned. The weed’s not that good. Stuff me and Bastian grew ourselves and we don’t know what we’re doing at all. Yet I’m reeling. Did I just see a twenty-five-foot-long tail belonging to fuck-knows-what slither into the cedar pines and that man way down there wave at me and then go inside and shoot a gun? Did I just hear that huge sound at daybreak?