by Carrie Richerson © 1994
The tiny, pink lizard sits on Katie's palm like a bejeweled Tiffany creation. Its sides puff rapidly in and out with its breathing; swallowing motions ripple through the loose skin of its gullet. The lizard's splayed toes grip Katie's hand with what seem to be large, adhesive pads below tiny claws. The fourth digit of each foot is the longest. At rest like this, the lizard's belly lies flat against Katie's palm. It feels cool and dry. The lizard is just over two inches long from the tip of its snout to the tip of its fat, blunt tail.
Slowly Katie reaches for the magnifying glass. Her guest waits patiently. An enormous, lidless eye gazes back at her through the glass. Round pupil stares into vertical pupil, and it is round pupil that blinks first. The scales are a bright pink color and cover every part of the animal Katie can see except for the eyes and the eardrums set flat to the skin. The scales form whorls around the tail, and there is a fold along the side of the lizard where the belly skin and scales seem to overlap the back scales. The magnifier shows her irregular, small, dark spots buried in the pink ground color.
As she watches, the lizard opens its mouth and slowly extends a short, thick tongue. It is so pale a pink as to be almost white, but the oral cavity is a deep crimson. The tongue has a hint of bifurcation at its tip; the lizard flicks it against Katie's palm and pulls it back in. Katie decides she has been tasted.
Without thinking, she shifts position slightly, and her guest is gone. She doesn't even see the leavetaking, it happens so fast. Disappointed, she looks about to see where it went. A twitch of movement catches the corner of her eye. There, on the end of the sofa. The lizard freezes as Katie spies it. She holds very still. Another twitch, and the lizard is on the bookcase, effortlessly clinging to the smooth, vertical side. Katie blinks, and the lizard is on the top shelf.
The lizard pumps itself up and down on its front legs, and Katie expects it to inflate its throat sack as she has seen anoles do in the garden. Instead the lizard opens that blood-blister cavern of a mouth and trills at her. It is a surprisingly large sound for so tiny a singer. The note seems to vibrate through the room. The lizard closes its mouth and cocks its head to one side. Katie feels a response is called for. She hums a note she thinks she can hit, then opens her mouth and sings it, full-throated. The lizard trills on top of her, the same note. Startled, she stops. The lizard stops, too. She tries a different note; the lizard matches it. They continue the duet for several minutes, until Katie tires of the game. The lizard seems to wait for Katie to continue. When she remains silent, it trills one last time, a note that sounds mournful to Katie, and disappears behind the books. Katie shrugs and returns to the journal entry the lizard had interrupted by climbing up on her hand.
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May 3: Ross didn't warn me about the lizards when he offered to let me house-sit for him here in San Antonio while he's in Europe this summer. I don't mind, really. I expected a few trade-offs for the privilege of getting out of that cramped, expensive apartment in Austin. Not getting that Dobie Paisano Fellowship hurt, but this place almost makes up for it. Ross knows how much writing this novel means to me. I'm lucky to have such a sweetie for an ex.
(From the journal and other unpublished papers of Katryn Taylor O'Connell. Quoted by permission of the Estate of Katryn Taylor O'Connell, Ross Kilpatrick O'Connell, Executor.)
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The house Katie is staying in is an idiosyncratic example of Texas frontier architecture, misplaced to the twentieth century. It is an unpretentious limestone rectangle at the end of a cul-de-sac on the bank of the San Antonio River, at the edge of the King William Historical District not far from downtown. The house is a straight shot from one end to the other — bedroom, living room, bath, kitchen, another bedroom — with lots of windows on both sides of the long axis and deep overhangs on the porches. The thick limestone walls and saltillo tile floors help the house resist the fierce San Antonio summers. There is no air conditioning. Katie knows this is one of the trade-offs she will have to accommodate.
Along the opposite bank of the river, two- and three-story Victorian manses, backed by large lawns and carriage houses, vie for historic plaques with the occasional O'Neill Ford design. On this side of the river the neighborhood is shabbier, sliding in the space of a few blocks from the clean but under-maintained houses of the working poor to the slums of the barrio. The walkways of a riverbank park wind past only a few feet from the house's back porch. During the days joggers and dog walkers trot past. At night, lovers stroll and whisper under the cypresses. The flood-controlled river flows sluggishly through its concrete channel, exhaling a moist breath of stale mud and floating trash.
A young Latino with little English comes once every week to mow the ever-vigorous lawn and trim back the masses of bougainvillea and wisteria that threaten to bury the house. He is paid automatically by Ross's bank; Katie offers him lemonade and practices her fragmentary Spanish on him. He is respectful, hard-working, and unobtrusive.
The neighborhood is quiet; most of Katie's neighbors are elderly, and there are few children to disturb the peace. Katie spends her days in a happy fog of writing and research.
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May 6: Summer is already here. It's even hotter and more humid than I expected, probably because I am right on the river. I did expect more bugs, because of the river, but I haven't seen a cockroach since I moved in. Now I know why.
Night before last, I got up about three to use the bathroom, flipped on the light, and surprised one of my pink lizards with a still-wiggling waterbug in his jaws. The cockroach was almost as large as the pink guy, who froze when the light came on, and then shot behind a cabinet, without ever letting go of his captive.
Last night I went searching with a flashlight, and found them all over the place. They're geckos, I think, even though I haven't found a picture to match them in the field guides at the library. I made the mistake of mentioning them to the old lady next door. "Lizards?" She seemed baffled. "Pink lizards?" She looked at me like I had suddenly sprouted two heads.
I don't care if she thinks I've been ingesting too many worms with my tequila — I'm just grateful to have these pink bug-hunters around. They're much cheaper and healthier than Orkin. I intend to make myself a very good neighbor.
I looked through my notes this morning. It was a leap of faith, quitting a steady job to write full time, but this novel is going to be worth it.
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The days grow longer, hotter, stickier. Katie makes a habit of waking before dawn, working through the morning, then sleeping again until late afternoon. On the worst days she takes the bus downtown to the library and barricades herself behind a stack of books on the Texas frontier, Plains Indians, and Comanche and Kiowa folklore. The air-conditioning is heaven.
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May 10: What do we mean when we talk about the "frontier"? Most people think of it as a place, a long, ragged line marking the westward expansion of European-descended settlers across the nascent United States. I'm one of those rarities: a native Texan. I grew up thinking of the frontier as something, some place of endless shoot-'em-ups, settlers versus savages. How naive.
It must have been Ross's friend Duncan, the chemist, with his talk of chemical reactions at "boundary layers," who first started me to thinking about the frontier as a tension, a dynamic, rather than a place. Two, sometimes many, civilizations collided, reacted, mutated, changed at the boundary layer we call the frontier. Bonds were broken, other bonds forged. States of mind and energy were irrevocably altered. To live on the frontier required a certain adaptability, a taste for change. No one could stay there for long and not be affected.
Cynthia Ann Parker was one of the most famous of the affected. She has fascinated me from the time I first heard about her in history class. For so notable a figure in Texas history, we know very little about her, and nothing from her own account. I want to tell her story, as she would have told it.
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— end of excerpt
© 1994, 2004, 2005, 2006 by Carrie Richerson. Comments? email: carrie@carriericherson.info