Have You Seen Marie? (3 page)

you

      seen …”

Our voices echoed off stone and metal.

She was out of sight before we could even finish.

In a hackberry tree shading the Acapulco Ice House, a squirrel flicked her tail like a housewife shaking a dirty dust rag.

“Have you seen Marie?”

The squirrel stared at us suspiciously as if we’d steal her secret stash of pecans.

“Okay, well … Let us know if you hear something.”

We walked down alleys, gravel crunching underfoot. We talked in between fence slats to folks getting ready to barbecue, the scent of mesquite and fajitas reminding us we hadn’t had lunch yet.

Over on Adams Street, we interrupted the family Ozuna’s Sunday get-together.

“¿Qué, qué, qué?”
Grandma Ozuna said.

“They’re looking for a cat, Yaya.”

“A hat?”

“No, Yaya,
un gato
, a cat.

A cat. CAT,” they shouted

into her ear.

“Cake? No, I don’t want any
queque
.”

Poor Grandma Ozuna. She’d lost more than a cat,
pobrecita
.

“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.