How the Rest of the Trip Went

After you have closed a cat's tail in a car door, your entire existence focuses sharply on not ever, ever doing that again.

Scott and I became a committed anti-tail-maiming team. Any time we stopped for food or gas or a bathroom or all three, we'd take turns getting out of the car while the other stayed inside with Hankie. When I opened the passenger side door, Scott reached down to the passenger floorboard to gently hold the tail of the sleeping Hankie, because the scheming thing could otherwise slither its way into the door slam again. And that would have been the end of me.

This process was not as easy as it sounds. Every time I left the car, I had been, for 2 or 3 hours, contorted like a gargoyle in order to wedge my feet into a space the size of a Chiclet. I could barely unfold myself enough to stand up, and when I did I grabbed the roof of the car with both hands to keep from collapsing like a startled souffle. Hankie would look up at whomever had his tail in hand, and squint in his sleepy confusion.

Oklahoma. The wind was pushing even my extremely weighed down car all over the highway like an air hockey puck. Semis were swerving like serpents as we passed them.

We had to stop for gas. Scott got out while I did the tail-holding. The sand and grit in the air flew into the car and into my hair and eyes and teeth. When I looked outside, Scott was running as fast as he could into the convenience store. He was getting sandblasted. When he came back to the car, all his flesh had been jackhammered off by the wind. All of it. He was a skeleton. I tried not to let on that he was fleshless, and that his every move should be accompanied by xylophone music, like in cartoons with skeletons, but when he opened his skull mouth and said "Holy sh*t. That wind almost knocked my legs out from under me." I could not stifle a laugh.

My turn came. I had no choice. I'd had a hearty breakfast of Sprite and Twizzlers, heavy on the Sprite. The second I opened the car door, Hankie's tail whipped to the danger zone. Scott pulled it back in. The plastic bag that covered the cat box scooper was sucked out of the car and shot like an angry sperm across the road into a churchyard. Litter was sucked right out of the litterbox in the back seat, bounced off our eyes and then followed the scoop to church. I didn't have time to worry about leaving traces of catshit for the Baptists.

When I got inside, I mumbled to the girl behind the counter that the wind was unbelievable. In full-Okie accent she said "We might git a tornado later on." As though she'd said she might be eating a Cheez-It later on. No big deal. Just a few trailers slamming around overhead. Whoop. What? You pussies never been in a twister before?

The skeleton and I took off, his flesh slowly reforming on his frame the farther away we got from there. "Where the wind comes sweeping down the plain," my ass. Hankie slept on, at my feet.