“Shut Up!  We killed it.  It’s dead.”

1989

   I didn’t usually ride home with Linda (named changed for personal protection), but I did that night.  My car was in the shop.  My regular carpool was full.  I was riding with Linda.  It’s been so long I don’t remember what kind of car she drove, a white sedan maybe.  We knew each other casually, shared a couple of classes.  We were part of a phalanx of students working at the factory a half shift, 8 to midnight.

    I suspected nothing at the start of our ride home.  We had the usual chit chat.  What classes, what profs, who do you know I know.  There was another student she called gorilla.  When I asked why she said he had a very hairy back.  Ok.  I guess if somebody’s gonna call you gorilla, you can take it.  This was going to be one unusual trip.  We took the four lane road around the city and exited at the regular road, but something was amiss.  We were directed onto a detour.  In street-lit darkness we could see the hulk of a house in the middle of the road.  Workmen were moving electric lines.  The house was propped on the bed of a trailer.  They were moving a house in the middle of the night.  The detour through the neighborhood was not marked.  We snaked this way and that before finding our way back on the two lane road.  I enjoyed this stretch of road every day as it wound its way past white fenced horse farms.  We wouldn’t see any horses tonight.  Another 20 minutes and we would be in the small town we called home.

    That’s when I saw them out of the corner of my right eye.  The headlight caught the last baby and the front tire caught the mother.  A near silent thump attested to the hit.  No sooner had the sound registered when a more ominous sound reverberated off the windows of the car.  In an instant Linda began wailing, I mean wailing, and shouting.  “Oh no, we killed it, a mother and all her babies.  We killed it.”  She began sobbing.  Her head went back and forth, first to the steering wheel, then up, then to the steering wheel, all the while repeating her mourning mantra.  In an effort to offer some comfort I said, “It was such a small sound, maybe she is still alive.”  She took her full attention off the road, clutched the steering wheel with all her strength,and poured the rest of her power into a screaming shout, “SHUT UP, WE KILLED IT.  IT’S DEAD!”

    For fifteen minutes I hung on to the door handle as though it were some kind of life ring.  Liinda repeated over and over and over every possible variation of we killed it, the mother and her babies, and all her babies, O God, O God, all her babies, we killed it, we killed it.  And all the while she was screaming her head was going left and right, laying on the steering wheel, looking out the windshield, shouting at the roof, checking the windshield, laying on the steering wheel.  The car careened back and forth in and out of the lane.  I gripped the door handle and made sure I was wearing my seatbelt and said not another word for 15 minutes wondering at what point we would pitch over the side of the road.  At best we might be stopped by a white fence.  At worst, well at worst, we would join Mrs. Raccoon.  Maybe that’s what Linda was wishing for.

    By some grace, some miracle, we did make it back.  She did slow down for my street, made the turn at a sensible speed and came to a quiet gentle stop.  As I loosened my grip on the handle, undid my seatbelt, and was getting out she turned to me for the second time during that ride and said in her normal pre-hysterical voice, “Good night, Rich.”  A perfectly normal goodbye for a perfectly normal day.

    I never rode with her again, but saw her another time on that same road.  Again, I was riding home from work from the same place a few months later.  “Isn’t that Linda’s car?” my friend and I asked each other.  The car was upside down in the ditch row.  the trunk lay in the roadside ditch, the front end pointed to the sky.  The exposed wheels gave the impression of an animal laying on its back, dead.  It didn’t make the left hand curve.  Linda was not injured.  Fortunately I was not in the car.              RSMitchell 2008