I am doing about 85 MPH across Wyoming with my daughter's cats, which I've let out of their cages an hour or so before. Around 6 PM, as the dying October light casts the shadows of the clouds on the rolling mocha hills, a semi drifts into my lane. I jerk the steering wheel too hard to the left, and the front tire blows, and I go into a roll. The vehicle comes to rest on its lid. With the glass from the shattered sun-roof ground into my scalp, I unfasten my seat belt and hustle out through the busted driver's side window through which both my daughter's cats have escaped already.
One of the cats, a fat, orange, affectionate rascal named Max, is grabbed by an alert witness and handed over to the proprietor of this establishment.
In the middle of the night, I'm released from the hospital. I'm covered in blood. My right ear sticks out like a car door. One corner of the back of my head is sheared raw. The front desk nurse has called her boyfriend, a very serious little man who works three jobs: security guard, cabbie, and Holiday Inn desk clerk. He calls his hotel, reserves a room for me, then gives me a ride in a Gremlin that is his cab and that had no meter. En route to the hotel, he agreeably stops by a liquor store, goes in with my debit card and PIN number and returns with a generously sized bottle of scotch.
The next day or so, liquor and codeine at the Laramie Holiday Inn. The endless, fidgeting pursuit of any physical attitude, of any configuration of head and limbs that will relieve the pain in one part of my body without dispatching it promptly to another.
One morning, I believe I have the strength to fetch Max. I drive to Elk Mountain and exit the interstate and find myself in a picture-postcard community with a single white church and a post office and little clapboard houses separated into blocks by dirt roads. In the post office, I ask the clerk how to get to the towing garage.
"There are two ways."
Please God, I think, just tell me one of them. He tells me I can drive up the gravel road that winds up the mountain and that, as soon as I crest it, I'll see the garage. So off I go. As I drive, my mind wanders and settles on a sign affixed to a tree, block letters, all caps: FREE STOCK. I work at Microsoft at the time, so "stock" means "shares", and I'm wondering what wily scheme is this when the sharp current of fear that preserved us until now moves my feet fast and hard to the brakes. The van fishtails and scatters a plume of gravel and dust and the bumper comes to rest two inches from the side of a steer. He is joined slowly by desultory cows that surround the van, staring stupidly at nothing in particular. Should I blow the horn? I wonder. Will they attack the van? I blow the horn. They disperse.
I continue to the garage. It is vast, fronted by what looks like an abandoned gas station. The elevation is about a mile, I'm in pain, I can't breathe, it's October, the wind is biting and whips so fiercely it feels as if it might tip the van. The proprietor is late. Finally, a little old yellow Toyota pickup pulls into the garage, and I approach the window. The driver, a taciturn old man, rolls it down.
"How you doin'?" he said.
"Well," I answer, "I can't breath at this elevation and I'm in severe pain and I've been waiting an hour. I'm fine, I guess."
Oblivious to my sarcasm, he answers, "I'm sorry. I was sure I told you I had to get the wife into Laramie for chemo before I could meet you here." Only then do I register that there is someone sitting beside him -- a pasty, bald woman with her head cradled in a neck pillow. I apologize with great conviction. He brushes my apologies aside.
"Let me take her home and I'll come back and get you your cat."
He returns and takes me to a place where he's put down a towel and a water dish, and for an exasperating hour, we search for Max. We pass a crushed economy car. The roof is nearly torn off, and there is a jumble of clothing and jewelry and cash and open suitcases, and a solitary spike-heeled shoe.
"That one was a fatality," he says.
Emotionally weakened by days of pain, I am, for a moment, attuned acutely to the unbearable sadness of someone who's just learned a daughter isn't coming home and has died violently in a place of almost lunar barrenness.
It is apparent now that the entire world is having a worse day than me.
After a two-hour search that covers every inch of this vast garage, we find Max in the wheel well of a truck. With him hugged to my chest, I race in great excitement to my van, trip over a trailer hitch, and split my head on the cement floor. Max flies from my arms, disappears, and for the day, I acknowledge defeat. I return to the hotel, to my liquor and codeine.
The next day, I return. I pass through the station in front of the garage, and there sits the proprietor's wife and several of her friends, in front of a fuel barrel with a hole cut in it and in which wood read more
