After Dinner with Mike and Latissia, his fiery Spanish flamenco-dancing girlfriend, (yrow!) Jaime and I headed to Wal-Mart in Covington, Louisiana, to replace a burnt-out headlight. This was a process. Normally, Wal-Marts are populated by Zombies, but if you go after-hours, you're doubling your odds. If you go after-hours in the Bayou, you gotta deal with Creole Cajun Zombies. Creole comes from Haiti, which, as you all know, is where zombies originated from. (Haiti, and Pittsburgh.)
So we parked, walked, found a headlight, took forever to check out because it's Wal-Mart, fough off Zombies, discovered it was the wrong size, bought the right size, took 3 different employees on the cerebral ride of their lives when while they learned how to make an exchange, fought off more zombies, and got back to our car with the right headlight.
During all this, someone had left a massive bull-dog in the van next to ours, and the dog missed his people. Severely. He cried "Brow, wou, wou, wou, woooooh!" so long, so loud, and so piteously, the whole time. He was sobbing his little doggy heart out, and it made my stomach hurt to hear him wailing. Such a classic, gutteral lonely sound.
While we were listening to the dog and repairing the light, some teenagers returned to their car, also nearby. One them approached the dog and made like he was going to punch it- the dog flinched as the boy screamed "Shut the f--k up!" at him. They laughed and got in their car, which is good, because if he'd hurt that dog I was considering kicking his ass until he made some similar sounds. I hated that kid so much.
After a somewhat sanitary hotel experience, we got in our car and drove into Texas. We drove, and drove, and drove. Texas is rather large, y'all. However, the reason it's so damn big is because it has to fit in the Texas Sky. If you've never seen it, Go. Just Go. The Texas Sky is the biggest roundest "hey, look, curvature of the earth" sky ever. It reminds you that you're on the face of a planet, and careening through the Universe, clinging to the Earth by gravity alone. And without gravity, you would float up into this colossal expanse of azure infinity- just you and the sky. It's nice. I liked it.
We counted off more cars and out-of-state license tags. We had over 30 states at this point. We began listing the unusual animals we saw on the side of the road as well, since we drove by beautiful long-horn Brahman cows and camels. Random, wonderful camels!
We stopped at a Dairy Queen, and met a trucker who asked us if we'd seen the "mammals" in addition to the camels.
"Mammals?"
"Yeah, you know, them fuzzy ones with the long necks and the ears up top. No humps."
"Oh," I said. "Llamas?"
"Yeah, that's them!"
He then told us that we should be truckdrivers together- a team. Apparently, zoological identification skills are in demand frequently along the road.
I made toe prints on Jaime's windshield because I'd stretched my feet out on the dashboard. I slept. We listened to NPR podcasts, because my husband is a closet geek, and learned about the Alamo, and Marco Polo, and angry violinists. We alternated between that, my super-cool Roadtrip playlist that I adored and Jay not-so-much, and basketball podcasts. We did not speed, because we were in Texas.
After a lackluster lunch at the Armadillo, Jay told me that he was pretty tired and that we should make it an early night and spend the night in Childress.
Childress.
As soon as he said the town's name, I got a creeped out kind of sick feeling. It might've been the super lame chili, but I felt physically ill. I'd heard of that town somewhere, and what I heard was bad. I just couldn't place why it bothered me so much. I put up a huge irrational protest, but because my reasons were completely unfounded, and I couldn't explain why I felt so unsettled, we pressed on and arrived at Childress.
As we drove through the rundown ghost town, I felt more and more anxious. My heart was pounding in my chest, and when we finally arrived at the Econo-lodge (which totally looked like a prison) I felt a full-on panic attack approaching. Everything about that town felt wrong. A group of Mexicans hanging out in the parking lot stopped talking and stared as we walked across the dark lot to the dimly lit lobby. Everything was yellow and ...off.
The Eastern Indians inside were chatting with a man in Hindi at the desk, and they gave us a pleasant enough "we'll be right with you." Jay sensed that I was upset and asked me if I wanted to go. I swear I almost ran back to the car.
As we drove out of the town, a huge wave of relief washed over me- to this day, I still don't know what freaked me out so much. I feel like something absolutely horrible would've happened if we'd stayed- but because we didn't, something wonderful happened...
We decided to drive to Amarillo, and spend the night there, but as we charged across the plains, the sky went from dark to BLACK. Pitch black. The winds whipped up all around us, and then got very, very still. A dead pitch black nothing was all around us- no lights, no stars, just an endless motionless Void.
Then the storm broke.
Our car was rocked back and forth as the wind flung prairie and tumbleweed at our car, and the sky opened up with the longest, brightest lightning I've ever seen in my life. The world became electrified as steaks of fire shot back and forth across the clouds, and torrents of rain hurtled down. We could only see in still-frame instant glimpses, but what we saw was epic- sheets of rain, walls of it, plunging towards the earth- and black columns of clouds lurking in ominous-looking funnel shapes in the distance.
We were going to die.
But we didn't.
Instead, we drove on, the only people in the only car on the only road in the world, until the storm thrashed itself out. It petered out into a soft rain, and then nothing. The rush was incredible. Jaime and I had been on the edge of our seats with electricity, and now we were exhausted. We finally found an extremely nasty Econo-Lodge, and collapsed into bed.
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