Night Of Carnage

This story is a re-post, and it is pretty grim. It involves a certain evening drive through the streets of southern Rhode Island with my dear friend Jackie. An evening that ended up involving a couple of dead animals.

We were in college. Jackie is like a finely-tuned instrument, hooked into the comedic spheres. Trust me: you’ve never met anyone like Jackie.

Here’s a Jackie story, before I get to the story of animal-carnage:

One evening, Jackie, another friend and I, had a very debauched wine-soaked evening at my house. This was also during college. We drank an inordinate amount of wine, and sat around the table, absolutely out of control with laughter for a good 2 hours. Then, as one, we all stumbled into bed, where we fell asleep. My bed was a double bed, with 3 of us passed out in it.

The next morning, HURTING with the hangovers, we woke up at the same time. Each one of us moaning, squinting, holding onto temples ….

But did Jackie say, “Man, I am so hungover.”

Did Jackie say, “I feel like crap!”

No. Jackie opened her eyes, spent half a second contemplating her hangover, and then announced in a flat voice, “You could tap my liver and feed communion to a small Catholic church.”

And now – onto the animal-slaying.

Jackie and I were restless one night. We had nothing to do. I have no idea why. We both were in college. Jackie had a car. And … we were kind of driving around aimlessly. I don’t know where we were going, maybe down to the beach, something.

As we drove down Rte 108, we felt a thud, a sickening thud, and then, filling the air immediately, the unmistakable scent of skunk.

We both gasped, as we drove on.

“Oh no!”

“Did we just kill an animal!”

“Oh shit, we just killed something!”

(We both love animals. I mean, we don’t love skunks in particular, but still – we were upset that we had just careened over one.)

Jackie, upset, felt compelled to turn around and go check. So we did a U-turn, and slowly drove back to the murderous spot. Skunk-scent filled the air. Jackie slowed down to almost a crawl, and as we crept by the spot, we both peered out at the dead skunk in the road.

A bit chagrined, we turned the car around again, and drove on. We felt bad for the skunk, yes, but hey, life goes on. We had to keep going … we had to keep driving around … (for what purpose, girls?)

Only a quarter of a mile later, a small white mouse raced out into the middle of the road and we careened right over it, killing it instantly.

Jackie and I both started SCREAMING.

“Ahhhh! Did you see that??”

“Did we just kill a mouse too?”

“What is going on??”

Jackie murmured in a grim tone, “Next thing you know, we’re gonna see a stallion galloping towards us.”

We were on the edge of hysterical laughter. We had murdered two animals in 20 seconds.

Jackie said, hunched over the wheel, “I better get off the road before I kill something else.”

The moments passed, and the situation started seeming funnier and funnier to us. We were crying tears of laughter about the carnage we had left behind, up and down Route 108. We HOWLED about the dead skunk. We ROARED about the dead mouse. We kept making jokes about the larger and larger animals we were going to kill as the night went on.

We kept driving. We were down near the beach, on a larger road than 108 – with 2 lanes on either side of the yellow line. It was a dark night.

Killing the animals had put us in kind of a giddy hilarious mood.

But then: We careened around a corner and suddenly – we saw something huge and dead lying in the middle of the road.

We freaked OUT.

“Oh my God – there’s something dead in the road…”

“What is it?”

“Sheila – what is going on??? What is going on tonight?”

The dead thing was in the center lane, and there were cars approaching, so we couldn’t just stop right there to investigate. We pulled over into the breakdown lane, and got out of the car.

It was a dark night but by the light of the streetlamps, we saw that it was a massive Husky dog who was now an enormous dead fur ball in the middle of the street. A gorgeous dog. Obviously a beloved pet. We were sad for it. We looked up and down the road, but most of the houses didn’t have any lights on. We wanted to knock on some doors. We wanted to get out there to the dead fur ball so that we could check the dog’s collar for the contact information and then contact the owners. But the dead dog was lying at a curve of the street, where cars could come whipping around in the dark, and not see us before they hit us.

And … I am so so sorry to say … that was what proceeded to happen as we watched … over and over and over and over … with that dog in the street.

We saw that dog get hit over and over and over again.

The dog was flying up through the air. The dog was splattering down again on the street. And then a car would come around that curve and send the dog flying up into the air again.

Jackie and I, watching this, were doing three things:

1. We were screaming at the tops of our lungs.

2. We were crying hysterically.

3. And we were laughing hysterically.

Every time we heard the horrible “thump” of the dog being hit again, we ROARED with laughter. Every time we saw the dog flying up through the dark night air, we GUFFAWED. But it was HORRIBLE. Tears streamed down our faces, and we GUFFAWED with laughter.

We finally realized that we could not get out to that dog to drag it off the road without risking getting killed ourselves, we were completely out of control – screaming and crying and laughing – so we drove over to my ex-boyfriend’s beach house. He lived a couple streets away.

I was probably in a very conspicuous fight with him at the time (we were always fighting and snarling at each other). So he opened the door, and immediately looked shocked to see me – his angry ex-girlfriend on his doorstep – but there we were, Jackie and I, crying and laughing at the same time, screaming right in his face, “Can we use your phone? Can we use your phone?”

All of this only became truly amusing much later. When it was all over.

My favorite memory of that weird evening of carnage is Jackie huddled over the wheel, muttering, “I’ve gotta get off the road…”