How I Drove From Austin to Brenham in Three Hours and Fifteen Minutes

(a trip that should take two hours, at most)

Today T came home from two straight weeks as a summer-camp counselor (last week she had thirteen and fourteen-year-olds, this week eleven and twelves).

Or she started home, at any rate.

Her new boyfriend from Houston was supposed to drive her to Austin, stay the night, and go home tomorrow.  That was the original plan.  But this morning the phone rang at eleven o’clock, and T explained that Andy’s car had overheated at Hempstead, two and a half hours from Austin, and I needed to come get her because she obviously wasn’t going to get home in Andy’s car.

L had told me earlier that I had to go to the branch bank inside the supermarket and make a loan payment, and also needed to pay the gas bill at the supermarket customer-service counter while I was at it, before the gas company went and cut us off.  Oh, and would I drop off a payment for Sears at their store, which is next door to the supermarket.  T’s call changed this to “you need to do all that before you leave town to go after her.”

I managed to fight my way through the drifts of dawdling, piddling Saturday shoppers, made all the worse because this weekend is the back-to-school weekend when the state forgives sales taxes to stimulate shopping, and that drew out everyone and his brother and their three kids (to say nothing of the dog).  Everyone wandered and stopped and darted in all directions without warning, which is dangerous when you have someone like me, who’s got the mass of a football tailback, moving at a high lope through the store.  Only through the mercy of several gods did I not leave behind a bloody trail of shoppers as I went.

I finally got all the bills paid, grabbed a quart of oil as I went through the supermarket because I knew the car was a quart low, ran out to the lot . . . and discovered I’d locked my keys in the car.  L couldn’t help because she’d accidentally locked her keys in her office Friday afternoon, and she was afoot anyhow and couldn’t have got her key to me if she’d had it with her.

I ended up calling a cab to come and pop the door lock for me—they’ve taken that on as a sideline these days, and a good thing, too, but it still took the cab more than twenty minutes to get to me.  (The cabbie, to my surprise, had a marked Parisian-French accent.  Do not ask me how come a Frenchman is driving a hack in Austin.  I don’t know.)  Fortunately, he didn’t have any trouble getting the passenger’s door open.

After that I still had to add the oil and stop at two filling stations to gas the car, because it turned out L had the only credit card for the first station where I stopped.  While I was standing there searching for the card, two guys came up at random and tried to sell me battery-powered drills which, from the way they acted and the price they wanted, must have fallen off the back of a truck.  I snarled that of all the things I had to do today, that was at the very bottom of my list, and squealed the tires as I dumped the clutch getting out of there, looking for a gas station I did have a card for.

All this foofaraw added up to an hour and a half’s delay; I didn’t get properly out of town until one o’clock, and after that made a farce of every speed limit on US 290 East.  Fortunately, when I was fifteen miles short of Giddings, T phoned to say that Andy’s uncle had driven up from Houston and picked them up, and we could meet someplace in between.  We finally met at Brenham, about ninety miles from Austin and seventy from Houston.  T transferred her stuff from the other car to ours, and we turned around.

Fortunately, nothing else bad happened on the way home; T chattered continuously about camp events and pranks, describing the stuff that counselors and staff pulled on the campers and things the campers pulled on one another.  She said she ended up being the Enforcer for her camps; apparently both the boy and the girl campers recognized The Counselor Who Won’t Take Any Shit, without having to be slapped to make the point.  Well, except for Maddie.  Maddie was the Bitch Camper From Hell who gave everyone attitude and broke rules just because she could, almost started a fistfight and had to be separated from another camper, and generally made herself as unpleasant as possible.  She’d already made a name for herself at a previous camp session, so when the word went round the counselors that Maddie was back, T volunteered to take the girl into her cabin, after which she rode Maddie all week like you’d ride a green-broke bronc, using several of the same techniques.  The result was that Maddie didn’t cause nearly as much trouble as she had before, and T got several more points with counselors and staff both for Dealing With the Difficult Camper.

Perry Mason must take a morbid Ski-Doo from Liechtenstein.  Fnord.