My mother always drugged our cat before family car trips. Ruth claimed that if she didn’t sedate him, Buster would run amok.

Buster was a Tomcat the size of a wolverine. He had a bite like a staple-remover, claws like a Mandarin, and the temperament of a Cossack. Was drugging him wise? Yes—my mother was convinced. This was the 1960s.

I was ten, my brother Craig was eight, when we drove from Chicago to Louisville. Ruth dosed Buster with twice the recommended feline sedative. We watched him free-fall into a Sunny Von Bülow coma.

Buster slept, open-eyed, until we crossed state lines and a fetid odor filled the car.

“Kentucky smells like a sewage treatment plant,” I said.

Suddenly, Buster’s eyes crossed. He writhed like a worm on a hook. He bolted, yowling, onto the shelf behind the back seat.

“That smell is Buster,” Ruth said. “He has gas.”

We unrolled the windows. Buster’s ears flattened in the wind. The attacks blitzkrieged, always the same pattern: a foul smell, then a pained frenzy. Buster hurled himself onto the headrests, the floor, the dashboard.

He pounced onto my father’s head and held fast, digging his claws into Harry’s jaw. Harry looked like he was wearing a coonskin cap with chinstraps.

“I’m putting Buster out in this cornfield,” Harry said. He tried to shoulder-check but couldn’t turn his cat-draped head.

“No,” Craig and I cried.

Tiny dots of blood seeped from Harry’s cheeks. He looked in the rearview mirror, coasted to the shoulder. Buster jumped down.

“He’s good now,” I said.

Harry dabbed his jaw with a hankie and eased the vehicle back onto the interstate. Buster crouched down. He flicked his tail, eyeing Craig. He hissed long and wet like a spitting cobra. Craig cringed into the corner, his knees pulled up, his forearms shielding his face.

“See what happens,” my mother said.

Craig whimpered.

“I told you not to torture that cat,” she said.

“I need gas,” Harry said. “Gasoline.”

We came to a hamlet—a collection of shotgun shacks tossed down by the interstate, some clad in brick, others in peeling, brick-patterned paper. A few businesses staggered up to the asphalt; a grocery, beauty parlor, a gas station.

We pulled in. A young station attendant sidled toward the vehicle. Harry cracked the window, craned his neck up to the opening, said, “fill it up” and quickly rolled the window shut.

The attendant bent down and peered into the car. Harry stared ahead, hands gripping the wheel. My mother gazed out the windshield as if we were driving along a scenic route, beneath bowers of blossoming dogwoods. Craig and I met the attendant’s eyes, our faces frozen into likenesses of two terrified budgies; heads tilted, pupils dilated, mouths calcified into rictus grins. The predator—our cat—rested serenely between us.

The attendant studied us. Then he walked to the back of the vehicle, unscrewed the gas nozzle, and filled up the tank.