NASHVILLE. I start for the Big City with the Biggest Airport at 6 PM. Why has it taken so long? Well, for the/my usual reasons, but the feather that tipped me over: heat. 100 degrees, index 115. Must I drive through the metal-heavy, dirty, hard hot sun? Oh, but if I wait just a bit longer…finally, nearly dusk, after adding oil (5W40, old engine), dropping off Djuna at the dog boarding-house, topping off gas tank, etc., etc., etc., I go. Monteagle is easy. Chattanooga traffic is jammed at 9 PM, though, and it takes 40 minutes to snake around the Tennessee River and up the ridge to meet I-75. I barrel down to the ATL, exit at the correct exit, enter my friend’s sub-city, and can’t find her house.

It’s 1 in the morning and misty-damp. I am still sweating so hard it drips into my eyes. I remember this Atlanta: small houses hidden among thick trees and hills in the middle of the city, the odor of trees everywhere, rich houses and poor looking remarkably alike at night, knives and crack-pipes on display in the gas station where I stop to call my friend. I’ve been circling, by this time, almost an hour, thinking I’ll find her street any moment now, running down the car window and squinting and putting on hi-beam to try to read street signs (Essex, in blackletter script on white, low, almost hidden by shrubbery; Devon, Hereford, Hampshire. When I was 12 my father called this place a seggie enclave; it was, then, a white fortress with its own city boundaries, built to opt out of newly integrated metro schools.) My friend talks me through the maze of silent, dripping-tree-overhung streets to her house; she greets me at the door, points me toward the bedroom, and says goodnight.

Three hours later I’m up and back at the knife-and-pipe station for coffee, then back on the downtown connector. My goal is the South Cargo Building on the enormous ATL campus. I miss the exit for I-75 and double back on I-85, spot an exit for cargo building’s street, accidentally head toward the passenger terminal, make a circuit by the passenger pick-up and loop back toward the road, turn right instead of left, and so on for another 15 minutes or so until finally I find the South Cargo Building and, more important, Doors 60 through 62. It’s 6:45 AM. The woman in the office (Door 60) checks my info for the cats and says the flight’s in but they won’t make it over here for at least an hour. I sit in a plastic chair and sip coffee and eat an energy bar. A man in an orange vest, headphones pulled down around his neck, whose nametag says Van, comes in through the noisy back doorway and makes a chrome pot of coffee. Tammy says “You can drink that, but he makes it double-strong!” Then Van comes up to me and motions to the coffee, offering it; I pour some and thank him. Yes, it’s double-strong. I dump in as much powdered creamer as I can stand.

Then there they are: two enormous crates, large enough to hold a medium-sized dog, and inside each a dark agouti tabby. Both are standing and looking through the wires on the ventilation openings, necks stretched out. They are enormous cats, magnificent, the kind of cats you’d expect to come from Anchorage. Govi’s huge round green eyes are so intense and detached he looks wild. Odin’s head is the size of a small cantaloupe, his paws as big as a dog’s. Both have a subtle white crust around the edges of their nostrils (from the dry air, maybe).

Van and Tammy help me squeeze both carriers into the Golf under the orange 8 AM sun and I head directly home, stopping only to fill the gas tank on the way out of the Big City with the Biggest Airport. As I cross the Chattahoochee River on I-75 North, I see distinct and motionless layers of mist and vapor over the shallow clear water between the two banks of motionless trees. By the time I get to my door, it’s 98 degrees, and rising.