Holy Cow

31 A TERMINAL CASE

The airport terminal was very big and confusing, but we knew we had to make it to one of those automated ticket machines. Tom was still in denial. “Maybe I’ll just glide myself to Turkey. Who needs a plane?”

I protested. “No, Tom, we need your beak, neither Shalom nor I have prehensile fingers, your beak is the nearest thing we have to a finger, please don’t glide away.”

“Okay, friend, for you I will temporarily ground Air Turkey.”

“I appreciate that,” I said as we entered the terminal.

I was so happy our disguises were working.

I’m sure we made for an interesting sight-big ol’ me, well over six feet on my hind legs (Oy, as Shalom would say, was my back killing me), in a beige raincoat and sunglasses, and Shalom dressed in the velvet pants of a little schoolboy, holding our pet turkey by the leash.

We had had the foresight to register Tom as a comfort turkey, an emotional-support fowl. There was a program where you could get your dog permitted to travel in the cabin with you rather than in storage to comfort you if you were a nervous flyer, and we were able to get Tom the same accreditation online. He had taken the course on the phone, and had learned some rudimentary therapeutic insights. Which made him very annoying. He kept lapsing into a German accent and saying things like “Zat pig has ein ‘edible complex’” or “Tell me about your mother.” He told me the pain in my hooves was all in my head, and I told him the pain in my hooves was gonna be all in his ass if he didn’t quit it.

“Apparently, you are having some transference resistance. I should get a pipe. Would you respect me more if I smoked a pipe?” he asked me.

Tom’s other problem was that the leash made him very nervous and sweaty. Anything around his neck made him nervous, and I understood-his greatest primal fear, one that was in his DNA, passed down from centuries of turkeys that had endured the peculiar American custom of Thanksgiving, was of the chopping block. His neck stretched out long and the blade glinting through the air coming down at light speed, his truncated life flashing before his eyes.

“Shut up!” Tom barked. I hadn’t realized I’d been saying that last bit out loud.

“My bad,” I apologized as we approached the automated ticket dispenser. Tom continued to tug at the leash around his neck like Rodney Dangerfield in his heyday. Shalom was getting his jollies treating Tom like a dog, saying things like “Heel” and “Good boy!” Referring to the phone, I relayed Tom the confirmation numbers for our reservations and he pecked at them on the computer screen. It went off without a hitch. All our planning was paying off. Like magic, the printed boarding passes slid slowly out of the mouth of the screen, one, two, three-to us they looked like winning lottery tickets, ’cause that’s what they were.