That morning, as we stood outside Hoppin Jon’s, me looking around to see if by any chance I could spot the youngish man who’d just been looking in, Don and I had parted.
“I know, I know. You’ll walk. Damn, I forgot to lock the thing again.” He pulled the door open and stood there in the notch. “Few more years, we’re both in those motorized wheelchairs, you’ll probably still cut out on your own. Hitch a ride behind a garbage truck, way kids do on bikes.”
“Surely it won’t come to that.”
It didn’t.
Shaking his head and grinning, Don worked the gearshift, with a moment’s maneuvering slipped into gear, and pulled away from the curb. He looked into the rearview mirror: a mask from which his eyes peered out. I waved.
Six or eight blocks down and more or less homeward, a battered Buick Regal pulled up, rocking, alongside me and a man leapt out from the driver’s seat. Sweat poured off him. He shook.
“Can you help me, man? My wife’s having a baby.”
I bent down to look through a back window permanently at half mast with a square of cardboard bracing it in place, floor an undergrowth of fast-food wrappers and sacks, throwaway cups with lids and straws still in them, beer cans. Terrified round eyes peered back out at me.
“I came home from work and found her like this,” he said. “I don’t think we’re gonna make it to the hospital. Something’s wrong.”
“Help me,” she said. “Please. It hurts. Hurts bad.”
She was white. Might be well along in the race’s evolution, but it was still the South. I knew what could happen if I got in the back of that car.
Moments later, I had a different kind of trouble from the kind I’d anticipated.
Back in Paris, Vicky worked as an OB nurse. She’d told me about those years, how dullingly routine the work was mostly, how reaffirming it could be occasionally, how horrible it might suddenly turn without warning. I knew enough to recognize a bad delivery. Contractions were strong but the baby didn’t seem to be moving along the birth canal. I thought I saw something up there, a head, a shoulder, but couldn’t be sure. My mind ground and spun like Don’s transmission, searching Vicky’s stories for the appropriate word.
Breech.
“It’s going to be all right,” I told her. “Don’t be afraid.” I was sufficiently afraid for us all.
Pain goosestepped over her face as the puppeteer worked fingers and strings. She clamped down on directives of pain just long enough to meet my eyes. She nodded. Then another wave hit and she passed out.
I stood bent over, half in and half out of the car, thinking of Deborah’s earrings: mouthdown sharks swallowing swimmers. I was in way over my head. As was this child.
Knuckles rapped on the window. I backed out expecting the husband and father. Police. Cavalry. Please.
“You got a license for that, boy?”
Doc stood there looking in, cup of coffee in his hand. Streaks of brown down the side where it’d spilled from his tremors. Layers of clothing, greasy thin hair, traces of this morning’s fast food, possibly yesterday’s, in his beard.
I shook my head.
“Neither do I,” he said. “Used to, though. Looks like you all could use some help.”
I told him what I thought. He nodded, considering.
“You’re probly right. K amp;B right across the street there. Get me a bottle of rubbing alcohol, whatever’s the cheapest.”
“But-”
“Now,” he said.
When I returned, he took the bottle from me, poured its contents carefully over his hands, and wiped them on his shirttail. “Do what we can,” he said as he ducked into the backseat.
“Okay, she’s fully dilated … I see … Not the head, though … You’re right, it’s a breech … And the cord’s … Damn … Ain’t seen this for a long time … If I can’t … Can’t seem to … Wait, I think … Okay, I’ve got it … You’re gonna be fine, honey … Yeah, I do … Almost there, ma’am … Sorry if I was a little rough … It’s a boy.”
Enveloped with mucus, smeared with blood, the newborn lay nestled in Doc’s arms. He held it out to me, and as he did, the tremors, which had stopped when he bent over the young woman, started up again. Hands trembling, he tore strips of cloth from the woman’s slip and tied off the cord, cut between ties with a pocket knife. Tears streamed down his face.
“You never quite get over it,” he said.
When I went in for the alcohol, I’d asked the store clerk to call an ambulance, which now arrived.
“Heart rate’s 160 or thereabouts,” Doc told the paramedics. “Color good, good capillary fill, good cry. Apgar, I’d put at about 9/9.”
“You a doctor, sir?” one of them, a stocky woman of thirty or so with flyaway blond hair, name tag Cherenski, asked.
“Me? No, I’m a drunk. Speaking of which, I sure could use one right now. A drink, that is.”
Shaking her head, Cherenski set to work, checking vitals, wrapping the baby in sterile batting, starting IVs.
“You did good here, sir,” she told Doc.
“Let’s get that drink,” I said.
We found a bar half a block down, where Doc sat beside me through four double whiskeys. His tears never let up the whole time, and I made no effort to talk. When we parted outside he nodded thanks, starting off in one direction then abruptly reversing. I don’t suppose it made much difference, finally.
Drop by drop at the heart, the pain of the pain remembered comes again, Aeschylus wrote in Agamemnon.
It sure as hell does. And the gods did no better than we’ve done ourselves. They never knew how to care for us, either.
Chapter Thirty-Two
After a while I got up and walked to the window. I felt that if I didn’t say anything, if I didn’t think about what had happened, didn’t acknowledge it, somehow it might all be all right again. I listened to the sound of my feet on the floor, the sounds of cars and delivery vans outside, my own breath. Whatever feelings I had, had been squeezed from me. I was empty as a shoe. Empty as the body on the bed behind me.
A limb bowed and pecked at the window, bowed and pecked again. Winds were coming in across Lake Ponchartrain with pullcarts of rain in their wake. I heard music from far off but couldn’t tell what it was, not even what kind. Maybe only wind caught in the building’s hard throats and hollows, or the city’s random noise congealing.
Sooner or later I’d have to move. Go back out there, into the world, a world much smaller now, where it was about to rain. And where one of the coldest winters in New Orleans history like a bit player waited impatiently in the wings, strutting and thrumming, for its cue to go on.
Out there in the window-world where a moth beat against glass, a man I knew both too well and not at all stood watching. A man dark and ill-defined, with the mark of lateness, of the autumnal, upon him too.
I must come to some sort of conclusion, I suppose, I had written, years ago. I can’t imagine what it should be.
Now I knew.
Chapter Thirty-Three
This is what happened, this is the truth.
Drop by drop at the heart, the pain of the pain remembered comes again. Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you. Minutes drop like black cherries from my side.
A birth, a death. Just the kind of balance and open structure my father always loved. He got off the streets finally, though never as far as he thought he had, or as far as he wanted. Nor did he ever, quite, get away from drinking. In those last years it didn’t ride him as it had, didn’t rent out the front room like before, but it was still a frequent and welcome visitor. Many nights, as levels of Scotch or wine fell in their bottles, he’d talk about books he loved, books he wanted to write. So I guess part of what I’m doing is writing them for him. Five so far; this, I think, the last.
David here, if you’ve not yet realized it.