Continental Drift (23 page)

The night Elaine went into labor and had the baby, Bob was with Marguerite at the Hundred Lakes Motel. It was a Thursday, October 16, and the baby, a boy weighing six pounds fourteen ounces and named Robert Raymond Dubois, Jr., was born three weeks ahead of schedule and, despite Elaine’s rapid weight gain in the last few weeks, had shown no signs of arriving prematurely, and so Bob, as he had for months, treated the forthcoming birth of his third child as an event in the distant future, almost as if it were an event in someone else’s life.

For Elaine, of course, the baby was already an active member of the family and had been since late May, when she first felt him kick against her ribs from inside. But it’s often this way, that the mother and father regard the birth of their child as taking place at dates months apart, especially after the birth of the first child and almost always when the mother and the father have made their life together one thing and their lives apart different and separate things, which has been increasingly true of Bob and Elaine since Bob discovered Marguerite Dill and, more emphatically, since the robbery.

At eight-fifteen that night, Bob telephones Elaine from the store to say that he’ll be home late, he’s going out for a drink with the Budweiser salesman. Business is light tonight anyhow, it’s a Thursday, so he may even close the store a little early. He’ll be home before midnight, he assures her, while outside in the parking lot, Marguerite waits for him in her car, the motor running, windows open to the cool fall night, tape deck playing Isaac Hayes.

Elaine whines briefly and in a thin voice, but after all, Bob, unlike most husbands, always calls her when he’s going to be late, and he’s seldom late more than once a week, and besides, he has no other friends, and, she reasons, a man needs friends, especially a man who has become, as Bob has, such a loner. Go ahead, she tells him, and have a good time, she had planned on going to bed early anyhow, she wasn’t feeling too great today. She probably shouldn’t have tried to do all the housecleaning in one day. She’s already in bed, or at least
on it, with her swollen feet up, her huge belly looming in front of her, her bulging slacks unzipped at the sides to ease her thick, soft flesh. Across from the bed on the dresser, the Sony jabbers in Spanish. She flicked it on just as the phone rang and hasn’t found her program yet.

At nine-oh-eight, she chuckles at one of Gary Coleman’s smart-aleck remarks on
Diff’rent Strokes
, feels the first, light contraction and suddenly turns serious, because she recognizes it immediately, does not for a second confuse it with indigestion or heartburn or just her imagination. Elaine knows her body, can read all its signals accurately, and she has been through this twice before and recently enough to have retained a clear, physical memory of it. She knows at once that she’s going to have her baby tonight. Picking up the phone next to the bed, she dials the liquor store, praying silently that her husband won’t have left yet.

The phone in the store rings an even dozen times, then stops. Bob is already at the Hundred Lakes Motel, smoking marijuana for the first time in his life. He mentioned to Marguerite the last time they were together like this that she might relax if she got drunk enough, and she suggested they get high together sometime. Did she mean marijuana? Grass?

“Sure. Why not?”

“Well, yeah, why not smoke a little grass? It can’t hurt you, can it?”

She was surprised he’d never tried it, she even thought it was cute, or so she said, and she promised him she’d bring a couple of joints with her the next time they went out.

Now, in the darkness of the room (which she seems to prefer, though he just once would like to leave the lights on when they are naked, but he still can’t figure out how to propose it without sounding slightly perverse), Marguerite lights the joint and sucks the smoke into her lungs noisily and passes it to Bob.

He tries to hold it casually, almost drops it, quickly recovers and inhales deeply. He likes the sucking noise she makes when she smokes, likes the odor, likes the way his thoughts suddenly soften and liquefy.
His skin feels crisp and tingly, but everything enclosed by his skin feels densely soft and warm. Like oatmeal, he thinks. He giggles and tells her what he was thinking.

“More like grits,” she says. “With gravy.”

“Pancakes with hot maple syrup,” he suggests.

She says, “No, more like hushpuppies. I feel like a hushpuppy.”

“Ah,” he exclaims, he has it now. “Corned beef and cabbage.”

She laughs a long time, or what seems like a long time. “Chitlins!”

“Yorkshire pudding, that’s it exactly!”

“Nope. It’s rice an’ field peas!”

“Baked beans … with molasses and salt pork.”

“Beaten biscuits. You ain’t never had no beaten biscuits, I bet. Sometime I got to make you some. With red gravy on ’em.”

“Boiled lobster!” Bob says he feels like a boiled lobster, red and hard on the outside, sweet and meaty on the inside. “Um-m-m,” he says, smacking his lips. “There’s nothing as good as that sweet, white, lobster meat sucked out of the hard, red claw and dipped in melted butter.”

They are silent for a few seconds, and then their hands touch, and they lie down beside one another and place mouth, breasts, belly, thighs and feet against mouth, breasts, belly, thighs and feet, and then he moves into her, swiftly and easily.

At nine thirty-five, Elaine’s water breaks. Too early, she thinks. Too soon. This is going to be a quick one, not like the others, and the contractions, now about five minutes apart, are heavy and deep, as if her uterus were a giant fist opening and closing. The pain is cold, not hot, and comes in waves, but it’s not as strong as when the others were born, she thinks, at least not as strong as she remembers. But they were big babies, and Emma was ten days late, and this baby is going to be early and probably small. Another girl, she decides. Oh, Jesus, not another girl, though it’ll be easier if it’s a girl. Easier and nicer. Except for Bob. Where the hell is he? The bastard. Oh, Bob, you bastard, where the hell are you? She grunts and turns to the phone
and dials the number of her friend Ellen Skeeter, who, thank God, answers right away.

They shower together, and for the first time Bob sees Marguerite’s naked body, long, dark brown and shining, like polished sandalwood. He soaps her slick back and buttocks, rubs her shoulders and neck with one hand, her ass and the back of her thighs with the other, and when, like a strung bow, she arches backwards and spreads her thighs, he slides his hand into her from behind, one finger, then two, then three, and she gasps, leans forward and lays her weight against the tile wall of the shower, lets the warm water splash over her soapy back, gush between her buttocks and down his stiff, pumping arm. Shoving her ass against him, she drives his fingers deeper and deeper into her body, until her cunt is sucking at his hand, reaching for it and grabbing, letting go, then reaching and grabbing again, farther in each time, snapping and letting go, over and over, deeper and deeper, and then she’s swirling his thick fingers around inside her, twitching them, whirling her ass in wet circles, and soon she starts to moan, low and steady, and flailing one hand back around in search of his prick, finding it, she pulls away from his fingers and jams his prick in, and he grabs onto her thrashing hips and rides, rides, rides, while the water splashes warmly over their faces, shoulders, chests and bellies.

By ten-eighteen, when Elaine arrives at the emergency room of the Winter Haven Hospital and is met by her doctor, swiftly examined and rushed upstairs to a delivery room, she’s deeply into hard labor, and her cervix has dilated sufficiently that the doctor, a gaunt, red-eyed, rumpled Mississippian named Tucker Beacham, escorts her stretcher to obstetrics himself, in case he has to deliver the baby in the hallway. Ellen Skeeter, frightened and excited, joggles along behind the two, calling out to her friend, “Don’t you worry ’bout a thing, honey, your chil’ren goin’ be fine. Soon’s I get you taken care of, honey, I’ll call home an’ tell Ronnie to stay right there at your place tonight. Ronnie’ll take good care of the chil’ren till Bob gets home, honey, an’ he’ll tell Bob everything, so don’t you fret, now.”

In the parking lot by the store, Bob kisses Marguerite softly on
the lips, says he loves her more and more every day, and steps from her car. “Wait a second,” he says, closing her car door. “Wait till I make sure I can get my car into gear.” He slides into his car, starts the motor and drops the car into reverse. It makes a clunking noise, but it goes in. “
Okay
, it’s fine,” he says happily. “I don’t need you no mo’ for
nuthin.
Not for
nuthin
!” he says, laughing.

She smiles out the open window of her car and purses her lips at him. “You will soon, honey. Jus’ wait.” Then she spins the wheel and drives off.

Slowly, Bob draws out a cigarette and lights it, inhaling the smoke the way he inhaled the grass, tamping it down into the furthest recesses of his lungs. Grass is great, he announces to himself. Switching on the radio, he fiddles with the tuner until he finds a country and western station, and for a few seconds he listens to Kenny Rogers and Dottie West sing “Don’t Fall in Love with a Dreamer.”

Abruptly, he cuts them off and flips the tuner down the band, until he picks up the rumbling, wet voice of Barry White. Then he backs the car, cuts the wheel, and slowly, smoothly, oozing sexy confidence like ol’ Barry himself, Bob Dubois drives onto the highway, turns left and heads on down the road to home.

At eleven-twelve, Bob’s son is born, tiny, cheesy and blue, and because this is the first time Elaine has seen one of her children born—with Ruthie and Emma, she exhausted herself in labor, and the pain grew so great that finally she asked to be knocked out with gas—she believes the baby is born dead, and she starts to sob uncontrollably.

Dr. Beacham grins behind his mask. “You got yourself a baby boy, Miz Dubois,” he says, handing the baby to the nurse. “Now,” he says, patting her still large belly, “let’s see if we can get the rest out as easy as he come out.”

“It’s okay?” she asks in a plaintive voice. “It’s alive?”

“Sure is. Soon’s we get him a little cleaned up, he’s all yours. Now, let’s bear down hard one more time,” he says softly.

“It’s a boy, then,” Elaine says. “And he’s alive!” She wants to see him, to hold him to her breasts, to examine him all over, his
mouth, nose, ears and eyes, his tiny fingers and toes, and his penis, oh, especially his penis! It’s the strangest thing that’s ever happened to her—to have a male body, a body with a penis on it, emerge from her female body! It seems beyond belief, almost nonsensical. In a sensible world, females would give birth to females, and males would give birth to males. How can this funny miracle be?

She does what she’s told and pushes her abdomen down and out, and when the placenta is driven from her, it feels like a wonderfully liberating bowel movement, and she almost laughs aloud. Then she reaches her arms toward the nurse, who places the baby boy on Elaine’s stomach with its tiny red face facing hers, and suddenly Elaine is weeping with love for this blind, wet infant, this sweet chaos lying limp as earth on her belly, this incredible, terrifying, godlike innocence.

At eleven-thirty, Bob drives into his yard and parks the car, gets out and strolls slowly in the moonlight across the dew-wet plot between the driveway and the trailer. He hitches up his pants, unlocks the door and walks inside, and stops short in the doorway when he sees Ronnie Skeeter spread out on the couch, the Sony flickering on the coffee table before him. Ronnie’s huge body takes up nearly the whole couch. Though it’s a cool evening, and all he’s wearing is a Dairy Queen tee shirt and Scotch-plaid Bermuda shorts, Ronnie, as usual, is sweating ripely. He’s sprawled from the center of the couch on out to the ends, his meaty arms flung over the back of the couch, his huge beer gut, like a weighty sack of flour, billowing out in front of him and swooping smoothly down to his pinched crotch, where enormous red legs merge like turnpike ramps.

He looks up brightly as Bob enters. “Hidie, Bob!” he says. “Elaine ain’t here. She …”

“What’s going on?” Bob interrupts, sensing disaster. “Where’re the kids?”

“Oh, they’re jus’ fine. Sleepin’ like bugs in a rug.” Ronnie goes back to watching Johnny Carson, his message delivered. With the flat
of one hand, he rubs the top of his blond crew cut, patting it affectionately, as if it were a pet.

“Where’s Elaine? What’s going on?”

Ronnie looks back slowly, reluctantly. It’s hard to watch the Johnny Carson show when you keep tuning out. You miss a lot of the jokes because you don’t know exactly who Johnny’s guest is or what Johnny or Ed said last. He tells Bob that his wife Ellen took Bob’s wife Elaine to the hospital.

“
Hospital
! Why?”

“Well, if I was to guess, Bob, I’d say it was so she could have her baby.”

“Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus! Jesus H. Christ! When, Ronnie? When did she go?”

“Couple hours ago. Hey, listen, I hope you don’t mind I drank a couple of your Colt 45’s. I didn’t want to leave the kiddies here alone and get some from home.”

“No, no, fine, fine.” Bob opens the door to leave, then abruptly turns back. “She went to the hospital?”

Ronnie answers without looking away from the TV screen. “Yeah. Couple hours ago.”

“Alone?” Bob feels his blood wash down his body. His face is stiff and white, a hardened plaster mask, and his hands are shaking. Alone? Oh, not alone. Please, not alone. Oh, my sweet Jesus, what an awful thing to happen. That poor woman. Alone.

“Naw. Ellen drove her. She tried to get you, Elaine did. But you was out, I guess.”

“Yeah, right. With a friend. From work. Had a couple of beers. You know.”

“Right. Well, she’s in the hospital….”

Bob turns to leave again. “What hospital? Winter Haven?”

“Yeah, that’d be the closest one. Same as the one you went when the niggers cut you.” Ronnie leans forward, grunting with the effort, and adjusts the sound. His broad forehead is slick with sweat. “You
… you oughta get yourself one of them remotes. I got me one, and they’re real nice.”