“Oh,” she said.
“I don’t want to be mean,” I said, because I was afraid that’s exactly what I was being, “but if I can possibly avoid it I would rather not get into the Guinness Book of Records as the driver of the New York City cab that was the farthest from New York when a baby was born in it.”
That made her laugh. “It would be an interesting record, though,” she said. “You have to admit that. Almost worth it.”
“Almost,” I agreed, and took the exit on two wheels, and turned left. We traveled about a mile on bumpy blacktop country road and then abruptly we reached civilization.
Town turned out to be fairly good-sized, with a lot of slow-moving traffic down the sleepy broad main shopping street. I drove with one hand permanently pressed on the horn, but unfortunately New York City law doesn’t permit cabs to have horns loud enough for situations like this one, so instead of going SNARRRLLLL as I swerved and skidded through the slalom of Friday afternoon shoppers, I more or less went nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn: more like a bee than an express train. What I needed was a tractor-trailer’s big airhorn. “Move! Move! Move!” I screamed at bewildered shoppers as we tore by.
The guy’s shouted directions from the back seat were clear and simple: Just keep going. At the far end of the shopping street — in my wake were a lot of open mouths and wide eyes and ashen faces — I should take the street that angles right and up the hill. Check. And that big brick building up at the top is the hospital. And the emergency entrance is around to the left side. And the three people dressed in white jumped out of the driveway as I came squealing and whining around the curve, slamming on the brakes at the last possible second and slewing to a stop like a skier, the right edge of the rear bumper just kissing the brick wall beside the entrance.
A white-garbed man who’d been seated on a folding chair beside the door, reading a comic book, was now quivering on his feet with his back pressed to the wall — my right front fender had punted his chair across the driveway as he was leaving it — and I at once leaped from the cab to yell at him across its roof, “Pregnancy! Quick!”
“Right!” He dropped the comic book, spun, and ran through the glass doors into the hospital. The people I hadn’t quite hit on the way in were now trotting this way, and I did believe I could hear a siren of some sort coming from town.
Sticking my head in through the open cab window I yelled, “Get her OUT!”
He already was, I’ll say that much for him. He couldn’t keep his goddam car in good repair, he and his wife let things delay until the last possible minute, but I will give him credit for that much: he was getting her out.
Katharine helped. So did the two men who came rushing from the hospital with a wheeled stretcher. They got her out of the cab and onto the stretcher, and damned if that woman didn’t start giving birth as they were pushing her through the doorway. I last saw the cluster of them — wife, husband, stretcher, several attendants — all running at top speed down the corridor into the dim interior of the hospital. And bon voyage to them all.
As I turned to watch the two police cars approaching along the driveway, Katharine came over to stand beside me and say, “See? A person can stall and delay too long for their own good. They should have made their decision to come to the hospital this morning.”
“The decision those two got wrong was nine months ago,” I said, and reached for my wallet. Pretty soon now, I suspected, somebody would be wanting to see my driver’s license.
11
The interview with the police took place in a small gray-walled office near Emergency. Katharine sat on a green vinyl sofa off to the side while the rest of us stood, except for one cop who half hitched his rump onto a corner of the gray metal desk that was the room’s principal piece of furniture.
The officers didn’t make an awful lot of trouble, once they understood the situation, though one of them couldn’t resist pulling the sort of cheapshot remark so beloved of cops: “Is that the way you drive in New York?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Every time I have a woman giving birth in the back seat.”
One of the other cops — five of them were clustered around me — offered a genial smile and said, “Well, we don’t want to wipe a lot of other citizens off the planet while helping a new one arrive.”
This whole situation had made me a little tense, so instead of letting the remarks go I kept answering: “How many did I kill?”
“This time you were lucky.”
“Lucky? I thought I was skillful.”
“Then the people of the town were lucky,” the cop said, with a dry smile. “Lucky you had so much skill.”
Another of the cops — the oldest — said, “Well, let’s not get excited all over again. Whether it was luck or skill is up to you, but all’s well that ends well as far as I’m concerned, and I understand mother and baby are both doing fine.”
“Good.”
“But,” said the cop, “you know what fascinates me.”
I did, but he told me anyway.
“What on Earth is a New York City taxicab doing in south-central Illinois?”
“Well,” I said, “I’ve got a fare.” And I gestured at Katharine, over there on the sofa.
The cops all looked at her, and the one who’d expressed the big question said, in utter bewilderment, “You mean, you two aren’t together?”
I knew what he meant, of course. “She’s my customer,” I said.
The cop said, “Miss—” (Cops haven’t learned ‘Ms’ yet.) “Miss,” he said, “could I ask where you’re going in this taxicab?”
“Los Angeles,” she said.
“And where did you get into the cab?”
“New York,” she said.
I explained, “Had to be New York, I’m not permitted to pick up fares outside the five boroughs. Newark, for instance. I mean the airport, not the city, I wouldn’t particularly want to pick up fares in the city of Newark, but people coming in to Newark airport are mostly headed for New York. You get runs out there all the time, but you have to travel back empty, and that means—”
“Just a minute,” said the cop. “I’m sure that’s all very interesting, but what fascinates me—” And he told us again.
Well, they must have killed an extra twenty minutes of our valuable time before we’d managed to answer every possible question they could think of to ask. The idea of a woman making haste slowly to her marriage intrigued them at first almost as much as the physical fact of the New York cab in their territory, but they soon sheared away from that aspect. They didn’t quite know what to make of Katharine. Was she just a dumbass broad and all she needs is a good screwing from a real man (such as themselves), or was she something else, and if so, what? After a while I noticed a couple of the cops squinting whenever they looked at her, as though she were hard to see — some sort of glare in the way.
Finally it was the discomfort they felt about Katharine that ended the Twenty Questions session. They agreed they wouldn’t press charges on all the illegal things I’d done while hurrying through their town — “reckless endangerment” was one of the phrases being bandied about in the early stages — and at last they said we could go. “Drive carefully,” one of them told me.
The hell with it; let them have the last word.
On our way out we met an intern who said, “Would you like to see the baby?”
What I’d like to see was the cab and Route 70 — this sidetrip was costing us a lot of time — but Katharine at once said, “Would that be possible?”
“Of course. I believe they’ve just now brought her to the nursery.”