Janice Coates took Lila’s arm. “Are we seeing this?”
“Yes,” Lila said.
Celia, Magda, and Jolie screamed shrilly, in piercing three-part harmony. The white tiger was emerging from the split in the many-boled trunk. It surveyed the women at the edge of the clearing with its green eyes, then stretched long and low, seeming almost to bow to them.
“Stand still!” Lila shouted. “Stand still, all of you! It won’t harm you!” Hoping with all her heart and soul that it was true.
The tiger touched noses with the fox. It turned to the women again, seeming to fix on Lila with particular interest. Then it paced around the Tree and out of sight.
“My God,” Kitty McDavid said. She was weeping. “How beautiful was that? How fucking oh-my-God beautiful was that?”
Magda Dubcek said, “This is svaté místo. Holy place.” And she crossed herself.
Janice was looking at Lila. “Tell me.”
“I think,” Lila said, “it’s a way out. A way back. If we want it.”
That was when the walkie-talkie on her belt came to life. There was a burst of static, and no way to make out words. But it sounded like Erin to Lila, and it sounded like she was yelling.
Tiffany was stretched across the front seat of the golf cart. An old St. Louis Rams tee-shirt that she had scrounged somewhere lay crumpled on the ground. Her breasts, once little more than nubbins, jutted skyward in a plain D-cup cotton bra. (The Lycra ones were now totally useless.) Erin was bent between her legs with her hands splayed on that amazing mound of belly. As the women came running, some brushing twigs and the odd moth from their hair, Erin bore down. Tiffany shrieked—“Stop that, oh for God’s sake stop!”—and her legs shot out in a V.
“What are you doing?” Lila asked, reaching her, but when she looked down, what Erin was doing and why she was doing it became obvious. Tiff’s jeans were unzipped. There was a stain on the blue denim and the cotton of Tiff’s underpants was a damp pink.
“The baby is coming, and its butt is where its head should be,” Erin said.
“Oh my God, a breech?” Kitty said.
“I have to turn it around,” Erin said. “Get us back to town, Lila.”
“We’ll have to straighten her up,” Lila said. “I can’t drive until you do that.”
With the help of Jolie and Blanche McIntyre, Lila got Tiffany to a half-sitting position with Erin crammed in next to her. Tiffany screamed again. “Oh, that hurts!”
Lila slid behind the wheel of the cart, her right shoulder tight against Tiffany’s left one. Erin had turned almost sideways to fit. “How fast will this thing go?” she asked.
“I don’t know, but we’re going to find out.” Lila hit the accelerator pedal, wincing at Tiff’s howl of pain as the cart jerked forward. Tiffany screamed at every jounce, and there were a lot of jounces. At that moment, the Amazing Tree with its freight of exotic birds was the farthest thing from Lila Norcross’s mind.
This was not true of the former Elaine Geary.
They stopped at the Olympia Diner. Tiffany was in too much pain to go further. Erin sent Janice and Magda back to town to get her bag while Lila and three other women carried Tiffany inside.
“Pull a couple of the tables together,” said Erin, “and do it fast. I need to straighten this baby out now, and I need Mom lying down to do it.”
Lila and Mary pushed over the tables. Margaret and Gail hefted Tiffany atop them, grimacing and turning their faces away, as if she were throwing mud at them instead of screams of objection.
Erin went back to work on Tiffany’s stomach, kneading it like dough. “I think it’s starting to move, praise God. Come on, Junior, how about a little somersault for Dr. E.?”
Erin bore down on Tiff’s stomach with one hand while Jolie Suratt pushed sideways.
“Stop!” Tiffany screamed. “Stop it, you fuckers!”
“It’s turning,” said Erin, ignoring the profanity. “Really turning, thank God. Yank her pants off, Lila. Pants and underpants. Jolie, keep pressing. Don’t let it turn back.”
Lila took one leg of Tiffany’s jeans, Celia Frode the other. They yanked and the old denims came off. Tiffany’s underpants came with them part way, leaving brushstrokes of blood and amniotic fluid on her thighs. Lila pulled them the rest of the way. They were heavy with liquid, warm and sopping. She felt her gorge rise, then settle back into place.
The screams were constant now, Tiffany’s head lashing from side to side.
“I can’t wait for the bag,” Erin said. “This baby is coming right now. Only…” She looked at her former office-mate, who nodded. “Somebody get Jolie a knife. A sharp one. We have to cut her a little.”
“I-gotta-push,” Tiffany panted.
“The hell you do,” Jolie said. “Not yet. The door’s open, but we need to take the hinges off. Make a little more room.”
Lila found a steak knife, and in the bathroom, an ancient bottle of hydrogen peroxide. She doused the blade, stopped to consider the hand sanitizer by the door, and tried it. Nothing. The stuff inside had evaporated long ago. She hurried back. The women had surrounded Tiffany, Erin, and Jolie in a semi-circle. All were holding hands except for Elaine Geary, who had her arms wrapped tightly around her midsection. She was directing her gaze first to the counter, then to the empty booths, then out the door. Anywhere but at the panting, screaming woman on the makeshift operating table, now mother-naked save for an old cotton bra.
Jolie took the knife. “Did you disinfect it with something?”
“Hydrogen per—”
“That’ll do,” Erin said. “Mary, find me a Styrofoam cooler if there’s one around. One of you other ladies, get towels. There’ll be some in the kitchen. Put them on top of the—”
A miserable howl from Tiffany as Jolie Suratt performed a steak-knife episiotomy, sans anesthetic.
“Put the towels on top of the golf carts,” Erin finished.
“Oh yeah, the solar panels!” That was Kitty. “To heat em up. Hey, that’s pretty sma—”
“We want them warm but not hot,” Erin said. “I have no intention of roasting our newest citizen. Go on.”
Elaine stood where she was, letting the other women wash around her like water around a rock, continuing to direct her gaze at any object that was not Tiffany Jones. Her eyes were shiny and shallow.
“How close is she?” Lila asked.
“Seven centimeters,” Jolie said. “She’ll be at ten before you can say Jack Robinson. Cervical effacement is complete—one thing that went right, at least. Push, Tiffany. Save a little for next time, though.”
Tiffany pushed. Tiffany screamed. Tiffany’s vagina flexed, then closed, then opened again. Fresh blood flowed between her legs.
“I don’t like the blood.” Lila heard Erin mutter this to Jolie from the side of her mouth, like a racetrack tout passing on a hot tip. “There’s way too much. Christ, I wish I at least had my fetoscope.”
Mary came back with the sort of hard plastic cooler Lila had toted to Maylock Lake many times, when she and Clint and Jared used to go on picnics there. Printed on the side was BUDWEISER! THE KING OF BEERS! “Will this do, Dr. E.?”
“Fine,” Erin said, but didn’t look up. “Okay, Tiff, big push.”
“My back is killing me—” Tiffany said, but me became meeeeeeeEEEEEEE as her face contorted and her fists beat up and down on the chipped Formica of the tabletop.