Call Me a Cab

10

Lunch from a McDonald’s near Terre Haute, then across another state line and our first new time zone: Illinois; Central Time. Katharine had returned to her brooding after our long talk, and following lunch she brought out the pencil and legal pad and did a lot of writing. As for me, I wondered if my glib praise of juvenility had had any effect on her. I hoped not; I’d only talked that way to pass the time. Not that I disagreed with myself; passivity was certainly the best game plan I’d ever found for my own situation. On the other hand, I knew it was wrong for most people, and at the moment useless for Katharine Scott. She had to make a decision, whether she wanted to or not. Her real difficulty wasn’t in solving the problem but in facing it, and she’d have to know that before she could break through.

I was pondering this magazine-psychology-article wisdom when I noticed, some distance ahead, a car parked at the side of the road, and a fellow actually standing in the road, running back and forth from lane to lane and urgently waving his arms crosswise above his head. Tapping my brakes, I said over my shoulder, “Something.”

Katharine peered past me at the road. “What is it?”

“Beats me.”

As I pulled off on the shoulder and came to a stop behind the other car, I saw that steam was pouring from its radiator and that it contained at least one passenger. Meanwhile, the man came hurrying over to my window and cried, “You have to take us to town!”

“Sorry, Mac,” I said. “I’ve already got a fare.”

“It’s my wife!”

Was that a woman in the other car? I said, “If you want, I’ll stop at the next gas station, have them come—”

“No time! No time! We have to get to the hospital!”

“Hospital?” And then I knew, and I thought, Oh, no.

“My wife!” he cried, and said the dreadful words: “She’s about to have a baby!”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said.

Katharine said, “A baby?”

“We were rushing to the hospital, the car broke down, I’ve got to—” And he broke off to yell at the car, “Myra! Come on, darling!”

Before I could say anything, before I could figure out some semi-decent way out of this, Katharine had leaped from the cab and was running over to the other car, where an extremely pregnant woman was now ponderously emerging. Her husband dashed over to help, and he and Katharine walked the woman to the cab and helped her into the back. “Thank God you came by!” the man cried.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said.

“Bless you,” said the woman. Her forehead was pebble-grained with perspiration. “Bless you for this.”

“Sure,” I said.

The couple got settled in back, Katharine slid into the front next to me — knocking all my roadmaps on the floor — and off we went, scattering gravel in our wake. I kept the accelerator pressed right down on the floor, and behind me the man yelled, “It’s the next exit, about five miles down the road! Then take the left toward town!”

“Right, right.”

“We’ll make it, darling,” he told his wife.

“We damn well better,” I muttered.

Beside me, Katharine was all excited and bright-eyed, her head first turning back to look at the woman and then forward to watch the rapidly unreeling highway. “Do you think we will make it?” she asked.

“You better hope we do.”

“Well, it has happened before,” she told me. “The Daily News constantly runs stories about women having babies in taxicabs.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but what the Daily News doesn’t run is what happens next. You ever been around childbirth?”

“No,” she said, looking doubtful. “Why? What’s wrong?”

“It’s a mess, that’s what’s wrong. The human body is a wonderful thing, so long as everything that’s inside stays inside. Once the inside stuff starts coming out, what you’ve got is a mess. A cabby I know had it happen to him, a woman giving birth in the back of the cab, and not only did it cost him an arm and a leg to get the cab cleaned it also took two days to air the thing out before he could use it again. Two days out of business. Romance is romance, but real life is real life, and believe me, Katharine, you do not want to travel to Los Angeles in a cab in which somebody has just given birth.”

“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.