Call Me a Cab

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.”

“Her? A girl?”

“That’s right.” He gave us directions — hallways, and then an elevator, and then more hallways — and Katharine thanked him, and we went to look at the baby.

It was one of those viewing windows, like in the movies. Through the glass we could see a fairly large and very clean cream-colored room with lots of chrome machinery against the walls. About half a dozen tiny cribs on wheels were dotted at random around the open floor space, and two starched young nurses were doing this and that. They looked brisk, efficient and incomprehensible. One of them noticed us standing there and came over to open the door beside the viewing window, releasing the sound of screaming baby: it looked so much more peaceful through the soundproof window. She smiled at us, apparently oblivious to the screaming, and said, “What name, please?”

I didn’t follow. “My name?”

“The family name.”

“Oh. Well— Come to think of it, I don’t know the family name.”

She disapproved. “I’m sorry, sir, but family only are permitted to view.”

Katharine said, “They told us downstairs we could see the baby.”

“They did? Who did?”

“In Emergency,” she said. “We’re the ones—”

“Oh, the taxi! Was it your taxi?”

“It’s my father’s, actually,” I said.

“That’s Baby Blodgett,” she told us. “I’ll bring her right over.” And she closed the door — no more baby screams — and went away to choose one of the little cribs and wheel it over by the window. And that was one of the screamers; that head was all mouth and it was wide open.

It wasn’t what you could call a beautiful baby, but in my opinion damn few are. This one seemed to be an assemblage made of slightly undercooked bacon; pink and white and wrinkled and rubbery. I looked at it for half a minute or so, then glanced at Katharine and saw her smiling fondly at the squalling hideous creature. I said, “You want one of those?”

She gave me an arch sidelong look: “You volunteering?”

“Not me, lady. I just thought every woman wanted children.”

“Because of your ex-wife?”

“Because of what the culture tells me.”

“Oh. All right.” She studied the bacon puff again for a few seconds, and then said, “Oh, I suppose so. At one time or another, every woman I suppose thinks she’d like to have a baby.”

“That’s what I understood.”

“But even if you have one,” she said, “you don’t get to keep it.”

“Why not?”

“Time,” she said, and turned to look at me full face, with a kind of wistful smile. “You start off with a sweet little marshmallow like that,” she said inaccurately, “and the first thing you know time has gone by and you’ve got a great big monster lunkhead like you, breaking his father’s heart.”

“What a pretty baby,” I said.