Her big, terrified eyes followed him. “I have…to get… to the…ha-ha-” But the shudders racked her and she couldn’t get the words out.
“Come on back here-let’s get you warm.” He took her by the shoulders and gently eased her around and then to her feet, guiding her like a sleepwalker.
He knew he didn’t have much time, that he had to get the rig rolling again, but he couldn’t very well leave her the way she was, either. Silently asking his brother and sister drivers for patience, he began to talk to her in an easy, soothing voice while he shucked off her worthless coat and sat her down on the bed, then knelt down and took off her ruined shoes. The thin, calf-high stockings she was wearing were soaking wet too, so he hiked up her pant legs and peeled them off. Then he opened up his locker and got out a pair of his nice thick winter socks.
“Here ya go,” he said gruffly. “Put these on-get those feet warmed up.” But she just looked at him.
After a moment it became clear to him that she wasn’t up to putting the socks on alone, so once again he skinned up her damp pant legs and did it himself. He couldn’t help but notice how cold her feet were, and how small and defenseless they looked. The socks came clear up to her knees. He told himself it wasn’t all that different from helping J.J. get dressed on those winter mornings when the boy didn’t feel like waking up and going out in the cold to catch the school bus. But as small as her feet were, they weren’t a little boy’s feet. They were a woman’s. And the way he felt when he touched them wasn’t anything at all like he felt when he was dressing J.J.
He got her eased down on the bed and the blankets tucked in nice and snug around her, then left her and slipped back into the driver’s seat. For a moment he sat and listened to the living, breathing, waiting silence coming over the CB radio. Then he picked up the mike, thumbed it on and drawled, “Uh…this potty stop was brought to you by the Big Blue Starr. Hope y’all enjoyed it… Ten-foh.”
He grinned as the radio erupted with whoops and hollers and crackling static, with everybody within earshot trying to talk at once. A few nearby drivers cut loose with blasts from their airhorns. Then he hung up his mike and put the Kenworth in gear, and slowly, slowly the line began to move again.
When he was pretty sure things were going along okay, nobody taking any unscheduled side trips into the median, he glanced around and called hopefully, “Hey, you doin’ okay back there?”
He thought he heard her whisper, “Fine…” But through the open door of the sleeper he could see that she was still curled up on her side with the blankets cuddled close, and that her eyes were closed. She was still shivering, too. He turned up the heat another notch and went back to concentrating on keeping his rig on the road, but worry was beginning to gnaw at his insides.
The channel 19 airwaves were pretty much back to the normal chatter, drivers bitching and moaning and looking out for one another, just generally doing what they could to keep their spirits up. Jimmy Joe listened to it while another couple of miles crawled by, then once again picked up his mike. He thought a minute, then thumbed it on.
“Uh…anybody seen any bears lately? Come on…”
That got him some guffaws and some rude remarks.
“Hell, there ain’t no bears out here. Ain’t no place for em to hide.”
“I ain’t seen a smoky since yesterday. Cain’t say’s I miss ’em.”
“Westbound…anybody out there?”
“Ain’t no bears gonna be movin’ westbound. They do, they ain’t gonna get back to Amarillo, not unless they can fly.”
“How come there’s never a bear around when you need ore?”
Jimmy Joe let a breath out, taking his time about it. It was pretty much what he’d expected, but he didn’t like it. After thinking about it another minute or two, he punched the mike button again. “Breaker…this is Big Blue Starr again. I’m gon’ be switchin’ channels here for a while, gon’ try and raise somebody over on nine. Uh…I could use a little help. Got a lady here in need of transportation right quick, that’s ’bout the…twenty-four-mile yardstick. If you got any bears in your neighborhood, I’d appreciate it if somebody’d flag ’em down. Ten-foh.”
He didn’t wait for a reply. When he had channel 9, the emergency channel, tuned in, he listened to nothing for a few seconds, then thumbed on his mike once more. He spoke in a low voice with only a trace of his trucker’s drawl.
“Mayday… Mayday… This is Blue Starr Transport. I’m eastbound on 1-40, about three miles east of Adrian…got an emergency situation here. Repeat-this is an emergency. Come back…” He listened hopefully, then tried once more. “Mayday, Mayday…anybody out there listenin’?”
There was only silence.
“Jimmy Joe?”
Oh, Lord. He held the mike against his thumping heart while he cleared his throat, then sang out, “Well, g‘mornin’, sunshine. You feelin’ better?”
She crept in between the seats, wrapped like an Indian in the comforter from the bed-an old quilt he’d borrowed from his mama’s house-and eased herself into the passenger seat. He knew he ought to tell her to fasten her seat belt, but a quick look over at her, the way she was holding herself, made him think…maybe not.
“Jimmy Joe…” She took a deep breath and pulled herself up straighter, and he could see that she was trying hard to recover some of the dignity she’d lost back there in the snowbank. “I think you should know… My, uh, my water broke.”
Oh, Lord, he thought. Lord, no.
But she took another breath, shakier than the first, and went on with it like somebody scared silly but determined to make a full confession. “Back there. It…startled me. That’s why I lost control of my car.” Her voice, which had started off calm and strong, got gradually fainter until she finished in a whisper, “I have to get…to a hospital. I think I’m going to have my baby…now.”
Chapter 7
“Eastbound, you got your ears on?”
I-40-Texas
Well, Lord, Jimmy Joe thought, if you’re listenin’, this would be a real good time for a miracle…
Because he knew that all the “Maydays” and all the prayers in the world weren’t going to get an ambulance out on that track of rutted black ice, and if one did manage to get here, there wasn’t any way in the world for it to get back to Amarillo with Mirabella-not with a solid line of trucks plugging up the road. Not unless it could fly. And until the wind died down and the snow quit blowing, there wasn’t much chance of that, either.
The best he could hope for was to keep going, keep heading for Amarillo, and hope he got there before the baby did. Amarillo… no more than fifty miles, now. At this rate that was ten hours. Ten hours.
He didn’t know why he wasn’t more surprised: Scared, yes, but not surprised. Icy sweat filmed his upper lip and ran in a trickling trail from his armpits and on down his ribs. Maybe we’ll make it, he thought. Sure, we will. Babies, especially the first one, can take a long time.
“Jimmy Joe?” Her eyes were dark, beseeching.
“Yeah,” he said, and cleared his throat, wondering how long he’d been sitting there in frozen silence. “I heard what you said.” He realized he was still holding his CB mike pressed against his chest and reached out to hang it up, stretching his arm slowly…stalling.
“I’m sorry.”
I’m sorry. He glanced at her, then transferred his scowl to the left-hand mirror instead, where beyond the endless line of headlights he could see streaks of red in between the layers of black and purple clouds. Somewhere out there behind him the sun was going down. It was going to get dark soon.
“Hey,” he said, “let me ask you something.”
Hearing the hoarseness and the edge in his voice, Mirabella caught her breath and waited. She wanted him to look at her with the calm, reassuring eyes she remembered-eyes the warm, comforting brown of teddy bears and chocolate. But he kept his face turned away from her, and the angle of his head and the set of his jaw had a tense, angry look.
; “You said your back’s been burtin’ you. That a steady kinda hurt, or more off and on?”
She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the back of the seat. “Off and on, I guess. I just thought it was the Tylenol taking effect. I thought I was aching because of too much sitting. I thought I was just tired. I never thought-”
Jimmy Joe was muttering under his breath. He broke off to ask, “How long has this been goin’ on?”
Wretchedly, Mirabella whispered, “Since yesterday, I think.”
Then he did finally look at her, with eyes that were more black than brown and in no way comforting, and exclaimed, “Good night, woman, what’s the matter with you? Don’t you know enough to know when you’re in labor?”
She flinched at the word-an appalling thing to do, but she couldn’t help it. Even though she knew she’d earned his anger, it seemed so unexpected, so incomprehensible, more frightening than anything that had happened to her so far. To her utter dismay she began to tremble, and then to cry. “It wasn’t supposed to be now!” she wailed. “It’s not supposed to be for another month. I just thought…I was, you know… uncomfortable. I never dreamed… It’s not supposed to…”
Another month. Oh, Lord. He remembered now; she’d told him that. Lord help us, he thought. A month early-a preemie. Oh, hell. Oh, damn. Anything but that. He felt himself go icy cold, then numb.
But not too numb for it to occur to him he’d forgotten who he was dealing with, to know he’d lost control of himself, and as a result now he had a very upset woman on his hands. Not too numb to feel like a bully, and thoroughly ashamed of himself.
He took a deep breath and stretched his arm slowly across the space between them, gripping the back of the seat, near enough to her to touch the quilt she’d wrapped herself in. “Easy… You just take it easy, now,” he muttered. A tremor went through him as he felt the slippery warmth of her hair against his fingertips. “It’s gonna be okay…it’s gonna be okay.”
She bowed her head so that her hair pulled through his fingers like a shuttle full of silk floss through a loom. It slithered forward across her cheeks and his hand found her neck instead. In a voice he could barely hear she whispered, “Jimmy Joe, I’m scared.”
Scared? He wanted to tell her he was scared, too; as scared as he’d ever been in his life before. Lord, how scared he was. He wanted to tell her-and God, too-that he didn’t want any part of this.
No, Lord, I don’t want ever again to hold a too-tiny baby in my hands and watch it slip away before it even has a chance to live. Not again, Lord. Not again.
“It’s gonna be okay,” he said for the third time, trying to make himself believe it. His voice sounded like the scratched 78-rpm records Great-granddaddy Joe Doyle used to play on his windup phonograph. “We’re only fifty miles from Amarillo.”
He could feel her turn to look at him, with a gaze both direct and solemn. “How many hours?”
Since he never had been any good at telling lies, instead of trying to think one up he gave her neck a little squeeze and then took his hand away. In his scratchy gramophone voice he said, “I put a call out on the emergency radio channel. We’ll get you some help out here, don’t you worry.”
Then he had an inspiration. Taking his mike down from its hook, he held it out to her and showed her with his thumb how to work the speaker button.
“Here,” he said, “why don’t you give ‘em another call right now? You just mash on this right here when you want to say somethin’, then let er go so you can listen. See there? Go on, give ’er a try.” If nothing else, he thought, it would give her something to do, make her feel, if not better, at least maybe not so helpless.
One of her hands crept from the folds of the quilt and took the mike from him. It came as a shock to him to feel how cold her fingers were. He heard a soft sniff, a throat-clearing cough, and then in a low voice, “What do I say?”
“You probably oughta start with ‘Mayday,’” he said dryly, trying out a grin to see if it had any effect on his spirits. It didn’t, and his words came out with an impatient edge. “Then, I don’t know. Tell ‘em it’s an emergency. Tell ’em where you are. Then…shoot, just tell ’em what the problem is.”
“I’ve never done this before.” She gave a nervous, hiccuping laugh. “I feel funny.”
He looked over at her, saw her trying to smile, and the sheen of fear in her eyes. His voice gentled. “No trick to it,” he said softly, dragging his eyes back to the road. “Just hold it up to your mouth, mash the button and talk. Nothin’ to be bashful about.”
“Okay, here goes…” He heard her take a breath, clear her throat. “Okay… Mayday, Mayday. This is an emergency. Uh…I’m in a truck-Blue Starr Transport-on I-40. Let’s see, that’s about fifty miles west of Amarillo. We’re stuck in traffic, and I’m, uh, well, I’m in labor. And, uh, we need help. So…please send someone. Please. Help…
“What now?” she whispered after a tense little silence. “Nobody’s answering.”
“Did you remember to let go of the button?”
“Oh…shoot.” She swore under her breath. Another few minutes of silence went by. “Still nothing. Shall I try again?”
“Sure, might as well.” Then he had to smile as this time she jumped right in with a self-confident singsong. He had to hand it to her-the lady did learn fast. Sounded just like a born trucker.
“Mayday, Mayday, this is an emergency. Repeat, this is an emergency. I am in a big rig owned by Blue Starr Transport, stuck in westbound traffic on I-40 about fifty miles west of Amarillo. I am in labor and in need of assistance. Please respond. Mayday.”
Together they listened to crackling static and breathing sounds. Then in a flat, expressionless voice she said, “Well. So much for that.” From the corner of his eye he could see her hand reaching toward him.
Wordlessly he took the mike from her and hung it back up, wishing he could have taken her hand instead, just because sometimes when there wasn’t anything to say, it was kinda good to have a hand to hold on to. But the mike was there in the way, and by the time he had it taken care of, the moment had gone by. So all he could do was try and find some words.
“We’ll keep ‘er on that channel,” he said gruffly. “Just keep on tryin’. Sooner or later we’re bound to raise somebody. Meanwhile, maybe you oughta go on back there and lie down for a while. Seems to me if you keep quiet, things might slow down some. Get out of those wet things, too, while you’re at it. I know I’ve got some clothes back there you can wear. Couple of sweatshirts, some long johns…”
“Jimmy Joe…” Just that.
The way she said it, the way she was breathing, got his attention real quick. He looked over at her, his heart jumping right out of his chest. “You havin’ a contraction?”
She nodded rapidly, clinging to him with eyes suddenly gone dark and scared. “I guess it must be.”
“Okay… okay.” He gripped the wheel and stared a hole in the windshield, hoping he didn’t sound as scared as he felt, hoping he didn’t drive right up the tailgate of the reefer truck in front of him. “Now…”
What now? It had been a long time since he’d attended those childbirth classes with Patti-J.J.’s mama. All he could remember about them was a lot about relaxation, and something called “cleansing breaths.” Which, judging from the sounds she was making, Mirabella already had down pat.
Finally getting up enough courage to look over at her, he saw that she had her eyes closed now and was concentrating on those breaths for all she was worth. It gave him an odd, lonely feeling to watch her, as if she’d gone away somewhere, to some place he could never follow. Nothing for him to do but keep his mouth shut and drive, until finally she let out her breath in a long, slow hiss and finished it up with, “Oh, boy.”
“Bad one?” he asked awkwardly, fully aware of the fact that no matter how she answered him, he would never really understand. Nothing like childbirth to make a man feel totally useless, he thought. Probably why in ages past at times like t
his the womenfolk were always sending the men out to chop wood or boil water or hunt buffalo, just to make em feel like they were good for something.
“Not so bad.” She said it with a relieved chuckle, like a kid finding out that the punishment he’d been dreading wasn’t so terrible after all. “If they don’t get any worse than that, I can handle it.”
“How often you havin’ ’em?”
“I don’t know.” She shifted restlessly. “I guess we’d better start keeping track.”
“Okay, say we start-” he pulled back the sleeve of his sweatshirt and got a good look at his watch, adding a couple of minutes for the time they’d been talking “-now. Okay, now, you tell me the minute you feel the next one comin’ on, y’hear? And right now before it does, you best get on back there and lie down.” He jerked his head in the direction of the sleeper. “Get some rest.”
Then he caught a replay of himself. He shook his head and made a sound that was full of all the self-disgust and helplessness he felt. “I beg your pardon-don’t mean to be givin’ out orders. I just do it so I’ll feel like I’m doin’ somethin’.” He gave her about half a grin, which was the best he could muster.
“That’s okay.” After a moment she gave a soft laugh and added dryly, “You probably ought to get in some practice while you can. Looks like you’re going to be my childbirth coach.”
With that she got up and eased herself between the seats. The quilt got hung up on the gearshift and he reached automatically to unhook it for her, taking more time than he needed, fussing with the dragging end like a bridesmaid with a bridal train while he tried to get some spit flowing in his mouth again. He’d never known his mouth to be so dry. Fear. That’s what it was.
But he couldn’t let Mirabella know. That was why he scraped up a little laughter and kind of a confident, know-it-all tilt to his head and drawled, “Childbirth coach… Oh, yeah, I sure do remember that. Those classes, now… I reckon that’s what they’re for, don’t you? Make the father feel like he’s actually doing something worthwhile, even if all it is is propping his wife up and yelling at her to do what she’s already doing anyway.”
One Christmas Knight Page 10