“I’m liking this!” Benny says, watching the little screen. “I think I can sell the kid on this! This is the kind of thing he just might like!”
“That’s the spirit, Benny!” Dwight says.
“I just had a thought!” Benny says. “A big thought! This could become some kind of craze! We could become the Budweiser of this!” He puts his hands in the air and then draws them apart to form the banner he sees in his mind. “The Veritas Grit World Championship Belt-Sander Races!”
“Think wild!” says Dwight. “Dream, Benny!”
“Hold on!” Benny says, putting his arm around my shoulders. “Wait a minute! We could put Walter here in it! Walter here could talk about being a world-class belt-sander racer, and how he would never race without Veritas Grit.”
“Great idea, Benny!”
“Except I’m not a world-class belt-sander racer,” I say.
Benny gives me a quizzical look. “Of course you’re not,” he says. “Nobody is. It’s just a fantasy we’re having.” Then the significance of that hits him—he’s seriously considering staking his career on a fantasy—and I watch his face go through a couple of surreal changes while he wrestles with that. “We’d be manufacturing a craze, Walter. We’d be sponsoring a sporting event, the way Budweiser does. Nobody in the abrasives industry has ever done that before. They never had a sport to sponsor!”
“Benjamin meant you’d be in the video as an actor,” Dwight says. “You remember—acting? Your niche in life? You’d be acting as though you were a world-class belt-sander racer.”
“Oh, acting,” I say.
“He gets it now,” Dwight says to Benny. Then he lowers his voice and points to his head. “A lot of actors are not really all that—you know.”
“We wouldn’t need Einstein,” Benny says. Then he slaps Dwight in the belly. “I’m liking this! Winners use Veritas Grit!”
When the races resume, a few men have removed parts of their sanders’ housings to lighten them up, but these half-naked creatures run very wrong, sucking sawdusty wind and finally choking out altogether. Heat after heat, the rogue Makita narrows the field, Anita memorializing its conquest on videotape. I watch her pan for cutaways of an ecstatic Benny cheering from the sidelines. “Go, Veritas Grit!” he cries, urging his sander on with thrusts of his arms, and even here in the pandemonium I can see how nicely those shots will work when the tape is cut together, what a pro Anita really is.
In the end it’s Hippie Trash versus Veritas Grit, as Dwight and Tempesto always knew it would be. The men put new belts on their sanders for the finals. I go to trackside to catch the action live. Veritas Grit’s gears must be wearing down because the first runoff looks like a tie to me. I glance back at Anita to see if she got the photo finish, but she’s standing there holding her belly, looking like a person who just ate the entire lump of wasabi from her sushi dinner, thinking it was something else.
Rebecca has seen her, too, and beats me there. “The baby!” she says.
Tempesto calls a time-out and sneaks off to put new gears into Veritas Grit. Dwight hustles over and hugs his wife. “Now look,” he says. “Everybody stay cool. There’s ten minutes left in this, and I don’t see why we can’t take care of business and have a baby, too.”
“Dwight, you swine,” Rebecca says.
“Rebecca, I’m closing an important business deal. We need this business to buy Pampers and strollers and everything, O.K.? Is your car air-conditioned? No? Here, trade keys with me. You and Walter take Anita to the hospital in the Bonneville, and I’ll be over in a half hour in your car. You won’t even be in labor yet, honey,” he tells Anita.
“She’s in labor right now!”
“She’s just starting, Rebecca. You realize this will probably go on for about twenty-four hours? We went to the Lamaze classes, didn’t we, babe?”
“You went to the first one,” Anita says, not bitterly, just sticking up for the facts.
“We know what to expect,” Dwight tells Rebecca. “You’re overreacting.”
“I’m overreacting?”
“You’re being considerate. But you’re a little worked up.”
“I’m worked up?”
“Anita’s going to the hospital to have a baby. People do it every day. You’ll be fine, sweetheart,” he says to Anita, though she seems to be going into a trance.
“Walter, you know where Brigham and Women’s is, right?”
“It’s where all the hospitals are, isn’t it? I think so. Do I?” I ask Rebecca.
“Oh, God,” she says.
The whole concept of a freight elevator takes on new meaning as we transport Anita to ground level in the dark, creaking box. Rushing from the building to open the car for the women, I wonder if Hippie Trash did something psychedelic to the punch upstairs. I’m picking up the world like a satellite dish. I’m hearing everything. I hear the blades of crabgrass rubbing each other in the crummy sand-soil of the concrete planters along the parking lot. I hear the mechanical noises of the belt-sander race. If I had to be up there right now, the sandpaper would shred my brain. As it is, I can distinguish the scrape of every different shoe on the asphalt out here.
“Does anybody else happen to feel like they’re on drugs?” I say.
“I do,” Anita says.
“Drugs?” says Rebecca. “You’re supposed to be driving the car.”
“I can drive fine,” I say, the way people always say these things.
We get Anita in the back seat of the Bonneville, Rebecca in there with her. Once I get behind the wheel, I understand what’s happening to me: I have a friend who has become for the moment a creature, a mammalian creature engaged in the live birth mammals are famous for, and I’m sympathizing with that, resonating with it. I’m an animal now myself.
“Music might help,” Anita says. “Could you turn on the radio?”
It’s only an AM, and at first all I can find are talk shows—people claiming to have been inside UFOs, telling about having fat vacuumed from their buttocks and bellies. Finally I hit music on an oldies station—Little Eva singing “The Loco-Motion.”
“That’s good,” Anita says. “I like that song.”
“Remind me what I do now?” I call to Rebecca in back.
“Go down this access road and make a right at the fork. I’ll tell you from there. Don’t go up the ramp onto 93.”
“Where’s that?”
“Right up there.”
It’s dark down here below the highway and I don’t see what she means. My skin is screaming thousands of messages at me, and I’m giving birth to a baby in my brain, and the next thing I know we’re rising into the air.
“Walter!” Rebecca cries out. “I just got finished saying don’t do this!”
“I got mixed up. I’m sorry. Let’s not fight, O.K.? Dwight and Anita never fight. We always fight. Plus, I’m having a mystical experience.”
“Well, go back! Back the car back down the ramp and get off!”
But it’s too late. We’re up there now. The space behind me was the only free slot on this whole merciless highway, and it’s been filled by a car which in turn left a space that has been filled by another car, like one of those puzzles of linked plastic numbers sliding around in a frame. One little mistake and we’re hopelessly locked in a grid.
Beneath the spectral mercury-vapor light, the traffic is moving in geological time. We need a helicopter right now. I open my door and stand on the frame to look out over the cars. It’s just more of the same, forever and ever. The atmosphere is a kiln where thousands of clay vehicles are baking. Anita can’t stand it, and I have to get back in. Now that we’re not moving at all, the air conditioner is dragging Dwight’s old behemoth to the tar pits. The temperature gauge edges into the red as I watch.
“I have this unbelievable urge to push,” says Anita.
“Well, don’t do it!” I say.
“She must have been in transition at the races,” Rebecca says.
“Really? Jesus, A
nita, didn’t you know the baby was coming? I thought women just sort of, you know, knew things like that.”
“I felt a little crampy,” she says. “I thought it was the baba ghanouj.”
On the theory that action is better than inaction, I pull off the road and make a run for it down the shoulder. This works for about a hundred yards, until the shoulder suddenly stops. I try to pull back into my lane but the people alongside us are getting revenge by not letting me. I’m looking around the car for something to threaten them with when I see Dwight’s cellular phone. I’m not used to the idea of phones in cars; I forgot it was there. “I have to make a call,” I say, getting out and closing the door gently on the telephone’s cord. A woman answers when I dial 911. “We’ve got somebody having a baby here,” I say.
“I’m showing you on a cellular phone,” she says. “She’s having the baby in a car?”
“Right. We’re stuck in traffic on 93 south.”
“Where on 93? Between what exits?”
“No idea. We’re at the place where the shoulder of the road disappears.”
“What can you see right now?”
“The Schrafft’s Building.”
“In front of you?”
“Right. Affirmative.”
“You’re in Somerville. Describe the car. Year, model, color, plates.”
“1964 Bonneville. White. Four-door. I can’t see the plates, the phone won’t reach that far. It’s the father’s car. He’s not here. Could you send a helicopter?”
“No, sir. We can’t land a helicopter on that part of 93. We’ll send an ambulance.”
“What if it happens before they get here?”
“Make sure the baby can breathe. Put it on its mother’s breast. Don’t cut the cord.”
“What about germs? The car is filthy.”
“An unread newspaper is relatively germ-free. You can deliver the baby on that if you have to. We’ll have somebody there as fast as we can.” Then she hangs up.
The traffic has moved a little bit. A Lincoln Town Car is alongside us now, the people in it watching me talk on the phone. They remind me of my mom and dad. I knock on their passenger window. The lady lowers it with the electric button. “Hi. Would you folks happen to have a recent newspaper?” I see a crisp copy of today’s Wall Street Journal right there on their back seat.
“Need the show times for the movies?” the man calls out sarcastically. “Why don’t you just call on your phone there, big fella?”
Maybe he is my father, after all. I crouch down to check. No, he isn’t. “We’re not going to the movies. A woman in our car is having a baby, and in a pinch you can deliver babies on newspapers. That Wall Street Journal right there would be fine.”
He makes his wife put up the window, and I see them arguing about it without sound, gesturing wildly. I’m about to knock on the next car when the radiator goes on the Bonneville, sheets of white steam spewing from the grille and hood with a horrid hissing sound. The man gets out of the Lincoln with the newspaper and looks in our car. I look in with him. It’s like a wolf den in there, one female hunkering on the floor, another one, heavy with young, lying on the seat. They’re breathing rapidly through their mouths and staring out with eyes dilated to black disks. The man pushes the newspaper at me and backs away, but his wife is already out of the Lincoln. “Oh, my God!” she cries when she looks in the car.
I get back in with the phone and open the Journal to its deep middle sections. “The lady on 911 told me this,” I tell Rebecca. “We’re supposed to spread these out over the seat. Anita, an ambulance is on the way. Hang in there, O.K.?”
“The women in my family have pretty easy births,” she says between gasps of air and pain, as though her job is to comfort us. “My doctor says I have a pelvis like the Holland Tunnel.” She thinks about this for a second and laughs. “Too bad we can’t take it to the hospital.”
“Anita, I think you’re starting to rave a little bit. Try to be calm.”
She snorts fiercely like a riled-up horse. I get the number of the cabinetry shop from Information, and ask for Dwight. He’s still there. They bring him to the phone.
“I was just leaving,” he says. “What’s going on?”
I tell him.
“This wasn’t the plan, Walter,” he says.
“I know it wasn’t, Dwight. What can I say? We’re stuck in traffic.”
“What are you doing on 93 in the first place?”
“I made a mistake and got on it. Here, I’m putting you on with Anita.”
“You were supposed to be here to tell me to push,” she says to Dwight.
“Don’t tell her that!” I say at the phone. I look outside. The woman from the Lincoln has spread the word, and now about thirty people from other cars are staring in through our steamed-up windows like a gathering of spirits.
“Walter thinks you’re mad at him,” Anita says. “Tell him you’re not.” She passes the phone back to me.
“Is that you there, where all the people are?” Dwight says. “I think I can see you from here.”
“Yeah, we’ve got a crowd here.”
“The Bonneville’s overheating, isn’t it?”
“Yup.”
“It does that when you run the air conditioner without driving.”
“I figured that out.”
“I’m not mad, Walter. You’re doing your best.”
“Thanks, Dwight. I called for an ambulance.”
“I see it coming on the shoulder right now. Should be there in a couple of minutes.”
“Oh, yeah. I hear the sirens.”
“You’re fine now. I’ll meet you at the hospital. Oh, hey! Guess who won the race.”
“Us?”
“You bet. Veritas Grit. Benny’s going wild. He wants to see a proposal for a big promotion. And, Walter? He says this is your niche. You’re gonna be the Veritas Grit spokesperson. You could be looking at national TV with this.”
“Gee, that’s great, Dwight. Thanks.”
The radio starts playing “I Second That Emotion,” and then all at once the crowd around the car breaks into cheers and applause. When I look in the back seat I see that the baby has left the mother ship and is now half in Rebecca’s hands, half space-walking in its birth fluids across the tiny print of the New York Stock Exchange. It’s made of rubber—that’s my first thought, seeing it jiggle from behind. But I’m not in my right mind. Rebecca gets a grip and lifts, and the baby’s slimy body flips over suddenly in her arms. It’s a boy. His two-second-old face meets my thirty-five-year-old one, the eyes puddling darkly beneath the matted hair, looking into mine and saying, I’m here again? Who am I this time? And then, unmistakably, he winks at me. For an instant I think I get it, the whole thing, life in all its dimension. Then Rebecca puts him back on his belly, slides him up the front of Anita, and he enters earthly bliss.
“Dwight!” I say. “You’re a father! It’s a boy!”
“A boy? The baby’s born? I have a son?”
“Look at the size of this kid!” I say.
“Where’s Anita?” he cries.
“What do you mean, where is she?”
“I mean how is she!”
“She seems fine. She’s smiling. She’s holding the baby.”
“It’s a boy!” I hear Dwight shout to the cabinetry shop. “He’s big!”
Tempesto’s voice comes on. “We’re firing a twenty-one-gun salute! Look in the steam!”
Sure enough, red filaments flash like pick-up-sticks tumbling through the white cloud around the car. The streetlamps around us start to go out.
“Walter,” says Dwight. “Hold the phone up to the baby.” I do that. “Dwight Junior!” he says, his tiny voice coming out of the earpiece. “Son! This is your father speaking!”
“Walter, let’s have a baby!” Rebecca says as we gaze upon the strapping boy on his mother’s breast, born in a ’64 Bonneville broken down on the side of the road while Smokey Robinson sang on the radio and his father s
poke to him on a cellular phone. I think: This will be no ordinary child.
“Sure, sweetheart,” I say. “Why not?”
And then, just as I kiss Rebecca, our fogged-up car becomes a huge heart attack, throbbing with red light and screaming sounds. Out in the distance, beyond the gaping ghost faces against the steamy glass, the ambulance has pulled to a stop behind the eight or ten cars lined up behind us on the shoulder. I fight through the crowd to meet the men coming toward me with a stretcher and a box of first-aid gear.
“What the hell happened to the lights?” the one is saying to the other.
“It’s the laser beams!” I shout, gesturing back to the vapors billowing above the Bonneville. “Men in that building over there are shooting them out with laser beams!”
“Is that right?” the first man says, stopping to look where I’m pointing. “Laser beams, Louie,” he says to the other guy, but the red ambulance light cancels out the red lasers so you can’t see their flicking tongues in the steam anymore. “Been out here awhile, huh, pal?”
“I’ll never rent on the Cape again,” the other man says.
“No, we go to Maine now,” the first one says. “I couldn’t take this. We’d like to help you, bud, but we’re here for a lady having a baby.”
“It already happened!” I cry. “He’s born!”
“The baby we’re looking for, or the Baby Jesus? We’re looking for a Bonneville with a pregnant lady inside.”
“In that crowd of people!” I tell them, so drained by birth I should be on that stretcher myself. “But she’s not pregnant anymore. It’s a boy named Dwight Junior. Go ahead. You’ll see him. A big wrinkly red guy on the phone with his dad.”
A HALF HOUR WITH GOD’S HEROES
Josephine assumed she’d find the shrine in a wooded glen down a private road. She expected a quiet place with a statue of the Virgin or a plaque recounting the miraculous event the trees had witnessed decades before, when a girl named Rose felt herself summoned down the path, a little crippled girl known far and wide for her special devotion to Our Lady—something along those lines. A shrine. And the gift shop, Josephine’s interest, would be a modest shed-like affair with a nun inside selling beads and figurines. So Josephine imagined; her ex-mother-in-law, Camilla, hadn’t described the shrine, and Josephine hadn’t asked.
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