“Right,” mumbled the boys.
“What did you say?!” shouted Agent Simon. “What kind of dance?”
“Faggot,” the Klansman snickered uneasily. “Well, look at ’em. You know what I’m saying.”
“Right.” Gates cocked the pistol and held it between the man’s eyes. “Take off that hood.”
“You ain’t about to shoot me,” the Klansman predicted defiantly, but as he saw the finger squeeze the trigger, he struggled out of the big hood and clutched it in his hands.
“Shit, man, are you ugly!” Gates shook his head. The man had a few long strands of dark hair slicked across his bald dome, and his sunken cheeks were pitted with old acne scars. “You are putrefyingly ugly. And I was planning on kissing you, too! See,” and Gates grinned, brushing his black mustache and tossing his curls in a flurry, “see, I’m a faggot myself. Bet you didn’t think of that. And I was going to give you a great big smacky kiss. But you are so goddamn pitifully miserably disgustingly ugly, I can’t make myself do it.” He grabbed the hood and threw it onto the bonfire at the base of the cross, then spun around to where the other eleven Klansmen stood flanked by the armed Orpheus and Charon. “Okay! Let’s see what the rest of you guys look like! Anybody worth kissing?”
Lenoir had now decided that if this was the kind of nut the FBI was hiring these days, it was time for him to go back to his job at the highway patrol.
No one moved. Gates fired his pistol over their heads. Again, volleys of artillery shot through the darkness. The white hoods came off fast, were gathered by the two dancers, and flung into the fire. “Nope,” Gates told the Klan, “You’re all too bad looking for me. In total sincerity, I think I ought to bring my men up here and let them kill you just for being so damn ugly.”
At this point, Lenoir, who had inched his way to a clump of pine trees, slipped behind them. From there, he watched his Klan comrades forced to lie down on their stomachs while the two students tied the backs of the skirts of their white robes together. He couldn’t understand why the other agent (the one in the suit, the one who looked like an agent) did nothing to control his partner’s wild behavior. He wondered if this bespectacled man might be in shock; if maybe the Bureau had sprung this weirdo Simon on him as well. Paddy wagon?! Had that fruitcake just said the Klan better not move a muscle until they got back with the ‘paddy wagon’? Okay, that’s it. He’d figured it out now. This leather guy had to be with the CIA. He was one of those flamboyant, crazy, Gordon Liddy types. Nobody in the Bureau was that bizarre; or, for that matter, could afford those kinds of clothes. Lenoir blinked. Where’d they go? While he was theorizing, all four of the invaders had disappeared. Then suddenly from every direction the air filled not only with shots but hissing bombs and the whistle of flying mortar. Lenoir crawled into a gully. Was that maniac’s squad firing missiles?
The Klansmen obviously thought so, for despite their instructions not to move, they were desperately struggling to stand up, while tied together by the skirts like a string of paper dolls. They stumbled and yanked and fell on each other and tugged each other in opposite directions and staggered this way and that, and, in fact, performed an entire chorus line dance, watching which, from their hiding places, their small audience had as much fun as the Klan had claimed to have had watching “Orpheus in the Underworld.” The audience watched, however, only while Gates unloaded the rifles and hurled them into the woods. Then they hurried back down to the highway, where they received the spoils of victory deserved by conquerors; in this case, the delirious embraces of all members of the Appalachian School for the Performing Arts, male, female, black, white, Asian, straight, and gay.
“There’s no way to thank you,” Mr. Rosestein admitted, as the old bus, with its borrowed fanbelt, rattled to a start.
Gates pointed at the side of the red truck across the highway, where KNICK-KNACK GEM-CRACK HIGH-TIME CIRCUS glittered in gold. “We artists,” he said, “have to stick together.”
“The testicles on the kid,” Simon Berg whispered. “Chutzpah? Talent? I love him.”
“We could have all been shot,” Raleigh replied, the gun still frozen in his hand.
Toutant Kingstree said, “Y’all could of been shot. I could of got coated in kerosene.”
When the travelers opened the rear doors of the truck, they received news which made Gates Hayes (who had just bounded almost gleefully into a clearing of armed bullies) turn gray with fear. Weeper Berg was saying, “Fatty, yah shouda been there,” and Toutant Kingstree was singing, “Hit the road, Jack, and don’cha come back,” when Mingo Sheffield said, “Diane’s having her baby.”
They all craned around him to see the teenaged girl, shadowy in the light of the battery lamp. She lay on the mattress on the truck floor. A blanket was now spread under her, and another rolled under her head. Sheffield’s suitcase had been opened, and his clean shirts and underwear placed around the girl’s body. Also beside the mattress were Kingstree’s plastic waterjug and the quart bottle of clear grain alcohol. Mingo held a white T-shirt and was carefully wiping sweat from Diane’s face. She lay there, eyes squeezed shut, head rocking against the pillow as pain seemed to swell over her in waves.
Gates lit a cigarette and stepped back. “I can’t handle this.”
The others climbed up into the trailer and knelt around the mattress. “Is that true, Diane?” Hayes bent over her. “Are you in labor?”
As soon as she could breathe, she admitted, “I think so.”
Mingo whispered, “She’s already been in transition for about twenty minutes. It could be quick now.”
“I’m rolling,” Gates yelled, already running. “I’ll make Atlanta in under an hour.” Seconds later the truck had rumbled back onto the highway.
“How far apart are your contractions?” Raleigh asked her, bracing himself on the truck wall.
“I don’t…I don’t…know. Not very far.” She held both hands squeezed on her enormous stomach, now shaken by the speeding truck. They were the hands of a child, the knuckles were dimpled, the cuticles bitten. “They, they, oh please, they got a little quicker a while ago. Could I, Mingo…”
Sheffield seemed to know she wanted water and held the plastic jug to her lips. “They’re ninety seconds apart now,” he told Raleigh. “Here’s your watch. Time them.”
Raleigh took off his glasses to press at his eyes in order to bring back memories of Aura’s delivery of the twins. Not that he had seen it, but she and the detestable Dr. Sonny Carmichael had told him about it. “Has your water broken?…Has, you know, had there been any, ah, liquid discharge?”
“Yes, yes, it’s broken; an hour ago,” Mingo said. “Pant, Diane. Here. Like a little puppy again. Like I told you. See? Huhhuhhuhhuhhuh. See?”
Hayes took a deep gulp of air. Toutant and Weeper took one noisily with him. They’d all been holding their breaths while the girl panted. “Diane, do you mind if I ask you why you said you weren’t in labor? When I said you should go to a hospital back in Augusta? Two hours ago?”
“Dammit, what’s the sense in asking stupid questions?” incredibly whispered Sheffield to the man who’d been his protector since childhood. Raleigh was shocked into an apology. “At this juncture, Mingo, I suppose you’re right.”
“I think that bastard that picked her up scared her so bad, it brought it on.”
Diane, purple-faced and exhausted in Mingo’s arms, now was breathing in quick short gasps of air. “I think it’s…Please…Please, stop the bouncing…Plea…” The last syllable was squeezed out through a pain that tightened her body, curling her with a moan against Mingo’s chest.
“In my humble opinion,” Weeper Berg said, “does anybody know how to deliver a baby?”
“I know animals,” said Kingstree, shaking his head, “but they don’t need any help to speak of.”
Raleigh kept his eyes glued to his watch; but this contraction appeared to be continuous. How could you tell when one stopped and the next began?
Mingo yelle
d to Berg, “For Christ’s sake, tell Gates to stop the truck! Just pull over. Right now. Just stop!”
As Berg ran to the window, Mingo added, “And, y’all get back, okay? How can she breathe?” He crawled along the metal truck floor to the foot of the mattress, pushed aside the blanket and the girl’s dark stained dress, and began swabbing alcohol from Kingstree’s whiskey bottle on her legs. “Like I said, don’t mind me, Diane. Everything’s just fine. Yell as loud as you feel like. And push! That’s all you’ve got left to do now, honey. Push.”
“Oh my God,” Hayes groaned and turned away. The girl’s legs were red with blood, and they were shaking uncontrollably. The truck slowed to a stop. No one talked. Raleigh could hear everyone’s breath keeping rhythm with Diane’s hurried gasps. Her small fists had grabbed into the mattress.
Mingo’s voice was a strange hoarse whisper. “Diane? Diane! It’s the tip of the head! I can see the head now. Push, honey! Keep pushing! Toutant, will you go up there and help her keep her head and shoulders up, give her something to push on, and you count with us. Okay? Yes, yes, like that, let her lean on you, that’s right. Okay, Diane, we’re going to count? You push, and we’re just going to count to eight. Bear down hard as you can, push on him. Then you take a big breath. Just eight.” He poured Kingstree’s whiskey all over his hands, and began mopping bright red blood away from the opening where a curve of black-haired scalp could now be seen. “All we’ve got to do, Diane…Diane? All we’ve got to do is just push this little head out. That’s all. Raleigh, bring me that other light over here, and get me some more clean shirts.” Sheffield’s face was now as red as Diane’s. He crouched over between her quivering legs, holding them. Beside her head, Toutant Kingstree’s gravely voice began to count, as the girl, her eyes widening with the swell of the pain, pulled her head tightly toward the huge rise of her stomach.
“I’m too old for this,” Berg muttered.
Raleigh gave Kingstree a cloth to pat Diane’s face, but she pushed it away.
Mingo’s head bobbed quickly as he counted with Kingstree. “Now, Diane, hold your breath, push, push, push, push, push, push, push, eight. Okay? You can. Yes, you can! Sure. It’s just like taking a great big poop.” He squinted his fat face tight.
“No it’s not,” she panted.
Kingstree kept quietly counting. “And one two three four five six and seven eight.”
“Now breathe!” Mingo sucked in breath. “Big breath.” She fell back panting in the crook of the long thin black arm, and everyone in the truck breathed loudly. Then she bore down again.
The saxophonist went on, long long minute after minute while Raleigh, his hands pressed to his mouth, felt his own breath hot against his fingers.
“And one push three four five push and seven eight. And breathe two three four. And push two three four. That’s right. That’s good. Here we go, push two three…”
Mingo reached up and brushed the sweaty hair and tears from her eyes. “Diane, honey, you’re going to have to keep pushing. Push harder. One two—”
“I can’t!” she cried.
“Yes you can. Don’t you want to see your little baby? Sure you can. Here we go!”
“Mingo,” whispered Raleigh, distraught. “Do you know what you’re doing? What if something goes wrong?”
“Nothing’s going to go wrong. That’s right, Diane, that’s right!”
“You can’t deliver a baby from watching goddamn Gone With the Wind ten thousand times, listen to me, don’t try to do anything that—”
But Sheffield’s Gargantuan lungs swelled and swelled. “Push Diane push Diane push Diane push Diane!”
The teenaged girl had both hands, the knuckles white, gripped around Kingstree’s lanky arm as her head pushed back hard against his breastbone. Veins pulsed dark blue in her neck and her temples. Suddenly she screamed, a piercing shriek that echoed off the sides of the metal truck.
“THAT’S IT! ONE MORE. ONE MORE. HERE IT COMES!”
Diane jerked forward, pulling Kingstree with her.
“I CAN SEE THE EAR!” Mingo’s huge hands cradled the tiny head and tilted it gently to the side. “HERE’S THE CHIN.”
There was a sound like the plop of a fish in water, then as fast and as slippery, the blood-covered baby slipped into Mingo’s outstretched arms.
“DIANE, DIANE, IT’S A GIRL, IT’S A BABY GIRL!”
“Slap it!” Weeper Berg shouted in a high squeak above Diane’s gasps. “Slap it to make it cry!”
But Sheffield, holding the baby’s feet up in one hand, moved aside the thick hose of the umbilical cord, wiped a finger over its mouth, patted it once on the back, and then the lips opened, the arms jerked out with tight fists, and with a high wail, life announced itself.
At the sound, the fat man burst out crying as wholeheartedly as the newborn. Toutant Kingstree was either laughing or bawling. Weeper Berg, in a coughing fit, had run to the front window and yelled out, “It’s a girl!” And Raleigh Hayes wasn’t breathing at all.
The truck horn began to shriek like a steamboat.
Diane, propped up on Kingstree’s damp breast, had her arms reached out. Mingo placed the baby, which was only half the length of his forearm, in the crook of the mother’s neck. Together he and Diane, both still gasping, stared at each hand and foot. Then Sheffield wiped his eyes. “Honey, you did just beautifully, you did a wonderful job, and we’ve got just a little bit more to do. We’ve got to push that placenta out, okay?”
She shook her head weakly. “No, please.”
“The hard part’s finished, honey. It’ll be easy as pie now.” Then he turned around, tears running down his wide cheeks. “Raleigh, get me some scissors or a knife and something to tie with, okay?”
Weeper Berg blew his nose in the stack of Sheffield’s boxer shorts he’d been holding to hand over if needed by anybody for anything. “So, who is this guy, Dr. Kildare?”
Kingstree carefully reached into his blue- and black-striped trousers for Gates’s knife, the blade of which Raleigh dipped in the grain alcohol.
“I’m just going to tie this cord off, honey, because she doesn’t need it anymore,” Mingo told the mother, who wasn’t paying any attention. Exhausted, wet with tears, her breath slowing and deepening, she was staring transfixed and smiling at the moving fingers of the minuscule human hand.
Thus, just before dawn on March 27, twelve days after the Ides that had brought his father’s message, and one week before Easter, our hero entered Atlanta with two more members in his company than he had anticipated. Not that he had anticipated Toutant Kingstree and his pig Peaches, or, for that matter, Weeper Berg, or Gates Hayes, or even Mingo Sheffield. He had anticipated nothing, thank God; for by no means could he have borne the foreknowledge.
The KNICK-KNACK GEM-CRACK HIGH-TIME CIRCUS stopped at the emergency entrance of the first hospital on their Atlanta map. Even at fourA.M. on Palm Sunday, the place was harried with alarm, and false alarms. The sleepy resident on call told them that while mother and infant were perfectly fine, they should not make a practice of delivering babies, as childbirth in the hands of unlicensed amateurs was a very dangerous business. Then he turned to Mingo Sheffield, who was still breathing oddly, and whose sweat-dried hair poked out on the sides of his enormous head.
“You’ve been in on your wife’s deliveries, I guess.” Sheffield turned bright pink from the neck up. “Wu…wu…we haven’t been bu…blessed with any children,” he stammered. “But we tu…tu…took two sets of Lamaze classes, ju…just maybe, you know, in ku…ku…case.”
Raleigh sighed, “Jesus, Mingo,” and took off his glasses because he pretended to himself that he’d gotten something in his eye.
“How are they?” said Gates, who’d waited in the parking lot. He couldn’t handle hospitals.
“Fine, they’re okay.”
“What a night! I almost tossed my cookies.”
“I can imagine. You just about got shot.”
“Oh that,” Gates shrugged. �
�Piece of cake. What a night, wow. Better to light a few little candles, toss a few little cherry bombs, than curse the darkness, n’est-ce pas, hombre? Where’s Mingo?”
Raleigh explained that Mingo Sheffield had insisted on spending what little was left of the night at the hospital with Diane, whose parents he was already trying to telephone. In turn, Gates explained that Weeper Berg had taken off, but would be in touch.
“All right,” said his brother. “That means we only need rooms at the Peachtree Plaza for you, me, Toutant, and Peaches.”
“Nah. Toots took off too.” Gates tossed his cigarette out into air. “Said he had a sister on Auburn Avenue. I do believe he meant in the sense that…” and the black mustache crinkled while the voice became baritone and evangelical. “We are ALL brothers and sisters under the skin, brothers and sisters. And let us get on UNDER that skin and FuHEEL the Power of LUVE.…I told him to show up in the lobby nine sharp Monday or we’d be going way down yonder in New Orleans without him. So, it’s just you and me, babe.” He kicked out a long-leathered leg at the sky. “Here’s the plan.”
“No more plans, Gates, please.”
“We park the circus wagon at a truck stop, unload the Caddy. And arrive in style!” Gates shook his curls, arched his head, threw out his arms and howled, “Ladies and Gents, the one and only, the unique, the never-before HAYES BROTHERS! Home delivery and Klan-busting our specialty. Famous stars of yesteryear’s Hayes Family KNICK-KNACK ET CETERA CIRCUS. Now appearing in the Big Peach of the Hustling Bustling Fast Track Quick Buck Integrated Amalgamated Incorporated New South. Man, I mean, Atlanta. G.A.!”
“Gates, you’re crazy. Please stop yelling! It’s five in the morning.”
Gates’s wrist shot out of the tawny leather. “No, it’s not. It’s fiveo-four thirty-two. Must be something wrong with your watch, Big Bro.” He flung his arm around Raleigh and led him back to the bright red truck.
Chapter 27
Why Raleigh Took His First Communion LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, Raleigh Hayes saw the world, and the people with whom he was obliged to share it, through the kaleidoscope of his own colored designs. As the years turned the viewer round and round, the bits of glass fell into new patterns, but the perspective remained limited to Raleigh’s eye.
Handling Sin Page 48