I noticed another woman in the bar sitting at one of the tables near the back. She was a round woman, not too old, wrapped in a blanket. It was not an Indian blanket but a plain pink wool blanket with a satin band sewed on the edge, exactly like one Mama and I had at home. Her hair lay across her shoulders in a pair of skinny, lifeless plaits. She was not eating or drinking, but fairly often she would glance up at the two men, or maybe just one of them, I couldn’t really tell. The way she looked at them made me feel like if I had better sense I’d be scared.
Earl’s ninety-nine-cent burger brought me around a little, though I still felt like my head had been stuffed with that fluffy white business they use in life preservers. I imagined myself stepping outside and the wind just scattering me. I would float out over the flat, dark plain like the silvery fuzz from a milk-weed pod.
Putting it off, I read all the signs on the walls, one by one, which said things like THEY CAN’T FIRE ME, SLAVES HAVE TO BE SOLD and IN CASE OF FIRE YELL FIRE. The television kept on saying PRAISE THE LORD. 1-800-THE LORD. I tried to concentrate on keeping myself all in one place, even if it wasn’t a spot I was crazy about. Then I went outside. The air was cool and I drank it too fast, getting a little dizzy. I sat with my hands on the steering wheel for a few minutes trying to think myself into the right mood for driving all night across Oklahoma.
I jumped when she pecked on the windshield. It was the round woman in the blanket.
“No thanks,” I said. I thought she wanted to wash the windshield, but instead she went around to the other side and opened the door. ‘You need a lift someplace?” I asked her.
Her body, her face, and her eyes were all round. She was someone you could have drawn a picture of by tracing around dimes and quarters and jar tops. She opened up the blanket and took out something alive. It was a child. She wrapped her blanket around and around it until it became a round bundle with a head. Then she set this bundle down on the seat of my car.
“Take this baby,” she said.
It wasn’t a baby, exactly. It was probably old enough to walk, though not so big that it couldn’t be easily carried. Somewhere between a baby and a person.
“Where do you want me to take it?”
She looked back at the bar, and then looked at me. “Just take it.”
I waited a minute, thinking that soon my mind would clear and I would understand what she was saying. It didn’t. The child had the exact same round eyes. All four of those eyes were hanging there in the darkness, hanging on me, waiting. The Budweiser sign blinked on and off, on and off, throwing a faint light that made the whites of their eyes look orange.
“Is this your kid?”
She shook her head. “My dead sister’s.”
“Are you saying you want to give me this child?”
“Yes.”
“If I wanted a baby I would have stayed in Kentucky,” I informed her. “I could have had babies coming out my ears by now.”
A man came out of the bar, gray hat or brown hat I couldn’t tell because my car was parked some distance from the door. He got into a pickup truck but didn’t start the ignition or turn on the lights.
“Is that your man in there, in the bar?” I asked her.
“Don’t go back in there. I’m not saying why. Just don’t.”
“Look,” I said, “even if you wanted to, you can’t just give somebody a kid. You got to have the papers and stuff. Even a car has papers, to prove you didn’t steal it.”
“This baby’s got no papers. There isn’t nobody knows it’s alive, or cares. Nobody that matters, like the police or nothing like that. This baby was born in a Plymouth.”
“Well, it didn’t happen this morning,” I said. “Plymouth or no Plymouth, this child has been around long enough for somebody to notice.” I had a foggy understanding that I wasn’t arguing the right point. This was getting us nowhere.
She put her hands where the child’s shoulders might be, under all that blanket, and pushed it gently back into the seat, trying to make it belong there. She looked at it for a long time. Then she closed the door and walked away.
As I watched her I was thinking that she wasn’t really round. Without the child and the blanket she walked away from my car a very thin woman.
I held the steering wheel and dug my fingernails into my palms, believing the pain might force my brain to wake up and think what to do. While I was thinking, the woman got in the pickup truck and it drove away without lights. I wondered if that was for a reason, or if it just didn’t have headlights. “Praise the Lord,” I said out loud. “At least my car has headlights.”
I thought: I can take this Indian child back into that bar and give it to Earl or whichever of those two guys is left. Just set it on the counter with the salt and pepper and get the hell out of here. Or I can go someplace and sleep, and think of something to do in the morning.
While I was deciding, the lights in the bar flickered out. The Budweiser sign blinked off and stayed off. Another pickup truck swung around in the gravel parking lot and headed off toward the highway.
It took everything I had to push-start the car. Naturally I had not found a hill to park on in Oklahoma. “Shit!” I said. “Shit fire son of a bitch!” I pushed and pushed, jumped in and popped the clutch, jumped out and pushed some more. I could see the child’s big eyes watching me in the dark.
“This isn’t as dumb as you think,” I said. “It’s easier in Kentucky.”
My car has no actual way of keeping track of miles, but I believe it must have been fifty or more before we came to a town. It was getting cold with no windows, and the poor little thing must have been freezing but didn’t make a peep.
“Can you talk?” I said. I wondered if maybe it spoke something besides English. “What am I supposed to do with you tonight?” I said. “What do you eat?”
I believe that flat places are quieter than hilly ones. The sounds of the cars on the highway seemed to get sucked straight out over the empty fields where there was nothing, not even a silo, to stop them from barreling on forever into the night. I began to think that if I opened my mouth nothing would come out. I hummed to myself to keep some sound in my ears. At that time I would have paid my bottom dollar for a radio. I would even have listened to Oral Roberts. I talked to the poor, dumb-struck child to stay awake, although with every passing mile I felt less sleepy and more concerned that I was doing something extremely strange.
We passed a sign that said some-odd number of miles to the Pioneer Woman Museum. Great, I thought. Now we’re getting somewhere.
“Are you a girl or a boy?” I asked the child. It had a cerealbowl haircut, like pictures you see of Chinese kids. She or he said nothing. I supposed I would find out eventually.
After a while I began to wonder if perhaps it was dead. Maybe the woman had a dead child, murdered or some such thing, and had put it in my car, and I was riding down the road beside it, talking to it. I had read a story in Senior English about a woman who slept with her dead husband for forty years. It was basically the same idea as the guy and his mother in Psycho, except that Norman Bates in Psycho was a taxidermist and knew how to preserve his mother so she wouldn’t totally rot out. Indians sometimes knew how to preserve the dead. I had read about Indian mummies out West. People found them in caves. I told myself to calm down. I remembered that the baby’s eyes had been open when she put it down on the seat. But then again, so what if its eyes were open? Had it blinked? What was the penalty for carrying a dead Indian child across state lines?
After a while I smelled wet wool. “Merciful heavens,” I said. “I guess you’re still hanging in there.”
My plan had been to sleep in the car, but naturally my plans had not taken into account a wet, cold kid. “We’re really in trouble now, you know it?” I said. “The next phone booth we come to, I’m going to have to call 1-800-THE LORD.”