The Used World (40 page)

The rain was so hard and constant, Claudia could barely see road signs; she missed one turn and had to double back. Her palms were sweating, her fingers icy with fear. She thought of something Amos had said last Sunday morning, about how evil was less a preestablished fact than a failure to respond to God’s tug upon our souls toward goodness and harmony.
Imagine the distance collapsed, the one between God and your every decision; it would be like walking down a dirt road in perfectly bright sun, followed by a hawk, or some bees. That is our Messianic dream, no division between God, the light, the road, the Man or Woman.

Claudia couldn’t pray, so she drove.

Rebekah was six years old and had scarlet fever and her mouth was so dry, her skin covered with red bumps. Sometimes she was too tired to cry out for her mother, and at those times Ruth just appeared, it was like magic, and she held a cold washcloth over Rebekah’s mouth and let the water drip inside. Her throat hurt too much to swallow, but this was nice, the water on her tongue. A jack-o’-lantern, a pumpkin caving in upon itself late in the season, that’s what she had become, although she wasn’t allowed to say so because she wasn’t allowed to know. She wasn’t allowed to know anything about Satan’s various holidays, and she wasn’t allowed to speak of the way worldly parents allowed him to work through their children. It was as good as inviting him in. Ruth was gone again and Rebekah looked through the haze of fever around her childhood bedroom. She was stunned, even though she was just a child, by Ruth’s fastidious care, the straight, tight stitches on the hem of the gingham curtains, the polish of her dresser top. Her mother’s love was like a…the fever kicked at her, it squeezed her body in a tightening vise, and she felt the water, hot beneath her and flowing from her, and knew then that something was over, and she was at sea.

Claudia didn’t recognize the truck following her, and the rain was much too hard for her to see the driver. She tried speeding up and slowing down, thinking she might be in someone’s way, but the truck stayed close to her. She turned onto Rebekah’s road and crept toward the cabin, knowing the driveway would be difficult to spot. There, finally, was the mailbox.

Peter’s car was gone, but Rebekah’s was there, covered with fallen leaves and a small branch from the tree it was parked under. Claudia reminded herself to breathe, to stay alert, to take mental note as if at a crime scene. She pulled up the hood of her raincoat and stepped out into the rain just as the truck pulled into the driveway and stopped behind the Jeep.

She stood, letting the rain pound against her, as Vernon Shook stepped out of his truck and walked toward her, his back and shoulders squared in defiance of the elements. He wore a jacket but nothing on his head, and in the strange light of the storm, the green of his eyes reached her first.

“You get on back in your car now,” he said to Claudia, almost gently, like a man trying to spare a child something unfortunate.

“I don’t think—”

“I said
get on.
You aren’t getting near my daughter or the baby.”

Even in the rain Claudia could see what she was up against: Vernon was the force that ran everything. She and Rebekah and all women everywhere lived and died according to the whim of men like him. She swallowed against her fear of him and tried to say something, but before she could, he opened the left side of his jacket and showed her the gun he had tucked into the waistband of his work pants. It looked like a .22 to her, the kind of weapon a lot of people kept in a bedside drawer.

“You have till I count to three,” he said, lowering his chin and watching her, unblinking.

He just gave me three seconds, Claudia thought, incredulous, as if I were his child or his battered wife. Even though I’ve got six inches on him and twice the gun. And she pulled the .44 out of the wide pocket of her raincoat. She didn’t
show
it to him, she didn’t
wave it around,
she extended her right arm and put the barrel against his forehead. A bullet in the first chamber. With her left hand she reached into his jacket and took the .22, dropping it into her pocket.

“You wouldn’t,” Vernon said, and Claudia wondered if he was right. There was, after all, something so familiar about him, something she felt inclined to hold on to. Then the corner of his mouth rose up in a sneer and twitched, a nervous tic, and Claudia realized, oh, I certainly would.

Vernon seemed to feel it too, that he had given himself away. His shoulders slumped and he let his eyes blink slowly, once, twice. He covered his face with his hands and pushed his hair back, then turned and headed for his truck. Even his walk was defeated. Just before he opened the driver’s side door he looked at Claudia and said, “I’d like to have that gun back at some point.”

She nodded, said, “You just worry about getting home safely.” He started the truck and backed out slowly, and Claudia stood still, waiting until the sound of his truck faded, disappeared.

The screen door was rusted, the mesh pulled away slightly from the frame all around the bottom. She turned the old brass handle and it opened. Now there was the heavy door with a single diamond pane; she raised her hand to knock, let it fall. No one was going to answer. She palmed the doorknob and there was the feeling again, that the weight of an object, or its purpose, offered more resistance than she could overcome. She leaned her head against the door, afraid she would hyperventilate.
Now
she was falling apart. She’d been fine pulling a loaded gun on a man, but now she thought she might faint. A part of her wanted to storm the gate, and another wanted to turn around and go home. What was beyond was not hers, it had nothing to do with her. She saw, again, Hazel’s face, her dry lips, the lines around her eyes; saw Rebekah carrying Oliver into the kitchen on a gray morning in December, and Claudia opened the door.

The room was dim, the air was close, and it took a few moments for her eyes to adjust. Here, just as in the kitchen at Cobb Creek, were layers of smells, most of them very bad. There was garbage in the kitchen, dead fish floating in a gray-green aquarium, a smell of sickness, fever, urine.

She took a step into the living room, sweat breaking out on her forehead, her neck. The cabin was so horrible and silent she was afraid to call out. She was about to turn and look for the bedroom when she saw, under an old quilt, Rebekah’s hand floating in the air, her skin so white it looked blue.

“No no no no,” Claudia whispered, trying to find Rebekah’s face in the swirl of hair and quilt. The smell was overwhelming, and when she finally turned Rebekah’s face toward her it was swollen, pale. Her bottom lip was cracked and bleeding from what must have been a fever; she was so
hot,
her skin was burning.

Claudia stood up, panting, and began clawing through the debris on the floor for the phone. She traced the wire running around the floorboard and found it on the desk, but when she lifted the receiver, it was dead, of course, it had been disconnected. She kept up a steady stream of verbal panic, beginning with where’s the phone where’s the phone, and moving on to oh my God oh my God, then Rebekah I’m here I’m here, hold on.

She unwrapped the rest of Rebekah’s body and saw that her nightgown was soaked and streaked with pink, as was the futon beneath her. Claudia ran out the door, leapt from the porch to the ground, and opened the passenger door of the Jeep with such force she felt a jolt go through her shoulder. She reclined the seat as far as it would go, then flew—it seemed she was flying—back into the house.

Rebekah was breathing, and her right hand was twitching against her chest, as if she were still running the adding machine at the Used World Emporium. Claudia ran into the bedroom, grabbed a blanket off the bed, and spread it over Rebekah, even her head. Claudia centered her feet just under her shoulders, squatted at the edge of the couch, and slipped her right arm under Rebekah’s knees, her left under Rebekah’s shoulders, all the while whispering Okay okay bear with me, I’m not very graceful. But when she actually lifted Rebekah up, she felt a hum, deep as electricity, in her thighs. It traveled up her back, through her shoulders, and into her arms, and Rebekah felt like nothing, she weighed less than Oliver, less than the groceries Claudia had carried thirty minutes earlier. Fluid ran down Claudia’s arm and soaked into her shirt, into the waistband of her pants. She held Rebekah as close to her as she could and took one long step and was over the threshold, another, and was across the porch. Each step brought a moan from Rebekah, a terrifying exhalation, and Claudia spoke constantly, we’re almost there, we’re almost to the car, I know you can hear me.

Rebekah was telling Claudia that the Mission had been right, the battle was lost and the world was going to end. They’d had this conversation before, and Claudia was impatient. She was impatient but she smiled nonetheless and told Rebekah, as it seemed she had done before, that the world has no end; that it was a trick of Pastor Lowell’s, just a shadow flung off his black wing, to suggest that it did. She said Who are you going to believe? And Rebekah sighed and lay back in bed. There were things Claudia might never understand. She had never really known Jesus, after all, she had never slept in a house that was, in essence, His tomb. She thought religion was the honeyed light of Ludie’s Christianity, songs about suppertime, jars of bright fruits and vegetables, lined up in a cellar. But that was all fine, Rebekah loved her. You, she said. It’s you I believe.

They were still three miles from the hospital when Rebekah began making a strange noise, a concentrated, open-throated hum that was close to a growl. “No no no, Rebekah, wait wait,” Claudia said, approaching a low place on the highway where the water was deep. Three cars were already pulled over, either because they’d attempted it and lost, or because they didn’t dare. The water rose and rose; she saw now that it was spilling out of an irrigation system in one of Nathan Leander’s fields; she was two-thirds of the way through it, almost there. She might make it through the water but she wouldn’t make it to the hospital. Three cars at the side of the road: one of them would have a phone.

Claudia coasted to the side of the road, slammed the car into park, left it on with the heater running. She sprinted back to the first car she came to, a green Neon, and knocked, maybe a little too hard. The window came down two inches or so. It was a teenaged girl, dressed in the god-awful fashion of the moment, wherein all of her clothes were made for someone Oliver’s size, and they all appeared to have been washed in lye.

“Do you have a cell phone?” Claudia asked, scaring the girl further.

She nodded, and reached into the seat beside her. She wasn’t wearing a seat belt, leaving the message on her T-shirt unimpeded:
I SUCKED HEAD AT JOE’S CRAWFISH SHACK.

“No, you call. I need an ambulance. Do you know where we are?”

The girl looked around, shook her head.

“We’re on Highway 27, eastbound, between exits twelve and thirteen. Can you remember that?” Without waiting for an answer, Claudia ran back to the Jeep and opened the passenger door. Something was definitely happening; Rebekah’s body pulled in on itself, and she moaned as if her chest were being crushed. An enormous energy seemed to be gathered just over the baby, and as Claudia began to rub Rebekah’s limp hand and say again that everything was fine, she realized Rebekah was pushing. Claudia grabbed the blanket she’d had over Rebekah and threw it over the roof of the Jeep and the open door, making a tent she could stand in without water getting inside.

“Oh no, Rebekah, don’t do that, wait wait—” Claudia said, resting her hand against Rebekah’s forehead. “Please don’t push yet, I have absolutely no idea what to do.” She lifted her hand off Rebekah’s head and tenderly peeled back the stained nightgown. Her angle was awkward, and she slid the seat back as far as she could, tried to turn Rebekah toward her. She pressed against Rebekah’s abdomen, and felt it: a band of muscles tightening, becoming as hard as skin stretched over a stone. The contraction was moving like lightning from the top of Rebekah’s stomach to the bottom, and Claudia said, “Push, Rebekah, if you have to, I’m right here.” Rebekah pushed, or was pushed, and she cried out again. The contraction eased and Claudia ran back to the girl still sitting in her car. She gave Claudia the thumbs-up, but didn’t move.

The next contraction came only a few seconds later, and Claudia inwardly cursed God, cursed Hazel for good measure, and then the third contraction simply didn’t stop. Rebekah moaned, turned from side to side, and Claudia saw it: the curve of the baby’s head. There wasn’t time to think. She slipped her hands, unwashed but soaking wet, in around the head, tearing Rebekah and feeling it as she did so. There was one ear, a second, and she gradually twisted and pulled. The baby’s head was almost completely out and he was facedown, so she couldn’t tell anything about him, if he was alive or dead. Claudia held on, now reaching for the shoulders. She could hear herself yelling but didn’t know what she was saying, and even in the midst of all that, the yelling, trucks driving slowly through the standing water on the highway, Rebekah crying now like a siren, she heard, or felt, the slightest snap between the baby’s shoulders, and Claudia pulled him the rest of the way out.

Without warning, there were hands reaching over her, broad-shouldered, well-fed Midwestern boys in the official clothes of EMTs, saying, “Sir, we need to step in here,” and then they were under her makeshift tent, clamping the cord, suctioning the baby’s face with a handheld pump. Claudia stepped back. She stayed at the edge, watching Rebekah’s face through the rear passenger’s window. They had placed an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth; the elastic cut into her hair. As soon as the cord was clamped and cut, one boy wrapped the baby in a warm towel as the other pulled up a gurney with a snap that made Claudia jump back a step. She wiped the sweat off her forehead, felt that she’d left a streak of thick, sticky blood. Now the second boy was packing something between Rebekah’s legs, and lifting her onto the gurney without half the ease of Claudia. He shouted to the boy with the baby to prepare an IV. Over his shoulder he shouted, “Are you the father?” And Claudia dumbly nodded yes. “You can follow us,” he said, slamming the door of the ambulance before she could answer, before she heard anything, anything at all, from the baby.