Spilk

One day, shortly before Jesus was born, God decided that we had to move. He was like that, nomadic. He said that life was simply too short to spend it in Ohio. So we packed up everything that we owned and threw it into the back of a big yellow truck and took off for Texas.

We were supposed to move in October. But it took longer to sell our house then either Mom or God expected and the closing became delayed because the person buying the house was a lawyer. God said that there were no lawyers in Heaven. He personally made sure they all got sent down to Hell just to bug the Devil.

God titled one of his favorite stories “Class-Action in Hell”. In the story all the lawyers in Hell got together and filed a class action lawsuit against the Devil, who from this point forward in this paragraph will be referred to as Defendant even though it takes more letters. The lawyers claimed misrepresentation because Hell was painfully cold rather than painfully hot. The lawyers filed some incredibly long list of damages they felt that they were owed by said Defendant. The Defendant made them file motion after motion as well as wade through stacks of unrelated case files on the absence of law and order in Hell. The judge finally dismissed the suit based on a technicality: the fact that hot and cold were both vague and relative terms and so could not be legally defined. In his brief opinion the Judge, who was also the Defendant, said he didn’t really care what the lawyers thought. The Defendant then responded by dropping the temperature to absolute zero and walking around in his shorts exclaiming, “Boy, is it hot in here. Does anybody have a fan?”

God said that one evening as he settled down to watch an episode of “Dallas” he received a phone call from the Devil complaining about all the lawyers that kept coming his way. God got a good laugh about it and said, “Lucifer, they don’t call it Hell for nothing.”

Given all the delays with closing the sale of our home, we didn’t get moving until the end of December and Mom was the full nine months pregnant. Mom said we might as well stay in Ohio and have the baby and God said that his son couldn’t be born in Ohio. No savior ever came from Ohio. Plus, it was only a sixteen-hour drive to Austin. What could possibly happen in sixteen hours?

Apparently, a lot can happen.

God was behind the wheel; the cruise control set at fifty-five miles per hour. God said that he could never figure out why they changed the speed law. He said people were always in a rush to get somewhere when actually they were already there. No moment was any more valuable than another. God said people wasted half their life trying to get to another place in time. Mom sat in the middle of the bench-like seat with Jesus lying in her belly and I sat up against the door.

I looked out through the large front window of the truck and imagined that I was behind the eyes of a giant beast greedily devouring up the asphalt as the road passed under us. Eyes wide open, I felt the barren plains of Oklahoma shift through my sight. Each mile blended into the next. I was going to my new home; where ever that was. I thought about God, Mom, the baby that I referred to as the big bulge and myself. I looked past the road and into the sky. Had it ever looked so blue before? The sky was unblemished by clouds. It blazed a watercolor blue, swirling blues and whites that seemed to stain the sky more than paint it.

The road was not crowded and only sporadically did cars pass us by as we moved along the toll road. Where were these people coming from? Where were they going to on this Christmas day? They would come into my view and then vanished as they quickly passed us by. All of these people shared one common trait: while they played the staring role in their own lives, in mine they were merely extras. The world was full of people who would live their entire lives without me ever having any contact with them. I thought that was strange.

We sat in the truck for what seemed forever, each minute dripping slowly into the next. I looked out the window of the truck and tried to relax. I let my body go limp. My hands vibrated and I strained to hold them at my side. Texas was all going to be new: the neighbors, the houses…the water dripping onto the floor mat of the truck. The steady stream of thoughts that filled the monotony of driving was suddenly interrupted by a steady stream of water sliding off the seat and falling onto the floor below. It tapped, tapped, tapped onto the rubber mats like a slow drum in a New Orleans funeral. Some of the water began to puddle up on the seat and cross the space that lay between Mom and me.

I looked over at my parents and they kept looking out at the road like Zombies hypnotized by the nothingness that made up the Oklahoma landscape. I looked back at the puddle, it crept closer.

“Did someone just pee their pants?” I asked.

God looked at Mom and then they both turned their eyes to me.

God smiled. “If that was supposed to be a subtle hint considered it registered loud and clear, Jellybean. There is a rest stop up the road about ten miles and we are all over it. The Lord needs to deposit a little wisdom, himself.” God pressed his foot down on the accelerator and the truck came up upon sixty miles per hour. “I think I can hurry us along a little. Think you can keep the cork in another fifteen minutes?”

God and I liked to watch the Weather Channel. He enjoyed the fact that humans devoted so much time to something random and uncontrollable. He said that people spent more time talking about the weather than telling the people in their lives how much they cared for them. I watched the Weather Channel mainly because God liked it, but also because I thought it was funny. I mocked one of our favorite weather casters, Bill Keneely. Bill was always standing in the middle of some terrible storm, sheets of water pounding him from every direction as he struggled to hold onto his rain parka and microphone. Bolts of lighting cracked the sky behind him and I wondered if it was smart standing in water and holding onto a microphone in the center of an electrical storm. Amidst this climatic backdrop, Bill would calmly explain the latest weather developments as if his words were validated by the fact that he stood in the eye of the storm rather than inside, somewhere safe, where any intelligent human being would have been.

Pretending to be Bill I said, “I think the cork containing this storm has already shot across the truck, God, and a tyrantial downpour is upon us. The Governor has declared a state of emergency, the National Guard is on their way and I highly recommend the evacuation of anyone in the immediate vicinity, which would include those in this truck.”

God recognized the Bill Keneely impression and started to chuckle.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mom asked looking somewhat confused. She obviously was not a Weather Channel fan.

“Never mind,” I said and moved over tightly against the door. Unlike Bill Keneely, I preferred to stay dry.

With the water getting close, I got nervous. I started rambling incoherently. I looked over at God and bombarded him with questions about the universe, the new neighborhood, slugs and especially my new first grade teacher. He mistook my nervousness about the puddle for one about the move.

God nodded and smiled. God smiles a lot, it is as if he’s in on a joke that we don’t understand. He assured me I would be happy in our new home and that slugs would do okay.

I did not know exactly why I had to leave my old friends and school. God said that he finally came to his senses and that we had to go. So after my parents took numerous trips, abandoning me to the musky smell of Grandmother Mary’s home, they finally loaded up a large truck with U-Hall on the side and headed south to a city called Austin. I thought it to be a funny name for a city; I had a friend in the first grade with the same name.

God was right about one thing. I worried that I would not be able to make friends in Austin. What if the kids didn’t like baseball or dodge ball? What if they didn’t watch Nickelodeon or play video games? God said that they would, but I figured that you never could know for sure until you met them.

The truck continued to roam down the highway and the puddle on the seat continued to creep towards me. I tried to accept the inevitability that I would soon be sitting in it yet still tried to move as far from the water as possible.

I started to stir and Mom asked me what was wrong. I asked her if she had ever seen the movie The Blob and she asked if I meant the one with Steve McQueen or Kevin Dillon and I said Kevin who? Next I said the one before the world had color and she nodded “yes” while adding who hasn’t seen the movie and I said remember how the Blob just kept slowly oozing down the stick towards the man’s hand after he picked it up from the meteor and she said yes and I said well that’s how I feel about that puddle on the seat and Mom shouted, “Oh my, God, my water’s broke.”

Well it didn’t take me long to figure out that the puddle of water on the seat meant that Jesus was on his way. Mom told God that he had to get us to a hospital and in a very calm voice God mentioned that the next rest services were now just four miles away.

“And you better not say anything about keeping a cork in it,” Mom rubbed her tummy and took some deep breaths. “We don’t need the next rest services, dear,” mom puffed. Her lips curled in a big “O” as she blew out each sentence. “We need a hospital.” Her voice strained to remain calm.

I don’t know exactly how to describe this correctly but I will try. It was about at this time that Mom started to breathe very funny. She took deep gasping sucks in and heaved out even harder gusts. As the minutes in the truck passed she started doing it faster and faster. I looked over at God’s face hoping for reassurance. I found none. From the expression on his face, I gathered that he was just as surprised by this new way of breathing as I was. The sound of air moving in and out of Mom’s body caused the truck to tremble. It was as though Mom had become a storm brewing over the sea and we were a trailer park in Florida.

I gathered my courage. “Are you feeling okay, Mom?” I asked hesitantly.

“Well as best as can be expected, given the fact that I am in the middle of nowhere and the head of Jesus is crowning,” she answered between gale force winds. I suddenly knew what it felt like to be Bill Keneely in the eye of a storm. “Why do you ask, dear?” she said.

“Well, it’s just that you are breathing kind of funny,” I said.

“Having a baby,” she replied, conserving her words.

“It doesn’t look like it feels too good.”

“That’s why you better wait until you are twenty-six and married before you have one,” she breathed out and then greedily drank air back in with a loud whoop.

“I haven’t even thought about getting pregnant,” I said. I was only six and I thought my mother had just gone crazy. She was, however, in labor and Dad said that could do it to you. “How do you get pregnant Mom?” I asked.

“Now’s not the time to talk about it. Let’s just say that I’m not going to fall for any of that Immaculate Conception stuff like your Great, Great Grandma pulled,” she finished.

I looked at God. He looked guilty.

God drove the truck past the rest stop and hoped for the next town to draw near. “Don’t worry, Mary, we’ll get to a hospital soon.”

“I told you we should have waited,” mom replied. “Nine months along and you want to drive across the country. ‘What could possibly happen in sixteen hours’.”

God interrupted. “Well no use crying over spilk,” God said with a smile. He tried to lighten the load in the truck but only managed to make the air heavier.

“Spilk,” my mother’s voice clanged in my ears. “Spilt milk,” mom rubbed her tummy and moaned as another contraction rocked her body. “I can’t believe you just said that. After I give birth to this baby you will have to explain to him how a man can be his father, the supreme creator of the universe and an idiot all in one.”

“I guess that’s the mystery of the trinity,” God laughed. “Now, honey, we both know that’s just the hormones talking,” God smiled. He had become a professional at minimizing earthly complaints.

Mom, however, was not going to let it drop. “’No use crying over spilk’ is all you can say when I should be having this baby in an Ohio hospital and not in a U-Hall truck in the middle of Oklahoma,” Mom cried.

God laughed nervously. “Well, all I’m saying is that while bad things may happen for no good reason at all, we still shouldn’t lament over decisions that have already been made and therefore can not be changed.”

My mother countered. “If we were in Cleveland, I would be in a hospital by now. And that’s not milk on the seat of this truck; its amniotic fluid. You better get me somewhere quick because little Jesus is coming and you're about to see his crown.”

“Where?” God asked. He looked outward and I followed his gaze into nothingness. Brown fields with dry grass and brush spread out in every direction for miles in every direction. The fields rolled beautifully into each other and all that I was left with was the thought that none of this could offer us ay help tonight.

“Anywhere but here, wait…except not some Oklahoma rest stop,” Mom said.

We kept driving west, the three of us trying to ignore the fact that we were soon going to have a fourth passenger. In a way I guess he had been with us since the start.

After we passed the rest stop we came upon the world’s biggest McDonalds stretching across the freeway in an unabashing arch and Mom said don’t even think about it before God’s stomach even had a chance to growl. The sun began to fall and the light in our truck became dim. Ten miles later we came to a sign that said last services for seventy miles and God took the exit into New Bethel.