They were somewhere between Nevada and Kansas, stuffed in a station wagon with a bunch of pickers, Dwayne Zukes and Bobby Hill and Terry Mann, when Heidi was born. Two hundred miles, an inch on Dwayne’s roadmap, a thousand in the prairie dark, snaked from the piston-powered engine of their wagon to the gig in Kansas City. If only the road, if only the road was all, but now, sometime after midnight, the snow began to fall like an act of malice, swirling and bleaching the night with salt. Stanley stopped the car and the pickers slid out of the backseat, checking some of the equipment that they had tied to the hood.
“The baby’s coming now, honey, snow or not.” Cindy lifted her legs and pressed them against the dashboard, so short there was barely a bend in her knee. Her naked toes grew blue as her face began to color and contort in rhythm with the mysterious will of God contracting and moving within her, the same mysterious will that planted seed in Cindy’s 41-year-old womb.
Of course it was not his. He knew it because of the way Cindy sat on Dwayne’s lap at the bars, snuggling against his head. How they’d disappear for hours in the pickers’ hotel room to work on music, how, certain nights, Cindy would come in and straddle him, demand they have sex, as if to cover her bets. He did not know what to do except sit in the bar and nurse whiskey and accept that he had failed as a man but was pretty good at being a roadie, driving the car on the two-lane highways while everyone slept, dragging amps and putting together drum kits on stage.
And now he was going to be a father, at least in name. It had been hours since he’d spoken to Cindy, after she agreed to the gig in Kansas City at the last minute, on their way home from Reno, when they should have been headed straight for the nearest hospital. When he put his foot down, and she threatened to leave him there at the shack its owners had billed as a casino and club, the New Texas Lounge. By its looks, he wasn’t sure what was so new about it.
He put out his cigarette and turned toward her. The new had already gotten old, the dates that their manager arranged haphazardly for them across the country, as if he were shooting rubber bands while spinning in a circle. The sleeping in the car, the show promoters skimming money off their ticket sales, the pickers—great guitar players but lousy men—the jeering, the leering drunks in the audiences who called Cindy names, sometimes threw bottles. It would have been enough for Stanley. But for every breakfast of coffee and toast, every lost shoe and blown tire, every boo, there was applause, encouragement, people who bought their single and fawned over Cindy. And that was enough for Cindy to stand the rest of it.
And now there was the child. He leaned over her and held out his hands as Cindy’s face went red and purple and white and then went again like Christmas lights. He patted the claw of her fist that had begun to separate the vinyl fabric of the front seat from the stuffing. He tore off his jacket, an old shearling rancher’s coat, and held it between her legs, ready to cloak the pink nub of hairy eraser, Calvin or Heidi, that had appeared and bring its little plum-sized heart next to his, and Cindy’s hair, long and blonde, caught her lips as she groaned and pushed once, twice, three times, and the slippery girl wormed out into the cocoon of Stanley’s coat, Heidi.
Heidi. Her breath made a little cloud above her face, so honey dark in color, before Stanley pressed her against his chest, wrapped the cord around his index finger and nicked it free with his pocket knife. Cindy wiped herself with the quilt, the quilt they slept under, would have to sleep under whenever they slept next.
“Jesus H. Christ. Look at that.” Dwayne, whose Indian skin glistened with the same syrup color as the baby’s, shook the snow off his shoulders and climbed into the back seat. If he had any thoughts about his new fatherhood, they came second after his guitars, strapped to the hood. “Two miracles tonight—my Gibson’s okay, and a baby.”
“Can we make it to town?” Stanley felt sleepy, the warm bean on his chest beginning to stir and cry for food, shelter. His baby. He cupped the caramel head with his pink hand, felt the wet of her dark hair against his palm. Dwayne’s baby. He handed her to Cindy and revved the engine.
“It’s as white as a sheet out there. But I don’t see what other choice we got.” Dwayne said as Terry and Bobby piled in, bringing with them the snow and the cold.
“Close the doors. I gotta feed her.” Cindy unbuttoned her blouse, the rawness of birth now hidden under the blanket. She brought the baby to her breast as if she were brushing her teeth.
They rode in silence, inches, white, creeping. The sound of snow crunching under tires, pickers breathing, baby suckling. The white erased them from everything in the world, everything from them. They were quiet in its vortex, except for Heidi, who had screamed as if they all owed her something.
Cindy was awake. She was awake when on stage, signing photos, and doing interviews at the radio stations. She was asleep in the car, in the hotel room, feeding Heidi, and whenever Stanley wanted to kiss her and maybe more.
She was awake now because of the call. She called Eddie every few days to check in, and after today’s call, lipstick containers and fake pearls and hairbrushes rattled and rolled across the vanity until Stanley lifted his head from the pillow.
“What?” He was up with Heidi until just a few hours ago, hours that felt like minutes. “You’ll wake the baby.”
“Oh my dear Lord, Stanley, ‘Forever in My Arms’ is number 1 on the Billboard!” Cindy half-skipped, half-danced over to him. “On my mother’s grave, baby. This is not a joke.”
“That’s great.” He turned over, his face in the hotel room pillow, sour and lumpy like a kindergarten bean bag. Good things for Cindy seemed to mean trouble for him. They had not been home in five months, even with a newborn baby.
“You know what this means honey?” She stood by the bed, stroking his hair. “It means we’re gonna be on the Opry! Wendell told me, once we hit the top 5, we were going to get a call. He was promised. Oh, Stanley, they do love me!”
“Even if they didn’t, baby, I would still love you.” He sat up in the bed, rubbing his temples. He had stopped drinking on the road but still felt like shit. Hours and hours of padding around the hotel room, the hallway, backstage, coaxing Heidi to sleep. Colic, the doctor back in Nashville had said. Babies need to be home. They need stability, regular feedings. Not the road.
Just one more gig. Cindy had said it again and again. So they don’t forget us. I’ll be a mother forever, but I’m only a star now. So Stanley padded back and forth in his socks while Heidi cried. I won’t be a baby forever, she seemed to say. But Stanley would always be her father. Even if he wasn’t. He cradled her head and sang to her, the little golden stranger with yellow-green eyes and caramel hair, and walked in circles until she was heavier than the forty pounds he’d dragged on his back through Europe, heavier than bodies he dragged into shallow ditches and unused foxholes. Heavier than Johnson in that space where his heart used to be. Then she would smile and coo, staring at Stanley with love, her eyes like little drops, little shards, of Dwayne’s.
“I know you love me, baby.” Cindy crawled on the bed. “But it’s good to know other people do, too.” Her hair, still in various stages of primping from last night’s show, framed half of her face, the other side matted where it lay on the pillow. She looked like some sort of mythic creature, a temptress turned siren. She smiled at him and he touched her face, a face he did not recognize some nights, behind the stage lights and the lipstick and rouge. A little woman propped on a stool in the front of the pickers so the audience could see her, a little woman with a big voice. Perhaps, he had never known her. Perhaps, he was one rung of the ladder on which she was climbing her way to adulation, to acceptance. A hunger for approval, for love, that seemed insatiable. A love Stanley had thought, foolishly, he could provide solely. And her love for him? On stage, she was everyone’s savior, dressing their wounds with her voice, her eyes.
“If one person loves you, that should be enough.” He took her hands and squeezed them, smelled the woman of her. He pushed her back on the bed, released her hands. He felt himself push against his pants as he straddled her. “You don’t need anybody after that.”
“Baby, not now.” She wriggled underneath him. “I have to call Wendell back. We’ve got a lot of free dates next week. There’s got to be a barn dance or radio show we can do while we wait to hear from the Opry. I bet they’ll give us a spot on the Louisiana Hayride after that show we did on KWKH.”
He leaned over her, his strength quelling her struggle, as he loosed his drawers. Heidi began to cry in the crib, a little cry that cracked his spine upright, sending pressure to his head, a headache. He gathered her and brought her to Cindy, who took her to her breast.
“Think we got a little country star on our hands, baby?” She stroked Heidi’s head. “Momma’s baby. Maybe we can get mother-daughter act going, when the time’s right.”
“Isn’t one selfish little country star enough?” He grabbed his shirt and his boots, his erection sinking. “I’m leaving.”
“Where are you going to go, Stanley?” She laughed at him, laughed at him like he was nothing, the baby sucking at her breast. “Home and drink yourself to death?”
“I’m going to Ohio. There are things I have to do.”
“Oh, that’s right, your little dead soldier friend.” She pulled Heidi from her breast and placed her in the bassinet. “I wonder who you really are in love with, Stanley. It would make much more sense, wouldn’t it?”
“You have to burp her.” Stanley dove toward the bassinet and cradled Heidi on his shoulder as she cried, then burped. “We know who you’re really in love with, and it ain’t me or this baby.”
“Go to Ohio or wherever, you goddamn pansy.” Cindy lit a cigarette and picked up the hotel phone. She reached into her purse and pulled out two one-hundred dollar bills and they fluttered toward him, birds with broken wings. “Just get out. I’m going to the Grand Ole Opry.”
He went to the bus station to purchase his ticket for Bowling Green, Ohio. But as he waited on the bench, smoking cigarettes, he thought of Heidi’s eyes, her sprout of hair, her little hands that had begun to memorize the contours of his face, hands that grasped frantically until she felt him, his shirt or his forefinger, his earlobe. Her weight pulsed in the muscle memory of his arms and chest. He felt tears in his eyes, her place in the foxhole in his heart right next to Johnson.
He went back to the hotel. Cindy looked up at him quizzically from the phone. She did not stop him as he packed Heidi’s bassinet and her bag and put her in the stroller. At the station, he traded in his ticket to Bowling Green and bought two bus tickets to Maryland. As he watched the fields of wheat and corn and barns and water towers and bus exhaust accumulate between him and Cindy, he thought of what he would do to Heidi’s room at home. A bunny painted on the wall, a crib. A doll. He could read her books, Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. He could find the child who abandoned him when he left for war. He did not have much to give her, except for his undivided love and attention. He figured it was a good start.