Bumpy

By the time they crossed the state line, when it was full dark and no stars, Krystal was still complaining about the heat, while Mark was more concerned about Bumpy, who was lying in the backseat. The screaming had started again, and it sounded like a wet drill going into both their ears. The A/C was turned to full blast, and while Mark’s black fringe waved like an undulating curtain caught in a high breeze, Krystal’s skirt billowed against her skin, which had tanned during the long summer. 

“You should pull in here,” she said, seeing the service station approaching up ahead.  

“Just a little farther,” he urged, keeping his eyes between the road and the dark skyline where the sun would soon rise. It would make matters worse. It was already Saturday, they had to get to Sydney before Monday, and the child always cried more during the daytime. 

The car whined thinly like a sewing machine, indicating that the engine was on its last leg. The fan belt had been deteriorating for a while. It was now becoming string, but neither of them had noticed. They didn’t know anything about maintaining cars. 

They’d driven over eighty miles from the south, crossing through pastures and small towns, but it was night now and you could hardly see the road except for the streetlights glowing in the distance. They were on their way to see a doctor who could help with the child. He was unnamed because neither of them could agree on what to call him. So, they used the nickname Bumpy because of how he’d come out. The skin was always so red it was like he was born burned, “overcooked” as Krystal liked to say. There were also tiny lumps appearing on the outer layer of the skull, and the teeth were already formed. It made breastfeeding a nightmare. 

The morning they gave him the nickname, Mark had carried him around the park and pulled the blanket off his skin only for a second. Instantly the skin had discolored, then it hardened; the flesh may have started to bubble if Mark hadn’t been so quick to pull the blanket back over the skin. With his heart racing, he’d peeked under the shade of the blanket to see if Bumpy was okay. Thankfully, the burn hadn’t been that bad. 

“Come on, Mark,” Krystal said, lifting her bare feet from the dashboard. “We need to stop.” During the whole drive her colored toenails had been a pink and black distraction, but he hadn’t mentioned it since leaving the outskirts of Melbourne. He was too focused on getting past the strips of endless highway as fast as his brother’s Ford Falcon could take them. Apparently, answers lay on the sunny Sydney tarmac, in an office somewhere near the Darling Harbor area.  

Not wanting to argue, he turned the wheel, pulling the car into the service station before the opportunity swept past them.

When he parked by the pumps, Krystal said to check on the car. She’d heard it was making funny noises. 

“I wouldn’t describe them as funny,” he said, now recalling the slight rattle under the sound of Bumpy wailing. 

“How would you describe them then?” 

“Do you hear me laughing?”

Bumpy started to cry again, clearly in some kind of state of unintelligible irritation. Krystal twisted her body halfway around until her chin rested on the head of the seat. She peered down at the bundle of thin blankets. Bumpy’s face peered back, shadowed eyes and chubby cheeks, permanently flushed as scars. He didn’t look ugly from this angle. His skin was much lighter now and his eyes were half-closed. She hoped to see that first smile, which told her that everything was normal, their panic just a symptom of being new parents, their concern indicating that they were going to be good parents.   

The shift in Bumpy’s complexion usually happened at night. Maybe that meant he just had a skin condition that flared up at certain times of the day. Something that could be explained as an anomaly or simply heightened sensitivity. Something manageable once they were versed on what exactly it was.   

“Do you think it’s anemia?” she asked. 

“Can’t say.” Mark got out of the car. “He’ll be okay. If he’s anything like his daddy, he’s tough.” 

“Don’t be long.” Krystal fanned herself with her hand. “We’ve to get out of here soon.” 

Then maybe you shouldn’t have asked me to pull in here, Mark thought as he stood in front of the window. He wouldn’t actually say it to her. That would start another argument. An argument would turn into a he-said-she-said thing, and he’d wind up shutting his mouth for good after gratuitously apologizing to the only love of his life. 

He told her he had to use the restroom as well and asked if she wanted anything.

She ignored him, still looking at Bumpy’s face. Worry lines cracked across her once-delicate forehead. 

When he got into the service station, he decided she’d have an ice-cream and an energy drink, something full of sugar or caffeine to get her more enthused about this trip. Because that’s what this was as well—a trip. She hadn’t once complained about their never leaving the house or not going overseas before, but he knew that’s what she wanted deep down. There were little hints she left around the house, messages just for him. The magazines she brought home from the hair salon and the reality-TV shows she made them watch at night before bed. Her comments were always telling: “Oh, wouldn’t it be amazing to go on a cruise in Hawaii?” and “I wonder if the Four Seasons in Thailand has some kind of deal.”   

Mark didn’t look at anything inside for himself. He was hungry—during the drive he’d sucked in his gut and held it every time it churned like a door with a broken hinge—but he didn’t know what to have. And then there was the issue of how much all of this would cost. Food wasn’t cheap anymore, and quotes from doctors had summed up another mortgage. Sometimes he thought it would be easier if he lived by himself. That was what his brother Daryl had done, but Mark didn’t want to think about his brother’s boring, solitary life. The guy had nothing to do all day but loan his only brother his only car. Mark was grateful for the Falcon and vowed that he’d returned it with a full tank. 

Chips and sweets weren’t his thing, either, or energy drinks, if consumed too quickly, could give him an ulcer that would bleed until his death.  

He decided on an organic energy bar and vegan ice-cream because it had caffeine in it and was low in artificial sugar. It might keep Krystal awake for the rest of the drive when he asked her to take over. 

He didn’t know what to get for Bumpy, though. The child didn’t appear to like anything in particular, neither mushy baby food nor even his own mother’s milk. Krystal had started wearing a bra all the time, even at night, which was unusual, and she hadn’t kissed him or pulled one leg over his waist. Which probably meant that the baby had done something to her breasts. Bit them too hard. Tired them out, maybe. Once, he even found blood on her shirt the one time he was doing their laundry. 

“Is that your car, man?” asked the tall boy at the counter.

“Yeah,” Mark said, dropping all his choices onto the counter. “So, just pump number five and these, thanks.” He hoped that he didn’t have to ask the kid for a plastic bag, which might cost an extra ten cents. 

“No,” the kid said, cracking a nervous smile and depositing the food into the bag. “I was actually gonna say your car didn’t sound too good just now when you pulled in.”

“Excuse me?”

“If you want, I can get someone to look at it for ya. There’s a garage that’s open 24-hours.”

Mark considered this carefully. If there was a problem with the car, he had to get it checked out. His girlfriend and child were in there, and if the wheels fell off or the engine dropped onto the tarmac while they were doing 100, it would be devastating. A picture of their car, crushed like a can, flashed through his mind. Beneath it read a news story highlighting the driver’s negligence and the unexpected occurrence of the road slipping away from him.

After paying, he made his way to the garage. 

Once he made it across the lot, heading in the direction of the well-lit garage, Krystal opened the car door and got out. Her bare feet touched the cold of the tarmac, and she sighed in relief. The night was better for her, it turned out, than the daytime. It had done its job to cool the ground while they were driving. 

But when she scraped her colored toenails against the grit, it felt like the strike board of a matchstick box. For a moment, she thought her body was about alight in flames under this still-dark humidity. The pink and black paint on her toenails chipped and the skin beneath reddened, but there were no flames and no smoke coiling from any surface of her flesh. 

 Bumpy was finally silent for a while, but she knew it wouldn’t last. Her child needed something, usually some kind of food or drink, but the problem was that he wouldn’t take bottle formula, and these days he chewed the very tip of her nipples. The skin surrounding the areolas had cracked, bled, and stung. By now, most of her body was numb.

While her boyfriend searched the garage, she looked across the night, wondering how many miles, towns, and service stations lay between them and their destination, the answer that Sydney would surely provide. 

She wondered what sorts of people lived between here and there, if the older men who fathered children took their sons to work, teaching them whatever trade, if the not-too-old mothers made tuna sandwiches for their baby girls so they wouldn’t starve at school. 

What do these people look like if they exist? she asked herself. 

She thought of proportionally shaped humans—button noses, centered eyes, chubby cheeks, sharp jaws, and thin lips. She wanted to know if the parents from these near-distant lands looked tired—worry lines cracked across their foreheads, shrunken eye sockets, and shriveled heads camouflaging them as misshapen at birth. Not once did she imagine that any of them, whether tired or energized from being a parent, wore the same cycle of black denim jeans, AC/DC t-shirts, and sour expressions which Mark had displayed every day. And was it possible that the women who drove past this service station from the neighboring towns and suburbs still had the energy to go to bars and pubs in the daytime, dancing until night under the fog lights? 

She couldn’t imagine that any other person’s child was prone to biting you until you bled. It wasn’t conceivable. Not to her. 

Mark returned to the car and handed her the bag of snacks, but she didn’t want to eat the organic energy bar that fell in her lap. She said she didn’t like nuts, and her boyfriend’s cheeks burned at the revelation because he hadn’t been thinking, couldn’t remember, what she liked and hated. 

“So, we ready to go now?” she asked him, sighing. 

“I guess,” he said, starting the car. 

“You guess?”

“Well, the kid from the station said he heard something wrong with the car. Like we did. I went to check the garage, but no one was there. I’m sure it’s fine, though.”

“Something wrong with the car? Shouldn’t we get it checked out?” 

She was right. She was always right. It was right for her to contact the doctor in Sydney a few weeks ago and to suggest taking Mark’s brother’s car, which was faster and more reliable than public transport or airplanes. Plus, although they wouldn’t admit it to each other, driving privately saved them from having to explain to strangers about how Bumpy looked. 

Silently, Mark put the car into drive. The garage was around the back of the service station, where tall trucks sat dormant in the parking lot like trees in a forest. He drove the car into the garage and parked it. 

A man, reaching his arm in through the open window, immediately took the keys from where they hung in the ignition switch. 

The mechanic, whose name was Stucky according to his work shirt, was dirty all over. His skin was mottled with dark smears like that of a leper, but it was easy to see the face beneath for its chiseled construction. His jawline was sharp, and his arms were swollen, undoubtedly popping with veins beneath his work shirt, Mark and Krystal both thought. 

“Take Bumpy and go for a walk,” Mark told her. It was too hot to sit in the car. 

But she said, “I believe it’s your turn, babe.” 

She took her ice-cream from the plastic bag but didn’t open it. She pressed it against her flushed chest and then rolled it across her forehead, fanning herself with her other hand to cool her clammy skin. 

“Jesus, by the time the sun comes up,” she complained, “we’ll be burned to ashes.”

Mark tore his eyes away from her and sighed. He was aware of Stucky’s eyes, which lingered on his girlfriend’s body like she was part of the ice cream, and he was a man standing alone in a desert of oil. But Mark didn’t say anything. 

He lifted Bumpy up onto his shoulder, making sure the child faced him and not Stucky or whoever else might be watching from the wider world. He didn’t want anyone looking at the child before they themselves understood what the condition was. Otherwise, by the way Bumpy looked, people might think it had something to do with them. Parents, everyone knew, were negligent. Either some or most. It didn’t matter to the public eye. 

At first, Krystal had been more concerned than Mark was. Every Google search had ended in frustration and confusion so far, as the child looked odd but didn’t really have any other symptoms apart from the uncontrollable crying, the constantly flushed face, the fixation on biting the nipple raw, and the bumpy gums with the sharp white teeth formed beneath—all had contributed to his temporary namesake. Most local doctors had diagnosed it as some kind of deformity unexpectedly developed in the womb. That meant it was beyond simple explanation, they’d said, calling for the opinion of a specialist. 

However, Dr. Morrison, an experienced pediatrician, had told Krystal that although it was very rare, she had seen it before. Initially Mark had been against it, insisting on a more natural path, but even he hadn’t been sure it would resolve by alternative methods. 

“If it’s a money issue,” she’d said, “I can call my dad.”

“No, don’t do that. We’ll figure it out.”