David Gates - Jernigan

It had become clear over the years that Judith shouldn’t drink. But one glass of wine had never been a problem, and it didn’t lead in every case to another glass and another. We were drinking Gallo that day because the only entrepreneurial beer we could think of was Coors and Judith refused to have Coors in the house. And because Ernesto and Julio Gallo embodied the immigrant spirit. And because drinking white wine, even Gallo, on the Fourth of July was another fuck-you touch. We were all sitting around the pool in bathing suits — it was an aboveground pool with this redwood deck going around it on three sides — and I suppose I wasn’t watching Judith as closely as I might have because I was talking with this Sandy and thinking about how much better I liked the shape of her breasts than the shape of Judith’s, an awful thing to remember now. Judith also made several trips back and forth to the house: to fetch food, to carry back dirty dishes and leftovers. I should have helped. Not just out of simple decency, but because she was probably sneaking gin in the kitchen every time she went in. The alcohol level they found in her blood argued that she’d had much more than the few glasses of wine we’d seen her drink.

This shitbox house of ours didn’t have any back door — just a blank wall with a couple of small, high windows — so you had to walk all the way around the fucking garage to get into the kitchen through the breezeway. I couldn’t imagine how the people who’d lived here before could have gone to the expense of putting in a pool — I hope you didn’t think we’d put it in — and then not bothered to put a lousy screen door on the back side of the breezeway so you could get out to it. Then again, we’d been here, what, ten years and hadn’t bothered either.

So after several of these trips back and forth, Judith just lay back on her lounge chair not talking to anybody. Peaceful day. Sandy sitting between Steve’s spread legs, lucky guy. Rick and his friend holding hands and pretending not to be self-conscious, Uncle Fred looking away from them. Me listening to Penny talk about going back to the Ph.D. program part time. She was talking away and I was thinking about how she called it “her” Ph.D., as if it were somewhere waiting for her, when Judith got up, came over, stood staring down at me and said, “Is there anything you can’t fuck up? I mean, once you really set your mind to it?” She started out on Steve and the entrepreneur thing — I looked over and I saw him start whispering to Sandy — and then she went on to no sex in the marriage, which wasn’t even true, technically. By this time everybody on fucking Heritage Circle could have heard her. Finally she gave me the finger and dived knifelike into the pool. Everybody stood up. She swam to the shallow end, stood up, unhooked the top of her suit and hurled it at me. Then she peeled the bottom down her legs, stepped out of it and hurled that too. I climbed into the water to get hold of her and she hauled herself out, naked, dripping, and ran across the deck in front of everybody, down the steps, across the grass and around the garage.

I got into the kitchen in time to hear the front door slam. I looked out the kitchen window and saw her, still naked, getting into the Honda. (We had a new Honda Civic in addition to my shitheap Datsun.) She started the engine and revved it to a roar. I ran back through the breezeway and out to the drive, grabbed for the door handle and missed as the car leaped into reverse. She backed into the street at what must have been twenty miles an hour, looking not over her shoulder but right into my eyes: with hate. Hornblast, shriek of tires. The van that hit her, it had no chance to stop.

When I looked again I could see her hair, and one arm draped over some metal. Not moving. The driver of the van, either. He had gone through his windshield and was jackknifed at the waist, his legs still in the cab, his arms and head hanging down, fingers just touching his own bumper, as if he were diving.

I ran into the house but Rick was already in there shouting into the telephone, and back outside a crowd had gathered around the car and the van. But nobody was getting too close. It looked like a scene out of an old Twilight Zone , neighbors on some little suburban street looking at the flying saucer whose arrival would soon reveal what fascists they all were. Pretty inappropriate thing to be thinking, but. The whole thing, in fact, looked as if it were in black and white. I should have gone and pushed through the crowd and done something. Later they told me it had been over instantly: no blame. Right. But at any rate, I walked around the end of the garage instead and back to the pool, now deserted. I climbed the steps up onto the deck, felt like I was going to black out, quick sat down on something, and when the shiny flecks stopped swimming in front of my eyes I looked down and saw her wet footprints fading.

They questioned us at the kitchen table, a cop with a heavy gun in a heavy gunbelt sitting in my usual place, from which I had carved turkeys and asked blessings, rolling my eyes ceilingward so nobody missed the irony.

“It was just a family party,” I said. Except Rick was actually the only family. “I mean family and friends.”

“Must have been some family party,” the cop said. “Doing a little coke to celebrate the Fourth? We’ll be getting a lab report, but you could save time.”

I shook my head. “It was just a normal thing,” I said.

“This is a normal thing to you, your wife out driving the car without her clothes on?”

Rick spoke up. “What are you saying?” he said. “You’re talking to him like this was his fault. I’m her brother, you know? We all thought she was all right, and she was all right and everybody was just having a good time and it was normal like he said.”

“And you’re her brother?” said the cop. Looking at Rick’s too-trim body and too-neat mustache.

At least Danny hadn’t been home. He’d gone off with his friend Warren Robinson and Warren’s family for a picnic at the lake. I say at least, though in fact it might have been better for him to have been there and seen it happen and know for sure that there was nothing anybody could have done. Although on the other hand, if he’d seen it he’d have those pictures in his head. The hair, the arm. Not that he doesn’t probably have pictures in his head anyway. But at least they’re probably not accurate. Oh, at least at least at least.

I called the Robinsons’ house but of course got only the machine. So the thing to do was to drive out to the lake and try to find them, if that was the thing to do.

“Michael,” I said to Uncle Fred. “What am I going to do about Danny? Should I go out to the lake right now and go looking all over hell for him and break up the Robinsons’ picnic? You know, there’s like a million picnic areas. Plus the Robinsons are going to shit. I sort of feel there’s nothing anybody can do anyway, so why not let ’em, you know, have their day?”

“Fuck the Robinsons and their fucking day , man,” he said. “Whoever the fucking Robinsons are. You let Danny fuck around all afternoon at some picnic and he will never forgive you, man, I’ll guarantee.”

So we left Penny at the house to answer the phone and Uncle Fred drove me out there. We pulled into pine grove after pine grove, kicking up dust. Eventually we found Henry and Suzanne Robinson (Suzette?) sitting across from each other at a picnic table, drinking Battles & Jaymes wine coolers. Thank you for your support. Henry Robinson spotted me coming his way and put down his bottle.

Danny and Warren Robinson and Warren’s sister, whatever her name was, were in swimming. Henry Robinson pointed to a cluster of yelling heads and splashing arms. “I got my trunks on under these,” he said. “I’ll go out there and get him in for you.” I shook my head no. This much, these few more minutes, I was damn well going to let him have, no matter how much he might make me pay later for having let him have it.