Donna lit up a cigarette
“Why do you insist on doing this to me?” I asked.
“Doing what, and to who now?”
“To me, you know your family, you could get an aneurysm”
“It would be a relief to you”
“Stop”
She looked to the side, she was done talking to me, and she wiped some ash off her knee, onto the grass. Donna took a bottle of wine out of her purse and took a swig from the bottle, say what you want about her class, but she wasn’t one for pretense, and I feel obligated to tell you that I delighted in that. She passed the bottle to me, and I did the same, gulping down room-temperature glorified boxed wine.
“Oh, that might give me an aneurysm, too. I’m surprised you’re not complaining” she said, with no hint whatsoever of surprise in her words.
“Sometimes when you’re drunk, you laugh, and maybe that’s worth a little risk” she looked at me pensively, I could almost see what we both desperately wanted to see, a glimmer of sadness, and longing. Because if there’s longing then there’s hope. We drank wine out of bottles in an attempt to transport us to our youth when we would drive her dad’s worn-down pick-up truck, drunk on Shiners. To give the younger us some excuse, it was out in the middle of nowhere, maybe we could have gotten unlucky and hit a cow; oh I’ll cut the shit, we didn’t care, not at all, is that what it meant to be young? To be cheap, and not give a shit? Maybe, but it also meant that Donna’s dad was still around and that Donna’s mom hadn’t died of a stroke. Then we didn’t have to worry about aneurysms or people leaving and never coming back.
When pressed on the issue, or something like the smell of Maxwell House coffee found its way to her nose, Donna would talk about how she believed her father went out to kill himself, too beset with sorrow to handle the death of his wife. It was always somber, but I still think there was a bit of hope there. The alternative was that he felt himself a free man and that he took the opportunity to start a new life. The worst thought of all was that he was happy, maybe happier than he had ever been. So, she said he killed himself, and that was that.
The sun was starting to go down now, golden and purple strips of light hanging on the clouds, a fleeting moment of time, and in that a premonition. Donna snatched the bottle and chugged. Her lips were stained now, and they hid the bite marks on her lower lip, the result of a nervous habit.
My phone buzzed, and I took it out of my pocket to cancel whatever alert that came up that I knew I would be useless to help. It was a notification that a man was on the loose in our area and considered dangerous. A man approximately about fifty years old, and if we were to see a blue honda civic, we should immediately call the police.
I laughed and showed Donna.
“If people followed this, the dispatch would be ringing off the hook, I can’t think of a more common description”
Donna laughed too, it was absurd, and it felt so good to hear genuine joy from her, even if it came at the expense of whatever poor man had to deal with this misfit driving a blue honda civic.
“You know, there’s someone out there who has a blue honda civic, and he’s drunk himself so silly that he’s wondering if he’s that maniac on the loose” we laughed together, and I drank from the bottle of wine, just as the day was officially night. We sat together in the dark, and I put my hand on Donna’s leg; this time she didn’t move or inch her leg away from mine. There was a lamp that was abuzz with insects doing what I wanted to do with Donna later, but with no need for decorum or privacy, but with so much more violence. In a few hours, the trucks that whirred and sprayed poison would be by, so it was good for them that they were getting their thrusts in now.
A car pulled up then, a blue honda civic. What were the odds of that? Well, pretty high. We discussed that. But Donna and I watched anyway with that sense of unease that comes with horrible possibilities. Like how every creak in the house is a murderer especially after you’ve watched a scary movie or read a terrifying tale. I tensed my legs onto the ground ready to jump and run into the trees. Donna, I’m sure would follow.
A man stepped out of the car, sure enough, a man in about his fifties, and I bolted from the bench, immediately my foot found itself turning the wrong way, and I was on the grass, unable to move. Donna knelt beside me, and I thought of telling her to save herself like those brave men in the movies do, but then I didn’t in fear that she might actually take me up on the offer.
The man walked forward, carrying a gun in his hand. Pointing it toward us, he was bleary-eyed and there was a stench of old cigarettes about him. It smelled like poverty without any hope, just bitter ashes.
The man stood in front of us, pointing his gun, looking at us, saying nothing.
“What do you want?” Donna’s voice shook with just that bit of hope that maybe all of this could be solved.
He looked at her as if he really was looking for something as if he had never thought about what he wanted himself. I groaned in pain and thought it best to keep quiet. My heart was racing anyway, if I couldn’t run away, maybe it would run right out of my body to find a better life.
“I don’t…” the man paused, and his eyes widened, and there was something that slowly crept its way out of his eyes, it was the glimmer of hope that I had fought to find in Donna over shitty wine. There was tension between Donna and him, and Donna started to cry. To really let out like I hadn’t seen her do in so many years, a childish and freeing cry. The man collapsed onto the ground, and so did Donna. I sat there, never so relieved that a man had collapsed onto the ground.
Donna leaned up and dried her eyes with her shirt, and we both stared at the man who had collapsed in front of us.
“Must have been an aneurysm” I quipped “Being a smoker and all, I told you that you should be careful”
“Fuck you, don’t say that”
“I’m sorry, I was trying to bring some levity, I’m glad that we are okay, we should probably call the police or something”
“No, I think we should just leave him here”
“Why would we do that?”
“Because that man could have been my dad, and my dad left me” It had taken a Donna brush with death to even think of such a possibility, that her father had left his life behind like an old corpse, and that she had been left behind along with it.
“But your father killed himself” I reassured her.
“And so did this man, a long time ago”