As the pavement turned to gravel on Old Murphy Road, he saw her car, the green Dodge, parked by the side of the road a hundred yards past the laneway. The little girl’s face appeared in the rear window, a white circle. Jules thought he saw her small hand wave at him as the car pulled back onto the road and Trudy started to drive away. Fine, he thought. Christ. He turned into what passed for a driveway — really just a couple of muddy, pebbly tracks overgrown with tall grass — and he felt his tires sink slightly into the spongey turf.
He turned off the car and looked out at the bay, the cattails waving, rustling in the breeze.
A red-winged blackbird perched on a bending reed made a mechanical trill.
A kingfisher stood on the sagging hydro wire slung between the house and the pole at the road, its head turned sharply to one side.
Chickadees flitted about the bushes, and Jules sat in the car, listening to the birds and the breeze, trying to muster the energy to hobble and hop to the house and tell his stupid story.
The screen door opened and James stepped out onto the porch, smiling and waving him in. Alright, thought Jules. Gimme twenty minutes, I’ll be right there.
Witnessing his elaborate tussle with the car door and the crutches, James and Mark came to his rescue, bearing him across the muddy lawn and into the house.
Finally seated at the round white Formica table in the middle of the old dilapidated kitchen, he was laying out his tale for the entertainment of his friends. The slate-coloured sky, the arena, the bikini-clad girls, the crowd (he doubled it in the telling, four hundred, maybe five), his approach, his mid-flight wave to the crowd. The height of his jump, almost over-shooting the landing (another lie), the moment of confusion when he realized his foot was still on the accelerator.
The crowd springing to its feet. (This was true, though their reason for standing was not fully explored in this version of the story.) His struggle to get his boot off before it was so tight it had to be cut off at the hospital, the pain. He was about to describe how they carried him to the microphone so he could address the crowd when suddenly he felt he was losing his audience, their eyes drifting to a spot above and behind his head.
His voice trailed off as he turned in his chair to see them through the screen door: Trudy and Mercy. There they were. The blackbird trilled and the rushes swayed at the shore of the bay. The warm late-afternoon sun was strong behind them, so that they were only shadows. Dark silhouettes brightly haloed by the glittering light.