ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching
Book Two, Chapter 283: Deja Vu
Joshua comes over to my place. We’re going out to dinner to celebrate his forty-first birthday. First, though, he tells me about yesterday’s trip to Lexington to see Jodi.
“It’s still daylight. I’m driving seventy miles an hour on the interstate when I suddenly become aware of a deer standing about thirty feet in front of me, straddling two lanes. My first thought is: I don’t want this deer hurt. My second thought is: I have to keep this car together.
“The deer trots toward my car. I brake. I see her eyes. Then we hit. I keep both hands on the wheel. Keep the car straight. From the sound of something dragging, I think she’s stuck to the underside of the car. I pull over, get out, and look for her down the highway. Nothing. I never saw her again.”
We head out to the car, and Joshua shows me the damage: left headlight blown out, left front fender bumped in, driver’s door out of alignment. I see a thin spray of long coarse white hair caught in the door’s hinge. No blood shows up on the car, and Joshua is okay. The hit didn’t hurt him physically.
I remember this: A trip to Florida with two-year-old Joshua on my lap and Ernie at the wheel. It’s night, just outside Waycross, Georgia, and a horse shows up in our headlights crossing the two-lane highway in front of us. Ernie can’t stop the car in time. The hit spins our car around, into the opposite lane, and knocks out the engine. “Get out of the car, you and Joshua. Get to the side of the road,” Ernie tells me. I don’t think about the danger he’s putting himself in; I just do what he says. I see the big lights of an on-coming semi. Its driver sees our car in time to stop, then calls out to Ernie, asks if he’s okay. A few minutes later Ernie picks up Joshua and me, and we head south again. “I think I saw the horse on his feet,” Ernie says. “Then he disappeared into the darkness.” The next morning we find a bit of red hair and a smear of blood on the car’s hood; that is all.
Joshua and I arrive at the restaurant and take a table near the front window. I tell him about hitting the horse outside Waycross. I add more.
“Your daddy had just won two hundred dollars at the harness track. He decided to spend it on this Florida vacation. We had an old Rambler with no car seat for you. You sat in front, on my lap. We didn’t even know where we were going, just headed south with our small wad of money. It was Easter weekend, high season in Florida, and motel rooms had been booked for months. Finally we found a room in an old motel outside New Smyrna Beach. You were so tired you wet the bed that night, the only time you ever did that. The next morning, after the maid reported the wet mattress, we were ordered to leave. We spent the day on the beach, then drove back home.
“It was the end of March, cold here, and Ernie couldn’t get the furnace to come on. Where’s the money to fix the furnace? He got sick — pneumonia — from the driving, the stress, the cold house. From the high-risk life we were leading. And we didn’t learn anything from this. Didn’t talk about it. didn’t change our ways. We were so impulsive — foolhardy and ill-prepared.”
“it was an adventure,” Joshua said. “People did that back then.”
No, the life we lived was not a life of adventure. It was a life of danger. We didn’t call it that or even know it was that, but that’s what it was.
