the last book I ever read (Jernigan: A Novel by David Gates, excerpt six)

from Jernigan: A Novel by David Gates:

She looked at me. “I just think you could have a more satisfying life for yourself, Peter,” she said. “You were talking the other night about how you used to want to write poetry. You know, you could do it.”

“Madre de dios,” I said. (The other night we’d gotten popped on that moonshine again and I’d been telling high school stories.) “I was talking about when I was fourteen years old, for Christ’s sake. Every kid in my little clique wanted to be a poet. Like with a beard, you know? Because we thought Allen Ginsberg was this great romantic figure. I mean, this was just after I wanted to be Roger Maris, okay?”

the last book I ever read (Jernigan: A Novel by David Gates, excerpt five)

from Jernigan: A Novel by David Gates:

When we came up out of the tunnel and into New Jersey, night had fallen, and all the salmon-pink highway lights were on. I glanced around the compartment. All the men looked like me. Human basset hounds in wrinkled suits. Except they were drunk, lucky bastards, from their after-work stop-off at Charley O’s or something. Ties loosened, breathing through their mouths.

Once I was off the train and safe in my own car, I put the seat all the way back and just lay there, as if in a dentist’s chair, in the station parking lot. Only a few other cars left, in all that expanse. I closed my eyes and pictured the empty house, eggshell walls. Put the seat back up straight, finally, got the car going and went left on Hamilton Avenue. Instead of taking the right, which was how you got to Heritage Circle. Heading for Martha, however crazy she was.

the last book I ever read (Jernigan: A Novel by David Gates, excerpt four)

from Jernigan: A Novel by David Gates:

Martha Peretsky was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, face down. Shoulders swelling and subsiding. I got out of bed, found the jockey shorts where they’d ended up—I remembered now her taking them down and my not caring what became of them—and crept to the door. Then I remembered the girl, Clarissa, and went back and put on trousers. Glanced at stomach. Put on shirt.

the last book I ever read (Jernigan: A Novel by David Gates, excerpt three)

from Jernigan: A Novel by David Gates:

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.

the last book I ever read (Jernigan: A Novel by David Gates, excerpt two)

from Jernigan: A Novel by David Gates:

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 Ernest 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.

the last book I ever read (Jernigan: A Novel by David Gates, excerpt one)

from Jernigan: A Novel by David Gates:

At the bottom of the slope the trees ended and I looked out across a field of snow. I don’t know about acres, but say the size of two football fields. Once this was somebody’s cornfield. Up in this part of the world they used to graze cows on the hillsides and plant corn in the bottom land, still do, there’s some folkways for you. In case you’re thinking, Well, Jernigan, fuck him, he just lives inside his own head. All around, hills forested in now-bare hardwoods and ever-dark evergreens. I remembered the shape of every hill. At the far end of the field, near the edge of the woods, sat Uncle Fred’s trailer, a faded blue, with snow halfway up to the doorknob and a white hump of snow on top, a stovepipe elbow poking out of a window. It semed to be floating like an ocean liner. What do you know, white sea, blue ocean liner. Huh.

the last book I ever read (Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis, excerpt seven)

from Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis:

I arrived in Ludwig’s neighborhood early and walked around the streets of the West Village for a long time. It seemed as if Ludwig were gone already. I remembered then—and I remember now, as I’m writing this, though I haven’t thought about it in a long time—how in the months after I first met him, I sometimes used to wander around after classes and find myself in the maze of narrow streets around his building, Bedford and Barrow and Commerce, where the little old house leaned into each other, cracking and covered with vines. I would try to imagine what it felt like for Ludwig to live there. I thought about how that part of the city, like no other, had corned and ancient shrubs for ghosts to hide in, places where the residue of the past hadn’t been swept away by thousands of moving bodies and buildings going up and down. The past had always seemed to be Ludwig’s element, and every forgotten thing in those corners vibrated somehow in harmony with his spirit.

On that morning in February I walked out near the river, where it was empty, and I could hear the wind moving in deserted garages and past the long, doorless walls of warehouses. Over the water a helicopter chopped its way through the ice-brown sky, pulsing light, sending indecipherable signals out into the empty air. It occurred to me that I loved Ludwig, and I had never said it to him. I wondered whether it would have been something worth saying or whether he knew.