Commonwealth(3)

“Orange juice is better,” Albert Cousins said, stopping just long enough to down the drink Bonnie had made for him. Bonnie, so recently enamored of cops, had shifted her allegiance to the two DAs.

“For vodka,” Fix said. Screwdrivers. Everyone knew that.

But Cousins tilted his head towards the disbeliever, and there was Beverly, handing her husband a drink. For all the world it looked like she and Cousins had a code worked out between them. Fix held the cup in his hand and stared at the uninvited guest. He had his three brothers in the house, an untold number of able-bodied men from the Los Angeles Police Department, and a priest who organized a Saturday boxing program for troubled boys, all of whom would back him up in the removal of a single deputy district attorney.

“Cheers,” Beverly said in a low voice, not as a toast but a directive, and Fix, still thinking there was a complaint to be made, turned up his paper cup.

Father Joe Mike sat on the ground with his back against the back of the Keating house, staking out a sliver of shade. He rested his cup of juice and gin on the knee of his standard-issue black pants. Priest pants. The drink was either his fourth or his third, he didn’t remember and he didn’t care because the drinks were very small. He was making an effort to write a sermon in his head for the following Sunday. He wanted to tell the congregation, the few who were not presently in the Keatings’ backyard, how the miracle of loaves and fishes had been enacted here today, but he couldn’t find a way to wring enough booze out of the narrative. He didn’t believe that he had witnessed a miracle, no one thought that, but he had seen a perfect explanation of how the miracle might have been engineered in the time of Christ. It was a large bottle of gin Albert Cousins had brought to the party, yes, but it was in no way large enough to fill all the cups, and in certain cases to fill them many times over, for the more than one hundred guests, some of whom were dancing not four feet in front of him. And while the recently stripped Valencia trees in the backyard had been heavy with fruit, they never would have been able to come up with enough juice to sate the entire party. Conventional wisdom says that orange juice doesn’t go with gin, and anyway, who was expecting a drink at a christening party? Had the Keatings just put the gin in their liquor cabinet no one would have thought less of them. But Fix Keating had given the bottle to his wife, and his wife, worn down by the stress of throwing a good party, was going to have a drink, and if she was going to have a drink then by God everyone at the party was welcome to join her. In many ways this was Beverly Keating’s miracle. Albert Cousins, the man who brought the gin, was also the one who suggested the mixer. Albert Cousins had been sitting beside him not two minutes before, telling Father Joe Mike that he was from Virginia and even after three years in Los Angeles he was still shocked by the abundance of citrus fruit hanging from trees. Bert—he told the priest to call him Bert—had grown up with frozen concentrate mixed into pitchers of water which, although he hadn’t known it at the time, had nothing to do with orange juice. Now his children drank fresh-squeezed juice as thoughtlessly as he had drunk milk as a boy. They squeezed it from the fruit they had picked off the trees in their own backyard. He could see a new set of muscles hardening in the right forearm of his wife, Teresa, from the constant twisting of oranges on the juicer while their children held up their cups and waited for more. Orange juice was all they wanted, Bert told him. They had it every morning with their cereal, and Teresa froze it into Tupperware popsicle molds and gave the popsicles to the children for their afternoon snacks, and in the evening he and Teresa drank it over ice with vodka or bourbon or gin. This was what no one seemed to understand—it didn’t matter what you put into it, what mattered was the juice itself. “People from California forget that, because they’ve been spoiled,” Bert said.

“It’s true,” Father Joe Mike admitted, because he’d grown up in Oceanside and couldn’t quite believe the extent to which this guy was going on about orange juice.

The priest, whose mind was wandering like the Jews in the desert, tried to focus again on his sermon: Beverly Keating went to the liquor cabinet, which she had not restocked for the christening party, and what she found there was a third of a bottle of gin, a nearly full bottle of vodka, and a bottle of tequila that Fix’s brother John had brought back from Mexico last September which they had never opened because neither one of them knew exactly what to do with tequila. She carried the bottles to the kitchen, at which point the neighbors who lived on either side of their house and the neighbors across the street and three of the people who lived near Incarnation offered to go home and see what they had in their own cabinets, and when those neighbors returned it wasn’t just with bottles but oranges. Bill and Susie came back with a pillowcase full of fruit they’d run home to pick, saying they could go back and get three pillowcases more: what they gave to the party hadn’t made a dent. Other guests followed suit, running home, raiding their fruit trees and the high boozy shelves of their pantries. They poured their bounty into the Keatings’ kitchen until the kitchen table looked like a bar back and the kitchen counter looked like a fruit truck.

Wasn’t that the true miracle? Not that Christ had rolled out a buffet table from His holy sleeve and invited everyone to join Him for fishes and loaves, but that the people who had brought their lunches in goatskin sacks, maybe a little more than they needed for their family but certainly not enough to feed the masses, were moved to fearless generosity by the example of their teacher and His disciples. So had the people at this christening party been moved by the generosity of Beverly Keating, or they were moved by the sight of her in that yellow dress, her pale hair twisted up and pinned to show the smooth back of her neck, the neck that disappeared into the back of the yellow dress. Father Joe Mike took a sip of his drink. And when it was done the people collected twelve baskets of scraps. He looked around at all the cups on the tables and chairs, on the ground, many of which had a sip or two left in the bottom. Were they to gather up all the leftovers, how much would they have? Father Joe Mike felt small for not having offered to go back to the rectory to see what was there. He had been thinking about how it would look for a priest to show his congregants just how much gin he had squirreled away, instead of taking the opportunity to participate in the fellowship of a community.