Francis Volkoff’s brain registered the juddering shock of the diving board springing free from his body the instant his splayed fingers split the pool's turquoise water. His first jackknife in years, and he blew it off by twenty degrees; he hoped no one noticed. Too many years and pounds had made a difference. As a boy, he once astonished friends with fearless dives from tree limbs and garage roofs into neighbors’ pools.
His momentum carried him toward the shallow end when his blurred vision accosted the shadow looming above, sparks of light dancing around the silhouette. He assumed one of the Ptarmigan kids’ floats and arched upward to intercept it like a shark coming up on a seal. As his brain took in the float’s shape, his outspread hands grazed along the alligator’s snout, passing through rubbery gums to caress its snaggle-toothed smile.
His escape from beneath its pale crosshatched belly lasted hideous seconds in a nightmare of fleeing. He kicked and stroked his way to the wall and propelled himself poolside in an explosion of water that caused several heads at the party to swivel and gape.
Until Francis’ choking gasps and flailing arms focused all their attention, no one understood what he was ranting about. He seemed crazed, alien. Ed Ptarmigan alone recognized the bright line twisting around Francis’ forearm and disappearing behind his elbow meant something not right here. Francis weaved, knees going sideways, while drops of bright blood hit the wet cement like exploding red commas; he tottered toward them, a Frankenstein monster in plaid bathing shorts.
The alligator, for all the ruckus she’d caused—her gender determined by the county’s nuisance alligator wrangler and the Bonita Springs deputy who took Mrs. Ptarmigan’s frantic call—submerged to a depth midway and remained still despite the commotion topside.
“You’re lucky, man. She’s only a five-footer,” the wrangler said. “That been a male, he’d a thought you were attacking him.”
Francis didn’t feel lucky, and he didn’t appreciate the man’s Discovery channel lecture.
The party grew livelier after the bound and taped alligator left the premises. The drinking increased even as the jokes subsided. Only Ed, very drunk, still called him “Crocodile Dundee.”
At home, the Volkoffs resumed normalcy: CNN, her Chardonnay, his Drambuie, a bowl of unsalted pretzels between them.
She asked for and received her nightly kiss and, within minutes, fell sound asleep. Francis could not stop replaying the pre- and post-dive events in his mind. His camera-brain zoomed in for close-ups, but refused to replay the transmogrifying of the toy float into an olive-green bulk dappled in wavy light from below and backlit against the afternoon sun.
He replayed the lens on its snout, fingers flickering past razor teeth, the comical stubs of forepaws, and the spiked dragon tail. Francis couldn’t recall seeing its crooked back legs with the distended claws but knew his neocortex must have lodged it in there somewhere with the rest of her in those ferocious seconds. The alligator’s dark form was intact in his mind; it seemed trapped in gelatinous amber, resisting any adjustment by him afterward to reshape the narrative; it remained frozen like that in the following days: the broken jackknife, the splash, the twin streams of bubbles from his nostrils—sheer vanity prompting him to redeem the ugly dive by crossing the pool’s length underwater in a few powerful strokes.
Francis jerked upright with a swallowed roar near dawn with a terrifying dream of swimming across the Zambia River escorted by a trio of massive alligators cruising behind and from either side, only their hooded eyes ridged back armor breaking the surface. He was halfway across before he was aware of them, but he knew to a certainty they intended to rip him apart before he made it across. The image of his grotesque, mangled torso jammed into a submerged branch to rot, eaten later launched him from his pillow, a wail bursting from his throat.
Francis clutched his knees and refused to get out of bed all day. He heard his wife on the phone to Ed and recognized the sotto voce of lovers commiserating. He imagined him folded around her like a jackknife on their bed. He stretched one leg over the edge, fighting an impulse to retreat to slam his head into the headboard. Before both feet touched carpet an hour later, he knew he was divorcing Ann and leaving his law firm. His heart pressed against his chest with a terrible force, a terror he had forgotten since boyhood.
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The Jackknife
by Terry White
BIO- Terry White was born and raised in Northeastern Ohio, Terry White has published several crime, noir, and hardboiled novels as well as genre and mainstream stories in various magazines and anthologies under such pseudonyms as Robb T. White and Terry White. Nominated for a Derringer in 2019, his crime story “Inside Man” was selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2019. Betray Me Not (Grand Mal, 2022) was selected by the Independent Fiction Alliance as a Truly Independent Book of 2022.
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TWITTER- @tomhaftmann
