S. Johnson: the death by Volvo, and the lie Bain stood through

pivotal · UNDATED (an idle August weekday, soon after Orin's license)

• When: UNDATED (an idle August weekday off after an early loss at Longwood, "soon after Orin had finally gotten his vehicle operator’s license"; Hal "still alive in what was then Boys’ 10’s")
• What: The grisliest set-piece of Bain's testimony, and the one the family record corroborates. At "the acme of our interest in such things," Orin and Bain, severely impaired, blast Avril's Volvo down Commonwealth Avenue for more substances — baffled by pedestrians waving and holding their heads — never having checked whether Avril's beloved dog S. Johnson was leashed to the rear bumper. "Let’s say what we found was a leash and collar, and a nubbin." Bain then stands beside Orin in the HmH living room while Orin, holding up the leash and collar "like Exhibit A" before the prone and weeping Avril, spins the fiction of a hit-and-run driver who swerved onto the sidewalk — "so more like a pulverize-and-run driver" — Bain wishing the immaculate hardwood floor would swallow the scene whole. The family side locks on: in the great Orin-Hal phone call Hal names the episode plainly — Orin "resents even the fact she forgives things like you and Marlon Bain killing her dog" — and Orin interrupts to re-assert the lie, years on, mid-sentence. (That day's chauffeur datum, carried as printed with no identification: Avril had been driven to Longwood by "a sort of swarthily foreign-looking monilial-internist medical resident" introduced only as a "dear and cherished friend.") Avril's "bizarrely furcated" response — lavish secret mourning, cherrywood coffin and all, coupled with an increased love-and-support-bombardment of Orin — is Bain's core exhibit on Avril, taken up under event 17.