If the River Was Whiskey: Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Silence.

  Puzzled, Ken ascended the stairs. As he reached the landing, he became aware of an odd sound emanating from Anthony’s room—a low hum, as of an appliance kicking in. He paused to knock at the door and the sound began to take on resonance, to swell and shrink again, a thousand muted voices speaking in unison. “Anthony?” he called, pushing open the door.

  Anthony was seated naked in the middle of his bed, wearing a set of headphones Ken had never seen before. The headphones were attached to a tape player the size of a suitcase. Ken had never seen the tape player before either. And the walls—gone were the dazzling sunstruck posters of Fernando Valenzuela, P-38s, and Mitsubishi Zeroes, replaced now by black-and-white photos of insects—torn, he saw, from library books. The books lay scattered across the floor, gutted, their spines broken.

  For a long moment, Ken merely stood there in the doorway, the sizzling pulse of that many-voiced hum leaking out of Anthony’s headphones to throb in his gut, his chest, his bones. It was as if he’d stumbled upon some ancient rite in the Australian Outback, as if he’d stepped out of his real life in the real world and into some cheap horror movie about demonic possession and people whose eyes lit up like Christmas-tree ornaments. Anthony was seated in the lotus position, his own eyes tightly closed. He didn’t seem to be aware of Ken. The buzzing was excruciating. After a moment, Ken backed out of the room and gently shut the door.

  At dinner that evening, Anthony gave them their first taste of his why-don’t-you-get-off-my-back look, a look that was to become habitual. His hair stood up jaggedly, drawn up into needlelike points—he must have greased it, Ken realized—and he slouched as if there were an invisible piano strapped to his shoulders. Ken didn’t know where to begin—with the scowl, the nudity, the desecration of library books, the tape player and its mysterious origins (had he borrowed it—perhaps from school? a friend?). Pat knew nothing. She served chicken croquettes, biscuits with honey, and baked beans, Anthony’s favorite meal. She was at the stove, her back to them, when Ken cleared his throat.

  “Anthony,” he said, “is there anything wrong? Anything you want to tell us?”

  Anthony shot him a contemptuous look. He said nothing. Pat glanced over her shoulder.

  “About the library books…”

  “You were spying on me,” Anthony snarled.

  Pat turned away from the stove, stirring spoon in hand. “What do you mean? Ken? What’s this all about?”

  “I wasn’t spying, I—” Ken faltered. He felt the anger rising in him. “All right,” he said, “where’d you get the tape player?”

  Anthony wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then looked past Ken to his adoptive mother. “I stole it,” he said.

  Suddenly Ken was on his feet. “Stole it?” he roared. “Don’t you know what that means, library books and now, now stealing?”

  Anthony was a statue, big-headed and serene. “Bzzzzzzzz,” he said.

  The scene at the library was humiliating. Clearly, the books had been willfully destroyed. Mrs. Tutwillow was outraged. And no matter how. hard Ken squeezed his arm, Anthony remained pokerfaced and unrepentant. “I won’t say I’m sorry,” he sneered, “because I’m not.” Ken gave her a check for $112.32, to cover the cost of replacing the books, plus shipping and handling. At Steve’s Stereo Shoppe, the man behind the counter—Steve, presumably—agreed not to press charges, but he had a real problem with offering the returned unit to the public as new goods, if Ken knew what he meant. Since he’d have to sell it used now, he wondered if Ken had the $87.50 it was going to cost him to mark it down. Of course, if Ken didn’t want to cooperate, he’d have no recourse but to report the incident to the police. Ken cooperated.

  At home, after he’d ripped the offending photos from the walls and sent Anthony to his room, he phoned Denteen. “Ken, listen. I know you’re upset,” Denteen crooned, his voice as soothing as a shot of whiskey, “but the kid’s life has been real hell, believe me, and you’ve got to realize that he’s going to need some time to adjust.” He paused. “Why don’t you get him a dog or something?”

  “A dog?”

  “Yeah. Something for him to be responsible for for a change. He’s been a ward—I mean, an adoptee—all this time, with people caring for him, and maybe it’s that he feels like a burden or something. With a dog or a cat he could do the giving.”

  A dog. The idea of it sprang to sudden life and Ken was a boy himself again, roaming the hills and stubble fields of Wisconsin, Skippy at his side. A dog. Yes. Of course.

  “And listen,” Denteen was saying, “if you think you’re going to need professional help with this, the man to go to is Maurice Barebaum. He’s one of the top child psychologists in the state, if not the country.” There was a hiss of shuffling papers, the flap of Rolodex cards. “I’ve got his number right here.”

  “I don’t want a dog,” Anthony insisted, and he gave them a strained, histrionic look.

  We’re onstage, Ken was thinking, that’s what it is. He looked at Pat, seated on the couch, her legs tucked under her, and then at his son, this stranger with the staved-in eyes and tallowy arms who’d somehow won the role.

  “But it would be so nice,” Pat said, drawing a picture in the air, “you’d have a little friend.”

  Anthony was wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with red and blue letters that spelled out MEGADETH. On the reverse was the full-color representation of a stupendous bumblebee. “Oh, come off it, Pat,” he sang, a keening edge to his voice, “that’s so stupid. Dogs are so slobbery and shitty.”

  “Don’t use that language,” Ken said automatically.

  “A little one, maybe,” Pat said, “a cocker or a sheltie.”

  “I don’t want a dog. I want a hive. A beehive. That’s what I want.” He was balancing like a tightrope walker on the edge of the fireplace apron.

  “Bees?” Ken demanded. “What kind of pet is that?” He was angry. It seemed he was always angry lately.

  Pat forestalled him, her tone soft as a caress. “Bees, darling?” she said. “Can you tell us what you like about them? Is it because they’re so useful, because of the honey, I mean?”

  Anthony was up on one foot. He tipped over twice before he answered. “Because they have no mercy.”

  “Mercy?” Pat repeated.

  “Three weeks, that’s how long a worker lasts in the summer,” Anthony said. “They kick the drones out to die. The spent workers too.” He looked at Ken. “You fit in or you die.”

  “And what the hell is that supposed to mean?” Ken was shouting; he couldn’t help himself.

  Anthony’s face crumpled up. His cheeks were corrugated, the spikes of his hair stood out like thorns. “You hate me,” he whined. “You fuck, you dickhead—you hate me, don’t you, don’t you?”

  “Ken!” Pat cried, but Ken already had him by the arm. “Don’t you ever—” he said.

  “Ever what? Ever what? Say ‘fuck’? You do it, you do it, you do it!” Anthony was in a rage, jerking away, tears on his face, shouting. “Upstairs, at night. I hear you. Fucking. That’s what you do. Grunting and fucking just like, like, like dogs!“

  “I’ll need to see him three days a week,” Dr. Barebaum said. He was breathing heavily, as if he’d just climbed several flights of stairs.

  Anthony was out in the car with Pat. He’d spent the past forty-five minutes sequestered with Barebaum. “Is he—is he all right?” Ken asked. “I mean, is he normal?”

  Barebaum leaned back in his chair and made a little pyramid of his fingers. “Adjustment problems,” he breathed. “He’s got a lot of hostility. He’s had a difficult life.”

  Ken stared down at the carpet.

  “He tells me,” Barebaum dredged up the words as if from some inner fortress, “he tells me he wants a dog.”

  Ken sat rigid in the chair. This must be what it feels like before they switch on the current at Sing Sing, he thought. “No, you’ve got it wrong. We wanted to get him a dog, but he said no. In fact, h
e went schizoid on us.”

  Barebaum’s nose wrinkled up at the term “schizoid.” Ken regretted it instantly. “Yes,” the doctor drawled, “hmmph. But the fact is the boy quite distinctly told me the whole blow-up was because he does indeed want a dog. You know, Mr., ah—”

  “Mallow.”

  “—Mallow, we often say exactly the opposite of what we mean; you are aware of that, aren’t you?”

  Ken said nothing. He studied the weave of the carpet.

  After a moment, the doctor cleared his throat. “You do have health insurance?” he said.

  In all, Anthony was with them just over three years. The dog—a sheltie pup Ken called “Skippy” and Anthony referred to alternately as “Ken” and “Turd”—was a mistake, they could see that now. For the first few months or so, Anthony had ignored it, except to run squealing through the house, the puppy’s warm excreta cupped in his palms, shouting, “It shit! It shit! The dog shit!” Ken, though, got to like the feel of the pup’s wet nose on his wrist as he skimmed the morning paper or sat watching TV in the evening. The pup was alive, it was high-spirited and joyful, and it brought him back to his own childhood in a way that Anthony, with his gloom and his sneer, never could have. “I want a hive,” Anthony said, over and over again. “My very own hive.”

  Ken ignored him—bees were dangerous, after all, and this was a residential neighborhood—until the day Anthony finally did take an interest in Skippy. It was one of those rare days when Pat’s car was at the garage, so Ken picked her up at work and they arrived home together. The house was quiet. Skippy, who usually greeted them at the door in a paroxysm of licking, rolling, leaping, and tail-thumping, was nowhere to be seen. And Anthony, judging from the low-threshold hum washing over the house, was up in his room listening to the bee tapes Pat had given him for Christmas. “Skippy,” Ken called, “here, boy!” No Skippy. Pat checked the yard, the basement, the back room. Finally, together, they mounted the stairs to Anthony’s room.

  Anthony was in the center of the bed, clad only in his underwear, reprising the ritual Ken had long since grown to accept (Dr. Barebaum claimed it was nothing to worry about—“It’s his way of meditating, that’s all, and if it calms him down, why fight it?”). Huge color photographs of bees obliterated the walls, but these were legitimate photos, clipped from the pages of The Apiarian’s Monthly, another gift from Pat. Anthony looked bloated, fatter than ever, pale and white as a grub. When he became aware of them, he slipped the headphones from his ears. “Honey,” Pat said, reaching down to ruffle his hair, “have you seen Skippy?”

  It took him a moment to answer. He looked bewildered, as if she’d asked him to solve an equation or name the twenty biggest cities in Russia. “I put him in his cell,” he said finally.

  “Cell?” Ken echoed.

  “In the hive,” Anthony said. “The big hive.”

  It was Ken who noticed the broomstick wedged against the oven door, and it was Ken who buried Skippy’s poor singed carcass and arranged to have the oven replaced—Pat wouldn’t, couldn’t cook in it, ever again. It was Ken too who lost control of himself that night and slapped Anthony’s sick pale swollen face till Pat pulled him off. In the end, Anthony got his hive, thirty thousand honeybees in a big white wooden box with fifteen frames inside, and Barebaum got to see Anthony two more days a week.

  At first, the bees seemed to exert a soothing influence on the boy. He stopped muttering to himself, used his utensils at the table, and didn’t seem quite as vulnerable to mood swings as he had. After school and his daily sessions with Barebaum, he’d spend hours tending the hive, watching the bees at their compulsive work, humming softly to himself as if in a trance. Ken was worried he’d be stung and bought him a gauze bonnet and gloves, but he rarely wore them. And when he was stung—daily, it seemed—he displayed the contusions proudly, as if they were battle scars. For Ken and Pat, it was a time of accommodation, and they were quietly optimistic. Gone was the smiling boy they’d taken into their home, but at least now he wasn’t so—there was no other word for it—so odd, and he seemed less agitated, less ready to fly off the handle.

  The suicide attempt took them by surprise.

  Ken found him, at dusk, crouched beneath the hive and quietly bleeding from both wrists. Pat’s X-ACTO knife lay in the grass beside him, black with blood. In the hospital the next day, Anthony looked lost and vulnerable, looked like a little boy again. Barebaum was there with them. “It’s a phase,” he said, puffing for breath. “He’s been very depressed lately.”

  “Why?” Pat asked, sweeping Anthony’s hair back from his forehead, stroking his swollen hands. “Your bees,” she choked. “What would your bees do without you?”

  Anthony let his eyes fall shut. After a moment he lifted his lids again. His voice was faint. “Bzzzzzzzz,” he said.

  They kept him at the Hart Mental Health Center for nine months, and then they let him come home again. Ken was against it. He’d contacted a lawyer about voiding the adoption papers—Anthony was just too much to handle; he was emotionally unstable, disturbed, dangerous; the psychiatric bills alone were killing them—but Pat overruled him. “He needs us,” she said. “He has no one else to turn to.” They were in the living room. She bent forward to light a cigarette. “Nobody said it would be easy,” she said.

  “Easy?” he retorted. “You talk like it’s a war or something. I didn’t adopt a kid to go to war—or to save the world either.”

  “Why did you adopt him then?”

  The question took him by surprise. He looked past Pat to the kitchen, where one of Anthony’s crayon drawings—of a lopsided bee—clung to the refrigerator door, and then past the refrigerator to the window and the lush still yard beyond. He shrugged. “For love, I guess.”

  As it turned out, the question was moot—Anthony didn’t last six months this time. When they picked him up at the hospital—“Hospital,” Ken growled, “nut hatch is more like it”—they barely recognized him. He was taller and he’d put on weight. Pat couldn’t call it baby fat anymore—this was true fat, adult fat, fat that sank his eyes and strained at the seams of his pants. And his hair, his rich fine white-blond hair, was gone, shaved to a transparent stubble over a scalp the color of boiled ham. Pat chattered at him, but he got into the car without a word. Halfway home he spoke for the first time. “You know what they eat in there,” he said, “in the hospital?”

  Ken felt like the straightman in a comedy routine. “What do they eat?” he said, his eyes fixed on the road.

  “Shit,” Anthony said. “They eat shit. Their own shit. That’s what they eat.”

  “Do you have to use that language?”

  Anthony didn’t bother to respond.

  At home, they discovered that the bees had managed to survive on their own, a fact that somehow seemed to depress Anthony, and after shuffling halfheartedly through the trays and getting stung six or seven times, he went up to bed.

  The trouble—the final trouble, the trouble that was to take Anthony out of their hands for good—started at school. Anthony was almost twelve now, but because of his various problems, he was still in fifth grade. He was in a special program, of course, but he took lunch and recess with the other fifth-graders. On the playground, he towered over them, plainly visible a hundred yards away, like some great unmoving statue of the Buddha. The other children shied away from him instinctively, as if they knew he was beyond taunting, beyond simple joys and simple sorrows. But he was aware of them, aware in a new way, aware of the girls especially. Something had happened inside him while he was away—“Puberty,” Barebaum said, “he has urges like any other boy”—and he didn’t know how to express it.

  One afternoon, he and Oliver Monteiros, another boy from the special program, cornered a fifth-grade girl behind one of the temporary classrooms. There they “stretched” her, as Anthony later told it—Oliver had her hands, Anthony her feet—stretched her till something snapped in her shoulder and Anthony felt his pants go wet. He tried to tell the pri
ncipal about it, about the wetness in his pants, but the principal wouldn’t listen. Dr. Conarroe was a gray-bearded black man who believed in dispensing instant justice. He was angry, gesturing in their faces, his beard jabbing at them like a weapon. When Anthony unzipped his fly to show him what had happened, Dr. Conarroe suspended him on the spot.

  Pat spoke with Anthony, and they both—she and Ken—went in to meet with Dr. Conarroe and the members of the school board. They brought Barebaum with them. Together, they were able to overcome the principal’s resistance, and Anthony, after a week’s suspension, was readmitted. “One more incident,” Conarroe said, his eyes aflame behind the discs of his wire-framed glasses, “and I don’t care how small it is, and he’s out. Is that understood?”

  At least Anthony didn’t keep them in suspense. On his first day back he tracked down the girl he’d stretched, chased her into the girls’ room, and as he told it, put his “stinger” in her. The girl’s parents sued the school district, Anthony was taken into custody and remanded to Juvenile Hall following another nine-month stay at Hart, and Ken and Pat finally threw in the towel. They were exhausted, physically and emotionally, and they were in debt to Barebaum for some thirty thousand dollars above what their insurance would cover. They felt cheated, bitter, worn down to nothing. Anthony was gone, adoption a sick joke. But they had each other, and after a while—and with the help of Skippy II—they began to pick up the pieces.

  And now, six years later, Anthony had come back to haunt them. Ken was enraged. He, for one, wasn’t about to be chased out of this house and this job—they’d moved once, and that was enough. If he’d found them, he’d found them—so much the worse. But this was America, and they had their rights too. While Pat took Skippy to the kennel for safekeeping, Ken phoned the police and explained the situation to an Officer Ocksler, a man whose voice was so lacking in inflection he might as well have been dead. Ken was describing the incident with Skippy the First when Officer Ocksler interrupted him. “I’m sorry,” he said, and there was a faint animation to his voice now, as if he were fighting down a belch or passing gas, “but there’s nothing we can do.”