If the River Was Whiskey

by T. C. Boyle

  “Soon,” she said, watching the crowd part as Konrad, a perplexed look on his face, bent to lap up the sour overflow of his digestive tract.

  “How about tomorrow?” Howie said.

  “Tomorrow,” Beatrice repeated, struck suddenly with the scent of the rain forest, her ears ringing with the call of shrike and locust and tree toad. “Yes,” she lisped, “that would be nice.”

  Konrad was subdued the next day. He spent the early morning halfheartedly tearing up the carpet in the guest room, then brooded over his nuts and bananas, all the while pinning Beatrice with an accusatory look, a look that had nacho chips and Fruit Roll-Ups written all over it. Around noon, he dragged himself across the floor like a hundred-year-old man and climbed wearily into his nest. Beatrice felt bad, but she wasn’t about to give in. They’d made him schizophrenic—neither chimp nor man—and if there was pain involved in reacquainting him with his roots, with his true identity, there was nothing she could do about it. Besides, she was feeling schizophrenic herself. Konrad was a big help—the smell of him, the silken texture of his fur as she groomed him, the way he scratched around in the basement when he did his business—but still she felt out of place, still she missed Makoua with an ache that wouldn’t go away, and as the days accumulated like withered leaves at her feet, she found herself wishing she’d stayed on there to die.

  Howie appeared at ten of three, his rust-eaten Datsun rumbling at the curb, the omnipresent grin on his lips. It was unseasonably warm for mid-April and he wore a red T-shirt that showed off the extraordinary development of his pectorals, deltoids, and biceps; a blue windbreaker was flung casually over one shoulder. “Miss Umbo,” he boomed as she answered the door, “it’s one perfect day for flying. Visibility’s got to be twenty-five miles or more. You ready?”

  She was. She’d been looking forward to it, in fact. “I hope you don’t mind if I bring Konrad along,” she said.

  Howie’s smile faded for just an instant. Konrad stood at her side, his lower lip unfurled in a pout. “Hoo-hoo,” he murmured, eyes meek and round. Howie regarded him dubiously a moment, and then the grin came back. “Sure,” he said, shrugging, “I don’t see why not.”

  It was a twenty-minute ride to the airport. Beatrice stared out the window at shopping centers, car lots, Burger King and Stereo City, at cemeteries that stretched as far as she could see. Konrad sat in back, absorbed in plucking cigarette butts from the rear ashtray and making a neat little pile of them on the seat beside him. Howie was oblivious. He kept up a steady stream of chatter the whole way, talking about airplanes mostly, but shading into his coursework at school and how flipped out his Anthro prof would be when she heard he was taking Beatrice flying. For her part, Beatrice was content to let the countryside flash by, murmuring an occasional “yes” or “uh huh” when Howie paused for breath.

  The airport was tiny, two macadam strips in a grassy field, thirty or forty airplanes lined up in ragged rows, a cement-block building the size of her basement. A sign over the door welcomed them to Arkbelt Airport. Howie pushed the plane out onto the runway himself and helped Beatrice negotiate the high step up into the cockpit. Konrad clambered into the back and allowed Beatrice to fasten his seatbelt. For a long while they sat on the ground, as Howie, grinning mechanically, revved the engine and checked this gauge or that.

  The plane was a Cessna 182, painted a generic orange and white and equipped with dual controls, autopilot, a storm scope, and four cramped vinyl seats. It was about what she’d expected—a little shinier and less battered than Champ’s Piper, but no less noisy or bone-rattling. Howie gunned the engine and the plane jolted down the runway with an apocalyptic roar, Beatrice clinging to the plastic handgrip till she could taste her breakfast in the back of her throat. But then they lifted off like gods, liberated from the grip of the earth, and Connecticut swelled beneath them, revealing the drift and flow of its topology and the hidden patterns of its dismemberment.

  “Beautiful,” she screamed over the whine of the engine.

  Howie worked the flaps and drew the yoke toward him. They banked right and rose steadily. “See that out there?” he shouted, pointing out her window to where the ocean threw the sky back at them. “Long Island Sound.”

  From just behind her, Konrad said: “Wow-wow, er-er-er-er!” The smell of him, in so small a confine, was staggering.

  “You want to sightsee here,” Howie shouted, “maybe go over town and look for your house and the university and all, or do you want to go out over the Island a ways and then circle back?”

  She was dazzled, high in the empyrean, blue above, blue below. “The Island,” she shouted, exhilarated, really exhilarated, for the first time since she’d left Africa.

  Howie leveled off the plane and the tan lump of Long Island loomed ahead of them. “Great, huh?” he shouted, gesturing toward the day like an impresario, like the man who’d made it. Beatrice beamed at him. “Woooo!” Howie said, pinching his nostrils and making an antic face. “He’s ripe today, Konrad, isn’t he?”

  “Forty years,” Beatrice laughed, proud of Konrad, proud of the stink, proud of every chimp she’d ever known, and proud of this boy Howie too—why, he was nothing but a big chimp himself. It was then—while she was laughing, while Howie mugged for her and she began to feel almost whole for the first time since she’d left Makoua—that the trouble began. Like most trouble, it arose out of a misunderstanding. Apparently, Konrad had saved one of the butts from Howie’s car, and when he reached out nimbly to depress the cigarette lighter, Howie, poor Howie, thought he was going for the controls and grabbed his wrist.

  A mistake.

  “No!” Beatrice cried, and immediately the tug of war spilled over into her lap. “Let go of him!”

  “Eeeee! Eeeee!” Konrad shrieked, his face distended in the full open grin of high excitement, already stoked to violence. She felt the plane dip out from under her as Howie, his own face gone red with the rush of blood, struggled to keep it on course with one hand while fighting back Konrad with the other. It was no contest. Konrad slipped Howie’s grasp and then grabbed his wrist, as if to say, “How do you like it?”

  “Get off me, goddamnit!” Howie bellowed, but Konrad didn’t respond. Instead, he jerked Howie’s arm back so swiftly and suddenly it might have been the lever of a slot machine; even above the noise of the engine, Beatrice could hear the shoulder give, and then Howie’s bright high yelp of pain filled the compartment. In the next instant Konrad was in front, in the cockpit, dancing from Beatrice’s lap to Howie’s and back again, jerking at the controls, gibbering and hooting and loosing his bowels in a frenzy like nothing she’d ever seen.

  “Son of a bitch!” Howie was working up a frenzy of his own, the plane leaping and bucking as he punched in the autopilot and hammered at the chimp with his left hand, the right dangling uselessly, his eyes peeled back in terror. “Hoo-ah-hoo-ah-hoo!” Konrad hooted, spewing excrement and springing into Beatrice’s lap. For an instant he paused to shoot Howie a mocking glance and then he snatched the yoke to his chest and the plane shot up with a clattering howl while Howie flailed at him with the heavy meat of his fist.

  Konrad took the first two blows as if he didn’t notice them, then abruptly dropped the yoke, the autopilot kicking in to level them off. Howie hit him again and Beatrice knew she was going to die. “Er-er,” Konrad croaked experimentally, and Howie, panic in his face, hit him again. And then, as casually as he might have reached out for a yam or banana, Konrad returned the blow and the plane jerked with the force of it. “Wraaaaa!” Konrad screamed, but Howie didn’t hear him. Howie was unconscious. Unconscious, and smeared with shit. And now, delivering the coup de grace, Konrad sprang to his chest, snatched up his left hand—the hand that had pummeled him—and bit off the thumb. A snap of the jaws and it was gone. Howie’s heart pumped blood to the wound.

  In that moment—the moment of Howie’s disfigurement-Beatrice’s own heart turned over in her chest. She looked at Konrad, perched atop poor Howie,
and at Howie, who even in repose managed to favor Agassiz. They were beyond Long Island now, headed out to sea, high over the Atlantic. Champ had tried to teach her to fly, but she’d had no interest in it. She looked at the instrument panel and saw nothing. For a moment the idea of switching on the radio came into her head, but then she glanced at Konrad and thought better of it.

  Konrad was looking into her eyes. The engine hummed, Howie’s head fell against the door, the smell of Konrad—his body, his shit—filled her nostrils. They had five hours’ flying time, give or take a few minutes, that much she knew. She looked out over the nose of the plane to where the sea swallowed up the rim of the world. Africa was out there, distant and serene, somewhere beyond the night that fell like an axe across the horizon. She could almost taste it.

  “Urk,” Konrad said, and he was still looking at her. His eyes were soft now, his breathing regular. He sat atop Howie in a forlorn slouch, the cigarette forgotten, the controls irrelevant, nothing at all. “Urk,” he repeated, and she knew what he wanted, knew in a rush of comprehension that took her all the way back to Makoua and that first, long-ago touch of Agassiz’s strange spidery fingers.

  She held his eyes. The engine droned. The sea beneath them seemed so still you could walk on it, so soft you could wrap yourself up in it. She reached out and touched his hand. “Urk,” she said.

  I F T H E R I V E R W A S W H I S K E Y

  THE WATER WAS a heartbeat, a pulse, it stole the heat from his body and pumped it to his brain. Beneath the surface, magnified through the shimmering lens of his face mask, were silver shoals of fish, forests of weed, a silence broken only by the distant throbbing hum of an outboard. Above, there was the sun, the white flash of a faraway sailboat, the weatherbeaten dock with its weatherbeaten rowboat, his mother in her deck chair, and the vast depthless green of the world beyond.

  He surfaced like a dolphin, spewing water from the vent of his snorkel, and sliced back to the dock. The lake came with him, two bony arms and the wedge of a foot, the great heaving splash of himself flat out on the dock like something thrown up in a storm. And then, without pausing even to snatch up a towel, he had the spinning rod in hand and the silver lure was sizzling out over the water, breaking the surface just above the shadowy arena he’d fixed in his mind. His mother looked up at the splash. “Tiller,” she called, “come get a towel.”

  His shoulders quaked. He huddled and stamped his feet, but he never took his eyes off the tip of the rod. Twitching it suggestively, he reeled with the jerky, hesitant motion that would drive lunker fish to a frenzy. Or so he’d read, anyway.

  “Tilden, do you hear me?”

  “I saw a Northern,” he said. “A big one. Two feet maybe.” The lure was in. A flick of his wrist sent it back. Still reeling, he ducked his head to wipe his nose on his wet shoulder. He could feel the sun on his back now and he envisioned the skirted lure in the water, sinuous, sensual, irresistible, and he waited for the line to quicken with the strike.

  The porch smelled of pine—old pine, dried up and dead—and it depressed him. In fact, everything depressed him—especially this vacation. Vacation. It was a joke. Vacation from what?

  He poured himself a drink—vodka and soda, tall, from the plastic half-gallon jug. It wasn’t noon yet, the breakfast dishes were in the sink, and Tiller and Caroline were down at the lake. He couldn’t see them through the screen of trees, but he heard the murmur of their voices against the soughing of the branches and the sadness of the birds. He sat heavily in the creaking wicker chair and looked out on nothing. He didn’t feel too hot. In fact, he felt as if he’d been cored and dried, as if somebody had taken a pipe cleaner and run it through his veins. His head ached too, but the vodka would take care of that. When he finished it, he’d have another, and then maybe a grilled swiss on rye. Then he’d start to feel good again.

  His father was talking to the man and his mother was talking to the woman. They’d met at the bar about twenty drinks ago and his father was into his could-have-been, should-have-been, way-back-when mode, and the man, bald on top and with a ratty beard and long greasy hair like his father’s, was trying to steer the conversation back to building supplies. The woman had whole galaxies of freckles on her chest, and she leaned forward in her sundress and told his mother scandalous stories about people she’d never heard of. Tiller had drunk all the Coke and eaten all the beer nuts he could hold. He watched the Pabst Blue Ribbon sign flash on and off above the bar and he watched the woman’s freckles move in and out of the gap between her breasts. Outside it was dark and a cool clean scent came in off the lake.

  “Un huh, yeah,” his father was saying, “the To the Bone Band. I played rhythm and switched off vocals with Dillie Richards.…”

  The man had never heard of Dillie Richards.

  “Black dude, used to play with Taj Mahal?”

  The man had never heard of Taj Mahal.

  “Anyway,” his father said, “we used to do all this really outrageous stuff by people like Muddy, Howlin’ Wolf, Luther Allison—”

  “She didn’t,” his mother said.

  The woman threw down her drink and nodded and the front of her dress went crazy. Tiller watched her and felt the skin go tight across his shoulders and the back of his neck, where he’d been burned the first day. He wasn’t wearing any underwear, just shorts. He looked away. “Three abortions, two kids,” the woman said. “And she never knew who the father of the second one was.”

  “Drywall isn’t worth a damn,” the man said. “But what’re you going to do?”

  “Paneling?” his father offered.

  The man cut the air with the flat of his hand. He looked angry. “Don’t talk to me about paneling,” he said.

  Mornings, when his parents were asleep and the lake was still, he would take the rowboat to the reedy cove on the far side of the lake where the big pike lurked. He didn’t actually know if they lurked there, but if they lurked anywhere, this would be the place. It looked fishy, mysterious, sunken logs looming up dark from the shadows beneath the boat, mist rising like steam, as if the bottom were boiling with ravenous, cold-eyed, killer pike that could slice through monofilament with a snap of their jaws and bolt ducklings in a gulp. Besides, Joe Matochik, the old man who lived in the cabin next door and could charm frogs by stroking their bellies, had told him that this was where he’d find them.

  It was cold at dawn and he’d wear a thick homeknit sweater over his T-shirt and shorts, sometimes pulling the stretched-out hem of it down like a skirt to warm his thighs. He’d take an apple with him or a slice of brown bread and peanut butter. And of course the orange lifejacket his mother insisted on.

  When he left the dock he was always wearing the lifejacket—for form’s sake and for the extra warmth it gave him against the raw morning air. But when he got there, when he stood in the swaying basin of the boat to cast his Hula Popper or Abu Reflex, it got in the way and he took it off. Later, when the sun ran through him and he didn’t need the sweater, he balled it up on the seat beside him, and sometimes, if it was good and hot, he shrugged out of his T-shirt and shorts too. No one could see him in the cove, and it made his breath come quick to be naked like that under the morning sun.

  “I heard you,” he shouted, and he could feel the veins stand out in his neck, the rage come up in him like something killed and dead and brought back to life. “What kind of thing is that to tell a kid, huh? About his own father?”

  She wasn’t answering. She’d backed up in a corner of the kitchen and she wasn’t answering. And what could she say, the bitch? He’d heard her. Dozing on the trundle bed under the stairs, wanting a drink but too weak to get up and make one, he’d heard voices from the kitchen, her voice and Tiller’s. “Get used to it,” she said, “he’s a drunk, your father’s a drunk,” and then he was up off the bed as if something had exploded inside of him and he had her by the shoulders—always the shoulders and never the face, that much she’d taught him—and Tiller was gone, out the door and gone. Now, he
r voice low in her throat, a sick and guilty little smile on her lips, she whispered, “It’s true.”

  “Who are you to talk?—you’re shit-faced yourself.” She shrank away from him, that sick smile on her lips, her shoulders hunched. He wanted to smash things, kick in the damn stove, make her hurt.

  “At least I have a job,” she said.

  “I’ll get another one, don’t you worry.”

  “And what about Tiller? We’ve been here two weeks and you haven’t done one damn thing with him, nothing, zero. You haven’t even been down to the lake. Two hundred feet and you haven’t even been down there once.” She came up out of the corner now, feinting like a boxer, vicious, her sharp little fists balled up to drum on him. She spoke in a snarl. “What kind of father are you?”

  He brushed past her, slammed open the cabinet, and grabbed the first bottle he found. It was whiskey, cheap whiskey, Four Roses, the shit she drank. He poured out half a water glass full and drank it down to spite her. “I hate the beach, boats, water, trees. I hate you.”

  She had her purse and she was halfway out the screen door. She hung there a second, looking as if she’d bitten into something rotten. “The feeling’s mutual,” she said, and the door banged shut behind her.

  There were too many complications, too many things to get between him and the moment, and he tried not to think about them. He tried not to think about his father—or his mother either—in the same way that he tried not to think about the pictures of the bald-headed stick people in Africa or meat in its plastic wrapper and how it got there. But when he did think about his father he thought about the river-was-whiskey day.