If the River Was Whiskey: Stories Read online

  Jill had a certain fragile beauty about her. She’d gone into a Carmelite nunnery after the obloquy of high school and the unrequited love she bore for Harvey, who at the time was hot for Tootle. She lived just up the street from Rob and Irene, in her late mother’s house, and she’d given up the nun’s life twelve years earlier to have carnal relations with a Safeway butcher named Eugene, who left her with a blind spot in one eye, a permanent limp, and triplets.

  Harvey had been a high-school lacrosse star who quit college to join the Marines, acquiring a reputation for ferocity and selfless bravery during the three weeks he fought at Da Nang before taking thirty-seven separate bayonet wounds in his legs, chest, buttocks, and feet. He was bald and bloated, a brooding semi-invalid addicted to Quaalude, Tuinol, aspirin, cocaine, and jack Daniel’s, and he lived in the basement of his parents’ house, eating little and saying less. He despised Hal, Rob and Irene, Jill, Tootle, and Pesky because they hadn’t taken thirty-seven bayonet wounds each and because they were communists and sellouts.

  Tootle had been a cover girl; a macrobiot; the campaign manager for a presidential candidate from Putnam Valley, New York, who promised to push through legislation to animate all TV news features; and, finally, an environmentalist who spent all her waking hours writing broadsides for the Marshwort Preservationists’ League. She was having an off/on relationship with an Italian race-car driver named Enzo.

  Pesky was assistant manager of Frampold’s LiquorMart, twice divorced and the father of a fourteen-year-old serial murderer whose twelve adult male victims all resembled Pesky in coloring, build, and style of dress.

  And Hal? Hal was home from California. For his birthday.

  Jill hosted the party. She had to. The triplets—Steve, Stevie, and Steven, now seven, seven, and seven, respectively—were hyperactive, antisocial, and twice as destructive as Hitler’s Panzer Corps. She hadn’t been able to get a baby-sitter for them since they learned to crawl. “All right,” Hal had said to her on the phone, “your house then. Seven o’clock. Radical. Really.” And then he hung up, thinking of the dingy cavern of her mother’s house, with its stained wallpaper, battered furniture, and howling drafts, and of the mortified silence that would fall over the gang when they swung by to pick up Jill on a Friday night and Mrs. Morlock—that big-bottomed, horse-toothed parody of Jill—would insist they come in for hot chocolate. But no matter. At least the place was big.

  As it turned out, Hal was two hours late. He was from California, after all, and this was his party. He hadn’t seen any of these people in what—six years now?—and there was no way he was going to be cheated out of his grand entrance. At seven he pulled a pair of baggy parachute pants over his pink hightops, stuck a gold marijuana-leaf stud through the hole in his left earlobe, wriggled into an Ozzie Osbourne Barf Tour T-shirt though it was twenty-six degrees out and driving down sleet, and settled into the Barcalounger in which his deceased dad had spent the last two-thirds of his life. He sipped Scotch, watched the TV blip rhythmically, and listened to his own sad old failing mom dodder on about the Jell-O mold she’d bought for Mrs. Herskowitz across the street. Then, when he was good and ready, he got up, slicked back his thinning, two-tone, forty-year-old hair that looked more and more like mattress stuffing every day, shrugged into his trenchcoat, and slammed out into the storm.

  There were two inches of glare ice on the road. Hal thumped his mother’s stuttering Oldsmobile from tree to tree, went into a 180-degree spin, and schussed down Jill’s driveway, narrowly avoiding the denuded azalea bush, three Flexible Flyers, and a staved-in Renault on blocks. He licked his fingertips and smoothed down his sideburns on the doorstep, knocked perfunctorily, and entered, grinning, in all his exotic, fair-haired, California glory. Unfortunately, the effect was wasted—no one but Jill was there. Hunched in the corner of a gutted sofa, she smiled wanly from behind a mound of soggy Fritos and half a gallon of California dip. “Hi,” she said in a voice of dole, “they’re coming, they’re coming.” Then she winked her bad eye at him and limped across the room to stick her tongue in his mouth.

  She was clinging to him, licking at his mustache and telling him about her bout with breast cancer, when the doorbell rang and Rob and Irene came hurtling into the room shrieking “My God, look at you!” They were late, they screamed, because the baby-sitter never showed for their daughter, Soukamathandravaki, whose frightened little face peered in out of the night behind them.

  An instant later, Harvey swung furiously up the walk on his silver crutches, Tootle and Pesky staggered in together with reddened noses and dilated pupils, and Steve, Stevie, and Steven emerged from the back of the house on their minibikes to pop wheelies in the middle of the room. The party was on.

  “So,” Harvey snarled, fencing Hal into the corner with the gleaming shafts of his crutches, “they tell me you’re doing pretty good out there, huh, bub?”

  Pesky and Tootle were standing beside him, grinning till Hal thought their lips would dry out and stick to their teeth, and Pesky had his arm around Tootle’s shoulder. “Me?” Hal said, with a modest shrug. “Well, since you ask, my agent did say that—”

  Harvey cut him off, turning to Pesky with a wild leer and shouting, “So how’s the kid, what’s his name—Damian?”

  Dead silence fell over the room.

  Rob and Irene froze, clutching Dixie cups of purple passion to their chests, and Jill, who’d been opening their eyes to the in-fighting, petty abuses, and catastrophic outrages of the food-stamp office where she worked, caught her tongue. Even Steve, Stevie, and Steven snapped to attention. They’d been playfully binding little Soukamathandravaki to one of the dining-room chairs with electrical tape, but at the mention of Damian, they looked round them in unison and vanished.

  “You son of a bitch,” Pesky said, his fingers dug so deep in Tootle’s shoulder his knuckles went white. “You crippled fascist Marine Corps burnout.”

  Harvey jerked his big head to one side and spat on the floor. “What’d they give him, life plus a hundred and fifty years? Or’d they send him to Matteawan?”.

  “Hey,” Irene shouted, a desperate keening edge to her voice, “hey, do you guys remember all those wild pranks we used to pull back in high school?” She tore across the room, waving her Dixie cup. “Like, like when we smeared that black stuff on our faces and burned the Jewish star on Dr. Rosenbaum’s front lawn?”

  Everyone ignored her.

  “Harv,” Hal said, reaching out to take his arm, but Harvey jerked violently away—“Get your stinking hands off me!” he roared—before he lost his balance and fell with a sad clatter of aluminum into the California dip.

  “Serves you right, you bitter son of a bitch,” Pesky growled, standing over him as if they’d just gone fifteen rounds. “The crippled war hero. Why don’t you show us your scars, huh?”

  “Pesky,” Hal hissed, “leave it, will you?”

  Rob and Irene were trying to help Harvey to his feet, but he fought them off, sobbing with rage. There was California dip on the collar of his campaign jacket. Hairless and pale, with his quivering jowls and splayed legs, he looked like a monstrous baby dropped there on the rug.

  “Or the time Pesky ran up in front of Mrs. Gold’s class in the third grade and blew on his thumb till he passed out, remember that?” Irene was saying, when the room was rent by a violent, predatory shriek, as if someone had torn a hawk in half. It was Tootle. She twisted out from under Pesky’s arm and slammed her little white fist into his kidney. “You,” she sputtered, “who are you to talk, lording it over Harvey as if he was some kind of criminal or something. At least he fought for his country. What’d you do, huh?” Her eyes were swollen. There was a froth of saliva caught in the corner of her mouth.

  Pesky swung around. He was wearing his trademark Levi’s—jeans, jacket, sweatshirt, socks, and big-buckled belt. If only they made shoes, he used to say. “Yeah, yeah, tell us about it,” he sneered, “you little whore. Peddling your ass just like—”

  “Cana
da, that’s what you did about it. Like a typical wimp.”

  “Hey, hold on,” Hal said, lurching out of the corner in his parachute pants, “I don’t believe this. We all tried to get out of it—it was a rotten war, an illegal war, Nixon’s and Johnson’s war—what’s the matter with you? Don’t you remember?”

  “The marches,” Irene said.

  “The posters,” Rob joined in.

  “A cheap whore, that’s all. Cover girl, my ass.”

  “Shut up!” Tootle shrieked, turning on Hal. “You’re just as bad as Pesky. Worse. You’re a hypocrite. At least he knows he’s a piece of shit.” She threw back a cup of purple passion and leveled her green-eyed glare on him. “And you think you’re so high and mighty, out there in Hollywood—well, la-de-da, that’s what I say.”

  “He’s an artist,” Harvey said from the floor. “He co-wrote the immortal script for the ‘Life with Beanie’ show.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck you too.”

  And then suddenly, as if it signaled a visitation from another realm, there was the deep-throated cough of a precision engine in the driveway, a sputter and its dying fall. As one, the seven friends turned to the door. There was a thump. A knock—dat dat-dat-dat da. And then: “Allo, allo, anybody is home?”

  It was Enzo. Tall, noble, with the nose of an emperor and a weave of silver in his hair so rich it might have been hammered from the mother lode itself. He was dressed in a coruscating jumpsuit with Pennzoil and Pirelli patches across the shoulder and chest, and he held his crash helmet in his hand. “Baby,” he said, crossing the room in two strides and taking Tootle in his arms, “ciao.”

  No one moved. No one said a thing.

  “Beech of a road,” Enzo said. “Ice, you know.” Outside, through the open door, the sleek low profile of his Lazaretto 2200 Pinin Farina coupe was visible, the windshield plated with ice, sleet driving down like straight pins. “Tooka me seventeen and a half minutes from La Guardia—a beech, huh? But baby, at least I’m here.”

  He looked round him, as if seeing the others for the first time, and then, without a word, crossed the room to the stereo, ran a quick finger along the spines of the albums, and flipped a black platter from its jacket as casually as if he were flipping pizzas in Napoli. He dropped the stylus, and as the room filled with music, he began to move his hips and mime the words: “Oooh-oooh, I heard it through the grapevine.…”

  Marvin Gaye. Delectable, smooth, icy cool, ancient.

  Pesky reached down to help Harvey from the floor. Jill took Hal’s arm. Rob and Irene began to snap their fingers and Enzo swung Tootle out into the middle of the floor.

  They danced till they dropped.

  K I N G B E E

  IN THE MAIL that morning there were two solicitations for life insurance, a coupon from the local car wash promising a “100% Brushless Wash,” four bills, three advertising flyers, and a death threat from his ex-son, Anthony. Anthony had used green ink, the cyclonic scrawl of his longhand lifting off into the loops, lassos, and curlicues of heavy weather aloft, and his message was the same as usual: I eat the royal jelly. I sting and you die. Bzzzzzzzz. Pat too, the bitch. He hadn’t bothered to sign it.

  “Ken? What is it?”

  Pat was right beside him now, peering over his elbow at the sheaf of ads and bills clutched in his hand. She’d been pruning the roses and she was still wearing her work gloves. They stood there out front of the house in the sunshine, hunched forward protectively, the mailbox rising up like a tombstone between them. “It’s Anthony,” she said, “isn’t it?”

  He handed her the letter.

  “My god,” she said, sucking in a whistle of breath like a wounded animal. “How’d he get the address?”

  It was a good question. They’d known he was to be released from Juvenile Hall on his eighteenth birthday, and they’d taken precautions. Like changing their phone number, their address, their places of employment, and the city and state in which they lived. For a while, they’d even toyed with the idea of changing their name, but then Ken’s father came for a visit from Wisconsin and sobbed over the family coat of arms till they gave it up. Over the years, they’d received dozens of Anthony’s death threats—all of them bee-oriented; bees were his obsession—but nothing since they’d moved. This was bad. Worse than bad.

  “You’d better call the police,” he said. “And take Skippy to the kennel.”

  Nine years earlier, the Mallows had been childless. There was something wrong with Pat’s fallopian tubes—some congenital defect that reduced her odds of conception to 222,000 to one—and to compound the problem, Ken’s sperm count was inordinately low, though he ate plenty of red meat and worked out every other day on the racquetball court. Adoption had seemed the way to go, though Pat was distressed by the fact that so many of the babies available were—well, she didn’t like to say it, but they weren’t white. There were Thai babies, Guianese babies, Herero babies, babies from Haiti, Kuala Lumpur, and Kashmir, but Caucasian babies were at a premium. You could have a nonwhite baby in six days—for a price, of course—but there was an eleven-year waiting list for white babies—twelve for blonds, fourteen for blue-eyed blonds—and neither Ken nor Pat was used to being denied. “How about an older child?” the man from the adoption agency had suggested.

  They were in one of the plush, paneled conference rooms of Adopt-A-Kid, and Mr. Denteen, a handsome, bold-faced man in a suit woven of some exotic material, leaned forward with a fatherly smile. He bore an uncanny resemblance to Robert Young of “Father Knows Best,” and on the wall behind him was a photomontage of plump and cooing babies. Pat was mesmerized. “What?” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him.

  “An older child,” Denteen repeated, his voice rich with insinuation. It was the voice of a seducer, a shrink, a black-marketeer.

  “No,” Ken said, “I don’t think so.”

  “How old?” Pat said.

  Denteen leaned forward on his leather elbow patches. “I just happen to have a child—a boy—whose file just came to us this morning. Little Anthony Cademartori. Tony. He’s nine years old. Just. Actually, his birthday was only last week.”

  The photo Denteen handed them showed a sunny, smiling, towheaded boy, a generic boy, archetypal, the sort of boy you envision when you close your eyes and think “boy.” If they’d looked closer, they would have seen that his eyes were like two poked holes and that there was something unstable about his smile and the set of his jaw, but they were in the grip of a conceit and they didn’t look that closely. Ken asked if there was anything wrong with him. “Physically, I mean,” he said.

  Denteen let a good-humored little laugh escape him. “This is your average nine-year-old boy, Mr. Mallow,” he said. “Average height, weight, build, average—or above average—intelligence. He’s all boy, and he’s one heck of a lot fitter than I am.” Denteen cast a look to the heavens—or, rather, to the ceiling tiles. “To be nine years old again,” he sighed.

  “Does he behave?” Pat asked.

  “Does he behave?” Denteen echoed, and he looked offended, hurt almost. “Does the President live in the White House? Does the sun come up in the morning?” He straightened up, shot his cuffs, then leaned forward again—so far forward his hands dangled over the edge of the conference table. “Look at him,” he said, holding up the picture again. “Mr. and Mrs. Mallow—Ken, Pat—let me tell you that this child has seen more heartbreak than you and I’ll know in a lifetime. His birth parents were killed at a railway crossing when he was two, and then, the irony of it, his adoptive parents—they were your age, by the way—just dropped dead one day while he was at school. One minute they’re alive and well and the next”—he snapped his fingers—“they’re gone.” His voice faltered. “And then poor little Tony…poor little Tony comes home.…”

  Pat looked stunned. Ken reached out to squeeze her hand.

  “He needs love, Pat,” Denteen said. “He has love to give. A lot of love.”

  Ken looked at Pat. Pa
t looked at Ken.

  “So,” Denteen said, “when would you like to meet him?”

  They met him the following afternoon, and he seemed fine. A little shy, maybe, but fine. Super-polite, that’s what Pat thought. May I this and may I that, please, thank you, and it’s a pleasure to meet you. He was adorable. Big for his age—that was a surprise. They’d expected a lovable little urchin, the kind of kid Norman Rockwell might have portrayed in the barber’s chair atop a stack of phone books, but Anthony was big, already the size of a teenager—big-headed, big in the shoulders, and big in the rear. Tall too. At nine, he was already as tall as Pat and probably outweighed her. What won them over, though, was his smile. He turned his smile on them that first day in Denteen’s office—a blooming angelic smile that showed off his dimples and the perfection of his tiny white glistening teeth—and Pat felt something give way inside her. At the end of the meeting she hugged him to her breast.

  The smile was a regular feature of those first few months—the months of the trial period. Anthony smiled at breakfast, at dinner, smiled when he helped Ken rake the leaves from the gutters or tidy up the yard, smiled in his sleep. He stopped smiling when the trial period was over, as if he’d suddenly lost control of his facial muscles. It was uncanny. Almost to the day the adoption became formal—the day that he was theirs and they were his—Anthony’s smile vanished. The change was abrupt and it came without warning.

  “Scooter,” Ken called to him one afternoon, “you want to help me take those old newspapers to the recycling center and then maybe stop in at Baskin and Robbins?”

  Anthony was upstairs in his room, the room they’d decorated with posters of ballplayers and airplanes. He didn’t answer.

  “Scooter?”