If the River Was Whiskey: Stories Read online

  The drizzle had turned to a steady, pelting rain. Irv’s face and hands were scratched and insect-bitten and the hair clung to his scalp like some strange species of mold. His suit—all four hundred bucks’ worth—was ruined. He was staggering through a stubborn tangle of briars, his mind veering sharply toward the homicidal end of the spectrum, when a movement up ahead made him catch his breath. Stumbling forward, he flushed a great black carrion bird from the bushes; as it rose silently into the darkening sky, he spotted the tablecloth. Still laden, it hung from the lower branches of a pocked and leprous oak. Irv looked round him cautiously. All was still, no sound but for the hiss of the rain in the leaves. He straightened up and lumbered toward the pale damp sack, thinking at least to recover his property.

  No such luck. When he lifted the bundle down, he was disappointed by its weight; when he opened it, he was shocked to the roots of his hair. The tablecloth contained two things only: a bloody heart and a bloody liver. His own heart was beating so hard he thought his temples would burst; in horror he flung the thing to the ground. Only then did he notice that the undergrowth round the base of the tree was beaten down and trampled, as if a scuffle had taken place beneath it. There was a fandango of footprints in the mud and clumps of stiff black hair were scattered about like confetti—and wasn’t that blood on the bark of the tree?

  “Irv,” murmured a voice at his back, and he whirled round in a panic. There he was, the big man, his swarthy features hooded in shadow. This time he was wearing a business suit in a muted gray check, a power yellow tie, and an immaculate trenchcoat. In place of the chainsaw, he carried a shovel, which he’d flung carelessly over one shoulder. “Whoa,” he said, holding up a massive palm, “I didn’t mean to startle you.” He took a step forward and Irv could see that he was grinning. “All’s I want to know is do we have a deal or not?”

  “Where’s Tish?” Irv demanded, his voice quavering. But even as he spoke he saw the angry red welt running the length of the big man’s jaw and disappearing into the hair at his temple, and he knew.

  The big man shrugged. “What do you care? She’s gone, that’s all that matters. Hey, no more of that nagging whiny voice, no more money down the drain on face cream and high heels-just think, you’ll never have to wake up again to that bitchy pout and those nasty red little eyes. You’re free, Irv. I did you a favor.”

  Irv regarded the stranger with awe. Tish was no mean adversary, and judging from the look of the poor devil’s face, she’d gone down fighting.

  The big man dropped his shovel to the ground and there was a clink of metal on metal. “Right here, Irv,” he whispered. “Half a million easy. Cash. Tax-free. And with my help you’ll watch it grow to fifty times that.”

  Irv glanced down at the bloody tablecloth and then back up at the big man in the trenchcoat. A slow grin spread across his lips.

  Coming to terms wasn’t so easy, however, and it was past dark before they’d concluded their bargain. At first the stranger had insisted on Irv’s going into one of the big Hollywood talent agencies, but when Irv balked, he said he figured the legal profession was just about as good—but you needed a degree for that, and begging Irv’s pardon, he was a bit old to be going back to school, wasn’t he? “Why can’t I stay where I am,” Irv countered, “—in stocks and bonds? With all this cash I could quit Tiller Ponzi and set up my own office.”

  The big man scratched his chin and laid a thoughtful finger alongside his nose. “Yeah,” he murmured after a moment, “yeah, I hadn’t thought of that. But I like it. You could promise them thirty percent and then play the futures market and gouge them till they bleed.”

  Irv came alive at the prospect. “Bleed ’em dry,” he hooted. “I’ll scalp and bucket and buy off the CFTC investigators, and then I’ll set up an offshore company to hide the profits.” He paused, overcome with the beauty of it. “I’ll screw them right and left.”

  “Deal?” the devil said.

  Irv took the big callused hand in his own. “Deal.”

  Ten years later, Irv Cherniske was one of the wealthiest men in New York. He talked widows into giving him their retirement funds to invest in ironclad securities and sure bets, lost them four or five hundred thousand, and charged half that again in commissions. With preternatural luck his own investments paid off time and again and he eventually set up an inside-trading scheme that made guesswork superfluous. The police, of course, had been curious about Tish’s disappearance, but Irv showed them the grisly tablecloth and the crude hole in which the killer had no doubt tried to bury her, and they launched an intensive manhunt that dragged on for months but produced neither corpse nor perpetrator. The boys he shunted off to his mother’s, and when they were old enough, to a military school in Tangiers. Two months after his wife’s disappearance, the newspapers uncovered a series of ritual beheadings in Connecticut and dropped all mention of the “suburban ghoul,” as they’d dubbed Tish’s killer; a week after that, Tish was forgotten and Beechwood went back to sleep.

  It was in the flush of his success, when he had everything he’d ever wanted—the yacht, the sweet and compliant young mistress, the pair of Rolls Corniches, and the houses in the Bahamas, and Aspen, not to mention the new wing he’d added to the old homestead in Beechwood—that Irv began to have second thoughts about the deal he’d made. Eternity was a long time, yes, but when he’d met the stranger in the woods that night it had seemed a long way off too. Now he was in his fifties, heavier than ever, with soaring blood pressure and flat feet, and the end of his career in this vale of profits was drawing uncomfortably near. It was only natural that he should begin to cast about for a loophole.

  And so it was that he returned to the church—not the Roman church, to which he’d belonged as a boy, but the Church of the Open Palm, Reverend Jimmy, Pastor. He came to Reverend Jimmy one rainy winter night with a fire in his gut and an immortal longing in his heart. He sat through a three-hour service in which Reverend Jimmy spat fire, spoke in tongues, healed the lame, and lectured on the sanctity of the one and only God—profit—and then distributed copies of the Reverend Jimmy Church-Sponsored Investment Guide with the chili and barbecue recipes on the back page.

  After the service, Irv found his way to Reverend Jimmy’s office at the back of the church. He waited his turn among the other supplicants with growing impatience, but he reminded himself that the way to salvation lay through humility and forbearance. At long last he was ushered into the presence of the Reverend himself. “What can I do for you, brother?” Reverend Jimmy asked. Though he was from Staten Island, Reverend Jimmy spoke in the Alabama hog-farmer’s dialect peculiar to his tribe.

  “I need help, Reverend,” Irv confessed, flinging himself down on a leather sofa worn smooth by the buttocks of the faithful.

  Reverend Jimmy made a small pyramid of his fingers and leaned back in his adjustable chair. He was a youngish man—no older than thirty-five or so, Irv guessed—and he was dressed in a flannel shirt, penny loafers, and a plaid fishing hat that masked his glassy blue eyes. “Speak to me, brother,” he said.

  Irv looked down at the floor, then shot a quick glance round the office—an office uncannily like his own, right down to the computer terminal, mahogany desk, and potted palms—and then whispered, “You’re probably not going to believe this.”

  Reverend Jimmy lit himself a cigarette and shook out the match with a snap of his wrist. “Try me,” he drawled.

  When Irv had finished pouring out his heart, Reverend Jimmy leaned forward with a beatific smile on his face. “Brother,” he said, “believe me, your story’s nothin’ new—I handle just as bad and sometimes worser ever day. Cheer up, brother: salvation is on the way!”

  Then Reverend Jimmy made a number of pointed inquiries into Irv’s financial status and fixed the dollar amount of his tithe—to be paid weekly in small bills, no checks please. Next, with a practiced flourish, he produced a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the text of which was interspersed with biblical quotes in suppor
t of its guiding theses, and pronounced Irv saved. “You got your holy book,” the Reverend Jimmy boomed as Irv ducked gratefully out the door, “—y’all keep it with you every day, through sleet and snow and dark of night, and old Satan he’ll be paarless against you.”

  And so it was. Irv gained in years and gained in wealth. He tithed the Church of the Open Palm, and he kept the holy book with him at all times. One day, just after his sixtieth birthday, his son Shane came to the house to see him. It was a Sunday and the market was closed, but after an early-morning dalliance with Sushoo, his adept and oracular mistress, he’d placed a half dozen calls to Hong Kong, betting on an impending monsoon in Burma to drive the price of rice through the ceiling. He was in the Blue Room, as he liked to call the salon in the west wing, eating a bit of poached salmon and looking over a coded letter from Butram, his deep man in the SEC. The holy book lay on the desk beside him.

  Shane was a bloated young lout in his late twenties, a sorrowful, shameless leech who’d flunked out of half a dozen schools and had never held a job in his life—unlike Morgan, who’d parlayed the small stake his father had given him into the biggest used-car dealership in the country. Unwashed, unshaven, the gut he’d inherited from his father peeping out from beneath a Hawaiian shirt so lurid it looked as if it had been used to stanch wounds at the emergency ward, Shane loomed over his father’s desk. “I need twenty big ones,” he grunted, giving his father a look of beery disdain. “Bad week at the track.”

  Irv looked up from his salmon and saw Tish’s nose, Tish’s eyes, saw the greedy, worthless, contemptible slob his son had become. In a sudden rage he shot from the chair and hammered the desk so hard the plate jumped six inches. “I’ll be damned if I give you another cent,” he roared.

  Just then there was a knock at the door. His face contorted with rage, Irv shoved past his son and stormed across the room, a curse on his lips for Magdalena, the maid, who should have known better than to bother him at a time like this. He tore open the door only to find that it wasn’t Magdalena at all, but his acquaintance of long ago, the big black man with the wild mane of hair and the vague odor of stir-fry on his clothes. “Time’s up, Irv,” the big man said gruffly. In vain did Irv look over his shoulder to where the Reverend Jimmy’s holy book sat forlorn on the desk beside the plate of salmon that was already growing cold. The big man took his arm in a grip of steel and whisked him through the hallway, down the stairs, and out across the lawn to where a black BMW with smoked windows sat running at the curb. Irv turned his pale fleshy face to the house and saw his son staring down at him from above, and then the big man laid an implacable hand on his shoulder and shoved him into the car.

  The following day, of course, as is usual in these cases, all of Irv’s liquid assets—his stocks and bonds, his Swiss and Bahamian bankbooks, even the wads of new-minted hundred-dollar bills he kept stashed in safe-deposit boxes all over the country—turned to cinders. Almost simultaneously, the house was gutted by a fire of mysterious origin, and both Rolls-Royces were destroyed. Joe Luck, who shuffled out on his lawn in a silk dressing gown at the height of the blaze, claimed to have seen a great black bird emerge from the patch of woods behind the house and mount into the sky high above the roiling billows of steam and smoke, but for some reason, no one else seemed to have shared his vision.

  The big refurbished house on Beechwood Drive has a new resident now, a corporate lawyer by the name of O’Faolain. If he’s bothered by the unfortunate history of the place—or even, for that matter, aware of it—no one can say. He knows his immediate neighbors as the Chinks, the Fat Family, and the Turf Builders. They know him as the Shyster.

  T H E M I R A C L E A T B A L L I N S P I T T L E

  THERE THEY ARE, the holybugs, widows in their weeds and fat-ankled mothers with palsied children, all lined up before the snotgreen likeness of the Virgin, and McGahee and McCarey among them. This statue, alone among all the myriad three-foot-high snotgreen likenesses of the Virgin cast in plaster by Finnbar Finnegan & Sons, Cork City, was seen one grim March afternoon some years back to move its limbs ever so slightly, as if seized suddenly by the need of a good sinew-cracking stretch. Nuala Nolan, a young girl in the throes of Lenten abnegation, was the only one to witness the movement—a gentle beckoning of the statue’s outthrust hand—after a fifteen-day vigil during which she took nothing into her body but Marmite and soda water. Ever since, the place has been packed with tourists.

  Even now, in the crowd of humble countrymen in shit-smeared boots and knit skullcaps, McGahee can detect a certain number of Teutonic or Manhattanite faces above cableknit sweaters and pendant cameras. Drunk and in debt, on the run from a bad marriage, two DWI convictions, and the wheezy expiring gasps of his moribund mother, McGahee pays them no heed. His powers of concentration run deep. He is forty years old, as lithe as a boxer though he’s done no hard physical labor since he took a construction job between semesters at college twenty years back, and he has the watery eyes and doleful, doglike expression of the saint. Twelve hours ago he was in New York, at Paddy Flynn’s, pouring out his heart and enumerating his woes for McCarey, when McCarey said, “Fuck it, let’s go to Ireland.” And now here he is at Ballinspittle, wearing the rumpled Levi’s and Taiwanese sportcoat he’d pulled on in his apartment yesterday morning, three hours off the plane from Kennedy and flush with warmth from the venerable Irish distillates washing through his veins.

  McCarey—plump, stately McCarey—stands beside him, bleary-eyed and impatient, disdainfully scanning the crowd. Heads are bowed. Infants snuffle. From somewhere in the distance come the bleat of a lamb and the mechanical call of the cuckoo. McGahee checks his watch: they’ve been here seven minutes already and nothing’s happened. His mind begins to wander. He’s thinking about orthodontia—thinking an orthodontist could make a fortune in this country—when he looks up and spots her, Nuala Nolan, a scarecrow of a girl, an anorectic, bones-in-a-sack sort of girl, kneeling in front of the queue and reciting the Mysteries in a voice parched for food and drink. Since the statue moved she has stuck to her diet of Marmite and soda water until the very synapses of her brain have become encrusted with salt and she raves like a mariner lost at sea. McGahee regards her with awe. A light rain has begun to fall.

  And then suddenly, before he knows what’s come over him, McGahee goes limp. He feels lightheaded, transported, feels himself sinking into another realm, as helpless and cut adrift as when Dr. Beibelman put him under for his gallbladder operation. He breaks out in a sweat. His vision goes dim. The murmur of the crowd, the call of the cuckoo, and the bleat of the lamb all meld into a single sound—a voice—and that voice, ubiquitous, timeless, all-embracing, permeates his every cell and fiber. It seems to speak through him, through the broad-beamed old hag beside him, through McCarey, Nuala Nolan, the stones and birds and fishes of the sea. “Davey,” the voice calls in the sweetest tones he ever heard, “Davey McGahee, come to me, come to my embrace.”

  As one, the crowd parts, a hundred stupefied faces turned toward him, and there she is, the Virgin, snotgreen no longer but radiant with the aquamarine of actuality, her eyes glowing, arms beckoning. McGahee casts a quick glance around him. McCarey looks as if he’s been punched in the gut, Nuala Nolan’s skeletal face is clenched with hate and jealousy, the humble countrymen and farmwives stare numbly from him to the statue and back again…and then, as if in response to a subconscious signal, they drop to their knees in a human wave so that only he, Davey McGahee, remains standing. “Come to me,” the figure implores, and slowly, as if his feet were encased in cement, his head reeling and his stomach sour, he begins to move forward, his own arms outstretched in ecstasy.

  The words of his catechism, forgotten these thirty years, echo in his head: “Mother Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our—”

  “Yesssss!” the statue suddenly shrieks, the upturned palm curled into a fist, a fist like a weapon. “And you think it’s as easy as that, do you?”

  McGahe
e stops cold, hovering over the tiny effigy like a giant, a troglodyte, a naked barbarian. Three feet high, grotesque, shaking its fists up at him, the thing changes before his eyes. Gone is the beatific smile, gone the grace of the eyes and the faintly mad and indulgent look of the transported saint. The face is a gargoyle’s, a shrew’s, and the voice, sharpening, probing like a dental tool, suddenly bears an uncanny resemblance to his ex-wife’s. “Sinner!” the gargoyle hisses. “Fall on your knees!”

  The crowd gasps. McGahee, his bowels turned to ice, pitches forward into the turf. “No, no, no!” he cries, clutching at the grass and squeezing his eyes shut. “Hush,” a new voice whispers in his ear, “look. You must look.” There’s a hand on his neck, bony and cold. He winks open an eye. The statue is gone and Nuala Nolan leans over him, her hair gone in patches, the death’s-head of her face and suffering eyes, her breath like the loam of the grave. “Look, up there,” she whispers.

  High above them, receding into the heavens like a kite loosed from a string, is the statue. Its voice comes to him faint and distant—“Behold…now…your sins…and excesses…”—and then it dwindles away like a fading echo.

  Suddenly, behind the naked pedestal, a bright sunlit vista appears, grapevines marshaled in rows, fields of barley, corn, and hops, and then, falling from the sky with thunderous crashes, a succession of vats, kegs, hogsheads, and buckets mounting up in the foreground as if on some phantom pier piled high with freight. Boom, boom, ka-boom, boom, down they come till the vista is obscured and the kegs mount to the tops of the trees. McGahee pushes himself up to his knees and looks around him. The crowd is regarding him steadily, jaws set, the inclemency of the hanging judge sunk into their eyes. McCarey, kneeling too now and looking as if he’s just lurched up out of a drunken snooze to find himself on a subway car on another planet, has gone steely-eyed with the rest of them. And Nuala Nolan, poised over him, grins till the long naked roots of her teeth gleam beneath the skirts of her rotten gums.