If the River Was Whiskey: Stories Read online

  Twenty-five years. And with people like this moon-eyed incompetent to look after him. It was a shock. “You mean to tell me you’ve had no training?” Beatrice demanded, the outrage constricting her throat till she could barely choke out the words. “None at all?”

  The girl gave her a meek smile and a shrug of the shoulders.

  “You’ve had nutritional training, certainly—you must have studied the dietary needs of the wild chimpanzee, at the very least…” and she gestured disdainfully at the bags of junk food, of salt and fat and empty calories.

  The girl murmured something, some sort of excuse or melioration, but Beatrice never heard it. A sudden movement from the front room caught her eye, and all at once she remembered Konrad. She turned away from the girl as if she didn’t exist and focused her bright narrow eyes on him, the eyes that had captured every least secret of his wild cousins, the rapt unblinking eyes of the professional voyeur.

  The first thing she noticed was that he’d finished with her notes, the remnants of which lay strewn about the room like confetti. She saw too that he was calm now, at home already, sniffing at the afghan as if he’d known it all his life. Oblivious to her, he settled into the armchair, draped the afghan over his knees, and began fumbling through the pockets of his overcoat like an absent-minded commuter. And then, while her mouth fell open and her eyes narrowed to pinpricks, he produced a cigar—a fine, green, tightly rolled panatela—struck a match to light it, and lounged back in an aureole of smoke, his feet, bereft now of the plastic galoshes, propped up luxuriously on the coffee table.

  It was a night of stinging cold and subarctic wind, but though the panes rattled in their frames, the old house retained its heat. Beatrice had set the thermostat in the high eighties and she’d built the fire up beneath a cauldron of water that steamed the walls and windows till they dripped like the myriad leaves of the rain forest. Konrad was naked, as nature and evolution had meant him to be, and Beatrice was in the clean, starched khakis she’d worn in the bush for the past forty years. Potted plants-cane, ficus, and dieffenbachia—crowded the hallway, spilled from the windowsills, and softened the corners of each of the downstairs rooms. In the living room, the TV roared at full volume, and Konrad stood before it, excited, signing at the screen and emitting a rising series of pant hoots: “Hoo-hoo, hoo-ah-hoo-ah-hoo!”

  Watching from the kitchen, Beatrice felt her face pucker with disapproval. This TV business was no good, she thought, languidly stirring vegetables into a pot of chicken broth. Chimps had an innate dignity, an eloquence that had nothing to do with sign language, gabardine, color TV, or nacho chips, and she was determined to restore it to him. The junk food was in the trash, where it belonged, along with the obscene little suits of clothes the girl had foisted on him, and she’d tried unplugging the TV set, but Konrad was too smart for her. Within thirty seconds he’d got it squawking again.

  “Eee-eee!” he shouted now, slapping his palms rhythmically on the hardwood floor.

  “Awright,” the TV said in its stentorian voice, “take the dirty little stool pigeon out back and extoiminate him.”

  It was an unfortunate thing for the TV to say, because it provoked in Konrad a reaction that could only be described as a frenzy. Whereas before he’d been excited, now he was enraged. “Wraaaaa!” he screamed in a pitch no mere human could duplicate, and he charged the screen with a stick of firewood, every hair on his body sprung instantly erect. Good, she thought, stirring her soup as he flailed at the oak-veneer cabinet and choked the voice out of it, good, good, good, as he backed away and bounced round the room like a huge India-rubber ball, the stick slapping behind him, his face contorted in a full open grin of incendiary excitement. Twice over the sofa, once up the banister, and then he charged again, the stick beating jerkily at the floor. The crash of the screen came almost as a relief to her—at least there’d be no more of that. What puzzled her, though, what arrested her hand in mid-stir, was Konrad’s reaction. He stood stock-still a moment, then backed off, pouting and tugging at his lower lip, the screams tapering to a series of squeaks and whimpers of regret.

  The moment the noise died, Beatrice became aware of another sound, low-pitched and regular, a signal it took her a moment to identify: someone was knocking at the door. Konrad must have heard it too. He looked up from the shattered cabinet and grunted softly. “Urk, he said, “urk, urk,” and lifted his eyes to Beatrice’s as she backed away from the stove and wiped her hands on her apron.

  Who could it be, she wondered, and what must they have thought of all that racket? She hung her apron on a hook, smoothed back her hair, and passed into the living room, neatly sidestepping the wreckage of the TV. Konrad’s eyes followed her as she stepped into the foyer, flicked on the porch light, and swung back the door.

  “Hello? Miss Umbo?”

  Two figures stood bathed in yellow light before her, hominids certainly, and wrapped in barbaric bundles of down, fur, and machine-stitched nylon. “Yes?”

  “I hope you don’t…I mean, you probably don’t remember me,” said the squatter of the two figures, removing his knit cap to reveal the stiff black brush cut beneath, “but we met a couple weeks ago at Waldbaum’s? I’m Howie, Howie Kantner?”

  Agassiz, she thought, and she saw his unsteady grin replicated on the face of the figure behind him.

  “I hope it isn’t an imposition, but this is my father, Howard,” and the second figure, taller, less bulky in the shoulders, stepped forward with a slouch and an uneasy shift of his eyes that told her he was no longer the dominant male. “Pleased to meet you,” he said in a voice ruined by tobacco.

  She was aware of Konrad behind her—he’d pulled himself into the precarious nest he’d made in the coat tree of mattress stuffing and strips of carpeting from the downstairs hallway—and her social graces failed her. She didn’t think to ask them in out of the cold till Howie spoke again. “I—I was wondering,” he stammered, “my father’s a big fan of yours, if you would sign a book for him?”

  Smile, she told herself, and the command influenced her facial muscles. Ask them to come in. “Come in,” she said, “please,” and then she made a banal comment about the weather.

  In they came, stamping and shaking and picking at their clothing, massive but obsequious, a barrage of apologies—“so late”; “we’re not intruding?”; “did she mind?”—exploding around them. They exchanged a glance and wrinkled up their noses at the potent aroma and high visibility of Konrad. Howard Sr. clutched his book, a dog-eared paper edition of The Wellsprings of Man. From his coat tree, which Beatrice had secured to the high ceilings with a network of nylon tow rope, Konrad grunted softly. “No, not at all,” she heard herself saying, and then she asked them if they’d like a cup of hot chocolate or tea.

  Seated in the living room and divested of their impressive coats and ponderous boots, scarves, gloves, and hats, father and son seemed subdued. They tried not to look at the ruined TV or at the coat tree or the ragged section of bare plaster where Konrad had stripped the flowered wallpaper to get at the stale but piquant paste beneath. Howie was having the hot chocolate; Howard Sr., the tea. “So how do you like our little town?” Howard Sr. asked as she settled into the armchair opposite him.

  She hadn’t uttered a word to a human being since Konrad’s companion had left, and she was having difficulty with the amenities expected of her. Set her down amidst a convocation of chimps or even a troop of baboons and she’d never commit a faux pas or gaucherie, but here she felt herself on uncertain ground. “Hate it,” she said.

  Howard Sr. seemed to mull this over, while unbeknownst to him, Konrad was slipping down from the coat tree and creeping up at his back. “Is it that bad,” he said finally, “or is it the difference between Connecticut and the, the—” He was interrupted by the imposition of a long, sinuous, fur-cloaked arm which snaked under his own to deftly snatch a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. Before he could react, the arm was gone. “Eeeee!” screamed Konrad, “eeee-eeee!,” and h
e retreated to the coat tree with his booty.

  Beatrice rose immediately to her feet, ignoring the sharp pain that ground at her kneecaps, and marched across the room. She wouldn’t have it, one of her chimps indulging a filthy human habit. Give it here, she wanted to say, but then she wouldn’t have one of her chimps responding to human language either, as if he were some fawning lapdog or neutered cat. “Woo-oo-oogh,” she coughed at him.

  “Wraaaaa!” he screamed back, bouncing down from his perch and careening round the room in a threat display, the cigarettes clutched tightly to his chest. She circled him warily, aware that Howie and his father loomed behind her now, their limbs loose, faces set hard. “Miss Umbo,” Howie’s voice spoke at her back, “do you need any help there?”

  It was then that Konrad tore round the room again—up over the couch, the banister, up the ropes and down—and Howard Sr. made a calculated grab for him. “No!” Beatrice cried, but the warning was superfluous: Konrad effortlessly eluded the old man’s clumsy swipe, bounced twice, and was back up in the coat tree before he could blink his eyes.

  “Heh, heh,” Howard Sr. laughed from the top of his throat, “frisky little fella, isn’t he?”

  Beatrice stood before him, trying to catch her breath. “You don’t,” she began, wondering how to put it, “you don’t want to, uh, obstruct him when he displays.”

  Howie, the son, looked bemused.

  “You don’t, I think, appreciate the strength of this creature. A chimpanzee—a full-grown male, as Konrad is—is at least three times as strong as his human counterpart. Now certainly, I’m sure he wouldn’t deliberately hurt anyone—”

  “Hurt us?” Howie exclaimed, involuntarily flexing his shoulders. “I mean, he barely comes up to my chest.”

  A contented grunt escaped Konrad at that moment. He lay sprawled in his nest, the rubbery soles of his prehensile feet blackly dangling. He’d wadded up the entire pack of cigarettes and tucked it beneath his lower lip. Now he extracted the wad of tobacco and paper, sniffed it with an appreciative roll of his eyes, and replaced it between cheek and gum. Beatrice sighed. She looked at Howie, but didn’t have the strength to respond.

  Later, while Konrad snored blissfully from his perch and the boy and his father had accepted first one bowl of chicken soup and then another, and the conversation drew away from the prosaic details of Beatrice’s life in Connecticut—and did she know Tiddy Brohmer and Harriet Dillers?—and veered instead toward Makoua and the Umbo Primate Center, Howard Sr. brought up the subject of airplanes. He flew, and so did his son. He’d heard about the bush pilots in Africa and wondered about her experience of them.

  Beatrice was so surprised she had to set down her tea for fear of spilling it. “You fly?” she repeated.

  Howard Sr. nodded and leveled his keen glistening gaze on her. “Twenty-two hundred and some-odd hours’ worth,” he said. “And Howie. He’s a regular fanatic. Got his license when he was sixteen, and since we bought the Cessna there’s hardly a minute when he’s on the ground.”

  “I love it,” Howie asserted, crouched over his massive thighs on the very edge of the chair. “I mean, it’s my whole life. When I get out of school I want to restore classic aircraft. I know a guy who’s got a Stearman.”

  Beatrice warmed up her smile. All at once she was back in Africa, 2500 feet up, the land spread out like a mosaic at her feet. Champ, her late husband, had taken to planes like a chimp to trees, and though she’d never learned to fly herself, she’d spent whole days at a time in the air with him, spying out chimp habitat in the rich green forests of Cameroon, the Congo, and Zaire or coasting above the golden veldt to some distant, magical village in the hills. She closed her eyes a moment, overcome with the intensity of the recollection. Champ, Makoua, the storms and sunsets and the close, savage, unimpeachable society of the apes—it was all lost to her, lost forever.

  “Miss Umbo?” Howie was peering into her eyes with an expression of concern, the same expression he’d worn that afternoon in Waldbaum’s when he’d asked if she needed help with the bananas.

  “Miss Umbo,” he repeated, “anytime you want to see Connecticut from the air, just you let me know.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” she said.

  “Really,” and he grinned Agassiz’s grin, “it’d be a pleasure.”

  Things were sprouting from the dead dun earth—crocuses, daffodils, nameless buds, and strange pale fingertips of vegetation—by the time the first of her scheduled lectures came round. It was an evening lecture, open to the public, and held in the Buffon Memorial Auditorium of the State University. Her topic was “Tool Modification in the Chimps of the Makoua Reserve,” and she’d chosen fifty color slides for illustration. For a while she’d debated wearing one of the crepe-de-chine dresses her sister had left hanging forlornly in the closet, but in the end she decided to stick with the safari shorts.

  As the auditorium began to fill, she stood rigid behind the curtain, deaf to the chatter of the young professor who was to introduce her. She watched the crowd gather—blank-faced housewives and their paunchy husbands, bearded professors, breast-thumping students, the stringy, fur-swathed women of the Anthropology Club—watched them command their space, choose their seats, pick at themselves, and wriggle in their clothing. “I’ll keep it short,” the young professor was saying, “some remarks about your career in general and the impact of your first two books, then maybe two minutes on Makoua and the Umbo Primate Center, is that all right?” Beatrice didn’t respond. She was absorbed in the dynamics of the crowd, listening to their chatter, observing their neck craning and leg crossing, watching the furtive plumbing of nostrils and sniffing of armpits, the obsessive fussing with hair and jewelry. Howie and his father were in the second row. By the time she began, it was standing room only.

  It went quite well at first—she had that impression, anyway. She was talking of what she knew better than anyone else alive, and she spoke with a fluency and grace she couldn’t seem to summon at Waldbaum’s or the local Exxon station. She watched them—fidgeting, certainly, but patient and intelligent, all their primal needs—their sexual urges, the necessity of relieving themselves and eating to exhaustion—sublimated beneath the spell of her words. Agassiz, she told them about Agassiz, the first of the wild apes to let her groom him, dead twenty years now. She told them of Spenser and Leakey and Darwin, of Lula, Pout, and Chrysalis. She described how Agassiz had fished for termites with the stem of a plant he’d stripped of leaves, how Lula had used a stick to force open the concrete bunkers in which the bananas were stored, and how Clint, the dominant male, had used a wad of leaves as a sponge to dip the brains from the shattered skull of a baby baboon.

  The problem arose when she began the slide show. For some reason, perhaps because the medium so magnified the size of the chimps and he felt himself wanting in comparison, Konrad threw a fit. (She hadn’t wanted to bring him, but the last time she’d left him alone he’d switched on all the burners of the stove, overturned and gutted the refrigerator, and torn the back door from its hinges—all this prior to committing a rash of crimes, ranging from terrorizing Mrs. Binchy’s Doberman to crushing and partially eating a still-unidentified angora kitten.) He’d been sitting just behind the podium, slouched in a folding chair around which Doris Beatts, the young professor, had arranged an array of fruit, including a basket of yim-yim flown in for the occasion. “Having him onstage is a terrific idea,” she’d gushed, pumping Beatrice’s hand and flashing a zealot’s smile that showed off her pink and exuberant gums, “what could be better? It’ll give the audience a real frisson, having a live, chimp sitting there.”

  Yes, it gave them a frisson, all right.

  Konrad had been grunting softly to himself and working his way happily through the yim-yim, but no sooner had the lights been dimmed and the first slide appeared, than he was up off the chair with a shriek of outrage. Puffed to twice his size, he swayed toward the screen on his hind legs, displaying at the gigantic chimp that had sud
denly materialized out of the darkness. “Wraaaaa!” he screamed, dashing the chair to pieces and snatching up one of its jagged legs to whirl over his head like a club. There was movement in the front row. A murmur of concern—concern, not yet fear—washed through the crowd. “Woo-oo-oogh,” Beatrice crooned, trying to calm him. “It’s all right,” she heard herself saying through the speakers that boomed her voice out over the auditorium. But it wasn’t all right. She snapped to the next slide, a close-up of Clint sucking termites from a bit of straw, and Konrad lost control, throwing himself at the screen with a screech that brought the audience to its feet.

  Up went the lights. To an individual, the audience was standing. Beatrice didn’t have time to catalogue their facial expressions, but they ran the gamut from amusement to shock, terror, and beyond. One woman—heavyset, with arms like Christmas turkeys and black little deepset eyes—actually cried out as if King Kong himself had broken loose. And Konrad? He stood bewildered amidst the white tatters of the screen, his fur gone limp again, his knuckles on the floor. For a moment, Beatrice actually thought he looked embarrassed.

  Later, at the reception, people crowded round him and he took advantage of the attention to shamelessly cadge cigarettes, plunder the canape trays, and guzzle Coca-Cola as if it were spring water. Beatrice wanted to put a stop to it—he was demeaning himself, the clown in the funny suit with his upturned palm thrust through the bars of his cage—but the press around her was terrific. Students and scholars, a man from the local paper, Doris Beatts and her neurasthenic husband, the Kantners, father and son, all bombarding her with questions: Would she go back? Was it for health reasons she’d retired? Did she believe in UFOs? Reincarnation? The New York Yankees? How did it feel having a full-grown chimp in the house? Did she know Vlastos Reizek’s monograph on the seed content of baboon feces in the Kalahari? It was almost ten o’clock before Konrad turned away to vomit noisily in the corner and Howie Kantner, beaming sunnily and balancing half a plastic cup of warm white wine on the palm of one hand, asked her when they were going to go flying.