If the River Was Whiskey: Stories Read online

  When at last—after two false starts—Ellis had succeeded in disarming the thing and they’d settled back with their drinks and exclamations of “Jesus!” and “I thought I was going to die,” there was a knock at the door. It was a man in a SecureCo uniform, with nightstick and gun. He was tall and he had a mustache. He invited himself in. “There a problem?” he asked.

  “No, no,” Ellis said, standing in the entranceway, heart pounding, acutely aware of his guests’ eyes on him, “it’s a new system and we, uh—it was a mistake.”

  “Name?” the man said.

  “Hunsicker. Ellis.”

  “Code word?”

  Here Ellis faltered. The code word, to be used for purposes of positive identification in just such a situation as this, was Hilary’s inspiration. Pick something easy to remember, the SecureCo woman had said, and Hilary had chosen the name of the kids’ pet rabbit, Honey Bunny. Ellis couldn’t say the words. Not in front of this humorless man in the mustache, not with Sid and Tina watching him with those tight mocking smiles on their lips…

  “Code word?” the man repeated.

  Hilary was sunk into the couch at the far end of the coffee table. She leaned forward and raised her hand like a child in class, waving it to catch the guard’s attention. “Honey Bunny,” she said in a gasp that made the hair prickle at the back of Ellis’ neck, “it’s Honey Bunny.”

  That had been two nights ago.

  But now, in the clear light of Saturday morning, after sleeping the sleep of the just—and prudent (Panty Rapist—all the Panty Rapists in the world could escape and it was nothing to him)—feeling self-satisfied and content right on down to the felt lining of his slippers, Ellis sat back, stretched, and gave his wife a rich little smile. “I guess it’s a matter of priorities, honey,” he said. “Sid and Tina can think what they want, but you know what I say—better safe than sorry.”

  When she talked about it afterward—with her husband at Gennaro’s that night (she was too upset to cook), with her sister, with Betty Berger on the telephone—Giselle said she’d never been so scared in all her life. She meant it too. This was no horror story clipped from the newspaper, this was real. And it happened to her.

  The guy was crazy. Creepy. Sick. He’d kept her there over four hours, and he had no intention of buying anything—she could see that in the first fifteen minutes. He just wanted an audience. Somebody to rant at, to threaten, to pin down with those jittery blue eyes. Richard had wanted her to go to the police, but she balked. What had he done, really? Scared her, yes. Bruised her arm. But what could the police do—she’d gone there of her own free will.

  Her own free will. He’d said that. Those were his exact words.

  Indignant, maybe a little shaken, she’d got up from the kitchen table to stuff her papers back into the briefcase. He was cursing under his breath, muttering darkly about the idiots on the freeway in their big-ass Mercedeses, crowding him, about spics and niggers and junior-high kids cutting through his yard—“Free country, my ass!” he’d shouted suddenly. “Free for every punk and weirdo and greaser to crap all over what little bit I got left, but let me get up from this table and put a couple holes in one of the little peckerheads and we’ll see how it is. And I suppose you’re going to protect me, huh, Miss Mercedes Benz with your heels and stockings and your big high-tech alarm system, huh?”

  When she snapped the briefcase closed—no sale, nothing, just get me out of here, she was thinking—that was when he grabbed her arm. “Sit down,” he snarled, and she tried to shake free but couldn’t, he was strong with the rage of the psychopath, the lion in its den, the loony up against the wall.

  “You’re hurting me,” she said as he forced her back down. “Mr.…Coles!” and she heard her own voice jump with anger, fright, pain.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” he said, tightening his grip, “but you came here of your own free will, didn’t you? Thought you were going to sucker me, huh? Run me a song and dance and lay your high-tech crap and your big bad SecureCo guards on me—oh, I’ve seen them, bunch of titsuckers and college wimps, who they going to stop? Huh?” He dropped her arm and challenged her with his jumpy mad tight-jawed glare.

  She tried to get up but he roared, “Sit down! We got business here, goddamnit!” And then he was calling for his wife: “Glenys! Woman! Get your ass in here.”

  If she’d expected anything from the wife, any help or melioration, Giselle could see at a glance just how hopeless it was. The woman wouldn’t look at her. She appeared in the doorway, pale as death, her hands trembling, staring at the carpet like a whipped dog. “Two G&T’s,” Coles said, sucking in his breath as if he were on the very edge of something, at the very beginning, “tall, with a wedge of lime.”

  “But—” Giselle began to protest, looking from Coles to the woman.

  “You’ll drink with me, all right.” Coles’ voice came at her like a blade of ice. “Get friendly, huh? Show me what you got.” And then he turned away, his face violent with disgust. “SecureCo,” he spat. He looked up, staring past her. “You going to keep the sons of bitches away from me, you going to keep them off my back, you going to give me any guarantees?” His voice rose. “I got a gun collection worth twelve thousand dollars in there—you going to answer for that? For my color TV? The goddamned trash can even?”

  Giselle sat rigid, wondering if she could make a break for the back door and wondering if he was the type to keep it locked.

  “Sell me,” he demanded, looking at her now.

  The woman set down the gin-and-tonics and then faded back into the shadows of the hallway. Giselle said nothing.

  “Tell me about the man in the mask,” he said, grinning again, grinning wide, too wide, “tell me about those poor old retired people. Come on,” he said, his eyes taunting her, “sell me. I want it. I do. I mean I really need you people and your high-tech bullshit…”

  He held her eyes, gulped half his drink, and set the glass down again. “I mean really,” he said. “For my peace of mind.”

  It wasn’t the fender-bender on the freeway the night before or the two hundred illegals lined up and looking for work on Canoga Avenue at dawn, and it wasn’t the heart-clenching hate he still felt after being forced into early retirement two years ago or the fact that he’d sat up all night drinking gin while Glenys slept and the police and insurance companies filed their reports—it wasn’t any of that that finally drove Everett Coles over the line. Not that he’d admit, anyway. It wasn’t that little whore from SecureCo either (that’s what she was, a whore, selling her tits and her lips and her ankles and all the rest of it too) or the veiny old hag from Westec or even the self-satisfied, smirking son of a bitch from Metropolitan Life, though he’d felt himself slipping on that one (“Death and dismemberment!” he’d hooted in the man’s face, so thoroughly irritated, rubbed wrong, and just plain pissed he could think of nothing but the big glistening Mannlicher on the wall in the den).…No, it was Rance Ruby’s stupid, fat-faced, shit-licking excuse of a kid.

  Picture him sitting there in the first faint glow of early morning, the bottle mostly gone now and the fire in his guts over that moron with the barking face who’d run into him on the freeway just about put out, and then he looks up from the kitchen table and what does he see but this sorry lardassed spawn of a sorry tattooed beer-swilling lardass of a father cutting through the yard with his black death’s-head T-shirt and his looseleaf and book jackets, and that’s it. There’s no more thinking, no more reason, no insurance or hope. He’s up out of the chair like a shot and into the den, and then he’s punching the barrel of the Mannlicher right through the glass of the den window. The fat little fuck, he’s out there under the grapefruit tree, shirttail hanging out, turning at the sound, and then ka-boom, there’s about half of him left.

  Next minute Everett Coles is in his car, fender rubbing against the tire in back where that sorry sack of shit ran into him, and slamming out of the driveway. He’s got the Mannlicher on the seat beside him and a coup
le fistfuls of ammunition and he’s peppering the side of Ruby’s turd-colored house with a blast from his Weatherby pump-action shotgun. He grazes a parked camper on his way up the block, slams over a couple of garbage cans, and leans out the window to take the head off somebody’s yapping poodle as he careens out onto the boulevard, every wire gone loose in his head.

  Ellis Hunsicker woke early. He’d dreamt he was a little cloud—the little cloud of the bedtime story he’d read Mifty and Corinne the night before—scudding along in the vast blue sky, free and untethered, the sun smiling on him as it does in picturebooks, when all at once he’d felt himself swept irresistibly forward, moving faster and faster, caught up in a huge, darkening, malevolent thunderhead that rose up faceless from the far side of the day…and then he woke. It was just first light. Hilary was breathing gently beside him. The alarm panel glowed soothingly in the shadow of the half-open door.

  It was funny how quickly he’d got used to the thing, he reflected, yawning and scratching himself there in the muted light. A week ago he’d made a fool of himself over it in front of Sid and Tina, and now it was just another appliance, no more threatening or unusual—and no less vital—than the microwave, the Cuisinart, or the clock radio. The last two mornings, in fact, he’d been awakened not by the clock radio but by the insistent beeping of the house alarm—Mifty had set it off going out the back door to cuddle her rabbit. He thought now of getting up to shut the thing off—it was an hour yet before he’d have to be up for work—but he didn’t. The bed was warm, the birds had begun to whisper outside, and he shut his eyes, drifting off like a little cloud.

  When he woke again it was to the beep-beep-beep of the house alarm and to the hazy apprehension of some godawful crash—a jet breaking the sound barrier, the first rumbling clap of the quake he lived in constant fear of—an apprehension that something was amiss, that this beep-beep-beeping, familiar though it seemed, was somehow different, more high-pitched and admonitory than the beep-beep-beeping occasioned by a child going out to cuddle a bunny. He sat up. Hilary rose to her elbows beside him, looking bewildered, and in that instant the alarm was silenced forever by the unmistakable roar of a gunblast. Ellis’ heart froze. Hilary cried out, there was the heavy thump of footsteps below, a faint choked whimper as of little girls startled in their sleep and then a strange voice—high, hoarse, and raging—that chewed up the morning like a set of jaws. “Armed response!” the voice howled. “Armed response, goddamnit! Armed response!”

  The couple strained forward like mourners at a funeral. Giselle had them, she knew that. They’d looked scared when she came to the door, a pair of timid rabbity faces peering out at her from behind the matching frames of their prescription glasses, and they seated themselves on the edge of the couch as if they were afraid of their own furniture. She had them wringing their hands and darting uneasy glances out the window as she described the perpetrator—“A white man, dressed like a schoolteacher, but with these wicked, jittery eyes that just sent a shiver through you.” She focused on the woman as she described the victims. There was a boy, just fourteen years old, on his way to school, and a woman in a Mercedes driving down to the corner store for coffee filters. And then the family—they must have read about it—all of them, and not three blocks from where they were now sitting. “He was thirty-five years old,” she said in a husky voice, “an engineer at Rocketdyne, his whole life ahead of him…and she, she was one of these supernice people who…and the children…” She couldn’t go on. The man—Mr. Dunsinane, wasn’t that the name?—leaned forward and handed her a Kleenex. Oh, she had them, all right. She could have sold them the super-deluxe laser alert system, stock in the company, mikes for every flower in the garden, but the old charge just wasn’t there.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, fighting back a sob.

  It was weird, she thought, pressing the Kleenex to her face, but the masked intruder had never affected her like this, or the knife-sharpening Mexican either. It was Coles, of course, and those sick jumpy eyes of his, but it was the signs too. She couldn’t stop thinking about those signs—if they hadn’t been there, that is, stuck in the lawn like a red flag in front of a bull…But there was no future in that. No, she told the story anyway, told it despite the chill that came over her and the thickening in her throat.

  She had to. If only for her peace of mind.

  S I N K I N G H O U S E

  WHEN MONTY’S LAST BREATH caught somewhere in the back of his throat with a sound like the tired wheeze of an old screen door, the first thing she did was turn on the water. She leaned over him a minute to make sure, then she wiped her hands on her dress and shuffled into the kitchen. Her fingers trembled as she jerked at the lever and felt the water surge against the porcelain. Steam rose in her face; a glitter of liquid leapt for the drain. Croak, that’s what they called it. Now she knew why. She left the faucet running in the kitchen and crossed the gloomy expanse of the living room, swung down the hallway to the guest bedroom, and turned on both taps in the bathroom there. It was almost as an afterthought that she decided to fill the tub too.

  For a long while she sat in the leather armchair in the living room. The sound of running water—pure, baptismal, as uncomplicated as the murmur of a brook in Vermont or a toilet at the Waldorf—soothed her. It trickled and trilled, burbling from either side of the house and driving down the terrible silence that crouched in the bedroom over the lifeless form of her husband.

  The afternoon was gone and the sun plunging into the canopy of the big eucalyptus behind the Finkelsteins’ when she finally pushed herself up from the chair. Head down, arms moving stiffly at her sides, she scuffed out the back door, crossed the patio, and bent to turn on the sprinklers. They sputtered and spat—not enough pressure, that much she understood—but finally came to life in halfhearted umbrellas of mist. She left the hose trickling in the rose garden, then went back into the house, passed through the living room, the kitchen, the master bedroom—not even a glance for Monty, no: she wouldn’t look at him, not yet—and on into the master bath. The taps were weak, barely a trickle, but she left them on anyway, then flushed the toilet and pinned down the float with the brick Monty had used as a doorstop. And then finally, so weary she could barely lift her arms, she leaned into the stall and flipped on the shower.

  Two weeks after the ambulance came for the old man next door, Meg Terwilliger was doing her stretching exercises on the prayer rug in the sunroom, a menthol cigarette glowing in the ashtray on the floor beside her, the new CD by Sandee and the Sharks thumping out of the big speakers in the comers. Meg was twenty-three, with the fine bones and haunted eyes of a poster child. She wore her black hair cut close at the temples, long in front, and she used a sheeny black eyeshadow to bring out the hunger in her eyes. In half an hour she’d have to pick up Tiffany at nursery school, drop off the dog at the veterinarian’s, take Sonny’s shirts to the cleaner’s, buy a pound and a half of thresher shark, cilantro, and flour tortillas at the market, and start the burritos for supper. But now, she was stretching.

  She took a deep drag on the cigarette, tugged at her right foot, and brought it up snug against her buttocks. After a moment she released it and drew back her left foot in its place. One palm flat on the floor, her head bobbing vaguely to the beat of the music, she did half a dozen repetitions, then paused to relight her cigarette. It wasn’t until she turned over to do her straight-leg lifts that she noticed the dampness in the rug.

  Puzzled, she rose to her knees and reached behind her to rub at the twin wet spots on the seat of her sweats. She lifted the corner of the rug, suspecting the dog, but there was no odor of urine. Looking closer, she saw that the concrete floor was a shade darker beneath the rug, as if it were bleeding moisture as it sometimes did in the winter. But this wasn’t winter, this was high summer in Los Angeles and it hadn’t rained for months. Cursing Sonny—he’d promised her ceramic tile and though she’d run all over town to get the best price on a nice Italian floral pattern, he still hadn’t fo
und the time to go look at it—she shot back the sliding door and stepped into the yard to investigate.

  Immediately, she felt the Bermuda grass squelch beneath the soles of her aerobic shoes. She hadn’t taken three strides—the sun in her face, Queenie yapping frantically from the fenced-in pool area—and her feet were wet. Had Sonny left the hose running? Or Tiffany? She slogged across the lawn, the pastel Reeboks spattered with wet, and checked the hose. It was innocently coiled on its tender, the tap firmly shut. Queenie’s yapping went up an octave. The heat—it must have been ninety-five, a hundred—made her feel faint. She gazed up into the cloudless sky, then bent to check each of the sprinklers in succession.

  She was poking around in the welter of bushes along the fence, looking for an errant sprinkler, when she thought of the old lady next door—Muriel, wasn’t that her name? What with her husband dying and all, maybe she’d left the hose running and forgotten all about it. Meg rose on her tiptoes to peer over the redwood fence that separated her yard from the neighbors’ and found herself looking into a glistening, sunstruck garden, with banks of impatiens, bird of paradise, oleander, and loquat, roses in half a dozen shades. The sprinklers were on and the hose was running. For a long moment Meg stood there, mesmerized by the play of light through the drifting fans of water; she was wondering what it would be like to be old, thinking of how it would be if Sonny died and Tiffany were grown up and gone. She’d probably forget to turn off the sprinklers too.

  The moment passed. The heat was deadening, the dog hysterical. Meg knew she would have to do something about the sodden yard and wet floor in the sunroom, but she dreaded facing the old woman. What would she say—I’m sorry your husband died but could you turn off the sprinklers? She was thinking maybe she’d phone—or wait till Sonny got home and let him handle it—when she stepped back from the fence and sank to her ankles in mud.