T. Boyle: If the River Was Whiskey

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 couple 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.

W HEN 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.