T. Boyle - If the River Was Whiskey

I’d begun to hear sounds from the kitchen — the faint kiss of cup and saucer, the rattle of cutlery — and my stomach suddenly dropped like an elevator out of control. I hadn’t eaten all day. It was the middle of the month, I’d read all the paperbacks in the house, listened to all the records, and I was waiting for my check to come. There was no mail service up here of course — the road was closed half the time in winter anyway — but Marshall, the lodgeowner and unofficial kingpin of the community, had gone down the mountain to lay in provisions against the holiday onslaught of tourists, ski-mobilers and the like, and he’d promised to pick it up for me. If it was there. If it was, and he made it back through the storm, I was going to have three or four shots of Wild Turkey, then check out the family dinner and sip coffee and Kahlua till Jill got off work. “Beer,” I said.

“Would you get this man a beer, pretty lady?” said Boo in his backwoods basso, and when she’d opened me one and come back for his money, he started in on the bear. Had she seen him? How much damage had he done? What about his tracks — anything unusual? His scat? He was reddish in color, right? Almost cinnamon? And with one folded ear?

She’d seen him. But not when he’d battered his way into the back storeroom, punctured a case of twelve-and-a-half-ounce cans of tuna, lapped up a couple of gallons of mountain red burgundy and shards of glass, and left a bloody trail that wound off through the ponderosa pines like a pink ribbon. Not then. No, she’d seen him under more intimate circumstances — in her own bedroom, in fact. She’d been asleep in the rear bedroom with her eight-year-old son, Adrian (they slept in the same room to conserve heat, shutting down the thermostat and tossing a handful of coal into the stove in the corner), when suddenly the back window went to pieces. The air came in at them like a spearthrust, there was the dull booming thump of the bear’s big body against the outer wall, and an explosion of bottles, cans, and whatnot as he tore into the garbage on the back porch. She and Adrian had jolted awake in time to see the bear’s puzzled shaggy face appear in the empty windowframe, and then they were up like Goldilocks and out the front door, where they locked themselves in the car. They came to me in their pajamas, trembling like refugees. By the time I got there with my Weatherby, the bear was gone.

“I’ve seen him,” Jill said. “He broke the damn window out of my back bedroom and now I’ve got it all boarded up.” Josh, the younger guy, seemed to find this funny, and he began a low snickering suck and blow of air like an old dog with something caught in his throat.

“Hell,” Jill said, lighting-up, centerstage, “I was in my nightie and barefoot too and I didn’t hesitate a second — zoom, I grabbed my son by the hand and out the door we went.”

“Your nightie, huh?” Boo said, a big appreciative grin transforming his face so that for a minute, in the dim light, he could have been a leering, hairy-hocked satyr come in from the cold.

“Maybe it wasn’t just the leftovers he wanted,” I offered, and everyone cracked up. Just then Marshall stepped through the door, arms laden, stamping the snow from his boots. I got up to help him, and when he began fumbling in his breast pocket, I felt a surge of relief: he’d remembered my check. I was on my way out the door to help with the supplies when I heard Boo’s rumbling bass like distant thunder: “Don’t you worry, pretty lady,” he was saying, “we’ll get him.”

Regina showed up three days later. For the past few years she’d rented a room up here over the holidays, ostensibly for her health, the cross-country skiing, and the change of scene, but actually so she could display her backend in stretch pants to the sex-crazed hermits who lived year-round amidst the big pines and sequoias. She was from Los Angeles, where she worked as a dental hygienist. Her teeth were perfect, she smiled nonstop and with the serenity of the Mona Lisa, and she wore the kind of bra that was popular in the fifties — the kind that thrust the breasts out of her ski sweater like nuclear warheads. She’s been known to give the tumble to the occasional tourist or one of the lucky locals when the mood took her, but she really had it for Marshall. For two weeks every Christmas and another week at Easter, she became a fixture at the bar, as much a part of the decor as the moosehead or the stuffed bear, perched on a barstool in Norwegian sweater, red ski pants, and mukluks, sipping a champagne cocktail and waiting for him to get off work. Sometimes she couldn’t hold out and someone else would walk off with her while Marshall scowled from behind the grill, but usually she just waited there for him like a flower about to drop its petals.

She came into the white world that afternoon like a foretaste of the good times to come — city women, weekend cowboys, grandmas, children, dogs, and lawyers were on their way, trees and decorations going up, the big festival of the goose-eating Christians about to commence — rolling into the snowbound parking lot in her Honda with the neat little chain-wrapped tires that always remind me of Tonka toys. It was about 4:00 P.M., the sky was a sorrowful gray, and a loose flurry was dusting the huge logs piled up on the veranda. In she came, stamping and shaking, the knit cap pulled down to her eyebrows, already on the lookout for Marshall.

I was sitting in my usual place, working on my fifth beer, a third of the way through the check Marshall had brought me three days previous and calculating gloomily that I’d be out of money by Christmas at this rate. Scooter was bartending, and his daughter-in-law Mae-Mae, who happened to be a widow, was hunched morosely over a Tom Collins three stools up from me. Mae-Mae had lost her husband to the mountain two years earlier (or, rather, to the tortuous road that connected us to civilization and snaked up 7300 feet from the floor of the San Joaquin Valley in a mere twenty-six miles, treacherous as a goat trail in the Himalayas), and hadn’t spoken or smiled since. She was a Thai. Scooter’s son, a Vietnam hero, had brought her back from Southeast Asia with him. When Jill was off, or the holiday crowd bearing down on the place, Scooter would drive up the mountain from his cabin at Little Creek, elevation 5500 feet, hang his ski parka on a hook in back, and shake, stir, and blend cocktails. He brought Mae-Mae with him to get her out of the house.

Scooter and I had been discussing some of the finer points of the prevent defense with respect to the coming pro-football playoffs when Regina’s Honda rolled into the lot, and now we gave it up to gape at her as she shook herself like a go-go dancer, opened her jacket to expose the jutting armaments of her breasts, and slid onto a barstool. Scooter slicked back his white hair and gave her a big grin. “Well,” he said, fumbling for her name, “um, uh, good to see you again.”

She flashed him her fluoridated smile, glanced past the absorbed Mae-Mae to where I sat grinning like an overworked dog, then turned back to him. “Marshall around?”

Scooter informed her that Marshall had gone down the mountain on a supply run and should be back by dinnertime. And what would she like?

She sighed, crossed her legs, lit a cigarette. The hat she was wearing was part of a set — hand-knit, imported from Scandinavia, woven from ram’s whiskers by the trolls themselves, two hundred bucks at I. Magnin. Or something like that. It was gray, like her eyes. She swept it from her head with a flourish, fluffed out her short black hair and ordered a champagne cocktail. I looked at my watch.

I’d read somewhere that nine out of ten adults in Alaska had a drinking problem. I could believe it. Snow, ice, sleet, wind, the dark night of the soul: what else were you supposed to do? It was the same way up on the mountain. Big Timber was a collection of maybe a hundred widely scattered cabins atop a broad-beamed peak in the southern Sierras. The cabins belonged to summer people from L.A. and San Diego, to cross-country skiers, gynecologists, talent agents, ad men, drunks, and nature lovers, for the most part, and to twenty-seven hard-core antisocial types who called the place home year-round. I was one of this latter group. So was Jill. Of the remaining twenty-five xenophobes and rustics, three were women, and two of them were married and post-menopausal to boot. The sole remaining female was an alcoholic poet with a walleye who lived in her parents’ cabin on the outer verge of the development and hated men. TV reception was spotty, radio nonexistent, and the nearest library a one-room affair at the base of the mountain that boasted three copies of the The Thorn Birds and the complete works of Irving Wallace.