T. Boyle - If the River Was Whiskey

She gave me a look that would have corroded metal, then heaved back from the bar and poured me a long slow shot of Wild Turkey and an even slower glass of beer. I winked at her as she set the drinks down and scraped my money from the bar. “Not tonight, Michael,” she said, “I don’t feel up to it,” and her tone was so dragged down and lugubrious she could have been a professional mourner. It was then that I began to realize just how much Boo had affected her (and by extension, how little I had), and I glanced over my shoulder to focus a quick look of jealous hatred on him. When Jill set down my change I grabbed her wrist. “What the hell do you mean ‘not tonight,’” I hissed. “Now I can’t even talk to you, or what?”

She looked at me like a martyr, like a twenty-eight-year-old woman deserted by her husband in the backend of nowhere and saddled with an unhappy kid and a deadbeat sometime beau to whom the prospect of marriage was about as appealing as a lobotomy, she looked at me like a woman who’s give up on romance. Then she jerked her arm away and slouched off to hear all the fascinating circumstances attending Alf Cornwall’s most recent bowel movement.

The crowd began to thin out about eleven, and Marshall came out from behind the grill to saunter up to the bar for a Remy Martin. He too seemed preternaturally interested in Alf Cornwall’s digestive tract, and sniffed meditatively at his cognac for five minutes or so before he picked up the glass and strolled over to join Boo and Regina. He slid in next to Regina, nodding and smiling, but he didn’t look too pleased.

Like Boo, Marshall was big. Big-headed, big-bellied, with grizzled hair and a beard flecked with white. He was in his mid-forties, twice divorced, and he had a casual folksy way about him that women found appealing, or unique — or whatever. Women who came up the mountain, that is. Jill had had a thing with him the year before I moved in, he was one of the chief reasons the walleyed poetess hated men, and any number of cross-country ski bunnies, doctors’ wives, and day trippers had taken some extracurricular exercise in the oak-framed waterbed that dominated his room in the back of the lodge. Boo didn’t stand a chance. Ten minutes after Marshall had sat down Boo was back up at the bar, a little unsteady from all he’d had to drink, and looking Jill up and down like he had one thing on his mind.

I was on my third shot and fifth beer, the lights were low, the fire going strong, and the twenty-foot Christmas tree lit up like a satellite. Alf Cornwall had taken his bullshit home with him; the poetess, the wives, and two-thirds of the new people had cleared out. I was discussing beach erosion with the guy in the cowboy hat, who as it turned out was from San Diego, and keeping an eye on Boo and Jill at the far end of the bar. “Well, Christ,” San Diego roared as if I was half a mile away, “you put up them godforsaken useless damn seawalls and what have you got, I ask you? Huh?”

I wasn’t listening. Boo was stroking Jill’s hand like a glove salesman, Marshall and Regina were grappling in the booth, and I was feeling sore and hurt and left out. A log burned through and tumbled into the coals with a thud. Marshall got up to poke it, and all of a sudden I was seething. Turning my back on San Diego, I pushed off of my stool and strode to the end of the bar.

Jill saw the look on my face and drew back. I put my hand on Boo’s shoulder and watched him turn to me in slow motion, his face huge, the scar glistening over his eyebrow. “You can’t do that,” I said.

He just looked at me.

“Michael,” Jill said.

“Huh?” he said. “Do what?” Then he turned his head to look at Jill, and when he swung back round he knew.

I shoved him, hard, as he was coming up off the barstool, and he went down on one knee before he caught himself and lunged at me. He would have destroyed me if Marshall hadn’t caught hold of him, but I didn’t care. As it was, he gave me one terrific shot to the breastbone that flattened me against the bar and sent a couple of glasses flying. Bang, bang, they shattered on the flagstone floor like lightbulbs dropped from a ladder.

“Goddamnit,” Marshall was roaring, “that’s about enough.” His face was red to the roots of his whiskers. “Michael,” he said — or blared, I should say — and then he waved his hand in disgust. Boo stood behind him, giving me a bad look. “I think you’ve had enough, Michael,” Marshall said. “Go on home.”

I wanted to throw it right back in his face, wanted to shout obscenities, take them both on, break up the furniture, and set the tree afire, but I didn’t. I wasn’t sixteen: I was thirty-one years old and I was reasonable. The lodge was the only bar in twenty-six miles and I’d be mighty thirsty and mighty lonely both if I was banished for good. “All right,” I said. “All right.” And then, as I shrugged into my jacket: “Sorry.”

Boo was grinning, Jill looked like she had the night the bear broke in. Regina was studying me with either interest or amusement — I couldn’t tell which — Scooter looked like he had to go to the bathroom, and San Diego just stepped aside. I pulled the door closed behind me. Softly.

Outside, it was snowing. Big, warm, healing flakes. It was the kind of snow my father used to hold his hands out to, murmuring, God must be up there plucking chickens. I wrapped the scarf round my throat and was about to start off across the lot when I saw something moving through the blur of falling flakes. The first thing I thought of was some late arrival from down below, some part-timer come to claim his cabin. The second thing I thought of was the bear.

I was wrong on both counts. The snow drove down against the dark branchless pillars of the treetrunks, chalk strokes on a blackboard, I counted off three breaths, and then Mae-Mae emerged from the gloom. “Michael?” she said, coming up to me.

I could see her face in the yellow light that seeped through the windows of the lodge and lay like a fungus on the surface of the snow. She gave me a rare smile, and then her face changed as she touched a finger to the corner of my mouth. “What happen you?” she said, and her finger glistened with blood.

I licked my lip. “Nothing. Bit my lip, I guess.” The snow caught like confetti in the feathery puff of her hair and her eyes tugged at me from the darkness. “Hey,” I said, surprised by inspiration, “you want to maybe come up to my place for a drink?”

Next day, at dusk, I was out in the woods with my axe. The temperature was about ten degrees above zero, I had a pint of Presidente to keep me warm, and I was looking for a nice round-bottomed silver fir about five feet tall. I listened to the snow groan under my boots, watched my breath hang in the air; I looked around me and saw ten thousand little green trees beneath the canopy of the giants, none of them right. By the time I found what I was looking for, the snow had drunk up the light and the trees had become shadows.

As I bent to clear the snow from the base of the tree I’d selected, something made me glance over my shoulder. Failing light, logs under the snow, branches, hummocks. At first I couldn’t make him out, but I knew he was there. Sixth sense. But then, before the shaggy silhouette separated itself from the gloom, a more prosaic sense took over: I could smell him. Shit, piss, sweat, and hair, dead meat, bad breath, the primal stink. There he was, a shadow among shadows, big around as a fallen tree, the bear, watching me.

Nothing happened. I didn’t grin him down, fling the axe at him, or climb a tree, and he didn’t lumber off in a panic, throw himself on me with a bloody roar, or climb a tree either. Frozen like an ice sculpture, not even daring to come out of my crouch for fear of shattering the moment, I watched the bear. Communed with him. He was a renegade, a solitary, airlifted in a groggy stupor from Yellowstone, where he’d become too familiar with people. Now he was familiar with me. I wondered if he’d studied my tracks as I’d studied his, wondered what he was doing out in the harsh snowbound woods instead of curled cozily in his den. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. The woods went dark. I stood up. He was gone.