T. Boyle - If the River Was Whiskey

Ruperto said nothing. Just smiled his homicidal smile, one eye gleaming, the other dead in a crater of pale, scarred flesh. By now the others had begun to gather — Robert Jordan counted six of them, flat-faced Indians all — and a light rain was sizzling through the trees. “You want hospitality,” Ruperto said finally, “go to Howard Johnson’s.” He spat at his feet. “Your mother,” he said, and then turned to shout over his shoulder. “Muchacha!”

Everyone stopped dead to watch as the girl in skintight fatigues stepped out of the hut, shadowed by an older woman with the build of a linebacker. “Sí?” the girl said in a voice that inflamed Robert Jordan’s groin.

Ruperto spat again. “Bring the gringo some chow.”

“The Cup of Soup?” the girl asked.

Ruperto winked his mad wet eye at Robert Jordan. “Sí,” he grunted, “the Cup of Soup.”

As he lay in his pup tent that night, his limbs entwined in the girl’s — her name was either Vidaluz or Concepción, he couldn’t remember which — Robert Jordan thought of his grandmother. She was probably the only person in the world he didn’t hate. His mother was a real zero, white wine and pasta salad all the way, and his friends back in Missoula were a bunch of dinks who thought Bryan Adams was god. His father was dead. When the old man had sucked on the barrel of his 30.06 Winchester, Robert was fourteen and angry. His role model was Sid Vicious and he was into glue and Bali Hai. It was his grandmother — she was Andalusian, really cool, a guerrilla who’d bailed out of Spain in the ‘30s, pregnant with Robert Jordan II — who listened patiently to his gripes about the school jocks and his wimpy teachers and bought him tire chains to wrap around his boots. They sat for hours together listening to the Clash’s Sandinista album, and when he blew off the tips of his pinky and ring fingers with a homemade bomb, it was she who gave him his first pair of studded black leather gloves. And what was best about her — what he liked more than anything else — was that she didn’t take any shit from anybody. Once, when her third husband, Joe Thunderbucket, called her “Little Rabbit,” she broke his arm in three places. It was she more than anyone who’d got him into all this revolution business — she and the Clash, anyway. And of course he’d always loved dynamite.

He lay there, slapping mosquitoes, his flesh sticky against the girl’s, wondering what his grandmother was doing now, in the dark of this night before his first offensive. It was a Tuesday, wasn’t it? That was bingo night on the reservation, and she usually went with Joe’s sister Leona to punch numbers and drink boilermakers at the bingo hall. He pictured her in her black mantilla, her eyes cold and hard and lit maybe a little with the bourbon and Coors, and then he woke up Concepción or Vidaluz and gave it to her again, all his anger focused in the sharp tingling stab and rhythm of it.

It was still dark when the old man woke him. “Son of a bitch,” Robert Jordan muttered. His hair was crushed like a Christmas-tree ornament and there was a sour metallic taste in his mouth. He didn’t mind fighting for the revolution, but this was ridiculous — it wasn’t even light yet. “Ándale,” the old man said, “the Cup of Soup awaits.”

“Are you out of your gourd, or what?” Robert Jordan twisted free of the girl and checked his watch. “It’s four-fifteen, for christ’s sake.”

The old man shrugged. “Qué puta es la guerra,” he said. “War’s a bitch.”

And then the smell of woodsmoke and frijoles came to him over Ruperto’s high crazed whinny of a laugh, the girl was up and out of his sleeping bag, strolling heavy-haunched and naked across the clearing, and Robert Jordan was reaching for his hair gel.

After breakfast — two granola bars and a tin plate of frijoles that looked and tasted like humus — Robert Jordan vomited in the weeds. He was going into battle for the first time and he didn’t have the stomach for it. This wasn’t like blowing the neighbors’ garbage cans at 2:00 A.M. or ganging up on some jerk in a frat jacket, this was the real thing. And what made it worse was that they couldn’t just slip up in the dark, attach the plastique with a timer, and let it rip when they were miles away — oh, no, that would be too simple. His instructions, carried by the old man from none other than Ruy Ruiz, the twenty-three-year-old Sandinista poet in charge of counter-counter-revolutionary activities and occasional sestinas, were to blow it by hand the moment the cargo plane landed. Over breakfast, Robert Jordan, angry though he was, had begun to understand that there was more at risk here than his coiffure. There could be shooting. Rocket fire. Grenades. A parade of images from all the schlock horror films he’d ever seen — exploding guts, melting faces, ragged ghouls risen from the grave — marched witheringly through his head and he vomited.

“Hey, gringo,” Ruperto called in English, “suck up your cojones and let’s hit it.”

Robert Jordan cursed him weakly with a barrage of shits and milks, but when he turned round to wipe the drool from his face he saw that Ruperto and his big woman had led a cluster of horses from the jungle. The big woman, her bare arms muscled like a weightlifter’s, approached him leading a gelding the size of a buffalo. “Here, gringo,” she breathed in her incongruously feminine voice, “mount up.”

“Mount?” Robert Jordan squeaked in growing panic. “I thought we were walking.”

The truth was, Robert Jordan had always hated horses. Growing up in Montana it was nothing but horses, horses, horses, morning, noon, and night. Robert Jordan was a rebel, a punk, a free spirit — he was no cowboy dildo — and for him it was dirt bikes and dune buggies. He’d been on horseback exactly twice in his life and both times he’d been thrown. Horses: they scared him. Anything with an eye that big—

“Vámonos,” Ruperto snapped. “Or are you as gutless as the rest of the gringo wimps they send us?”

“Leche,” Robert Jordan whinnied, too shaken even to curse properly. And then he was in the saddle, the big, broad-beamed monster of a horse peering back at him out of the flat wicked discs of its eyes, and they were off.

Hunkered down in the bug factory, weeds in his face, his coccyx on fire, and every muscle, ligament, and tendon in his legs and ass beaten to pulp by the hammer of the horse’s backbone, Robert Jordan waited for the cargo plane. He was cursing his grandmother, the Sandinistas, the Clash, and even Sid Vicious. This was, without doubt, the stupidest thing he’d ever done. Still, as he crouched there with the hard black plastic box of the detonator in his hand, watching the pot-bellied crewcut rednecks and their runty flat-faced Indian allies out on the landing strip, he felt a surge of savage joy: he was going to blow the motherfuckers to Mars and back.

Ruperto was somewhere to his left, dug in with the big woman and their Kalashnikovs. Their own flat-faced Indians, led by the flat-faced old man, were down to the right somewhere, bristling with rifles. The charges were in place — three in the high grass along the runway median and half a dozen under the prefab aluminum warehouse itself. The charges had been set by a scampering Ruperto just before dawn while the lone sentry dreamed of cold cerveza and a plate of fried dorado and banana chips. Ruperto had set them because when the time came Robert Jordan’s legs hadn’t worked and that was bad. Ruperto had called him a cheesebag, a faggot, and worse, and he’d lost face with the flat-faced Indians and the old man. But that was then, this was now.

Suddenly he heard it, the distant drone of propellers like the hum of a giant insect. He caressed the black plastic box, murmuring “Come on, baby, come on,” all the slights and sneers he’d ever suffered, all the head slaps and jibes about his hair, his gloves, and his boots, all the crap he’d taken from his yuppie bitch of a mother and those dickheads at school — all of it had come down to this. If the guys could only see him now, if they could only see the all-out, hellbent, super-destructive, radical mess he was about to make…Yes! And there it was, just over the treetops. Coming in low like a pregnant goose, stuffed full of Twinkies. He began counting down: ten, nine, eight…