T. Boyle - If the River Was Whiskey

The blast was the most beautiful thing he’d ever witnessed. One minute he was watching the plane touch down, its wings and fuselage unmarked but for the painted-over insignia of the Flying Tigers, the world still and serene, the sack-bellies standing back expectantly, already tasting that first long cool Bud, and then suddenly, as if he’d clapped another slide in the projector, everything disappeared in a glorious killing thunderclap of fire and smoke. Hot metal, bits of molten glass and god knew how many Twinkies, Buds, and Cups of Soup went rocketing into the air, scorching the trees, and streaming down around Robert Jordan like a furious hissing rain. When the smoke cleared there was nothing left but twisted aluminum, the burned-out hulk of the plane, and a crater the size of Rockefeller Center. From the corner of his eye Robert Jordan could see Ruperto and the big woman emerge cautiously from the bushes, weapons lowered. In a quick low crouch they scurried across the open ground and stood for a moment peering into the smoking crater, then Ruperto let out a single shout of triumph—“Yee-haw!”—and fired off a round in the air.

It was then that things got hairy. Someone opened up on them from the far side of the field — some Contra Contra Contra, no doubt — and Ruperto went down. The flat-faced Indians let loose with all they had and for a minute the air screamed like a thousand babies torn open. The big woman threw Ruperto over her shoulder and flew for the jungle like a wounded crab. “Ándale!” she shouted and then the firing stopped abruptly as everyone, Robert Jordan included, bolted for the horses.

When he saw the fist-sized chunk torn out of Ruperto’s calf, Robert Jordan wanted to vomit. So he did. The horses were half crazy from the blast and the rat-tat-tat of the Kalashnikovs and they stamped and snorted like fiends from hell. God, he hated horses. But he was puking, Ruperto’s wound like raw meat flecked with dirt and bone, and the others were leaping atop their mounts, faces pulled tight with panic. Now there was firing behind them again and he straightened up and looked for his horse. There he was, Diablo, jerking wildly at his tether and kicking out his hoofs like a doped-up bronc at the rodeo. Shit, Robert Jordan wiped his lips and made a grab for the reins. It was a mistake. He might just as well have stabbed the horse with a hot poker — in that instant Diablo reared, snapped his tether, and brought all of his wet steaming nine hundred and fifty-eight pounds squarely down on Robert Jordan’s left foot.

The sound of his toes snapping was unmusical and harsh and the pain that accompanied it so completely demanding of his attention that he barely noticed the retreating flanks of Diablo as he lashed off through the undergrowth. Robert Jordan let out a howl and broke into a string of inspired curses in two languages and then sat heavily, cradling his foot. The time he’d passed out having his nose pierced flashed through his mind and then the tears started up in his eyes. Stupid, stupid, stupid, he thought. And then he remembered where he was and who was shooting at him from across the field and he looked up to see his comrades already mounted — Ruperto included — and giving him a quick sad look. “Too bad, gringo,” Ruperto said, grinning crazily despite the wound, “but it looks like we’re short a horse.”

“My toes, my toes!” Robert Jordan cried, trying to stand and falling back again.

Rat-tat. Rat-tat-tat, sang the rifles behind them.

Ruperto and his big woman spoke to their horses and they were gone. So too the flat-faced Indians. Only the old man lingered a moment. Just before he lashed his horse and disappeared, he leaned down in the saddle and gave Robert Jordan a wistful look. “Leche,” he said, abbreviating the curse, “but isn’t war a bitch.”

H AL HAD KNOWN Rob and Irene, Jill, Harvey, Tootle, and Pesky since elementary school, and they were all forty going on sixty.

Rob and Irene had been high-school sweethearts, and now, after quitting their tenured teaching jobs, they brokered babies for childless couples like themselves. They regularly flew to Calcutta, Bahrain, and Sarawak to bring back the crumpled brown-faced little sacks of bones they located for the infertile wives of dry cleaners and accountants. Though they wouldn’t admit it, they’d voted for Ronald Reagan.

Jill had a certain fragile beauty about her. She’d gone into a Carmelite nunnery after the obloquy of high school and the unrequited love she bore for Harvey, who at the time was hot for Tootle. She lived just up the street from Rob and Irene, in her late mother’s house, and she’d given up the nun’s life twelve years earlier to have carnal relations with a Safeway butcher named Eugene, who left her with a blind spot in one eye, a permanent limp, and triplets.

Harvey had been a high-school lacrosse star who quit college to join the Marines, acquiring a reputation for ferocity and selfless bravery during the three weeks he fought at Da Nang before taking thirty-seven separate bayonet wounds in his legs, chest, buttocks, and feet. He was bald and bloated, a brooding semi-invalid addicted to Quaalude, Tuinol, aspirin, cocaine, and jack Daniel’s, and he lived in the basement of his parents’ house, eating little and saying less. He despised Hal, Rob and Irene, Jill, Tootle, and Pesky because they hadn’t taken thirty-seven bayonet wounds each and because they were communists and sellouts.

Tootle had been a cover girl; a macrobiot; the campaign manager for a presidential candidate from Putnam Valley, New York, who promised to push through legislation to animate all TV news features; and, finally, an environmentalist who spent all her waking hours writing broadsides for the Marshwort Preservationists’ League. She was having an off/on relationship with an Italian race-car driver named Enzo.

Pesky was assistant manager of Frampold’s LiquorMart, twice divorced and the father of a fourteen-year-old serial murderer whose twelve adult male victims all resembled Pesky in coloring, build, and style of dress.

And Hal? Hal was home from California. For his birthday.

Jill hosted the party. She had to. The triplets — Steve, Stevie, and Steven, now seven, seven, and seven, respectively — were hyperactive, antisocial, and twice as destructive as Hitler’s Panzer Corps. She hadn’t been able to get a baby-sitter for them since they learned to crawl. “All right,” Hal had said to her on the phone, “your house then. Seven o’clock. Radical. Really.” And then he hung up, thinking of the dingy cavern of her mother’s house, with its stained wallpaper, battered furniture, and howling drafts, and of the mortified silence that would fall over the gang when they swung by to pick up Jill on a Friday night and Mrs. Morlock — that big-bottomed, horse-toothed parody of Jill — would insist they come in for hot chocolate. But no matter. At least the place was big.

As it turned out, Hal was two hours late. He was from California, after all, and this was his party. He hadn’t seen any of these people in what — six years now? — and there was no way he was going to be cheated out of his grand entrance. At seven he pulled a pair of baggy parachute pants over his pink hightops, stuck a gold marijuana-leaf stud through the hole in his left earlobe, wriggled into an Ozzie Osbourne Barf Tour T-shirt though it was twenty-six degrees out and driving down sleet, and settled into the Barcalounger in which his deceased dad had spent the last two-thirds of his life. He sipped Scotch, watched the TV blip rhythmically, and listened to his own sad old failing mom dodder on about the Jell-O mold she’d bought for Mrs. Herskowitz across the street. Then, when he was good and ready, he got up, slicked back his thinning, two-tone, forty-year-old hair that looked more and more like mattress stuffing every day, shrugged into his trenchcoat, and slammed out into the storm.