T. Boyle - If the River Was Whiskey

There were two inches of glare ice on the road. Hal thumped his mother’s stuttering Oldsmobile from tree to tree, went into a 180-degree spin, and schussed down Jill’s driveway, narrowly avoiding the denuded azalea bush, three Flexible Flyers, and a staved-in Renault on blocks. He licked his fingertips and smoothed down his sideburns on the doorstep, knocked perfunctorily, and entered, grinning, in all his exotic, fair-haired, California glory. Unfortunately, the effect was wasted — no one but Jill was there. Hunched in the corner of a gutted sofa, she smiled wanly from behind a mound of soggy Fritos and half a gallon of California dip. “Hi,” she said in a voice of dole, “they’re coming, they’re coming.” Then she winked her bad eye at him and limped across the room to stick her tongue in his mouth.

She was clinging to him, licking at his mustache and telling him about her bout with breast cancer, when the doorbell rang and Rob and Irene came hurtling into the room shrieking “My God, look at you!” They were late, they screamed, because the baby-sitter never showed for their daughter, Soukamathandravaki, whose frightened little face peered in out of the night behind them.

An instant later, Harvey swung furiously up the walk on his silver crutches, Tootle and Pesky staggered in together with reddened noses and dilated pupils, and Steve, Stevie, and Steven emerged from the back of the house on their minibikes to pop wheelies in the middle of the room. The party was on.

“So,” Harvey snarled, fencing Hal into the corner with the gleaming shafts of his crutches, “they tell me you’re doing pretty good out there, huh, bub?”

Pesky and Tootle were standing beside him, grinning till Hal thought their lips would dry out and stick to their teeth, and Pesky had his arm around Tootle’s shoulder. “Me?” Hal said, with a modest shrug. “Well, since you ask, my agent did say that—”

Harvey cut him off, turning to Pesky with a wild leer and shouting, “So how’s the kid, what’s his name — Damian?”

Dead silence fell over the room.

Rob and Irene froze, clutching Dixie cups of purple passion to their chests, and Jill, who’d been opening their eyes to the in-fighting, petty abuses, and catastrophic outrages of the food-stamp office where she worked, caught her tongue. Even Steve, Stevie, and Steven snapped to attention. They’d been playfully binding little Soukamathandravaki to one of the dining-room chairs with electrical tape, but at the mention of Damian, they looked round them in unison and vanished.

“You son of a bitch,” Pesky said, his fingers dug so deep in Tootle’s shoulder his knuckles went white. “You crippled fascist Marine Corps burnout.”

Harvey jerked his big head to one side and spat on the floor. “What’d they give him, life plus a hundred and fifty years? Or’d they send him to Matteawan?”.

“Hey,” Irene shouted, a desperate keening edge to her voice, “hey, do you guys remember all those wild pranks we used to pull back in high school?” She tore across the room, waving her Dixie cup. “Like, like when we smeared that black stuff on our faces and burned the Jewish star on Dr. Rosenbaum’s front lawn?”

Everyone ignored her.

“Harv,” Hal said, reaching out to take his arm, but Harvey jerked violently away—“Get your stinking hands off me!” he roared — before he lost his balance and fell with a sad clatter of aluminum into the California dip.

“Serves you right, you bitter son of a bitch,” Pesky growled, standing over him as if they’d just gone fifteen rounds. “The crippled war hero. Why don’t you show us your scars, huh?”

“Pesky,” Hal hissed, “leave it, will you?”

Rob and Irene were trying to help Harvey to his feet, but he fought them off, sobbing with rage. There was California dip on the collar of his campaign jacket. Hairless and pale, with his quivering jowls and splayed legs, he looked like a monstrous baby dropped there on the rug.

“Or the time Pesky ran up in front of Mrs. Gold’s class in the third grade and blew on his thumb till he passed out, remember that?” Irene was saying, when the room was rent by a violent, predatory shriek, as if someone had torn a hawk in half. It was Tootle. She twisted out from under Pesky’s arm and slammed her little white fist into his kidney. “You,” she sputtered, “who are you to talk, lording it over Harvey as if he was some kind of criminal or something. At least he fought for his country. What’d you do, huh?” Her eyes were swollen. There was a froth of saliva caught in the corner of her mouth.

Pesky swung around. He was wearing his trademark Levi’s — jeans, jacket, sweatshirt, socks, and big-buckled belt. If only they made shoes, he used to say. “Yeah, yeah, tell us about it,” he sneered, “you little whore. Peddling your ass just like—”

“Canada, that’s what you did about it. Like a typical wimp.”

“Hey, hold on,” Hal said, lurching out of the corner in his parachute pants, “I don’t believe this. We all tried to get out of it — it was a rotten war, an illegal war, Nixon’s and Johnson’s war — what’s the matter with you? Don’t you remember?”

“The marches,” Irene said.

“The posters,” Rob joined in.

“A cheap whore, that’s all. Cover girl, my ass.”

“Shut up!” Tootle shrieked, turning on Hal. “You’re just as bad as Pesky. Worse. You’re a hypocrite. At least he knows he’s a piece of shit.” She threw back a cup of purple passion and leveled her green-eyed glare on him. “And you think you’re so high and mighty, out there in Hollywood — well, la-de-da, that’s what I say.”

“He’s an artist,” Harvey said from the floor. “He co-wrote the immortal script for the ‘Life with Beanie’ show.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you too.”

And then suddenly, as if it signaled a visitation from another realm, there was the deep-throated cough of a precision engine in the driveway, a sputter and its dying fall. As one, the seven friends turned to the door. There was a thump. A knock— dat dat-dat-dat da. And then: “Allo, allo, anybody is home?”

It was Enzo. Tall, noble, with the nose of an emperor and a weave of silver in his hair so rich it might have been hammered from the mother lode itself. He was dressed in a coruscating jumpsuit with Pennzoil and Pirelli patches across the shoulder and chest, and he held his crash helmet in his hand. “Baby,” he said, crossing the room in two strides and taking Tootle in his arms, “ciao.”

No one moved. No one said a thing.

“Beech of a road,” Enzo said. “Ice, you know.” Outside, through the open door, the sleek low profile of his Lazaretto 2200 Pinin Farina coupe was visible, the windshield plated with ice, sleet driving down like straight pins. “Tooka me seventeen and a half minutes from La Guardia — a beech, huh? But baby, at least I’m here.”

He looked round him, as if seeing the others for the first time, and then, without a word, crossed the room to the stereo, ran a quick finger along the spines of the albums, and flipped a black platter from its jacket as casually as if he were flipping pizzas in Napoli. He dropped the stylus, and as the room filled with music, he began to move his hips and mime the words: “Oooh-oooh, I heard it through the grapevine.…”

Marvin Gaye. Delectable, smooth, icy cool, ancient.

Pesky reached down to help Harvey from the floor. Jill took Hal’s arm. Rob and Irene began to snap their fingers and Enzo swung Tootle out into the middle of the floor.

They danced till they dropped.

I N THE MAIL that morning there were two solicitations for life insurance, a coupon from the local car wash promising a “100 % Brushless Wash,” four bills, three advertising flyers, and a death threat from his ex-son, Anthony. Anthony had used green ink, the cyclonic scrawl of his longhand lifting off into the loops, lassos, and curlicues of heavy weather aloft, and his message was the same as usual: I eat the royal jelly. I sting and you die. Bzzzzzzzz. Pat too, the bitch. He hadn’t bothered to sign it.