T. Boyle - If the River Was Whiskey

With a curse, Irv trundled down the hill and pushed his way through the mounds of cuttings the gardener had piled up like breastworks at the edge of the woods and a moment later found himself in the hushed and shadowy stand of beeches. An odor of slow rot assaulted his nostrils. Crickets chirruped. There was no sign of the ball. He was kicking aimlessly through the leaves, all but certain it was gone for good — two and a half bucks down the drain — when he was startled by a noise from the gloom up ahead.

Something — or someone — was coming toward him, a presence announced by the crush of brittle leaves and the hiss of uncut grass. “Who is it?” he demanded, and the crickets fell silent. “Is someone there?”

The shape of a man began to emerge gradually from the shadows — head and shoulders first, then a torso that kept getting bigger. And bigger. His skin was dark — so dark Irv at first took him to be a Negro — and a wild feral shock of hair stood up jaggedly from his crown like the mane of a hyena. The man said nothing.

Irv was not easily daunted. He believed in the Darwinian struggle, believed, against all signs to the contrary, that he’d risen to the top of the pack and that the choicest morsels of the feast of life were his for the taking. And though he wasn’t nearly the bruiser he’d been when he started at nose tackle for Fox Lane High, he was used to wielding his paunch like a weapon and blustering his way through practically anything, from a potential mugging right on down to putting a snooty maître d’ in his place. For all that, though, when he saw the size of the man, when he factored in his complexion and considered the oddness of the circumstances, he felt uncertain of himself. Felt as if the parameters of the world as he knew it had suddenly shifted. Felt, unaccountably, that he was in deep trouble. Characteristically, he fell back on bluster. “Who in hell are you?” he demanded.

The stranger, he now saw, wasn’t black at all. Or, rather, he wasn’t a Negro, as he’d first supposed, but something else altogether. Swarthy, that’s what he was. Like a Sicilian or a Greek. Or maybe an Arab. He saw too that the man was dressed almost identically to himself, in a Lacoste shirt, plaid slacks, and white Adidas. But this was no golf club dangling from the stranger’s fingertips — it was a chainsaw. “Hell?” the big man echoed, his voice starting down low and then rising in mockery. “I don’t believe it. Did you actually say ‘Who in hell are you?’?” He began to laugh in a shallow, breathy, and decidedly unsettling way.

It was getting darker by the minute, the trunks of the trees receding into the shadows, stars dimly visible now in the dome of the sky. There was a distant sound of fireworks and a sharp sudden smell of gunpowder on the air. “Are you…are you somebody’s gardener or something?” Irv asked, glancing uncomfortably at the chainsaw.

This got the stranger laughing so hard he had to pound his breastbone and wipe the tears from his eyes. “Gardener?” he hooted, stamping around in the undergrowth and clutching his sides with the sheer hilarity of it. “You’ve got to be kidding. Come on, tell me you’re kidding.”

Irv felt himself growing annoyed. “I mean, because if you’re not,” he said, struggling to control his voice, “then I want to know what you’re doing back here with that saw. This is private property, you know.”

Abruptly, the big man stopped laughing. When he spoke, all trace of amusement had faded from his voice. “Oh?” he growled. “And just who does it belong to, then — it wouldn’t be yours, by any chance, would it?”

It wasn’t. As Irv well knew. In fact, he’d done a little title-searching six months back, when Tish had wanted to mow down the beeches and put in an ornamental koi pond with little pink bridges and mechanical waterfalls. The property, useless as it was, belonged to the old bird next door—“the Geek” was the only name Irv knew him by. Irv thought of bluffing, but the look in the stranger’s eye made him think better of it. “It belongs to the old guy next door — Beltzer, I think his name is. Bitzer. Something like that.”

The stranger was smiling now, but the smile wasn’t a comforting one. “I see,” he said. “So I guess you’re trespassing too.”

Irv had had enough. “We’ll let the police decide that,” he snapped, turning to stalk back up the lawn.

“Hey, Irv,” the stranger said suddenly, “don’t get huffy — old man Belcher won’t be needing this plot anymore. You can hide all the golf balls you want down here.”

The gloom thickened. Somewhere a dog began to howl. Irv felt the tight hairs at the base of his neck begin to stiffen. “How do you know my name?” he said, whirling around. “And how do you know what Belcher needs or doesn’t need?” All of a sudden, Irv had the odd feeling that he’d seen this stranger somewhere before — real estate, wasn’t it?

“Because he’ll be dead five minutes from now, that’s how.” The big man let out a disgusted sigh. “Let’s quit pissing around here — you know damn well who I am, Irv.” He paused. “October twenty-two, 1955, Our Lady of the Immaculate Heart Church in Mount Kisco. Monsignor O’Kane. The topic is the transubstantiation of the flesh and you’re screwing around with Alfred LaFarga in the back pew, talking ‘Saturday Night Creature Features.’ ‘Did you see it when the mummy pulled that guy’s eyes out?’ you whispered. Alfred was this ratty little clown, looked like his shoulders were going to fall through his chest — now making a killing in grain futures in Des Moines, by the way — and he says, ‘That wasn’t his eye, shit-for-brains, it was his tongue.’”

Irv was stunned. Shocked silent for maybe the first time in his life. He’d seen it all, yes — but not this. It was incredible, it really was.. He’d given up on all that God and Devil business the minute he left parochial school — no percentage in it — and now here it was, staring him in the face. It took him about thirty seconds to reinvent the world, and then he was thinking there might just be something in it for him. “All right,” he said, “all right, yeah, I know who you are. Question is, what do you want with me?”

The stranger’s face was consumed in shadow now, but Irv could sense that he was grinning. “Smart, Irv,” the big man said, all the persuasion of a born closer creeping into his voice. “What’s in it for me, right? Let’s make a deal, right? The wife isn’t working, the kids need designer jeans, PCs, and dirt bikes, and the mortgage has you on the run, am I right?”

He was right — of course he was right. How many times, bullying some loser over the phone or wheedling a few extra bucks out of some grasping old hag’s retirement account, had Irv wondered if it was all worth it? How many times had he shoved his way through a knot of pink-haired punks on the subway only to get home all the sooner to his wife’s nagging and his sons’ pale, frightened faces? How many times had he told himself he deserved more, much more — ease and elegance, regular visits to the track and the Caribbean, his own firm, the two or maybe three million he needed to bail himself out for good? He folded his arms. The stranger, suddenly, was no more disturbing than sweet-faced Ben Franklin gazing up benevolently from a mountain of C-notes. “Talk to me,” Irv said.

The big man took him by the arm and leaned forward to whisper in his ear. He wanted the usual deal, nothing less, and he held out to Irv the twin temptations of preternatural business success and filthy lucre. The lucre was buried right there in that shabby patch of woods, a hoard of Krugerrands, bullion, and silver candlesticks socked away by old man Belcher as a hedge against runaway inflation. The business success would result from the collusion of his silent partner — who was leaning into him now and giving off an odor oddly like that of a Szechuan kitchen — and it would take that initial stake and double and redouble it till it grew beyond counting. “What do you say, Irv?” the stranger crooned.