T. Boyle - If the River Was Whiskey

Irv said nothing. He was no fool. Poker face, he told himself. Never look eager. “I got to think about it,” he said. He was wondering vaguely if he could rent a metal detector or something and kiss the creep off. “Give me twenty-four hours.”

The big man drew away from him. “Hmph,” he grunted contemptuously. “You think I come around every day? This is the deal of a lifetime I’m talking here, Irv.” He paused a moment to let this sink in. “You don’t want it, I can always go to Joe Luck across the street over there.”

Irv was horrified. “You mean the Chinks?”

At that moment the porch light winked on in the house behind them. The yellowish light caught the big man’s face, bronzing it like a statue. He nodded. “Import/export. Joe’s got connections with the big boys in Taiwan — and believe me, it isn’t just backscratchers he’s bringing in in those crates. But I happen to know he’s hard up for capital right now, and I think he’d jump at the chance—”

Irv cut him off. “Okay, okay,” he said. “But how do I know you’re the real thing? I mean, what proof do I have? Anybody could’ve talked to Alfred LaFarga.”

The big man snorted. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he fired up the chainsaw. Rrrrrrrrrrow , it sang as he turned to the nearest tree and sent it home. Chips and sawdust flew off into the darkness as he guided the saw up and down, back and across, carving something in the bark, some message. Irv edged forward. Though the light was bad, he could just make out the jagged uppercase B , and then the E that followed it. When the big man reached the L , Irv anticipated him, but waited, arms folded, for the sequel. The stranger spelled out BELCHER, then sliced into the base of the tree; in the next moment the tree was toppling into the gloom with a shriek of clawing branches.

Irv waited till the growl of the saw died to a sputter. “Yeah?” he said. “So what does that prove?”

The big man merely grinned, his face hideous in the yellow light. Then he reached out and pressed his thumb to Irv’s forehead and Irv could hear the sizzle and feel the sting of his own flesh burning. “There’s my mark,” the stranger said. “Tomorrow night, seven o’clock. Don’t be late.” And then he strode off into the shadows, the great hulk of him halved in an instant, and then halved again, as if he were sinking down into the earth itself.

The first thing Tish said to him as he stepped in the door was “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been shouting myself hoarse. There’s an ambulance out front of the neighbor’s place.”

Irv shoved past her and parted the living-room curtains. Sure enough, there it was, red lights revolving and casting an infernal glow over the scene. There were voices, shouts, a flurry of people clustered round a stretcher and a pair of quick-legged men in hospital whites. “It’s nothing,” he said, a savage joy rising in his chest — it was true, true after all, and he was going to be rich—“just the old fart next door kicking off.”

Tish gave him a hard look. She was a year younger than he — his college sweetheart, in fact — but she’d let herself go. She wasn’t so much obese as muscular, big, broad-beamed — every inch her husband’s match. “What’s that on your forehead?” she asked, her voice pinched with suspicion.

He lifted his hand absently to the spot. The flesh seemed rough and abraded, raised in an annealed disc the size of a quarter. “Oh, this?” he said, feigning nonchalance. “Hit my head on the barbecue.”

She was having none of it. With a move so sudden it would have surprised a cat, she shot forward and seized his arm. “And what’s that I smell — Chinese food?” Her eyes leapt at him; her jaw clenched. “I suppose the enchiladas weren’t good enough for you, huh?”

He jerked his arm away. “Oh, yeah, I know — you really slaved over those enchiladas, didn’t you? Christ, you might have chipped a nail or something tearing the package open and shoving them in the microwave.”

“Don’t give me that shit,” she snarled, snatching his arm back and digging her nails in for emphasis. “The mark on your head, the Chinese food, that stupid grin on your face when you saw the ambulance — I know you. Something’s up, isn’t it?” She clung to his arm like some inescapable force of nature, like the tar in the La Brea pits or the undertow at Rockaway Beach. “Isn’t it?”

Irv Cherniske was not a man to confide in his wife. He regarded marriage as an arbitrary and essentially adversarial relationship, akin to the yoking of prisoners on the chain gang. But this once, because the circumstances were so arresting and the stranger’s proposal so unique (not to mention final), he relented and let her in on his secret.

At first, she wouldn’t believe it. It was another of his lies, he was covering something up— devils: did he think she was born yesterday? But when she saw how solemn he was, how shaken, how feverish with lust over the prospect of laying his hands on the loot, she began to come around. By midnight she was urging him to go back and seal the bargain. “You fool. You idiot. What do you need twenty-four hours for? Go. Go now.”

Though Irv had every intention of doing just that — in his own time, of course — he wasn’t about to let her push him into anything. “You think I’m going to damn myself forever just to please you?” he sneered.

Tish took it for half a beat, then she sprang up from the sofa as if it were electrified. “All right,” she snapped. “I’ll find the son of a bitch myself and we’ll both roast — but I tell you I want those Krugerrands and all the rest of it too. And I want it now.”

A moment later, she was gone — out the back door and into the soft suburban night. Let her go, Irv thought in disgust, but despite himself he sat back to wait for her. For better than an hour he sat there in his mortgaged living room, dreaming of crushing his enemies and ascending the high-flown corridors of power, envisioning the cut-glass decanter in the bar of the Rolls and breakfast on the yacht, but at last he found himself nodding and decided to call it a day. He rose, stretched, and then padded through the dining room and kitchen to the back porch. He swung open the door and halfheartedly called his wife’s name. There was no answer. He shrugged, retraced his steps, and wearily mounted the stairs to the bedroom: devil or no devil, he had a train to catch in the morning.

Tish was sullen at breakfast. She looked sorrowful and haggard and there were bits of twig and leaf caught in her hair. The boys bent silently over their caramel crunchies, waiflike in the khaki jerseys and oversized shorts they wore to camp. Irv studied his watch while gulping coffee. “Well,” he said, addressing his stone-faced wife, “any luck?”

At first she wouldn’t answer him. And when she did, it was in a voice so constricted with rage she sounded as if she were being throttled. Yes, she’d found the sorry son of a bitch, all right — after traipsing all over hell and back for half the night — and after all that he’d had the gall to turn his back on her. He wasn’t in the mood, he said. But if she were to come back at noon with a peace offering — something worth talking about, something to show she was serious — he’d see what he could do for her. That’s how he’d put it.

For a moment Irv was seized with jealousy and resentment-was she trying to cut him out, was that it? — but then he remembered how the stranger had singled him out, had come to him, and he relaxed. He had nothing to worry about. It was Tish. She just didn’t know how to bargain, that was all. Her idea of a give and take was to reiterate her demands, over and over, each time in a shriller tone than the last. She’d probably pushed and pushed till even the devil wouldn’t have her. “I’ll be home early,” he said, and then he was driving through a soft misting rain to the station.