T. Boyle - If the River Was Whiskey

It was in the flush of his success, when he had everything he’d ever wanted — the yacht, the sweet and compliant young mistress, the pair of Rolls Corniches, and the houses in the Bahamas, and Aspen, not to mention the new wing he’d added to the old homestead in Beechwood — that Irv began to have second thoughts about the deal he’d made. Eternity was a long time, yes, but when he’d met the stranger in the woods that night it had seemed a long way off too. Now he was in his fifties, heavier than ever, with soaring blood pressure and flat feet, and the end of his career in this vale of profits was drawing uncomfortably near. It was only natural that he should begin to cast about for a loophole.

And so it was that he returned to the church — not the Roman church, to which he’d belonged as a boy, but the Church of the Open Palm, Reverend Jimmy, Pastor. He came to Reverend Jimmy one rainy winter night with a fire in his gut and an immortal longing in his heart. He sat through a three-hour service in which Reverend Jimmy spat fire, spoke in tongues, healed the lame, and lectured on the sanctity of the one and only God — profit — and then distributed copies of the Reverend Jimmy Church-Sponsored Investment Guide with the chili and barbecue recipes on the back page.

After the service, Irv found his way to Reverend Jimmy’s office at the back of the church. He waited his turn among the other supplicants with growing impatience, but he reminded himself that the way to salvation lay through humility and forbearance. At long last he was ushered into the presence of the Reverend himself. “What can I do for you, brother?” Reverend Jimmy asked. Though he was from Staten Island, Reverend Jimmy spoke in the Alabama hog-farmer’s dialect peculiar to his tribe.

“I need help, Reverend,” Irv confessed, flinging himself down on a leather sofa worn smooth by the buttocks of the faithful.

Reverend Jimmy made a small pyramid of his fingers and leaned back in his adjustable chair. He was a youngish man — no older than thirty-five or so, Irv guessed — and he was dressed in a flannel shirt, penny loafers, and a plaid fishing hat that masked his glassy blue eyes. “Speak to me, brother,” he said.

Irv looked down at the floor, then shot a quick glance round the office — an office uncannily like his own, right down to the computer terminal, mahogany desk, and potted palms — and then whispered, “You’re probably not going to believe this.”

Reverend Jimmy lit himself a cigarette and shook out the match with a snap of his wrist. “Try me,” he drawled.

When Irv had finished pouring out his heart, Reverend Jimmy leaned forward with a beatific smile on his face. “Brother,” he said, “believe me, your story’s nothin’ new — I handle just as bad and sometimes worser ever day. Cheer up, brother: salvation is on the way!”

Then Reverend Jimmy made a number of pointed inquiries into Irv’s financial status and fixed the dollar amount of his tithe — to be paid weekly in small bills, no checks please. Next, with a practiced flourish, he produced a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations , the text of which was interspersed with biblical quotes in support of its guiding theses, and pronounced Irv saved. “You got your holy book,” the Reverend Jimmy boomed as Irv ducked gratefully out the door, “—y’all keep it with you every day, through sleet and snow and dark of night, and old Satan he’ll be paarless against you.”

And so it was. Irv gained in years and gained in wealth. He tithed the Church of the Open Palm, and he kept the holy book with him at all times. One day, just after his sixtieth birthday, his son Shane came to the house to see him. It was a Sunday and the market was closed, but after an early-morning dalliance with Sushoo, his adept and oracular mistress, he’d placed a half dozen calls to Hong Kong, betting on an impending monsoon in Burma to drive the price of rice through the ceiling. He was in the Blue Room, as he liked to call the salon in the west wing, eating a bit of poached salmon and looking over a coded letter from Butram, his deep man in the SEC. The holy book lay on the desk beside him.

Shane was a bloated young lout in his late twenties, a sorrowful, shameless leech who’d flunked out of half a dozen schools and had never held a job in his life — unlike Morgan, who’d parlayed the small stake his father had given him into the biggest used-car dealership in the country. Unwashed, unshaven, the gut he’d inherited from his father peeping out from beneath a Hawaiian shirt so lurid it looked as if it had been used to stanch wounds at the emergency ward, Shane loomed over his father’s desk. “I need twenty big ones,” he grunted, giving his father a look of beery disdain. “Bad week at the track.”

Irv looked up from his salmon and saw Tish’s nose, Tish’s eyes, saw the greedy, worthless, contemptible slob his son had become. In a sudden rage he shot from the chair and hammered the desk so hard the plate jumped six inches. “I’ll be damned if I give you another cent,” he roared.

Just then there was a knock at the door. His face contorted with rage, Irv shoved past his son and stormed across the room, a curse on his lips for Magdalena, the maid, who should have known better than to bother him at a time like this. He tore open the door only to find that it wasn’t Magdalena at all, but his acquaintance of long ago, the big black man with the wild mane of hair and the vague odor of stir-fry on his clothes. “Time’s up, Irv,” the big man said gruffly. In vain did Irv look over his shoulder to where the Reverend Jimmy’s holy book sat forlorn on the desk beside the plate of salmon that was already growing cold. The big man took his arm in a grip of steel and whisked him through the hallway, down the stairs, and out across the lawn to where a black BMW with smoked windows sat running at the curb. Irv turned his pale fleshy face to the house and saw his son staring down at him from above, and then the big man laid an implacable hand on his shoulder and shoved him into the car.

The following day, of course, as is usual in these cases, all of Irv’s liquid assets — his stocks and bonds, his Swiss and Bahamian bankbooks, even the wads of new-minted hundred-dollar bills he kept stashed in safe-deposit boxes all over the country — turned to cinders. Almost simultaneously, the house was gutted by a fire of mysterious origin, and both Rolls-Royces were destroyed. Joe Luck, who shuffled out on his lawn in a silk dressing gown at the height of the blaze, claimed to have seen a great black bird emerge from the patch of woods behind the house and mount into the sky high above the roiling billows of steam and smoke, but for some reason, no one else seemed to have shared his vision.

The big refurbished house on Beechwood Drive has a new resident now, a corporate lawyer by the name of O’Faolain. If he’s bothered by the unfortunate history of the place — or even, for that matter, aware of it — no one can say. He knows his immediate neighbors as the Chinks, the Fat Family, and the Turf Builders. They know him as the Shyster.

T HERE THEY ARE, the holybugs, widows in their weeds and fat-ankled mothers with palsied children, all lined up before the snotgreen likeness of the Virgin, and McGahee and McCarey among them. This statue, alone among all the myriad three-foot-high snotgreen likenesses of the Virgin cast in plaster by Finnbar Finnegan & Sons, Cork City, was seen one grim March afternoon some years back to move its limbs ever so slightly, as if seized suddenly by the need of a good sinew-cracking stretch. Nuala Nolan, a young girl in the throes of Lenten abnegation, was the only one to witness the movement — a gentle beckoning of the statue’s outthrust hand — after a fifteen-day vigil during which she took nothing into her body but Marmite and soda water. Ever since, the place has been packed with tourists.