T. Boyle - If the River Was Whiskey

“Rotten as your soul,” the statue says.

McGahee, still on his knees, begins to blubber. Meaningless slips of apology issue from his lips—“I didn’t mean…it wasn’t…how could I know?”—when all of a sudden the statue shouts “Drugs!” with a voice of iron.

Immediately the scene changes. The vats are gone, replaced with bales of marijuana, jars of pills in every color imaginable, big, overbrimming tureens of white powder, a drugstore display of airplane glue. In the background, grinning Laotians, Peruvian peasants with hundreds of scrawny children propped like puppets on their shoulders.

“But, but—” McGahee stutters, rising to his feet to protest, but the statue doesn’t give him a chance, won’t, can’t, and the stentorian voice — his wife’s, his mother’s, no one’s and everyone’s, he even detects a trace of his high-school principal’s in there — the stentorian voice booms: “Sins of the Flesh!”

He blinks his eyes and the Turks and their bales are gone. The backdrop now is foggy and obscure, dim as the mists of memory. The statue is silent. Gradually the poor sinner becomes aware of a salacious murmur, an undercurrent of moaning and panting, and the lubricious thwack and whap of the act itself. “Davey,” a girl’s voice calls, tender, pubescent, “I’m scared.” And then his own voice, bland and reassuring: “I won’t stick it in, Cindy, I won’t, I swear…or maybe, maybe just…just an inch.…”

The mist lifts and there they are, in teddies and negligees, in garter belts and sweat socks, naked and wet and kneading their breasts like dough. “Davey,” they moan, “oh, Davey, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” and he knows them all, from Cindy Lou Harris and Betsy Butler in the twelfth grade to Fredda in her youth and the sad and ugly faces of his one-night stands and chance encounters, right on up to the bug-eyed woman with the doleful breasts he’d diddled in the rest room on the way out from Kennedy. And worse. Behind them, milling around in a mob that stretches to the horizon, are all the women and girls he’d ever lusted after, even for a second, the twitching behinds and airy bosoms he’d stopped to admire on the street, the legs he’d wanted to stroke and lips to press to his own: McCarey’s wife, Beatrice, is there and Fred Dolby’s thirteen-year-old daughter, the woman with the freckled bosom who used to sunbathe in the tiger-skin bikini next door when they lived in Irvington, the girl from the typing pool, and the outrageous little shaven-headed vixen from Domino’s Pizza. And as if that weren’t enough, there’s the crowd from books and films too. Linda Lovelace, Sophia Loren, Emma Bovary, the Sabine women and Lot’s wife, even Virginia Woolf with her puckered foxy face and the eyes that seem to beg for a good slap on the bottom. It’s too much — all of them murmuring his name like a crazed chorus of Molly Blooms, and yes, she’s there too — and the mob behind him hissing, hissing.

He glances at the statue. The plaster lip curls in disgust, the adamantine hand rises and falls, and the women vanish. “Gluttony!” howls the Virgin and all at once he’s surrounded by forlornly mooing herds of cattle, sad-eyed pigs and sheep, funereal geese and clucking ducks, a spill of scuttling crabs and claw-waving lobsters, even the odd dog or two he’d inadvertently wolfed down in Tijuana burritos and Cantonese stir-fry. And the scales — scales the size of the Washington Monument — sunk under pyramids of ketchup, peanut butter, tortilla chips, truckloads of potatoes, onions, avocados, peppermint candies and after-dinner mints, half-eaten burgers and fork-scattered peas, the whole slithering wasteful cornucopia of his secret and public devouring. “Moooooo,” accuse the cows. “Stinker!” “Pig!” “Glutton!” cry voices from the crowd.

Prostrate now, the cattle hanging over him, letting loose with their streams of urine and clots of dung, McGahee shoves his fists into his eyes and cries out for mercy. But there is no mercy. The statue, wicked and glittering, its tiny twisted features clenching and unclenching like the balls of its fists, announces one after another the unremitting parade of his sins: “Insults to Humanity, False Idols, Sloth, Unclean Thoughts, The Kicking of Dogs and Cheating at Cards!”

His head reels. He won’t look. The voices cry out in hurt and laceration and he feels the very ground give way beneath him. The rest, mercifully, is a blank.

When he comes to, muttering in protest—“False idols, I mean like an autographed picture of Mickey Mantle, for christ’s sake?”—he finds himself in a cramped mud-and-wattle hut that reeks of goat dung and incense. By the flickering glow of a bank of votary candles, he can make out the bowed and patchy head of Nuala Nolan. Outside it is dark and the rain drives down with a hiss. For a long moment, McGahee lies there, studying the fleshless form of the girl, her bones sharp and sepulchral in the quavering light. He feels used up, burned out, feels as if he’s been cored like an apple. His head screams. His throat is dry. His bladder is bursting.

He pushes himself up and the bony demi-saint levels her tranced gaze on him. “Hush,” she says, and the memory of all that’s happened washes over him like a typhoon.

“How long have I—?”

“Two days.” Her voice is a reverent whisper, the murmur of the acolyte, the apostle. “They say the Pope himself is on the way.”

“The Pope?” McGahee feels a long shiver run through him.

Nods the balding death’s-head. The voice is dry as husks, wheezy, but a girl’s voice all the same, and an enthusiast’s. “They say it’s the greatest vision vouchsafed to man since the time of Christ. Two hundred and fifteen people witnessed it, every glorious moment, from the cask of gin to the furtive masturbation to the ace up the sleeve.” She’s leaning over him now, inching forward on all fours, her breath like chopped meat gone bad in the refrigerator; he can see, through the tattered shirt, where her breasts used to be. “Look,” she whispers, gesturing toward the hunched low entranceway.

He looks and the sudden light dazzles him. Blinking in wonder, he creeps to the crude doorway and peers out. Immediately a murmur goes up from the crowd — hundreds upon hundreds of them gathered in the rain on their knees — and an explosion of flash cameras blinds him. Beyond the crowd he can make out a police cordon, vans and video cameras, CBS, BBC, KDOG, and NPR, a face above a trenchcoat that could only belong to Dan Rather himself. “Holy of holies!” cries a voice from the front of the mob — he knows that voice — and the crowd takes it up in a chant that breaks off into the Lord’s Prayer. Stupefied, he wriggles out of the hut and stands, bathed in light. It’s McCarey there before him, reaching out with a hundred others to embrace his ankles, kiss his feet, tear with trembling devoted fingers at his Levi’s and Taiwanese tweed — Michael McCarey, adulterer, gambler, drunk and atheist, cheater of the IRS and bane of the Major Deegan — hunkered down in the rain like a holy supplicant. And there, not thirty feet away, is the statue, lit like Betelgeuse and as inanimate and snotgreen as a stone of the sea.

Rain pelts McGahee’s bare head and the chill seizes him like a claw jerking hard and sudden at the ruined ancient priest-ridden superstitious root of him. The flashbulbs pop in his face, a murmur of Latin assaults his ears, Sister Mary Magdalen’s unyielding face rises before him out of the dim mists of eighth-grade math…and then the sudden imperious call of nature blinds him to all wonder and he’s staggering round back of the hut to relieve himself of his two days’ accumulation of salts and uric acid and dregs of whiskey. Stumbling, fumbling for his zipper, the twin pains in his groin like arrows driven through him, he jerks out his poor pud and lets fly.