T. Boyle: If the River Was Whiskey

“Funny thing,” Uncle Dagoberto said, “there are some shoes here, in the customs warehouse — fine Italian shoes, the finest, thirty thousand in a single lot — and no one has claimed them. Can you imagine that?”

There was such joy in his tone that I couldn’t resist playing out the game with him. “There must be something wrong with them,” I said.

I could picture his grin. “Nothing, nothing at all. If you’re one-legged.”

That was two years ago.

Today, Uncle Dagoberto is the undisputed shoe king of our city. He made such a killing on that one deal that he was able to buy his way into the cartel that “advises” the government. He has a title now — Undersecretary for International Trade — and a vast, brightly lit office in the President’s palace.

I’ve changed too, though I still live with my mother on La Calle Verdad and I still attend the university. My shoes — I have some thirty pairs now, in every style and color those clever Italians have been able to devise — are the envy of all, and no small attraction to the nubile and status-hungry young women of the city. I no longer study semantics, hermeneutics, and the deconstruction of deconstruction, but have instead been pursuing a degree in business. It only makes sense. After all, the government doesn’t seem half so unfriendly these days.

S OMEHOW, she found herself backed up against the artichoke display in the fruit-and-vegetable department at Waldbaum’s, feeling as lost and hopeless as an orphan. She was wearing her dun safari shorts and matching workshirt; the rhino-hide sandals she’d worn at the Makoua Reserve clung to the soles of her pale splayed tired old feet. Outside the big plate-glass windows, a sullen, grainy snow had begun to fall.

Maybe that was it, the snow. She was fretting over the vegetables, fumbling with her purse, the grocery list, the keys to the rheumatic Lincoln her sister had left her, when she glanced up and saw it, this wonder, this phenomenon, this dishwater turned to stone, and for the life of her she didn’t know what it was. And then it came to her, the word chipped from the recesses of her memory like an old bone dug from the sediment: snow. Snow. What had it been — forty years?

She gazed out past the racks of diet cola and facial cream, past the soap-powder display and the thousand garish colors of the products she couldn’t use and didn’t want, and she was lost in a reminiscence so sharp and sudden it was like a blow. She saw her sister’s eyes peering out from beneath the hood of her snow-suit, the drifts piled high over their heads, hot chocolate in a decorated mug, her father cursing as he bent to wrap the chains round the rear wheels of the car…and then the murmur of the market brought her back, the muted din concentrated now in a single voice, and she was aware that someone was addressing her. “Excuse me,” the voice was saying, “excuse me.”

She turned, and the voice took on form. A young man — a boy, really — short, massive across the shoulders, his dead-black hair cut close in a flattop, was standing before her. And what was that in his hand? A sausage of some sort, pepperoni, yes, and another word came back to her. “Excuse me,” he repeated, “but aren’t you Beatrice Umbo?”

She was. Oh, yes, she was — Beatrice Umbo, the celebrated ape lady, the world’s foremost authority on the behavior of chimpanzees in the wild, Beatrice Umbo, come home to Connecticut to retire. She gave him a faint, distant smile of recognition. “Yes,” she said softly, with a trace of the lisp that had clung to her since childhood, “and it’s just terrible.”

“Terrible?” he echoed, and she could see the hesitation in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said, grinning unsteadily and thumping the pepperoni against his thigh, “but we read about you in school, in college, I mean. I even read your books, the first one, anyway— Jungle Dawn? “

She couldn’t respond. It was his grin, the way his upper lip pulled back from his teeth and folded over his incisors. He was Agassiz, the very picture of Agassiz, and all of a sudden she was back in the world of leaves, back in the Makoua Reserve, crouched in a huddle of chimps. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“Of course I’m all right,” she snapped, and at that moment she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror behind the halved cantaloupes. The whites of her eyes were stippled with yellow, her hair was like a fright wig, her face as rutted and seamed as an old saddlebag. Even worse, her skin had the oddest citrus cast to it, a color about midway between the hue of a grapefruit and an orange. She didn’t look well, she knew it. But then what could they expect of a woman who’d devoted her life to science and survived dysentery, malaria, schistosomiasis, hepatitis, and sleeping sickness in the process, not to mention the little things like the chiggers that burrow beneath your toenails to lay their eggs. “I mean the fruit,” she said, trying to bite back the lisp. “The fruit is terrible. No yim-yim,” she sighed, gesturing toward the bins of tangerines, kumquats, and pale seedless grapes. “No wild custard apple or tiger peach. They haven’t even got passionfruit.”

The boy glanced down at her cart. There were fifty yams — she’d counted them out herself — six gallons of full-fat milk, and a five-pound block of cheese buried in its depths. All the bananas she could find, ranging in color from burnished green to putrescent black, were piled on top in a great towering pyramid that threatened to drop the bottom out of the thing. “They’ve got Italian chestnuts,” he offered, looking up again and showing off his teeth in that big tentative grin. “And in a month or so they’ll get those little torpedo-shaped things that come off the cactuses out west — prickly pear, that’s what they call them.”

She cocked her head to give him an appreciative look. “You’re very sweet,” she said, the lisp creeping back into her voice. “But you don’t understand — I’ve got a visitor coming. A permanent visitor. And he’s very particular about what he eats.”

“I’m Howie Kantner,” he said suddenly. “My father and me run Kantner Construction?”

She’d been in town less than a week, haunting the chilly cavernous house her mother had left her sister and her sister had left her. She’d never heard of Kantner Construction.

The boy ducked his head as if he were genuflecting, told her how thrilled he was to meet her, and turned to go — but then he swung back round impulsively. “Couldn’t you…I mean, do you think you’ll need some help with all those bananas?”

She pursed her lips.

“I just thought…the boxboys are the pits here and you’re so…casually dressed for the weather and all.…”

“Yes,” she said slowly, “yes, that would be very nice,” and she smiled; She was pleased, terribly pleased. A moment earlier she’d felt depressed, out of place, an alien in her own hometown, and now she’d made a friend. He waited for her behind the checkout counter, this hulking, earnest college boy, this big post-adolescent male with the clipped brow and squared shoulders, and she beamed at him till her gums ached, wondering what he’d think if she told him he reminded her of a chimp.

Konrad was late. They’d told her three, but it was past five already and there was no sign of him. She huddled by the fire, draped in an afghan she’d found in a trunk in the basement, and listened to the clank and wheeze of the decrepit old oil burner as it switched itself fitfully on and off. It was still snowing, snow like a curse, and she wished she were back in her hut at Makoua with the monsoon hammering at the roof. She looked out the window and thought she was on the moon.