T. Boyle - If the River Was Whiskey

In that moment — the moment of Howie’s disfigurement-Beatrice’s own heart turned over in her chest. She looked at Konrad, perched atop poor Howie, and at Howie, who even in repose managed to favor Agassiz. They were beyond Long Island now, headed out to sea, high over the Atlantic. Champ had tried to teach her to fly, but she’d had no interest in it. She looked at the instrument panel and saw nothing. For a moment the idea of switching on the radio came into her head, but then she glanced at Konrad and thought better of it.

Konrad was looking into her eyes. The engine hummed, Howie’s head fell against the door, the smell of Konrad — his body, his shit — filled her nostrils. They had five hours’ flying time, give or take a few minutes, that much she knew. She looked out over the nose of the plane to where the sea swallowed up the rim of the world. Africa was out there, distant and serene, somewhere beyond the night that fell like an axe across the horizon. She could almost taste it.

“Urk,” Konrad said, and he was still looking at her. His eyes were soft now, his breathing regular. He sat atop Howie in a forlorn slouch, the cigarette forgotten, the controls irrelevant, nothing at all. “Urk,” he repeated, and she knew what he wanted, knew in a rush of comprehension that took her all the way back to Makoua and that first, long-ago touch of Agassiz’s strange spidery fingers.

She held his eyes. The engine droned. The sea beneath them seemed so still you could walk on it, so soft you could wrap yourself up in it. She reached out and touched his hand. “Urk,” she said.

T HE WATER WAS a heartbeat, a pulse, it stole the heat from his body and pumped it to his brain. Beneath the surface, magnified through the shimmering lens of his face mask, were silver shoals of fish, forests of weed, a silence broken only by the distant throbbing hum of an outboard. Above, there was the sun, the white flash of a faraway sailboat, the weatherbeaten dock with its weatherbeaten rowboat, his mother in her deck chair, and the vast depthless green of the world beyond.

He surfaced like a dolphin, spewing water from the vent of his snorkel, and sliced back to the dock. The lake came with him, two bony arms and the wedge of a foot, the great heaving splash of himself flat out on the dock like something thrown up in a storm. And then, without pausing even to snatch up a towel, he had the spinning rod in hand and the silver lure was sizzling out over the water, breaking the surface just above the shadowy arena he’d fixed in his mind. His mother looked up at the splash. “Tiller,” she called, “come get a towel.”

His shoulders quaked. He huddled and stamped his feet, but he never took his eyes off the tip of the rod. Twitching it suggestively, he reeled with the jerky, hesitant motion that would drive lunker fish to a frenzy. Or so he’d read, anyway.

“Tilden, do you hear me?”

“I saw a Northern,” he said. “A big one. Two feet maybe.” The lure was in. A flick of his wrist sent it back. Still reeling, he ducked his head to wipe his nose on his wet shoulder. He could feel the sun on his back now and he envisioned the skirted lure in the water, sinuous, sensual, irresistible, and he waited for the line to quicken with the strike.

The porch smelled of pine — old pine, dried up and dead — and it depressed him. In fact, everything depressed him — especially this vacation. Vacation. It was a joke. Vacation from what?

He poured himself a drink — vodka and soda, tall, from the plastic half-gallon jug. It wasn’t noon yet, the breakfast dishes were in the sink, and Tiller and Caroline were down at the lake. He couldn’t see them through the screen of trees, but he heard the murmur of their voices against the soughing of the branches and the sadness of the birds. He sat heavily in the creaking wicker chair and looked out on nothing. He didn’t feel too hot. In fact, he felt as if he’d been cored and dried, as if somebody had taken a pipe cleaner and run it through his veins. His head ached too, but the vodka would take care of that. When he finished it, he’d have another, and then maybe a grilled swiss on rye. Then he’d start to feel good again.

His father was talking to the man and his mother was talking to the woman. They’d met at the bar about twenty drinks ago and his father was into his could-have-been, should-have-been, way-back-when mode, and the man, bald on top and with a ratty beard and long greasy hair like his father’s, was trying to steer the conversation back to building supplies. The woman had whole galaxies of freckles on her chest, and she leaned forward in her sundress and told his mother scandalous stories about people she’d never heard of. Tiller had drunk all the Coke and eaten all the beer nuts he could hold. He watched the Pabst Blue Ribbon sign flash on and off above the bar and he watched the woman’s freckles move in and out of the gap between her breasts. Outside it was dark and a cool clean scent came in off the lake.

“Un huh, yeah,” his father was saying, “the To the Bone Band. I played rhythm and switched off vocals with Dillie Richards.…”

The man had never heard of Dillie Richards.

“Black dude, used to play with Taj Mahal?”

The man had never heard of Taj Mahal.

“Anyway,” his father said, “we used to do all this really outrageous stuff by people like Muddy, Howlin’ Wolf, Luther Allison—”

“She didn’t,” his mother said.

The woman threw down her drink and nodded and the front of her dress went crazy. Tiller watched her and felt the skin go tight across his shoulders and the back of his neck, where he’d been burned the first day. He wasn’t wearing any underwear, just shorts. He looked away. “Three abortions, two kids,” the woman said. “And she never knew who the father of the second one was.”

“Drywall isn’t worth a damn,” the man said. “But what’re you going to do?”

“Paneling?” his father offered.

The man cut the air with the flat of his hand. He looked angry. “Don’t talk to me about paneling,” he said.

Mornings, when his parents were asleep and the lake was still, he would take the rowboat to the reedy cove on the far side of the lake where the big pike lurked. He didn’t actually know if they lurked there, but if they lurked anywhere, this would be the place. It looked fishy, mysterious, sunken logs looming up dark from the shadows beneath the boat, mist rising like steam, as if the bottom were boiling with ravenous, cold-eyed, killer pike that could slice through monofilament with a snap of their jaws and bolt ducklings in a gulp. Besides, Joe Matochik, the old man who lived in the cabin next door and could charm frogs by stroking their bellies, had told him that this was where he’d find them.

It was cold at dawn and he’d wear a thick homeknit sweater over his T-shirt and shorts, sometimes pulling the stretched-out hem of it down like a skirt to warm his thighs. He’d take an apple with him or a slice of brown bread and peanut butter. And of course the orange lifejacket his mother insisted on.

When he left the dock he was always wearing the lifejacket — for form’s sake and for the extra warmth it gave him against the raw morning air. But when he got there, when he stood in the swaying basin of the boat to cast his Hula Popper or Abu Reflex, it got in the way and he took it off. Later, when the sun ran through him and he didn’t need the sweater, he balled it up on the seat beside him, and sometimes, if it was good and hot, he shrugged out of his T-shirt and shorts too. No one could see him in the cove, and it made his breath come quick to be naked like that under the morning sun.