T. Boyle - If the River Was Whiskey

“I heard you,” he shouted, and he could feel the veins stand out in his neck, the rage come up in him like something killed and dead and brought back to life. “What kind of thing is that to tell a kid, huh? About his own father?”

She wasn’t answering. She’d backed up in a corner of the kitchen and she wasn’t answering. And what could she say, the bitch? He’d heard her. Dozing on the trundle bed under the stairs, wanting a drink but too weak to get up and make one, he’d heard voices from the kitchen, her voice and Tiller’s. “Get used to it,” she said, “he’s a drunk, your father’s a drunk,” and then he was up off the bed as if something had exploded inside of him and he had her by the shoulders — always the shoulders and never the face, that much she’d taught him — and Tiller was gone, out the door and gone. Now, her voice low in her throat, a sick and guilty little smile on her lips, she whispered, “It’s true.”

“Who are you to talk? — you’re shit-faced yourself.” She shrank away from him, that sick smile on her lips, her shoulders hunched. He wanted to smash things, kick in the damn stove, make her hurt.

“At least I have a job,” she said.

“I’ll get another one, don’t you worry.”

“And what about Tiller? We’ve been here two weeks and you haven’t done one damn thing with him, nothing, zero. You haven’t even been down to the lake. Two hundred feet and you haven’t even been down there once.” She came up out of the corner now, feinting like a boxer, vicious, her sharp little fists balled up to drum on him. She spoke in a snarl. “What kind of father are you?”

He brushed past her, slammed open the cabinet, and grabbed the first bottle he found. It was whiskey, cheap whiskey, Four Roses, the shit she drank. He poured out half a water glass full and drank it down to spite her. “I hate the beach, boats, water, trees. I hate you.”

She had her purse and she was halfway out the screen door. She hung there a second, looking as if she’d bitten into something rotten. “The feeling’s mutual,” she said, and the door banged shut behind her.

There were too many complications, too many things to get between him and the moment, and he tried not to think about them. He tried not to think about his father — or his mother either — in the same way that he tried not to think about the pictures of the bald-headed stick people in Africa or meat in its plastic wrapper and how it got there. But when he did think about his father he thought about the river-was-whiskey day.

It was a Tuesday or Wednesday, middle of the week, and when he came home from school the curtains were drawn and his father’s car was in the driveway. At the door, he could hear him, the chunk-chunk of the chords and the rasping nasal whine that seemed as if it belonged to someone else. His father was sitting in the dark, hair in his face, bent low over the guitar. There was an open bottle of liquor on the coffee table and a clutter of beer bottles. The room stank of smoke.

It was strange, because his father hardly ever played his guitar anymore — he mainly just talked about it. In the past tense. And it was strange too — and bad — because his father wasn’t at work. Tiller dropped his bookbag on the telephone stand. “Hi, Dad,” he said.

His father didn’t answer. Just bent over the guitar and played the same song, over and over, as if it were the only song he knew. Tiller sat on the sofa and listened. There was a verse — one verse — and his father repeated it three or four times before he broke off and slurred the words into a sort of chant or hum, and then he went back to the words again. After the fourth repetition, Tiller heard it:

If the river was whiskey ,

And I was a divin’ duck ,

I’d swim to the bottom ,

Drink myself back up.

For half an hour his father played that song, played it till anything else would have sounded strange. He reached for the bottle when he finally stopped, and that was when he noticed Tiller. He looked surprised. Looked as if he’d just woke up. “Hey, ladykiller Tiller,” he said, and took a drink from the mouth of the bottle.

Tiller blushed. There’d been a Sadie Hawkins dance at school and Janet Rumery had picked him for her partner. Ever since, his father had called him ladykiller, and though he wasn’t exactly sure what it meant, it made him blush anyway, just from the tone of it. Secretly, it pleased him. “I really liked the song, Dad,” he said.

“Yeah?” His father lifted his eyebrows and made a face. “Well, come home to Mama, doggie-o. Here,” he said, and he held out an open beer. “You ever have one of these, ladykiller Tiller?” He was grinning. The sleeve of his shirt was torn and his elbow was raw and there was a hard little clot of blood over his shirt pocket. “With your sixth-grade buddies out behind the handball court, maybe? No?”

Tiller shook his head.

“You want one? Go ahead, take a hit.”

Tiller took the bottle and sipped tentatively. The taste wasn’t much. He looked up at his father. “What does it mean?” he said. “The song, I mean — the one you were singing. About the whiskey and all.”

His father gave him a long slow grin and took a drink from the big bottle of clear liquor. “I don’t know,” he said finally, grinning wider to show his tobacco-stained teeth. “I guess he just liked whiskey, that’s all.” He picked up a cigarette, made as if to light it, and then put it down again. “Hey,” he said, “you want to sing it with me?”

All right, she’d hounded him and she’d threatened him and she was going to leave him, he could see that clear as day. But he was going to show her. And the kid too’. He wasn’t drinking. Not today. Not a drop.

He stood on the dock with his hands in his pockets while Tiller scrambled around with the fishing poles and oars and the rest of it. Birds were screeching in the trees and there was a smell of diesel fuel on the air. The sun cut into his head like a knife. He was sick already.

“I’m giving you the big pole, Dad, and you can row if you want.”

He eased himself into the boat and it fell away beneath him like the mouth of a bottomless pit.

“I made us egg salad, Dad, your favorite. And I brought some birch beer.”

He was rowing. The lake was churning underneath him, the wind was up and reeking of things washed up on the shore, and the damn oars kept slipping out of the oarlocks, and he was rowing. At the last minute he’d wanted to go back for a quick drink, but he didn’t, and now he was rowing.

“We’re going to catch a pike,” Tiller said, hunched like a spider in the stern.

There was spray off the water. He was rowing. He felt sick. Sick and depressed.

“We’re going to catch a pike, I can feel it. I know we are,” Tiller said, “I know it. I just know it.”

It was too much for him all at once — the sun, the breeze that was so sweet he could taste it, the novelty of his father rowing, pale arms and a dead cigarette clenched between his teeth, the boat rocking, and the birds whispering — and he closed his eyes a minute, just to keep from going dizzy with the joy of it. They were in deep water already. Tiller was trolling with a plastic worm and spinner, just in case, but he didn’t have much faith in catching anything out here. He was taking his father to the cove with the submerged logs and beds of weed — that’s where they’d connect, that’s where they’d catch pike.