If the River Was Whiskey (10 page)

There was no response.

“Son of a bitch,” he spat, turning to glare over his shoulder at her as if it were her fault or something. From inside they could hear the drama of running water, a drip and gurgle, a sough and hiss. Sonny turned back to the door, hammering his fist against it till Meg swore she could see the panels jump.

It frightened her, this sudden rage. Sure, there was a problem here and she was glad he was taking care of it, but did he have
to get violent, did he have to get crazy? “You don’t have to beat her door down,” she called, focusing on the swell of his shoulder and the hammer of his fist as it rose and fell in savage rhythm. “Sonny, come on. It’s only water, for god’s sake.”

“Only?” he snarled, spinning round to face her. “You saw the fence—next thing you know the foundation’ll shift on us. The whole damn house—” He never finished. The look on her face told him that Muriel had opened the door.

Muriel was wearing the same faded blue housecoat she’d had on earlier, and the same wet slippers. Short, heavyset, so big in front it seemed as if she were about to topple over, she clung to the doorframe and peered up at Sonny out of a stony face. Meg watched as Sonny jerked round to confront her and then stopped cold when he got a look at the interior of the house. The plaster walls were stained now, drinking up the wet in long jagged fingers that clawed toward the ceiling, and a dribble of coffee-colored liquid began to seep across the doorstep and puddle at Sonny’s feet. The sound of rushing water was unmistakable, even from where Meg was standing. “Yes?” Muriel said, the voice withered in her throat. “Can I help you?”

It took Sonny a minute—Meg could see it in his eyes: this was more than he could handle, willful destruction of a domicile, every tap in the place on full, the floors warped, plaster ruined—but then he recovered himself. “The water,” he said. “You—our fence—I mean you can’t, you’ve got to stop this—”

The old woman drew herself up, clutching the belt of her housedress till her knuckles bulged with the tension. She looked first at Meg, still planted in the corner of the yard, and then turned to Sonny. “Water?” she said. “What water?”

The young man at the door reminded her, in a way, of Monty. Something about the eyes or the set of the ears—or maybe it was the crisp high cut of the sideburns…Of course, most young men reminded her of Monty. The Monty of fifty years ago, that is. The Monty who’d opened up the world to her over
the shift lever of his Model-A Ford, not the crabbed and abrasive old man who called her bonehead and dildo and cuffed her like a dog. Monty. When the stroke brought him down, she was almost glad. She saw him pinned beneath his tubes in the hospital and something stirred in her; she brought him home and changed his bedpan, peered into the vaults of his eyes, fed him Gerber’s like the baby she’d never had, and she knew it was over. Fifty years. No more drunken rages, no more pans flung against the wall, never again his sour flesh pressed to hers. She was on top now.

The second young man—he was a Mexican, short, stocky, with a mustache so thin it could have been penciled on and wicked little red-flecked eyes—also reminded her of Monty. Not so much in the way he looked as in the way he held himself, the way he swaggered and puffed out his chest. And the uniform too, of course. Monty had worn a uniform during the war.

“Mrs. Burgess?” the Mexican asked.

Muriel stood at the open door. It was dusk, the heat cut as if there were a thermostat in the sky. She’d been sitting in the dark. The electricity had gone out on her—something to do with the water and the wires. She nodded her head in response to the policeman’s question.

“We’ve had a complaint,” he said.

Little piggy eyes. A complaint.
We’ve had a complaint.
He wasn’t fooling her, not for a minute. She knew what they wanted, the police, the girl next door, and the boy she was married to—they wanted to bring Monty back. Prop him up against the bedframe, stick his legs back under him, put the bellow back in his voice. Oh, no, they weren’t fooling her.

She followed the policeman around the darkened house as he went from faucet to faucet, sink to tub to shower. He firmly twisted each of the taps closed and drained the basins, then crossed the patio to kill the sprinklers and the hose too. “Are you all right?” he kept asking. “Are you all right?”

She had to hold her chin in her palm to keep her lips from
trembling. “If you mean am I in possession of my faculties, yes, I am, thank you. I am all right.”

They were back at the front door now. He leaned nonchalantly against the doorframe and dropped his voice to a confidential whisper. “So what’s this with the water then?”

She wouldn’t answer him. She knew her rights. What business was it of his, or anybody’s, what she did with her own taps and her own sprinklers? She could pay the water bill. Had paid it, in fact. Eleven hundred dollars’ worth. She watched his eyes and shrugged.

“Next of kin?” he asked. “Daughter? Son? Anybody we can call?”

Now her lips held. She shook her head.

He gave it a moment, then let out a sigh. “Okay,” he said, speaking slowly and with exaggerated emphasis, as if he were talking to a child, “I’m going now. You leave the water alone—wash your face, brush your teeth, do the dishes. But no more of this.” He swaggered back from her, fingering his belt, his holster, the dead weight of his nightstick. “One more complaint and we’ll have to take you into custody for your own good. You’re endangering yourself and the neighbors too. Understand?”

Smile, she told herself, smile. “Oh, yes,” she said softly. “Yes, I understand.”

He held her eyes a moment, threatening her—just like Monty used to do, just like Monty—and then he was gone.

She stood there on the doorstep a long while, the night deepening around her. She listened to the cowbirds, the wild parakeets that nested in the Murtaughs’ palm, the whoosh of traffic from the distant freeway. After a while, she sat on the step. Behind her, the house was silent: no faucet dripped, no sprinkler hissed, no toilet gurgled. It was horrible. Insupportable. In the pit of that dry silence she could hear him, Monty, treading the buckled floors, pouring himself another vodka, cursing her in a voice like sandpaper.

She couldn’t go back in there. Not tonight. The place was deadly, contaminated, sick as the grave—after all was said and done, it just wasn’t clean enough. If the rest of it was a mystery—oral history, fifty years of Monty, the girl with the blackened eyes—that much she understood.

Meg was watering the cane plant in the living room when the police cruiser came for the old lady next door. The police had been there the night before and Sonny had stood out front with his arms folded while the officer shut down Muriel’s taps and sprinklers. “I guess that’s that,” he said, coming up the walk in the oversized Hawaiian shirt she’d given him for Father’s Day. But in the morning, the sprinklers were on again and Sonny called the local substation three times before he left for work. She’s crazy, he’d hollered into the phone, irresponsible, a threat to herself and the community. He had a four-year-old daughter to worry about, for christ’s sake. A dog. A wife. His fence was falling down. Did they have any idea what that amount of water was going to do to the substrata beneath the house?

Now the police were back. The patrol car stretched across the window and slid silently into the driveway next door. Meg set down the watering can. She was wearing her Fila sweats and a new pair of Nikes and her hair was tied back in a red scarf. She’d dropped Tiffany off at nursery school, but she had the watering and. her stretching exercises to do and a pasta salad to make before she picked up Queenie at the vet’s. Still, she went directly to the front door and then out onto the walk.

The police—it took her a minute to realize that the shorter of the two was a woman—were on Muriel’s front porch, looking stiff and uncertain in their razor-creased uniforms. The man knocked first—once, twice, three times. Nothing happened. Then the woman knocked. Still nothing. Meg folded her arms and waited. After a minute, the man went around to the side gate and let himself into the yard. Meg heard the sprinklers die
with a wheeze, and then the officer was back, his shoes heavy with mud.

Again he thumped at the door, much more violently now, and Meg thought of Sonny. “Open up,” the woman called in a breathy contralto she tried unsuccessfully to deepen, “police.”

It was then that Meg saw her, Muriel, at the bay window on the near side of the door. “Look,” she shouted before she knew what she was saying, “she’s there, there in the window!”

The male officer—he had a mustache and pale, fine hair like Sonny’s—leaned out over the railing and gestured impatiently at the figure behind the window. “Police,” he growled. “Open the door.” Muriel never moved. “All right,” he grunted, cursing under his breath, “all right,” and he put his shoulder to the door. There was nothing to it. The frame splintered, water dribbled out, and both officers disappeared into the house.

Meg waited. She had things to do, yes, but she waited anyway, bending to pull the odd dandelion the gardener had missed, trying to look busy. The police were in there an awful long time—twenty minutes, half an hour—and then the woman appeared in the doorway with Muriel.

Muriel seemed heavier than ever, her face pouchy, arms swollen. She was wearing white sandals on her old splayed feet, a shapeless print dress, and a white straw hat that looked as if it had been dug out of a box in the attic. The woman had her by the arm; the man loomed behind her with a suitcase. Down the steps and up the walk, she never turned her head. But then, just as the policewoman was helping her into the backseat of the patrol car, Muriel swung round as if to take one last look at her house. But it wasn’t the house she was looking at: it was Meg.

The morning gave way to the heat of afternoon. Meg finished the watering, made the pasta salad—bow-tie twists, fresh salmon, black olives, and pine nuts—ran her errands, picked up Tiffany, and put her down for a nap. Somehow, though, she just couldn’t get Muriel out of her head. The old lady had stared at her for
five seconds maybe, and then the policewoman was coaxing her into the car. Meg had felt like sinking into the ground. But then she realized that Muriel’s look wasn’t vengeful at all—it was just sad. It was a look that said this is what it comes to. Fifty years and this is what it comes to.

The backyard was an inferno, the sun poised directly overhead. Queenie, defleaed, shampooed, and with her toenails clipped, was stretched out asleep in the shade beside the pool. It was quiet. Even the birds were still. Meg took off her Nikes and walked barefoot through the sopping grass to the fence, or what was left of it. The post had buckled overnight, canting the whole business into Muriel’s yard. Meg never hesitated. She sprang up onto the plane of the slats and dropped to the grass on the other side.

Her feet sank in the mud, the earth like pudding, like chocolate pudding, and as she lifted her feet to move toward the house the tracks she left behind her slowly filled with water. The patio was an island. She crossed it, dodging potted plants and wicker furniture, and tried the back door; finding it locked, she moved to the window, shaded her face with her hands, and peered in. The sight made her catch her breath. The plaster was crumbling, wallpaper peeling, the rug and floors ruined: she knew it was bad, but this was crazy, this was suicide.

Grief, that’s what it was. Or was it? And then she was thinking of Sonny again—what if he was dead and she was old like Muriel? She wouldn’t be so fat, of course, but maybe like one of those thin and elegant old ladies in Palm Springs, the ones who’d done their stretching all their lives. Or what if she wasn’t an old lady at all—the thought swooped down on her like a bird out of the sky—what if Sonny was in a car wreck or something? It could happen.

She stood there gazing in on the mess through her own wavering reflection. One moment she saw the wreckage of the old lady’s life, the next the fine mouth and expressive eyes everyone commented on. After a while, she turned away from the
window and looked out on the yard as Muriel must have seen it. There were the roses, gorged with water and flowering madly, the impatiens, rigid as sticks, oleander drowning in their own yellowed leaves—and there, poking innocuously from the bushes at the far corner of the patio, was the steel wand that controlled the sprinklers. Handle, neck, prongs: it was just like theirs.

And then it came to her. She’d turn them on—the sprinklers—just for a minute, to see what it felt like. She wouldn’t leave them on long—it could threaten the whole foundation of her house.

That much she understood.