If the River Was Whiskey (18 page)

There were two inches of glare ice on the road. Hal thumped his mother’s stuttering Oldsmobile from tree to tree, went into a 180-degree spin, and schussed down Jill’s driveway, narrowly avoiding the denuded azalea bush, three Flexible Flyers, and a staved-in Renault on blocks. He licked his fingertips and smoothed down his sideburns on the doorstep, knocked perfunctorily, and entered, grinning, in all his exotic, fair-haired, California glory. Unfortunately, the effect was wasted—no one but Jill was there. Hunched in the corner of a gutted sofa, she smiled wanly from behind a mound of soggy Fritos and half a gallon of California dip. “Hi,” she said in a voice of dole, “they’re coming, they’re coming.” Then she winked her bad eye at him and limped across the room to stick her tongue in his mouth.

She was clinging to him, licking at his mustache and telling him about her bout with breast cancer, when the doorbell rang and Rob and Irene came hurtling into the room shrieking “My God, look at you!” They were late, they screamed, because the baby-sitter never showed for their daughter, Soukamathandravaki, whose frightened little face peered in out of the night behind them.

An instant later, Harvey swung furiously up the walk on his silver crutches, Tootle and Pesky staggered in together with
reddened noses and dilated pupils, and Steve, Stevie, and Steven emerged from the back of the house on their minibikes to pop wheelies in the middle of the room. The party was on.

“So,” Harvey snarled, fencing Hal into the corner with the gleaming shafts of his crutches, “they tell me you’re doing pretty good out there, huh, bub?”

Pesky and Tootle were standing beside him, grinning till Hal thought their lips would dry out and stick to their teeth, and Pesky had his arm around Tootle’s shoulder. “Me?” Hal said, with a modest shrug. “Well, since you ask, my agent did say that—”

Harvey cut him off, turning to Pesky with a wild leer and shouting, “So how’s the kid, what’s his name—Damian?”

Dead silence fell over the room.

Rob and Irene froze, clutching Dixie cups of purple passion to their chests, and Jill, who’d been opening their eyes to the in-fighting, petty abuses, and catastrophic outrages of the food-stamp office where she worked, caught her tongue. Even Steve, Stevie, and Steven snapped to attention. They’d been playfully binding little Soukamathandravaki to one of the dining-room chairs with electrical tape, but at the mention of Damian, they looked round them in unison and vanished.

“You son of a bitch,” Pesky said, his fingers dug so deep in Tootle’s shoulder his knuckles went white. “You crippled fascist Marine Corps burnout.”

Harvey jerked his big head to one side and spat on the floor. “What’d they give him, life plus a hundred and fifty years? Or’d they send him to Matteawan?”.

“Hey,” Irene shouted, a desperate keening edge to her voice, “hey, do you guys remember all those wild pranks we used to pull back in high school?” She tore across the room, waving her Dixie cup. “Like, like when we smeared that black stuff on our faces and burned the Jewish star on Dr. Rosenbaum’s front lawn?”

Everyone ignored her.

“Harv,” Hal said, reaching out to take his arm, but Harvey jerked violently away—“Get your stinking hands off me!” he roared—before he lost his balance and fell with a sad clatter of aluminum into the California dip.

“Serves you right, you bitter son of a bitch,” Pesky growled, standing over him as if they’d just gone fifteen rounds. “The crippled war hero. Why don’t you show us your scars, huh?”

“Pesky,” Hal hissed, “leave it, will you?”

Rob and Irene were trying to help Harvey to his feet, but he fought them off, sobbing with rage. There was California dip on the collar of his campaign jacket. Hairless and pale, with his quivering jowls and splayed legs, he looked like a monstrous baby dropped there on the rug.

“Or the time Pesky ran up in front of Mrs. Gold’s class in the third grade and blew on his thumb till he passed out, remember that?” Irene was saying, when the room was rent by a violent, predatory shriek, as if someone had torn a hawk in half. It was Tootle. She twisted out from under Pesky’s arm and slammed her little white fist into his kidney. “You,” she sputtered, “who are you to talk, lording it over Harvey as if he was some kind of criminal or something. At least he fought for his country. What’d you do, huh?” Her eyes were swollen. There was a froth of saliva caught in the corner of her mouth.

Pesky swung around. He was wearing his trademark Levi’s—jeans, jacket, sweatshirt, socks, and big-buckled belt. If only they made shoes, he used to say. “Yeah, yeah, tell us about it,” he sneered, “you little whore. Peddling your ass just like—”

“Canada, that’s what you did about it. Like a typical wimp.”

“Hey, hold on,” Hal said, lurching out of the corner in his parachute pants, “I don’t believe this. We all tried to get out of it—it was a rotten war, an illegal war, Nixon’s and Johnson’s war—what’s the matter with you? Don’t you remember?”

“The marches,” Irene said.

“The posters,” Rob joined in.

“A cheap whore, that’s all. Cover girl, my ass.”

“Shut up!” Tootle shrieked, turning on Hal. “You’re just as bad as Pesky. Worse. You’re a hypocrite. At least he knows he’s a piece of shit.” She threw back a cup of purple passion and leveled her green-eyed glare on him. “And you think you’re so high and mighty, out there in Hollywood—well, la-de-da, that’s what I say.”

“He’s an artist,” Harvey said from the floor. “He co-wrote the immortal script for the ‘Life with Beanie’ show.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you too.”

And then suddenly, as if it signaled a visitation from another realm, there was the deep-throated cough of a precision engine in the driveway, a sputter and its dying fall. As one, the seven friends turned to the door. There was a thump. A knock—
dat dat-dat-dat da.
And then: “Allo, allo, anybody is home?”

It was Enzo. Tall, noble, with the nose of an emperor and a weave of silver in his hair so rich it might have been hammered from the mother lode itself. He was dressed in a coruscating jumpsuit with Pennzoil and Pirelli patches across the shoulder and chest, and he held his crash helmet in his hand. “Baby,” he said, crossing the room in two strides and taking Tootle in his arms, “ciao.”

No one moved. No one said a thing.

“Beech of a road,” Enzo said. “Ice, you know.” Outside, through the open door, the sleek low profile of his Lazaretto 2200 Pinin Farina coupe was visible, the windshield plated with ice, sleet driving down like straight pins. “Tooka me seventeen and a half minutes from La Guardia—a beech, huh? But baby, at least I’m here.”

He looked round him, as if seeing the others for the first time, and then, without a word, crossed the room to the stereo, ran a quick finger along the spines of the albums, and flipped a black platter from its jacket as casually as if he were flipping pizzas in Napoli. He dropped the stylus, and as the room filled with
music, he began to move his hips and mime the words: “Oooh-oooh, I heard it through the grapevine.…”

Marvin Gaye. Delectable, smooth, icy cool, ancient.

Pesky reached down to help Harvey from the floor. Jill took Hal’s arm. Rob and Irene began to snap their fingers and Enzo swung Tootle out into the middle of the floor.

They danced till they dropped.

I
N THE MAIL
that morning there were two solicitations for life insurance, a coupon from the local car wash promising a “100% Brushless Wash,” four bills, three advertising flyers, and a death threat from his ex-son, Anthony. Anthony had used green ink, the cyclonic scrawl of his longhand lifting off into the loops, lassos, and curlicues of heavy weather aloft, and his message was the same as usual:
I eat the royal jelly. I sting and you die. Bzzzzzzzz. Pat too, the bitch.
He hadn’t bothered to sign it.

“Ken? What is it?”

Pat was right beside him now, peering over his elbow at the sheaf of ads and bills clutched in his hand. She’d been pruning the roses and she was still wearing her work gloves. They stood there out front of the house in the sunshine, hunched forward protectively, the mailbox rising up like a tombstone between them. “It’s Anthony,” she said, “isn’t it?”

He handed her the letter.

“My god,” she said, sucking in a whistle of breath like a wounded animal. “How’d he get the address?”

It was a good question. They’d known he was to be released from Juvenile Hall on his eighteenth birthday, and they’d taken precautions. Like changing their phone number, their address, their places of employment, and the city and state in which they lived. For a while, they’d even toyed with the idea of changing
their name, but then Ken’s father came for a visit from Wisconsin and sobbed over the family coat of arms till they gave it up. Over the years, they’d received dozens of Anthony’s death threats—all of them bee-oriented; bees were his obsession—but nothing since they’d moved. This was bad. Worse than bad.

“You’d better call the police,” he said. “And take Skippy to the kennel.”

Nine years earlier, the Mallows had been childless. There was something wrong with Pat’s fallopian tubes—some congenital defect that reduced her odds of conception to 222,000 to one—and to compound the problem, Ken’s sperm count was inordinately low, though he ate plenty of red meat and worked out every other day on the racquetball court. Adoption had seemed the way to go, though Pat was distressed by the fact that so many of the babies available were—well, she didn’t like to say it, but they weren’t white. There were Thai babies, Guianese babies, Herero babies, babies from Haiti, Kuala Lumpur, and Kashmir, but Caucasian babies were at a premium. You could have a nonwhite baby in six days—for a price, of course—but there was an eleven-year waiting list for white babies—twelve for blonds, fourteen for blue-eyed blonds—and neither Ken nor Pat was used to being denied. “How about an older child?” the man from the adoption agency had suggested.

They were in one of the plush, paneled conference rooms of Adopt-A-Kid, and Mr. Denteen, a handsome, bold-faced man in a suit woven of some exotic material, leaned forward with a fatherly smile. He bore an uncanny resemblance to Robert Young of “Father Knows Best,” and on the wall behind him was a photomontage of plump and cooing babies. Pat was mesmerized. “What?” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him.

“An older child,” Denteen repeated, his voice rich with insinuation. It was the voice of a seducer, a shrink, a black-marketeer.

“No,” Ken said, “I don’t think so.”

“How old?” Pat said.

Denteen leaned forward on his leather elbow patches. “I just happen to have a child—a boy—whose file just came to us this morning. Little Anthony Cademartori. Tony. He’s nine years old. Just. Actually, his birthday was only last week.”

The photo Denteen handed them showed a sunny, smiling, towheaded boy, a generic boy, archetypal, the sort of boy you envision when you close your eyes and think “boy.” If they’d looked closer, they would have seen that his eyes were like two poked holes and that there was something unstable about
his
smile and the set of his jaw, but they were in the grip of a conceit and they didn’t look that closely. Ken asked if there was anything wrong with him. “Physically, I mean,” he said.

Denteen let a good-humored little laugh escape him. “This is your average nine-year-old boy, Mr. Mallow,” he said. “Average height, weight, build, average—or above average—intelligence. He’s all boy, and he’s one heck of a lot fitter than I am.” Denteen cast a look to the heavens—or, rather, to the ceiling tiles. “To be nine years old again,” he sighed.

“Does he behave?” Pat asked.

“Does he behave?” Denteen echoed, and he looked offended, hurt almost. “Does the President live in the White House? Does the sun come up in the morning?” He straightened up, shot his cuffs, then leaned forward again—so far forward his hands dangled over the edge of the conference table. “Look at him,” he said, holding up the picture again. “Mr. and Mrs. Mallow—Ken, Pat—let me tell you that this child has seen more heartbreak than you and I’ll know in a lifetime. His birth parents were killed at a railway crossing when he was two, and then, the irony of it, his adoptive parents—they were your age, by the way—just dropped dead one day while he was at school. One minute they’re alive and well and the next”—he snapped his fingers—“they’re gone.” His voice faltered. “And then poor little Tony…poor little Tony comes home.…”