If the River Was Whiskey (20 page)

“Why?” Pat asked, sweeping Anthony’s hair back from his forehead, stroking his swollen hands. “Your bees,” she choked. “What would your bees do without you?”

Anthony let his eyes fall shut. After a moment he lifted his lids again. His voice was faint. “Bzzzzzzzz,” he said.

They kept him at the Hart Mental Health Center for nine months, and then they let him come home again. Ken was against it. He’d contacted a lawyer about voiding the adoption papers—Anthony was just too much to handle; he was emotionally unstable, disturbed, dangerous; the psychiatric bills alone
were killing them—but Pat overruled him. “He needs us,” she said. “He has no one else to turn to.” They were in the living room. She bent forward to light a cigarette. “Nobody said it would be easy,” she said.

“Easy?” he retorted. “You talk like it’s a war or something. I didn’t adopt a kid to go to war—or to save the world either.”

“Why did you adopt him then?”

The question took him by surprise. He looked past Pat to the kitchen, where one of Anthony’s crayon drawings—of a lopsided bee—clung to the refrigerator door, and then past the refrigerator to the window and the lush still yard beyond. He shrugged. “For love, I guess.”

As it turned out, the question was moot—Anthony didn’t last six months this time. When they picked him up at the hospital—“Hospital,” Ken growled, “nut hatch is more like it”—they barely recognized him. He was taller and he’d put on weight. Pat couldn’t call it baby fat anymore—this was true fat, adult fat, fat that sank his eyes and strained at the seams of his pants. And his hair, his rich fine white-blond hair, was gone, shaved to a transparent stubble over a scalp the color of boiled ham. Pat chattered at him, but he got into the car without a word. Halfway home he spoke for the first time. “You know what they eat in there,” he said, “in the hospital?”

Ken felt like the straightman in a comedy routine. “What do they eat?” he said, his eyes fixed on the road.

“Shit,” Anthony said. “They eat shit. Their own shit. That’s what they eat.”

“Do you have to use that language?”

Anthony didn’t bother to respond.

At home, they discovered that the bees had managed to survive on their own, a fact that somehow seemed to depress Anthony, and after shuffling halfheartedly through the trays and getting stung six or seven times, he went up to bed.

The trouble—the final trouble, the trouble that was to take Anthony out of their hands for good—started at school.
Anthony was almost twelve now, but because of his various problems, he was still in fifth grade. He was in a special program, of course, but he took lunch and recess with the other fifth-graders. On the playground, he towered over them, plainly visible a hundred yards away, like some great unmoving statue of the Buddha. The other children shied away from him instinctively, as if they knew he was beyond taunting, beyond simple joys and simple sorrows. But he was aware of them, aware in a new way, aware of the girls especially. Something had happened inside him while he was away—“Puberty,” Barebaum said, “he has urges like any other boy”—and he didn’t know how to express it.

One afternoon, he and Oliver Monteiros, another boy from the special program, cornered a fifth-grade girl behind one of the temporary classrooms. There they “stretched” her, as Anthony later told it—Oliver had her hands, Anthony her feet—stretched her till something snapped in her shoulder and Anthony felt his pants go wet. He tried to tell the principal about it, about the wetness in his pants, but the principal wouldn’t listen. Dr. Conarroe was a gray-bearded black man who believed in dispensing instant justice. He was angry, gesturing in their faces, his beard jabbing at them like a weapon. When Anthony unzipped his fly to show him what had happened, Dr. Conarroe suspended him on the spot.

Pat spoke with Anthony, and they both—she and Ken—went in to meet with Dr. Conarroe and the members of the school board. They brought Barebaum with them. Together, they were able to overcome the principal’s resistance, and Anthony, after a week’s suspension, was readmitted. “One more incident,” Conarroe said, his eyes aflame behind the discs of his wire-framed glasses, “and I don’t care how small it is, and he’s out. Is that understood?”

At least Anthony didn’t keep them in suspense. On his first day back he tracked down the girl he’d stretched, chased her into the girls’ room, and as he told it, put his “stinger” in her.
The girl’s parents sued the school district, Anthony was taken into custody and remanded to Juvenile Hall following another nine-month stay at Hart, and Ken and Pat finally threw in the towel. They were exhausted, physically and emotionally, and they were in debt to Barebaum for some thirty thousand dollars above what their insurance would cover. They felt cheated, bitter, worn down to nothing. Anthony was gone, adoption a sick joke. But they had each other, and after a while—and with the help of Skippy II—they began to pick up the pieces.

And now, six years later, Anthony had come back to haunt them. Ken was enraged. He, for one, wasn’t about to be chased out of this house and this job—they’d moved once, and that was enough. If he’d found them, he’d found them—so much the worse. But this was America, and they had their rights too. While Pat took Skippy to the kennel for safekeeping, Ken phoned the police and explained the situation to an Officer Ocksler, a man whose voice was so lacking in inflection he might as well have been dead. Ken was describing the incident with Skippy the First when Officer Ocksler interrupted him. “I’m sorry,” he said, and there was a faint animation to his voice now, as if he were fighting down a belch or passing gas, “but there’s nothing we can do.”

“Nothing you can do?” Ken couldn’t help himself: he was practically yelping. “But he broiled a harmless puppy in the oven, raped a fifth-grade girl, sent us thirty-two death threats, and tracked us down even though we quit our jobs, packed up and moved, and left no forwarding address.” He took a deep breath. “He thinks he’s a bee, for christsake.”

Officer Ocksler inserted his voice into the howling silence that succeeded this outburst. “He commits a crime,” he said, the words stuck fast in his throat, “you call us.”

The next day’s mail brought the second threat. It came in the form of a picture postcard, addressed to Pat, and postmarked locally. The picture—a Japanese print—showed a pale fleshy
couple engaged in the act of love. The message, which took some deciphering, read as follows:

Your son, Anthony

Ken tore it to pieces. He was red in the face, trembling. White babies, he thought bitterly. An older child. They would have been better off with a seven-foot Bantu, an Eskimo, anything. “I’ll kill him,” he said. “He comes here, I’ll kill him.”

It was early the next morning—Pat was in the kitchen, Ken upstairs shaving—when a face appeared in the kitchen window. It was a large and familiar face, transformed somewhat by the passage of the years and the accumulation of flesh, but unmistakable nonetheless. Pat, who was leaning over the sink to rinse her coffee cup, gave a little gasp of recognition.

Anthony was smiling, beaming at her like the towheaded boy in the photograph she’d kept in her wallet all these years. He was smiling, and suddenly that was all that mattered to her. The sweetness of those first few months came back in a rush—he was her boy, her own, and the rest of it was nothing—and before she knew what she was doing she had the back door open. It was a mistake. The moment the door swung open, she heard them. Bees. A swarm that blackened the side of the house, the angry hiss of their wings like grease in a fryer. They were right there, right beside the door. First one bee, then another, shot past her head. “Mom,” Anthony said, stepping up onto the porch, “I’m home.”

She was stunned. It wasn’t just the bees, but Anthony. He was huge, six feet tall at least, and so heavy. His pants—they
were pajamas, hospital-issue—were big as a tent, and it looked as if he’d rolled up a carpet beneath his shirt. She could barely make out his eyes, sunk in their pockets of flesh. She didn’t know what to say.

He took hold of the door. “I want a hug,” he said. “Give me a hug.”

She backed away from him instinctively. “Ken!” she called, and the catch in her throat turned it into a mournful, drawn-out bleat. “Ken!”

Anthony was poised on the threshold. His smile faded. Then, like a magician, he reached out his hand and plunged it into the mass of bees. She saw him wince as he was stung, heard the harsh sizzle of the insects rise in crescendo, and then he drew back his hand, ever so slowly, and the bees came with him. They moved so fast—glutinous, like meringue clinging to a spoon—that she nearly missed it. There was something in his hand, a tiny box, some sort of mesh, and then his hand was gone, his arm, the right side of his body, his face and head and the left side too. Suddenly he was alive with bees, wearing them, a humming, pulsating ball of them.

She felt a sharp pain in her ankle, then another at her throat. She backed up a step.

“You sent me away,” Anthony scolded, and the bees clung to his lips. “You never loved me. Nobody ever loved me.”

She heard Ken behind her—“What is this?” he said, and then a weak curse escaped him—but she couldn’t turn. The hum of the bees mesmerized her. They clung to Anthony, one mind, thirty thousand bodies.

And then the blazing ball of Anthony’s hand separated itself from his body and his bee-thick fingers opened to reveal the briefest glimpse of the gauze-covered box. “The queen,” Anthony said. “I throw her down and you’re”—she could barely hear him, the bees raging, Ken shouting out her name—“you’re history. Both of you.”

For a long moment Anthony stood there motionless, afloat
in bees. Huge as he was, he seemed to hover over the linoleum, derealized in the mass of them. And then she knew what was going to happen, knew that she was barren then and now and forever and that it was meant to be, and that this, her only child, was beyond human help or understanding.

“Go away,” Anthony said, the swarm thrilling louder, “go…into the…next room…before, before—” and then Ken had her by the arm and they were moving. She thought she heard Anthony sigh, and as she darted a glance back over her shoulder he crushed the box with a snap loud as the crack of a limb. There was an answering roar from the bees, and in her last glimpse of him he was falling, borne down by the terrible animate weight of them.

“I’ll kill him,” Ken spat, his shoulder pressed to the parlor door. Bees rattled against the panels like hailstones.

She couldn’t catch her breath. She felt a sudden stab under her collar, and then another. Ken’s words didn’t make sense—Anthony was gone from them now, gone forever—didn’t he understand that? She listened to the bees raging round her kitchen, stinging blindly, dying for their queen. And then she thought of Anthony, poor Anthony, in his foster homes, in the hospital, in prison, thought of his flesh scored a thousand, ten thousand times, wound in his cerement of bees.

He was wrong, she thought, leaning into the door as if bracing herself against a storm, they do have mercy. They do.

T
HEY WERE FEET
that he loved, feet that belonged in high heels, calfskin, furry slippers with button eyes and rabbit ears, and here they were, naked to the snow. He was hunched in his denim jacket, collar up, scarf wound tight round his throat, and his fingers were so numb he could barely get a cigarette lit. She stood beside him in her robe, barely shivering, the wild ivy of her hair gone white with a dusting of snow. He watched her lift her arms, watched her breasts rise gently as she fought back her hair and pulled the bathing cap tight to her skull. He took a quick drag on the cigarette and looked away.

There were maybe twenty cars in the lot: station wagons, Volvos, VW Bugs, big steel-blue Buicks with their crushproof bumpers and nautical vents. An inch of new snow softened the frozen ruts and the strips of yellowed ice that lay like sores beneath it. Beyond the lot, a short slope, the white rails of the dock, and the black lapping waters of the Hudson. It was five of two—he checked his watch—but the belly of the sky hung so low it might have been dusk.