If the River Was Whiskey: Stories

  He got up to poke the fire, his back to her. “Terry’s going back to the West Coast this summer. He wants me to go along. For a vacation. I mean, I’ve never seen it.”

  “So what does that mean?” she said.

  He poked the fire.

  “You know I can’t go,” she said after a moment. “I’ve got courses to take at New Paltz. You know that, right?”

  He felt guilty. He looked guilty. He shrugged.

  Later, he made Irish coffee, heavy on sugar, cream, and whiskey. She was curled up in the corner of the sofa, her legs bare, feet tucked under her. She was spending the night.

  The wind had come up and sleet began to rattle the windows. He brought the coffee to her, sat beside her and took her hand. It was then that the picture of her perched at the edge of the snowy dock came back to him. “Tell me again,” he said, “about the water, how it felt.”

  “Hm?”

  “You know, with the Polar Bear Club?”

  He watched her slow smile, watched the snowy afternoon seep back into her eyes. “Oh, that—I’ve been doing it since I was three. It’s nothing. I don’t even think about it.” She looked past him, staring into the flames. “You won’t believe this, but it’s not that cold—almost the opposite.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “I won’t.”

  “No, really,” she insisted, looking him full in the face now. She paused, shrugged, took a sip of her coffee. “It depends on your frame of mind, I guess.”

  At the end of June, just before he left for San Francisco, they took a trip together. He’d heard about a fishing camp in northern Quebec, a place called Chibougamau, where pike and walleye attacked you in the boat. There were Eskimos there, or near there, anyway. And the last four hours of driving was on dirt roads.

  She had no affection for pike or walleye either, but this was their vacation, their last chance to be together for a while. She smiled her quiet smile and packed her bag. They spent one night in Montreal and then drove the rest of the way the following day. When they got there—low hills, a scattering of crude cabins, and a river as raw and hard as metal—Marty was so excited his hands trembled on the wheel. “I want to fish,” he said to the guide who greeted them.

  The guide was in his forties, hard-looking, with a scar that ran in a white ridge from his ear to his Adam’s apple. He was dressed in rubber knee boots, jeans, and a lumberjack shirt. “Hi” and “thank you” was about all the English he could manage. He gestured toward the near cabin.

  “Ours?” Marty said, pointing first to Naina and then himself.

  The guide nodded.

  Marty looked up at the sun; it squatted on the horizon, bloated and misshapen.

  “Listen, Naina,” he said, “honey, would you mind if…I mean, I’m dying to wet my line and since we’re paying for today and all—”

  “Sure,” she said. “I’ll unpack. Have fun.” She grinned at the guide. The guide grinned back.

  A moment later, Marty was out on the river, experimentally manning the oars while the guide stood in the bow, discoursing on technique. Marty tried to listen, but French had never been his strong suit; in the next instant the guide cast a lure ahead of them and immediately connected with a fish that bent the rod double. Marty pulled at the oars, and the guide, fighting his fish, said something over his shoulder. This time, though, the guide’s face was alive with urgency and the something came in an angry rush, as if he were cursing. Pull harder? Marty thought. Is that what he wants?

  He dug in a bit harder, his eyes on the line and the distant explosion where the fish—it was a walleye—cut the surface. But now the guide was raving at him, nonstop, harsh and guttural, and all the while looking desperately from Marty to the bent rod and back again. Marty looked round him. The river was loud as a freight train. “What?” he shouted. “What’s the matter?” And then all at once, his eyes wild, the guide heaved the pole into the water, knocked Marty aside, and took up the oars in a frenzy. Then Marty saw it, the precipice yawning before them, the crash and flow of the water, spray in his face, the shore looming up, and the guide snatching frantically at the brush shooting past them. With ten feet to spare, the guide caught a low-hanging branch, the boat jerked back, and all of a sudden Marty was in the water.

  But what water! The shock of it beat the breath from him and he went under. He grasped at the air and then he was swept over the falls like a bit of fluff, pounded on the rocks, and flung ashore with the flotsam below. He was lucky. Nothing broken. The guide, muttering under his breath and shooting him murderous looks, sewed up the gash in his thumb with fishing line while Marty gritted his teeth and drank off a glass of whiskey like the wounded sheriff in an old western. It took him two hours to stop shivering.

  In bed that night they heard the howling of wolves, a sound that opened up the darkness like a surgeon’s blade. “It was a communication problem,” Marty insisted, “that’s all.” Naina pressed her lips to his bruises, kneaded his back, nursed him with a sad, tender, tireless grace.

  He woke at dawn, aching. She lay stiff beside him, her eyes open wide. “Will you miss me?” she said.

  At first, he’d written her every day—postcards, mainly—from Des Moines, Albuquerque, the Grand Canyon. But then he got to San Francisco, found a job bartending, and drifted into another life. For a while he and Terry stayed with a girl Terry knew from his last trip, then they found a room for sixty dollars a week in a tenement off Geary, but Terry got mugged one night and the two of them moved in with a cocktail waitress Marty knew from work. Things were loose. He stopped writing. And when September came around, he didn’t write to the principal at school either.

  December was half gone by the time he got back.

  The Camaro had broken down on him just outside Chicago—a burnt valve—and the repairs ate up everything he had. He slept in the bus station for three nights while a Pakistani with mad black eyes worked over his car, and if it wasn’t for the hitchhiker who split the cost of gas with him, he’d still be there. When he finally coasted into Yorktown and pulled up at the curb outside Naina’s apartment, he was running on empty. For a long while, he stood there in the street looking up at her window. It had been a joyless trip back and he’d thought of her the whole way—her mouth, her eyes, the long tapering miracle of her body, especially her body—and twice he’d stopped to send her a card. Both times he changed his mind. Better to see her, try to explain himself. But now that he was here, outside her apartment, his courage failed him.

  He stood there in the cold for fifteen minutes, then started up the driveway. There was ice on the steps and he lost his footing and fell against the door with a thump that shook the frame. Then he rang the bell and listened to the crashing in his chest. A stranger came to the door, a big fat-faced woman of thirty with a baby in her arms. No, Naina didn’t live there anymore. She’d left in September. No, she didn’t know where she was.

  He sat in the car and tried to collect himself. Her mother’s, he thought, she’s probably at her mother’s. He patted down his pockets and counted the money. Two dollars and sixty-seven cents. A dollar for gas, a pack of cigarettes, and two phone calls.

  He called his landlord first. Mr. Weiner answered the phone himself, his breathing ravaged with emphysema. He was sorry, Mr. Weiner was, but when he hadn’t heard from him he’d gone ahead and rented the place to someone else. His things were in the basement—and if he didn’t pick them up within the week he’d have to put them out for the trash, was that understood?

  The other call was to his mother. She sounded surprised to hear from him—surprised and defensive. But had he heard? Yes, she was remarried. And no, she didn’t think Roger would like it if he spent the night. It was a real shame about his teaching job, but then he always was irresponsible. She punctuated each phrase with a sigh, as if the very act of speaking were torture. All right, she sighed finally, she’d loan him a hundred dollars till he got back on his feet.

  It was getting dark when he pulled up in front of the h
ouse in Cold Spring. He didn’t hesitate this time—he was too miserable. Get it over with, he told himself, one way or the other.

  Naina’s mother answered the door, peering myopically into the cold fading light. He could smell cabbage, cat, and vinegar, felt the warmth wafting out to him. “Marty?” she said.

  He’d grown his hair long and the clipped mustache had become a patchy beard. His denim jacket was faded and it was torn across the shoulder where he’d fallen flat one afternoon in Golden Gate Park, laughing at the sky and the mescaline percolating inside his brain. He wore an earring like Terry’s. He wondered that she recognized him, and somehow it made him feel sorrowful—sorrowful and guilty. “Yes,” he said.

  There was no embrace. She didn’t usher him in the door. She just stood there, the support hose sagging round her ankles.

  “I, uh…I was looking for Naina,” he said, and then, attempting a smile, “I’m back.”

  The old woman’s face was heavy, stern, hung with folds and pouches. She didn’t respond. But she was watching him in her shrewd way, totting up the changes, deciding something. “All right,” she said finally, “come,” and she swung back the door for him.

  Inside, it was as he remembered it, nothing changed but for an incremental swelling of the heaps of magazines in the corners. She gestured for him to sit on the swaybacked sofa and took the chair across from him. A cat sprang into his lap. It was so quiet he could hear the ticking of the kitchen clock. “So, is she,” he faltered, “is she living here now?—I mean, I went out to Yorktown first thing.…”

  Mama Vyshensky slowly shook her head. “College,”she said. She shrugged her big shoulders and looked away, busying herself with the arrangement of the doily on the chair arm. “When she doesn’t hear from you, she goes back to college. For the Master.”

  He didn’t know what to say. She was accusing him, he knew it. And he had no defense. “I’m sorry,” he said. He stood to go.

  The old woman was studying him carefully, her chin propped on one hand, eyes reduced to slits. “Your house,” she said, “the bungalow. Where do you sleep tonight?”

  He didn’t answer. He was going to sleep in the car, in a rubble of crumpled newspaper and fast-food containers, the greasy sleeping bag pulled up over his head.

  “I have a cot,” she said. “In the closet.”

  “I was going to go over to my mother’s…” he said, trailing off. He couldn’t seem to keep his right foot still, the heel tapping nervously at the worn floorboards.

  “Sit,” she said.

  He did as he was told. She brought him a cup of hot tea, a bowl of boiled cabbage and ham, and a plate of cold pirogen. Eating, he tried to explain himself. “About Naina,” he began, “I—”

  She waved her hand in dismissal. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “I’m not the one you should tell.”

  He set the cup down and looked at her—really looked at her—for the first time.

  “Day after tomorrow,” she said, “the solstice, shortest day of year. You come to dock on river.” She held his eyes and he thought of the day she’d offered him the whole shabby pile of the house as if it were Hyde Park itself. “Same time as last year,” she said.

  The day was raw, cold, the wind gusting off the river. A dead crust of snow clung to the ground, used up and discolored, dirt showing through in streaks that were like wounds. Marty got there early. He pulled into the lot and parked the Camaro behind a Cadillac the size of a Rose Parade float. He didn’t want her to see him right away. He let the car run, heater going full, and lit a cigarette. For a while he listened to the radio, but that didn’t feel right, so he flicked it off.

  The lot gradually filled. He recognized some of the cars from the previous year, watched the white-haired old masochists maneuver over the ruts as if they were bringing 747s in for a landing. Mama Vyshensky was late, as usual, and no one made a move till her battered Pontiac turned the corner and jolted into the lot. Then the doors began to open and bare feet gripped the snow.

  Still, he waited. The driver’s door of the Pontiac swung open, and then the passenger’s door, and he felt something rising in him, a metallic compound of hope and despair that stuck in the back of his throat. And then Naina stepped out of the car. Her back was to him, her legs long and naked, a flash of her blood-red nails against the tarnished snow. He watched her toss her head and then gather her hair in a tight knot and force it under the bathing cap. He’d slept in the car the past two nights, he’d hunkered over cups of coffee at McDonald’s like a bum. He saw her and he felt weak.

  The crowd began to gather around Mama Vyshensky, ancient, all of them, spindly-legged, their robes like shrouds. He recognized the old man with red ears, bent double now and hunched over a cane. And a woman he’d seen last year, heaving along in a one-piece with a ballerina fringe round the hips. They drank a toast and shouted. Then another, and they flung their glasses. Naina stood silent among them.

  He waited till they began to move down the slope to the dock and then he stepped noiselessly from the car, heart pounding in his chest. By the time they’d reached the dock, Naina and her mother at the head of the group, he was already passing the stragglers. “You bring a towel?” one old woman called out to him, and another tittered. He just gave her a blank stare, hurrying now, his eyes on Naina.

  As he stepped onto the dock, Naina stood poised at the far end. She dropped her robe. Then she turned and saw him. She saw him—he could read it in her eyes—though she turned away as if she hadn’t. He tried to get to her, wedging himself between two heavy-breasted women and a hearty-looking old man with a white goatee, but the dock was too crowded. And then came the first splash. Naina glanced back at him and the soft smile seemed to flicker across her lips. She held his eyes now, held them across the field of drooping flesh, the body hair, the toothless mouths. Then she turned and dove.

  All right, he thought, his pulse racing, all right. And then he had a boot in his hand and he was hopping on one leg. Then the other boot. A confusion of splashes caromed around him, water flew, the wind cut across the dock. He tore off his jacket, sweater, T-shirt, dropped his faded jeans, and stood there in his briefs, scanning the black rollicking water. There she was, her head bobbing gently, arms flowing across her breast in an easy tread.

  He never hesitated. His feet pounded against the rough planks of the dock, the wind caught his hair, and he was up and out over the churning water, hanging suspended for the briefest, maddest, most lucid instant of his life, and then he was in.

  Funny. It was warm as a bath.

  T H E D E V I L A N D I R V C H E R N I S K E

  JUST OUTSIDE the sleepy little commuter village of Irvington, New York, there stands a subdivision of half-million-dollar homes, each riding its own sculpted acre like a ship at sea and separated from its neighbors by patches of scrub and the forlorn-looking beeches that lend a certain pricy and vestigial air to the place. The stockbrokers, lawyers, doctors, and software salesmen who live here with their families know their community as Beechwood, in deference to the legend hammered into the slab of pink marble at the entrance of Beechwood Drive. This slab was erected by the developer, Sal Maggio, in the late nineteen-sixties, though there are few here now who can remember that far back. For better or worse, Beechwood is the sort of community in which the neighbors don’t know one another and don’t really care to, though they do survey each other’s gardeners and automobiles with all the perspicacity of appraisers, and while the proper names of the people next door may escape them, they are quick to invent such colorful sobriquets as the Geeks, the Hackers, the Volvos, and the Chinks by way of compensation.

  For the most part, the handsome sweeping macadam streets go untrodden but for the occasional backward jogger, and the patches of wood are ignored to the point at which they’ve begun to revert to the condition of the distant past, to the time before Maggio’s bulldozer, when the trees stretched unbroken all the way to Ardsley. Fieldmice make their home in these woods, moths, spiders, sparrow
s, and squirrels. In the late afternoon, garter snakes silently thread the high rank thick-stemmed morass of bluegrass gone wild, and toads thump from one fetid puddle to another. An unpropitious place, these woods. A forgotten place. But it was here, in one of these primordial pockets, beneath a wind-ravaged maple and within earshot of the chit-chit-chit of the gray squirrel, that Irv Cherniske made the deal of his life.

  Irv was one of the senior residents of Beechwood, having moved into his buff-and-chocolate Tudor with the imitation flagstone façade some three years earlier. He was a hard-nosed cynic in his early forties, a big-headed, heavy-paunched, irascible stock trader who’d seen it all—and then some. The characteristic tone of his voice was an unmodulated roar, but this was only the daintiest of counterpoint to the stentorian bellow of his wife, Tish. The two fought so often and at such a pitch that their young sons, Shane and Morgan, often took refuge in the basement game room while the battle raged over their heads and out across the placid rolling lawns of Beechwood Estates. To the neighbors, these battles were a source of rueful amusement: separately, yet unanimously, they had devised their own pet nickname for the Cherniskes. A torn, ragged cry would cut the air around dinnertime each evening, and someone would lift a watery gimlet to his lips and remark, with a sigh, that the Screechers were at it again.

  One evening, after a particularly bracing confrontation with his wife over the question of who had last emptied the trash receptacle in the guest room, Irv was out in the twilit backyard, practicing his chip shot and swatting mosquitoes. It was the tail end of a long Fourth of July weekend, and an unearthly stillness had settled over Beechwood, punctuated now and again by the distant muffled pop of leftover fireworks. The air was muggy and hot, a fiery breath of the tropics more suitable to Rangoon than New York, Irv bent in the fading light to address a neon-orange Titleist. Behind him, in the house which seemed almost to sink under the weight of its mortgage, Tish and his sons were watching TV, the muted sounds of conflict and sorrow carrying fitfully to where he stood in the damp grass, awash in birdsong. He raised the nine-iron, dropped it in a fluid rush, and watched the ball rise mightily into the darkening belly of the sky. Unfortunately, he overshot the makeshift flag he’d set up at the foot of the lawn and carried on into the ragged clump of trees beyond it.