If the River Was Whiskey: Stories

  This is genius, Bob, you’re going to love it.

  I ask myself, how do we soften this guy a little, you know, break down the barriers between him and the public, turn all that negative shit around? And what audience are we targeting here? Think about it. He can have all the camel drivers and Kalashnikov toters in the world, but let’s face it, the bottom line is how does he go down over here and that’s like no-wheresville. So my idea is this: baseball. Yeah, baseball. Where would Castro be without it? What can the American public relate to—and I’m talking the widest sector now, from the guys in the boardroom to the shlump with the jackhammer out the window there—better than baseball? Can you dig it: the Ayatollah’s a closet baseball fan, but his people need him so much—love him, a country embattled, he’s like a Winston Churchill to them—they won’t let him come to New York for a Yankee game. Can you picture it?

  No? Well, dig the photo. Yeah. From yesterday’s New York Times. See the button there, on his bathrobe? Well, maybe it is a little fuzzy, AP is the pits, but that’s a “Go Yankees!” button I gave him myself.

  No, listen, he liked it, Bob, he liked it. I could tell. I mean I lay the concept on him and he goes off into this fucking soliloquy, croaking up a storm, and then Parviz tells me it’s okay but it’s all over for today, he’s gotta have his hat surgically removed or something, and the guys with the Uzis are closing in again…but I’m seeing green, Bob, I’m seeing him maybe throwing out the first ball this spring, Yankees versus the Reds or Pirates—okay, okay, wrong league—the Birds, then—I’m telling you, the sun on his face, Brooks Brothers draping his shoulders, the cameras whirring, and the arc of that ball just going on and on, out over the grass, across the airwaves and into the lap of every regular Joe in America.

  Believe me, Bob, it’s in the bag.

  P E A C E O F M I N D

  FIRST SHE TOLD THEM the story of the family surprised over their corn muffins by the masked intruder. “He was a black man,” she said, dropping her voice and at the same time allowing a hint of tremolo to creep into it, “and he was wearing a lifelike mask of President Reagan. He just jimmied the lock and waltzed in the front door with the morning paper as if he was delivering flowers or something…. They thought it was a joke at first.” Giselle’s voice became hushed now, confidential, as she described how he’d brutalized the children, humiliated the wife—“Sexually, if you know what I mean”—and bound them all to the kitchen chair with twists of sheer pantyhose. Worse, she said, he dug a scratchy old copy of Sam and Dave’s “Soul Man” out of the record collection and made them listen to it over and over as he looted the house. They knew he was finished when Sam and Dave choked off, the stereo rudely torn from the socket and thrown in with the rest of their things—she paused here to draw a calculated breath—“And at seven-thirty A.M., no less.”

  She had them, she could see it in the way the pretty little wife’s eyes went dark with hate and the balding husband clutched fitfully at his pockets—she had them, but she poured it on anyway, flexing her verbal muscles, not yet noon and a sale, a big sale, already in the bag. So she gave them an abbreviated version of the story of the elderly lady and the overworked Mexican from the knife-sharpening service and wrung some hideous new truths from the tale of the housewife who came home to find a strange car in her garage. “A strange car?” the husband prompted, after she’d paused to level a doleful, frightened look on the wife. Giselle sighed. “Two white men met her at the door. They were in their early forties, nicely dressed, polite—she thought they were real-estate people or something. They escorted her into the house, bundled up the rugs, the paintings, the Camcorder and VCR and then took turns desecrating”—that was the term she used, it got them every time—“desecrating her naked body with the cigarette lighter from her very own car.”

  The husband and wife exchanged a glance, then signed on for the whole shmeer—five thousand and some-odd dollars for the alarm system—every window, door, keyhole, and crevice wired—and sixty bucks a month for a pair of “Armed Response” signs to stick in the lawn. Giselle slid into the front seat of the Mercedes and cranked up the salsa music that made her feel as if every day was a fiesta, and then let out a long slow breath. She checked her watch and drew a circle around the next name on her list. It was a few minutes past twelve, crime was rampant, and she was feeling lucky. She tapped her foot and whistled along with the sour, jostling trumpets—no doubt about it, she’d have another sale before lunch.

  The balding husband stood at the window and watched the Mercedes back out of the driveway, drift into gear, and glide soundlessly up the street. It took him a moment to realize he was still clutching his checkbook. “God, Hil,” he said (or, rather, croaked—something seemed to be wrong with his throat), “it’s a lot of money.”

  The pretty little wife, Hilary, crouched frozen on the couch, legs drawn up to her chest, feet bare, toenails glistening. “They stuff your underwear in your mouth,” she whispered, “that’s the worst thing. Can you imagine that, I mean the taste of it—your own underwear?”

  Ellis didn’t answer. He was thinking of the masked intruder—that maniac disguised as the President—and of his own children, whose heedless squeals of joy came to him like hosannas from the swingset out back. He’d been a fool, he saw that now. How could he have thought, even for a minute, that they’d be safe out here in the suburbs? The world was violent, rotten, corrupt, seething with hatred and perversion, and there was no escaping it. Everything you worked for, everything you loved, had to be locked up as if you were in a castle under siege.

  “I wonder what they did to her,” Hilary said.

  “Who?”

  “That woman—the one with the cigarette lighter. I heard they burn their initials into you.”

  Yes, of course they did, he thought—why wouldn’t they? They sold crack in the elementary schools, pissed in the alleys, battered old women for their Social Security checks. They’d cleaned out Denny Davidson while he was in the Bahamas and ripped the stereo out of Phyllis Steubig’s Peugeot. And just last week they’d stolen two brand-new Ironcast aluminum garbage cans from the curb in front of the neighbor’s house—just dumped the trash in the street and drove off with them. “What do you think, Hil?” he said. “We can still get out of it.”

  “I don’t care what it costs,” she murmured, her voice drained of emotion. “I won’t be able to sleep till it’s in.”

  Ellis crossed the room to gaze out on the sun-dappled backyard. Mifty and Corinne were on the swings, pumping hard, lifting up into the sky and falling back again with a pure rhythmic grace that was suddenly so poignant he could feel a sob rising in his throat. “I won’t either,” he said, turning to his wife and spreading his hands as if in supplication. “We’ve got to have it.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “If only for our peace of mind.”

  Giselle was pretty good with directions—she had to be, in her business—but still she had to pull over three times to consult her Thomas’ Guide before she found the next address on her list. The house was in a seedy, run-down neighborhood of blasted trees, gutted cars, and tacky little houses, the kind of neighborhood that just made her blood boil—how could people live like that? she wondered, flicking off the tape in disgust. Didn’t they have any self-respect? She hit the accelerator, scattering a pack of snarling, hyenalike dogs, dodged a stained mattress and a pair of overturned trash cans and swung into the driveway of a house that looked as if it had been bombed, partially reconstructed, and then bombed again. There has to be some mistake, she thought. She glanced up and caught the eye of the man sitting on the porch next door. He was fat and shirtless, his chest and arms emblazoned with lurid tattoos, and he was in the act of lifting a beer can to his lips when he saw that she was peering at him from behind the frosted window of her car. Slowly, as if it cost him an enormous effort, he lowered the beer can and raised the middle finger of his free hand.

  She rechecked her list. 7718 Picador Drive. There was no numb
er on the house in front of her, but the house to the left was 7716 and the one to the right 7720. This was it, all right. She stepped out of the car with her briefcase, squared her shoulders, and slammed the door, all the while wondering what in god’s name the owner of a place like this would want with an alarm system. These were the sort of the people who broke into houses—and here she turned to give the fat man an icy glare—not the ones who had anything to protect. But then what did she care?—a sale was a sale. She set the car alarm with a fierce snap of her wrist, waited for the reassuring bleat of response from the bowels of the car, and marched up the walk.

  The man who answered the door was tall and stooped—mid-fifties, she guessed—and he looked like a scholar in his wire-rims and the dingy cardigan with the leather elbow patches. His hair was the color of freshly turned dirt and his eyes, slightly distorted and swimming behind the thick lenses, were as blue as the skies over Oklahoma. “Mr. Coles?” she said.

  He looked her up and down, taking his time. “And what’re you supposed to be,” he breathed in a wheezy humorless drawl, “the Avon Lady or something?” It was then that she noticed the nervous little woman frozen in the shadows of the hallway behind him. “Everett,” the woman said in a soft, pleading tone, but the man took no notice of her. “Or don’t tell me,” he said, “you’re selling Girl Scout cookies, right?”

  When it came to sales, Giselle was unshakable. She saw her opening and thrust out her hand. “Giselle Nyerges,” she said, “I’m from SecureCo? You contacted us about a home security system?”

  The woman vanished. The fat man next door blew into his fist and produced a rude noise and Everett Coles, with a grin that showed too much gum, took her hand and led her into the house.

  Inside, the place wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. K-Mart taste, of course, furniture made of particle board, hopelessly tacky bric-a-brac, needlepoint homilies on the walls, but at least it was spare. And clean. The man led her through the living room to the open-beam kitchen and threw himself down in a chair at the Formica table. A sliding glass door gave onto the dusty expanse of the backyard. “So,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”

  “First I want to tell you how happy I am that you’re considering a SecureCo home security system, Mr. Coles,” she said, sitting opposite him and throwing the latches on her briefcase with a professional snap. “I don’t know if you heard about it,” she said, the conspiratorial whisper creeping into her voice, “but just last week they found a couple—both retirees, on a fixed income—bludgeoned to death in their home not three blocks from here. And they’d been security-conscious too—deadbolts on the doors and safety locks on the windows. The killer was this black man—a Negro—and he was wearing a lifelike mask of President Reagan.…Well, he found this croquet mallet…”

  She faltered. The man was looking at her in the oddest way. Really, he was. He was grinning still—grinning as if she were telling a joke—and there was something wrong with his eyes. They seemed to be jerking back and forth in the sockets, jittering like the shiny little balls in a pinball machine. “I know it’s not a pleasant story, Mr. Coles,” she said, “but I like my customers to know that, that…” Those eyes were driving her crazy. She looked down, shuffling through the papers in her briefcase.

  “They crowd you,” he said.

  “Pardon?” Looking up again.

  “Sons of bitches,” he growled, “they crowd you.”

  She found herself gazing over his shoulder at the neat little needlepoint display on the kitchen wall: SEMPER FIDELIS; HOME SWEET HOME; BURN, BABY, BURN.

  “You like?” he said.

  Burn, Baby, Burn?

  “Did them myself.” He dropped the grin and gazed out on nothing. “Got a lot of time on my hands.”

  She felt herself slipping. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go at all. She was wondering if she should hit him with another horror story or get down to inspecting the house and writing up an estimate, when he asked if she wanted a drink. “Thank you, no,” she said. And then, with a smile, “It’s a bit early in the day for me.”

  He said nothing, just looked at her with those jumpy blue eyes till she had to turn away. “Shit,” he spat suddenly, “come down off your high horse, lady, let your hair down, loosen up.”

  She cleared her throat. “Yes, well, shouldn’t we have a look around so I can assess your needs?”

  “Gin,” he said, and his voice was flat and calm again, “it’s the elixir of life.” He made no move to get up from the table. “You’re a good-looking woman, you know that?”

  “Thank you,” she said in her smallest voice. “Shouldn’t we—?”

  “Got them high heels and pretty little ankles, nice earrings, hair all done up, and that smart little tweed suit—of course you know you’re a good-looking woman. Bet it don’t hurt the sales a bit, huh?”

  She couldn’t help herself now. All she wanted was to get up from the table and away from those jittery eyes, sale or no sale. “Listen,” she said, “listen to me. There was this woman and she came home and there was this strange car in her garage—”

  “No,” he said, “you listen to me.”

  “’Panty Rapist Escapes,’” Hilary read aloud in a clear declamatory tone, setting down her coffee mug and spreading out the “Metro” section as if it were a sacred text. “’Norbert Baptiste, twenty-seven, of Silverlake, dubbed the Panty Rapist because he gagged his victims with their own underthings…’” She broke off to give her husband a look of muted triumph. “You see,” she said, lifting the coffee mug to her lips, “I told you. With their own underthings.”

  Ellis Hunsicker was puzzling over the boxscores of the previous night’s ballgames, secure as a snail in its shell. It was early Saturday morning, Mifty and Corinne were in the den watching cartoons, and the house alarm was still set from the previous night. In a while, after he’d finished his muesli and his second cup of coffee, he’d punch in the code and disarm the thing and then maybe do a little gardening and afterward take the girls to the park. He wasn’t really listening, and he murmured a halfhearted reply.

  “And can you imagine Tina Carfarct trying to tell me we were just wasting our money on the alarm system?” She pinched her voice in mockery: “’I hate to tell you, Hil, but this is the safest neighborhood in L.A.’ Jesus, she’s like a Pollyanna or something, but you know what it is, don’t you?”

  Ellis looked up from the paper.

  “They’re too cheap, that’s what—her and Sid both. They’re going to take their chances, hope it happens to the next guy, and all to save a few thousand dollars. It’s sick. It really is.”

  Night before last they’d had the Carfarcts and their twelve-year-old boy, Brewster, over for dinner—a nice sole amandine and scalloped potatoes Ellis had whipped up himself—and the chief object of conversation was, of course, the alarm system. “I don’t know,” Sid had said (Sid was forty, handsome as a prince, an investment counselor who’d once taught high-school social studies), “it’s kind of like being a prisoner in your own home.”

  “All that money,” Tina chimed in, sucking at the cherry of her second Manhattan, “I mean I don’t think I could stand it. Like Sid says, I’d feel like I was a prisoner or something, afraid to step out into my own yard because some phantom mugger might be lurking in the marigolds.”

  “The guy in the Reagan mask was no phantom,” Hilary said, leaning across the table to slash the air with the flat of her hand, bracelets ajangle. “Or those two men—white men—who accosted that woman in her own garage—” She was so wrought up she couldn’t go on. She turned to her husband, tears welling in her eyes. “Go on,” she’d said, “tell them.”

  It was then that Tina had made her “safest neighborhood in L.A.” remark and Sid, draining his glass and setting it down carefully on the table, had said in a phlegmy, ruminative voice, “I don’t know, it’s like you’ve got no faith in your fellow man,” to which Ellis had snapped, “Don’t be naive, Sid.”

  Even Tina scored
him for that one. “Oh, come off it, Sid,” she said, giving him a sour look.

  “Let’s face it,” Ellis said, “it’s a society of haves and have-nots, and like it or not, we’re the haves.”

  “I don’t deny there’s a lot of crazies out there and all,” Tina went on, swiveling to face Ellis, “it’s just that the whole idea of having an alarm on everything—I mean you can’t park your car at the mall without it—is just, well, it’s a sad thing. I mean next thing you know people’ll be wearing these body alarms to work, rub up against them in a crowd and—bingo!—lights flash and sirens go off.” She sat back, pleased with herself, a tiny, elegant blonde in a low-cut cocktail dress and a smug grin, untouched, unafraid, a woman without a care in the world.

  But then Sid wanted to see the thing and all four of them were at the front door, gathered round the glowing black plastic panel as if it were some rare jewel, some treasure built into the wall. Ellis was opening the closet to show them the big metal box that contained the system’s “brain,” as the SecureCo woman had called it, when Sid, taken by the allure of the thing, lightly touched the tip of his index finger to the neat glowing red strip at the bottom that read EMERGENCY.

  Instantly, the scene was transformed. Whereas a moment earlier they’d been calm, civilized people having a drink before a calm, civilized meal, they were suddenly transformed into hand-wringing zombies, helpless in the face of the technology that assaulted them. For Sid had activated the alarm and no one, least of all Ellis, knew what to do about it. The EMERGENCY strip was flashing wildly, the alarm beep-beep-beeping, the girls and the Carfarcts’ boy fleeing the TV room in confusion, four pairs of hands fluttering helplessly over the box, and Ellis trying to dredge up the disarm code from the uncertain pocket of memory in which it was stored. “One-two-two-one!” Hilary shouted. Tina was holding her ears and making a face. Sid looked abashed.