If the River Was Whiskey (24 page)

He jerked his arm away. “Oh, yeah, I know—you really slaved over those enchiladas, didn’t you? Christ, you might have chipped a nail or something tearing the package open and shoving them in the microwave.”

“Don’t give me that shit,” she snarled, snatching his arm back and digging her nails in for emphasis. “The mark on your head, the Chinese food, that stupid grin on your face when you saw the ambulance—I know you. Something’s up, isn’t it?” She clung to his arm like some inescapable force of nature, like the tar in the La Brea pits or the undertow at Rockaway Beach. “Isn’t it?”

Irv Cherniske was not a man to confide in his wife. He regarded marriage as an arbitrary and essentially adversarial relationship, akin to the yoking of prisoners on the chain gang. But this once, because the circumstances were so arresting and the stranger’s proposal so unique (not to mention final), he relented and let her in on his secret.

At first, she wouldn’t believe it. It was another of his lies, he was covering something up—
devils:
did he think she was born yesterday? But when she saw how solemn he was, how shaken, how feverish with lust over the prospect of laying his hands on the loot, she began to come around. By midnight she was urging him to go back and seal the bargain. “You fool. You idiot. What do you need twenty-four hours for? Go. Go now.”

Though Irv had every intention of doing just that—in his own time, of course—he wasn’t about to let her push him into anything. “You think I’m going to damn myself forever just to please you?” he sneered.

Tish took it for half a beat, then she sprang up from the sofa as if it were electrified. “All right,” she snapped. “I’ll find the son of a bitch myself and we’ll both roast—but I tell you I want those Krugerrands and all the rest of it too. And I want it now.”

A moment later, she was gone—out the back door and into the soft suburban night. Let her go, Irv thought in disgust, but despite himself he sat back to wait for her. For better than an hour he sat there in his mortgaged living room, dreaming of crushing his enemies and ascending the high-flown corridors of power, envisioning the cut-glass decanter in the bar of the Rolls and breakfast on the yacht, but at last he found himself nodding and decided to call it a day. He rose, stretched, and then padded through the dining room and kitchen to the back porch. He swung open the door and halfheartedly called his wife’s name. There was no answer. He shrugged, retraced his steps, and wearily mounted the stairs to the bedroom: devil or no devil, he had a train to catch in the morning.

Tish was sullen at breakfast. She looked sorrowful and haggard and there were bits of twig and leaf caught in her hair. The boys bent silently over their caramel crunchies, waiflike in the khaki jerseys and oversized shorts they wore to camp. Irv studied his watch while gulping coffee. “Well,” he said, addressing his stone-faced wife, “any luck?”

At first she wouldn’t answer him. And when she did, it was in a voice so constricted with rage she sounded as if she were being throttled. Yes, she’d found the sorry son of a bitch, all right—after traipsing all over hell and back for half the night—and after all that he’d had the gall to turn his back on her. He wasn’t in the mood, he said. But if she were to come back at noon with a peace offering—something worth talking about, something to show she was serious—he’d see what he could do for her. That’s how he’d put it.

For a moment Irv was seized with jealousy and resentment-was she trying to cut him out, was that it?—but then he remembered how the stranger had singled him out, had come to him, and he relaxed. He had nothing to worry about. It was Tish. She just didn’t know how to bargain, that was all. Her idea of a give and take was to reiterate her demands, over and
over, each time in a shriller tone than the last. She’d probably pushed and pushed till even the devil wouldn’t have her. “I’ll be home early,” he said, and then he was driving through a soft misting rain to the station.

It was past seven when finally he did get home. He pulled into the driveway and was surprised to see his sons sitting glumly on the front stoop, their legs drawn up under them, rain drooling steadily from the eaves. “Where’s your mother?” he asked, hurrying up the steps in alarm. The elder, Shane, a pudgy, startled-looking boy of eight, whose misfortune it was to favor Tish about the nose and eyes, began to whimper. “She, she never came back,” he blubbered, smearing snot across his lip.

Filled with apprehension—and a strange, airy exhilaration too: maybe she was gone, gone for good!—Irv dialed his mother. “Ma?” he shouted into the phone. “Can you come over and watch the kids? It’s Tish. She’s missing.” He’d no sooner set the phone down than he noticed the blank space on the wall above the sideboard. The painting was gone. He’d always hated the thing—a gloomy dark swirl of howling faces with the legend “Cancer Dreams” scrawled in red across the bottom, a small monstrosity Tish had insisted on buying when he could barely make the car payments—but it was worth a bundle, that much he knew. And the moment he saw that empty space on the wall he knew she’d taken it to the big man in the woods—but what else had she taken? While the boys sat listlessly before the TV with a bag of taco chips, he tore through the house. Her jewelry would have been the first thing to go, and he wasn’t surprised to see that it had disappeared, teak box and all. But in growing consternation he discovered that his coin collection was gone too, as were his fly rod and his hip waders and the bottle of V.S.O.P. he’d been saving for the World Series. The whole business had apparently been bundled up in the Irish-linen cloth that had shrouded the dining-room table for as long as he could remember.

Irv stood there a moment over the denuded table, overcome
with grief and rage. She
was
cutting him out, the bitch. She and the big man were probably down there right now, dancing round a gaping black hole in the earth. Or worse, she was on the train to New York with every last Krugerrand of Belcher’s hoard, heading for the Caymans in a chartered yacht, hurtling out of Kennedy in a big 747, two huge, bursting, indescribably heavy trunks nestled safely in the baggage compartment beneath her. Irv rushed to the window. There were the woods: still, silent, slick with wet. He saw nothing but trees.

In the next instant, he was out the back door, down the grassy slope, and into the damp fastness of the woods. He’d forgotten all about the kids, his mother, the house at his back—all he knew was that he had to find Tish. He kicked through dead leaves and rotting branches, tore at the welter of grapevine and sumac that seemed to rise up like a barrier before him. “Tish!” he bawled.

The drizzle had turned to a steady, pelting rain. Irv’s face and hands were scratched and insect-bitten and the hair clung to his scalp like some strange species of mold. His suit—all four hundred bucks’ worth—was ruined. He was staggering through a stubborn tangle of briars, his mind veering sharply toward the homicidal end of the spectrum, when a movement up ahead made him catch his breath. Stumbling forward, he flushed a great black carrion bird from the bushes; as it rose silently into the darkening sky, he spotted the tablecloth. Still laden, it hung from the lower branches of a pocked and leprous oak. Irv looked round him cautiously. All was still, no sound but for the hiss of the rain in the leaves. He straightened up and lumbered toward the pale damp sack, thinking at least to recover his property.

No such luck. When he lifted the bundle down, he was disappointed by its weight; when he opened it, he was shocked to the roots of his hair. The tablecloth contained two things only: a bloody heart and a bloody liver. His own heart was beating so hard he thought his temples would burst; in horror he flung the thing to the ground. Only then did he notice that the
undergrowth round the base of the tree was beaten down and trampled, as if a scuffle had taken place beneath it. There was a fandango of footprints in the mud and clumps of stiff black hair were scattered about like confetti—and wasn’t that blood on the bark of the tree?

“Irv,” murmured a voice at his back, and he whirled round in a panic. There he was, the big man, his swarthy features hooded in shadow. This time he was wearing a business suit in a muted gray check, a power yellow tie, and an immaculate trenchcoat. In place of the chainsaw, he carried a shovel, which he’d flung carelessly over one shoulder. “Whoa,” he said, holding up a massive palm, “I didn’t mean to startle you.” He took a step forward and Irv could see that he was grinning. “All’s I want to know is do we have a deal or not?”

“Where’s Tish?” Irv demanded, his voice quavering. But even as he spoke he saw the angry red welt running the length of the big man’s jaw and disappearing into the hair at his temple, and he knew.

The big man shrugged. “What do you care? She’s gone, that’s all that matters. Hey, no more of that nagging whiny voice, no more money down the drain on face cream and high heels-just think, you’ll never have to wake up again to that bitchy pout and those nasty red little eyes. You’re free, Irv. I did you a favor.”

Irv regarded the stranger with awe. Tish was no mean adversary, and judging from the look of the poor devil’s face, she’d gone down fighting.

The big man dropped his shovel to the ground and there was a clink of metal on metal. “Right here, Irv,” he whispered. “Half a million easy. Cash. Tax-free. And with my help you’ll watch it grow to fifty times that.”

Irv glanced down at the bloody tablecloth and then back up at the big man in the trenchcoat. A slow grin spread across his lips.

Coming to terms wasn’t so easy, however, and it was past
dark before they’d concluded their bargain. At first the stranger had insisted on Irv’s going into one of the big Hollywood talent agencies, but when Irv balked, he said he figured the legal profession was just about as good—but you needed a degree for that, and begging Irv’s pardon, he was a bit old to be going back to school, wasn’t he? “Why can’t I stay where I am,” Irv countered, “—in stocks and bonds? With all this cash I could quit Tiller Ponzi and set up my own office.”

The big man scratched his chin and laid a thoughtful finger alongside his nose. “Yeah,” he murmured after a moment, “yeah, I hadn’t thought of that. But I like it. You could promise them thirty percent and then play the futures market and gouge them till they bleed.”

Irv came alive at the prospect. “Bleed ’em dry,” he hooted. “I’ll scalp and bucket and buy off the CFTC investigators, and then I’ll set up an offshore company to hide the profits.” He paused, overcome with the beauty of it. “I’ll screw them right and left.”

“Deal?” the devil said.

Irv took the big callused hand in his own. “Deal.”

Ten years later, Irv Cherniske was one of the wealthiest men in New York. He talked widows into giving him their retirement funds to invest in ironclad securities and sure bets, lost them four or five hundred thousand, and charged half that again in commissions. With preternatural luck his own investments paid off time and again and he eventually set up an inside-trading scheme that made guesswork superfluous. The police, of course, had been curious about Tish’s disappearance, but Irv showed them the grisly tablecloth and the crude hole in which the killer had no doubt tried to bury her, and they launched an intensive manhunt that dragged on for months but produced neither corpse nor perpetrator. The boys he shunted off to his mother’s, and when they were old enough, to a military school in Tangiers. Two months after his wife’s disappearance, the newspapers
uncovered a series of ritual beheadings in Connecticut and dropped all mention of the “suburban ghoul,” as they’d dubbed Tish’s killer; a week after that, Tish was forgotten and Beechwood went back to sleep.

It was in the flush of his success, when he had everything he’d ever wanted—the yacht, the sweet and compliant young mistress, the pair of Rolls Corniches, and the houses in the Bahamas, and Aspen, not to mention the new wing he’d added to the old homestead in Beechwood—that Irv began to have second thoughts about the deal he’d made. Eternity was a long time, yes, but when he’d met the stranger in the woods that night it had seemed a long way off too. Now he was in his fifties, heavier than ever, with soaring blood pressure and flat feet, and the end of his career in this vale of profits was drawing uncomfortably near. It was only natural that he should begin to cast about for a loophole.

And so it was that he returned to the church—not the Roman church, to which he’d belonged as a boy, but the Church of the Open Palm, Reverend Jimmy, Pastor. He came to Reverend Jimmy one rainy winter night with a fire in his gut and an immortal longing in his heart. He sat through a three-hour service in which Reverend Jimmy spat fire, spoke in tongues, healed the lame, and lectured on the sanctity of the one and only God—profit—and then distributed copies of the
Reverend Jimmy Church-Sponsored Investment Guide
with the chili and barbecue recipes on the back page.

After the service, Irv found his way to Reverend Jimmy’s office at the back of the church. He waited his turn among the other supplicants with growing impatience, but he reminded himself that the way to salvation lay through humility and forbearance. At long last he was ushered into the presence of the Reverend himself. “What can I do for you, brother?” Reverend Jimmy asked. Though he was from Staten Island, Reverend Jimmy spoke in the Alabama hog-farmer’s dialect peculiar to his tribe.

“I need help, Reverend,” Irv confessed, flinging himself down on a leather sofa worn smooth by the buttocks of the faithful.

Reverend Jimmy made a small pyramid of his fingers and leaned back in his adjustable chair. He was a youngish man—no older than thirty-five or so, Irv guessed—and he was dressed in a flannel shirt, penny loafers, and a plaid fishing hat that masked his glassy blue eyes. “Speak to me, brother,” he said.

Irv looked down at the floor, then shot a quick glance round the office—an office uncannily like his own, right down to the computer terminal, mahogany desk, and potted palms—and then whispered, “You’re probably not going to believe this.”

Reverend Jimmy lit himself a cigarette and shook out the match with a snap of his wrist. “Try me,” he drawled.