If the River Was Whiskey (16 page)

I glanced around the room. All of a sudden I felt indescribably weary. “Party’s over,” I said.

I woke at noon with a hangover. I drank from the tap, threw some water in my face, and shambled down to the lodge for breakfast. Marshall was there, behind the grill, looking as if he was made of mashed potatoes. He barely noticed as I shuffled in and took a window seat among a throng of chipper, alert, and well-fed tourists.

I was leafing through the
Chronicle
and puffing away at my third cup of coffee when I saw Regina’s car sail past the window, negotiate the turn at the end of the lot, and swing onto the road that led down the mountain. I couldn’t be sure—it was a gloomy day, the sky like smoke—but as near as I could tell she was hatless. No more queen of the mountain for her, I thought. No more champagne cocktails and the tight thrilling clasp of spandex across the bottom—from here on out it was stinking mouths and receding gums. I turned back to the newspaper.

When I looked up again, Boo, Josh, and Scott were stepping
out of a Jeep Cherokee, a knot of gawkers and Sunday skiers gathered round them. Draped over the hood of the thing, still red at the edges with raw meat and blood, was a bearskin, head intact. The fur was reddish, almost cinnamon-colored, and one ear was folded down. I watched as Boo ambled up to the door, stepped aside for a pair of sixteen-year-old ski bunnies with layered hair, and then pushed his way into the lodge.

He took off his shades and stood there a moment in the doorway, carefully wiping them on his parka before slipping them into his breast pocket. Then he started toward the cash register, already easing back to reach for his wallet. “Hey,” he said when he saw me, and he stopped to lean over the table for a moment. “We got him,” he said, scraping bottom with his baritone and indicating the truck beyond the window with a jerk of his head. There was a discoloration across the breast of his white parka, a brownish spatter. I swiveled my head to glance out the window, then turned back to him, feeling as if I’d had the wind punched out of me. “Yeah,” I said.

There was a silence. He looked at me, I looked at him. “Well,” he said after a moment, “you take care,” and then he strode up to the cash register to pay his bill and check out.

Jill came in about one. She was wearing shades too, and when she slipped behind the bar and removed them, I saw the black-and-blue crescent under her right eye. As for Marshall, she didn’t even give him a glance. Later, after I’d been through the paper twice and figured it was time for a Bloody Mary or two and some Bowl games, I took a seat at the bar. “Hi, Michael,” she said, “what’ll you have?,” and her tone was so soft, so contrite, so sweet and friendly and conciliatory, that I could actually feel the great big heaving plates of the world shifting back into alignment beneath my feet.

Oh, yes, the hat. A week later, when the soot and dust and woodchips around the cabin got too much for me, I dragged out the vacuum cleaner for my semiannual sweep around the
place. I scooted over the rug, raked the drapes, and got the cobwebs in the corners. When I turned over the cushions on the couch, the wand still probing, I found the hat. There was a label inside.
J.C. Penney
, it read,
$7.95.
For a long moment I just stood there, turning the thing over in my hand. Then I tossed it in the fire.

“
S
O TELL ME
, comrade, why do you wear your hair this way?”

Robert Jordan fingered the glistening, rock-hard corona of his spiked hair (dyed mud-brown now, with khaki highlights, for the sake of camouflage) and then loosened the cap of his flask and took a long burning hit of mescal. He waited till the flame was gone from his throat and the familiar glow lit his insides so that they felt radioactive, then leaned over the campfire to address the flat-faced old man in worn fatigues. “Because I shit in the milk of my mother, that’s why,” he said, the mescal abrading his voice. He caressed the copper stud that lay tight against the flange of his left nostril and wiped his hands with exaggerated care on his Hussong’s T-shirt. “And come to think of it,” he added, “because I shit in the milk of your mother too.”

The old man, flat-faced though he was, said nothing. He wasn’t that old, actually—twenty-eight or-nine, Robert Jordan guessed—but poor nutrition, lack of dental care, and too much squinting into the sun gave him the look of a retired caterer in Miami Beach. The fire snapped, monkeys howled. “La reputa que lo parió,” the old man said finally, turning his head to spit.

Robert Jordan didn’t catch it all—he’d dropped out of college in the middle of Intermediate Spanish—but he got the gist of it all right and gave the old man the finger. “Yeah,” he said, “and screw you too.”

Two nights earlier the old man had come to him in the Managua
bus station as he gingerly lifted his two aluminum-frame superlightweight High Sierra mountain packs down from the overhead rack and exited the bus that had brought him from Mexico City. The packs were stuffed with soiled underwear, granola bars, hair gel, and plastic explosives, and Robert Jordan was suffering from a hangover. He was also suffering from stomach cramps, diarrhea, and dehydration, not to mention the general debilitating effects of having spent two days and a night on a third-class bus with a potpourri of drunks, chicken thieves, disgruntled pigs, and several dozen puking, mewling, loose-boweled niñitos. “Over here, comrade,” the old man had whispered, taking him by the arm and leading him to a bench across the square.

The old man had hovered over him as Robert Jordan threw himself down on the bench and stretched his legs. Trucks rumbled by, burros brayed, campesinos hurried about their business. “You are the gringo for this of the Cup of Soup, no?” the old man asked.

Robert Jordan regarded him steadily out of the slits of his bloodshot eyes. The old man’s face was as dry and corrugated as a strip of jerky and he wore the armband of the Frente, black letters—FSLN—against a red background. Robert Jordan was thinking how good the armband would look with his Dead Kennedys tour jacket, but he’d caught the “Cup of Soup” business and nodded. That nod was all the old man needed. He broke into a grin, bent to kiss him on both cheeks, and breathed rummy fumes in his face. “I am called Bayardo,” the old man said, “and I am come to take you to the border.”

Robert Jordan felt bone-weary, but this is what he’d come for, so he stood and shouldered one of the packs while Bayardo took the other. In a few minutes they’d be boarding yet another bus, this one north to Jinotega and the Honduran border that lay beyond it. There Robert Jordan would rendezvous with one of the counterr-counter-revolutionary bands (Contra Contra) and he would, if things went well, annihilate in a roar of flying earth
clods and shattered trees a Contra airstrip and warehouse where foodstuffs—Twinkies, Lipton Cup of Soup, and Rice Krispies among them—were flown in from Texas by the CIA. Hence the codename, “Cup of Soup.”

But now—now they were camped somewhere on the Nicaraguan side of the border, listening to monkeys howl and getting their asses chewed off by mosquitoes, ticks, chiggers, leeches, and everything else that crawled, swam, or flew. It began to rain. The rain, Robert Jordan understood, would be bad for his hair. He finished a granola bar, exchanged curses with the old man, and crawled into his one-man pup tent. “You take the first watch,” he growled through the wall of undulating nylon in his very bad Spanish. “And the second and third too. Come to think of it, why don’t you just wake me at noon.”

The camp was about what you’d expect, Robert Jordan thought, setting his pack down in a clump of poisonous-looking plants. He and the old man had hiked three days through the bug factory to get here, and what was it but a few banana-leaf hovels with cigarette cartons piled outside. Robert Jordan was thinking he’d be happy to blow this dump and get back to the drugs, whores, semi-clean linen, and tequila añejo of Mexico City and points north, when a one-eyed man emerged from the near hut, his face split with a homicidal grin. His name was Ruperto, and he wore the combat boots, baggy camouflage pants, and black T-shirt that even professors in Des Moines favored these days, and he carried a Kalashnikov assault rifle in his right hand. “Qué tal, old man,” he said, addressing Bayardo, and then, turning to Robert Jordan and speaking in English: “And this is the gringo with the big boom-boom. Nice hair, gringo.”

Robert Jordan traded insults with him, ending with the usual malediction about shit, milk, and mothers, and then pinched his voice through his nose in the nagging whine he’d perfected when he was four. “And so where’s all the blow that’s supposed to be dropping from the trees out here, huh? And what about
maybe a hit of rum or some tortillas or something? I mean I been tramping through this craphole for three days and no sooner do I throw my pack down than I get some wiseass comment about my hair I could’ve stayed in Montana and got from some redneck cowboy. Hey,” he shouted, leaning into Ruperto’s face and twisting his voice till it broke in a snarl, “screw you too, Jack.”

Ruperto said nothing. Just smiled his homicidal smile, one eye gleaming, the other dead in a crater of pale, scarred flesh. By now the others had begun to gather—Robert Jordan counted six of them, flat-faced Indians all—and a light rain was sizzling through the trees. “You want hospitality,” Ruperto said finally, “go to Howard Johnson’s.” He spat at his feet. “Your mother,” he said, and then turned to shout over his shoulder. “Muchacha!”

Everyone stopped dead to watch as the girl in skintight fatigues stepped out of the hut, shadowed by an older woman with the build of a linebacker. “Sí?” the girl said in a voice that inflamed Robert Jordan’s groin.

Ruperto spat again. “Bring the gringo some chow.”

“The Cup of Soup?” the girl asked.

Ruperto winked his mad wet eye at Robert Jordan. “Sí,” he grunted, “the Cup of Soup.”

As he lay in his pup tent that night, his limbs entwined in the girl’s—her name was either Vidaluz or Concepción, he couldn’t remember which—Robert Jordan thought of his grandmother. She was probably the only person in the world he didn’t hate. His mother was a real zero, white wine and pasta salad all the way, and his friends back in Missoula were a bunch of dinks who thought Bryan Adams was god. His father was dead. When the old man had sucked on the barrel of his 30.06 Winchester, Robert was fourteen and angry. His role model was Sid Vicious and he was into glue and Bali Hai. It was his grandmother—she was Andalusian, really cool, a guerrilla who’d bailed out of
Spain in the ‘30s, pregnant with Robert Jordan II—who listened patiently to his gripes about the school jocks and his wimpy teachers and bought him tire chains to wrap around his boots. They sat for hours together listening to the Clash’s Sandinista album, and when he blew off the tips of his pinky and ring fingers with a homemade bomb, it was she who gave him his first pair of studded black leather gloves. And what was best about her—what he liked more than anything else—was that she didn’t take any shit from anybody. Once, when her third husband, Joe Thunderbucket, called her “Little Rabbit,” she broke his arm in three places. It was she more than anyone who’d got him into all this revolution business—she and the Clash, anyway. And of course he’d always loved dynamite.

He lay there, slapping mosquitoes, his flesh sticky against the girl’s, wondering what his grandmother was doing now, in the dark of this night before his first offensive. It was a Tuesday, wasn’t it? That was bingo night on the reservation, and she usually went with Joe’s sister Leona to punch numbers and drink boilermakers at the bingo hall. He pictured her in her black mantilla, her eyes cold and hard and lit maybe a little with the bourbon and Coors, and then he woke up Concepción or Vidaluz and gave it to her again, all his anger focused in the sharp tingling stab and rhythm of it.

It was still dark when the old man woke him. “Son of a bitch,” Robert Jordan muttered. His hair was crushed like a Christmas-tree ornament and there was a sour metallic taste in his mouth. He didn’t mind fighting for the revolution, but this was ridiculous—it wasn’t even light yet. “Ándale,” the old man said, “the Cup of Soup awaits.”