If the River Was Whiskey (30 page)

“Soon,” she said, watching the crowd part as Konrad, a perplexed look on his face, bent to lap up the sour overflow of his digestive tract.

“How about tomorrow?” Howie said.

“Tomorrow,” Beatrice repeated, struck suddenly with the scent of the rain forest, her ears ringing with the call of shrike and locust and tree toad. “Yes,” she lisped, “that would be nice.”

Konrad was subdued the next day. He spent the early morning halfheartedly tearing up the carpet in the guest room, then brooded over his nuts and bananas, all the while pinning Beatrice with an accusatory look, a look that had nacho chips and Fruit Roll-Ups written all over it. Around noon, he dragged himself across the floor like a hundred-year-old man and climbed wearily into his nest. Beatrice felt bad, but she wasn’t about to give in. They’d made him schizophrenic—neither chimp nor man—and if there was pain involved in reacquainting him with his roots, with his true identity, there was nothing she could do about it. Besides, she was feeling schizophrenic herself. Konrad was a big help—the smell of him, the silken texture of his fur as she groomed him, the way he scratched around in the basement when he did his business—but still she felt out of place, still she missed Makoua with an ache that wouldn’t go away, and as the days accumulated like withered leaves at her feet, she found herself wishing she’d stayed on there to die.

Howie appeared at ten of three, his rust-eaten Datsun rumbling at the curb, the omnipresent grin on his lips. It was unseasonably warm for mid-April and he wore a red T-shirt that showed off the extraordinary development of his pectorals, deltoids, and biceps; a blue windbreaker was flung casually over one shoulder. “Miss Umbo,” he boomed as she answered the
door, “it’s one perfect day for flying. Visibility’s got to be twenty-five miles or more. You ready?”

She was. She’d been looking forward to it, in fact. “I hope you don’t mind if I bring Konrad along,” she said.

Howie’s smile faded for just an instant. Konrad stood at her side, his lower lip unfurled in a pout.
“Hoo-hoo,”
he murmured, eyes meek and round. Howie regarded him dubiously a moment, and then the grin came back. “Sure,” he said, shrugging, “I don’t see why not.”

It was a twenty-minute ride to the airport. Beatrice stared out the window at shopping centers, car lots, Burger King and Stereo City, at cemeteries that stretched as far as she could see. Konrad sat in back, absorbed in plucking cigarette butts from the rear ashtray and making a neat little pile of them on the seat beside him. Howie was oblivious. He kept up a steady stream of chatter the whole way, talking about airplanes mostly, but shading into his coursework at school and how flipped out his Anthro prof would be when she heard he was taking Beatrice flying. For her part, Beatrice was content to let the countryside flash by, murmuring an occasional “yes” or “uh huh” when Howie paused for breath.

The airport was tiny, two macadam strips in a grassy field, thirty or forty airplanes lined up in ragged rows, a cement-block building the size of her basement. A sign over the door welcomed them to Arkbelt Airport. Howie pushed the plane out onto the runway himself and helped Beatrice negotiate the high step up into the cockpit. Konrad clambered into the back and allowed Beatrice to fasten his seatbelt. For a long while they sat on the ground, as Howie, grinning mechanically, revved the engine and checked this gauge or that.

The plane was a Cessna 182, painted a generic orange and white and equipped with dual controls, autopilot, a storm scope, and four cramped vinyl seats. It was about what she’d
expected—a little shinier and less battered than Champ’s Piper, but no less noisy or bone-rattling. Howie gunned the engine and the plane jolted down the runway with an apocalyptic roar, Beatrice clinging to the plastic handgrip till she could taste her breakfast in the back of her throat. But then they lifted off like gods, liberated from the grip of the earth, and Connecticut swelled beneath them, revealing the drift and flow of its topology and the hidden patterns of its dismemberment.

“Beautiful,” she screamed over the whine of the engine.

Howie worked the flaps and drew the yoke toward him. They banked right and rose steadily. “See that out there?” he shouted, pointing out her window to where the ocean threw the sky back at them. “Long Island Sound.”

From just behind her, Konrad said:
“Wow-wow, er-er-er-er!”
The smell of him, in so small a confine, was staggering.

“You want to sightsee here,” Howie shouted, “maybe go over town and look for your house and the university and all, or do you want to go out over the Island a ways and then circle back?”

She was dazzled, high in the empyrean, blue above, blue below. “The Island,” she shouted, exhilarated, really exhilarated, for the first time since she’d left Africa.

Howie leveled off the plane and the tan lump of Long Island loomed ahead of them. “Great, huh?” he shouted, gesturing toward the day like an impresario, like the man who’d made it. Beatrice beamed at him. “Woooo!” Howie said, pinching his nostrils and making an antic face. “He’s ripe today, Konrad, isn’t he?”

“Forty years,” Beatrice laughed, proud of Konrad, proud of the stink, proud of every chimp she’d ever known, and proud of this boy Howie too—why, he was nothing but a big chimp himself. It was then—while she was laughing, while Howie mugged for her and she began to feel almost whole for the first time since she’d left Makoua—that the trouble began. Like most
trouble, it arose out of a misunderstanding. Apparently, Konrad had saved one of the butts from Howie’s car, and when he reached out nimbly to depress the cigarette lighter, Howie, poor Howie, thought he was going for the controls and grabbed his wrist.

A mistake.

“No!” Beatrice cried, and immediately the tug of war spilled over into her lap. “Let go of him!”

“Eeeee! Eeeee!”
Konrad shrieked, his face distended in the full open grin of high excitement, already stoked to violence. She felt the plane dip out from under her as Howie, his own face gone red with the rush of blood, struggled to keep it on course with one hand while fighting back Konrad with the other. It was no contest. Konrad slipped Howie’s grasp and then grabbed
his
wrist, as if to say, “How do you like it?”

“Get off me, goddamnit!” Howie bellowed, but Konrad didn’t respond. Instead, he jerked Howie’s arm back so swiftly and suddenly it might have been the lever of a slot machine; even above the noise of the engine, Beatrice could hear the shoulder give, and then Howie’s bright high yelp of pain filled the compartment. In the next instant Konrad was in front, in the cockpit, dancing from Beatrice’s lap to Howie’s and back again, jerking at the controls, gibbering and hooting and loosing his bowels in a frenzy like nothing she’d ever seen.

“Son of a bitch!” Howie was working up a frenzy of his own, the plane leaping and bucking as he punched in the autopilot and hammered at the chimp with his left hand, the right dangling uselessly, his eyes peeled back in terror.
“Hoo-ah-hoo-ah-hoo!”
Konrad hooted, spewing excrement and springing into Beatrice’s lap. For an instant he paused to shoot Howie a mocking glance and then he snatched the yoke to his chest and the plane shot up with a clattering howl while Howie flailed at him with the heavy meat of his fist.

Konrad took the first two blows as if he didn’t notice them,
then abruptly dropped the yoke, the autopilot kicking in to level them off. Howie hit him again and Beatrice knew she was going to die.
“Er-er,”
Konrad croaked experimentally, and Howie, panic in his face, hit him again. And then, as casually as he might have reached out for a yam or banana, Konrad returned the blow and the plane jerked with the force of it.
“Wraaaaa!”
Konrad screamed, but Howie didn’t hear him. Howie was unconscious. Unconscious, and smeared with shit. And now, delivering the coup de grace, Konrad sprang to his chest, snatched up his left hand—the hand that had pummeled him—and bit off the thumb. A snap of the jaws and it was gone. Howie’s heart pumped blood to the wound.

In that moment—the moment of Howie’s disfigurement-Beatrice’s own heart turned over in her chest. She looked at Konrad, perched atop poor Howie, and at Howie, who even in repose managed to favor Agassiz. They were beyond Long Island now, headed out to sea, high over the Atlantic. Champ had tried to teach her to fly, but she’d had no interest in it. She looked at the instrument panel and saw nothing. For a moment the idea of switching on the radio came into her head, but then she glanced at Konrad and thought better of it.

Konrad was looking into her eyes. The engine hummed, Howie’s head fell against the door, the smell of Konrad—his body, his shit—filled her nostrils. They had five hours’ flying time, give or take a few minutes, that much she knew. She looked out over the nose of the plane to where the sea swallowed up the rim of the world. Africa was out there, distant and serene, somewhere beyond the night that fell like an axe across the horizon. She could almost taste it.

“Urk,”
Konrad said, and he was still looking at her. His eyes were soft now, his breathing regular. He sat atop Howie in a forlorn slouch, the cigarette forgotten, the controls irrelevant, nothing at all.
“Urk,”
he repeated, and she knew what he wanted, knew in a rush of comprehension that took her all the way back
to Makoua and that first, long-ago touch of Agassiz’s strange spidery fingers.

She held his eyes. The engine droned. The sea beneath them seemed so still you could walk on it, so soft you could wrap yourself up in it. She reached out and touched his hand.
“Urk,”
she said.

T
HE WATER WAS
a heartbeat, a pulse, it stole the heat from his body and pumped it to his brain. Beneath the surface, magnified through the shimmering lens of his face mask, were silver shoals of fish, forests of weed, a silence broken only by the distant throbbing hum of an outboard. Above, there was the sun, the white flash of a faraway sailboat, the weatherbeaten dock with its weatherbeaten rowboat, his mother in her deck chair, and the vast depthless green of the world beyond.

He surfaced like a dolphin, spewing water from the vent of his snorkel, and sliced back to the dock. The lake came with him, two bony arms and the wedge of a foot, the great heaving splash of himself flat out on the dock like something thrown up in a storm. And then, without pausing even to snatch up a towel, he had the spinning rod in hand and the silver lure was sizzling out over the water, breaking the surface just above the shadowy arena he’d fixed in his mind. His mother looked up at the splash. “Tiller,” she called, “come get a towel.”

His shoulders quaked. He huddled and stamped his feet, but he never took his eyes off the tip of the rod. Twitching it suggestively, he reeled with the jerky, hesitant motion that would drive lunker fish to a frenzy. Or so he’d read, anyway.

“Tilden, do you hear me?”

“I saw a Northern,” he said. “A big one. Two feet maybe.” The lure was in. A flick of his wrist sent it back. Still reeling,
he ducked his head to wipe his nose on his wet shoulder. He could feel the sun on his back now and he envisioned the skirted lure in the water, sinuous, sensual, irresistible, and he waited for the line to quicken with the strike.