It was a Tuesday or Wednesday, middle of the week, and when he came home from school the curtains were drawn and his father’s car was in the driveway. At the door, he could hear him, the chunk-chunk of the chords and the rasping nasal whine that seemed as if it belonged to someone else. His father was sitting in the dark, hair in his face, bent low over the guitar. There was an open bottle of liquor on the coffee table and a clutter of beer bottles. The room stank of smoke.
It was strange, because his father hardly ever played his guitar anymore—he mainly just talked about it. In the past tense. And it was strange too—and bad—because his father wasn’t at work. Tiller dropped his bookbag on the telephone stand. “Hi, Dad,” he said.
His father didn’t answer. Just bent over the guitar and played the same song, over and over, as if it were the only song he knew. Tiller sat on the sofa and listened. There was a verse—one verse—and his father repeated it three or four times before he broke off and slurred the words into a sort of chant or hum, and then he went back to the words again. After the fourth repetition, Tiller heard it:
If the river was whiskey,
And I was a divin’ duck,
I’d swim to the bottom,
Drink myself back up.
For half an hour his father played that song, played it till anything else would have sounded strange. He reached for the bottle when he finally stopped, and that was when he noticed Tiller. He looked surprised. Looked as if he’d just woke up. “Hey, ladykiller Tiller,” he said, and took a drink from the mouth of the bottle.
Tiller blushed. There’d been a Sadie Hawkins dance at school and Janet Rumery had picked him for her partner. Ever since, his father had called him ladykiller, and though he wasn’t exactly sure what it meant, it made him blush anyway, just from the tone of it. Secretly, it pleased him. “I really liked the song, Dad,” he said.
“Yeah?” His father lifted his eyebrows and made a face. “Well, come home to Mama, doggie-o. Here,” he said, and he held out an open beer. “You ever have one of these, ladykiller Tiller?” He was grinning. The sleeve of his shirt was torn and his elbow was raw and there was a hard little clot of blood over his shirt pocket. “With your sixth-grade buddies out behind the handball court, maybe? No?”
Tiller shook his head.
“You want one? Go ahead, take a hit.”
Tiller took the bottle and sipped tentatively. The taste wasn’t much. He looked up at his father. “What does it mean?” he said. “The song, I mean—the one you were singing. About the whiskey and all.”
His father gave him a long slow grin and took a drink from the big bottle of clear liquor. “I don’t know,” he said finally, grinning wider to show his tobacco-stained teeth. “I guess he just liked whiskey, that’s all.” He picked up a cigarette, made as if to light it, and then put it down again. “Hey,” he said, “you want to sing it with me?”
All right, she’d hounded him and she’d threatened him and she was going to leave him, he could see that clear as day. But he was going to show her. And the kid too’. He wasn’t drinking. Not today. Not a drop.
He stood on the dock with his hands in his pockets while Tiller scrambled around with the fishing poles and oars and the rest of it. Birds were screeching in the trees and there was a smell of diesel fuel on the air. The sun cut into his head like a knife. He was sick already.
“I’m giving you the big pole, Dad, and you can row if you want.”
He eased himself into the boat and it fell away beneath him like the mouth of a bottomless pit.
“I made us egg salad, Dad, your favorite. And I brought some birch beer.”
He was rowing. The lake was churning underneath him, the wind was up and reeking of things washed up on the shore, and the damn oars kept slipping out of the oarlocks, and he was rowing. At the last minute he’d wanted to go back for a quick drink, but he didn’t, and now he was rowing.
“We’re going to catch a pike,” Tiller said, hunched like a spider in the stern.
There was spray off the water. He was rowing. He felt sick. Sick and depressed.
“We’re going to catch a pike, I can feel it. I know we are,” Tiller said, “I know it. I just know it.”
It was too much for him all at once—the sun, the breeze that was so sweet he could taste it, the novelty of his father rowing, pale arms and a dead cigarette clenched between his teeth, the boat rocking, and the birds whispering—and he closed his eyes a minute, just to keep from going dizzy with the joy of it. They were in deep water already. Tiller was trolling with a plastic worm and spinner, just in case, but he didn’t have much faith in catching anything out here. He was taking his father to the cove with the submerged logs and beds of weed—that’s where they’d connect, that’s where they’d catch pike.
“Jesus,” his father said when Tiller spelled him at the oars. Hands shaking, he crouched in the stern and tried to light a cigarette. His face was gray and the hair beat crazily around his face. He went through half a book of matches and then threw the cigarette in the water. “Where are you taking us, anyway,” he said, “—the Indian Ocean?”
“The pike place,” Tiller told him. “You’ll like it, you’ll see.”
The sun was dropping behind the hills when they got there, and the water went from blue to gray. There was no wind in the cove. Tiller let the boat glide out across the still surface while his father finally got a cigarette lit, and then he dropped anchor. He was excited. Swallows dove at the surface, bullfrogs burped from the reeds. It was the perfect time to fish, the hour when the big lunker pike would cruise among the sunken logs, hunting.
“All right,” his father said, “I’m going to catch the biggest damn fish in the lake,” and he jerked back his arm and let fly with the heaviest sinker in the tackle box dangling from the end of the rod. The line hissed through the guys and there was a thunderous splash that probably terrified every pike within half a mile. Tiller looked over his shoulder as he reeled in his silver spoon. His father winked at him, but he looked grim.
It was getting dark, his father was out of cigarettes, and Tiller had cast the spoon so many times his arm was sore, when suddenly the big rod began to buck. “Dad! Dad!” Tiller shouted, and his father lurched up as if he’d been stabbed. He’d been dozing, the rod propped against the gunwale, and Tiller had been studying the long suffering-lines in his father’s face, the grooves in his forehead, and the puffy discolored flesh beneath his eyes. With his beard and long hair and with the crumpled suffering look on his face, he was the picture of the crucified Christ Tiller had contemplated a hundred times at church. But now the rod was bucking and his father had hold of it and he was playing a fish, a big fish, the tip of the rod dipping all the way down to the surface.
“It’s a pike, Dad, it’s a pike!”
His father strained at the pole. His only response was a grunt, but Tiller saw something in his eyes he hardly recognized anymore, a connection, a charge, as if the fish were sending a current up the line, through the pole, and into his hands and body and brain. For a full three minutes he played the fish, his slack biceps gone rigid, the cigarette clamped in his mouth, while Tiller hovered over him with the landing net. There was a surge, a splash, and the thing was in the net, and Tiller had it over the side and into the boat. “It’s a pike,” his father said, “goddamnit, look at the thing, look at the size of it.”
It wasn’t a pike. Tiller had watched Joe Matochik catch one off the dock one night. Joe’s pike had been dangerous, full of teeth, a long, lean, tapering strip of muscle and pounding life. This was no pike. It was a carp. A fat, pouty, stinking, ugly mud carp. Trash fish. They shot them with arrows and threw them up on the shore to rot. Tiller looked at his father and felt like crying.
“It’s a pike,” his father said, and already the thing in his eyes was gone, already it was over, “it’s a pike. Isn’t it?”
It was late—past two, anyway—and he was drunk. Or no, he was beyond drunk. He’d been drinking since morning, o
ne tall vodka and soda after another, and he didn’t feel a thing. He sat on the porch in the dark and he couldn’t see the lake, couldn’t hear it, couldn’t even smell it. Caroline and Tiller were asleep. The house was dead silent.
Caroline was leaving him, which meant that Tiller was leaving him. He knew it. He could see it in her eyes and he heard it in her voice. She was soft once, his soft-eyed lover, and now she was hard, unyielding, now she was his worst enemy. They’d had the couple from the roadhouse in for drinks and burgers earlier that night and he’d leaned over the table to tell the guy something—Ed, his name was—joking really, nothing serious, just making conversation. “Vodka and soda,” he said, “that’s my drink. I used to drink vodka and grapefruit juice, but it tore the lining out of my stomach.” And then Caroline, who wasn’t even listening, stepped in and said, “Yeah, and that”—pointing to the glass—“tore the lining out of your brain.” He looked up at her. She wasn’t smiling.
All right. That was how it was. What did he care? He hadn’t wanted to come up here anyway—it was her father’s idea. Take the cabin for a month, the old man had said, pushing, pushing in that way he had, and get yourself turned around. Well, he wasn’t turning around, and they could all go to hell.
After a while the chill got to him and he pushed himself up from the chair and went to bed. Caroline said something in her sleep and pulled away from him as he lifted the covers and slid in. He was awake for a minute or two, feeling depressed, so depressed he wished somebody would come in and shoot him, and then he was asleep.
In his dream, he was out in the boat with Tiller. The wind was blowing, his hands were shaking, he couldn’t light a cigarette. Tiller was watching him. He pulled at the oars and nothing happened. Then all of a sudden they were going down, the boat sucked out from under them, the water icy and black, beating in on them as if it were alive. Tiller called out to him. He saw his son’s face, saw him going down, and there was nothing he could do.
T. Coraghessan Boyle, If the River Was Whiskey: Stories
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