If the River Was Whiskey (13 page)

There was no moose. Zoltan’s cocoon was still intact, and so was he. He was lying there on his side, a thin fetal lump rounding out of the steel and grime. “What?” he rumbled.

I asked him the question I always seemed to be asking him: was he all right?

It took him a moment—he was working his hand free—and then he gave me the thumbs-up sign. “A-OK,” he said.

The rest of the trip—through the icy Midwest, the wind-torn Rockies, and the scorching strip between Tucson and Gila Bend—was uneventful. For me, anyway. I alternately slept, ate truck-stop fare designed to remove the lining of your stomach, and listened to Mink or Steve—their conversation was interchangeable—rhapsodize about Harleys, IROC Camaros, and women who went down on all fours and had “Truckers’ Delite” tattooed across their buttocks. For Zoltan, it was business as usual. If he suffered from the cold, the heat, the tumbleweeds, beer cans, and fast-food containers that ricocheted off his poor lean scrag of a body day and night, he never mentioned it. True to form, he refused food and drink, though I suspected he must have had something concealed in his cape, and he never climbed down out of his cocoon, not even to move his bowels. Three days and three nights after we’d left Maine, we wheeled the big rig through the streets of Pasadena and into the parking lot outside the Rose Bowl, right on schedule.

There was a fair-sized crowd gathered, though there was no telling whether they’d come for the swap meet, the heavy-metal band we’d hired to give some punch to Zoltan’s performance,
or the stunt itself, but then who cared? They were there. As were the “Action News” teams, the souvenir hawkers and hot-dog vendors. Grunting, his face beaded with sweat, Mink guided the truck into place alongside the twenty-five others, straining to get it as close as possible: an inch could mean the difference between life and death for Zoltan, and we all knew it.

I led a knot of cameramen to the rear of the truck so they could get some tape of Zoltan crawling out of his grapefruit bag. When they were all gathered, he stirred himself, shaking off the froth of insects and road grime, the scraps of paper and cellophane, placing first one bony foot and then the other on the pavement. His eyes were feverish behind the lenses of the goggles and when he lurched out from under the truck I had to catch his arm to prevent him from falling. “So how does it feel to conquer the roadways?” asked a microphone-jabbing reporter with moussed hair and flawless teeth. “What was the worst moment?” asked another.

Zoltan’s legs were rubber. He reeked of diesel fuel, his cape was in tatters, his face smeared with sweat and grease. “Twenty-six truck,” he rumbled. “The Human Fly is invincible.”

And then the band started in—smokebombs, megadecibels, subhuman screeches, the works—and I led Zoltan to his dressing room. He refused a shower, but allowed the makeup girl to sponge off his face and hands. We had to cut the old outfit off of him—he was too exhausted to undress himself—and then the girl helped him into the brand-new one I’d provided for the occasion. “Twenty-six truck,” he kept mumbling to himself, “A-OK.”

I wanted him to call it off. I did. He wasn’t in his right mind, anybody could see that. And he was exhausted, beat, as starved and helpless as a refugee. He wouldn’t hear of it. “Twenty-six truck,” he rumbled, and when I put through a frantic last-minute call to Sol, Sol nearly swallowed the phone. “Damn straight he’s going for it!” he shouted. “We got sponsors lined up here. ABC Sports wants to see the tape, for christsake.” There was
an outraged silence punctuated by the click of throat lozenges, and then Sol cut the connection.

Ultimately, Zoltan went for it. Mink threw open the trailer door, Zoltan fired up the motorcycle—a specially modified Harley Sportster with gas shocks and a bored engine—and one of our people signaled the band to cut it short. The effect was dynamic, the band cutting back suddenly to a punchy drum-and-bass thing and the growl of the big bike coming on in counterpoint…and then Zoltan sprang from the back of the trailer, his cape stiff with the breeze, goggles flashing, tires squealing. He made three circuits of the lot, coming in close on the line of trucks, dodging away from the ramp, hunched low and flapping over the handlebars. Every eye was on him. Suddenly he raised a bony fist in the air, swerved wide of the trucks in a great arcing loop that took him to the far end of the lot, and made a run for the ramp.

He was a blur, he was nothing, he was invisible, a rush of motion above the scream of the engine. I saw something—a shadow—launch itself into the thick brown air, cab after cab receding beneath it, the glint of chrome in the sun, fifteen trucks, twenty, twenty-five, and then the sight that haunts me to this day. Suddenly the shadow was gone and a blemish appeared on the broad side panel of the last truck, the one we’d taken across country, Mink’s truck, and then, simultaneous with it, there was the noise. A single booming reverberation, as if the world’s biggest drum had exploded, followed by the abrupt cessation of the motorcycle’s roar and the sad tumbling clatter of dissociated metal.

We had medical help this time, of course, the best available: paramedics, trauma teams, ambulances. None of it did any good. When I pushed through the circle of people around him, Zoltan was lying there on the pavement like a bundle of broken twigs. The cape was twisted round his neck, and his limbs—the sorry fleshless sticks of his arms and legs—were skewed like a doll’s. I bent over him as the paramedics brought up the stretcher.
“Twenty-five truck next time,” he whispered, “promise me.”

There was blood in his ears, his nostrils, his eye sockets. “Yes,” I said, “yes. Twenty-five.”

“No worries,” he choked as they slid the stretcher under him, “the Human Fly…can survive…anything.”

We buried him three days later.

It was a lonely affair, as funerals go. The uncle, a man in his seventies with the sad scrawl of time on his face, was the only mourner. The press stayed away, though the videotape of Zoltan’s finale was shown repeatedly over the air and the freeze-frame photos appeared in half the newspapers in the country. I was shaken by the whole thing. Sol gave me a week off and I did some real soul-searching. For a while I thought of giving up the entertainment business altogether, but I was pulled back into it despite myself. Everybody, it seemed, wanted a piece of Zoltan. And as I sat down to sort through the letters, telegrams, and urgent callback messages, the phone ringing unceasingly, the sun flooding the windows of my new well-appointed and highflown office, I began to realize that I owed it to Zoltan to pursue them. This was what he’d wanted, after all.

We settled finally on an animated series, with the usual tie-ins. I knew the producer—Sol couldn’t say enough about him—and I knew he’d do quality work. Sure enough, the show premiered number one in its timeslot and it’s been there ever since. Sometimes I’ll get up early on a Saturday morning just to tune in, to watch the jerky figures move against a backdrop of greed and corruption, the Human Fly ascendant, incorruptible, climbing hand over hand to the top.

T
HEY SENT
a hit squad after the bear. Three guys in white parkas with National Forestry Service patches on the shoulders. It was late Friday afternoon, about a week before Christmas, the snow was coming down so fast it seemed as if the sky and earth were glued together, and Jill had just opened up the lodge for drinks and dinner when they stamped in through the door. The tall one—he ordered shots of Jim Beam and beers for all of them—could have been a bear himself, hunched under the weight of his shoulders in the big quilted parka, his face lost in a bristle of black beard, something feral and challenging in the clash of his blue eyes. “Hello, pretty lady,” he said, looking Jill full in the face as he swung a leg over the barstool and pressed his forearms to the gleaming copper rail. “I hear you got a bear problem.”

I was sitting in the shadows at the end of the bar, nursing a beer and watching the snow. Jill hadn’t turned up the lights yet and I was glad—the place had a soothing underwater look to it, snow like a sheet stretched tight over the window, the fire in the corner gentle as a backrub. I was alive and moving—lighting a cigarette, lifting the glass to my lips—but I felt so peaceful I could have been dozing.

“That’s right,” Jill said, still flushing from the “pretty lady” remark. Two weeks earlier, in bed, she’d told me she hadn’t felt pretty in years. What are you talking about? I’d said. She
dropped her lower lip and looked away. I gained twenty pounds, she said. I reached out to touch her, smiling, as if to say twenty pounds—what’s twenty pounds? Little Ball of Suet, I said, referring to one of the Maupassant stories in the book she’d given me. It’s not funny, she said, but then she’d rolled over and touched me back.

“Name’s Boo,” the big man said, pausing to throw back his bourbon and take a sip of beer. “This is Scott,” nodding at the guy on his left, also in beard and watchcap, “and Josh.” Josh, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen, appeared on his right like a jack-in-the-box. Boo unzipped the parka to expose a thermal shirt the color of dried blood.

“Is this all together?” Jill asked.

Boo nodded, and I noticed the scar along the ridge of his cheekbone, thinking of churchkey openers, paring knives, the long hooked ivory claws of bears. Then he turned to me. “What you drinking, friend?”

I’d begun to hear sounds from the kitchen—the faint kiss of cup and saucer, the rattle of cutlery—and my stomach suddenly dropped like an elevator out of control. I hadn’t eaten all day. It was the middle of the month, I’d read all the paperbacks in the house, listened to all the records, and I was waiting for my check to come. There was no mail service up here of course—the road was closed half the time in winter anyway—but Marshall, the lodgeowner and unofficial kingpin of the community, had gone down the mountain to lay in provisions against the holiday onslaught of tourists, ski-mobilers and the like, and he’d promised to pick it up for me. If it was there. If it was, and he made it back through the storm, I was going to have three or four shots of Wild Turkey, then check out the family dinner and sip coffee and Kahlua till Jill got off work. “Beer,” I said.

“Would you get this man a beer, pretty lady?” said Boo in his backwoods basso, and when she’d opened me one and come back for his money, he started in on the bear. Had she seen him?
How much damage had he done? What about his tracks—anything unusual? His scat? He was reddish in color, right? Almost cinnamon? And with one folded ear?

She’d seen him. But not when he’d battered his way into the back storeroom, punctured a case of twelve-and-a-half-ounce cans of tuna, lapped up a couple of gallons of mountain red burgundy and shards of glass, and left a bloody trail that wound off through the ponderosa pines like a pink ribbon. Not then. No, she’d seen him under more intimate circumstances—in her own bedroom, in fact. She’d been asleep in the rear bedroom with her eight-year-old son, Adrian (they slept in the same room to conserve heat, shutting down the thermostat and tossing a handful of coal into the stove in the corner), when suddenly the back window went to pieces. The air came in at them like a spearthrust, there was the dull booming thump of the bear’s big body against the outer wall, and an explosion of bottles, cans, and whatnot as he tore into the garbage on the back porch. She and Adrian had jolted awake in time to see the bear’s puzzled shaggy face appear in the empty windowframe, and then they were up like Goldilocks and out the front door, where they locked themselves in the car. They came to me in their pajamas, trembling like refugees. By the time I got there with my Weatherby, the bear was gone.

“I’ve seen him,” Jill said. “He broke the damn window out of my back bedroom and now I’ve got it all boarded up.” Josh, the younger guy, seemed to find this funny, and he began a low snickering suck and blow of air like an old dog with something caught in his throat.

“Hell,” Jill said, lighting-up, centerstage, “I was in my nightie and barefoot too and I didn’t hesitate a second—zoom, I grabbed my son by the hand and out the door we went.”