If the River Was Whiskey (28 page)

S
OMEHOW
, she found herself backed up against the artichoke display in the fruit-and-vegetable department at Waldbaum’s, feeling as lost and hopeless as an orphan. She was wearing her dun safari shorts and matching workshirt; the rhino-hide sandals she’d worn at the Makoua Reserve clung to the soles of her pale splayed tired old feet. Outside the big plate-glass windows, a sullen, grainy snow had begun to fall.

Maybe that was it, the snow. She was fretting over the vegetables, fumbling with her purse, the grocery list, the keys to the rheumatic Lincoln her sister had left her, when she glanced up and saw it, this wonder, this phenomenon, this dishwater turned to stone, and for the life of her she didn’t know what it was. And then it came to her, the word chipped from the recesses of her memory like an old bone dug from the sediment:
snow.
Snow. What had it been—forty years?

She gazed out past the racks of diet cola and facial cream, past the soap-powder display and the thousand garish colors of the products she couldn’t use and didn’t want, and she was lost in a reminiscence so sharp and sudden it was like a blow. She saw her sister’s eyes peering out from beneath the hood of her snow-suit, the drifts piled high over their heads, hot chocolate in a decorated mug, her father cursing as he bent to wrap the chains round the rear wheels of the car…and then the murmur of the market brought her back, the muted din concentrated now
in a single voice, and she was aware that someone was addressing her. “Excuse me,” the voice was saying, “excuse me.”

She turned, and the voice took on form. A young man—a boy, really—short, massive across the shoulders, his dead-black hair cut close in a flattop, was standing before her. And what was that in his hand? A sausage of some sort, pepperoni, yes, and another word came back to her. “Excuse me,” he repeated, “but aren’t you Beatrice Umbo?”

She was. Oh, yes, she was—Beatrice Umbo, the celebrated ape lady, the world’s foremost authority on the behavior of chimpanzees in the wild, Beatrice Umbo, come home to Connecticut to retire. She gave him a faint, distant smile of recognition. “Yes,” she said softly, with a trace of the lisp that had clung to her since childhood, “and it’s just terrible.”

“Terrible?” he echoed, and she could see the hesitation in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said, grinning unsteadily and thumping the pepperoni against his thigh, “but we read about you in school, in college, I mean. I even read your books, the first one, anyway—
Jungle Dawn?
“

She couldn’t respond. It was his grin, the way his upper lip pulled back from his teeth and folded over his incisors. He was Agassiz, the very picture of Agassiz, and all of a sudden she was back in the world of leaves, back in the Makoua Reserve, crouched in a huddle of chimps. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“Of course I’m all right,” she snapped, and at that moment she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror behind the halved cantaloupes. The whites of her eyes were stippled with yellow, her hair was like a fright wig, her face as rutted and seamed as an old saddlebag. Even worse, her skin had the oddest citrus cast to it, a color about midway between the hue of a grapefruit and an orange. She didn’t look well, she knew it. But then what could they expect of a woman who’d devoted her life to science and survived dysentery, malaria, schistosomiasis, hepatitis, and sleeping sickness in the process, not to mention the little things like the chiggers that burrow beneath your toenails to lay their
eggs. “I mean the fruit,” she said, trying to bite back the lisp. “The fruit is terrible. No yim-yim,” she sighed, gesturing toward the bins of tangerines, kumquats, and pale seedless grapes. “No wild custard apple or tiger peach. They haven’t even got passionfruit.”

The boy glanced down at her cart. There were fifty yams—she’d counted them out herself—six gallons of full-fat milk, and a five-pound block of cheese buried in its depths. All the bananas she could find, ranging in color from burnished green to putrescent black, were piled on top in a great towering pyramid that threatened to drop the bottom out of the thing. “They’ve got Italian chestnuts,” he offered, looking up again and showing off his teeth in that big tentative grin. “And in a month or so they’ll get those little torpedo-shaped things that come off the cactuses out west—prickly pear, that’s what they call them.”

She cocked her head to give him an appreciative look. “You’re very sweet,” she said, the lisp creeping back into her voice. “But you don’t understand—I’ve got a visitor coming. A permanent visitor. And he’s very particular about what he eats.”

“I’m Howie Kantner,” he said suddenly. “My father and me run Kantner Construction?”

She’d been in town less than a week, haunting the chilly cavernous house her mother had left her sister and her sister had left her. She’d never heard of Kantner Construction.

The boy ducked his head as if he were genuflecting, told her how thrilled he was to meet her, and turned to go—but then he swung back round impulsively. “Couldn’t you…I mean, do you think you’ll need some help with all those bananas?”

She pursed her lips.

“I just thought…the boxboys are the pits here and you’re so…casually dressed for the weather and all.…”

“Yes,” she said slowly, “yes, that would be very nice,” and she smiled; She was pleased, terribly pleased. A moment earlier she’d felt depressed, out of place, an alien in her own hometown, and now she’d made a friend. He waited for her behind the
checkout counter, this hulking, earnest college boy, this big post-adolescent male with the clipped brow and squared shoulders, and she beamed at him till her gums ached, wondering what he’d think if she told him he reminded her of a chimp.

Konrad was late. They’d told her three, but it was past five already and there was no sign of him. She huddled by the fire, draped in an afghan she’d found in a trunk in the basement, and listened to the clank and wheeze of the decrepit old oil burner as it switched itself fitfully on and off. It was still snowing, snow like a curse, and she wished she were back in her hut at Makoua with the monsoon hammering at the roof. She looked out the window and thought she was on the moon.

It was close to seven when the knock at the door finally came. She’d been dozing, the notes for her lecture series scattered like refuse at her feet, the afghan drawn up tight around her throat. Clutching the title page as if it were a lifejacket tossed her on a stormy sea, she rose from the chair with a click of her arthritic knees and crossed the room to the door.

Though she’d swept the porch three times, the wind kept defeating her efforts, and when she’d pulled back the door she found Konrad standing in a drift up to his knees. He was huge—far bigger than she’d expected—and the heavy jacket, scarf, and gloves exaggerated the effect. His trainer or keeper or whatever she was stood behind him, grinning weirdly, her arms laden with groceries. Konrad was grinning too, giving her the low closed grin she’d been the first to describe in the wild: it meant he was agitated but not yet stoked to the point of violence. His high-pitched squeals—
eeeee! eeeee! eeeee!
—filled the hallway.

“Miss Umbo?” the girl said, as Konrad, disdaining introductions, flung his knuckles down on the hardwood floor and scampered for the fire. “I’m Jill,” the girl said, trying simultaneously to shake hands, pass through the doorframe, and juggle the bags of groceries.

Beatrice was still trying to get over the shock of seeing a chimpanzee in human dress—and one so huge: he must have stood better than four and a half feet and weighed close to 180—and it was a moment before she could murmur a greeting and offer to take one of the bags of groceries. The door slammed shut and the girl followed her into the kitchen while Konrad slapped his shoulders and stamped round the fireplace.

“He’s so…so big,” Beatrice said, depositing the bag on the oak table in the kitchen.

“I guess,” the girl said, setting her bags down with a shrug. “And what is all this?” Beatrice gestured at the groceries. She caught a glance of Konrad through the archway that led into the living room: he’d settled into her armchair and was studiously bent over her notes, tearing the pages into thin white strips with the delicate tips of his black leather fingers.

“Oh, this,” the girl said, brightening. “This is the stuff he likes to eat,” dipping into the near bag and extracting one box after another as if they were exhibits at a trial, “Carnation Instant Breakfast, cheese nachos, Fruit Roll-Ups, Sugar Daffies.…”

“Are you—?” Beatrice hesitated, wondering how to phrase the question. “What I mean is, you’re his trainer, I take it?”

The girl must have been in her mid-twenties, though she looked fourteen. Her hair was limp and blond, her eyes too big for her face. She was wearing faded jeans, a puffy down vest over a flannel shirt, and a pair of two-hundred-dollar hiking boots. “Me?” she squealed, and then she blushed. Her voice dropped till it was nearly inaudible: “I’m just the person that cleans up his cage and all and I’ve always had this like way with animals.…”

Beatrice was shocked. Shocked and disgusted. It was worse than she’d suspected. When she agreed to take Konrad, she knew she’d be saving him from the sterility of a cage, from the anomie and humiliation of the zoo. And those were the very terms—“anomie” and “humiliation”—she’d used on the phone with his former trainer, with the zookeeper himself. For Konrad was
no run-of-the-mill chimp snatched from the jungle and caged for the pleasure of the big bland white apes who lined up to gawk at him and make their little jokes at the expense of his dignity—though that would have been crime enough—no, he was special, extraordinary, a chimp made after the image of man.

Raised as a human, in one of those late-sixties experiments Beatrice deplored, he’d been bathed, dressed, and pampered, taught to use cutlery and sit at a table, and he’d mastered 350 of the hand signals that constituted American Sign Language. (This last especially appalled her—at one time he could actually converse, or so they said.) But when he grew into puberty at the age of seven, when he developed the iron musculature and crackling sinews of the adolescent male who could reduce a room of furniture to detritus in minutes or snap the femur of a linebacker as if it were tinder, it was abruptly decided that he could be human no more. They took away his trousers and shoes, his stuffed toys and his color TV, and the overseers of the experiment made a quiet move to shift him to the medical laboratories for another, more sinister, sort of research. But he was famous by then and the public outcry landed him in the zoo instead, where they made a sort of clown of him, isolating him from the other chimps and dressing him up like something in a toy-store window. There he’d languished for twenty-five years, neither chimp nor man.

Twenty-five years. And with people like this moon-eyed incompetent to look after him. It
was
a shock. “You mean to tell me you’ve had no training?” Beatrice demanded, the outrage constricting her throat till she could barely choke out the words. “None at all?”

The girl gave her a meek smile and a shrug of the shoulders.

“You’ve had nutritional training, certainly—you must have studied the dietary needs of the wild chimpanzee, at the very least…” and she gestured disdainfully at the bags of junk food, of salt and fat and empty calories.

The girl murmured something, some sort of excuse or melioration, but Beatrice never heard it. A sudden movement from the front room caught her eye, and all at once she remembered Konrad. She turned away from the girl as if she didn’t exist and focused her bright narrow eyes on him, the eyes that had captured every least secret of his wild cousins, the rapt unblinking eyes of the professional voyeur.

The first thing she noticed was that he’d finished with her notes, the remnants of which lay strewn about the room like confetti. She saw too that he was calm now, at home already, sniffing at the afghan as if he’d known it all his life. Oblivious to her, he settled into the armchair, draped the afghan over his knees, and began fumbling through the pockets of his overcoat like an absent-minded commuter. And then, while her mouth fell open and her eyes narrowed to pinpricks, he produced a cigar—a fine, green, tightly rolled panatela—struck a match to light it, and lounged back in an aureole of smoke, his feet, bereft now of the plastic galoshes, propped up luxuriously on the coffee table.

It was a night of stinging cold and subarctic wind, but though the panes rattled in their frames, the old house retained its heat. Beatrice had set the thermostat in the high eighties and she’d built the fire up beneath a cauldron of water that steamed the walls and windows till they dripped like the myriad leaves of the rain forest. Konrad was naked, as nature and evolution had meant him to be, and Beatrice was in the clean, starched khakis she’d worn in the bush for the past forty years. Potted plants-cane, ficus, and dieffenbachia—crowded the hallway, spilled from the windowsills, and softened the corners of each of the downstairs rooms. In the living room, the TV roared at full volume, and Konrad stood before it, excited, signing at the screen and emitting a rising series of pant hoots:
“Hoo-hoo, hoo-ah-hoo-ah-hoo!”

Watching from the kitchen, Beatrice felt her face pucker with
disapproval. This TV business was no good, she thought, languidly stirring vegetables into a pot of chicken broth. Chimps had an innate dignity, an eloquence that had nothing to do with sign language, gabardine, color TV, or nacho chips, and she was determined to restore it to him. The junk food was in the trash, where it belonged, along with the obscene little suits of clothes the girl had foisted on him, and she’d tried unplugging the TV set, but Konrad was too smart for her. Within thirty seconds he’d got it squawking again.

“Eee-eee!”
he shouted now, slapping his palms rhythmically on the hardwood floor.

“Awright,” the TV said in its stentorian voice, “take the dirty little stool pigeon out back and extoiminate him.”

It was an unfortunate thing for the TV to say, because it provoked in Konrad a reaction that could only be described as a frenzy. Whereas before he’d been excited, now he was enraged.
“Wraaaaa!”
he screamed in a pitch no mere human could duplicate, and he charged the screen with a stick of firewood, every hair on his body sprung instantly erect. Good, she thought, stirring her soup as he flailed at the oak-veneer cabinet and choked the voice out of it, good, good, good, as he backed away and bounced round the room like a huge India-rubber ball, the stick slapping behind him, his face contorted in a full open grin of incendiary excitement. Twice over the sofa, once up the banister, and then he charged again, the stick beating jerkily at the floor. The crash of the screen came almost as a relief to her—at least there’d be no more of that. What puzzled her, though, what arrested her hand in mid-stir, was Konrad’s reaction. He stood stock-still a moment, then backed off, pouting and tugging at his lower lip, the screams tapering to a series of squeaks and whimpers of regret.