If the River Was Whiskey by T.C. Boyle

Author:T.C. Boyle [Boyle, T. Coraghessan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101651025
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 1990-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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