It’s a low sort of place, the Riverside Tavern. It’s dark inside. When we got there, that early in the afternoon, there was only one other customer, a whiskery old man at one end of the bar, bowed over a mug of beer. Billy picked a table by a window. He put a twenty dollar bill in my hand and sent me to get drinks, while he sat looking across the street at the old ferry dock, rotting, partly collapsed, its yellow paint faded and flaked. I brought him the double Jack Daniels he wanted. I had a Coke. If he asked, I was going to say it was a rum-and-Coke, to avoid an argument. But he didn’t.
"Cheers," Billy said.
He drank it off in three swallows. Then he raised his hand and waggled his finger, signaling the bartender to bring more.
"Boy, sometimes all the business pressures get to me," Billy said, and he knocked off the second drink in one long continuous swallow.
He signaled to the bartender for more.
"You’ve got it too easy, Kevin," he said.
"How is that, Billy?" I asked.
He looked at me. You could see he didn’t really know what he meant, and was thinking what to say.
"You like your retirement package?"
"It’s fine," I said.
"You bet it is," he said. "I’m giving you a cushy ride, my friend."
I’d worked before at a big printing company, in Albany, which paid a much higher salary. But when they relocated to South Carolina, I couldn’t go, my mother needing me to do so much. By then, though, Gardner Bronk had died from a heart attack, and Billy ran Bronk Printing. He called me up, said he’d be willing to give a former classmate a job, for old time’s sake.
He did offer an excellent pension plan. If I stopped working for Billy, I’d lose it. I don’t need much to live on, anyway. For instance, Herbert is happy with store-brand dog chow. Also, after Gardner Bronk died, Bronk Printing skidded downhill. So it felt good to come in and be of use, like convincing Billy to switch from the old letterpresses to digital, and to do more than just stationery and pamphlets. So now Bronk Printing creates an entire image for businesses—web sites, advertising, sign design, everything, all with an integrated theme, usually something ecological.
Billy agreed to sort of specialize in giving businesses a green look. Images of clean water or clear skies on their materials, or healthy forests, and so on, even if they’re just a mushroom farm or a cement plant or whatever.
After that, Bronk Printing really took off again. It’s given Billy enough profit to go off on his long hunting trips.
By now, at the Riverside Tavern, Billy had drunk so much Jack Daniels he sprawled in his chair, looking too big for it.
"Billy," I said. "About the company picnic…."
He looked at me sort of vague. Then he laughed.
"Kevinator," he said. "Holding it at your place, that’s my good deed for this decade."
"How’s that, Billy?" I said.
He signaled the bartender to bring more bourbon. He grinned at me.
"Kevin, you live like a marmot," he said. "Hiding in your hole—you’ve gotta throw some weight in the world, mix it up, raise hell."
"It’s okay how it is," I said.
He turned his head back to the window. For a long time he sat without speaking. Finally he did say something, but staring out the window at the old ferry slip.
"So big brother comes back from Vietnam and gets a parade…."
We were sixteen years old then. They had Jerry Bronk’s black casket on a wagon, draped in black, drawn by two black horses, with soldiers carrying rifles, and everyone in town followed along to the cemetery. Jerry Bronk had been student-council president and prom king and a super football and basketball player, in high school and then at Dartmouth, too. He was supposed to take over Bronk Printing. But he volunteered for the Green Berets.
"That left just El Destructo," Billy said.
He sat staring out the window at the rotting ferry dock. Then he finished off the Jack Daniels left in his glass and waved at the bartender for more.
"In that championship game, with Vanderkill High, I scored how many touchdowns? Four?" he said. "Guess what he told me, after that."
I shook my head. Billy snorted. He sat back in his chair, frowning like Gardner Bronk, and I knew he was pretending to be his father.
"’Jerry, he had big talent,’" Billy said, imitating his father’s voice. "’You? You’re just big.’"
He stared out the window at the ferry slip.
"Bronks ace everything," he said. "Uncles, cousins….All except El Destructo."
"You run Bronk Printing now," I told him. "Look how well it’s doing."
For a moment, he sat with his head turned, staring out the window. Then he snickered.
"I’ve always envied you, Kevin," he said, still looking at the ferry slip.
"Why?" I asked.
He didn’t say anything. Then he sighed, still looking out the window.
"Because nobody expected anything from you," he said.
By now my Coke tasted warm and flat.
"I’m a hell of a good shot," Billy said. "I can nail a sparrow on a fencepost when it’s so far away it’s just a dot."
We sat silently again.
"My last trip, to Brazil, have I told you about that?" he said.
His eyelids drooped now. But he could drink amazing amounts of bourbon without falling on the floor or even slurring his words much.
"So I’m after jaguar," he said. "I’m motorboating up a river with this native, whose supposed to be a shaman or something, but also does guiding, and we come to this side-stream emptying into the river we’re on, and the little old man starts burbling—‘Up there,’ he says, ‘valley, strange valley, sacred, white jaguars.’"
Billy’s eyes shut and he sprawled in his seat, his long legs splayed out. He looked as if he had gone to sleep. But suddenly he started talking again.
"I told him, ’Let’s go shoot a white jaguar,’ and he looks upset, starts gesturing, says ‘No, never in the valley, no killing’ which ticked me off because so far he’d showed me nothing to shoot at all, so I told him, ’Hey, no shoot, okay? Just see sacred valley, pray to trees and squirrels, okay?’"
Apparently the old man felt a need to visit the sacred valley anyway, even with the big gringo in his boat. Because he took Billy at his word, about the no shooting. And they went up the smaller river.
It took hours, Billy told me. On both sides the rain forest pressed in, the treetops leaning out over the river, so it seemed like they traveled up a green tunnel. Eventually they came to a rickety dock made of posts tied together with plant-fiber rope, with strings tied so that they blew in the breeze, dyed blue and orange. After that they walked along a footpath, climbing. Billy couldn’t see anything because of the dense foliage. Finally, though, the path seemed to level off, and they walked a while, until everything stopped and they looked down into a deep rift.
In that valley, looking down at the trees from above, the foliage seemed especially lush and brilliant green. Billy thought the trees below looked different, not the same kinds of trees growing in the rest of forest. Parrots flew down there, like sparks of red and yellow.
Now the old man looked excited. He made Billy promise again, no shooting.
"Animals there, powerful spirits," the old man admonished. "Eat your soul."
"Yeah, yeah," Billy told him, holding up one hand. "Scout’s honor."
So they followed a footpath, zigzagging down the steep slope. Because of the rain forest’s heat and humidity, Billy’s soaked shirt plastered against his skin. But the farther down they walked, the cooler it felt. At the bottom, it seemed more like a lush garden than a wild forest, because instead of dense underbrush flowers grew between the trees, most with huge blossoms colored scarlet or deep blue or purple or yellow. They walked to a waterfall splashing into a pool. Here the old man fell down on his knees and buried his forehead in the grass. At that moment, Billy felt strange.
He glanced to the side. Next to a huge tree trunk sat a jaguar, looking at him with blue eyes. And the jaguar was white.
Billy carried his rifle strapped to his shoulder. He slid it off, aimed, shot.
"You shot the jaguar?" I asked.
Billy looked at me, as if he hadn’t realized anybody was listening to him.
"Nah," he said. "Damned thing disappeared into the trees just when I pulled the trigger."
I looked at my watch.
"Billy, I’ve really got to get back to work…."
He stared at me.
"I’m a damned good hunter," he said.
I looked at my watch again. Billy glared at me.
"If you tried shooting off my rifle, it’d knock you on your skinny butt," he said.
He signaled the bartender for more Jack Daniels.
"Just before that jaguar disappeared," he said. "It turned into a man—I saw a warrior standing there staring at me, an albino guy…."
He put his chin down on his chest and went into a sort of funk. I doubt he even noticed me leaving.
I walked back to Bronk Printing. It was only about a mile, which is nothing for me. Herbert and I go for much longer walks than that just about every evening.