If the monkeys didn’t move on soon, I’d have to risk a call to Bobby’s mobile number to warn him. I wasn’t happy about the electronic tone that would sound when I switched on my cell phone. In the hush of Dead Town, that pure note would resonate like a monk breaking wind in a monastery where everyone had taken a vow of silence.
Finally, Curious George finished contemplating the medallion moon, lowered his face, and rose to his feet. He stretched his shaggy arms, shook his head, and scampered back toward the street.
Just as I let out a sigh of relief, the little freak squealed, and his shrill cry could have been interpreted only as a shriek of alarm.
As one, the troop responded, raising their heads, springing away from the iron disc that had preoccupied them, craning their necks to see what was happening.
Bleating, shrieking, scolding, gibbering, Curious George leaped into the air, leaped and leaped, tumbled and flipped and twirled and capered, beat upon the sidewalk with his fists, hissed and screeched, clawed at the air as if it were cloth that could be rended, contorted himself until he seemed to be looking up his own butt, rolled, sprang to his feet, slapped his chest with his hands, hissed and spat and sputtered, rocked and jigged, raced toward the bungalow, but exploded away from it and scurried back toward the street, keening at a pitch that ought to have cracked the concrete under him.
Regardless of how primitive their language might be, I was pretty sure I got the message.
Even though most of the troop was forty feet from the bungalow, I could see their beady shining eyes like a swarm of fat fireflies.
A few of them began to croon and hoot. Their voices were lower and softer than Curious George’s caterwauling, but they didn’t sound like a hospitality committee welcoming a visitor.
I drew the Glock from my shoulder holster.
Eight rounds remained in the gun.
I had the spare ten-round magazine in the holster.
Eighteen bullets. Thirty monkeys.
I had done the calculations before. I did them again. Poetry, after all, is of more interest to me than math, so there was reason to double-check my figures. They still sucked.
Curious George raced toward the house again. This time he kept coming.
Behind him, the entire troop erupted out of the street, across the lawn, straight at the bungalow. Simultaneously, as they came, they all fell into a silence that implied organization, discipline, and deadly purpose.
7
I still didn’t believe the troop could have seen me, heard me, or smelled me, but they must have detected me somehow, because obviously they were not merely expressing their distaste for the undistinguished architecture of the bungalow. They were in a rage of a kind that I had seen before, a fury they reserved for humanity.
Furthermore, by their schedule, dinnertime had probably arrived. In lieu of a mouse or juicy spider, I was the meat dish, a refreshing change from their usual fare of fruits, nuts, seeds, leaves, flowers, and birds’ eggs.
I turned a hundred eighty degrees from the window and headed across the living room, hands out in front of me. I was moving fast, blindly trusting in my familiarity with these houses. My shoulder clipped the casing on a doorway, and I pushed through a half-open door into the dining room.
Although the monkeys continued to restrain themselves, operating in attack-status silence, I heard the hollow thumping of their paws on the wooden floor of the porch. I hoped they would hesitate at the front entrance, tempering their rancor with caution long enough for me to put a little ground between us.
A tattered blind, though askew, covered most of the single window in the small dining room. Too little light penetrated to bring meaningful relief from the gloom.
I kept moving, because I knew that the door to the kitchen was directly in line with the living-room door through which I had just entered. This time, passing from room to room, I didn’t even knock my shoulder against the jamb.
No blinds or curtains covered the pair of windows over the sink in the kitchen. Painted with a thin wash of moonlight, they had that ghostly phosphorous glow of television screens just after you switch them off.
Under my feet, the aging linoleum popped and cracked. If any members of the troop had entered the house behind me, I couldn’t hear them above the noise that I was making.
The air was thick with a foul miasma that made me want to retch. A rat or some wild animal must have died in a corner of the kitchen or in one of the cabinets, where it was now decomposing.
Holding my breath, I hurried to the back door, which featured a large pane of glass in the upper half. It was locked.
When this was a military base, personal security had been assured, and no one who lived inside the fence had reason to fear crime. Consequently, the locks were simple, keyed only from the outside.
I felt for the doorknob, which would have a lock-release button in the center. Found it. I would have turned it and torn open the door—except that the shadow of a leaping monkey flew up across the glass and fell away just as my hand closed on the cold brass.
I quietly released the knob and retreated two steps, considering my options. I could open the door and, pistol blazing, stride boldly through the murderous monkey multitudes as though I were Indiana Jones minus bullwhip and fedora, relying on sheer panache to survive. The only alternative was to remain in the kitchen and wait to see what happened next.
A monkey leaped onto the sill of one of the windows above the sink. Gripping the casing to keep its balance, it pressed against the glass, peering into the kitchen.
Because this mangy gremlin was silhouetted against moonlight, I could see no details of its face. Just its hot-ember eyes. The faint white crescent of its humorless grin.
Turning its head left and right and left again, it rolled its eyes, squinted, then went wide-eyed once more. By following its questing gaze, which roamed the kitchen, I deduced that it couldn’t see me in the darkness.
Options. Stay here and be trapped. Plunge into the night only to be dragged down and savaged under the mad moon.
These weren’t options, because either choice guaranteed an identical outcome. The worst kook surfer knows that whether you get sucked over the falls on a fully macking shore break or just get pitched off the board and do a faceplant in some seaweed soup, the result is the same: wipeout.
Another monkey leaped onto the sill at the second window.
Like most of us in this movie-besotted, Hollywood-corrupted world, if I succumbed to the narcissist in me and listened to my mind’s ear, I could probably hear a film score underlying my every waking moment: gluey sentimental string-section indulgences when I am stricken by sadness or sorrow; tear-evoking, heart-stirring full-orchestra rhapsodies when I enjoy a triumph; droll piano riffs during my not infrequent spells of foolishness. Sasha insists that I look like the late James Dean, and even though I don’t see the resemblance, I am appalled and ashamed to say that at times I take pleasure in this supposed resemblance to such a celebrated figure; indeed, it would require little effort for me to conduct periods of my life with the edgy score of Rebel Without a Cause swelling in my mind. At the door a moment earlier, when the monkey shadow swooped up the window: Hear the violins shriek from the shower scene in Psycho. Now, as I considered my next move, with monkeys closing in all around me: Imagine low, ominous, pulsing tones plucked from a bass fiddle, threaded through by a single attenuated but muted high note from a clarinet.
Although I am as capable of self-delusion as the next guy, I decided against the most cinematic of my options, electing not to swashbuckle into the night. After all, though charismatic, James Dean is no Harrison Ford. In the majority of his handful of movies, sooner or later he got the crap beaten out of him.
I quickly sidled across the floor, away from the windows, but also away from the entrance to the dining room. Within a few feet, I bumped into cabinetry.
These cabinets would match those in every house in Dead Town: plain but sturdy, with birch frames, their shiplap door
s painted so often that the shallow grooves created by the overlapping joints had all but disappeared under the many coats. The work counters would be laminated with one color or another of speckled Formica.
Before any of the troop entered the kitchen from the front of the house, I needed to get off the floor. If I stood with my back to a wall, pressed into a corner, dead motionless, breathing as noiselessly as a fish passing water through its gills, I was still certain to give myself away. The linoleum was so curled and so undermined by tiny pockets of air that it would crackle and pop from any unintentional shift of weight, from no more than a heavy thought. The betraying sound was sure to come precisely when the monkeys were stone still and ready to hear it.
In spite of darkness so thick that it seemed viscous, and in spite of a stench of decomposition strong enough to mask any scent of me that they might otherwise detect, I didn’t think I’d have much chance of escaping the troop’s notice during a search of the kitchen, even if they conducted it strictly by touch. Nevertheless, I had to give it a try.
If I climbed onto the countertop, I would be restricted by the narrow space between the Formica and the upper cabinets. I’d have to lie on my left side, facing out toward the room. After drawing my knees toward my chest, curling compactly into the fetal position, so as to occupy as small a space as possible and to make myself more difficult to locate, I wouldn’t be in an ideal posture to fight back if I was found by one of those walking condominiums for lice.
By body contact alone, I followed the cabinetry to the corner, where the kitchen in every one of these bungalows features a broom closet with a tall lower compartment and a single shelf at the top. If I was able to squeeze into that narrow space and close the door after me, at least I would be off the treacherous linoleum and beyond easy reach if the troop probed-poked-groped-tapped its way around the room.
At the end of the cabinet row, I discovered the broom closet where I’d expected it to be—but the door was missing. With dismay, I felt one bent and broken hinge, then the other, and patted air where the door should have been, as though just the right series of magical gestures would charm the door into existence again.
Unless the horde of monkeys that had followed Curious George onto the front porch was still huddled there, devising strategy or discussing the price of coconuts, I was nearly out of time.
My hidey-hole was suddenly more hole than hidey.
Unfortunately, no alternative presented itself.
I fished the spare magazine of ammunition from its pocket in my holster and clutched it in my left hand.
Holding the Glock ready in front of me, I eased backward into the broom closet—and wondered if the reek of death that saturated the kitchen might have its maggoty source in this cramped space. My stomach slithered like a ball of copulating eels, but nothing squished under my shoes.
The closet was just wide enough to admit me. To fit, I had to scrunch my shoulders only slightly. Although I am nearly six feet tall, I didn’t have to hunch down; however, the underside of the storage shelf pressed hard enough against my Mystery Train cap to impress the shape of the crown button through my hair and into my scalp.
To avoid second thoughts and an attack of claustrophobia, I decided not to pass the time by listing the ways in which my hiding place was like a coffin.
As it turned out, I didn’t have any time to pass. No sooner had I stashed myself in the broom closet than monkeys entered the kitchen from the dining room.
I heard them just beyond the threshold, revealed only by a barely audible conspiratorial hissing and muttering. They hesitated, apparently scoping the situation, then entered at a rush, lantern eyes aglow as they fanned out to both sides of the door, like SWAT-team cops in a TV drama.
The crackling linoleum startled them. One squeaked in surprise, and they all froze.
As far as I could determine, this first squad consisted of three members. I couldn’t see anything but their shining eyes, which were revealed only during the moments when they were facing in my direction. Because they were standing still, swiveling just their heads as they surveyed the black room, I could be sure that I wasn’t seeing the same pair of eyes as a single individual progressed from place to place.
I was breathing shallowly through my mouth, not solely because this method was comparatively quiet. Using my nose would result in a more sickening exposure to the vile stink. Already, a sludge of nausea oozed back and forth in my belly. Now I was beginning to be able to taste the foul air, which left a musty-bitter flavor on my tongue and induced a flux of sour saliva that threatened to make me gag.
After a pause to analyze the situation, the bravest of the three monkeys moved—and then went rigid when the linoleum protested noisily again.
One of its pals took a step with the same result, and it, too, halted warily.
A nerve began to twitch in my left calf. I hoped to God it wouldn’t develop into a painful cramp.
Following a lengthy silence, the most timid member of the squad issued a thin whine. It sounded fearful.
Call me insensitive, call me cruel, call me a mutant-monkey hater, but under the circumstances, I was pleased by the anxiety in its voice.
Their apprehension was so palpable that if I said “Boo,” they would leap, screaming, straight to the ceiling and hang there by their fingernails. Monkey stalactites.
Of course, totally pissed by that little trick, they would eventually come down again and, with the rest of the troop, tear my guts out. Which would spoil the joke.
If they were as spooked as I believed they were, they might conduct only a token search and retreat from the house, where after Curious George would be the troop’s equivalent of the boy who cried wolf.
The increased intelligence conferred on these rhesuses is as much a curse as a blessing to them. With higher intelligence comes an awareness of the complexity of the world, and from this awareness arises a sense of mystery, wonder. Superstition is the dark side of wonder. Creatures with simple animal intelligence fear only real things, such as their natural predators. But those of us who have higher cognitive abilities are able to torture ourselves with an infinite menagerie of imaginary threats: ghosts and goblins and vampires and brain-eating extraterrestrials. Worse, we find it difficult not to dwell on the most terrifying two words in any language, even in monkey talk: what if…
I was counting on these creatures being, right now, nearly paralyzed by a daunting list of what-ifs.
One of the squad snorted as though trying to clear the stench out of its nostrils, then spat with distaste.
The wimpy one whined again.
It was answered by one of its brethren, not with another whine, but with a fierce growl that dispelled my cozy notion that all the monkeys were too spooked to linger here. The growler, at least, was not intimidated, and it sounded tough enough to ensure the discipline of the other two.
The three proceeded deeper into the kitchen, past the broom closet, and out of my line of sight. They seemed to be full of trepidation, but they were no longer inhibited by the noisy flooring.
A second squad, also composed of three members and also revealed only by their eyeshine, entered the room. They paused to survey the unpierceable darkness, and one by one they looked in my direction without any indication that they detected me.
From elsewhere in the kitchen arose the continuous crackle of the brittle linoleum. I heard a scrabbling and a thump, noises no doubt made by one of the first three monkeys as it climbed onto a counter.
The button on my cap was pressed so firmly between the crown of my head and the shelf above me that I felt as though God’s thumb was thrust against my scalp in a not so subtle announcement that my number was up, my ticket punched, my dime dropped, my license to live revoked. If I could have hunched down an inch or two, the pressure would have been relieved, but I was afraid that even with the monkeys making a racket, I would still be heard as my back and shoulders slid along the walls of the narrow closet. Besides, the twitching nerve in my
leg had quickly evolved into a mild cramp, as I had feared that it would; even a minor change in my position might contract the calf muscle and cause the pain to flare into intolerable agony.
A member of the second squad began to move slowly toward me, its bright eyes sliding nervously from side to side while it felt its way through the cloying murk. As the clever little beast approached, I could hear it rhythmically slapping its right hand against the wall to keep itself oriented.
In another corner of the room, rusted hinges squeaked. One of the shiplap doors banged shut, its loose joints rattling.
Evidently, they were opening the cabinets and fumbling blindly inside.
I had hoped that they would not be intelligent enough to conduct a thorough search or, conversely, that they would be too intelligent to endanger themselves by poking blindly into places where an armed man might be waiting to blast them to monkey hell. They were smart enough to be thorough, all right, but too reckless to be as cautious as the situation required. From past encounters, I had already known all this about them; but having jammed myself into the broom coffin, having regretted doing so almost as soon as I was encased, I’d been in denial.
The wall slapper was still coming toward me, no more than three feet away. Its eyes continued to blaze at the gloom on all sides of it, not just at me.
More hinges squeaked. A warped cabinet door stuttered open with some resistance, and another door banged shut.
The cramp in my calf abruptly became more severe. Hot. Sharp. I clenched my teeth to keep from groaning. I had a headache, too: The cap button felt as if it had been pressed all the way through my skull, into my brain, and had begun working its way out through my right eye. My neck ached. My scrunched shoulders didn’t feel too good, either. I had a nagging pain in the small of my back, a spot of tenderness in the gum at an upper right molar, a queasy feeling that I was developing serious hemorrhoids at the tender age of twenty-eight, and was in general feeling pretty much, you know, blah.
The wall slapper stopped slapping the wall when it reached the corner and discovered the cabinetry. It was directly in front of me now.