The Monkey Read online

  He rushed at it again, meaning to stomp it, smash it, jump on it until cogs and gears flew and its horrible glass eyes rolled along the floor. But just as he reached it, its cymbals came together once more, very softly ... (jang) . . . as a spring somewhere inside expanded one final, minute notch . . . and a sliver of ice seemed to whisper its way through the walls of his heart, impaling it, stilling its fury and leaving him sick with terror again. The monkey almost seemed to know--how gleeful its grin seemed!

  He picked it up, tweezing one of its arms between the thumb and first finger of his right hand, mouth drawn down in a bow of loathing, as if it were a corpse he held. Its mangy fake fur seemed hot and fevered against his skin. He fumbled open the tiny door that led to the back closet and turned on the bulb. The monkey grinned at him as he crawled down the length of the storage area between boxes piled on top of boxes, past the set of navigation books and the photograph albums with their fume of old chemicals and the souvenirs and the old clothes, and Hal thought: If it begins to clap its cymbals together now and move in my hand, l'll scream, and if I scream, it'll do more than grin, it'll start to laugh, to laugh at me, and then I'll go crazy and they'll find me in here, drooling and laughing crazy, I'll be crazy, oh please dear God, please dear Jesus, don't let me go crazy--

  He reached the far end and clawed two boxes aside, spilling one of them, and jammed the monkey back into the Ralston-Purina box in the farthest corner. And it leaned in there, comfortably, as if home at last, cymbals poised, grinning its simian grin, as if the joke were still on Hal. Hal crawled backward, sweating, hot and cold, all fire and ice, waiting for the cymbals to begin, and when they began, the monkey would leap from its box and scurry beetlelike toward him, clockwork whirring, cymbals clashing madly, and--

  --and none of that happened. He turned off the light and slammed the small down-the-rabbit-hole door and leaned on it, panting. At last he began to feel a little better. He went downstairs on rubbery legs, got an empty bag, and began carefully to pick up the jogged shards and splinters of the broken milk bottle, wondering if he was going to cut himself and bleed to death, if that was what the clapping cymbals had meant. But that didn't happen, either. He got a towel and wiped up the milk and then sat down to see if his mother and brother would come home.

  His mother came first, asking, "Where's Bill?"

  In a low, colorless voice, now sure that Bill must be Dead at some Scene, Hal started to explain about the school play meeting, knowing that, even given a very long meeting, Bill should have been home half an hour ago.

  His mother looked at him curiously, started to ask what was wrong, and then the door opened and Bill came in--only it was not Bill at all, not really. This was a ghost-Bill, pale and silent.

  "What's wrong?" Mrs. Shelburn exclaimed. "Bill, what's wrong'?"

  Bill began to cry and they got the story, through his tears. There had been a car, he said. He and his friend Charlie Silverman were walking home together after the meeting and the car came around Brook Street Corner too fast and Charlie had frozen, Bill had tugged Charlie's hand once but had lost his grip and the car--

  Bill began to bray out loud, hysterical sobs, and his mother hugged him to her, rocking him, and Hal looked out on the porch and saw two policemen standing there. The squad car in which they had conveyed Bill home was standing at the curb. Then he began to cry himself. . . but his tears were tears of relief.

  It was Bill's turn to have nightmares now dreams in which Charlie Silverman died over and over again, knocked out of his Red Ryder cowboy boots and was flipped onto the hood of the rusty Hudson Hornet the drunk had been piloting. Charlie Silverman's head and the Hudson's windshield had met with explosive force. Both had shattered. The drunk driver, who owned a candy store in Milford. suffered a heart attack shortly after being taken into custody (perhaps it was the sight of Charlie Silverman's brains drying on his pants), and his lawyer was quite successful at the trial with his "this man has been punished enough" theme. The drunk was given sixty days (suspended) and lost his privilege to operate a motor vehicle in the state of Connecticut for five years . . . which was about as long as Bill Shelburn's nightmares lasted. The monkey was hidden away again in the back closet. Bill never noticed it was gone from his shelf. . . or if he did, he never said.

  Hal felt safe for a while He even began to forget about the monkey again, or to believe it had only been a bad dream. But when he came home from school on the afternoon his mother died, it was back on his shelf, cymbals poised, grinning down at him.

  He approached it slowly, as if from outside himself as if his own body had been turned into a wind-up toy at the sight of the monkey. He saw his hand reach out and take it down. He felt the nappy fur cnnkle under his hand, but the feeling was muffled, mere pressure, as if someone had shot him full of Novocain. He could hear his breathing, quick and dry, like the rattle of wind through straw.

  He turned it over and grasped the key and years later he would think that his drugged fascination was like that of a man who puts a six-shooter with one loaded chamber against a closed and jittering eyelid and pulls the trigger.

  No don't--let it alone throw it away don't touch it--

  He turned the key and in the silence he heard a perfect tiny series of winding-up clicks. When he let the key go, the monkey began to clap its cymbals together and he could feel its body jerking, bend-and-jerk, bend-and-jerk, as if it were alive, it was alive, writhing in his hand like some loathsome pygmy, and the vibration he felt through its balding brown fur was not that of turning cogs but the beating of its heart.

  With a groan, Hal dropped the monkey and backed away, fingernails digging into the flesh under his eyes, palms pressed to his mouth. He stumbled over something and nearly lost his balance (then he would have been right down on the floor with it, his bulging blue eyes looking into its glassy hazel ones). He scrambled toward the door, backed through it, slammed it, and leaned against it. Suddenly he bolted for the bathroom and vomited.

  It was Mrs. Stukey from the helicopter plant who brought the news and stayed with them those first two endless nights, until Aunt Ida got down from Maine. Their mother had died of a brain embolism in the middle of the afternoon. She had been standing at the water cooler with a cup of water in one hand and had crumpled as if shot, still holding the paper cup in one hand. With the other she had clawed at the water cooler and had pulled the great glass bottle of Poland water down with her. It had shattered. . . but the plant doctor, who came on the run, said later that he believed Mrs. Shelburn was dead before the water had soaked through her dress and her underclothes to wet her skin. The boys were never told any of this, but Hal knew anyway. He dreamed it again and again on the long nights following his mother's death. You still have trouble gettin to sleep, little brother? Bill had asked him, and Hal supposed Bill thought all the thrashing and bad dreams had to do with their mother dying so suddenly and that was right . . . but only partly right. There was the guilt, the certain, deadly knowledge that he had killed his mother by winding the monkey up on that sunny after-school alternoon.

  When Hal finally fell asleep, his sleep must have been deep. When he awoke, it was nearly noon. Petey was sitting cross-legged in a chair across the room, methodically eating an orange section by section and watching a game show on TV.

  Hal swung his legs out of bed, feeling as if someone had punched him down into sleep.., and then punched him back out of it. His head throbbed. "Where's your mom, Petey?"

  Petey glanced around. "She and Dennis went shopping, I said I'd hang out here with you. Do you always talk in your sleep, Dad?"

  Hal looked at his son cautiously. "No. What did I say?"

  "I couldn't make it out. It scared me, a little."

  "Well, here I am in my right mind again," Hal said, and managed a small grin. Petey grinned back, and Hal felt simple love for the boy again, an emotion that was bright and strong and uncomplicated. He wondered why he had always been able to feel so good about Petey, to feel he understood Petey a
nd could help him, and why Dennis seemed a window too dark to look through, a mystery in his ways and habits, the sort of boy he could not understand because he had never been that sort of boy. It was too easy to say that the move from California had changed Dennis, or that--

  His thoughts froze. The monkey. The monkey was sitting on the windowsill, cymbals poised. Hal felt his heart stop dead in his chest and then suddenly begin to gallop. His vision wavered, and his throbbing head began to ache ferociously.

  It had escaped from the suitcase and now stood on the windowsill, grinning at him. Thought you got rid of me didn't you? But you've thought that before, haven't you?

  Yes, he thought sickly. Yes, I have.

  "Pete, did you take that monkey out of my suitcase'?" he asked, knowing the answer already. He had locked the suitcase and had put the key in his overcoat pocket.

  Petey glanced at the monkey, and something--Hal thought it was unease--passed over his face. "No," he said. "Mom put it there."

  "Mom did?''

  "Yeah. She took it from you. She laughed."

  "Took it from me? What are you talking about?"

  "You had it in bed with you. I was brushing my teeth, but Dennis saw. He laughed, too. He said you looked like a baby with a teddy bear."

  Hal looked at the monkey. His mouth was too dry to swallow. He'd had it in bed with him? In bed? That loathsome fur against his cheek, maybe against his mouth, those glaring eyes staring into his sleeping face, those grinning teeth near his neck? On his neck? Dear God.

  He turned abruptly and went to the closet. The Samsonite was there, still locked. The key was still in his overcoat pocket.

  Behind him. the TV snapped off. He came out of the closet slowly. Peter was looking at him soberly. "Daddy, I don't like that monkey," he said, his voice almost too low to hear.

  "Nor do I," Hal said.

  Petey looked at him closely, to see if he was joking, and saw that he was not. He came to his father and hugged him tight. Hal could feet him trembling.

  Petey spoke into his ear then, very rapidly, as if afraid he might not have courage enough to say it again. . . or that the monkey might overhear.

  "It's like it looks at you. Like it looks at you no matter where you are in the room. And if you go into the other room, it's like it's looking through the wall at you. I kept feeling like it... like it wanted me for something."

  Petey shuddered. Hal held him tight.

  "Like it wanted you to wind it up," Hal said.

  Pete nodded violently. "It isn't really broken, is it, Dad?"

  "Sometimes it is," Hal said, looking over his son's shoulder at the monkey. "But sometimes it still works."

  "I kept wanting to go over there and wind it up. It was so quiet, and I thought, I can't, it'll wake up Daddy, but I still wanted to, and I went over and I . . . I touched it and I hate the way it feels . . . but I liked it, too . . . and it was like it was saying, Wind me up, Petey, we'll play, your father isn't going to wake up, he's never going to wake up at all, wind me up, wind me up . . ."

  The boy suddenly burst into tears.

  "It's bad. I know it is. There's something wrong with it. Can't we throw it out, Daddy? Please?"

  The monkey grinned its endless grin at Hal. He could feel Petey's tears between them, Late-morning sun glinted off the monkey's brass cymbals--the light reflected upward and put sun streaks on the motel's plain white stucco ceiling.

  "What time did your mother think she and Dennis would be back, Petey?"

  "Around one." He swiped at his red eyes with his shirt sleeve, looking embarrassed at his tears. But he wouldn't look at the monkey. "I turned on the TV," he whispered. "And I turned it up loud."

  "That was all right, Petey."

  How would it have happened? Hal wondered. Heart attack? An embolism, like my mother? What? It doesn't really matter, does it?

  And on the heels of that, another, colder thought' Get rid of it, he, says. Throw it out. But can it be gotten rid of? Ever?

  The monkey grinned mockingly at him, its cymbals held a foot apart. Did it suddenly come to life on the night Aunt Ida died? he wondered suddenly. Was that the last sound she heard, the muffled jang-jang-jang of the monkey beating its cymbals together up in the black attic while the wind whistled along the drainpipe?

  "Maybe not so crazy," Hal said slowly to his son. "Go get your flight bag, Petey."

  Petey looked at him uncertainly. "What are we going to do?"

  Maybe it can be got rid of. Maybe permanently, maybe just for a while . . . a long while or a short while Maybe it's just going to come back and come back and that's all this is about . . . but maybe I--we--can say good-bye to it, for a long time. It took twenty years to come back this time. It took twenty y,ears to get out of the well . . .

  "We're going to go for a ride," Hal said. He felt fairly calm, but somehow too heavy inside his skin. Even his eyeballs seemed to have gained weight. "But first I want you to take your flight bag out there by the edge of the parking lot and find three or four good-sized rocks. Put them inside the bag and bring it back to me. Got it'?"

  Understanding flickered in Petey's eyes. "All right, Daddy."

  Hal glanced at his watch. It was nearly 12:15. "Hurry. I want to be gone before your mother gets back."

  "Where are we going?"

  "To Uncle Will's and Aunt Ida's," Hal said. "To the home place."

  Hal went into the bathroom, looked behind the toilet, and got the bowl brush leaning there. He took it back to the window and stood there with it in his hand like a cut-rate magic wand. He looked out at Petey in his melton shirt-jacket, crossing the parking lot with his flight bag, DELTA showing clearly in white letters against a blue field. A fly bumbled in an upper comer of the window, slow and stupid with the end of the warm season. Hal knew how it felt.

  He watched Petey hunt up three good-sized rocks and then start back across the parking lot. A car came around the comer of the motel, a car that was moving too fast, much too fast, and without thinking, reaching with the kind of reflex a good shortstop shows going to his fight, the hand holding the brush flashed down, as if in a karate chop ... and stopped.

  The cymbals closed soundlessly on his intervening hand, and he felt something in the air. Something like rage.

  The car's brakes screamed. Petey flinched back. The driver motioned to him, impatiently, as if what had almost happened was Petey's fault, and Petey ran across the parking lot with his collar flapping and into the motel's rear entrance.

  Sweat was running down Hal's chest; he felt it on his forehead like a drizzle of oily rain. The cymbals pressed coldly against his hand, numbing it.

  Go on, he thought grimly. Go on, I can wait all day. Until hell freezes over, if that's what it takes.

  The cymbals drew apart and came to rest. Hal heard one faint click! from inside the monkey. He withdrew the brush and looked at it. Some of the white bristles had blackened, as if singed.

  The fly bumbled and buzzed, trying to find the cold October sunshine that seemed so close.

  Pete came bursting in, breathing quickly, cheeks rosy. "I got three good ones, Dad, I " He broke off. "Are you all right, Daddy?"

  "Fine," Hal said. "Bring the bag over."

  Hal hooked the table by the sofa over to the window with his foot so it stood below the sill, and put the flight bag on it. He spread its mouth open like lips. He could see the stones Petey had collected glimmering inside. He used the toilet-bowl brush to hook the monkey forward. It teetered for a moment and then felt into the bag. There was a faint ting! as one of its cymbals struck one of the rocks.

  "Dad? Daddy?" Petey sounded frightened. Hal looked around at him. Something was different: something had changed. What was it?

  Then he saw the direction of Petey's gaze and he knew. The buzzing of the fly had stopped. It lay dead on the windowsill.

  "Did the monkey do that?" Petey whispered.

  "Come on," Hal said, zipping the bag shut. "I'11 tell you while we ride out to the home place."<
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  "How can we go'? Mom and Dennis took the car." "Don't worry," Hal said, and ruffled Petey's hair.

  He showed the desk clerk his driver's license and a twenty-dollar bill. After taking Hal's Texas Instruments digital watch as collateral, the clerk handed Hal the keys to his own car a battered AMC Gremlin. As they drove east on Route 302 toward Casco, Hal began to talk, haltingly at first, then a little faster. He began by telling Petey that his father had probably brought the monkey home with him from overseas, as a gift for his sons. It wasn't a particularly unique toy--there was nothing strange or valuable about it. There must have been hundreds of thousands of wind-up monkeys in the world, some made in Hong Kong, some in Taiwan, some in Korea. But somewhere along the line perhaps even in the dark back closet of the house in Connecticut where the two boys had begun their growing up something had happened to the monkey. Something bad. It might be, Hal said as he tried to coax the clerk's Gremlin up past forty, that some bad things maybe even most bad things weren't even really awake and aware of what they were. He left it there because that was probably as much as Petey could understand, but his mind continued on its own course. He thought that most evil might be very much like a monkey full of clockwork that you wind up; the clockwork tums, the cymbals begin to beat, the teeth grin, the stupid glass eyes laugh ... or appear to laugh ....

  He told Petey about finding the monkey, but little more he did not want to terrify his already scared boy any more than he was already. The story thus became disjointed, not really clear, but Petey asked no questions: perhaps he was filling in the blanks for himself, Hal thought, in much the same way that he had dreamed his mother's death over and over, although he had not been there.