New World Monkeys (18 page)

“Lily mentioned it.”

“Well, that was Skinner’s pig. He thinks someone stole it. Maybe it’s unrelated, but some dormitory windows at Bard were shot at. I mean with a BB gun—they didn’t break, but the kids got a jolt.”

“He thinks some of the kids from Bard are responsible?”

“Well, like I mentioned, the windows didn’t break. Anyway, Duncan, what I’m saying is, if Laura’s going to be up there, she should just be aware.”

Duncan scratches at his scalp.
“Lily
has spent her entire adult life in Manhattan.”

“Oh, for sure. She’s got her street smarts. I just wanted to say my piece.”

“Whatever problems they might have, we can’t really change our summer plans. It’s kind of petty, this issue.”

“Yes, that’s it exactly. Petty! It’ll pass. The pig will come back and it’ll all pass. Everything does, isn’t that the way?”

But now Duncan isn’t so sure. When he hangs up with Valerie he’s lost his thrill for the Viet Cong guerrilla girl and her tapered pant legs. What the Historical Society Matriarch has reinforced here is a real sense of reckoning. The possibility of comeuppance for a single, stupid, and innocent mistake that simply lacked a decent follow-through. And he has left his wife to face it alone. He looks at his left hand. Fresh skin is already growing to cover the injury. Lily’s tough, he must bear this in mind. She released him from a fender skirt with her bare hands. Sill, tough means squat when a ten-pound Parrott rifle is rolled onto your front lawn. No, what he needs to do is get those bones out of the garden. Lily’s stuck on the find and he knows full well that she won’t budge until it’s done. If this turns out to be nothing less than his own special ops mission into the Mekong, then at least his orders are clear: get your bones, get your woman, and get the hell out.

When the concert’s over Lily raises the rotting window sash hoping the musicians will fly off without having to trap them under a jam jar. She’s waving a toilet paper streamer out the bathroom window, flagging the wasps away from the tacky resin of the outer casement, when her eye catches on a white bundle in the garden. Lily sticks her head out the window. She’s mistaken. It’s not a white bundle lolling around down there. It’s a sheep.

No way. She takes another look, thinking it might have something to do with the cooking sherry she just polished off. No. It’s still a sheep. And now with its head lowered in Tinker’s grave. My God, she thinks. This has got to be the worst bit of Orwellian recompense conceivable. Even the animals are revolting.

“Hey!” Lily knocks at the top of the windowpane. “What are you doing down there?” The animal keeps its hindquarters angled in her direction, its head down and grazing around the site. It must have detected from the tremble in her cry that she’s pure greenhorn when it comes to negotiating with livestock. Perhaps her precision with the tire iron was nothing more than a lucky strike after all.

The sheep’s fleece, all spit curls and marcel waves, betrays the renegade lifestyle of the untended: the crimped underbelly wool dragging like trampled hems, the flanks snaggled with twigs and grass and seasoned brown from a long, rasping massage against the base of a creosote-soaked telephone pole. Dirty sheep. She sees it raise its shock-headed skull from the hummocky pile of Tinker’s plot to scout left and right.

“Up here, lamb chop.”

The animal lifts its head to observe treetops for voices, turning to her finally, the source of recrimination, and it’s only then that she realizes she was wrong yet again. It’s not a sheep. It’s a poodle.

Lily leans on the windowsill, naked, swearing off cooking sherry and overcome with either hysteria or a sense of adversarial one-upmanship. If only Duncan could see they’re up against much more than Skinner’s crew. A dog’s urgency! The innate compulsion to dig! The poodle raises its left paw at her, either an atavistic impulse or the forgotten gesture of puppyhood, the shake-a-paw gag that delighted someone once. But Lily is not kindhearted.

“Go on,” she shouts. “Get out of there!”

The dog lowers its trick paw. Its good humor has vanished; Lily isn’t going to play. They face each other: the poodle, a filthy meringue, and she, naked at the breast. Nothing regal in that face, she thinks. There’s a
twitch of snout muscle as the poodle’s lip ruches over its fang, forming a sneer that is not of Lily’s anthropomorphic creation.

Lily, furious, barks twice out the window. She’s surprised by the harsh and authentic sound that she produces. The dog, however, ignores her, turns back to the hole, and noses around for the spot where it left off. She reaches down, picks one of her sneakers off the floor, and launches it through the window.

“A
fter witnessing the dismemberment of a field medic from Alabama and shaking the trees for dog tags, Grunt Girl realizes she isn’t going to win this war. We see her, jeans and cammies, under a tree that’s literally strung with dog tags.”

“Dog tags in trees?”

“Yeah,” Leetower turns to Kooch, “I should have mentioned that. Idea there is someone’s been blown sky high from a land mine, okay? So, the various bits, they end up in the trees.” The tail of his sentence bends upward, seeking affirmation.

“Then Grunt Girl says—and we put this in quotes in the print ad—she says, ‘What’s left of the field medic from Alabama could fit in a shoe box.’” Leetower spreads his drawings on Duncan’s desk. “See how the, uh, the quote functions the same as the voice-over on the TV?”

For a minute no one speaks.

“Well.” Duncan, relying on monosyllabic ambiguity to communicate his disinterest, shuffles the concepts around. Maybe if he changes their order.

“Stick to pictures, Leetits.” Kooch puts his feet up on the desk. “Doesn’t it say
Art Director
on your business card?”

The boy sits and crosses his legs at the thighs. His lips are the color of bone. “Right, in the same place where yours says
Asshole.”

“I’m rounding out a script here where Grunt Girl realizes the frayed edges of her jeans have grown into a scabbing wound on her calf. Right into the scab so that skin and war and denim are inextricably laced.” Kooch slaps his broad mitt down over his notes. His cuticles are immaculate, Duncan observes. Bred for the barn but raised in the manor house.

“The field medic is alive. He’s bent over Grunt Girl’s leg with a rusty straight-edge razor, slicing the jeans away from the scabbing wound. Transferring his cigarette to her mouth the way two scuba divers may be forced to share a single oxygen mask.” Kooch doesn’t look to either of them for a reaction. He flips the page.

“Next spot. We open on a wide shot of an opium den.”

Duncan stands, acknowledging a certain didactic thrill. While he needs to take these two in hand before the entire concept bleeds away into the furniture, he’s got to admit he’s pleased they’ve followed his lead instead of putting up roadblocks.

“You guys ever hear that saying, ‘Kill your darlings’?”

“Yeah. Bob Barrie.”

“No, it was Helmut Krone.”

“Actually it was Faulkner.” Duncan walks around his desk. “You two are close, but I think we’re getting stuck on genre films. Let’s go more stylized. Forget reality altogether.”

“But we’ve already been talking to a couple guys.”

“What couple of guys?”

“Who do shakycam. Guys we know, DPs mostly.” Kooch’s flat voice speaks of lapped terrain.

“Really. When did this happen?”

Leetower rouses himself. “What Kooch means is, we like frenetic randomness. Remember the Omaha Beach scene in
Saving Private Ryan?
But instead of dead soldiers, a beach full of hot Grunt Girls.”

“And we intercut with some retro Super 8.”

Since when have these little shits been talking to cameramen? Duncan walks the length of his small office. “You’re getting way ahead of
yourselves,” he says, making a heroic attempt at calm. Sure, Hawke was always more gracious when handling his fledgling ideas, his experiments. But Duncan just can’t seem to extend the same courtesy to these punks. It’s Kooch, something about his watchfulness. As though he’s humoring him, as though he knows Duncan doesn’t have a clue as to where to lead the troops next, let alone bring home another One Show Pencil. He thinks of Skinner’s speech at the library, how he’d rallied his men to bear arms against the boar thief. Even Duncan, who was more than aware of the pig’s fate, was taken up for a moment in the visible charisma. It wasn’t simple manipulation that allowed men like Skinner—like Hawke—to lead uncompromising campaigns. It was unequaled conviction, certifiable egomania that allowed them to fly under nuclear radar.

“I need an idea before you give me the camera angle, okay?” Duncan rubs the back of his hand across his mouth. “And where’s the Viet Cong? I want to see her being hosed down with orange liquid. Orange, you know, to symbolize Agent Orange. But she’s wearing skinny-leg Stand and Be Counted jeans—they resist the spray. She might even be enjoying it.”

“Like a wet T-shirt.”

Anne appears in the doorway, a pack of cigarettes and a file folder up against her breasts. She glances over at the rough sketches on the desk. “Look at all the fresh spoils you’ve dragged back to the Village of the Boys.”

“We’ve had to interdict a lot of sleeping civilians.”

“Excellent. Body count?” Anne strips the cigarette pack of its plastic sheathing. “I hear you’re going to use a Vietnamese girl in the skinny-leg jeans. Very smart, Duncan. Girl-on-girl action is very in.”

“Girl-on-girl action can bring the world together.” Kooch stands, spreads the points of his shoulders so that he seems to clear the room with the wide brisket of his chest. “In the last spot of the campaign we’re going to have the hot Vietnamese girl and the hot American girl making peace in a suite at the Rex Hotel.”

“Whose side are we supposed to be on?”

“That’s the beauty of it, McPherson,” he says. “Straight leg, wide leg, Asian, white—let proclivities fall where they may. We get to shoot this in Saigon, right?”

Duncan feels the ache of annoyance at the root of his teeth. He does not like the way Kooch injects himself into the production of the campaign. Does not like it one bit.

“No money for Vietnam.” Anne lodges a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. “Think Everglades. Actually, I was talking the idea around Upstairs. They are very keen on
History Repeating
, Duncan. They are right with you on bringing home some awards for this. First comment in the room—which I personally thought astute—was that we can really capitalize on the current trouble in Iraq.”

Leetower spreads out on the sofa. “Why Iraq?”

“It puts everything in perspective.”

“Wait a minute.” Duncan holds up his hand. “You took the idea Upstairs?”

“Well, in general terms only,” she says, feeling through her jacket pocket for a lighter.

“It’s not ready for an audience, Anne. We’re still brainstorming.”

“But you said you didn’t want to consult with anyone from outside.”

“To consult on what? We don’t even have a script written.”

“They wanted something, Duncan.” She looks at him, tweezing the cigarette from her lips. Her face, which had been riding calm, is now tacking hard to the wind. “Excuse me for giving them a reason to deposit your next paycheck.”

Kooch whistles his appreciation.

Duncan’s hand moves.

This is how it happens, he thinks. This is what they mean by losing control. How the arm, hand, and fist become not only as involuntary as internal organs, but also much more powerful; what does the pancreas do anyway, besides produce its sugar-seeking squirt of insulin? As his hand
moves, Duncan understands, this is how simple striated muscle (the lackey of the brain) gains the ability to calibrate itself. Once a man strips down to his pure, simian heart, he discovers that all muscle has memory. This explains it, how each day, men perform certain actions they never thought themselves capable of. The trigger is woman. How easy it is for a woman with an obstinate will to undermine a man’s efforts. This explains how the founder of sawmills and forefather of a town tamped his child’s governess into the soil. Some say it’s weakness to strike at the small, but a woman can invite aggression as well as any man. Many will even change before your eyes, their chins spreading into a hollow for the fist.

Besides, the Age of Chivalry had climaxed with
Ivanhoe.

This is it, he thinks, feeling his hand gearing up with backward torque. This is what happens when talk fails. When reason fails, and words die with it. Hadn’t he made a living scrambling words? Rearranging them until they revealed their molecular structure? Watson and Crick were amateurs. What he himself has done with words! So many years and they have been the only pliant company he’s kept. He has shoved them roughly to the floor just to see something—someone—look up to him.

His hand moves, the monkey heart moves it. And Anne sees it move. She steps back. Kooch’s whistle is a disappearing train. The air-conditioning vent drops a register. Anne is not afraid. There are two spots of color on her cheeks, as though someone had pressed a thumb against either side of her face. She is nearly pretty in her awe. She backs to the door but he knows she doesn’t want to leave. They’re just getting started.

“Jesus.” Anne laughs through fine nerves. “It’s a madhouse around here without a creative director, yeah?”

Leetower closes his eyes on the sofa. He has female lashes. “Burn the hooches,” he says. “Kill every chicken and pig in the ville.”

She admires the inverted symmetry of the two blue veins under her tongue. The deep lingual vein, twisting under a layer of soft tissue, precise
as its pencil-rendered twin in the copy of
Gray’s Anatomy
that she brought home from the library. She tosses a freshly polished silver spoon on the coffee table and rests the open book on her chest like a weighty bird. Between these two wings is a catalog of an assembled Tinker, although the real woman is scattered under a packed layer of dirt. Lily has run out of things to do. The light ticks away now, reading is a strain, sharp edges of furniture are lost in the dusk, corners are just faded pockets where walls may or may not meet. The sofa holds her loneliness, the ancient wadding presses shapes of lost men into her spine. A genealogy of posterior impressions, she thinks. How many have come before her, scrimmaged with the darkness only to expire despite the effort? And were any of them involved in the nanny’s demise? She wonders if Tinker ever sat here. When the family was out, did she move from room to room, learning the feel of each chair beneath her weight?