New World Monkeys (30 page)

“I think he’s passed out.”

Hips slide from vinyl seat. Arms splay to the sides as if the body’s being prepped for a gutting.

Lloyd finally turns from her to look through the window. “Yeah, I’d say he has.”

The gas mask is strapped at the back of his head. Because the jelly chamber is fogged, Lily guesses the seal between mask and mouth and nose is still intact. She moves back from the window.

“Why would he strap the mask on?”

“Silly him.”

“He should’ve held it,” she says. “It would have just fallen off.”

Lloyd comes down off his toes. “It always has in the past. Do you think he’s trying to off himself?” But his concern is baroque, gilded.

She tries reading the pervert’s face in the meek operatory light. She knows this voice, of course, this method of rhetorical questioning. But does she believe it?

“Is this part of the thing?” she asks.

“It’s a sleeping dog, little sister,” he says with nothing in his eyes. “I’ll bet they don’t do this shit where you come from.”

She turns, knocks on the glass. “I’m going to go look for a phone.”

Lloyd puts his fingers on the window.

“I won’t give my name,” she adds.

Lloyd keeps his fingers on the pane, as though the glass is a conductor of ugly energy between the two men.

“You’ll do no such thing.”

The remaining codeine pills have slipped from their envelope and have come loose in his pocket with a handful of like-shaped breath mints. Duncan draws out five white tablets. His neck and shoulders are hounding him for relief and in the dim car interior he downs the handful.

He reaches Osterhagen with minty fresh breath and takes the country bypass west of the town, past the infamous site where they exterminated and abandoned the Sovereign of the Deep Wood. He drives slowly along the dirt road, not knowing what to expect here on a Wednesday night in the country. How far sounds might carry.

Duncan reaches the house and drives a couple hundred yards past the place, pulling into the first clearing he sees off the road. He gets out and throws on an old sweater to guard against burrs and branches and deer ticks. There’s a clear moon overhead and with its assistance, he tackles
the ditch and thickets with surprising ease. The split rail fence sags under his weight but holds, and it’s a short climb beyond this into the narrow field of stubble. Here, Duncan can see across the flats to the start of the barley crops. He starts hiking back toward Lily.

The house stands over the grain, folded up for the night without a single candle burning to greet the surprise guest wading through the barley. When he pulls out alongside the house, the same moon that got him through the scrub now reveals that Lily’s bike is gone, both ends of the chain lock hanging from the porch rail like empty shackles. At least, he thinks, it’s a voluntary absence. He digs through his pockets for the house keys. Brings up instead a beer cap, a paper coaster, and a plastic cocktail sword. Fuck. Duncan watches his cool curl into wisps and float away. He’s aware of what he’s done wrong tonight: fleeing the office, leaving several campaign components primed to unspool in an air already rank with mutiny. But he wants to see Lily. Or, more accurately, he wants to see her when she least expects it.

Duncan turns to look down the driveway. He could return to the car and search for the keys. But neither the long walk down the road or through the field will be possible now that he’s actually beginning to feel the drain of the meds. He knocks on the door instead. He knocks, knowing there won’t be a response. He knocks because a man can only plan so far in advance and, quite frankly, he hasn’t thought of what might happen beyond this front-step encounter.

What’s he expecting to find anyway? Evidence of witchcraft? Tambourines and candle wax? The golden ram idol of forest nymphs? Or maybe he wants to find her in the garden, breaking her promise once again. Expose her in a small lie that’ll allow him to extrapolate to a larger lie. Another man? Someone brazen and unafraid of nature. Someone whose attributes can be brought down to a concise set of bullet points, an index-card explanation as to why she should be set free.

Duncan walks around to the backyard, where the grass sighs, passing away strand by strand. He keeps within the shadow of this blight of a
house, all the while wishing the Crusaders had never come into the piece of ill-managed property. At least in the city he could follow his wife if he had to, find out where she went at night.

The massacred lawn bears a strong resemblance to the topography of eastern seaboard sand dunes. The terrain is still tarped from their Sunday downpour. Lily has neglected to roll away the rock weights and fold up the canvas, which would allow the soil to dry. Here and there the tarp sags where rainwater has pooled. Duncan’s shovel is still staked where he planted it in a mound of grass. He sits on the sweep of porch. The only differences he sees in the dig site are the changes brought about by precipitation. The small mountains of soil remain, their peaks chewed down by rainfall. Beyond the yard the barley heads dip and toss vigorously, but hold. They have another month to fight gravity.

What will he do when Lily gets home? If she gets home? Drag her into the woods and give her such a seeing-to? It’s something he’s never considered before. But maybe he should now. After all, the written, spoken word has failed. The structured sentence, vocalized intelligibly, restructured with plosives, both barked at her and sung, this has failed. All he’s left with is articulate muscle.

Duncan sees the thing coming out of the barley before he hears it. He slides down the porch to the bottom step. Why isn’t it a surprise? Out back, the grain whisks apart and he knows that all along he’s been waiting for Lily’s avatars to emerge. The obstinate governess, leading a man’s pride off by the hand. The Viet Cong, setting miles of underground
punji-staked
labyrinths. The flare-legged Grunt Girl, waiting for the Zulu on the small-boned Latinos she’d sent down to spring those tunnel traps. Down on her hands and knees, her face pressed close to the forest floor, listening to the whisper of steam vents, the expiration of grass, the sighs of the frontline dead conducted up through roots. Those tunnel rat souls, all of them, small puffs of smoke.

He crawls from the porch, lowering himself in the soil as though the paleontological era of upright vertebrates is over. He spreads himself on
the ground, drags nipples and nuts across the last few feet of earth until he’s reached the two mounds of dirt nearest the staked shovel. Duncan jockeys between these two lookouts, following as the dog moves from the hedge to the garden, its white fur luminous among the foliage. The smell is familiar here, something he has eaten or watched burn. He eases forward a bit, the animal unaware of his presence. It’s squatting at the edge of the tarp, urinating, the sound a sharp spray against canvas. Duncan gets to his knees, watching as the dog edges under a corner flap and starts to dig.

Too many of us want what’s in the soil, he thinks, rising to his feet. He has to tell Lily this. He moves across the boneyard. Warn Lily that taking Tinker from her grave is just the beginning of an unexpected responsibility. Hereafter, they have no choice but to spend the rest of their lives together, fending off disruption, chaos, personal ambition, the charge of those who would bite them at the neck and leave them dry.

Let’s start now, Lily.
Duncan lifts his shovel, steps directly behind the dog, and clobbers it over the head.

S
he can hardly bear to watch as the man slides out of the armless dental chair and strikes the checker-box linoleum.

“His mask snapped off.” She sees the rubber tubing of his gas mask caught in the headrest. She begins pounding her fist against the glass. “Wake up!”

Lloyd’s hand is on her, not exactly twisting, but bending her fist backward and then pushing her down the strip of grass between the fence and the office building.

“He could die.”

“We’re all going to die, Lily.”

“Fuck your Jesuitry.”

He smiles but doesn’t let go until they reach the alley. He stands with his back to the fence as though ready to tackle if she tries anything. Lily holds both her arms against her chest.

“Sorry to manhandle you. But you did swear.”

She feels short of breath. “I don’t even know what to think here.” Her voice is girlish and insulted.

“I’m sure you’ll come up with something.” He starts walking away from her into the shadows.

She has to hustle to catch up. “Why did you show me that?”

“Crossed the line, hey?” Lloyd smiles evasively. “You like to think you’re tough. Really you’re just a chump.”

She stops. “You’re calling me a chump?”

“As long as you can spin those wheels.”

“Hold on,” she says. “The pervert is calling
me
a chump?”

“Certain girls deserve what they’ve got coming, right?”

“Watching a man,” she flares her hand in the direction of the office, “maybe take his life. That’s crossing the line.”

Lloyd begins to laugh. “You’re the sophist, Lily. You probably think what? That you’re a great liberal?” He shakes his head as if she is pitiful. “But you’ve never done anything wrong. That’s why the little things bother you so much—smirches on your sterling record of close calls.”

She can’t believe this articulate ugliness, or more precisely, she can’t believe how he’s turned his ugliness on her. They move through the buildings now, and as much as she had it in her to help the dentist, she finds herself marching quickly away from the scene, if only to part ways with Lloyd.

Once they’re out on the sidewalk he relaxes back down to his pear-shaped stroll. “Listen,” he says, turning to her, congenial again under the streetlight. “I told you there’d be a quiz. In my books you pass on so many other levels. How can I hold one night against you?”

He stops walking and holds out his hand.

She looks at his fat palm but doesn’t take it.

“Let’s just agree to disagree, Lily.”

She allows her mouth to gather into a rich smile. “I’m just here to provide you with an objective view of yourself.”

“That is more kindness than I deserve.” Each word saccharine-coated.

“It’s clear to see how comfortable you are—how much you like it—on this side of the glass.”

He nods. “Where the average folk are.”

“See, I don’t believe you’re ever going to become the great frotteurist you want to be. You are a Peeping Tom and nothing else.”

“From one failure to another?” He looks at her. “Is that the idea?”

In the morning, Duncan finds himself in the front seat of the car, roasting in a sweater that’s skewered here and there with twigs and stems. His forehead is slick, the trail of moisture less viscous than perspiration. When he rubs his face, his hands come away patterned with mud created by his own body fluids and the dirt of a hasty burial.

Never one for early morning, Duncan sits and looks out the window, trying to slow his recollection of the previous night into manageable increments. But outside, his shovel is leaning up against a tree and provides undeniable evidence. Also, he’s sitting on a dog collar. He pulls the tongue of blue leather out from underneath him. A killer’s memento, he thinks, buckling the strap at its loosest notch, twirling it around his finger.

He waits for the incriminating thought to come, but it seems that remorse and conscience are pretty concepts grown too short in the leg, too tight across the chest. Duncan had believed it was the double shot of codeine that had made him giddy, but this morning the feeling lingers. Had it been a dingo or some trailer trash rottie that he’d draped over his shoulders last night as though he were the Good Shepherd, he couldn’t be more satisfied with himself. No, the fact that it was a rangy poodle does nothing to discourage his self-righteousness.

The only wrench in the whole business had been trying to find his way back to the house last night. How could he have gotten lost in a patch of forest the size of a handkerchief? Only explanation was that he’d been describing circles around base camp. Maybe the codeine did have some effect on his internal coordinates. It had taken an hour or so to make it out to the dirt road. Then he walked about a quarter mile, trailing the shovel, until realizing he was beyond the house and nearly at the river. Duncan spun around, undiscouraged, thinking he might walk up to the front porch, stretch out on those questionable floorboards, and wait for Lily to trip over him. She’d either be coming or going. And in the direction of her landing, he’d have his answer. But he came across the car in
the clearing first. With the pills making it impossible to continue in an upright position he reclined the passenger seat and slept.

Despite the parcel of land between them this morning, he can hear the slam of the back door, followed by the rasp of the screen latching into place, then the leaves of the softwoods rushing to fill the space around the morning sounds of Lily’s bicycle gears. Duncan turns the key partway in the ignition and checks the time.