New World Monkeys (31 page)

He gives Lily a head start and then follows her, easing the crippled Saab out of the clearing and onto the gravel shoulder. The chestnut trees bordering the road have dropped early fruit and he drives over them, pleased with the crunch of the spiny husks under the wheel. In the sunlight Duncan can see the lip of crushed bonnet through the windshield. Instead of replaying the humiliation of the wild boar, he reminds himself of the silent and bloodless slump of the poodle.

In the second layer of his consciousness—that pink spongy layer resembling insulation fiber—he is aware of a huge lack of discretion here, taking the car into Osterhagen in daylight. However, this morning he’s operating strictly at the first layer of consciousness, the one lined with billboards and FM radio waves, and it’s telling him he doesn’t care. Something is changing just beyond his sightline. He’s got a wife to tail.

He catches up with Lily at the highway junction, trails her bicycle at an eighty-yard lag, keeping one eye on the surprising volume of Osterhagen morning traffic, and the other on the locomotion of her ass on the bicycle seat. It takes her ten minutes to reach the downtown district and another five until she stops at the library.

She actually does stop. Pulls up in front, locks her bike to a post with the ease and familiarity of daily routine.

He idles in front of some shops, slouched beneath the shady mercy of an alder branch, while she unclips her helmet and shakes out her hair. He is surprised to feel his heart beating in his mouth, as if relief volleyed the organ up there. She is still true. Despite the rift between them, she is still his wife.

She crosses the lawn and goes right into the library.

Duncan is alarmed by the pleasure he feels, tries to control it by starting angry fires. Circles back to the beginning when he was unable to kill a pig. Such a small failure and yet she insisted on pinning it to his chest.

He pulls up the hand brake and feels under his seat for a pen.
This thing with the pig, Lily—enough is enough
, he writes on an unpaid parking ticket.
Rewind to that night and believe me—not only would I finish the thing off, I’d fritter it on the spot. I’m obviously a simple guy and can’t keep up with these mental Olympics you’ve got going on. It’s like I’m up in the nosebleeds and you’re down in the box, sipping gimlets. If you plan on remaining my wife, Lily, get your ass up here.

Startled by a tap on his window. A thick finger, a cracked yellow nail whittled to the stub. He somehow recognizes it. Yes, Duncan knows the hand but takes a breath or two to move up to the face. It’s Wakefield hunched toward the window. Of course. Duncan realizes he’s parked directly in front of the shop.

“Hey,” the old guy says, eyes not on Duncan but scouring the car interior. “What happened to your front end?” The voice is muffled through the sealed window as though it were traveling a great distance to reach him. For a second Duncan believes he’s referring to his face, the streaks of sweat and dirt. Then he realizes the man’s talking about the car.

There’s a pause here where Duncan has an opportunity to act neighborly. In the moment or so it’d take to lower the window, he could concoct an explanation. A fence, a cyclist, a drunken bender in the city. But none of these things come. Panic takes him instead, stem to stern. He throws off the hand brake, knocks the car into first, and rips a streak down the road.

This morning she found the dentist’s name in the slender phone book, called and asked whether the doctor was taking any new patients. Then she held her breath. The receptionist, she told herself in the pause between
question and response, seemed too blissfully pleasant to have found her employer dead in the operatory this morning.

He certainly is taking new patients. When would you like to come in?

Check your nitrous oxide levels
, Lily said and hung up the phone.

So what if it was a cheat? The result is she’s feeling much more disposed to seeing Lloyd after their argument last night. She can’t wait to present him with news of the dentist’s survival. She will wave it in his face like a flag captured from the tower of his pervy little kingdom. Lloyd is just a mental pugilist lacking a sparring partner. She sees it now.

She folds her coil notebook open to a call number in the American Fiction stacks and scans the cutter numbers on some spines. There’s a book she has in mind for Duncan, the Graham Greene novel, but she has turned in three aisles short at the
D
’s. Even though it’s late in the game, the book might spark some thoughts for his campaign. Or at least create a square of familiar ground between them, beyond the terror of the townsfolk, give her footing from which to ask questions. She continues toward the back of the building, glad to know that for once she’s not in any way responsible for a major Osterhagen tragedy. For once she and Duncan are not the hairpins in the socket, the ones conducting skunk energy through the little town.

She’d told her husband that her grandfather’s abduction was likely a “rape and revenge” story. She admired Tinker’s ingenuity in this version. Instead of sticking old man Oster with a pair of sewing shears, she got him where it would really hurt—by carting off the boy. But after last night, Lily suspects that even this account is a bit clean-cut, somewhat naive and small-minded.

She has to review her theory based on her new knowledge. Hold it up against the mottled light of this new dimension the pervert’s opened up for her.
The Secret Life of People.
Isn’t this the rubric of her new education, what Lloyd has been trying to tell her in his own magniloquent way? That she’s not meant to have a definitive answer, but rather to understand that there are infinite answers?

Lily steps between the corridor of shelves, into the heart of the
G
’s,
having given up on the call numbers and now just skimming for
Greene.
She turns into the next set of shelves and glances down to the end of the aisle. At first she doesn’t understand the arrangement of bodies slumped up against the wall. Because the positions of the figures are distorted, the picture strikes her as incomplete. There’s the rigid truss of arms and legs, a hip’s line of force—the mathematics of push and pull. Lily blinks. Repeats. The physics are impossible to register in one eyeful.

He has the girl raised up on her toes and pressed against a shelf. Parts of his body—arms and legs—are thrust toward her, as though he’s leaning into the weight of a looping punch. From behind, Lily thinks his shoulders are strong enough to be yoked and made to pull a wagon through town. His knee is raised and cleaves the girl’s thighs apart; one of his hands is lost there in the bunches of her skirt. The other is on her small face, on Audiophile’s small face, his fingers like a muzzle on a beak. Lily can see that he’s holding her head still with the simple threat of his pinky finger over her eye. The girl’s lid is creased shut, fluttering below this finger. Her hands are clenched and pecking at his shoulder but the disproportionate scale of their bodies suggests her fight is without progress. There is some sound that carries over to Lily, some music from her small, songbird throat, but it’s screened by the palm of Lloyd’s hand. He has planned for this, that’s for certain. He has set his trap too deep in the stacks for the girl’s music to reach anyone that can save her.

Somewhere in Lily’s belly the idea registers that she should do something. She is watching as his hand comes down out of the skirt, the girl’s underwear coming with it. They’re covered with orange flowers—daisies. She sees daisies. Try to think now; she could unlace the tangle of girl and man. Although this sort of knotwork requires skill. Where are her own hands? Somewhere at her sides, cramped and broken.

Lloyd has drawn the panties down the girl’s calves and scuffles to get the stretchy fabric over each foot. Then he presses his elbow into her belly, bracing her against the wall with one arm while he raises the underwear to his face. Against his mouth and nose and sniffs deep. Audiophile’s
free eye follows him. Tracks his hand as he lowers the scrap of material and stuffs it in his pocket. Lily feels her mouth as a pouch of unwieldy stones, the weight of it drawing her empty head forward. She wants to help this creature. She wants to free her. But how? There’s no one here to show her the technique, how to release a snared bird.

Lloyd’s hand returns to the skirt, struggles with it as one might with a stubborn valance. Lily thinks, How long will this last? Hovering is the most expensive form of flight. How long until the muscles slump from fatigue? Lloyd’s knee is between her small thighs. If only the girl could fly away, Lily thinks. She’s aware that these long moments are illusory, that everything is happening at an alarming speed. That when the girl finally pries her leg loose, she’s actually taking advantage of the sliver of a second required for Lloyd to shift his weight from one foot to the other. And though it seems a month of Sundays before Audiophile jams her knee between Lloyd’s legs, the incoming thrust is so rapid that he actually looks at his crotch in surprise before curdling inward like a salted leech.

Lily looks up to the ceiling, considers all possible points of exit. A hummingbird would lift and dart. She, however, turns and runs.

D
uncan stands in the leaking chill of the open refrigerator, lips crimped around the orange juice spout, dazed about the dog and now also wincing at his bad judgment with Wakefield and the car this morning. Nothing you can do now, he thinks, lowering the juice carton, but put it out of your head.

He’s listening to Lily through the ceiling. Dropped things: a shoe, a book, a belt buckle. Also, something round and important. Round because, when it falls, it rolls in the direction of warped flooring. Important because she chases it out into the hallway. A man should be made to live beneath a woman before he marries her, he thinks. Before he even makes himself known to her. There is incredible intimacy in the ceiling, the floor, the space in between.

This evening, with Lily moving around up there, stacked
on top
of him, he’s got more checks in the Vague and Unstable column than anywhere else. He’s got a theory about fiefdoms and another about barnacles, but neither fully explains his situation. What is this coupling tendency? A man chooses a woman, selects her above all others, and takes her away to live in a box. Then the man loses the ability to address her like a human being. For reasons he cannot explain. And the woman locks herself away in a smaller box within the larger box. That they are in the same box is essential, Duncan suspects, for the ease of sex. He remembers reading that barnacles,
while cemented headfirst to rock, procreate by extending their organ over and into a neighboring barnacle. For the crustaceous it’s necessary to live within a penis length of a neighbor. But remove the sexual (as he and Lily did so many months ago) and you’re left with largely agricultural motivations. Duncan suspects the contemporary custom of joining fiefdoms has its roots in smart farming policy, is evolved from the feudal system. And so here they are today, acting like vassals, when really, he is a robber baron at heart.

Duncan shuts the refrigerator, composing his thoughts. There’s a bit of swish left in the orange juice carton and he stands tipping his head back to catch it. Why is he unable to ask the simplest question?
Where were you last night?
What about her renders him an inarticulate ass?

Duncan holds the recalcitrant belief that, in love, one being must eventually consume the other. That two are superfluous; how long can two unhinged creatures rummage together in the wild? Duncan wishes for the companionship of an old geezer. Not a crazed vigilante like Skinner, but someone who has seen success with the opposite sex, who’s chosen a wife for her deft hand with the plowshare and her knowledge of calving practices. A salty dog who’s lived through a world war. Yes, an old man with rheumy eyes who’d punctuate his lessons with a quivering finger to illustrate where Duncan has veered from the path.

He looks out the kitchen door to the backyard and the barley beyond. The sun has lowered now, but still clings like a burr to the clouds. The garden is blistered into mounds of earth from which they’ve pulled the woman’s bones and over which he dragged the dead poodle last night.

It’s the perfect time of evening, he thinks, for Skinner’s clan to douse their torches in petrol and come after them. Hasn’t anyone noticed the correlation between their arrival in town and the number of missing animals? He’s reminded again how he botched things this morning. Not only by trailing Lily directly through town, but by blasting the hell out of there with Wakefield practically latched to his window. What should he tell Lily?

What about that you killed a dog and slept in the car?
a salty old-timer
would have advised him.
Then you followed her. To make sure she actually goes where she says she goes.

Old men, Duncan thinks, know how to handle women. They had universal perils to distract them. An abundance of commies and Nazis to threaten their daily existence. Maybe the threat of a posse wouldn’t unnerve him so much if he were involved in large-scale issues. It was too bad they weren’t alive in the shadowy antebellum years, poised between one epic battle and the next. We might do well in crisis, he thinks. But without the immediate threat of conscription or the rise of a dictatorship, Duncan can’t see much to bind young man and wife together.

Doorbell’s ringing
, the old man says.

The cop is not a swallower of bullshit. Lily understands this the instant she opens the door and sees the straining collar. Maybe it’s the way he’s driven the cruiser partially onto the front lawn and left the red and blue lights flashing. Maybe it’s the prairie flatness of his eyes or the puckered stretch of neck visible over the collar of his uniform, but Lily is already considering her escape options while he tells her his name.

Duncan walks out of the kitchen, comes and stands beside her so that their two bodies fill the entire door.