New World Monkeys (35 page)

“In the trunk, LT.” Duncan tries to keep his voice steady, his eyes trained on the kid until he picks up the portfolio case and moves out into
the hallway. Kooch is standing in the middle of the office, legs set apart like some hard-riding ranch hand.

“Listen to this,” he says to Duncan, flipping through his notes. “We got a chopper lifting off the roof of the Presidential Palace during the fall of Saigon, right? But suspended from its skid is a human chain of Grunt Girls.”

“I know it was you,” Duncan says.

“Each girl’s got on a different cut of Stand and Be Counted jeans. It can be print or we use it as a store banner, on the Web site, whatever.”

“I know it was you with the pencils.”

Kooch stops, earmarks his notes. “I heard. I wish I could take credit for that little prank, Duncs.” He drops down on the sofa.

“You’re off Stand and Be Counted.”

“The hell I am.” Kooch props his feet on the upholstered armrest. “You can’t take me off my own idea.”

“Jesus, that’s getting old.” Duncan stands up, walks around the room. Then, worried that he’s betraying his anxiety, sits back down on the edge of his desk.

“I gotta tell you, Duncan, man-to-man. It’s feeling like we’re here to work out your personal problems.” He leans back, folding his hands behind his head. “We’re supposed to be selling jeans, remember?”

“Are you
trying
to jeopardize your writer slash on Stand and Be Counted?”

“Slash?” Kooch looks at him with surprise. “You better be shitting me.”

Duncan holds up his palms as if to indicate he’s fresh out of accolades. “I’ll be going up to the podium, if that’s what you mean. But I will mention you.”

“I’m going to need more.”

“There isn’t any more.”

“Creative director.”

Duncan laughs. “I’m creative director.”

“That’s debatable,” Kooch says quietly. He starts patting around the sofa under his ass.

Duncan feels a hum of unnatural scale in his left ear. He presses a palm against it, creates suction, and counts to three. Still, the bright, whistling strain continues.

Kooch’s hand comes out from between the cushions. He holds up a chewed pencil, crafts a look of surprise that’s worthy of community theater. “That is definitely the mouthwork of a maniac,” he says, examining its crenellated patterns.

Duncan reaches over and slaps the pencil out of his fingers. It flies across the room like an arrow, then strikes the wall with the clatter of tossed furniture. “Get out of my office.”

“Why is it so difficult for you to give credit where it’s due?” Kooch leans back on the armrest, smiling dreamily. “Is it because you haven’t done anything worthwhile in five years?”

The sound in his ear has evolved. From reedy whistle to jet stream to monkey howl. The echo of cannon fire replicated through the vacuum of space. And the last thing Duncan remembers before he attacks Kooch is, if this were the jungle, there’d be only the tremble of bamboo before his unexpected incarnation of Death from Above. As it is, Duncan descends onto the sofa from his desk—roughly table-top height—but he instantly gains purchase on the younger man’s arms and legs and shag of wolf hair. Kooch is bewildered, his reflexes are slumberous in response to the overhead assault, and for a few blurred and glorious moments Duncan’s got him pinned at the neck and knees.

They begin to grapple in earnest. For the first minute or so, Duncan employs superior clutch, demonstrates an understanding of choke, uses the structure of the other man’s bone and fiber as leverage to get him off the sofa and to the ground. A folding chair tips over. Otherwise there’s no sound, no articulated noise beyond the snorts and brays that score the struggle.

As Duncan tries to wrestle Kooch toward the trash can full of pencils,
he begins to understand the sort of animals that their bodies comprise. The spring-loaded muscle packaged tight under sheets of skin. The sheets of skin dim and freckled under sparse fur. Claws studding both hands. Duncan wants to fit an HB number 2 between the beast’s rack of teeth and close the book on this Cinderella story. But Kooch, at some primordial level, is conditioned for surprise raids and gains enough traction on the carpet to allow him to flip Duncan. He also lands the impressive first swing on the left side of his face.

The reed pipe blasts at his ear again, this time stuck on a single note,
E.
The sound is critical and shrill and helps raise Duncan to his feet. And though he’s not fast enough to parry a right cross, he has time to get in two quick jabs that make Kooch’s head snap like a tethered ball.

Duncan is suddenly aware of Leetower in the room, circling the peripheries like a man waiting his go in a dorm room gangbang. For a moment the boy’s actions are unclear. Is he waiting to break the fray or to join in? But his hand is moving toward Kooch’s arm, and as he locks down, he takes the drive out of his partner’s punch. He’s gonna break things up, Duncan thinks. He straightens his footwork, then notices that Leetower has
both
of Kooch’s arms behind his back. This confuses him; he’s opening his partner up to attack. Handing him over like a punching bag, in fact. The moment won’t last. He knows it. Already Kooch is bending forward, trying to throw Leetower to the ground. Duncan rushes in, his right arm finally free of striated muscle command, and he feeds Kooch an uppercut that is, if not textbook, at least powerful enough to cause an explosion of tiny bones.

Duncan’s broken thumb is set at St. Vincent’s, the same hospital where Kooch has been admitted, a stream of morphine pumped straight into his veins and his jaw to be wired shut. Although he hasn’t asked for any intelligence on the matter, Duncan is told that after the triage is complete, Kooch will be taken upstairs to the surgical ward.

“One week,” the nurse says and gives Duncan a small envelope of
Vicodin. “When your swelling goes down we have to replace this with a plaster cast.” She has a concerned voice that he finds surprising in a city full of exasperation. He looks at the lump of gauze at the end of his arm; the metal bracket holding his thumb in place is partly visible through the wrapping.

“Is there someone to drive you home?”

“Yes,” he says. Although he seems to remember Leetower dumping him and Kooch
and
the car at the emergency entrance and fleeing.

“Your friend’s going to be here for a while. They’ll probably encourage him to file a mugging report when he’s conscious. You should do that too.” The nurse moves the bed tray away from the examination table, giving Duncan room to put his shirt on while she prepares his sling. “Just be careful what you do when you’re on those pills,” she says.

S
ome subtle noise from the lean-to has Lily walking out of the house to investigate. Much later she’ll realize how the gravest confrontations are always precipitated by the inconsequential; the sound of a pickax chipping into packed dirt, the intermittent creak and snap from the hobblebush.

She finds Skinner in the lean-to, poking through a set of wooden shelves that her father had salvaged from a tack house and which Duncan had stacked with gardening supplies. Lily’s outrage is only slightly mitigated by fear.

“Excuse me?”

If the old man is surprised by her appearance, he gives no sign. He turns slowly to her, scratches the hollow of his throat. “You never answered me yesterday. Where’s your husband?”

“What are you doing in my garage?”

“You call this a garage?” Skinner looks up to the sloped beams, the lines on his forehead cast in triplicate. “Where is your car is what I want to know?”

Lily folds her arms across her chest, remembers the night of the torches, how successful Duncan had been at leading the entire clan off their property and into the woods. “Duncan is in the city today,” she says, without half the charm or ease he might be able to muster. “What can I help you with?”

“How did you know the boar was in the ditch?”

Lily shrugs, tries her best for casual though she had spent all of last night thinking about the slip. “That’s the rumor. Among about a dozen others.”

“Wakefield says he saw your husband in a car. Outside his shop. Says the front end was smashed in. Says that something was very wrong with him.”

“I don’t follow,” she says, and truly doesn’t.

“I’m thinking it was the two of you all along.” Skinner waggles a crooked finger at her, at her invisible husband.

“The two of us what?” Lily reminds herself how dogs always smell fear. But to make matters worse, she finds herself eyeing the old shovel Duncan’s left propped against a wooden stud. She’s caught suddenly by a glint of light reflected in its metal fender.

Skinner turns, follows her eye to the tool in the corner. “You did the boar in. And Christ knows what else.”

Lily forces herself to meet the old man’s pouchy eyes. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Not at all. It’s making good sense to me.”

“What’s next? You’re going to blame us for your missing dog?”

“Who says my dog is missing?”

A pause then, the click at the end of a reel. Her voice is a faint projection on a white wall. “It’s a joke.”

Skinner lifts a blue dog collar from the top of the wooden shelf. “It’s no joke,” he says.

The ringing sound is just an alert, an audio charge to startle him from the sofa. What actually forces him out of sleep is the burning agony of his right hand and the search for the telephone in the squalor of the condo.

The receiver is under a chair cushion, which is under the kitchen table.

“Jesus Christ, tell me you’ve got the boards!” Anne’s shriek paralyzes him.

Duncan rests his head on the chair cushion and looks up at the underside of the
wenge
table. “Yes.”

“Thank fucking God,” Anne yells. “What the hell happened last night?”

He decides that he liked the shriek better.

“Duncan, it’s all over the agency—no, look, I just got an e-mail from Ravi. It’s all over town. It’s only ten a.m.!” There’s a break in Anne’s shouting voice and Duncan hears her hiss as she reads the e-mail to herself. He wonders if it’s a bad sign that the underside of the table is rotating.

“Jesus, Duncan. You and I have to go present now. Where the fuck are you?”

“Under the kitchen table. You called me.”

“What happened? Kooch is waiting for surgery—” Anne takes a breath. “Wait, you have
all
the scripts and boards? We have no copies here.”

“Yes. I’ve got it.”

“And Leetower was fired, so it’s just you in front of the client.”

“What?”

“They walked him out this morning.”

“Why?” He tries to sit up, but the table looms too close to his head.

“He fucking put Kooch in the hospital!” Her voice peaks and flattens as though she’s wary of someone listening outside her door.

Duncan rolls out from under the kitchen table, keeping to his knees in case he faints. “Who told you that?” he asks. His voice is just the tail end of a voice, hardly registering. “Did Leetower say he did it?”

“Listen, Duncan. You’ve got to get there now. I want these boards in front of them before they hear about this nightmare.”

Could it be—did the kid really take the bullet for him? Duncan is surprised, touched. His right hand throbs with an unpleasant regularity.

“Leetower didn’t hit him, Anne. I did.”

“You did not.”

“Kooch got in some good shots.”

“Never mind! Don’t tell me, Duncan. I don’t want to know—I don’t care.” She takes a deep breath that rattles a bit. “You’ve got the boards, right?”

“Yeah.”

“TAKE THE BOARDS TO THE CLIENT. NOW!”

Lily swallows, watches Skinner twirl the collar around his index finger.

“I don’t know where that came from.” She is genuinely surprised. Duncan had failed to mention the existence of this little trinket.

“I’ll tell you where.” He takes a step toward her. “Off the neck of my dog.”

“I’ve got nothing to tell you,” she says, turning from the lean-to. The front door is unlocked, a quick twenty yards, seconds away if she runs. She doesn’t take a step before the old man’s got her by the arm.

“I said, where is my dog?” His old claw is pincer-tight against the soft flesh of her inner elbow. He holds her arm up to his veined cheek as though it were a telephone receiver he was growling into.

Lily’s mouth is parched, her tongue full of grit. “Let go of me,” she manages, tugging to free herself.

Skinner laughs. “You thinking of calling the cops?” But he lets go with a shake. “Now don’t make me ask twice, when’s your husband get back?”

Lily backs away. She moves out of lunging distance but does not run. She refuses. The old man is not going to move her. She straightens her spine, roots herself to the gravel drive, then swallows deeply to unstick her mouth. “Get off my property,” she tells him.

Skinner clears his throat, spits at her feet. “That’s what I think about your property.”

Lily looks down, surprised at the fine spray of saliva that has caught the toe of her sneaker. Same sneaker she once lobbed at his dog. When she looks up, Skinner is already hobbling down the drive.