New World Monkeys (6 page)

His wife is missing. Her bicycle is still chained to the porch rail this morning so Duncan can only conclude that she’s been swallowed up by the house. Fallen through some soggy flooring, slipped behind a revolving bookshelf.

“Hey, Lily?”

The question goes unanswered through the kitchen, the bathroom, up the staircase and past the open bedroom doors. Her name feels odd in his mouth, fleshy, the pocket of air between the
li
and
ly
catching between
his tongue and molars. How long has it been since he’s said it out loud? Lily. A name, he realizes, he is not comfortable speaking.

Duncan stands in the hallway. Holding the rock in both hands, he begins to feel both heat and annoyance spreading across his shoulders again. It’s part of the fabulous absence of harmony between them. Here he is, chasing her down. The one time he has something to show that might appeal to the historian in her, and she’s chosen to disappear.

Yo, bitch?

He doesn’t say it out loud, just mutters it in his head, wanting to retard the slow burn of irritation he’s experiencing. Although
bitch
is one of those words that rockets easily off the tongue, doesn’t get caught in the recesses of his soft palate. Lily is unrelenting, isn’t she? Her rejoinders come at him with the velocity of hubcaps whisking off speeding cars. He thinks again how she couldn’t give him just one bloody minute to gather his wits and kill the hog himself the other night. Yes,
bitch
seems to fit. And when he hears a shuffling sound from the cedar closet beside him, he wonders if he might have just said it out loud after all.

He opens the closet door and finds her sitting cross-legged in the dark, wearing her usual khakis. Duncan is angry, suddenly filled with the suspicion that she has been hiding in this closet—and every closet in the house—under every stairwell, behind armchairs and drapery folds, waiting to catch the vocalized bits of his thoughts. Lily is a household spy, squirreled away, desperate to catch evidence as unforgivable as
bitch.
She’s waiting with restrained pleasure for an excuse to pack up and ride off on her bicycle. To shift the failure of five years onto his shoulders.

She twists her hair like a length of rope and turns her eyes up toward him. The end of her nose is red as if she’s been crying. Does she know what he’s capable of thinking about her? Duncan’s indignation begins to deflate. A quick leaking hiss.

“I found it in the garden,” he says, and turns the rock over in his hands.

She reaches out of the closet and takes it. It is an interest piece, a solid thought, an item free of emotional implication, and her reaching for
it as simple as the transfer of a relic from one historian to another. Her finger traces the inscription,
Tinker, 1902.
Duncan is about to step back and gently close the door when he sees her touch the floor beside her. They look at each other for a moment. He understands this motion, the invitation in it, and so he bends down, squeezes into the space beside her. Their folded legs touch. Lily leans forward, slips her fingers under the cedar door, and draws it shut.

“What’s this remind you of?” she asks in the darkness.

“The crypt,” he says. “On Stanton.”

Her laugh is a small, involuntary burst.

“We barely got an hour of sunlight in that apartment.”

“We were translucent.”

“We slept well.”

Duncan touches the wooden door, imagines it absorbing the mingled high notes of their laughter, allowing only a bass-heavy grunt to escape into the outside world.

“Are you okay, Lily?”

He feels her leg rest against his. “It’s complicated.”

“Maybe you should come home.”

She doesn’t answer. Her knee begins to bob anxiously.

“We can come up on the weekends together.”

“I can’t—” She stops, swerves. He can hear the smack in her throat as she swallows. “Why don’t you stay? For the meeting tonight?”

Duncan breathes sharply, the inhaled current making a slicing sound as it parts into the two lanes of his nostrils. “This accident with the pig, Lily. Let it go.”

Her jittering leg falls still. “Duncan, please stay.”

“The blown-ball method is ancient history in most places,” Skinner says, flicking an errant peppercorn from the tufting of his deviled egg. “What’s taken over is those computers that call out the bingo for you.”

Duncan nods. He’s watching his wife across the room as she attempts to shirk off the pair of old women who’ve attached themselves like remoras. On the way over tonight, they’d decided it would be best to divide and conquer. To split the obligatory introductions and handshakes as a way of speeding up the evening and minimizing any chance for error.

“Thing’s called a random number generator. Ever hear of it?”

Duncan turns back to the old man. He has a red sty in his eye that is visible with certain turns of the head. “You mean, like a lottery machine?”

“Instead of numbers bobbing around in a cage there’s this computer that chooses them. Pops them up on a screen so you don’t need people to call bingo anymore.”

Normally, Duncan would have to probe these Luddite tendencies. But how to be impertinent to an old man whose pig he’s killed?

“I guess,” he offers weakly, “you still need people for some things.”

“Well, it don’t matter to me.” Skinner’s red eye roves over the small crowd gathered in the library reading room. “I’ll probably be dead before the thing catches on in Osterhagen.” He coughs and spits into his empty glass. Duncan tries not to look.

“You drive over?”

“We walked.”

“Walked? You a Jew?”

Duncan arranges his face. “It’s just a nice night,” he says, as if answering a benign question.

The huddle of river folk surrounding Lily puts Duncan in mind of his family back in St. Paul, an inherently parochial bunch washed soft by the cycle of seasons, planed free of sharp corners, tugged back into place to dry. Here in the country, nature is oversentimentalized. He thinks of the stone he turned up in the garden, the carefully etched headstone for a pet. Or worse, the feral hog festooned with a cape.

Lily is receiving a similar type of attention. He can sense her discomfort at being led between the yard sale collection of chairs, introduced as the rightful heir of Oster Haus when all she often desires is to
sail under the radar. He should have headed back to the city an hour ago, but he couldn’t just let her come here alone.

“You ever learn to hog-tie, son?”

Duncan shakes his head, notices how Skinner’s eye keeps returning to Lily. She’s accepting a glass of punch from a man with a thinly knotted ponytail.

“My boy’s out at the ranch now, while I’m here. From Poughkeepsie but he knows his way round a boar from when we lived in Augusta. Which was before I gave up hunting. Out on the back trails—behind the power station—is where you’d likely spot them. This was fair sport, so no guns. But we’d take dogs, generally. Two per man—one was a bayer—kind of dog trained to bark a hog up against an embankment or tree or whatever. The other’s job was to take nips at it, keep it occupied enough for us guys to come from behind. Once you got practiced enough, you grab up the hind legs and there you go. Hog-tie. When things go right, the pig doesn’t even know what hit it.”

Must have been in better days, Duncan thinks. Skinner’s cheeks are a lace of veins over sunken bones and blown red by the force of a phlegmy and persistent hack. He’s a small man, hair shorn down to a quarter inch of silver bristle over the ears. But in these remains, a semblance of structural power, a man brought down to basic mechanics. Down to cable rope and wire.

“Mind you, lost some of my favorite dogs that way,” he says. “To the tusks. But like I said, it was fair game. Nowadays the dogs wear those Kevlar vests. You ever eat dog?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I did. Once when I was serving in Korea. I done some other things at the time too. That your wife?”

Lily has turned and is watching him from across the room, giving him a look that, in a nautical situation, might read
boat in distress.
He nods and says, “Yes, it is.”

“Keep your eye on her,” Skinner says, shifting over to the food table.
“Though none of ’em are much better than swine, anyway. I went through two myself before I got Sovereign of the Deep Wood. And I’ve had him longer than both of those put together.”

There is a minor incident at the punch bowl, an upset glass of pink liquid that has the old library women clucking and futzing about with napkins. Lily takes advantage of this moment of distraction to move across the room toward him. Duncan watches as she approaches, feels a tricky hit of pride; she really is beautiful. Even more beautiful when cornered and anxious. When she reaches his side she takes his hand as naturally as she once did.

“You’re tired, I’ll bet,” she says with an earnest delivery.

“Early day tomorrow.” He squeezes her hand. “You don’t mind if we leave early, do you?”

“Of course not.” She returns the pressure of his hairy paw.

Duncan smiles wistfully, as if vocation has indentured him to an on-call life forever at odds with social pleasures. To those watching, he and Lily are pleased at the prospect of retiring together, walking home in the moist evening balm. Outside the small ring of truth, they must look like standard issue, a catalog couple with more love than grievance.

Beside them Skinner leafs through a tray of hors d’oeuvres. “Doesn’t anyone know I’m a vegetarian?” He peels away bread skins to assess sandwich fillings.

“Let’s get out of here,” Lily says under her breath. Her hand is still in his, she makes no move to twist free. Duncan looks down at their twined fingers. Why is his pulse coming as a soft, messy thump in the gut? Is it the thought of the long drive back to the city, the empty house waiting to swallow her up?

Skinner backs away from the food tray while folding a deconstructed canapé into his mouth. He comes to stand between Duncan and Lily so that their hands must fall apart out of courtesy. The old man chews with circular intensity.

“My son figures the latch on that fence was busted from the inside,
you know.” There are bits of crust littering his shirtfront but he makes no move to brush them away. “Busted from the inside means the pig pushed his way out.” While he’s still anchored between them, the zagging course of the red sty suggests his sights are on a wider audience. Duncan feels a trigger of electricity down the notched rail of his spine. Could the old guy suspect?

“One thing I know,” Skinner continues with the plangent, rattling voice of the lung-sick, “is that an animal does not run away when it’s treated good.”

There’s a gentle oscillation among the crowd. Heads turn in the direction of their threesome. Despite his wizened stature, Skinner commands energy from the room. He suddenly pushes past Duncan and Lily as though inspired and weaves between the gathered chairs. “Let me tell you what I told my son. And this concerns anyone who gives a rat’s ass about this town.”

Slowly, shoulders are squared toward the man. Teaspoon chimes of silver and porcelain are stilled as he stops between two chairs and turns. “I told him, that boar did not run away. He was stolen. There is a thief among us.”

Duncan feels his wife’s arm press against his but he doesn’t dare look at her. Their hands, which moments ago were clutched together, now drag at the end of limp arms. Skinner regards his audience with a left eye that is blue iris and red menace.

“Why steal a pig, hey? My boy asked the same thing—and those who know Emmett know he don’t ask what he don’t need to know. But the reason is this: there’s no ballsier move than to kill a town’s pride. You go ahead and rob Wakefield’s, you hurt only Wakefield. Maybe a couple of those Japs who run the place in winter. But you steal the Sovereign of the Deep Wood and what do you get?” The orator pauses, measures the radius of his net as it settles over his people.

“You get someone spitting in the face of tradition, is what.”

There’s something persuasive about this rhetoric, Duncan thinks. Perhaps because the content is so far removed from his own daily concerns. It’s the vague yet charismatic monologue of a general inciting his boys to riot. How long has it been since Duncan himself was under any administrative rule? When Hawke was chopped, the rabble-rousing went with him.

“This is the beginning of the ruin of our town,” Skinner says. “You don’t need me to tell you what comes next, do you?” Scattered about the reading room, concerned Osterhagenians—mostly gray and aged—nod and wait for the visceral call to action.

Lily reaches up and presses two fingers against Duncan’s arm. He finally looks at her. Her glasses have slid down her nose, she watches the old man over the frames. He thinks of her proximity in the dark closet, the touch of her leg, those words,
please stay.

“What do you propose to do about it? If you are called upon to save your town, will you answer?” Skinner cajoles them now, a proper general leading a congress of young men to sure death. Lily’s fingers remain on Duncan’s arm, not only to form two points of connection between them, he knows, but to separate them from the rest of the room.