Tough Day for the Army (7 page)

“The good news is that you are about to be a witness to her own heartbreak as she is about to be rejected by the one she chose over you.”

“How do you know this?”

“I know it because I know it, and I know this also: that when you see Constance having her heart broken you will know yourself whether or not you
really
did love her.”

“What do you mean?”

“You'll see,” he said, letting go of my hand and pointing at a restaurant window across the street. Constance was there visible through the window, sitting alone at a table for two like she was on display. She wore the blue dress. A single candle enclosed in glass flickered from the middle of the table. There was a bottle of wine with two glasses, one empty, hers half-full. My heart leapt into my throat and merged with the rising bile. This felt like love to me. Was this what the monkey was talking about?

The monkey skittered toward the restaurant door. Constance peered out the window and looked right at me and smiled. She raised her hand and waved her fingers, but I could see her eyes were tracking something other than me.

As the monkey approached the door, the hostess swung it open and the monkey skipped through, disappearing briefly before clambering up onto the chair across from Constance and then all the way to the tabletop. Constance offered her cheek, and the monkey pecked at her with his lips. A waiter appeared and poured wine into the empty glass. The monkey gripped it in both hands and took an overlong swallow. Constance beamed at him. I'd never seen her look so beautiful.

The monkey squatted, perched on his edge of the table, and did almost all the talking, whatever he was saying briefly punctuated by single words from Constance. Even from a distance I could see her grow flushed and agitated, her bottom lifting off the chair as she stood to protest the monkey's message. The news was clearly not good, and she wasn't having it. I'd never seen her so worked up, but after a few final words from the monkey she slumped backwards, grabbing the wineglass and draining the last of it before reaching for the bottle and refilling her glass to the top. The monkey moved to her side of the table and touched his hand briefly to her cheek, wiping away what I imagined was a tear. He flipped a trio of twenties onto the table before hopping back down, and out the restaurant door, recrossing the street toward me. Constance stood and pressed her face and hands to the window, watching the monkey retreat. She pounded against the glass and shouted, “Come back! Wait! Come back!” until a waiter pulled her away. The monkey never turned around, even when he arrived at my side. My fists clenched and pulsed.

“I ought to kill you,” I said.

“Why?”

Why, indeed? Why for the second time in a few hours was I thinking about how I might kill this monkey, how I could quite possibly grab one arm and one leg and pull as hard as I could, rending him into pieces? “You took her from me.”

“Is that really why?”

“Yes.”

The monkey sighed and shook his head sadly. “Then you never loved her either, my friend. That's not love; that's possession. If you loved her, you would want to kill me because I've just broken her heart and you would not be able to bear that.” The monkey jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Constance, who had broken away and angrily waved the near-empty bottle of wine at the waitstaff that now surrounded her table. Sirens began softly calling in the distance. The monkey's ears pricked.

“Time to go,” he said.

We drove toward the shipping-terminal offices, but the monkey couldn't manage to be quiet. “About that DNA business,” he said, “they always talk about the monkeys' share of human DNA, like you all are the ideal and we are the simulacrum. But why can't it be the other way around? Why can't it be that humans have 98 percent of monkeys' DNA?”

“Maybe because monkeys didn't discover DNA,” I replied. I was still pissed at this monkey, maybe even more pissed than before, since I was starting to feel like he might've been right about me and Constance. I drove fast, recklessly, steering toward potholes, feeling the tires spin in the air as we'd launch over the bumps. The monkey took no notice. I considered turning off the headlights to see what that might be like, if a surprise telephone pole might crop up in front of the car's grille.

“Seriously,” he said, “think about it. You have something we don't, the whole opposable thumb thing, but in return we have things you don't, our own 2 percent.”

“I suppose that's true.”

“Of course it's true.”

“OK.”

“And I'm pretty sure I know what it is.”

“What?”

“What we have that you don't.”

“What's that?”

The monkey stared out the window. I could see his reflection in the glass, his eyes flicking across the rows of trees that lined the road. “You're not going to believe me.”

“No,” I said, “probably not.”

“I deserved that,” he said. “You're mad, and I don't blame you. I don't expect you to ever forgive me, but I think someday you'll realize that this is all for the best.”

“Hmph.”

“You know,” he said, still gazing out the window, “I've never climbed anything higher than a coat stand. I've never caught or picked my own food. I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to eat.” His voice trailed off, and I thought maybe he was going to shut up for the rest of the ride to the depot, but then he cleared his throat with a loud hack and started in again.

“I'm a wild animal who's barely been outside! First the lab, then Giuseppe… but here's the thing. I
do
know what it's like to climb hand over foot, sixty feet up into the canopy, and make the blind leap from one tree or branch or vine to another, just knowing without
really
knowing that something is going to be there to grab on to. I can
feel
it in every part of me. If you gave me a tree and some vines I could do it,
just like that.
” The monkey tapped his knuckles against the glass to emphasize the last three words. “Though I never met her, I know my grandmother's smell and her mother's smell, and so on and so on, back and back. I've never done it, but I'm certain I could comb the mites out of another monkey's fur with my fingers. I'm pretty sure that there's someplace where the night sky is so clear that when you look up there's so many stars that it looks cloudy. I think that after a rain you can suck the water from the grass, and you've never tasted anything so pure.”

Even in the car window's reflection I could see the tears running down his cheeks.

“There's a lot of time to think when you're chained to an organ grinder with nothing to do but clap your tiny cymbals together and steal the occasional passerby's wallet, and what I've come to realize is that within me I carry everything of my ancestors, that I can feel every last bit of them, that I am the sum total of each and every one of them, all the way back to whenever it was that we were all together— your kind and my kind—and some of us thought it would be a good idea to stand upright and leave our genitals open to attack. Anyway, I think that's what's different between your kind and mine.”

The monkey snuffled and rubbed his arm across his nose.

“What is it that you want?” I said.

“I want to go home, but I don't know where that is. Do you know where that is?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Africa?”

The monkey mouthed the word,
Africa
, as though he were tasting it. “I don't think
we
call it that, but it sounds right. Send me to Africa.”

We used the last of the money I'd taken from the ATM to buy provisions out of the depot vending machine. I wrote FRAGILE, THIS SIDE UP on each side of the shipping container and punched air holes in the sides. I placed the sodas, candy, chips, and boxed sandwiches inside. “That should be plenty,” I said. The monkey set the hatbox on the floor and stepped out of the cutoffs and rainbow suspenders. Carefully he folded the clothes and put them back inside the hatbox before handing it to me.

“Won't you get cold?” I said.

“I think,” he said, “when it gets cold we huddle together for warmth. I'm looking forward to that.” The monkey extended his paw to me, and I shook it before he climbed inside the container, his head just barely poking out of the top.

“Wait,” I said. “What about Giuseppe?”

The monkey reached out and tapped a bony finger on the hatbox. “Just give the cops this. It spells out everything. The toxicology and my confession will tell the tale. Farewell, friend.” The monkey squatted in the container and I sealed the top with tape. As I left the depot, I could hear the crinkle of a candy bar being unwrapped, followed by some noisy chewing. “Farewell, monkey,” I said, snapping off the lights.

At home, despite it being pretty late, the dog was waiting at the door for me with his ball. Across the street from our apartment is a ball field that is lighted at night for the neighborhood kids to use. Three or four of them sprinted around the bases, taking turns sliding into home, seeing who could kick up the biggest cloud of dust. The dog and I went to the outfield, where I hurled the ball as far as I could for him to chase. Each time he brought it back and dropped it at my feet, panting, showing his teeth in what I was pretty sure was a smile. After a while I felt a chill and we went back inside.

The caption for the photo of yesterday's city council meeting (Section 1, Page 2) misidentified Lawrence Billings as Horance Willings. We regret the error.

In Wednesday's lead editorial, we declared that Sheriff Jack Seager is an ineffectual public servant whose slipshod leadership is plunging our town into a death spiral of crime and corruption. We regret this because we actually think, as sheriffs go, he's doing a pretty good job. And when you mention the words “crime” and “this town” together people generally laugh and say, “What crime?” and “Where?” What we meant to say is word has it that Sheriff Seager has a really small dick.

Now that we think about it, we also regret that we were unable to hit the ball to the right side in order to move the runner from first into scoring position during the big state playoff game all those years ago.

That time we said we would set the TiVo for your favorite show and it must've recorded the wrong channel, or the time was messed up or something? We regret that.

The thing is, we thought that Horance Willings was an awfully strange name, but frankly, we were quite taken with it. Still and all, we regret the error.

Speaking of high school, we regret staring at Julie Norman's chest.

We also shouldn't let the recyclables pile up like that in the corner of the kitchen. It's kind of messy and attracts bugs. We regret this.

We regret that during the undressing period of our noontime coupling with Mrs. Seager, consumed as we were by our furtive passion, we flung our underpants
all the way under
the clothes dresser, which made them very hard to find when Sheriff Seager unexpectedly came home for lunch.

Remember Lawrence Billings? Turns out he prefers Larry. We should have asked. It smarts when you compound one error with another. It really does. We regret this.

Actually, what we regret is
getting caught
staring at Julie Norman's chest. It made us look like a pervert.

We have some very small regrets over failing to read the assembly directions for that prefabricated bookshelf.

We regret also that we spent so much time searching for the underwear, rushing around the Seager bedroom in the altogether. We should have ditched them and gone commando. Precious moments were lost there for sure. Regrets.

In our defense, we are right-handed and were given nothing but hard cheese on the inner half of the plate. Nevertheless, regrets are ours.

Failure to recycle belies a kind of careless attitude toward the larger needs of the community. We wish we could get it together on this front.

Shoving our foot through the fly of our boxers once the boxers were finally located was also a problem.

What we mean is that we regret that first we referred to Larry Billings as Horance Willings, then compounded the error by calling him “Lawrence” when it is now clear that only his mother calls him “Lawrence.” We don't regret that his name is Larry or that making errors leads to regrets. Errors should have consequences, and while we count ourselves lucky when consequences don't result from our errors, we accept them when they do.

That guy was all-conference. First team. Veins ran down his forearm. If we were supposed to bunt, we would have bunted, but the signs were to swing away with an eye toward hitting to the right side. If there's a regret, it's that we didn't back out of the batter's box, call time, and clarify things with the third-base coach, stressing our doubts about our ability to get good wood on this guy's stuff.

We've never told our father we loved him, never felt the rasp of his whiskers on our lips. We regret this.

We're grateful for Mrs. Julie Seager's laughter as we searched for the underwear. Given the inherent franticness and tension of the situation, that she sat up in the bed with the sheet only half-covering her breasts and held her hand over her mouth as she did the aforementioned laughing really seemed to take the edge off, despite the heavy tread of her husband's, Sheriff Seager's, trooper boots on the stairs.

Regarding the bookshelf, we agree that the side with the faux-woodgrain contact paper looks better on the outside than does the one with the plain medium-density fiberboard. On the other hand, we
do not
regret
not
disassembling then reassembling the bookshelf all over again because we feel that the bookshelf looks just fine, or at least as fine as a prefabricated, medium-density fiberboard bookshelf can look, as long as the offending, non-faux-woodgrain side is pushed against the wall, which it is.