Fear Nothing (26 page)

“Love your voice,” I said.

“Smooth as the bay.”

She hung up, and so did I.

Although he had only heard my half of the conversation, Bobby relied on his uncanny intuition to figure out the tone and intent of Sasha’s call. “What’re you walking into?”

“Just Nancy stuff,” I said. “You wouldn’t be interested.”

As Bobby and I led a still-uneasy Orson onto the front porch, the radio in the kitchen began to swing with “Dancin’” by Chris Isaak.

“Sasha is an awesome woman,” Bobby said.

“Unreal,” I agreed.

“You can’t be with her if you’re dead. She’s not that kinky.”

“Point taken.”

“You have your sunglasses?”

I patted my shirt pocket. “Yeah.”

“Did you use some of my sunscreen?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Geek.”

I said, “I’ve been thinking….”

“It’s about time you started.”

“I’ve been working on the new book.”

“Finally got your lazy ass in gear.”

“It’s about friendship.”

“Am I in it?”

“Amazingly, yes.”

“You’re not using my real name, are you?”

“I’m calling you Igor. The thing is…I’m afraid readers might not relate to what I have to say, because you and I—all my friends—we live such different lives.”

Stopping at the head of the porch steps, regarding me with his patented look of scorn, Bobby said, “I thought you had to be smart to write books.”

“It’s not a federal law.”

“Obviously not. Even the literary equivalent of a gyrospaz ought to know that every last one of us leads a different life.”

“Yeah? Maria Cortez leads a different life?”

Maria is Manuel Ramirez’s younger sister, twenty-eight like Bobby and me. She is a beautician, and her husband works as a car mechanic. They have two children, one cat, and a small tract house with a big mortgage.

Bobby said, “She doesn’t live her life in the beauty shop, doing someone’s hair—or in her house, vacuuming the carpet. She lives her life between her ears. There’s a
world
inside her skull, and probably way stranger and more bitchin’ than you or I, with our shallow brain pans, can imagine. Six billion of us walking the planet, six billion smaller worlds on the bigger one. Shoe salesmen and short-order cooks who look boring from the outside—some have weirder lives than you. Six billion stories, every one an epic, full of tragedy and triumph, good and evil, despair and hope. You and me—we aren’t so special, bro.”

I was briefly speechless. Then I fingered the sleeve of his parrot-and-palm-frond shirt and said, “I didn’t realize you were such a philosopher.”

He shrugged. “That little gem of wisdom? Hell, that was just something I got in a fortune cookie.”

“Must’ve been a big honker of a cookie.”

“Hey, it was a huge monolith, dude,” he said, giving me a sly smile.

The great wall of moonlit fog loomed half a mile from the shore, no closer or farther away than it had been earlier. The night air was as still as that in the cold-holding room at Mercy Hospital.

As we descended the porch steps, no one shot at us. No one issued that loonlike cry, either.

They were still out there, however, hiding in the dunes or below the crest of the slope that fell to the beach. I could feel their attention like the dangerous energy pending release in the coils of a motionless, strike-poised rattlesnake.

Although Bobby had left his shotgun inside, he was vigilant. Surveying the night as he accompanied me to my bike, he began to reveal more interest in my story than he had admitted earlier: “This monkey Angela mentioned…”

“What about it?”

“What was it like?”

“Monkeylike.”

“Like a chimpanzee, an orangutan, or what?”

Gripping the handlebars of my bicycle and turning it around to walk it through the soft sand, I said, “It was a rhesus monkey. Didn’t I say?”

“How big?”

“She said two feet high, maybe twenty-five pounds.”

Gazing across the dunes, he said, “I’ve seen a couple myself.”

Surprised, leaning the bike against the porch railing again, I said, “Rhesus monkeys? Out here?”

“Some kind of monkeys, about that size.”

There is, of course, no species of monkey native to California. The only primates in its woods and fields are human beings.

Bobby said, “Caught one looking in a window at me one night. Went outside, and it was gone.”

“When was this?”

“Maybe three months ago.”

Orson moved between us, as if for comfort.

I said, “You’ve seen them since?”

“Six or seven times. Always at night. They’re secretive. But they’re also bolder lately. They travel in a troop.”

“Troop?”

“Wolves travel in a pack. Horses in a herd. With monkeys, it’s called a troop.”

“You’ve been doing research. How come you haven’t told me about this?”

He was silent, watching the dunes.

I was watching them, too. “Is that what’s out there now?”

“Maybe.”

“How many in this troop?”

“Don’t know. Maybe six or eight. Just a guess.”

“You bought a shotgun. You think they’re dangerous?”

“Maybe.”

“Have you reported them to anyone? Like animal control?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Instead of answering me, he hesitated and then said, “Pia’s driving me nuts.”

Pia Klick. Out there in Waimea for a month or two, going on three years.

I didn’t understand how Pia related to Bobby’s failure to report the monkeys to animal-control officers, but I sensed that he would make the connection for me.

“She says she’s discovered that she’s the reincarnation of Kaha Huna,” Bobby said.

Kaha Huna is the mythical Hawaiian goddess of surfing, who was never actually incarnate in the first place and, therefore, incapable of being
re.

Considering that Pia was not a
kamaaina,
a native of Hawaii, but a
haole
who had been born in Oskaloosa, Kansas, and raised there until she left home at seventeen, she seemed an unlikely candidate to be a mythological
uber wahine.

I said, “She lacks some credentials.”

“She’s dead-solid serious about this.”

“Well, she’s way pretty enough to be Kaha Huna. Or any other goddess, for that matter.”

Standing beside Bobby, I couldn’t see his eyes too well, but his face was bleak. I had never seen him bleak before. I hadn’t even realized that bleakness was an option for him.

Bobby said, “She’s trying to decide whether being Kaha Huna requires her to be celibate.”

“Ouch.”

“She thinks she probably shouldn’t ever live with an ordinary dude, meaning a mortal man. Somehow that would be a blasphemous rejection of her fate.”

“Brutal,” I said sympathetically.

“But it would be cool for her to shack up with the current reincarnation of Kahuna.”

Kahuna is the mythical
god
of surfing. He is largely a creation of modern surfers who extrapolate his legend from the life of an ancient Hawaiian witch doctor.

I said, “And you aren’t the reincarnation of Kahuna.”

“I refuse to be.”

From that response, I inferred that Pia was trying to convince him that he was, indeed, the god of surfing.

With audible misery and confusion, Bobby said, “She’s so smart, so talented.”

Pia had graduated
summa cum laude
from UCLA. She had paid her way through school by painting portraits; now her hyperrealist works sold for impressive prices, as quickly as she cared to produce them.

“How can she be so smart and talented,” Bobby demanded, “and then…this?”

“Maybe you
are
Kahuna,” I said.

“This isn’t funny,” he said, which was a striking statement, because to one degree or another, everything was funny to Bobby.

In the moonlight, the dune grass drooped, no blade so much as trembling in the now windless night. The soft rhythm of the surf, rising from the beach below, was like the murmured chanting of a distant, prayerful crowd.

This Pia business was fascinating, but understandably, I was more interested in the monkeys.

“These last few years,” Bobby said, “with this New Age stuff from Pia…well, sometimes it’s okay, but sometimes it’s like spending days in radical churly-churly.”

Churly-churly is badly churned-up surf heavy with sand and pea gravel, which smacks you in the face when you walk into it. This is not a pleasant surf condition.

“Sometimes,” Bobby said, “when I get off the phone with her, I’m so messed up, missing her, wanting to be with her…I could almost convince myself she
is
Kaha Huna. She’s so
sincere.
And she doesn’t rave on about it, you know. It’s this quiet thing with her, which makes it even more disturbing.”

“I didn’t know you got disturbed.”

“I didn’t know it, either.” Sighing, scuffing at the sand with one bare foot, he began to make the connection between Pia and the monkeys: “When I saw the monkey at the window the first time, it was cool, made me laugh. I figured it was someone’s pet that got loose…but the second time I saw more than one. And it was as weird as all this Kaha Huna shit, because they weren’t behaving at all like monkeys.”

“What do you mean?”

“Monkeys are playful, goofing around. These guys…they weren’t playful. Purposeful, solemn, creepy little geeks. Watching me and studying the house, not out of curiosity but with some agenda.”

“What agenda?”

Bobby shrugged. “They were so strange….”

Words seemed to fail him, so I borrowed one from H. P. Lovecraft, for whose stories we’d had such enthusiasm when we were thirteen: “Eldritch.”

“Yeah. They were eldritch to the max. I knew no one was going to believe me. I almost felt I was hallucinating. I grabbed a camera but couldn’t get a picture. You know why?”

“Thumb over the lens?”

“They didn’t want to be photographed. First sight of the camera, they ran for cover, and they’re insanely fast.” He glanced at me, reading my reaction, then looked to the dunes again. “They knew what the camera was.”

I couldn’t resist: “Hey, you’re not anthropomorphizing them, are you? You know—ascribing human attributes and attitudes to animals?”

Ignoring me, he said, “After that night, I didn’t put the camera away in the closet. I kept it on a kitchen counter, close at hand. If they showed up again, I figured I might get a snapshot before they realized what was happening. One night about six weeks ago, it was pumping eight-footers with a good offshore, barrel after barrel, so even though it was way nipple out there, I put on my wet suit and spent a couple of hours totally tucked away. I didn’t take the camera down to the beach with me.”

“Why not?”

“I hadn’t seen the damn monkeys in a week. I figured maybe I’d never see them again. Anyway, when I came back to the house, I stripped out of the neoprene, went into the kitchen, and got a beer. When I turned away from the fridge, there were monkeys at two windows, hanging on the frames outside, looking in at me. So I reached for my camera—and it was gone.”

“You misplaced it.”

“No. It’s gone for good. I left the door unlocked when I went to the beach that night. I don’t leave it unlocked anymore.”

“You’re telling me the monkeys took it?”

He said, “The next day I bought a disposable camera. Put it on the counter by the oven again. That night I left the lights on, locked up, and took my stick down to the beach.”

“Good surf?”

“Slow. But I wanted to give them a chance. And they took it. While I was gone, they broke a pane, unlocked the window, and stole the disposable camera. Nothing else. Just the camera.”

Now I knew why the shotgun was kept in a locked broom closet.

This cottage on the horn, without neighbors, had always appealed to me as a fine retreat. At night, when the surfers left, the sky and the sea formed a sphere in which the house stood like a diorama in one of those glass paperweights that fills with whirling snow when you shake it, though instead of a blizzard there were deep peace and a glorious solitude. Now, however, the nurturing solitude had become an unnerving isolation. Rather than offering a sense of peace, the night was thick and still with expectation.

“And they left me a warning,” Bobby said.

I pictured a threatening note laboriously printed in crude block letters—
WATCH YOUR ASS.
Signed,
THE MONKEYS.

They were too clever to leave a paper trail, however, and even more direct. Bobby said, “One of them crapped on my bed.”

“Oh, nice.”

“They’re secretive, like I said. I’ve decided not even to try to photograph them. If I managed to get a flash shot of them some night…I think they’d be way pissed.”

“You’re afraid of them. I didn’t know you got disturbed, and I didn’t know you were ever afraid. I’m learning a lot about you tonight, bro.”

He didn’t admit to feeling fear.

“You bought the shotgun,” I pressed.

“Because I think it’s good to challenge them from time to time, good to show the little bastards that I’m territorial, and that this is, by God, my territory. But I’m not afraid, really. They’re just monkeys.”