I didn’t give Monk a chance to argue. I grabbed him by the lapels and yanked him outside.
We walked a few feet away from the motor home and looked out into the distance, our backs to the door.
“This isn’t going to work,” Monk whispered.
“Be patient, Mr. Monk,” I whispered back and then raised my voice. “It’s amazing out here, Ambrose. It’s like we are the only people on earth. Can you imagine what that feels like?”
“I’ve imagined it,” Ambrose said.
I turned and saw him standing in the doorway of the motor home, gripping the frame with both hands. Ambrose was holding on tight, but he was leaning ever so slightly forward.
It was as if we’d landed on the moon and our motor home was the landing module. He was gathering his courage to take that first small step for man and that giant leap for mankind.
Ambrose felt the pull. All he needed was someone to hold on to.
I looked at Monk and tipped my head toward his brother. For once, Monk got the unspoken message. He slowly approached Ambrose and held out his hand to him.
Ambrose took a deep breath, let go of the doorframe with one hand, and reached out to his brother.
Monk took his hand but didn’t draw him near. He waited. Wincing, Ambrose stepped forward with one foot, lowering it carefully to the ground, and then waited to see what happened.
Nothing did.
But he remained standing, his body half inside the motor home and half outside of it.
It wasn’t a comfortable position to be in, and the strain showed on his face. He had to make a decision. In or out?
Ambrose took another deep breath, closed his eyes, and let go of the motor home, planting both feet on the ground. Again he waited for something to happen.
But it already had—he was standing outside, of his own accord, for the first time in decades.
Ambrose opened his eyes, looked at me, and, still holding Monk’s hand, took a step in my direction. And then another. And then another.
The Monk brothers stood there, hand in hand a few feet from the motor home, looking out at me and the desert beyond.
Ambrose stood very stiffly and gripped Monk’s hand so tightly that his knuckles were white, but after a long moment, he nodded, more to himself than to either of us.
“It’s nice out here,” he said.
“Yes,” Monk said, “it is.”
And he smiled.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Mr. Monk and the Peanuts
W
e were able to stand there for another five minutes before Ambrose began to panic and made a hasty return to the confines of the motor home. But I considered those few moments a great success, and I’m sure that Monk did, too.
I picked up a rock, just like Neil Armstrong did, and brought it back with me into the motor home as a souvenir of Ambrose’s big step. I put it in the drawer with his sand dollars, his key chain, and his figurine. Maybe if he had these to look at when he got home he’d get swept up in nostalgic wanderlust and maybe step outside for a moment or two.
Since Ambrose seemed to like the desert so much, and it was getting late in the day, I figured this would be a good place to spend the night. I suggested that we just stay where we were, but neither of the Monks felt comfortable being out there on our own.
“What if we’re attacked by hillbillies?” Monk whispered to me. “Or ravenous wolves? Nobody would ever know.”
I didn’t think we were in any danger from hillbillies or wild animals, but when he mentioned being attacked, I remembered that the first mistake the travelers in
Race with the Devil
made was camping off road. A remote area like this would be the perfect place for demon worshippers to picnic.
But I still thought we should stay in the desert, only somewhere a bit more populated. So I drove us back to the interstate and decided to pull into the first trailer park or campground that we came upon.
I didn’t have to wait long. A few miles up the freeway, I saw a sign for Silver Spur, a trailer park with a mining camp theme out among the boulders and cactus.
The front office was a frontier-style wooden cabin with a hitching post and an empty water trough. Some rusty pick-axes, shovels, mine trolleys, and a couple of wooden wagon wheels were scattered around the property as decorative props. The camp didn’t offer much in terms of amenities, just a laundry room, toilets, showers, and a small swimming pool with some weather-beaten furniture on the cracked concrete decking. But that was okay, all we really wanted was the solitude of the desert landscape, and there was plenty of that.
Almost all of the camping spots were taken, but they all had the same unobstructed view of the open desert, the barren hills, and, in the distance, the interchange where the I-15 and the I-40 met and then branched off in separate directions across the dry scrub plains.
We parked beside an old A-class that had a map of the United States on the back with nearly all of the states colored in with differing shades of red. My guess was that the red states were all places the RV’s occupants had visited so far. Or perhaps they just wanted to remember which states voted for the McCain-Palin ticket in 2008.
Their window shades were drawn and there appeared to be nobody home. The garbage can beside their camper was overflowing with beer bottles, and there were cigarette stubs and bottle caps on top of the picnic table. I could see that we were going to get along great with our neighbors.
As I hooked us up to the utilities, my gaze kept drifting to the pool area in the center of the park. The pool itself wasn’t very appealing, but the idea of floating in cool water in the middle of the warm desert was too enticing to ignore.
“I’m going swimming,” I declared as I stepped back into the RV and went to the control panel. “Anyone want to join me?”
They both looked at me as if I’d suggested that we rob a liquor store together.
“Why would you want to do that?” Monk said.
“Because it’s hot out,” I said, and pushed the buttons to expand the slide-out sections of the motor home.
“Take a shower or have a Popsicle.”
“I’d rather take a swim,” I said.
“The only reason you need to swim is to save yourself from drowning.”
“What about swimming for exercise or pleasure?”
“It’s conceivable,” Monk said, “if you have your own pool and no one else is allowed in it.”
“Not everyone can afford that,” I said. “So for me, it’s a luxury when I have the chance to go in a swimming pool.”
“Is it also a luxury to sprinkle your food with rat poison?” Monk asked.
“I don’t see the connection,” I said.
“I do,” Ambrose said.
“You have no idea how many sweaty, filthy, diseased strangers have been in that pool. Or how many children have relieved themselves in there,” Monk said. “You might as well take a dip in raw sewage.”
To be honest, I wasn’t surprised by Monk’s reaction. When Monk and I were in Hawaii, he didn’t want me swimming in the ocean because billions of fish relieve themselves in it. It was also why he doesn’t eat fish, because they breathe water “thick with their own waste.”
I ignored his protests, went into the bathroom, stripped off my clothes, and changed into my one-piece bathing suit and flip-flops. I slathered myself in suntan lotion, wrapped a towel around my waist, and when I stepped out again, the Monks had settled into the dinette with a bag of roasted peanuts, which they’d spilled out onto the tabletop and were busy shelling.
Both Monks quickly averted their gaze away from me and concentrated on shelling the nuts, though I was pretty sure Ambrose snuck a few glances as I went to the refrigerator to get myself a bottle of water, because when I looked back at him, his face was bright red.
“Save some room for dinner,” I said.
“We aren’t
eating
peanuts,” Ambrose said, without looking up from his shelling. “We’re
playing
peanuts.”
“And I’m going to decimate you,” Monk said.
The game was simple in concept but impossible to play, at least for me. You start by separating the nuts and their shells into two piles. The goal is to match as many of the nuts with the shells that they came from as you can. The person who matches the most nuts with their shells wins.
I’ve played the bizarre game with Monk half a dozen times. My lifetime high score is one, and that’s only because Monk matched up everything else on the table and, out of pity, left a nut behind for me to put together.
Monk called it “the sport of the gods” because it requires a level of such intense concentration that players reach a “transcendent state” that puts them in sync with the spatial dynamics of the universe.
Who knew a bag of roasted peanuts had such power?
I started for the door, but Monk spoke up.
“Wait a minute, Natalie. You’re not carrying any soap or disinfectant cleanser with you.”
“I’m swimming in the pool, not cleaning it.”
“But you’re not coming back in here dripping with sewage,” Monk said. “This is where we live, eat, and sleep.”
I sighed, went back to the bathroom, and got my clothes, a plastic bag for my suit, and all of my toiletries, as well as a can of Lysol cleanser just for show.
Monk nodded approvingly and then began shuffling the shells.
Once I was outside, I left the cleanser behind and headed for the pool. It was occupied by a deeply tanned, morbidly obese middle-aged man who stood in the shallow end, wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses and holding an enormous can of beer. He reminded me of a hippopotamus. A woman I assumed was his wife rested on a chaise lounge with a matching beer of her own. She had a beehive hairdo that must have been sprayed with a mist of quick-drying cement and wore a loud pink one-piece bathing suit with industrial-strength support that made her bust look like two ballistic missiles.
Two sunburned kids, a boy and a girl around ten years old, were doing cannonballs into the deep end while their parents sat together under the one working umbrella and read his-and-hers James Patterson paperbacks—he was reading Alex Cross and she was reading Women’s Murder Club. A French poodle rested under the woman’s chair and would probably have been reading something by James Patterson, too, if the author had written anything about dogs.
I smiled politely at everyone, put my stuff down on a chaise lounge, and stepped into the pool. It was lukewarm and smelled strongly of chlorine, but it was still a relief from the heat.
The Hippo made no secret of checking me out as I got into the water, and neither did Mr. Patterson. I swam from one end of the pool to the other, aware of their eyes on me.
I stopped for a moment in the deep end and saw that the two kids were standing on the edge of the pool looking at me, too. Even the dog had his eyes on me.
For a moment, I felt a cold shudder of fear ... and recognition. I suddenly remembered a scene from
Race with the Devil
when the travelers stopped at a trailer park and everyone there, it later turned out, worshipped at the feet of Beelzebub.
I dunked myself underwater to clear my head and hide from their gaze. What was I thinking? Had I gone completely insane? I had to get a grip.
When I emerged I decided the kids were staring at me because they wanted me to get out of the deep end so they could do more cannonballs, and the guys were staring at me because they were guys, and the women were watching me because their men and children were. I had no idea what the dog’s motivation was.
So I swam to the middle of the pool and floated on my back, swishing my arms and kicking my legs every so often to maintain my position. The kids got the deep end back and the Hippo had the shallow end to himself.
I closed my eyes and enjoyed the feeling of desert air on the top of me and the water underneath. My muscles unwound and my tensions melted away.
For the first time in more than twenty years, I was on my own. My husband was dead, my daughter was off to college, and I was unmoored. I was no longer responsible to, or responsible for, anyone.
Well, that wasn’t exactly true. I had Monk.
And I had come to accept the fact that he was more than just an employer to me, that no matter what happened, he would always be a part of my life.
But would he always
be
my life? Because that was what he was now, even more so since Julie had left for college.
There was a certain comfort in letting him become the center of my life.
And security.
Which made me wonder, was Monk the same thing to me that Ambrose’s house was to him?
Was I sticking with Monk because it was what I wanted or because I was afraid to try something new?
My mind began to wander, and I must have dozed off, because when I opened my eyes again, it was dusk, and I was all alone in the pool.
Everybody was gone.
I stood up in the pool, stunned and disoriented. I didn’t know it was humanly possible to float and sleep at the same time. And then I felt the hot sting all over the front of my body.
I’d burned myself from head to toe, but since I was wearing suntan lotion with an SPF of about 10,750, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
I got out of the pool, grabbed my things, and went over to the bathrooms and showers. When I turned on the water in the little shower stall, three lizards scurried across the floor, startling me. I wondered what else was in the stall that I hadn’t seen.
The water was cold and rough, as if it was spiked with sand. I couldn’t do anything with my hair. All that time in the chlorinated water had made it look and feel like the end of a broom.
Monk ought to like that, I thought. He was big on brooms.
I got dressed, put my wet bathing suit in a plastic bag, and headed back to our motor home in the darkness, my path lit by the moon, a few park lights, and the flickering glow from flames in the campsite fire rings and barbeques. The air was thick with the aroma of grilled food.