A silhouette suddenly appeared in my low doorway. It was Helen, her flyaway hair a halo against the lingering crimson of the sunset. I had not seen her since that morning. She was no respecter of thresholds, and mine was probably too new to merit any special consideration as a threshold. What was mine was willy-nilly hers, apparently, and she seemed to have concluded that this new hut could easily accommodate both of us. She squeezed inside, walked to me on all fours, and touched my forehead like a confessor bestowing absolution on a penitent.
Something cold and hard fell against my knee. I reached down, picked it up, and realized that it was my Colt automatic. Slyly canting her head, Helen leaned back and studied my face. Her eyes were smoky marbles in a bust of discolored lapis lazuli, and I regarded her at that moment as an angel of transcendent apehood, a woman well ahead of her time.
“You're liable to need that,” she said.
Of course she had said nothing at all, but in my despair I half believed that she
had
spoken, and I felt with absolute certainty that all I needed to survive this out-of-sequence period of my life was Helen herself. To that end, reading my thoughts, she had come to me of her own accord.
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Eglin Air Force Base, Florida
Spring 1976
On
Friday afternoon Hugo came into his family's Capehart housing unit and found John-John sprawled across a chair reading an omnibus volume of John Collier short stories. The boy acknowledged him with a nod but went quickly back to his book. Nobody else was at home.
Anna was attending Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, and Jeannette, since mid-April, had been living on Long Island with the family of her editor at the Vireo Press. She was doing full-scale revisions on a manuscript that had been assembled in February, a collection of semiserious book columns she had written for the
Herald-Plainsman
and then for a small syndicate with outlets in both the Sunbelt and the Rocky Mountain region. Her purpose now was to polish, update, and citify these columns so that they
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would appeal to Eastern urbanites as well as the easygoing, down-home sophisticates who had comprised their first audience. Hugo had wanted Jeannette to do this work at home, but when her editor invited her to New York for consultations on the necessary changes, he had not been able to bring himself to forbid the trip. Anyway, he had never had that kind of power.
“Come on Johnny, let's take a little vacation this weekend. You up to goin’ for a ride?”
“A vacation? Where?”
“Through the pine woods of northern Flo-
REE
-dah. Maybe over to Silver Springs, too. We'll go for a cruise on a glass-bottom boat and watch the pretty mermaids in the ballet.”
John put down his book and grimaced.
“We're goin',
hijo mío
. I'm tired of all this jackass creative bachin’ we been doin’ and ready for somethin’ new, okay?” Supper, if he bothered to fix it, would be either hot dogs or frozen TV dinners.
“Go pack some stuff, Johnny. Twenty minutes, okay?”
The boy grudgingly obeyed. Hugo, in his own room, threw several items into an overnight bag and changed into sports clothes. He found the meerschaum pipe that Pete Grier, four years ago, had given him as a going-away present just prior to his departure for an unaccompanied tour of duty on Guam.
That tour, with Jeannette and the kids remaining in Cheyenne, had marked a critical watershed in the Monegals’ married life, their first protracted separation. There were lots of bad memories about his part in the bombardment of Cambodia, too, including playing father confessor to a young navigator who had accidentally obliterated a friendly village by failing to throw a switch locked on the village's targeting beacon. The kid's B-52 had “boxed” the place with bombs.... It was a good pipe, though, well broken-in and comforting.
* * * *
When the complex itself hove into view (a pair of single-story, whitewashed buildings with tile roofs and heavy Spanish beamwork), Hugo swung off the highway into the gravel parking lot. Behind the larger of the two buildings was a bamboo stockade—a fortress projecting into the pines—and behind the stockade loomed a densely forested hill. Despite its being Friday evening, Hugo's green-gold Dodge Dart was one of only about four cars in the immense parking area.
“You want some papaya juice, don’ you, Johnny?”
“No, sir. Not really.”
“Well, I do. Come on.” Hugo gestured the teenager out of the car with his pipe and led him toward a gangway beside the main building. A huge red arrow on the wall directed father and son to a turnstile, which squeaked as they pushed through. Inside the stockade a metal rack containing peanuts caught Hugo's eyes, and he dropped a quarter into the coin box and handed John-John one of the small brown paper bags. “You can feed the animals, okay? Maybe cheer you up.”
They strolled between a pair of green metal rails describing a mazelike path through the compound.
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Gravel crunched underfoot, and the glassy twitterings of caged birds reverberated in the hush of the evening. Hugo halted John-John briefly before a wire-fronted cage in which a coyote lay, its tail immersed in its own water trough. Elsewhere peacocks strutted, a pair of llamas nibbled hay, rattlesnakes coiled in dirty glass display cases, a burro drowsed, and a slew of half and three-quarter-grown alligators, like the victims of some bizarre massacre, lay sprawled atop one another in a scum-filled concrete basin. Hugo was utterly heedless of the stench, but eventually, to his son's relief, he tired of the coyote's listless behavior and ambled away over the gravel to another small green cage.
RHESUS MONKEYS
(
MUCACA MULATTA
)
COMMON TO INDIA
LIKE PEANUTS BUT MAY BITE
Here two monkeys occupied a cramped ledge, one a shy female and the other a male with one leg dangling into space. The male lay prone, the neon-bright callosities of his buttocks exposed. Hugo told John-John to give the female a peanut, but her stare seemed to disconcert the boy, as did the casual posture of her mate, and he yielded the bag to his father.
“What's the matter?”
“They're prisoners, Papa. I feel guilty standing here. They're like furry little people who've been put in jail for no good reason at all.”
“It's no worse for them than the others.”
“It's worse.”
“Okay, okay,
está peor
, Johnny.” He chewed his pipe stem, dug in the paper bag. “Maybe a peanut'll make this little lady feel better, what do you think?”
Hugo extended a peanut through the wire mesh, but the female moved so suddenly to accept it that he was startled and dropped it into the bottom compartment of the cage. Undismayed, the rhesus dropped from the wooden ledge, retrieved the offering, and faced away to crack and eat it. Hugo, laughing, flicked another peanut through the screen.
“Look, Johnny,
tiene hambre
. She's hungry.”
The sound of cracking shells aroused the male, who promptly sat up, hiding his bruised-looking derrière beneath him and noncommittally working his muzzle. Balanced on the edge of his perch, he put his small, delicately fashioned hand through the wire—but stared off into another section of the compound, as if too proud to acknowledge to either himself or anyone else that he was begging.
“
Ven aquí,
” Hugo urged the loftily uninterested rhesus. “Come get your
cacahuate
, eh?”
Haughtily the monkey turned his head and looked at Hugo. Attention fully engaged, he reached ever farther toward the Monegals, leaning against the wire so that his hairy shoulder was outlined in the mesh.
His upsettingly human fingers closed on the peanut—then, deliberately, let it fall into the gravel at Hugo's feet. This disdain for the offering, John-John could see, had struck his father as an insult, one more slight in a chain of slights initiated by Jeannette's steady progress toward a career independent of the Monegal family unit. How else explain Hugo's reaction to an event of no objective magnitude whatever?
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“What's the matter with you?” he shouted at the rhesus. “They feed you so good you can turn up your nose at a nice plump peanut?”
He bent to pick up the peanut. Swiftly—so swiftly that John-John scarcely had time to blink—the male rhesus grabbed the bowl of Hugo's meerschaum pipe and wrenched it from his mouth. Shielding the stolen pipe with his body, the monkey retreated to the back of the cage and, casting guarded glances over his shoulder at the two human beings, proceeded to bang the pipe against the sleeping ledge.
“
¡Hijo de puta!
” Hugo exclaimed, grievously hurt by the creature's duplicity. He threw himself against the cage and reached through the wire for a handful of reddish-brown rhesus hair.
“Papa! Papa,
don't
!”
The male spun about madly, sprang forward in a rage, and drove Hugo back. Mouth wide open, the rhesus displayed a set of glistening yellow fangs and a liver-colored throat. The female shied into a corner, but her mate, growling, clung to the wire mesh and taunted the human beings, who were in embarrassed terror of him. John-John glanced about the compound to see if anyone else had observed the rhesus's attack and their clumsy withdrawal. No one had.
“Goddamn little gook!” Hugo exclaimed in English, echoing the abusive language of men who have served in remote corners of the world. “Give me back my
pipa
! My pipe, you thief!”
Unimpressed, the rhesus disengaged his hands and feet from the wire and leapt back to his plank, where he sat on his haunches chewing the pipe's briar stem until, audibly, it splintered. Hugo's favorite pipe, a comfort and a crutch from the days he had manfully struggled to give up cigarettes.
“We'll tell them inside,” John-John suggested. “We'll tell the manager what's happened.”
But Hugo flung the bag of peanuts aside and stalked angrily through the gravel toward the compound's exit. The boy followed. They passed other cages, other animals, an aviary, a small stable with ponies, and turned a final corner to find themselves facing another sign and a second turnstile.
IF YOU HAVE ENJOYEDRITKI'S ANIMAL RANCH
PLEASE MAKE A DONATION TOWARD
FEEDING THE ANIMALS
To leave the stockade, it now became clear, they would have to go through the souvenir-cluttered emporium of the main building. Intimidated, Hugo pushed a dollar through the window of the donations booth, murmured a greeting at the bored woman inside, and shoved John-John through the turnstile and into the gift shop. The sickeningly sweet smells of peanut brittle and pralines assailed them, and Hugo stumbled toward the door like a man who has narrowly survived a mugging. John-John apologetically stumbled after.
The Monegals drove until dark, then found a second-rate motel consisting of ten or twelve separate cabins where they stopped for the night. Hugo left John-John sitting on the bed watching television and returned about twenty minutes later with a pair of barbecued-pork sandwiches wrapped in translucent wax paper. At eleven he made his son turn off the television and go to bed. Then, like a paid hospital orderly, he sat in a cheap, imitation-leather chair opposite the bed, cleaning his fingernails with a penknife in the faint illumination coming through the cabin's only window.
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John-John awoke convinced that the rhesus from Ritki's was perched on the chest of drawers near the cabin's bathroom. His father was not in bed with him, and when he hitched himself into a sitting position against the headboard, he saw that somebody, or something, was indeed staring across the room at him.
His stomach dropped, but he did not cry out. Instead, his hand crept through the darkness to turn on the floor lamp next to the sagging bed.
Click!
In the electric light's yellow glare John-John saw a mirror in which his own dark face was reflected. The expression on the face betrayed his fear.
Hugo was gone. Further, the Dodge Dart was not in the parking lot outside the cabin. Benumbed by this inexplicable desertion, John-John stood in the open doorway staring at the small, swordfish-shaped neon sign burning red and violet above the motel's office building. He stood there for a long time, watching automobiles go by on the highway and waiting for one that looked like the Dart. He felt no panic, for he believed implicitly that Hugo would return for him.
Eventually a Florida state trooper arrived at the motel. He came to John-John with Hugo's room key and the news that his father had just had a serious automobile accident several miles to the west.
* * * *
Possessed by a desire for vengeance, Hugo had waited for John-John to fall asleep. At last convinced that the boy was dozing, or perhaps even spirit-traveling, he had left the motel and driven back along the highway toward Ritki's Gift & Souvenir Emporium. Before reaching the compound, however, he turned onto a side road, a mere red-clay gash in the pine forest, and parked. Darkness and clustering foliage concealed the car.