Skeleton Crew (25 page)

He had been a merchant mariner with a navigator’s certificate, and there were stacks of charts in the closet, some marked with neat circles (and the dimple of the compass’s swing-point in the center of each). There were twenty volumes of something called
Barron’s Guide to Navigation.
A set of cockeyed binoculars that made your eyes feel hot and funny if you looked through them too long. There were touristy things from a dozen ports of call—rubber hula-hula dolls, a black cardboard bowler with a torn band that said YOU PICK A GIRL AND I’LL PICCADILLY, a glass globe with a tiny Eiffel Tower inside. There were envelopes with foreign stamps tucked carefully away inside, and foreign coins; there were rock samples from the Hawaiian island of Maui, a glassy black—heavy and somehow ominous—and funny records in foreign languages.

That day, with the sleet ticking hypnotically off the roof just above his head, Hal worked his way all the way down to the far end of the back closet, moved a box aside, and saw another box behind it—a Ralston-Purina box. Looking over the top was a pair of glassy hazel eyes. They gave him a start and he skittered back for a moment, heart thumping, as if he had discovered a deadly pygmy. Then he saw its silence, the glaze in those eyes, and realized it was some sort of toy. He moved forward again and lifted it carefully from the box.

It grinned its ageless, toothy grin in the yellow light, its cymbals held apart.

Delighted, Hal had turned it this way and that, feeling the crinkle of its nappy fur. Its funny grin pleased him. Yet hadn’t there been something else? An almost instinctive feeling of disgust that had come and gone almost before he was aware of it? Perhaps it was so, but with an old, old memory like this one, you had to be careful not to believe too much. Old memories could lie. But... hadn’t he seen that same expression on Petey’s face, in the attic of the home place?

He had seen the key set into the small of its back, and turned it. It had turned far too easily; there were no winding-up clicks. Broken, then. Broken, but still neat.

He took it out to play with it.

“Whatchoo got, Hal?” Beulah asked, waking from her nap.

“Nothing,” Hal said. “I found it.”

He put it up on the shelf on his side of the bedroom. It stood atop his Lassie coloring books, grinning, staring into space, cymbals poised. It was broken, but it grinned nonetheless. That night Hal awakened from some uneasy dream, bladder full, and got up to use the bathroom in the hall. Bill was a breathing lump of covers across the room.

Hal came back, almost asleep again ... and suddenly the monkey began to beat its cymbals together in the darkness.

He came fully awake, as if snapped in the face with a cold, wet towel. His heart gave a staggering leap of surprise, and a tiny, mouselike squeak escaped his throat. He stared at the monkey, eyes wide, lips trembling.

Its body rocked and humped on the shelf. Its lips spread and closed, spread and closed, hideously gleeful, revealing huge and carnivorous teeth.

“Stop,” Hal whispered.

His brother turned over and uttered a loud, single snore. All else was silent ... except for the monkey. The cymbals clapped and clashed, and surely it would wake his brother, his mother, the world. It would wake the dead.

Hal moved toward it, meaning to stop it somehow, perhaps put his hand between its cymbals until it ran down, and then it stopped on its own. The cymbals came together one last time—
jang!
—and then spread slowly apart to their original position. The brass glimmered in the shadows. The monkey’s dirty yellowish teeth grinned.

The house was silent again. His mother turned over in her bed and echoed Bill’s single snore. Hal got back into his own bed and pulled the covers up, his heart beating fast, and he thought:
I’ll put it back in the closet again tomorrow. I don’t want it.

But the next morning he forgot all about putting the monkey back because his mother didn’t go to work. Beulah was dead. Their mother wouldn’t tell them exactly what happened. “It was an accident, just a terrible accident,” was all she would say. But that afternoon Bill bought a newspaper on his way home from school and smuggled page four up to their room under his shirt. Bill read the article haltingly to Hal while their mother cooked supper in the kitchen, but Hal could read the headline for himself—TWO KILLED IN APARTMENT SHOOT-OUT. Beulah McCaffery, 19, and Sally Tremont, 20, had been shot by Miss McCaffery’s boyfriend, Leonard White, 25, following an argument over who was to go out and pick up an order of Chinese food. Miss Tremont had expired at Hartford Receiving. Beulah McCaffery had been pronounced dead at the scene.

It was like Beulah just disappeared into one of her own detective magazines, Hal Shelburn thought, and felt a cold chill race up his spine and then circle his heart. And then he realized the shootings had occurred about the same time the monkey—

 

“Hal?” It was Terry’s voice, sleepy. “Coming to bed?”

He spat toothpaste into the sink and rinsed his mouth. “Yes,” he said.

He had put the monkey in his suitcase earlier, and locked it up. They were flying back to Texas in two or three days. But before they went, he would get rid of the damned thing for good.

Somehow.

“You were pretty rough on Dennis this afternoon,” Terry said in the dark.

“Dennis has needed somebody to start being rough on him for quite a while now, I think. He’s been drifting. I just don’t want him to start falling.”

“Psychologically, beating the boy isn’t a very productive—”

“I didn’t
beat
him, Terry—for Christ’s sake!”

“—way to assert parental authority—”

“Oh, don’t give me any of that encounter-group shit,” Hal said angrily.

“I can see you don’t want to discuss this.” Her voice was cold.

“I told him to get the dope out of the house, too.”

“You did?” Now she sounded apprehensive. “How did he take it? What did he say?”

“Come on, Terry!
What could
he say? You’re fired?”

“Hal, what’s the
matter
with you? You’re not like this—what’s
wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said, thinking of the monkey locked away in his Samsonite. Would he hear it if it began to clap its cymbals? Yes, he surely would. Muffled, but audible. Clapping doom for someone, as it had for Beulah, Johnny McCabe, Uncle Will’s dog Daisy.
Jang-jang-jang,
is it you, Hal? “I’ve just been under a strain.”

“I hope that’s all it is. Because I don’t like you this way.”

“No?” And the words escaped before he could stop them: he didn’t even want to stop them. “So pop a Valium and everything will look okay again.”

He heard her draw breath in and let it out shakily. She began to cry then. He could have comforted her (maybe), but there seemed to be no comfort in him. There was too much terror. It would be better when the monkey was gone again, gone for good. Please God, gone for good.

He lay wakeful until very late, until morning began to gray the air outside. But he thought he knew what to do.

Bill had found the monkey the second time.

That was about a year and a half after Beulah McCaffery had been pronounced Dead at the Scene. It was summer. Hal had just finished kindergarten.

He came in from playing and his mother called, “Wash your hands, Senor, you are feelthy like a peeg.” She was on the porch, drinking an iced tea and reading a book. It was her vacation; she had two weeks.

Hal gave his hands a token pass under cold water and printed dirt on the hand towel. “Where’s Bill?”

“Upstairs. You tell him to clean his side of the room. It’s a mess.”

Hal, who enjoyed being the messenger of unpleasant news in such matters, rushed up. Bill was sitting on the floor. The small down-the-rabbit-hole door leading to the back closet was ajar. He had the monkey in his hands.

“That’s busted,” Hal said immediately.

He was apprehensive, although he barely remembered coming back from the bathroom that night and the monkey suddenly beginning to clap its cymbals. A week or so after that, he had had a bad dream about the monkey and Beulah—he couldn’t remember exactly what—and had awakened screaming, thinking for a moment that the soft weight on his chest was the monkey, that he would open his eyes and see it grinning down at him. But of course the soft weight had only been his pillow, clutched with panicky tightness. His mother came in to soothe him with a drink of water and two chalky-orange baby aspirin, those Valiums of childhood’s troubled times. She thought it was the fact of Beulah’s death that had caused the nightmare. So it was, but not in the way she thought.

He barely remembered any of this now, but the monkey still scared him, particularly its cymbals. And its teeth.

“I know that,” Bill said, and tossed the monkey aside.

“It’s stupid.” It landed on Bill’s bed, staring up at the ceiling, cymbals poised. Hal did not like to see it there. “You want to go down to Teddy’s and get Popsicles?”

“I spent my allowance already,” Hal said. “Besides, Mom says you got to clean up your side of the room.”

“I can do that later,” Bill said. “And I’ll loan you a nickel, if you want.” Bill was not above giving Hal an Indian rope burn sometimes, and would occasionally trip him up or punch him for no particular reason, but mostly he was okay.

“Sure,” Hal said gratefully. “I’ll just put the busted monkey back in the closet first, okay?”

“Nah,” Bill said, getting up. “Let’s go-go-go.”

Hal went. Bill’s moods were changeable, and if he paused to put the monkey away, he might lose his Popsicle. They went down to Teddy’s and got them, and not just any Popsicles, either, but the rare blueberry ones. Then they went down to the Rec where some kids were getting up a baseball game. Hal was too small to play, but he sat far out in foul territory, sucking his blueberry Popsicle and chasing what the big kids called “Chinese home runs.” They didn’t get home until almost dark, and their mother whacked Hal for getting the hand towel dirty and whacked Bill for not cleaning up his side of the room, and after supper there was TV, and by the time all of that happened, Hal had forgotten all about the monkey. It somehow found its way up onto
Bill’s
shelf, where it stood right next to Bill’s autographed picture of Bill Boyd. And there it stayed for nearly two years.

By the time Hal was seven, babysitters had become an extravagance, and Mrs. Shelburn’s parting shot each morning was, “Bill, look after your brother.”

That day, however, Bill had to stay after school and Hal came home alone, stopping at each comer until he could see absolutely no traffic coming in either direction, and then skittering across, shoulders hunched, like a doughboy crossing no-man’s-land. He let himself into the house with the key under the mat and went immediately to the refrigerator for a glass of milk. He got the bottle, and then it slipped through his fingers and crashed to smithereens on the floor, the pieces of glass flying everywhere.

Jang-jang-jang-jang,
from upstairs, in their bedroom.
Jang-jang-jang, hi, Hal! Welcome home! And by the way, Hal, is it you? Is it you this time? Are they going to find you Dead at the Scene?

He stood there, immobile, looking down at the broken glass and the puddle of milk, full of a terror he could not name or understand. It was simply there, seeming to ooze from his pores.

He turned and rushed upstairs to their room. The monkey stood on Bill’s shelf, seeming to stare at him. The monkey had knocked the autographed picture of Bill Boyd facedown onto Bill’s bed. The monkey rocked and grinned and beat its cymbals together. Hal approached it slowly, not wanting to, but not able to stay away. Its cymbals jerked apart and crashed together and jerked apart again. As he got closer, he could hear the clockwork running in the monkey’s guts.

Abruptly, uttering a cry of revulsion and terror, he swatted it from the shelf as one might swat a bug. It struck Bill’s pillow and then fell on the floor, cymbals beating together,
jang-jang-jang,
lips flexing and closing as it lay there on its back in a patch of late April sunshine.

Hal kicked it with one Buster Brown, kicked it as hard as he could, and this time the cry that escaped him was one of fury. The clockwork monkey skittered across the floor, bounced off the wall and lay still. Hal stood staring at it, fists bunched, heart pounding. It grinned saucily back at him, the sun of a burning pinpoint in one glass eye.
Kick me all you want,
it seemed to tell him,
I’m nothing but cogs and clockwork and a worm gear or two, kick me all you feel like, I’m not real, just a funny clockwork monkey is all I am, and who’s dead? There’s been an explosion at the helicopter plant! What’s that rising up into the sky like a big bloody bowling ball with eyes where the finger-holes should be? Is it your mother’s head, Hal? Whee! What a ride your mother’s head is having! Or down at Brook Street Corner! Looky-here, pard! The car was going too fast! The driver was drunk! There’s one Bill less in the world! Could you hear the crunching sound when the wheels ran over his skull and his brains squirted out his ears? Yes? No? Maybe? Don’t ask me, I don’t know, I can’t know, all I know how to do is beat these cymbals together jang-jang-jang, and who’s Dead at the Scene, Hal? Your mother? Your brother? Or is it you, Hal? Is it you?