Tough Day for the Army (6 page)

“Take care.”

The thing is, if we're going to do this, there's only so much you can do. What I'm saying is that it is what it is.

Care should be taken to ensure proper stunner maintenance. Stunners should be used correctly, particularly when stunning cows and bulls with heavy skulls.

So I was sitting on the couch, scratching behind the dog's second-favorite ear and humming a song of woe over Constance leaving us, when the doorbell rang. Through the cracked door I saw a vaguely familiar monkey dressed in tuxedo shirt, bow tie, and cummerbund, but no pants. He clutched a circular hatbox.

“Sorry, no monkeys needed here,” I said.

But the monkey jammed the hatbox in the closing door, and a hairy paw extended through the opening. The paw held a convincing replica of my wallet, so convincing that it and my wallet appeared to be one and the same.

He said, “You need this; we're going for a ride. Giuseppe is dead.”

Giuseppe, the organ-grinder, dead, and this, his monkey.

He stepped inside, opened the hatbox, and changed into an outfit of cutoff shorts held up by rainbow suspenders before folding the tuxedo top neatly back into the box. His chest was sunken and only spotted with fur. He was an old monkey.

“Where did you get this?” I said, searching through the wallet, cataloguing the contents. The dog circled, showed just a hint of teeth.

The monkey sighed. “Have you noticed that when you're arguing with your now ex-girlfriend, you are often distracted by the hot flush of her cheeks? Of course I know you are, because you never felt the light touch of my deft monkey paw.”

“All the money is gone.” It was.

“I hardly think that seven dollars is something to quibble over when one has been reunited with his wallet.” He snapped the hatbox's latch closed and flipped on the television. Over the news anchor's shoulder was a file picture of Giuseppe in his fez and fringed jacket, squeezing his accordion. In the picture, the monkey perched on his shoulder, grinning and clapping.

The monkey looked at the TV. “Did you know,” he said, “that when an animal shows its teeth, that's a sign of aggression? For some reason you people take it as smiling.”

The dog worked into a growl. The monkey shushed him, flashing the back of his paw. He removed a small steno-style notebook and pencil from the hatbox, licked the pencil tip, and jotted a few things down. As the news bulletin ended, the monkey underlined the last bit of his entry and snapped the notebook shut before turning to face me.

“I want to prepare you for a couple of things,” he said, a replica of concern crossing his simian face. “Thing the first is that it's possible, nay, probable, check that, definite, that Constance has already moved on from the relationship.”

“And the second?”

“The second is that you may be a suspect in Giuseppe's death, given that your thumbprint is on his throat and he did indeed die of strangulation.”

I started to speak, but the monkey placed his long, bony finger across my lips.

“She is a beauty, for sure, but she is not right for you.” He took his finger from my lips and poked the roll of flab at my waist. “Look at this,” he said. “Should she be subjected to that? And this,” he said, turning me to face the hall mirror. “Seriously, it's important that you stick to your own kind, your own level.”

“I didn't kill Giuseppe,” I said.

“That's good,” he said. “Go with that. Very convincing. Now, let's go clear your name.”

“Why do you care?”

“I am but a simple monkey who exists to serve my humankind brethren as I have done for all my days, but also, from your wallet, I noticed that you are a midlevel supervisor at a shipping company, which will come in handy when it's time for you to express your gratitude for not going to jail for the rest of your life. Now, let's get going, because any second the cops are going to show up and ask questions you can't answer, which is going to make you look really suspicious, and if you're locked up, you're never going to be able to prove yourself innocent.”

“But I
am
innocent,” I told the monkey.

“Don't overdo it,” the monkey said. “It'll get stale.” The monkey hitched his thumbs under his rainbow suspenders and hoisted his cutoffs above his jutting hip bones. “And leave the creature here,” he said, pointing at the dog. “I don't know how you can stand the smell.”

As I pulled my coat off the rack, the monkey clambered up my leg to the top of the stand and grabbed a baseball hat that he jammed onto my head and low over my eyes. “We don't need anyone recognizing you,” he said.

I opened the door and the monkey craned his head through the opening for a couple seconds. “Follow,” he said.

And I did. What can I say? He was a very persuasive monkey.

In the car, driving the tollway, I scanned for police heading the other way. The monkey sat boosted on the hatbox and fingered the cheap plastic beads dangling from the review, baubles showered on Constance for flashing her breasts at a street fair.

“These are nice,” the monkey said before letting go the beads and placing his paw on my leg.

I never particularly liked displaying them there, given how they were procured, but Constance insisted, saying I shouldn't be jealous since I was the only one who got to do more than just look.

Or not, if this monkey was right.

As we approached the tollbooth, I fished in the ashtray for the appropriate change, but the monkey grabbed my hand, then stood briefly and from the hatbox pulled a metal slug with a string tied through the hole. I rolled down the window, the monkey fired the slug into the basket, waited momentarily, then yo-yoed the slug back into his paw.

The light flashed green, the toll gate rose, and the monkey gave me a look that said, “What are you waiting for?”

We pulled slowly through. I looked around, but nobody said a word. We accelerated back to speed.

This monkey was creeping me out. He was obviously some kind of con monkey, but on the other hand, he'd been right about more than a couple of things. I'd never been entirely sure that Constance felt about me the way I felt about her, which was a kind of soul ache, a desperate helplessness every time I thought about her. When I would mention things like cohabitation, even marriage, she would laugh, not a mean laugh, necessarily, but her teeth would flash and there would be something in her eyes asking if I was kidding, implying that I was only temporary, that an attempt to move closer would push her further away like two magnets turned to the same poles.

I had a test of my love for Constance. When she was not there, I would sit on my couch and turn on the cable news and wait for the first report of a tragedy (it usually didn't take long), a plane crash in Phuket, an overturned trawler in the Bering Sea, brushfires, E. coli, West Nile, car bomb, falling into the polar bear enclosure at the zoo, what have you, and I would imagine it was Constance on that plane or ship, or hospital bed, or hanging from a polar bear's jaws being dragged, unconscious and limp, into its den, and as I imagined this, her face pained and confused, her body battered, I would search my feelings and feel only devastation. I would literally wish to trade places with her, at the bottom of icy ocean, or in a million bloody pieces spread across a road, or again, what have you, and in those moments I knew for sure that what I felt for Constance had to be love.

Once, after we had made love, I had turned to Constance and stroked her sweat-matted hair out of her eyes and asked what she would do if I died and she said, “I'm sleepy.”

* * *

“You know, of course,” the monkey said, “that you and I share 98 percent of our genetic material.”

“I guess so.”

“Ninety-eight percent!” he practically shouted. “That precious dog of yours, 60, 65 percent tops, yet he is treated like royalty. You and me, we're almost the same, virtually identical, and look what you do to us? You keep us in cages. You rub cosmetics on our skin to see if we break out in welts. You inject us with medicines to see if our hearts explode or our kidneys shrivel or our stomachs ulcer. You enclose us in plexi-glas and give us ropes to swing on and a deflated soccer ball to kick around and you watch and point and giggle as we make sweet monkey love to each other, and yet you wonder why we fling our poop back at you and screech and beat our chests. You strap tiny cymbals on our paws and demand that we clap along with your stupid three songs, all of which are in goddamn waltz time and for that we are fed cat food and sleep in a drawer. Can you imagine the rage? Can you?”

I could see that the organ-grinder's monkey was not observing safety protocol and wearing his seatbelt. He was standing excitedly on the hatbox and banging his little fist against the dash to punctuate his words. I eased my foot deeper into the gas pedal and pictured throwing on the brake and watching his body launch through my windshield, a monkey missile that I might or might not drive over as I passed.

“Don't do it,” the monkey said.

“What?”

“What you're thinking; don't do it.”

“I'm not thinking anything.”

The monkey idly scratched his wrinkled ballsack through the leg of his cutoff shorts. He looked at me intently, batting his long monkey lashes. “Don't fucking do it,” he said. “Don't even think it. You
need
me.”

He sat back down on the hatbox and for a while we were both silent, until he raised his arm and pointed.

“Look, up there, in the distance,” the monkey said. “Look at how narrow the road is, like a sliver could not slide through, yet, as I approach, it widens, opening itself to me.”

The monkey gripped my hand as we walked toward our historic downtown. “Look both ways,” he said as we crossed the street. Ours is a good downtown, clean, gentrified but still charming, cobblestone streets and gas lighting mixed with shiny boutiques and restaurants with white tablecloths. Our steel drummers and Pan flautists and organ grinders are licensed and bonded, and apparent stranglings are not even a semi-regular occurrence. As we neared the center square I could see orange cones with yellow tape stretched between them cordoning off the area where Giuseppe was found, his usual spot. A group of people knotted at the scene, sharing shrugs. I started to walk toward them, but the monkey tugged me away.

“You don't want to return to the scene of the crime,” he said. “Very suspicious.”

“But I wasn't there to begin with.”

“Once again, I remind you of the thumbprint, not to mention the slip of paper in his back pocket with your address and phone number on it. Clearly you two had a connection. Now you need some money. Thank God you got your wallet back.”

The monkey tugged me over to a street ATM and gestured toward the screen. The machine sucked my card inside, and I blocked the monkey from the keyboard as I punched in my code, but as I glanced over my shoulder I saw that he wasn't even looking at me and instead scanned the street, lightly hopping from one foot to the other.

“Hey,” the monkey said as I slipped the money into my wallet and reclaimed my card. “I bet I can tell you where you got your shoes at.”

I looked down at my shoes, nondescript brown loafers, bought at Constance's insistence that I, for once, spend more than thirty dollars on shoes. I remembered the day, her squeezing my arm in encouragement as I flipped my credit card across the counter. They were great shoes, comfortable. Durable. Swedish. Available just about anywhere.

I'm not stupid. I was suspicious. “How could you possibly know where I got my shoes?”

“I just do.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Do you not believe me two hundred bucks' worth?”

I was already out seven bucks and a potential murder rap to this monkey. I was Constanceless. What else was there to lose, other than a couple hundred bucks? “You're on,” I said.

“You got them on your feet,” he said.

“What?”

“Your feet—you got them on your feet.”

“I don't get it,” I said.

The monkey cupped his elbow in one hand and used the other to massage his temple. “I said, ‘I bet I can tell you where you got your shoes at,' and you said, ‘You're on,' for two hundred bucks, no less, and I said, ‘You got them on your feet,' which is 100 percent true, which means you owe me the double c-note.”

I'd had just about enough of this monkey. “That's stupid, and I'm not paying.”

“Too late,” the monkey said, snapping his fingers and flashing a roll of twenties. I pulled out my wallet and looked inside. All the money I'd withdrawn from the ATM was gone. “That was three hundred.”

“Interest,” the monkey said, grabbing my arm and once again tugging me down the street toward wherever we were going next.

“Now,” he said, speaking as we walked, or rather I walked and he waddled along next to me, bowlegged, shambling. “This next part is going to be hard for you, but it's a sort of bad news, good news thing and I've really already told you the bad news.”

“Which part was that?”

“The part that Constance is not right for you and that she's already moved on to someone else. That's true, and you're about to be confronted with incontrovertible evidence of it, which will likely be painful because you humans are irrational creatures who hold onto beliefs despite all signs to the contrary. The irrational belief in this instance being that Constance might have ever loved you, just in case I'm not being clear.”

I was getting pretty fucking tired of this monkey. This was a seriously annoying monkey. I understood that pound for pound, monkeys are many times stronger than human beings, but as he shuffled beside me, in my hand, he felt weightless, like with a single movement I could spin like a discus thrower and hurl him far, far away. “What's the good news?” I said.