“She’s so mean,” said Patrick in a choked voice. “I thought she was nice at first. She laughed at me!”
“I know,” said Father Souza. “But you have to learn—”
There was a shimmer in the air. All the leaves in the rectory garden fluttered, the big, glossy leaves of ivy and acanthus, the red leaves of ornamental plum, the broad and pointed maple leaves. There was a gust of heat; there was a wave of overpowering smell, like a banana-scented car freshener overlaid with crushed and steaming vegetation, and a certain mammal stench.
They burst out of the ivy like brown cannon balls, screaming.
“Monkeys!” yelled Patrick in delight. “Get her, monkeys!”
But they were already racing across the asphalt toward Ms. Washburn, two dozen howling monkeys, with pink-rimmed fuzzy ears and streaming, curly tails, like Curious George on crack, beating the ground with their knuckles as they came, baring their fangs. Behind him Father Souza heard thumps and the swaying of tree branches. Black hairy bodies hurtled past him, chimpanzees as real as any on an
Animal Planet
special. They, too, converged on Ms. Washburn, shrieking threats.
“Holy God,” cried Father Souza. “Get into your car! Get in and lock the door, Ms. Washburn!”
She lifted her head and looked out at him, across the advancing tide of simian rage. “I beg your pardon?” she said coldly.
“Look out for the damn monkeys!” shouted Father Souza, leaping to his feet.
“What monkeys?” she said, just as they reached her.
He braced himself, expecting to see her torn apart; but she made a negligent gesture with the hand holding her car keys, and the sharp silver keys glittered in the afternoon light, and the foremost monkeys in the pack burst like bubbles, vanishing without a trace. The others pulled back angrily and swarmed around to either side, circling, and some produced cocoanuts from thin air and hurled them at the Volvo. Its windows began to crack and star, but Ms. Washburn didn’t seem to notice.
“Come on, monkeys!” ordered Patrick, leaping up and down. From the shadows under the big eucalyptus trees vaulted baboons, with long, gray bodies like jungle wolves and hideous red and blue muzzles, and white manes, and long, white teeth. They roared forward in a second assault, but Ms. Washburn looked right through them. By this time the chimpanzees had found something else to throw at her car, and it splatted and stank, but nothing seemed to touch her.
“Ms. Washburn, for God’s sake!” Father Souza started down the steps to her, his heart in his mouth. The first of the baboons to reach her vanished in midleap, though foam from its jaws flecked her dress. “Don’t you see them?”
“There are no monkeys,” she said, raising her handful of keys. The little monkeys cowered back and then sprang again, hooting, beating her car with bananas, and the baboons bit savagely at its tires. With a hiss, the left rear tire flattened.
“Yes, there are!” shouted Patrick gleefully, as ten silverback gorillas pushed up out of the cracks in the asphalt, throwing flat chunks of it aside like tombstones, and lumbered forward. They stood upright, rocked from hind foot to hind foot and beat their chests, grunting menace. One after another they worked themselves into frenzies and rushed Ms. Washburn, who stood her ground and stared through them defiantly.
She refused to acknowledge when they veered away at the last possible moment, merely gripped her bright keys. Her unbelief was a silver helmet, her refusal an Aegis. Three of them exploded into powder, but the others attacked the poor Volvo. They put their fists through the windows, they leaped up and down on the roof.
“Go, monkeys, go!” said Patrick, running forward. Father Souza ran after him and pulled him back.
“Patrick, you have to make them stop—” he said, just as a roar shook the earth. He looked around and saw nothing new emerging from the bushes, from anywhere in the parking lot; then something moved at the edge of his vision and he tilted his head back to see—
“Oh, no,” he murmured. Patrick looked up and fell silent, cowering against him.
For something black was lifting itself above the hilltop behind them. A monstrous face moved jerkily up from the reservoir fence, stared down with living eyes out of what was patently so much rabbit fur and rubber skin, but it was still Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World, and it was
ten stories tall
. Its grunts sent gusts of hot wind rushing down the long grass. Up and over the hill it came, moving unevenly but with appalling speed, trampling everything in its path, making straight for Ms. Washburn.
Ms. Washburn turned pale, but did not flinch. She raised her little fistful of keys. “There are no monkeys,” she repeated.
Over the past thirty seconds Father Souza had felt something growing in him, inappropriate joy mingled with entirely appropriate terror mingled with something else, something he couldn’t quite put a name to but which seemed obvious, something that burned through him and lit him up like neon.
These events are only as real as we make them.
He saw the boy, brilliant innocent of terrifying faith; he saw Ms. Washburn in all her harsh bravery and steely resolve. Monkeys who could envision a heaven full of glorious divinity, or a crystalline rational universe of ice and stars. Wonderful monkeys! Who could have made such creatures?
“Enough,” he said, in a voice not his own, and a blast of blue-white light and shockwave force moved out from him at high speed. It caught the little generic monkeys and blew them into oblivion like so many autumn leaves. The chimpanzees, the baboons and gorillas puffed out like smoke; and Kong itself became no more than a towering shadow, before dropping in a rain of black sand across the parking lot.
“Dude,” said Patrick, awed.
Father Souza looked at himself in disbelief. Little residual white flames were running down him like water, sinking into him as though he were so much spiritual blotting paper.
Only as real as we make them.
“Ms. Washburn, can I call you a tow truck?” he heard himself saying.
“No, thank you,” she replied, in a voice nearly as firm as was her accustomed wont. “Why would I need one?”
He looked up and watched as she got into her car. She ignored the broken glass and the fact that she had to crouch forward because the roof had been so badly dented. The engine started up and the Volvo limped away on three wheels, shedding cocoanuts and banana peels as it went. Ms. Washburn did not look back.
Real as we make them.
“That was
so
cool,” said Patrick. “Except, um, King Kong. He was too scary. But, see? You can, too, do spells. I would have stopped him myself, except he was so big. When I get my superpowers, though, it’ll be different.”
Father Souza stretched his shoulders, rolled his neck, felt all the little stresses and tensions of years of everyday life melting away.
“You know,” he said, “you’re going to have to swear to use your powers for good, right?”
“Okay,” said Patrick happily. “Does this mean I don’t have to take catechism classes anymore?”
“Oh, no way.” Father Souza leaned down and grinned, putting a hand on his shoulder. “They’re more important than ever, now.” His grin widened. “You belong to God, Patrick.”
“Okay,” said Patrick, grinning back. “I can pretend I’m taking secret ninja lessons, all right?”
A car rounded the corner and came up the hill into the parking lot. Mrs. Avila waved and honked the car’s horn, steering around the potholes left by the gorillas. Patrick ran to her and climbed into the car.
“Was he good?” Mrs. Avila called.
Father Souza smiled and nodded. He waved after them as they drove away down the hill. Then he went inside to have a long talk with the Almighty.
The town had seen better days.
Its best year had probably been 1906, when displaced San Franciscans, fleeing south to find slightly less unstable real estate, discovered a bit of undeveloped coastline an inconvenient distance from the nearest train station.
No tracks ran past Nunas Beach. There wasn’t even a road to its golden sand dunes, and what few locals there were didn’t know why. There were rumors of long-ago pirates. There was a story that the fathers from the local mission had forbidden their parishioners to go there, back in the days of Spanish rule.
Enterprising Yankee developers laughed and built a road, and laid out lots for three little beach towns, and sold them like hotcakes. Two of the towns vanished like hotcakes at a Grange Breakfast, too; one was buried in a sandstorm and the other washed out to sea during the first winter flood.
But Nunas Beach remained, somehow, and for a brief season there were ice cream parlors and photographers’ studios, clam stands, Ferris wheels, drug stores and holiday cottages. Then, for no single reason, people began to leave. Some of the shops burned down; some of the cottages dwindled into shanties. Willow thickets and sand encroached on the edges. What was left rusted where it stood, with sand drifting along its three streets, yet somehow did not die.
People found their way there, now and then, especially after the wars. It was a cheap place to lie in the sun while your wounds healed and your shell-shock faded away. Some people stayed.
Pegasus Bright, who had had both his legs blown off by a land mine, had stayed, and opened the Chowder Palace. He was unpleasant when he drank and, for that matter, when he didn’t, but he could cook. The Chowder Palace was a long, low place on a street corner. It wasn’t well lit, its linoleum tiles were cracked and grubby, its windows dim with grease. Still, it was the only restaurant in town. Therefore all the locals ate at the Chowder Palace, and so, too, did those few vacationers who came to Nunas Beach.
Mr. Bright bullied a staff of illegal immigrants who worked for him as waiters and busboys; at closing time they faded like ghosts back to homeless camps in the willow thickets behind the dunes, and he rolled himself back to his cot in the rear of the Palace, and slept with a tire iron under his pillow.
One Monday morning the regulars were lined up on the row of stools at the counter, and Mr. Bright was pushing himself along the row topping up their mugs of coffee, when Charlie Cansanary said:
“I hear somebody’s bought the Hi-Ho Lounge.”
“No they ain’t, you stupid bastard,” said Mr. Bright. He disliked Charlie because Charlie had lost his right leg to a shark while surfing, instead of in service to his country.
“That’s what I heard too,” said Tom Avila, who was the town’s mayor.
“Why would anybody buy that place?” demanded Mr. Bright. “
Look
at it!”
They all swiveled on their stools and looked out the window at the Hi-Ho Lounge, which sat right across the street on the opposite corner. It was a windowless stucco place painted gray, with martini glasses picked out in mosaic tile on either side of the blind slab of a door. On the roof was a rusting neon sign portraying another martini glass whose neon olive had once glowed like a green star against the sunset. But not in years; the Hi-Ho Lounge had never been open in living memory.
“Maybe somebody wants to open a bar,” said Leon Silva, wiping egg yolk out of his mustache. “It might be kind of nice to have a place to drink.”
“You can get drinks here,” said Mr. Bright quickly, stung.
“Yeah, but I mean legally. And in glasses and all,” said Leon.
“Well, if you want to go to
those
kinds of places and spend an arm and a leg—” said Mr. Bright contemptuously, and then stopped himself, for Leon, having had an accident on a fishing trawler, only had one arm. Since he’d lost it while earning a paycheck rather than in pursuit of frivolous sport, however, he was less a target for Mr. Bright’s scorn. Mr. Bright continued: “Anyway it’ll never happen. Who’s going to buy an old firetrap like that place?”
“Those guys,” said Charlie smugly, pointing to the pair of business-suited men who had just stepped out of a new car and were standing on the sidewalk in front of the Hi-Ho Lounge.
Mr. Bright set down the coffee pot. Scowling, he wheeled himself from behind the counter and up to the window.
“Developers,” he said. He watched as they walked around the Hi-Ho Lounge, talking to each other and shaking their heads. One took a key from an envelope and tried it in the padlock on the front door; the lock was a chunk of rust, however, and after a few minutes he drew back and shook his head.
“You ain’t never getting in that way, buddy,” said Tom. “You don’t know beach winters.”
The developer went back to his car and, opening the trunk, took out a hammer. He struck ineffectually at the lock.
“Look at the sissy way he’s doing it,” jeered Mr. Bright. “Hit it
hard
, you dumb son of a bitch.”
The padlock broke, however, and the chain dropped; it took three kicks to get the door open, to reveal inky blackness beyond. The developers stood looking in, uncertain. The spectators in the Chowder Palace all shuddered.
“There has got to be serious mildew in there,” said Charlie.
“And pipes rusted all to hell and gone,” said Mr. Bright, with a certain satisfaction. “Good luck, suckers.”
But the developers seemed to have luck. They certainly had money.
Work crews with protective masks came and stripped out the inside of the Hi-Ho Lounge. There were enough rusting fixtures to fill a dumpster; there were ancient red vinyl banquettes, so blackened with mold they looked charred, and clumped rats’ nests of horsehair and cotton batting spilled from their entrails.
When the inside had been thoroughly gutted, the outside was tackled. The ancient stucco cracked away to reveal a surprise: graceful arched windows all along both street walls, and a shell-shaped fanlight over the front door. Stripped to its framing, the place had a promise of airy charm.
Mr. Bright watched from behind the counter of the Chowder Palace, and wondered if there was any way he could sue the developers. No excuses presented themselves, however. He waited for rats to stream from their disturbed havens and attack his customers; none came. When the workmen went up on ladders and pried off the old HI-HO LOUNGE sign from the roof, he was disappointed, for no one fell through the rotting lath, nor did sharp edges of rusted tin cut through any workmen’s arteries, and they managed to get the sign down to the sidewalk without dropping it on any passers-by. Worse; they left the neon martini glass up there.