Different Dreams (24 page)

“But that's not the best part of the idea. The best part is this: With the monkeys in a smaller area, it would be more feasible to turn the sanctuary into a tourist attraction. We could just build some viewing platforms with telescopes on the edge of the sanctuary, and tourists could watch without disturbing the troop. The troop could be self-supporting with that and the grants. And I'd keep writing the grant proposals so you . . .”

“Sounds good,” Cam finally put in.

“Okay,” Malou replied, still charging ahead too rapidly to stop and really listen, “maybe you don't like having a monkey sanctuary named after you. We could call it the South Texas Sanctuary or . . . What did you say?”

“I said it sounds good to me.”

“You like the idea?”

“Wasn't I supposed to?”

“Well, yes, of course, but I thought you'd be more, well, resistant.”

“Why? It's a good solution. Obvious once it's been presented. But then, most of the best solutions do seem obvious once someone's thought of them.”

“You like the idea,” Malou muttered, stunned with happiness.

“Don't act so surprised,” Cam chuckled. “Although you seem not to believe me, I always work for deals where there are no losers and no tears.”

Malou winced at the reminder of the cruelly misguided charges she had hurled at Cam the day before. He saw the cloud gathering over her sunny joy, and he tapped the end of her nose. “Hey, just one thing.”

She looked up at him.

“Don't think I'm developing any late-blooming affection for those furry nuisances. It's just that, when it floods, monkeys are so much better at climbing trees than cows are. With that in mind, you've got yourself a
deal. Now kiss me, or every one of the sorry beasts goes on the block.”

Malou was preparing to do just that when, her relief clouding her judgment, she made one final remark. “I just knew you couldn't have done it.”

Cam halted. “Done what, my lovely?”

“Oh, it doesn't matter anymore. None of it matters. Everything is solved and you're beside me and nothing else matters.”

“But what is it that doesn't matter? That I couldn't have done?”

He'd stopped bending toward her and was leaning back now, set on finding out what it was that Malou suddenly seemed so nervous about.

“Oh, Cam, just forget I ever said anything.”

“Malou, if you'll recall, there are already quite a few things I've made myself forget you ever said. I don't feel like adding another one to a list that's already too long, so tell me what it is you think I couldn't have done.”

Surely he must have already guessed at her suspicions, Malou told herself. Though she was loath to bring up the subject again, perhaps now was the time to have done with it once and for all. Her voice was small and tentative when she spoke. “Poisoned the monkeys. I knew in my heart that you never would have ordered that. It was Ernie who kept badgering me about it; then it turned out he was the scoundrel all along.”

Cam's look of disbelief told Malou a tale that she did not want to know. “You thought
I
poisoned those monkeys?”

“Not really,” Malou protested. “Not deep down inside. Anyway, it was Jorge who Ernie kept saying had done it.”

“And you believed him?” His voice was scoured clean of all emotion except astonishment.

“Well, there were certain things that had me wondering. Like you knowing what coyotillo was. And our first morning here when Jorge came and told you, ‘Everything is done as you ordered,' and then you hurried him outside so quickly that it seemed like you had things to say to him that you didn't want me to overhear.”

Cam's mouth dropped in amazement. “What I didn't want was for Jorge to see you bedded down here with his
patrón
. In his culture the judgments are harsh for a woman who spends the night with a man she's not married to. I wanted to shield you from that. And the ‘everything' I'd ordered done were some repairs that he'd told me about over the phone. What other things had you wondering?” A new harshness was entering his voice as the shock wore off.

A sick feeling was welling up in Malou's stomach, but there was no way out of the trap she'd laid for herself except to keep going straight ahead.

“Just you, and my misunderstanding of who you are.
To me you seemed like a man who would do anything to get what he wanted. You even said as much to me.”

“Malou, did you and dear old Ernie ever stop to consider that if what I'd wanted was no monkeys, I could have cleared them off my land with a phone call and made money in the process? Why on earth would I have to send Jorge in the dark of night to poison the creatures?”

“I told you it was stupid,” Malou admitted. “But you reacted so violently when I threatened to call in the press, and then Ernie had a theory that you wanted to neutralize any bad press you might get from selling off the troop, so you tried to show that they were dying off in the wild.”

Cam looked at Malou as if she'd turned into a stranger before his eyes. He sat up, backed away from her, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. The gulf between them had opened again. When he spoke, his eyes were fixed on the wall in front of him. “Believing what you did about me, Malou, how could you have let me touch you? Love you? How?”

A thousand protests sprang up in Malou's heart, but they were all stopped dead by the lump in her throat caused by the grim finality of Cam's question. He had asked it like a man for whom no answer would suffice.

“What kind of man do you really think I am? Yes, I like to win. But what is a victory worth if it has to be won
with the kind of sleaze you suspected me of?” Now anger began to seep into his tone. “You ivory-tower types,” he lashed out, standing to hurriedly pull on his pants. “You think you've cornered the market on ethics and that anyone who sullies himself by actually working in the real world of business would stoop to anything to get ahead.” He jerked on his shirt. “Wrong, Malou. Fundamentally incorrect assumption.” He drove his feet into his shoes without bothering with socks and started for the door.

Pausing there, he pounded his fist against the frame and said, without looking back, “You'll still have your sanctuary, and I'd like you to stay on at least long enough to supervise the transfer. After that, what you do is up to you. Just one thing—all communication between us will be through my receptionist. Call her and leave messages if you need to get in touch with me and I'll have her convey all my instructions to you.”

“Cam, no, don't . . .” But he was gone before Malou's tear-blurred words could reach him.

The tears dried shortly after that when the numb fog set back in just as if it had never lifted. Only now it was worse. Now Malou had this short, sharp memory of ecstasy waiting to lance her whenever she stumbled across it in the fog.

T
he day of the transfer
dawned with white heat already shimmering across the land. Everything had worked out just as Malou had predicted it would. The land had sold quickly and Cam had met his financial deadlines with enough left over to get the sanctuary under way. Or that, at any rate, was what his receptionist had reported to Malou. The woman had also conveyed Mr. Landell's wishes that Malou supervise the relocation and that she handle it in whatever way she deemed most expedient.

“In other words, don't bother him with the details,” Malou had translated the instructions.

“I think that's about what it comes down to,” the secretary had agreed.

Those instructions had taken a month to translate further into reality. Working with Jorge and a crew of laborers, she'd first fenced in the sanctuary and dug out a
wide spot in the creek for a swimming pond for the monkeys. Small sparks of something as close to excitement as she was able to muster glowed in Malou as she surveyed the new compound. The troop would be so much happier in this new home with its tall, sturdy trees for them to scramble up and down and the cool creek meandering through it.

Back at the old compound she oversaw the building of several large, wire-screened enclosures. When they were finished, she baited each one with a cache of peanuts and apples. Then the wait began.

For the first few days the apples merely withered in the heat and the peanuts went untouched. Then, as Malou knew they would, the adventurous juveniles were the first to venture into the foreign structures, darting in to snatch a peanut or a chunk of apple, then scurrying back outside with it. But gradually, as they learned that nothing terrible waited for them inside the structures, they began to linger, squatting on their haunches to finish off a few peanuts before making off with an apple chunk.

The higher-ranking males, with Sumo at the lead, were the next to dare entry. After a cautious entrance, they grew bold and claimed the privileges of their rank, swatting the youngsters away from the apple chunks and appropriating all the choice bits for themselves. Once they were comfortably ensconced, even the females with babies took to frequenting the strange new places to grab
off the windfall snacks. But always, for those first few weeks, the door was left wide-open for the timid to race in and out of. After a while, even the most wary became accustomed to the new buildings and took to staying inside beneath their shade for longer and longer periods.

But it was Kojiwa that Malou watched, just as she'd been watching him since that first night when she'd returned him to the troop. Concern for him was what had finally given her the strength to drag herself from the bed in the stone cottage, where Cam had left her, and to stumble back to Los Monos. The old monkey had been in better shape that night than she had, and over the weeks that followed, he had managed to gain strength and energy until he now seemed fitter than he had in years.

But the wily patriarch had not survived these many years without learning some hard lessons about caution. Lessons that had recently been vividly refreshed by the disguised bitterness of those bright, honeyed berries. Of all the troop, Kojiwa was the last to succumb to the temptation of the piles of treats within the walls of wire. On the day that Malou saw him amble into an enclosure, she knew that the transfer would be a success. Quickly she arranged for her mentor at the university, Professor Everitt, to bring a dozen of his best primatology students down to Los Monos to help on the day of the relocation.

And now that day was here. From across the field, she saw Jorge riding up on his chestnut mare. He tethered
the horse beside a water tank and came up to the station, where Malou was standing at the door.

“Buenos días,”
he called to her.

“Hola,”
she answered back.

Malou wondered how she could ever have thought Jorge menacing. Over the past few weeks, as they'd worked side by side stringing fence lines and hammering chicken wire into place, she'd seen what a warm, good-hearted man he was beneath a thin layer of reserve and natural shyness. He'd even managed to develop some late-blooming affection for the monkeys and to teach her some Spanish, like the word for “smile,” which he felt she didn't do nearly enough of late.

And so, this morning, she tacked one on her face as she answered his greeting. As it had been for the past month, however, the act of turning up the corners of her mouth seemed to require an inordinate amount of energy.

Together they hauled out baskets of apples and peanuts and dumped them in the wire enclosures. Monkeys habituated now to the morning snacks scrambled in from all across the field. Kojiwa was the last. When he'd finally entered, Malou did what she had not done in all the long weeks of waiting: She shut the door and the enclosure became a cage. The monkeys continued munching away on the day's extraordinary largess. Once Malou was sure that the monkeys were contentedly feeding, she and Jorge moved on to bait and then close up two other
enclosures set up to lure the peripheral males from the outskirts.

They were just finishing and the confined monkeys were just beginning to grow restless when Professor Everitt pulled up leading a convoy of pickup trucks. The students piled out, eager for the experience that lay ahead. Malou led them to the enclosures and pointed out the feature she and Jorge had built onto each one: a small section off to one side that monkeys could be admitted to one at a time.

Trained by Professor Everitt, the students skillfully let the first monkey, a scrappy juvenile, into the little room. After a chase made short and harmless by the limited space, the little fellow was tranquilized, weighed, measured, and gently set in the back of a pickup. The trucks filled quickly with dozing monkeys, who were then shuttled over and set free in their new home. Malou went with the first truck of drugged monkeys to oversee their release.

She was glad that Sumo had been among the first group transferred. With their leader to guide them, she was sure that the other monkeys would adapt swiftly to this new paradise she had carved out for them. As she waited for Sumo and the dozen monkeys with him to come around, a tiny thought of the variety she was always on her guard against assailed her. She wished that Cam could see her. Could see how competently she was
handling everything. Could see the wonderful new home she'd created for the monkeys here, just beyond the stone cabin. Could . . . But then the wishes took an even more dangerous turn toward thoughts of sheltering arms wrapped around her, pulling her from the awful loneliness that she had only come to know for the first time in the last month. A loneliness that her work alone could no longer fill.

She drove her straying thoughts back to the macaques. Sumo and a couple of the others were groggily trying to get to their feet. They had been put down near the creek on a spot that was thickly carpeted with grass and shaded by a spreading oak. A tiny thrum of excitement went through Malou as she imagined their happy frolics once they awoke fully in this wonderland.