New World Monkeys (10 page)

“And you were impressed with my technique in the stacks? Unimpressed?” Lloyd gestures to the building.

“Yes.”

“Which is it? A critical analysis, please.”

“The heart was there,” Lily says and pinches the cigarette to death against the lip of the fountain. “But your approach could use some work. You know, I saw you the other day. Coming out of the women’s bathroom.” She remembers his thumbs-up—as though she had been sitting there to field prospects for him or to keep watch.

“An old trick.” He nods. “This might surprise you, Lily, but I’ve been a deviant my entire life.” Lloyd stands up, paces a bit. “I change locations, for sure. Same way a man of the earth approaches his hundred acres. You leave the ground idle one season and it’ll turn up lush wheat the next. Haven’t come around the Osterhagen library since the late nineties. And, Christ, the place is crawling!” He looks through the gate toward the main
building, licking his lips as though they were trimmed with honey. “Bad school girls in uniform. Just like MTV.”

Lily smirks. “You think they’re bad because they roll up their skirts?”

Lloyd stops his shuffle. “You underestimate me. But whatever, I understand.” He tucks his cigarettes into a shirt pocket. “It’s summer, right?”

“Barely the cusp of June.”

“School’s out for the good kids. So who gets stuck behind in summer school?”

The question’s rhetorical, she doesn’t answer.

“Bad girls—that’s who. Bad girls just begging for it.”

“Girls like teenage boys.”

Lloyd looks around the courtyard, holds up his fat hands. “Do you see any teenage boys? There are no teenage boys at Our Lady of the Apparition, okay? I’m just going to have to do.” He lowers his voice. “Look, I’m not saying I’m the best out there. There are guys who could perv me under the table, I admit. But if you don’t have a skill to improve, what do you have?”

Lily fakes a yawn. “My husband says all dialogue should lead somewhere.”

Lloyd pats his back pockets now, takes out a stick of gum. “Husband? Really?”

“One and only.”

“I would have guessed
girlfriend.”

She stands, flattens the creases across her thighs a bit too violently.

“Sometimes I get a sense, is all.” He waves the butt of his palm. “Christ, you got some story to tell me, huh?”

She looks at him, tries to make sense of his shrewd eyes and baby fat and the blotch of sweat the size of a tortilla beneath each arm.

“I don’t even know you.”

“Hey, this isn’t Butch Cassidy and Sundance, okay? This isn’t a lifelong friendship—just tell me your shit if it makes you feel better.”

“What makes you think I’ve got shit?” Lily tries to uncrank the machine of her jaw.

“You’re uptight. Don’t get offended, but you’re going to explode.” Lloyd glances back toward the cloister gate. One of the circulation desk workers walks out of the building, lighting a cigarette. She nods at Lily, turns an eye over the lumped edge of Lloyd.

“I’m supposed to trust you?” For some reason, Lily flashes on the bone that has been secreted in the cellar.

“Oh, no, you can’t trust me. I am the scorpion.”

H
e wills her home through the afternoon, drawing long strides around the sunroom, imposing pace and measure on her return. It’s because he really wants to dig. Duncan rubs at his eyes; the heat in the house reminds him of hotboxing in his ’82 Datsun. Outside, a hoot that he thinks sounds like an owl, a bark that he knows for sure is a dog.

This is about slapping your ass, Lily.
He sits in front of his computer, starts pecking into the dialogue slug of a TV template.
I’m not saying that I liked it, but I’m not going to say that I didn’t like it. Maybe I’m a spanker at heart, maybe I’ve started swinging from the trees.

When had Lily changed? In the first days he knew her she seemed so alone—as though she’d sprung to earth fully formed or had somehow raised herself. He found the idea incredibly attractive; here was a shadow-less creature that he’d discovered for himself. Once she gave herself to him, the idea became complete. She was smart in a way that he wasn’t, he was creative in a way that she could never be. He had come down the hard road of experience and she roosted under his knowledge. What looked like a charmed life from without was really a great, churning machine of mutual awe. It was not so long ago that they could go entire days with the blinds drawn against everything.

These days, however, he suspects if he opened her chest he’d find the hum of a carburetor, a twin-valve engine. The night after his talk with
Anne he’d confided in Lily, hoping that she would accept the intimate offering of his vulnerability. “They’re setting me up for failure,” he’d said. If he was sacked now, the futility of his career would become apparent. Five years of writing snappy headlines, bones without dangling meat, left Duncan with the impression he’d been living against his fate.

“They’re clearing out Hawke’s regime,” he told her.

“Of which you are a decorated officer.”

“I should have left five years ago when I was hot.”

Lily was reading the paper, her face firmly in the arts section. “So what, you feared the unknown?”

“They’re calling the account Stand and Be Slaughtered. And now it’s mine. Basically, this is the kiss of death.”

Lily hadn’t exactly laughed, but he detected an explicit mirth in her voice that called to mind shaking all his loose coins into Leetower’s coffee filter collection. He immediately regretted confessing these fears to her.

“‘Kiss of death’ suggests betrayal, Duncan.” She looked at him over a folded corner of paper. “Who exactly is your horse-faced Judas?”

He hadn’t answered, he’d said too much. Although he suspected Lily knew exactly who the culprit was: it had been five years since he’d hit gold. Between then and now a breadth of years and nothing.

There’s just no way, he thinks, standing in front of the cold fireplace. The Lily he has now can’t be the same one he started with. Which begs the question: Which is his real wife? He’d like to think that it’s the one he married, but there
is
evidence to suggest the contrary. Her behavior around the Crusaders, for instance. As it happened, Lily did not raise herself. In fact, the idea of her parents fascinated Duncan; her father a coffee importer, her mother a Catholic missionary. They met under the shade of an Ecuadorian banana tree and joined forces to strip the natives of both coffee bean and soul. Independently, each had a justifiable ambition: profit and Jesus. Who could lay blame on either? It was Corporate America and Lily stood to inherit not only a great bundle of cash, but also life everlasting. Her parents were iconic apart. But together they were a marching
contradiction. Duncan saw the potential in this situation and even sketched an outline for a screenplay. Lily hadn’t liked the idea. Not at all. Around the wealthy zealots, she toughened, became android leather. Wore things with buttoned collars.

Duncan thinks about the femur in the garden. Sure, Osterhagen’s a quirky little village, but maybe he’d been too quick with his theory of a nanny-lynching brigade. Most likely it was one of Lily’s ancestors. What undeniable satisfaction it would bring him to drive up to Albany one weekend with news of human remains in the garden.
Some families spawn lines of gifted musicians, or athletes
, he’ll tell her nabob of a father while feathering his own cap.
By the way, have you seen your daughter swing a tire iron? She’s an absolute savant.

The Crusaders had never liked him. Thought him a Turk or something urban and unsavory for whose sadistic pleasure they had convent-educated their only child. On his part, he was hard-pressed to find a kind word to describe their parenting skills. While Lily hadn’t been neglected exactly, she’d had a less-than-perfect childhood. The Crusaders held fast to some sort of doctrine that children should be neither seen nor heard. Hadn’t their interest in Lily only begun once she’d reached adulthood? Once she’d gained the courage to make the sort of decisions that could be easily criticized?

For her part, Lily denied wanting a country life with a tennis pro and terraced gardens. But he watched her face after a weekend upstate. He thought that walking back into their apartment, swish as it was, she was struck by all that she’d given up settling for the son of a railyard worker from St. Paul.

Anyway, he wasn’t tied to his roots the way she was. He had come to the East Coast believing it to have obverse properties of Minnesota, a well-turned muscle that would hammer everything provincial out of him. And clocking these years at the agency meant he was now an advertising man. Hawke had once even come into his office and perched on the corner of his desk.

Duncan, no matter what shit goes down here
, he said, ruffling his raven-feather hair,
I’ve got your back, buddy.

Same here
, the protégé had replied those several months ago, still secure within the radius of Hawke’s favor.

Now he looks at the blinking screen of his laptop where concepts swim about the pixels. He’d like to recover that keen spur but feels ham-fisted and crude. Can’t get his fingers under that sheet of glass.

Saturday night, when the air has cooled significant degrees, they continue their exhumation. Their Friday evening attempt had come up empty. Lily had
insisted
they channel linear troughs north toward the barley field. Duncan felt they should instead dig concentrically, radiating out from the site of the femur. The garden was supposed to have been his project, though he was being shouldered into the peripheries. Here was Lily digging her own history, here was Duncan providing cheap labor. After an hour of nothing he decided it was easier to avoid a quibble by calling it quits.

Tonight they’re employing Duncan’s method and are rewarded almost immediately with an articulated little piece they suspect is from the top of the vertebral column. It looks like a thick wishbone with a grooved spanner connecting the bottom of its arch. Duncan has seen whale vertebrae washed up in Montauk, amplified in size, but bearing the similar wing-nut design and hollowed passage for the spine. Alone, the function of the notched bone had been unclear to him. But stack two of these together and suddenly the interlocking shape of the spinal column emerges. In unearthing one of these vertebrae in the garden, Duncan finds himself wondering about what came before it and what comes after.

They can hear the faint whiz of the Amtrak beyond the fields toward the river. It makes them conscious of the private nature of their project and, should anyone come up the drive—Skinner, the universal aunties of the library, an absent neighbor popping in for a spot check—should anyone poke around to the back of the house, they’ve prepared a statement.
We are avid horticulturalists. We are charmed by growing things. Please just leave us alone.
Duncan might even raise his shovel with a nuance of threat. The thought sort of excites him. He’s never played the kook before.

Lily doesn’t even wear gloves now that she’s abandoned her trench system. Her excitement is like the hushed middle section of a fireworks display. She holds a flashlight on the hole with one hand and pulls back soil with the other. Duncan continues with the spadework, sweats a pleasant grassy smell into the night air.

“I’ve found fault with my Osterhagen lynch-mob theory,” he says, conscious that they haven’t exchanged much tonight beyond the gentle grunt of acknowledgment as one finds a stone, one overturns a root.

Lily sits back on the grass to wipe the paste of soil and perspiration from her forehead.

“A public lynching takes some organization,” he continues. “Whelping the hounds, tuning pitchforks, inciting riot—you heard the old man last week. Plenty of time there for a dissident faction to form, right?”

“What am I agreeing to?” Lily says.

“Bleeding heart liberals always leave some record of their objection. Someone in town would have leaked the truth about a witch hunt.”

“Right, and I didn’t find anything else at the library.”

“You have to admit, your family, they’re kind of private people.” Duncan leans on the shovel, injects a little cross-examination into his voice. “Not the sort to follow a leader like Skinner. I’m thinking this was an inside job. Your relative, the Bavarian count or whoever he was.”

Lily looks up at him. “You’re kidding me.”

“No. Your great-grandfather.”

“You think he murdered the nanny?” Something about the way she locutes each syllable tells him she’s neither buying nor pleased with his supposition.

“I’m not saying he wielded the ax. But commissioned, maybe.” He knows he’s taunting, but he feels the need to elicit some sort of response from her.

“So, you’re saying I’m a descendant of savages?”

Duncan shrugs. “We’re all born naked, wet, and hungry.”

Her smile suggests something razored into place below the nose. He has to fight back a terrible itch to nudge her with the shovel—
hey, remember when you used to think I was funny?