New World Monkeys (17 page)

In the staff kitchen Duncan empties out a filter of used grinds from the coffee machine. It’s Monday and his humiliation at being trapped in the wheel well of his own car and then rescued by his wife has eased somewhat. He’s left with only a few scratches as a reminder. But the very best remedy, he knows, is work. Arriving early, digging in, leaving late.

He spent most of his weekend locked in the apartment, icing his hand and watching an old bootleg copy of
Apocalypse Now
(the last forty minutes of which had accidentally been taped over with
Super Bowl XXVIII).
He was full of dread and wonder at the thought that a contorting river might hold such power over a man and couldn’t help but make the connection to his own travels along the Hudson each weekend, the push and pull of a body of water changing direction with the tides. Leetower eventually sent over a sketch for a magazine ad. The marker rendering was a simple cross section of the Cu Chi tunnel network, but in each of the underground chambers, LT had drawn a girl soldier in Stand and Be Counted jeans. The drawings were preliminary, but Duncan could pick out the Viet Cong girls for their wispy eyes and tight ankles. In some rooms they were depicted demonstrating the mysteries of the Orient: punches, kicks, lethal jabs at the jugular. In others they lounged in hammocks strung from one clay wall to the other, sucking the starch from bamboo shoots. In narrow, scorpion-infested passages, Leetower drew Grunt Girls crawling in their wide-cuffed denim. In the war rooms they rifled through vital documents by the light of a Zippo, or went M-16 to AK-47 with their commie counterparts. The tagline ran across the top of the ad,
History Repeating
, each letter cut from jungle leaf. Leetower had taken his advice and created a sexually charged ant farm of women. Duncan was pleased.
The idea has legs
, he told the young art director over the phone, and regained a measure of confidence in the campaign.

As the fresh coffee brews, he walks over to the intern’s desk, the poorest real estate on the block, wedged on the landfill between toilet and photocopier. Maybe it’s the dead morning hour, but he’s only just noticed the startling parallels between the cubicle landscape surrounding him and the underground miles at Cu Chi. The lack of natural light and privacy, the totalitarian functionality of such spaces. The North Vietnamese Army carved surgical operatories from the earth, war rooms, mess halls, everything necessary for a comrade to be born, serve, and expire. He considers the sallow, subterranean faces around the department. Could it be when the Viet Cong died, they were reborn as his colleagues?
Duncan gives the intern’s chair a kick that leaves the dusty imprint of his foot. He feels a sudden disdain for the time-honored tradition of climbing the rungs. It’s been years since he’d scrambled his own way up from the slums, the cubicle ghetto, but the very same taste of anxiety persists in his mouth. What was it that Hawke once said to him? One of those occasional pearls that fell from his mouth among the turds.
Remember, you’re only as good as your last campaign.
He must remain vigilant. Especially now as Stand and Be Counted sprouts wings. Isn’t it true that throughout his career, a man will do well to stop occasionally and remind himself to regard those around him with a suspicious eye? During prosperous times, rather than relaxing this code, efforts should be redoubled, as passivity and comfort are, for a man, akin to the polyp preceding the cancer. Duncan moves on to the next desk, positions the chair and boots the backrest.

Yes, he thinks. Rivals become the enemies who’ll massacre you while you sleep. Hasn’t history demonstrated—hasn’t literature chimed in—that to be truly valiant, one must earn his chops for action? Seek out and destroy the enemy? Or better, destroy and then seek? Hawke would have agreed to this in his salad years, no doubt. So would have Luis Oster, Senior, in the year 1902. There was a man willing to cut the governess to bits for wronging him. It’s no wonder that today, his great-granddaughter considers her own husband so irresolute—she has the same strain of bloodlust coursing through her.

Now Duncan finishes putting the boot to one row of cubicles, and starts down along the east wall of the department. He knows better than anyone that all great ideas seem absurd at first—but only until pop culture absorbs them. After which they tend to outgrow their masters, become pervasive and household, sometimes financially lucrative enough to allow the discarded masters to move forward. He’s been working on a voice-over for a television spot that has his Grunt Girl crawling through the understory of Vietnamese jungle. With ten confirmed kills under her belt, she’s just returned from a special ops mission with the Long Range Recon Patrollers. Was actually shanghaied by the crazy motherfucker Lurps to
help chase Charlie up the Mekong Delta and into the no-go zone of Cambodia. It was against protocol but put an M-16 in her hands and, hell, everyone’s fighting the same war anyway. Duncan has been considering the imposition of a voice-over, but wonders if this information will simply telegraph through the visual of his Grunt Girl, bulletproof, pulling the gooks back by the cinched pant leg, tearing them to shreds like a starved dog on a joint of meat—

He stops in front of Hawke’s glass office, its vacancy easily confused for minimalist design. The great engine Upstairs has yet to descend and announce which new wrist they’ll be fitting into their fist of steel. Sunrise does make the position tempting, however. An arc of eastern light illuminates a film of dust over the man’s desk. Duncan steps closer to the glass. Across the surface of the scored metal someone has written in finger script:

He tries the door but finds it locked. Brass’s little trick to keep the minions from poaching office furniture. Was this Hawke’s final message to those still in the pen? An alert from the old ranger who had read the signs, seen the scalpers riding over the bluff?

Tuesday, Lily decides to skip the library and, instead, bows her legs up at the knees and slots herself into the narrow sarcophagus of the bathtub. She rests an old thermos lid of sherry on the ledge. In the window, two trapped yellow jackets serenade her with the most extraordinary, the most enormous unmusic. The buzz and thud of insect against glass creates the Foley effects of snapped power lines or the blue light death of obstinate golfers, three-irons raised to the electric sky. …

She should write that down. Lily picks up the cordless phone from the ledge beside the thermos lid. She clicks on the handset, listens to the drone of ring tone and then, changing her mind, turns it off. Drains the cup of sherry instead. Thinks how nice it is to be drunk in her own private body
of water. She sticks her toe into the corroded spout, inviting death by tetanus. No clawfoot romance and milky water here, no sir. No grievous Ophelia floating an inch below Millais’s oiled surface. One would have to scale brick to spy on her, only to be disappointed by a view of her knees cropping up through the water. She forgets the thermos lid is empty, and raises it in a toast to the Invisible Man. To Tinker. Why hadn’t the nanny simply turned to drink instead of kidnapping? Crime required such effort. Lily herself used to steal lipsticks from the Rite Aid. But it was an act of impulse, only forming into a habit and sustained during junior high because of her relative success. To snatch a child, though. That required hours of premeditation. The nappies and milk and jointed teddy bears alone. Lily holds the thermos lid between her knees. It’s because she doesn’t want children, isn’t it? That’s why she can’t understand the risking of life. Become a fugitive to wipe the snotty nose of someone else’s child? Although, there was a case to be made for avoiding the messiness of childbirth. For retaining all forms of ownership over your body.

But what kind of deal is that? A kid without the fun of making it?

Lily slowly lowers herself further down in the hot broth, watching as her nipples pucker and respond to the heat. In the window, the yellow jackets rattle away in appreciation of her naked self. She runs a sea sponge down the inside of her thigh, raking it timidly against the flesh until it sets off an electric response. She has either forgotten or ignored the simple pleasure of being alone with her body. Fortified wine and the smell of soap have softened her reflexes. When she no longer feels like someone is watching her, she slips her hand between her legs.

By day the Viet Cong Guerrilla leads a draft plow through the rice paddy muck of her family farm. The docile water buffalo she rides requires only the occasional switch across the rump to keep it from straying into the bamboo hedgerow. Years of southwestern monsoons have cured the animal’s hide into the tough-wearing leather of an old armchair.

Or maybe, Duncan thinks, it’s not the monsoon rains that have worn down the buffalo’s hide. It’s the rolling friction of the VC girl’s thighs in her skinny-fit jeans.

He turns to the marker pad on his desk. Come to think of it, why show the girl at all? He sketches the rectangular lump of a Southeast Asian ungulate on four stick legs, grazing in a swamp. Why not remove the product from the shot entirely? Might work. Might be brilliant to show the water buffalo, alone on some yellow silt bank, with just the straddle pattern of denim clad legs worn down either side of its withers.

He likes the print potential and begins shading in the creature himself instead of waiting for Leetower. And when the phone rings, he’s so caught up in detailing the greasy patina marks on the animal’s side that he doesn’t recognize the caller. “Valerie from the Historical Society,” the woman repeats. “Of Osterhagen?”

Duncan stops middraft. “Right. Osterhagen.” He flexes his left hand, the humiliating sequence in the driveway pecking its way back in.

“Duncan, a couple things.” The woman clears her throat, a prefatory effect which assures him that she, in fact, has an entire laundry list to run through. His mind suddenly sweeps back to Tinker. To the bones in the cellar and the lazy open grave. He sits up very straight.

“We’ve had reports of cannon discharge over the weekend. Just following up to see if you heard any of that?”

This is not at all what he was expecting. “No,” he tells her slowly. “I don’t think I did.”

“You
were
in Osterhagen this past weekend?” the woman says. “Isn’t this your work number?”

Duncan takes up his marker again. Draws a shark fin rising up out of the same swamp that the water buffalo is lolling about in. “I go up Thursday nights. I don’t have the entire summer off, I’m afraid.”

“I tried your wife at the house but there was no answer.”

Brilliant strategy, he thinks. Tell a man his wife’s never home.

“Is there an active cannon in Osterhagen?” he asks.

“Some of the old homesteads below Market Road got a hold of one. The farmers there pitched in, brought it back from the foundry in Cold Spring.”

“I wasn’t aware.”

“You must have met Skinner? He’s quite the character.”

Duncan taps his notepad, chews at a stray bit of cuticle. “I have met him,” he says casually. “At the library.”

Valerie sighs down the wire. “We had to pass an ordinance against him. A few years ago. Well, more of a cease-and-desist letter. He was just firing that thing off willy-nilly. Made the summer people nervous as anything.”

“Did you hear the cannon?”

“God, no!” Valerie laughs. “I live in Scarsdale, I’m just on the committee. My late husband owned a house in town.”

That’s a good thing, Duncan thinks, crossing her off his list of guests most likely to drop by unannounced. “Well, I’ll let you know if we hear anything.”

“Look, Duncan. Can I ask you something?” She ignores his conclusive tone. “Is Laura up there alone all week?”

“Lily.”

“That’s right. Lily. By herself?”

“Yes, Lily is by herself. She’s writing her dissertation.”

“Isn’t that marvelous!” But Valerie’s trill is distracted. “Duncan, not that it’s any of my business, but you might want to rethink that arrangement. I know you’re not strictly summer people—there’s family history with that house—but the town is, you know, somewhat eccentric.”

Instead of responding, he leans on his desk and weighs the risks of this conversation. He can’t grasp what the woman is angling for. How much does she already know? And Skinner, Duncan’s still not sure what to make of him. Despite his threatening prologue that night at the farm, the cannon hadn’t been loaded. He’d fired a blank charge at the river. While the sound was shit-inducing enough, there was no ten-pound lead
projectile launched into the woods as they were led to believe.
Not yet
, Skinner had muttered on the drive home that night.

“They tend to do things their own way,” Valerie continues. “Some people there don’t really welcome change. When word got to me that Laura was living there alone for the summer, well, I thought, that’s such a big house for one woman by herself! And you can imagine I feel somewhat responsible. I did help arrange the opening.”

Duncan stands up, walks around his desk, stretching the phone cord until he can reach the office door and close it. He has a sense that her uncomfortable thesis statement is on the horizon. “Valerie, I drive up to Osterhagen every weekend.”

“Oh, I understand, I don’t mean to pry. I just want you to be aware. Some people in Osterhagen, once they get it in their head that they don’t like you—”

“Who doesn’t like us?”

“I wouldn’t know that, Duncan. Like I told you, I never go up there. I just hear things.”

“Have you heard someone doesn’t like us?”

“Not yet.”

Christ. The last thing he wants to do is try monitoring Lily’s whereabouts. These days, she seems to suspect anything he does of an ulterior motive. “Lily’s at the library most of the time and they seem to like her.”

“Oh, yes! Those women are old darlings. But I’m talking about, you know, this undercurrent. They’ve recently lost the town mascot. I don’t know if you’ve heard?” Valerie’s voice drops an artful octave. Duncan pictures her on the other end, telephone cradled between neck and shoulder, brushing cat fur from her pantsuit. “It’s a wild boar—the mascot. The high school parades him around at homecoming. Something silly like that.”