New World Monkeys (22 page)

Duncan had been impressed. For a brief moment she knew he really had admired her. History offered such a beautiful backlight; he had to shield his eyes against the dazzle of her. Isn’t that true? Although she grew reckless in his awe. She began to chase the mind long-distance, following it until she became a speck on the horizon. And he was soon weary of watching. Who could hold his hand up against the sun all that time?

A string of knuckle cracks from the backyard pulls Lily from her trough of self-pity. The single light from the kitchen cuts a feeble slit in
the darkness, but by it she can see a patch of scorched hedges shudder at the rear of the house. Instinct kicks in, she slides off the tree trunk and lowers herself behind it, hoping to blend into the humped silhouette. Out back, the hedges quiver as stems of the old fencing snap apart. Someone is coming through the shrubs. For a second she considers running but knows her legs will refuse this challenge. They are disobedient, sluggish with fear. Lily squeezes her knees to her chest. Where would she run anyway? Across the road, the stand of maples might provide shelter. But it might just mean running into the arms of a waiting posse. For all she knows the men may have come to flush her out of the trees. Isn’t this what every bird dog knows? A quick, clean chase always makes for good sport.

I
n the apartment, Duncan tosses a balled rubber dish glove at Anne and says, “Get to work.”

Around him, Kooch and Leetower hold back their breath, willing to forego exhalation in case it means missing minor auditory details.

“Go ahead, get busy.”

Anne turns away from them. Lifts her hand, looks at her nails for a moment, as if to ensure they’re each still in place. Then she slowly reaches across the sink and turns on the faucet. Hot water jets over weeks of Duncan’s impossible crusts. His lips twitch. He gives Leetower, who is still on the kitchen floor, a meaningful glance to say,
See how she obeys?
Anne picks up the rubber glove, begins stretching it over her fingers. How is it possible, he wonders, that she’s become so compliant? Is it this voice? How could he not have known? Imagine, to have lived over three decades without knowing his own strength. The sound of water rushing into the sink is the musical score of his ascendancy and it fills Duncan’s desert cactus of a heart until Kooch reaches over and shuts off the tap. He is smiling at Duncan, but there’s nothing friendly or respectful in those bared teeth. Nothing but fangs. He tugs at the rubber glove on Anne’s hand and she moves toward him, begins to dry herself on his shirt. He takes her wrist, pinching his fingers around it. “Come on, McPherson,” he says, still looking at Duncan. “Let’s go join our fortunes in the bedroom.”

Leetower sits up against the dishwasher. He watches Anne follow Kooch from the kitchen. Then he rests his head back on the floor. “Duncan,” he says into the tile. “You are our next Tin God.”

But Duncan is reaching up the wall for the telephone mounted by the corkboard. He must call Lily. While he still has the voice. While he can still whistle and spit marbles at the same time. The line rings through. He’s aware that he was due upstate an hour ago. He remembers his promise to Valerie from the Historical Society, his solemn pledge to protect Lily from the seedy undercurrent of Osterhagen. Somewhere in the apartment, a door shuts and a toilet flushes.

“Get me an order of lo mein with spring rolls,” Leetower says, his eyes now shut. There is no answer at the house. Duncan hangs up before the machine kicks in. There’s no reason for her not to be home. No reason to be out this time of night in Osterhagen. He counts to twenty and dials again.

At some point during this attempt, Anne comes into the kitchen on one foot, screwing a heeled shoe onto the other. “Fucking Kooch bit me!” She snatches her bag off the floor and leaves.

Lily watches the mound of dwarf shrub cut itself free from the thicket and trot across the backyard. She has to hold her breath for a confused moment but then she’s on her feet and on the move like a woman approaching a low chopper blade. Lily runs to the back porch and ducks beside it, tracking the figure as it circles the site of Tinker’s grave. It lowers itself in a divot between hummocks and begins rasping at the dirt, sending up a spray into the grass behind it. In the denuded flower bed beneath her, Lily finds a large, faceted rock. If only Duncan had kept his word and come home tonight. They could be digging and returning some of the tired bones to the cellar. Instead, she’s left with the Battle of the Cowshed on her hands. She bounces lightly on bent knees and, with an accuracy that was absent in her previous attempt with the running shoe, lobs the rock at the poodle.

In return, a surprised yelp as the dog rolls off the plot and away from incoming fire. She pats the ground for another rock, cursing Duncan for making her defend the homestead alone. The dog, a barbellated mass of twill, quickly reassembles on all fours. Without looking around for the source of attack it lowers its shoulders and skull in the manner of a herder avoiding a cattle hoof to the head and—she can hardly believe it—circles back to the grave. Lily looks down at the pebbles in her hand. It’s not enough. It will just return, keep returning until it’s poached something satisfying from the plot. She gets to her feet, takes a full breath, and charges into the yard. With arms apish and raised, and evacuative shrieks percussing in the night, Lily embodies what she hopes to be complete animal terror. The dog looks up, stands frozen for a moment before it turns and bolts for the barley field.

She chases after it, watching as the animal dives into the safety of the grain stalks. Lily runs as far as the edge of the grave and slumps over, hands to knees, her breath coming noisily. She remains motionless for some time, listening for the animal’s retreat. Instead hears only the putter of a diesel engine, a night train to Albany. She wonders if her airborne imprecations have reached Duncan yet? Wherever he is tonight, whatever he’s doing, may he stop a moment to gnash his teeth against the sudden, eviscerating pain of her bad juju. How many bloody animals is she going to have to take on?

In the garden patch a few thick inches of grass-peppered soil have been gouged out. Maybe the dog was on to something. Maybe there’s something to be said for the canine sense of smell. She kneels to the ground, licks sweat from her upper lip. Is it really an
excavation
if she picks up a small hand shovel and just lifts away grass, broadens the circumference of the hole? Continues what the poodle has begun?

She promised Duncan she’d wait for him. Duncan promised he’d be home Thursday night. Sounds about even.

Lily starts troweling through the dry earth, working carefully to clear a shallow area the size of a cookie sheet. If she doesn’t recover anything,
no harm done. She won’t bother telling him. There’s no need to provide him with a running commentary, a blow-by-blow account of her night. Most likely he won’t even ask.

She considers her successful tyranny over the poodle without surprise. The aggression is in her blood and in her parents’ blood, a Mendelian truth smeared between two glass slides. They share the same tender-footed skill of advancing on the downtrodden the way one might approach a nickering horse. How else could her mother have persuaded the natives to embrace a Homeric god?
Meanwhile, in another quadrant of jungle, her father supervises the efforts of the indigenous people, who express gratitude at the prospect of clear-cutting their fertile plateaus to sow his bean crop.

The trowel scrapes against a hard surface. Lily stops. Lays the tool aside. With steady fingers she clears earth from a chipped yellow patch in the ground. The dirt here is sandy and she has to rake away several inches in order to expose the entire flat pan of bone. She runs her fingers under the edges, plying it gently from the earth. The bone is about the size of her hand but triangular, shaped like a wing, she thinks, as it comes free. The airfoil design and cambered surfaces suggest it was created for flight; it even grows into a crude hook along one edge, just where a wing might latch to the body. But it’s much too dense for flight. Lily holds it on her outstretched palm. Dense and irregular. In some places it’s scalloped out to the depth of a saucer. And where the bone is the thinnest, two large perforations have formed. She sticks her fingers through these cavities, runs a fingernail along the blunt edges. A hole in a wing compromises aerodynamics, she knows. Puts an end to the lift-to-drag ratio necessary for flight.

Where in Tinker’s body was this piece lodged? Lily turns the triangle over in her hand, curious, certainly. But beyond this inquisitiveness, beyond the constant cloying heat, she can’t ignore the nagging feeling of nothingness. A bone is a bone, she thinks. Organic fiber. A structure nature has repeated a billion times over. Here she is, alone in Osterhagen, might as well be pulling rocks out of the ground. Lily sits back in the grass, crosses her legs. Thinks, this is totally no fun by myself.

Her emotions are so fluid and changing; how could she ever have agreed to base her entire future on something as irrational as a
feeling?
How to be sure she won’t think the opposite tomorrow? Hasn’t it been months—maybe a year—of living with Duncan at the very periphery of her life? One step further and there he goes, tumbling off the edge of the earth. Has she been afraid to be without Duncan, or just afraid to be left alone?

What animals we are, she thinks, looking up at the evening sky through a hole in the wing bone. Feral opportunists who lek and mate and move with the migrating herds. The dawdlers must be culled. Is this what Oster knew? That the trick to successful predation is to wait for the semblance of calm, the coast to clear, the homeless dog to circle, circle, circle, before lying down, the nanny to shut her eyes for a moment of rest under a tree where she cowers with her charge. Until the moment her great-grandfather dropped from the branches to cudgel the nanny to death, he likely had no understanding of what it meant to enact harm. And here’s Lily, innocuous but of the same blood. She too only lying in wait.

The next morning she waits in the doorway of her husband’s bedroom. If the nearly indiscernible rise and fall of his chest are any indication, he might very well have received her short-wave malediction last night. Fully dressed and unconscious, his jaw sagging apart and exposing the mossy underside of his tongue, Duncan takes small huffs through the nose. Lily notices that his bed linens are still tucked, although twisted, as if he’d struggled to crawl between the sheets but found the tight corners as impossible to negotiate as the lost end on a roll of Scotch tape.

Lily takes note of all the things that are wrong with this situation, and then itemizes these things in ascending order of urgency.

1. The fact that he has his own bedroom.
   

2. That he agreed to her idea that he have his own bedroom.
   

3. That she has no clue when he got home. Or where he was before that.
   

4. That she doesn’t recognize much about him anymore—like his T-shirt,
   Union Cap-C Votes Yes
   , depicting a fist clenching a wrench. Or maybe it’s a hammer.
   

5. The impossible-to-ignore stench of liquor distilled down to wound-cauterizing astringent.
   

Without thinking, she gives the open door a single kick (feeling better already) and listens to the ugly thump of wood and brass. In the bed Duncan’s startled limbs bend in a semaphoric contortion. He sits upright, the way television characters often rise from nightmares, and peers at her through sleep.

“Welcome back.” Spoken like two arms folded across the chest.

The face before her is glaucous and confused, a map that will no longer fold along its original lines. She notes a rim of dried lather on his new scruff of beard.

“I’m going to look at the pig,” Lily says, unsure of her intentions.

Duncan’s eyes move over her, but how insignificant they’ve become in that face! As if someone had applied two thumbs and some pressure and popped them back into his head. When he finally speaks, she can hear the labor of his tongue unsticking itself from the roof of his mouth.

“I’ll come with you,” he says.

If this were Greek tragedy, the wild boar would have sealed the fate of their marriage. If this scene had been conducted on the proscenium, Lily’s hand in the extermination of the beast would represent the final blow she herself had dealt to the union of husband and wife. She would have slaughtered it and the sky would have grown funereal and the ground given way between them. Towns, peasants, cattle sucked down
along the fault line. But waking life, she’s come to learn, is never so neatly divided, so clearly cause-and-effect.

“What did you do last night?” Duncan says once they’re walking.

Lily stiffens, remembering Lloyd’s gift of the breast-fed man and the banishment of the poodle. “I read.”

The sad thing is, even Hercules was careful to bring the Erymanthian boar back alive. No question he made his share of mistakes, but the one thing he got right was the handling of the swine. It’s been three weeks since they left the pig in the ditch and Lily is haunted by the Sovereign of the Deep Wood for all of the callous, sulking, and reactionary facets of her personality that it has revealed.
I have inherited a real mean streak, Duncan. It’s pathological and I can only monitor it for so long. Like eight minutes. Then you’re fair game, friend.