New World Monkeys (26 page)

“You’ll excuse me.” Wakefield moves down the aisle toward the back room.

To call the posse.

Duncan heads for the exit. He needs to get out of there. To move quickly, but not too quickly. He feigns composure, takes his time as he approaches the storefront. An odd unguent is collecting in each palm, making it tough to ease the door open without triggering bells. He stumbles out of the place. Cuts across the parking lot. Believes he could have executed a hammer and anvil tactic on an enemy camp with more grace.

Calm down, Chief, he tells himself, disoriented and blinking against the Sunday sky that has, since he’s been in the shop, acquired the same gray, pixilated waver as his computer screen. The Osterhagen witch hunt
is about as accurate as a game of Telephone. Both he and Lily had been amazed by yesterday’s stories. How could two hundred pounds of pork make its way from a dry creekbed into both the downstream roll of the Hudson
and
a taxidermy shop in Kingston?

Still, knowing what is truth and what is outrageous gossip brings him little comfort. For each new kink in the narrative is maliciously wrought. He suspects the nature and scene of the crime are changing to suit Skinner’s secret indictment plan.

The one good thing, Duncan thinks, the one saving grace in the latest incarnation of slaughter is that the modus operandi has actually evolved past his own capabilities. The deluded band of old farts can trick themselves into believing the hog was killed intentionally, but there’s no way to accuse him of single-handedly hoisting that dead weight up and over the rim of a dumpster.

Instead Duncan tries to focus on what he came to town for. A half-hour walk for what reason? Maybe it’s just a sign that work is going well. You forget things. He starts walking back up the hill toward the house, kicking the same stone all the way. Has to chase it out of the ditch a couple times. Duncan has just over a week until he presents to Stand and Be Counted. Until he easels up his sweat for those tasteless cloth merchants. As he turns onto the dirt road, the rain starts coming down. The drops are well spaced but large enough that it takes only a few to turn his green T-shirt the colors of variegated foliage. He realizes he’s going home to Lily empty-handed. This wasn’t the plan; he’d like to hide his hands behind something, however small. Duct tape or bolts or a double-headed hammer. But it hardly matters. Something tells him all they could possibly want is already there, under the soil.

Lily carefully squares up the stack of sheets so that her spying is less obvious. She goes back and stands in the open door. Duncan could be back at any time with the wheelbarrow. They’ve managed, in the course of their
clumsy night maneuvers, to snap the wheel off their old one. Drove it into some pothole or other. The backyard had looked ravaged this morning. As though a Paratrooper Girl had launched several grenades from an upstairs window. Their intention was just to stretch the garden a bit, extend the perimeters and gather up the rest of Tinker without making too much of a fuss. Surely she wasn’t scattered across the entire yard? But this perimeter extension had turned into nibbles that have now turned into great bites of lawn.

Maybe Duncan’s found his game. Maybe hitting his stride means he’s writing about things that he’s never actually experienced. But even this thought isn’t pleasing to her, as if his stride is a train he may or may not catch. Does he get off on this? No wonder he hasn’t showed any interest in her—his tastes have evolved, or devolved—he’s gone to the dark side, hardcore and militant. And she can’t ask, can’t bridge the divide from indifference to familiarity. There’s still no spirit of ease between them to allow this. It would be as difficult as trying to explain her hours with Lloyd, his knowledge of rooftops and kitchens, her own abnormal curiosity. Or the fact that she has quietly shelved her dissertation—so quietly, she realizes, it’s even news to her—believing that if the pointed arch really wants her, it’ll come and get her.

She shifts her discomfort back and forth. Outside the air seems to hold its breath as the sky gathers up a turbulent mash of clouds. Of course, this isn’t the first time she’s suspected all writers of being megalomaniacs, sparking characters to life just so they can reach down and play them like the hand of God.
Dance, monkey, dance.
She just wonders why he’s decided to sell jeans by burning women and babies to a crisp.

And what about that five-fingered smack to her ass? The painful cannon kiss? No. This is faulty logic, of course. An oversimplification of the thousand wishes and desires firing through his brain each hour. Arriving at a creative concept is not masonry; it doesn’t adhere to a formula. She knows better than to take his work personally.

She takes it personally anyway.

Who can explain hidden aggression? The tickle of it can be kept down to a feather most days. Although, if she sometimes wants to kill Duncan, doesn’t it follow that he wants to kill her too?

The truth—when you really come down to it—is that she doesn’t need Duncan. Not in the traditional sense. Not for the mechanics of opening jars and carrying large boxes. Despite the heat, she shivers. Thinks of herself in the hated posture of the pigsticker; sprattle-legged over the wild boar with a tire iron in her raised fist. What sort of damage does a woman like this do to a man? If he has stopped loving her, isn’t it because she’s given her husband no soft spot to land? Not a single fissure to seep through? She was supposed to let him hold doors and reach high shelves.

She was supposed to let him kill the pig.

It was a wheelbarrow. Duncan remembers it only as he comes around the back of the house and finds Lily in a plastic windbreaker dragging the cracked tarp around the garden. While his wife’s been toiling against the rain like a pioneer woman, here he is, empty-handed, having failed his one simple task of the afternoon.

“There were no wheelbarrows,” he says.

Under the flimsy hood, Lily scrapes her hair back from her face, avoiding the swollen side of her brow. The rain has picked up enough to obscure her eyes behind her glasses.

“I swear I saw one outside the hardware store yesterday.”

“Yeah, well. Not today.” He picks up a side of the tarp and helps drag it over to the garden. “I did get the latest on the Sovereign of the Deep Wood, though.”

“More?”

“Not more, just worse,” he says. “A dumpster this time. Behind the Old Mill.”

“Does that preclude us?”

“Wishful thinking.”

The soil has turned viscous in places and tugs at his sandaled feet with a pleasant sucking action. Duncan considers standing in place, allowing the earth to take him if it so wishes. The mud doesn’t seem to stop Lily. She skims across the surface as though she’s been waist deep in the business her entire life. This familiarity with the land, her shine to the country and the elements quietly bothers him. Not once has she mentioned any need to return to the apartment, even for a day or two. Which leads him to wonder what she’ll do once the summer is over. Does she have any intention of returning home? Or will she simply wait here to be run out of town?

“How’s your face?”

She looks up from under the hood. “Slightly less disfigured. At least my cheek and hands are fine.”

“I’m surprised you left the house like that yesterday. To go to the library.”

“Why?”

“Your eye was nearly puffed shut. I thought you’d stay home.”

“Well, you were busy working. I didn’t want to disturb you.” Lily’s staring at the ground near the hedgerow, wiping her glasses on her wet skirt. She lifts a patch of grass that has been skinned from the soil in fine strips. “Come and look at this.”

He slowly pries his feet from the mud, circles the scarp and crag to squat beside her near the hedge. Lily flips back the shredded lawn. Underneath are a series of holes, each the depth of a mixing bowl and still relatively dry under the grass lids. Her peasant skirt, meanwhile, has grown damp and sticks to her legs and ass so that he can see the high cut of her underwear.

“We didn’t dig these,” Lily says. “That dog was here.”

“The poodle?” Some sort of lace underwear he’s never seen before. When has she started wearing lace underthings? “I don’t think poodles dig, Lily. They’re water retrievers.”

“Any dog will dig if there’s something to unbury.” She stands up
quickly—could she tell he was looking at her ass? “Maybe that’s why we’re missing so many small bones.”

“And here I thought it was because you’ve been digging alone.”

She looks at him. “I
dug
alone. Once.”

“Are you sure?”

Lily’s moving back to her end of the tarp. “Why would you say that?”

He follows and takes up an opposite corner, stretching the heavy canvas over the south side of the plot. “There’s not much to do here all week.” Duncan tries to weed inflection and injury from his voice. “A cold case in your very own backyard. I’d be tempted.”

“Well, that’s you.” She’s avoiding his face. “I’ve been working.”

“Right. How’s the pointed arch going, by the way? The library, how are you finding it?”

“Why do you say it like that?”

“Say it like what?”

“The
library.
Like you can’t imagine anyone taking pleasure in a pursuit that doesn’t involve motion picture. You talk like it’s a personal affront to you.”

“Well, I’ve got to wonder why you haven’t made it over to Bard. They’ve got a real library. At the level you’re working at, I can’t imagine the Osterhagen Lending Library is meeting your research needs.” He works his way toward her, up along the side of the garden where the dog holes are. “I mean, wasn’t that part of the reason for staying here? Bard is close by?”

“I just haven’t made it over yet.” When she looks away he knows he’s caught her in some sort of lie. But the thought only fills him with the same sour happiness he felt while Anne was soaping his dirty dishes. It’s the triumph of his hairy, sweat-stained will.

The garden has produced a sizable rock reserve. Lily uses her foot to roll a five-pounder over an edge of the tarp. “Besides, I don’t need additional research at the moment. I’m structuring a bibliography and writing
an outline.” She moves away from him again. “And you know, Duncan, if I was really honest about it, I would be in Europe now, doing on-site research.”

“If you were really honest?”

“Yeah. If I hadn’t decided to stay here this summer instead.”

A loose, horsey snort spurts from his sinus cavities. “What’s holding you back, Lily? And don’t say Tinker. Tinker didn’t exist when we got here.”

She’s silent for a moment. “Does it matter?”

He waits. Waits for the words to elucidate her meaning.

Then turning her face up to him: “It’s me doing all the heavy lifting here.”

Her simple delivery, the flat and firm belief in herself, nearly sends him across the grave at her. “What, are you crazy? I drive up here every weekend—you don’t think that’s making an effort?”

“You’re punching a clock.”

“What are we talking about here? Us, or this bloody house, or what?” He throws down the tarp. “Are you seeing someone?”

She looks up, surprised. “Where did that come from?”

“I have no idea what you’re doing up here, Lily.” He talks with a sawed-off tongue, half his words lost in anger. “Or who you’re doing it with.”

She remains silent.

“You want to accomplish something? Come home.”

“Accomplish something?” Her voice rises sharply in the rain. “You don’t give a shit about my accomplishments.”

He stops, tries to rein in his words. But he can feel the swift roll from his mouth, his shoulders rise and drop in defeat. “You’re right,” he says finally. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I do.”

Lily turns the same shade as newsprint. She bends over suddenly. He thinks she has lurched in pain but a moment or so later she straightens up,
her hand cupped and loaded with mud. Before feeling the cool ooze of it on his face, the heavy drip between shirt and chest, he sees Lily’s swollen eye blossom as raw as purple onion. Duncan has to shut his own eyes to prevent the mud, which, against the cheek and nostril, carries the consistency and faint aroma of Turkish coffee dregs, from blinding him. He lifts the bottom of his shirt to his face and wipes. When he can open his eyes again, she is gone.

“W
ake up,” he says.

She recognizes his voice, his face, even as he grows out of her amorphous dream shape. He is moving away from her, a swift and dark form against the morning light.

“You need to get up, Lily. They’re here.”

She opens her eyes, sees Duncan in his boxers, moving to her bedroom window. And beyond the window, the spark of orange sunrise. She pushes herself to her elbows—it’s strange to find him here, in her room. As if the waking Duncan is less probable than one conjured by her subconscious.

“Who’s here?” She casts her first glance at the alarm clock. It too provides incongruous evidence: 3 a.m.? A chime sounds somewhere in the house, the percussive appeal of a doorbell, and with this she finally wakens to the lucid overlap of her surroundings.

At the window, Duncan’s hair stands up from his head like a crown of palm fronds. Lily cringes; the details of last night are returning. That handful of mud. She slides out of bed, goes to his side, and looks down over the front yard. She was right on one account, it’s nowhere near sunrise. Instead, the deceit of morning. A dozen torches burning across the lawn.