since sundown, I was vulnerable to the infection.
Tensing in my chair, I cocked my head to allow any sinister sound to
fall into the upturned cup of my ear.
The three rings of reflected light shimmered soundlessly on the
ceiling.
The curtains hung silently at the windows.
After a while Angela said, “Its breath smelled like tangerines. It
hissed and hissed. I knew it could kill me if it wanted, kill me
somehow, even though it was only a monkey and hardly a fourth my
weight.
When it had been on the floor, maybe I could have drop-kicked the
little son of a bitch, but now it was right in my face.”
I had no difficulty imagining how frightened she had been. A seagull,
protecting its nest on a seaside bluff, diving repeatedly out of the
night sky with angry shrieks and a hard burrrr of wings, pecking at
your head and snaring strands of hair, is a fraction the weight of the
monkey that she’d described but nonetheless terrifying.
“I considered running for the open door,” she said, “but I was afraid I
would make it angrier. So I froze here. My back against the
refrigerator. with the hateful thing. After a while, when it was sure
I was intimidated, it jumped off the counter, shot across the kitchen,
pushed the back door shut, climbed quick onto the table again, and
picked up the unfinished tangerine.”
I poured another shot of apricot brandy for myself after all.
“So I reached for the handle of this drawer here beside the fridge,”
she continued. “There’s a tray of knives in it.”
Keeping her attention on the table, as she had that Christmas Eve,
Angela skinned back the cardigan sleeve and reached blindly for the
drawer again, to show me which one contained the knives.
Without taking a step to the side, she had to lean and stretch.
“I wasn’t going to attack it, just get something I could defend myself
with. But before I could put my hand on anything, the monkey leaped to
its feet on the table, screaming at me again.”
She groped for the drawer handle.
“It snatches an apple out of the bowl and throws it at me,” she said,
“really whales it at me. Hits me on the mouth. Splits my lip.”
She crossed her arms over her face as if she were even now under
assault. “I try to protect myself The monkey throws another apple,
then a third, and it’s shrieking hard enough to crack crystal if there
were any around.”
“Are You saying it knew what was in that drawer?”
Lowering her arms from the defensive posture, she said, “It had some
intuitive sense what was in there, yeah.”
“And You didn’t try for the knife again?”
She shook her head. “The monkey moved like lightning.
Seemed like it could be off that table and all over me even as I was
pulling the drawer open, biting my hand before I could get a good grip
on the handle of a knife. I didn’t want to be bitten.”
“Even if it wasn’t foaming at the mouth, it might have been rabid,” I
agreed.
“Worse,” she said cryptically, rolling up the cuffs of the cardigan
sleeves again.
“Worse than rabies?” I asked.
“So I’m standing at the refrigerator, bleeding from the lip, scared,
trying to figure what to do next, and Rod comes home from work, comes
through the back door there, whistling, and walks right into the middle
of this weirdness. But he doesn’t do anything You might expect. He’s
surprised-but not surprised. He’s surprised to see the monkey here,
yeah, but not surprised by the monkey itself. Seeing it here, that’s
what rattles him. Do You understand what I’m saying?”
“I think so.”
“Rod-damn him-he knows this monkey. He doesn’t say, A monkey? He
doesn’t say, “Where the hell did a monkey come from? He says, Oh,
Jesus.
Just, Oh, Jesus. It’s cool that night, there’s a threat of rain, he’s
wearing a trench coat, and he takes a pistol out of one of his coat
pockets-as if he was expecting something like this. I mean, yeah, he’s
coming home from work, and he’s in uniform, but he doesn’t wear a