I patted my shirt pocket. “Yeah.”
“Did You use some of my sunscreen?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Geek.” I said, “I’ve been thinking.
“It’s about time You started.”
I’ve been working on the new book.”
“Finally got your lazy ass in gear.”
“It’s about friendship.”
“Am I in it?”
“Amazingly, yes.”
“You’re not using my real name, are You?”
“I’m calling You Igor. The thing is . . . I’m afraid readers might
not relate to what I have to say, because You and I-all my friends-we
live such different lives.”
Stopping at the head of the porch steps, regarding me with his patented
look of scorn, Bobby said, “I thought You had to be smart to write
books.”
“It’s not a federal law.”
“Obviously not. Even the literary equivalent of a gyrospaz ought to
know that every last one of us leads a different life.”
“Yeah? Maria Cortez leads a different life?”
Maria is Manuel Ramirez’s younger sister, twenty-eight like Bobby and
me. She is a beautician, and her husband works as a car mechanic.
They have two children, one cat, and a small tract house with a big
mortgage.
Bobby said, “She doesn’t live her life in the beauty shop, doing
someone’s hair-or in her house, vacuuming the carpet. She lives her
life between her ears. There’s a world inside her skull, and probably
way stranger and more bitchin’ than You or I, with our shallow brain
pans, can imagine. Six billion of us walking the planet, six billion
smaller worlds on the bigger one. Shoe salesmen and short-order cooks
who look boring from the outside-some have weirder lives than You. Six
billion stories, every one an epic, full of tragedy and triumph, good
and evil, despair and hope. You and me-we aren’t so special, bro.”
I was briefly speechless. Then I fingered the sleeve of his
parrot-and-palm-frond shirt and said, “I didn’t realize You were such a
philosopher.”
He shrugged. “That little gem of wisdom? Hell, that was just
something I got in a fortune cookie.”
“Must’ve been a big honker of a cookie.”
“Hey, it was a huge monolith, dude,” he said, giving me a sly smile.
The great wall of moonlit fog loomed half a mile from the shore, no
closer or farther away than it had been earlier. The night air was as
still as that in the cold-holding room at Mercy Hospital.
As we descended the porch steps, no one shot at us. No one issued that
loonlike cry, either.
They were still out there, however, hiding in the dunes or below the
crest of the slope that fell to the beach. I could feel their
attention like the dangerous energy pending release in the coils of a
motionless, strike-poised rattlesnake.
Although Bobby had left his shotgun inside, he was vigilant.
Surveying the night as he accompanied me to my bike, he began to reveal
more interest in my story than he had admitted earlier: “This monkey
Angela mentioned “What about it?”
“What was it like?”
“Monkeylike.”
“Like a chimpanzee, an orangutan, or what?”
Gripping the handlebars of my bicycle and turning it around to walk it
through the soft sand, I said, “It was a rhesus monkey.
Didn’t I say?”
“How big?”
“She said two feet high, maybe twenty-five pounds.”
Gazing across the dunes, he said, “I’ve seen a couple myself.”
Surprised, leaning the bike against the porch railing again, I said,
“Rhesus monkeys? Out here?”
“Some kind of monkeys, about that size.”
There is, of course, no species of monkey native to California.
The only primates in its woods and fields are human beings.
Bobby said, “Caught one looking in a window at me one night.
Went outside, and it was gone.”
“When was this?”
“Maybe three months ago.”
Orson moved between us, as if for comfort.
I said, “You’ve seen them since?”
“Six or seven times. Always at night. They’re secretive. But they’re
also bolder lately. They travel in a troop.”
“Troop?”
“Wolves travel in a pack. Horses in a herd. With monkeys, it’s called
a troop.”
“You’ve been doing research. How come You haven’t told me about
this?”
He was silent, watching the dunes.
I was watching them, too. “Is that what’s out there now?”