Standing in my line of fire, unaware that it was vulnerably exposed to
an emotional basket case with a handgun, the creature burbled softly,
more like a pigeon than a rhesus. The sound had an inquisitive quality.
One of the other monkeys shrieked.
I almost fired the Glock reflexively.
Two additional voices scolded the first.
In front of me, the monkey spun away from the broom closet. It scampered
deeper into the kitchen, drawn by the commotion.
In fact, the uproar indicated that all six were now gathered at the
farther end of the room. I saw no shining eyes turned in my direction.
They had found something of interest. I could imagine only that it was
the source of the putrid odor.
As I eased up on the trigger, I realized that a glutinous mass had risen
into my throat maybe my heart, maybe my lunch and I had to swallow hard to
get it down and to be able to breathe again.
While my eyes and the monkey’s had been locked, I’d fallen into a
curious physical detachment so complete that I had ceased to feel the
spasms of pain in my cramping calf. Now the agony returned, worse than
before.
Because all the members of the search party were distracted and making
noise, I exercised the cramped muscle as best I could by shifting my
weight firmly back and forth from heel to toe of my left foot.
This maneuver relieved the pain somewhat, although not enough to ensure
that I would be able to move gracefully if one of the monkeys invited me
to waltz.
The conferring members of the search party began to jabber in louder
voices. They were excited. Although I don’t believe they have a language
in remotely the sense that we do, their bleats and hisses and growls and
warbles were obviously argumentative. They appeared to have forgotten
what they had come looking for in the first place. Easily distracted,
quick to fall into disorganization, prone to put aside mutual interests
in favor of quarreling among themselves for the first time, these guys
seemed an awful lot like human beings.
The longer I listened to them, the more I dared to believe that I would
get out of this bungalow alive.
I was still rocking my foot, flexing and contracting my calf, when one
of the quarrelers broke away from the rest of the search party and
crossed the kitchen to the dining-room doorway. The instant I saw its
eye shine, I stopped moving and pretended to be a broom.
The monkey halted at the dining-room threshold and shrieked. It seemed
to be calling to other members of the troop, who were, presumably,
waiting outside on the front porch or searching the bedrooms.
Answering voices rose at once. They grew nearer.
The prospect of sharing this small kitchen with even more monkeys
possibly with the entire trooppunctured my half-inflated hope of
survival. As my shaky confidence rapidly gave way to confident
desperation, I examined my options and found no new ones.
The depth of my desperation was so abyssal that I actually asked myself
what the immortal Jackie Chan would do in a situation like this.
The answer was simple, Jackie would erupt out of the broom closet with
an athletic leap that landed him in the very midst of the search party,
drop kick one of them between the legs, karate-chop two of them in their
necks as he somersaulted to his feet, get off a cool one-liner, break
the arms and legs of multiple adversaries during an astonishing
pirouette of flashing fists and feet, execute a series of charming and
hilarious rubber-faced expressions the likes of which no one has seen
since the days of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, tap-dance across
the heads of the remaining members of the troop, crash through the
window above the sink, and flee to safety. Jackie Chan never gets calf
cramps.
Meanwhile, my calf cramp had become so painful that my eyes were
watering.
More monkeys entered the kitchen. They were chattering as they came, as
if the discovery of any decomposing critter was the ideal occasion to
call in all the relatives, open a keg of beer, and have a hootenanny .