tailgate, shrieking what must have been simian obscenities and furiously
slapping its hands against the window. Orson snarled to warn it away,
face-to-face at the glass, while struggling to stay on his feet as
Doogie resorted to slalom maneuvers to try to shake the primates loose.
+ Another monkey slid down from the roof, directly in front of the wind
shield, glaring in at Doogie, blocking his view. With one hand it
gripped the armature of one windshield wiper, to keep from tumbling off
the Hummer, and in its other hand was a small stone. It hammered the
stone against the windshield, but the glass didn’t break, so it swung
again, and this time the stone left a starburst scratch.
“Hell with this, ” Doogie said, switching on the wipers.
The moving armature pinched the monkey’s hand, and the whisking blade
startled it. The beast squealed, let go, tumbled across the hood, and
fell off the side of the Hummer.
The Stuart twins cheered.
In the front seat, forward of Sasha, Roosevelt rode shotgun, sans shot
gun but with cat.
Something cracked against the window beside him, loud enough to make
Mungojerrie yelp with surprise.
A monkey was hanging there, too, also upside down, but this one had a
combination wrench in its right hand, gripping it by the box end, using
the open end as a hammer. It was the wrong tool for the job, but it was
a lot better than the stone, and when the precocious primate swung it
again, the tempered glass crazed.
As thousands of tiny fissures laid an instant crackle glaze across the
side window, Mungojerrie sprang out of Roosevelt’s lap, onto the
backrest of the front seat, onto the seat between Bobby and me, up and
over and into the third row, taking refuge with the kids.
The cat moved so fast that it was landing among the children even as the
sparking, gummy sheet of tempered glass collapsed onto Roosevelt’s lap.
Doogie needed both hands for the wheel, and none of the rest of us could
take a shot at the invader without blowing off our animal communicator’s
head, which seemed counterproductive. Then the monkey was inside,
swarming across Roosevelt, snapping its teeth at him and swinging the
wrench when he tried to seize it, so fast that it might have been a cat,
out of the front seat and into the middle seat, where I was sitting
between Sasha and Bobby.
Surprisingly, it went for Bobby, perhaps because it mistook him for the
boy chick of Wisteria Jane Snow. Mom was its creator, which in monkey
circles made me the son of Frankenstein. I heard the wrench ring dully
off the side of Bobby’s skull, though not a fraction as hard as the
rhesus would have liked, because it hadn’t been able to get in a good,
solid swing as it was leaping.
Then somehow Bobby had it by the neck, both hands around its small
throat, and the beast let go of the wrench to pry at Bobby’s choking
hands. Only an extremely reckless monkey hater would have attempted to
use a gun in these close quarters, and so as Doogie continued to slalom
from curb to curb, Sasha put down the window at her side, and Bobby held
the invader toward me. I slipped my hands around its neck, under Bobby’s
hands, and got a strangulation grip as he let go. Though this all
happened fast, too fast to think about what we were doing, the
snarling-gagging-spitting rhesus made its presence felt, kicking and
thrashing with surprising strength, considering that it wasn’t getting
any breath and the blood supply to its brain was zero, twenty-five
pounds of pissed-off primate, grabbing at our hair, determined to gouge
our eyes, tear off our ears, lashing its tail, twisting fiercely as it
tried to pull free. Sasha turned her head aside, and I leaned across
her, trying to choke the monkey senseless but, more important, trying to
shove it out of the Hummer, and then it was through the window, and I
let it go, and Sasha cranked the glass up so fast that she almost
pinched my hands.
Bobby said, “Let’s not do that again.”