“I’m not Einstein, bro. I just drained my brain.” He started the engine
and drove down river, still leaving the headlights off.
I said, “I think I know what Big Head might be.”
“Enlighten me.”
“It’s one of the second troop.” The first troop had escaped the Wyvern
lab on that violent night well over two years ago, and they had proved
so elusive that every effort to locate and eradicate them had failed.
Desperate to find the monkeys before their numbers drastically
increased, the project scientists had released a second troop to search
for the first, figuring that it would take a monkey to find a monkey.
Each of these new individuals carried a surgically implanted
transponder, so it could be tracked and ultimately destroyed along with
whatever members of the first troop it found. Although these new monkeys
were supposedly unaware that they had been put through this surgery,
once set loose they had chewed the transponders out of one another,
setting themselves free.
“You think Big Head was a monkey? ” he asked with disbelief. “A
radically redesigned monkey. Maybe not entirely a rhesus.
Maybe some baboon in there.”
“Maybe some crocodile, ” Bobby said sourly. He frowned. “I thought the
second troop was supposed to be a lot better engineered than the first.
Less violent.”
“So? ”
“Big Head didn’t look like a pussycat. That thing was designed for the
battlefield.”
“It didn’t attack us.”
“Only because it was smart enough to know what the shotgun could do to
it.” Ahead was the access ramp down which I had traveled on my bike
earlier in the night, with Orson padding at my side. Bobby angled the
Jeep toward it.
Recalling the sorry beast on the bungalow roof and the way it had hidden
its face behind its crossed arms, I said, “I don’t think it’s a killer.”
“Yeah, all those teeth are just for opening canned hams.”
“Orson has wicked teeth, and he’s no killer.”
“Oh, you’ve convinced me, you absolutely have. Let’s invite Big Head for
a pajama party.
We’ll make huge bowls of popcorn, order in a pizza, put one another’s
hair up in curlers, and talk about boys.”
“Asshole.”
“A minute ago, we were brothers.”
“That was then.” Bobby drove up the ramp to the top of the levee,
between the signs warning about the dangers of the river during storms,
across the barren strip of land to the street, where at last he switched
on the headlights. He headed toward Lilly Wing’s house.
“I think Pia and I are going to be together again, ” Bobby said,
referring to Pia Klick, the artist and love of his life, who believes
that she is the reincarnation of Kaha Huna, the goddess of surf.
“She says Waimea is home, ” I reminded him.
“I’m going to work some major mojo.” Mother Earth was busily rotating us
toward dawn, but the streets of Moonlight Bay were so deserted and
silent it was easy to imagine that it was, like Dead Town, inhabited
only by ghosts and cadavers.
“Mojo? You’re into voodoo now? ” I asked Bobby.
“Freudian mojo.”
“Pia’s way too smart to fall for it, ” I predicted.
Although she had been acting flaky for the past three years, ever since
she had gone to Hawaii to find herself, Pia was no dummy. Before Bobby
ever met her, she had graduated summa cum laude from UCLA. These days,
her hyper realist paintings sold for big bucks, and the pieces she wrote
for various art magazines were perceptive and brilliantly composed.
“I’m going to tell her about my new tandem board, ” he said.
“Ah. The implication being there’s some wahine you’re riding it with.”
“You need a reality transfusion, bro. Pia can’t be manipulated like
that. What I tell her isi got the tandem board, and I’m ready whenever
she is.” Since Pia’s meditations had led her to the revelation that she
was the reincarnation of Kaha Huna, she had decided that it would be
blasphemous to have carnal relations with a mere mortal man, which meant
that she would have to live the rest of her life in celibacy. This had
demoralized Bobby.
An elusive squiggle of hope appeared with Pia’s subsequent realization