There had been no reflection of his face trapped at the bottom of the well the day he threw the monkey down, only stone cobbles and the stink of wet mud. He had looked at the monkey lying there on the wiry grass that grew between the blackberry tangles, its cymbals poised, its grinning teeth huge between its splayed lips, its fur rubbed away in balding, mangy patches here and there, its glazed eyes.
“I hate you,” he hissed at it. He wrapped his hand around its loathsome body, feeling the nappy fur crinkle. It grinned at him as he held it up in front of his face. “Go on!” he dared it, beginning to cry for the first time that day. He shook it. The poised cymbals trembled minutely. The monkey spoiled everything good. Everything. “Go on, clap them! Clap them!” The monkey only grinned.
“Go on and clap them!” His voice rose hysterically. “Fraidycat, fraidycat, go on and clap them/ I dare you! DOUBLE DARE YOU/” Its brownish-yellow eyes. Its huge gleeful teeth.
He threw it down the well then, mad with grief and terror. He saw it turn over once on its way down, a simian acrobat doing a trick, and the sun glinted one last time on those cymbals. It struck the bottom with a thud, and that must have jogged its clockwork, for suddenly the cymbals did begin to beat. Their steady, deliberate, and tinny banging rose to his ears, echoing and fey in the stone throat of the dead well: jang-jang jang-jang—Hat clapped his hands over his mouth, and for a moment he could see it down there, perhaps only in the eye of imagination… lying there in the mud, eyes glaring up at the small circle of his boy’s face peering over the lip of the well (as if marking that face forever), lips expanding and contracting around those grinning teeth, cymbals clapping, funny wind-up monkey.
Jang-jang-jang-jang, who’s dead? Jang-jang-jang-jang, is it Johnny McCabe.
falling with his eves wide. doing his own acrobatic somersautt as he falls through the bright summer vacation air with the splintered rung still held in his hands to strike the ground with a single bitter snapping sound, with blood flying out of his nose and mouth and wide eyes? Is it Johnny, Hal? Or is it you’?
Moaning. Hal had shoved the boards across the hole, getting splinters in his hands, not caring, not even aware of them until later. And still he could hear it, even through the boards, muffled now and somehow all the worse for that: it was down there in stone-faced dark, clapping its cymbals and jerking its repulsive body, the sound coming up like sounds heard in a dream.
Jang-jang-jang-jang, who’s dead this time?
He fought and battered his way back through the blackberry creepers. Thorns stitched fresh lines of welling blood briskly across his face and burdocks caught in the cuffs of his jeans, and he fell full-length once, his ears still jangling, as if it had followed him. Uncle Will found him later, sitting on an old tire in the garage and sobbing, and he had thought Hal was crying for his dead friend. So he had been: but he had also cried in the aftermath of terror.
He had thrown the monkey down the well in the afternoon. That evening, as twilight crept in through a shimmering mantle of ground-tog, a car moving too fast for the reduced visibility had run down Aunt Ida’s Manx cat in the road and gone right on.
There had been guts everywhere, Bill had thrown up, but Hal had only turned his face away, his pale, still face, hearing Aunt Ida’s sobbing (this on top of the news about the McCabe boy had caused a fit of weeping that was almost hysterics, and it was almost two hours before Uncle Will could calm her completely) as if from miles away. In his heart there was a cold and exultant joy. It hadn’t been his turn. It had been Aunt Ida’s Manx, not him, not his brother Bill or his Uncle Will just two champions of the rodayo). And now the monkey was gone, it was down the well, and one scruffy Manx cat with ear mites was not too great a price to pay. If the monkey wanted to clap its hellish cymbals now, let it. It could clap and clash them for the crawling bugs and beetles, the dark things that made their home in the well’s stone gullet. It would rot down there. Its loathsome cogs and wheels and springs would rust down there. It would die down there. In the mud and the darkness. Spiders would spin it a shroud.
But… it had come back.
Slowly, Hal covered the well again, as he had on that day, and in his ears he heard the phantom echo of the monkey’s cymbals: Jang-jang-jang-jang, who’s dead, Hal? Is it Terry? Dennis? Is it Petey, Hal? He’s your favorite, isn’t he? Is it him? jang-jang-jang—
“Put that down/” Petey flinched and dropped the monkey, and for one nightmare moment Hal thought that would do it, that the jolt would jog its machinery and the cymbals would begin to beat and clash.
“Daddy, you scared me.”
“I’m sorry. 1 just… I don’t want you to play with that.” The others had gone to see a movie, and he had thought he would beat them back to the motel. But he had stayed at the home place longer than he would have guessed; the old, hateful memories seemed to move in their own eternal time zone.
Terry was sitting near Dennis, watching The Beverly Hillbillies. She watched the old, grainy print with a steady, bemused concentration that spoke of a recent Valium pop.
Dennis was reading a rock magazine with Culture Club on the cover. Petey had been sitting cross-legged on the carpet goofing with the monkey.
“It doesn’t work anyway,” Petey said. Which explains why Dennis let him have it, Hat thought, and then felt ashamed and angry at himself. He felt this uncontrollable hostility toward Dennis more and more often, but in the aftermath he felt demeaned and tacky… helpless.
“No,” he said. “It’s old. I’m going to throw it away. Give it to me.” He held out his hand and Peter, looking troubled, handed it over.
Dennis said to his mother, “Pop’s turning into a friggin schizophrenic.” Hal was across the room even before he knew he was going, the monkey in one hand, grinning as if in approbation, He hauled Dennis out of his chair by the shirt. There was a purring sound as a seam came adrift somewhere. Dennis looked almost comically shocked. His copy of Rock Wave fell to the floor.
“Hey!”
“You come with me,” Hal said grimly, pulling his son toward the door to the connecting room.
“Hal!” Terry nearly screamed. Petey just goggled.
Hal pulled Dennis through. He slammed the door and then slammed Dennis against the door. Dennis was starting to look scared.
“You’re getting a mouth problem,” Hal said.
“Let go of me! You tore my shirt, you—” Hal slammed the boy against the door again. “Yes,” he said. “A real mouth problem. Did you learn that in school? Or back in the smoking area?” Dennis flushed, his face momentarily ugly with guilt. “I wouldn’t be in that shitty school if you didn’t get canned!” he burst out.
Hal slammed Dennis against the door again. “I didn’t get canned, I got laid off, you know it, and I don’t need any of your shit about it. You have problems? Welcome to the world, Dennis. Just don’t lay all of them off on me. You’re eating. Your ass is covered. You are twelve years old, and at twelve, I don’t need any… shit from you.” He punctuated each phrase by pulling the boy forward until their noses were almost touching and then slamming Dennis back into the door. It was not hard enough to hurt, but Dennis was scared—his father had not laid a hand on him since they moved to Texas—and now he began to cry with a young boy’s loud, braying, healthy sobs.
“Go ahead, beat me up!” he yelled at Hal. his face twisted and blotchy. “Beat me up if you want, I know how much you fucking hate me!”
“I don’t hate you. I love you a lot, Dennis. But I’m your dad and you’re going to show me respect or I’m going to bust you for it.” Dennis tried to pull away. Hal pulled the boy to him and hugged him: Dennis fought for a moment and then put his face against Hal’s chest and wept as if exhausted. It was the sort of cry Hal hadn’t heard from either of his children in years. He closed his eyes, realizing that he felt exhausted himself.
Terry began to hammer on the other side of the door. “Stop it, Hal! Whatever you’re doing to him, stop it!”