“I’m not killing him,” Hal said. “Go away, Terry.”
“Don’t you—”
“It’s all right, Mom,” Dennis said, muffled against Hal’s chest.
He could feet her perplexed silence for a moment, and then she went. Hal looked at his son again.
“I’m sorry I bad-mouthed you, Dad,” Dennis said reluctantly.
“Okay. I accept that with thanks. When we get home next week, I’m going to wait two or three days and then I’m going to go through all your drawers, Dennis. If there’s something in them you don’t want me to see, you better get rid of it.” That flash of guilt again. Dennis lowered his eyes and wiped away snot with the back of his hand.
“Can I go now?” He sounded sullen once more.
“Sure,” Hal said, and let him go. Got to take him camping in the spring, just the two of us. Do some fishing, like Uncle Will used to do with Bill and me. Got to get close to him. Got to try.
He sat down on the bed in the empty room, and looked at the monkey. You’ll never be close to him again, Hal, its grin seemed to say. Count on it. I am back to take care of business, just like you always knew I would be, someday.
Hal laid the monkey aside and put a hand over his eyes.
That night Hal stood in the bathroom, brushing his teeth, and thought. It was in the same box. How could it be in the same box’?
The toothbrush jabbed upward, hurting his gums. He winced. He had been four, Bill six, the first time he saw the monkey. Their missing father had bought a house in Hartford, and it had been theirs, free and clear, before he died or fell into a hole in the middle of the world or whatever it had been. Their mother worked as a secretary at Holmes Aircraft, the helicopter plant out in Westville, and a series of sitters came in to stay with the boys, except by then it was just Hal that the sitters had to mind through the day—Bill was in first grade, big school. None of the babysitters stayed for long. They got pregnant and married their boyfriends or got work at Holmes, or Shelburn would discover they had been at the cooking sherry or her bottle of brandy, which was kept in the sideboard for special occasions. Most were stupid girls who seemed only to want to eat or sleep. None of them wanted to read to Hal as his mother would do.
The sitter that long winter was a huge, sleek black girl named Beulah. She fawned over Hal when Hal’s mother was around and sometimes pinched him when she wasn’t.
Still, Hal had some liking for Beulah, who once in a while would read him a lurid tale from one of her confession or true-detective magazines (“Death Came for the Voluptuous Red-head,” Beulah would intone ominously in the dozy daytime silence of the living room, and pop another Reese’s peanut butter cup into her mouth while Hal solemnly studied the grainy tabloid pictures and drank milk from his Wish-Cup). The liking made what happened worse.
He found the monkey on a cold, cloudy day in March. Sleet ticked sporadically off the windows, and Beulah was asleep on the couch, a copy of My Story tented open on her admirable bosom.
Hal had crept into the back closet to look at his father’s things.
The back closet was a storage space that ran the length of the second floor on the left side, extra space that had never been finished off. You got into it by using a small door—a down-the-rabbit-hole sort of door—on Bill’s side of the boys’ bedroom. They both liked to go in there, even though it was chilly in winter and hot enough in summer to wring a bucketful of sweat out of your pores. Long and narrow and some-how snug, the back closet was full of fascinating junk. No matter how much stuff you looked at, you never seemed to be able to look at it all. He and Bill had spent whole Saturday afternoons up here, barely speaking to each other, taking things out of boxes, examining them, turning them over and over so their hands could absorb each unique reality, putting them back. Now Hal wondered if he and Bill hadn’t been trying, as best they could, to somehow make contact with their vanished father.
He had been a merchant mariner with a navigator’s certificate, and there were stacks of charts in the closet, some marked with neat circles (and the dimple of the compass’s swing-point in the center of each). There were twenty volumes of something called Barron’s Guide to Navigation. A set of cockeyed binoculars that made your eyes feel hot and funny if you looked through them too tong. There were touristy things from a dozen ports of call—rubber hula-hula dolls, a black cardboard bowler with a torn band that said YOU PICK A GIRL AND I’LL PICCADILLY, a glass globe with a tiny Eiffel Tower inside. There were envelopes with foreign stamps tucked carefully away inside, and foreign coins: there were rock samples from the Hawaiian island of Maui, a glassy black- heavy and somehow ominous and funny records in foreign languages.
That day, with the sleet ticking hypnotically off the roof just above his head, Hal worked his way all the way down to the far end of the back closet, moved a box aside, and saw another box behind it a Ralston-Purina box. Looking over the top was a pair of glassy hazel eyes. They gave him a start and he skittered back for a moment, heart thumping, as if he had discovered a deadly pygmy. Then he saw its silence, the glaze in those eyes, and realized it was some sort of toy. He moved forward again and lifted it carefully from the box.
It grinned its ageless, toothy grin in the yellow light, its cymbals held apart.
Delighted, Hal had turned it this way and that, feeling the crinkle of its nappy fur.
Its funny grin pleased him. Yet hadn’t there been something else’? An almost instinctive feeling of disgust that had come and gone almost before he was aware of it? Perhaps it was so, but with an old, old memory like this one, you had to be careful not to believe too much. Old memories could lie. But… hadn’t he seen that same expression on Petey’s face, in the attic of the home place?
He had seen the key set into the small of its back, and turned it. It had turned far too easily: there were no winding-up clicks. Broken. then. Broken, but still neat.
He took it out to play with it.
“Whatchoo got, Hal?” Beulah asked, waking from her nap.
“Nothing,” Hal said. “I found it.” He put it up on the shelf on his side of the bedroom. It stood atop his Lassie coloring books, grinning, staring into space, cymbals poised. It was broken, but it grinned nonetheless. That night Hal awakened from some uneasy dream, bladder full, and got up to use the bathroom in the hall. Bill was a breathing lump of covers across the room.
Hal came back, almost asleep again… and suddenly the monkey began to beat its cymbals together in the darkness.
Jang-jang-jang-jang—- He came fully awake, as if snapped in the face with a cold, wet towel. His heart gave a staggering leap of surprise, and a tiny, mouselike squeak escaped his throat. He stared at the monkey, eyes wide, lips trembling.
Jang-jang-jang-jang—Its body rocked and humped on the shelf. Its lips spread and closed, spread and closed, hideously gleeful, revealing huge and carnivorous teeth.
“Stop,” Hal whispered.
His brother turned over and uttered a loud, single snore. All else was silent…
except for the monkey. The cymbals clapped and clashed, and surely it would wake his brother, his mother, the world. It would wake the dead.
Jang-jang-jang-jang—Hal moved toward it, meaning to stop it somehow, perhaps put his hand between its cymbals until it ran down, and then it stopped on its own. The cymbals came together one last time—jang!—and then spread slowly apart to their original position. The brass glimmered in the shadows. The monkey’s dirty yellowish teeth grinned.
The house was silent again. His mother turned over in her bed and echoed Bill’s single snore. Hal got back into his own bed and pulled the covers up, his heart beating fast. and he thought: l’ll put it back in the closet again tomorrow. I don’t want it.
But the next morning he forgot all about putting the monkey back because his mother didn’t go to work. Beulah was dead. Their mother wouldn’t tell them exactly what happened. “It was an accident, just a terrible accident,” was all she would say. But that afternoon Bill bought a newspaper on his way home from school and smuggled page four up to their room under his shin. Bill read the article haltingly to Hal while their mother cooked supper in the kitchen, but Hal could read the headline for himself—TWO KILLED IN APARTMENT SHOOT-OUT. Beulah McCafiery, 19, and Sally Tremont, 20, had been shot by McCaffery’s boyfriend, Leonard White, 25, following an argument over who was to go out and pick up an order of Chinese food. Tremont had expired at Hartford Receiving. Beulah McCaffery had been pronounced dead at the scene.