“I couldn’t make it out. It scared me, a little.”
“Well, here I am in my right mind again,” Hal said, and managed a small grin.
Petey grinned back, and Hal felt simple love for the boy again, an emotion that was bright and strong and uncomplicated. He wondered why he had always been able to feel so good about Petey, to feel he understood Petey and could help him, and why Dennis seemed a window too dark to look through, a mystery in his ways and habits, the sort of boy he could not understand because he had never been that sort of boy. It was too easy to say that the move from California had changed Dennis, or that—His thoughts froze. The monkey. The monkey was sitting on the windowsill, cymbals poised. Hal felt his heart stop dead in his chest and then suddenly begin to gallop. His vision wavered, and his throbbing head began to ache ferociously.
It had escaped from the suitcase and now stood on the windowsill, grinning at him. Thought you got rid of me didn’t you? But you’ve thought that before, haven’t you?
Yes, he thought sickly. Yes, I have.
“Pete, did you take that monkey out of my suitcase’?” he asked, knowing the answer already. He had locked the suitcase and had put the key in his overcoat pocket.
Petey glanced at the monkey, and something—Hal thought it was unease—passed over his face.
“No,” he said. “Mom put it there.”
“Mom did?”
“Yeah. She took it from you. She laughed.”
“Took it from me? What are you talking about?”
“You had it in bed with you. I was brushing my teeth, but Dennis saw. He laughed, too. He said you looked like a baby with a teddy bear.” Hal looked at the monkey. His mouth was too dry to swallow. He’d had it in bed with him? In bed? That loathsome fur against his cheek, maybe against his mouth, those glaring eyes staring into his sleeping face, those grinning teeth near his neck? On his neck? Dear God.
He turned abruptly and went to the closet. The Samsonite was there, still locked.
The key was still in his overcoat pocket.
Behind him. the TV snapped off. He came out of the closet slowly. Peter was looking at him soberly. “Daddy, I don’t like that monkey,” he said, his voice almost too low to hear.
“Nor do I,” Hal said.
Petey looked at him closely, to see if he was joking, and saw that he was not. He came to his father and hugged him tight. Hal could feet him trembling.
Petey spoke into his ear then, very rapidly, as if afraid he might not have courage enough to say it again… or that the monkey might overhear.
“It’s like it looks at you. Like it looks at you no matter where you are in the room.
And if you go into the other room, it’s like it’s looking through the wall at you. I kept feeling like it… like it wanted me for something.” Petey shuddered. Hal held him tight.
“Like it wanted you to wind it up,” Hal said.
Pete nodded violently. “It isn’t really broken, is it, Dad?”
“Sometimes it is,” Hal said, looking over his son’s shoulder at the monkey. “But sometimes it still works.”
“I kept wanting to go over there and wind it up. It was so quiet, and I thought, I can’t, it’ll wake up Daddy, but I still wanted to, and I went over and I… I touched it and I hate the way it feels… but I liked it, too… and it was like it was saying, Wind me up, Petey, we’ll play, your father isn’t going to wake up, he’s never going to wake up at all, wind me up, wind me up…” The boy suddenly burst into tears.
“It’s bad. I know it is. There’s something wrong with it. Can’t we throw it out, Daddy? Please?” The monkey grinned its endless grin at Hal. He could feel Petey’s tears between them, Late-morning sun glinted off the monkey’s brass cymbals—the light reflected upward and put sun streaks on the motel’s plain white stucco ceiling.
“What time did your mother think she and Dennis would be back, Petey?”
“Around one.” He swiped at his red eyes with his shirt sleeve, looking embarrassed at his tears. But he wouldn’t look at the monkey. “I turned on the TV,” he whispered. “And I turned it up loud.”
“That was all right, Petey.” How would it have happened? Hal wondered. Heart attack? An embolism, like my mother? What? It doesn’t really matter, does it?
And on the heels of that, another, colder thought’ Get rid of it, he, says. Throw it out. But can it be gotten rid of? Ever?
The monkey grinned mockingly at him, its cymbals held a foot apart. Did it suddenly come to life on the night Aunt Ida died? he wondered suddenly. Was that the last sound she heard, the muffled jang-jang-jang of the monkey beating its cymbals together up in the black attic while the wind whistled along the drainpipe?
“Maybe not so crazy,” Hal said slowly to his son. “Go get your flight bag, Petey.” Petey looked at him uncertainly. “What are we going to do?” Maybe it can be got rid of. Maybe permanently, maybe just for a while… a long while or a short while Maybe it’s just going to come back and come back and that’s all this is about… but maybe I—we—can say good-bye to it, for a long time. It took twenty years to come back this time. It took twenty y,ears to get out of the well…
“We’re going to go for a ride,” Hal said. He felt fairly calm, but somehow too heavy inside his skin. Even his eyeballs seemed to have gained weight. “But first I want you to take your flight bag out there by the edge of the parking lot and find three or four good-sized rocks. Put them inside the bag and bring it back to me. Got it’?” Understanding flickered in Petey’s eyes. “All right, Daddy.” Hal glanced at his watch. It was nearly 12:15. “Hurry. I want to be gone before your mother gets back.”
“Where are we going?”
“To Uncle Will’s and Aunt Ida’s,” Hal said. “To the home place.” Hal went into the bathroom, looked behind the toilet, and got the bowl brush leaning there. He took it back to the window and stood there with it in his hand like a cutrate magic wand. He looked out at Petey in his melton shirt-jacket, crossing the parking lot with his flight bag, DELTA showing clearly in white letters against a blue field. A fly bumbled in an upper comer of the window, slow and stupid with the end of the warm season. Hal knew how it felt.
He watched Petey hunt up three good-sized rocks and then start back across the parking lot. A car came around the comer of the motel, a car that was moving too fast, much too fast, and without thinking, reaching with the kind of reflex a good shortstop shows going to his fight, the hand holding the brush flashed down, as if in a karate chop…and stopped.
The cymbals closed soundlessly on his intervening hand, and he felt something in the air. Something like rage.
The car’s brakes screamed. Petey flinched back. The driver motioned to him, impatiently, as if what had almost happened was Petey’s fault, and Petey ran across the parking lot with his collar flapping and into the motel’s rear entrance.
Sweat was running down Hal’s chest; he felt it on his forehead like a drizzle of oily rain. The cymbals pressed coldly against his hand, numbing it.
Go on, he thought grimly. Go on, I can wait all day. Until hell freezes over, if that’s what it takes.
The cymbals drew apart and came to rest. Hal heard one faint click! from inside the monkey. He withdrew the brush and looked at it. Some of the white bristles had blackened, as if singed.
The fly bumbled and buzzed, trying to find the cold October sunshine that seemed so close.
Pete came bursting in, breathing quickly, cheeks rosy. “I got three good ones, Dad, I ” He broke off. “Are you all right, Daddy?”
“Fine,” Hal said. “Bring the bag over.” Hal hooked the table by the sofa over to the window with his foot so it stood below the sill, and put the flight bag on it. He spread its mouth open like lips. He could see the stones Petey had collected glimmering inside. He used the toilet-bowl brush to hook the monkey forward. It teetered for a moment and then felt into the bag. There was a faint ting! as one of its cymbals struck one of the rocks.
“Dad? Daddy?” Petey sounded frightened. Hal looked around at him. Something was different: something had changed. What was it?