A Beautiful Truth (2 page)

What’s her name.

I call her Buddy. They’re all different. Buddy here is a good one.

Walt said hey Buddy, somewhere between the way he would talk to a horse and the way he would talk to a unicorn.

I can’t rent her out or anything. But I can get you one for twelve grand.

Christ.

Sometimes as low as ten. I don’t have that kind of money myself and if I did I wouldn’t be a clown. You know. This is a chimpanzee. It’s not a racehorse but it’s not a dog. I can’t tell you where I can get one, but it’s not a simple thing.

Walt stared at his lipstick.

They’re not born here, you see. It costs me. They travel. I travel.

The chimpanzee was looking at Walt and looking at the clown and she put her hand through a gap between the bars.

She wants to touch you.

She seemed small again. Her face wasn’t as pale as others Walt had seen in photos. He looked at her fingers and something stirred in him. They seemed long and you could almost imagine them on a grandmother.

She’s pretty goddamn strong. You might not want to touch her.

Walt saw no threat and softly repeated hey Buddy. He was low on his worsening knees and reached towards the cage and gently put the back of his own finger against the back of the chimp’s and held it there. Buddy.

She moved her finger slightly to manipulate Walt’s and the clown said be nice to the man, he’s a friend, be nice, and she looked at Walt with whiteless eyes and scratched a little mole on the side of his finger.

She’s cleaning you. It’s a thing they do.

Walt looked at her and her eyes looked at his finger. Walt looked down at his finger and while he was smiling inside and thinking
this animal’s cleaning me with a woman’s finger, she gathered some spit and Walt felt the splash on his face.

The clown said hey be nice now dammit.

Walt looked at her and she laughed like she laughed in the show.

I’ll be.

Buddy stood up and made a gesture and the clown said okay, come out, but be nice.

She slipped the dress over her head and revealed a homemade diaper.

I keep a bat or a stick around, but I’m guessing if you’re not in the trade you won’t be teaching so many tricks. I put her in the cage when there’s visitors or when she goes to bed and whatnot. She calls it her bedroom.

She talks.

I talk. I call it her bedroom.

I read about one who knew sign language.

Yeah, she knows signs. Tell daddy to fuck off.

She raised her finger.

Doesn’t mean they’re ready for high school.

Buddy walked over to the couch with her arms up like she was walking through waist-deep water. She got up on the couch and sat just like a person would sit and Walt looked at her feet. They looked like hands.

The clown went to the fridge and grabbed a can of beer which he tossed across the room to her. She made a sort of coughing noise and opened the can with her teeth.

I’d offer you one but there’s only one left.

He opened it and chugged it and so did she.

When she neared the end she caught the last drops with prehensile lips, looked at Walt like she was telling him a joke and
didn’t care what he thought of it, got up from the couch and went to the fridge where the clown said there’s no more.

She looked at him like she was making sure she understood properly. Walt watched her flip through a magazine while the clown talked business. It seemed like everything she did was either funny or impossible.

While driving home, Walt reflected on his day and acknowledged that it was always going to be slightly odd to talk to a clown about a chimpanzee. But his mind was trying to catch up to greater things—the feeling of confusion had less to do with negotiating with a clown and more to do with the simple vision of that hairy little girl sitting on the couch across from him. Was she a person or a pet. The longer Walt drove, the more he realized that what he predominantly felt was excitement. This was an opening. She had seemed so energetic, so full of stories somehow. Were they all like that. Were girls and boys different. She was eight and the clown said that was different from an eight-year-old girl, but maybe not so different except for the menses and some peculiarities, he reckoned. He didn’t actually know exactly what age she was.

What would Judy think.

Walt had finalized nothing. He and the clown had agreed that Walt would get in touch in a while and the clown would make some inquiries and try to line up the right chimp. The younger the more expensive he said.

Walt wanted to think for a while and not necessarily surprise Judy with a baby chimpanzee but maybe try to find the right way to tell her about the idea. She was waiting with a roast chicken when he returned and she was the picture of his idea of home and there was gratitude in his heart. Please don’t take those eyes away from me or let them get any sadder.

A month or so later he met the clown at a diner in Burlington.
He wore no makeup and his name was Henry Morris. He could line up a chimp, probably a boy, might even need bottle-feeding.

Walt was nervous, but resolved.

He talked Henry down to six thousand dollars, not knowing that Henry would pocket three of those six. Henry himself did not know that his connection in Sierra Leone, a German named Franz Singer, paid only thirty dollars for the chimps he sold for three thousand.

In Outamba-Kilimi a mother chimpanzee had been walking with her baby clinging to her chest and a shotgun blast sent bone through the back of her eyes. She was several meals for Liberians across the border, her punctured skull was ground into a paste which a man in Hong Kong bought to heal his broken arm, and her baby was put in a sack and delivered to Franz Singer’s farm outside Freetown.

Nights of hunger and bony moons, steel and the rubber teat.

Singer’s chimpanzees were renowned for being free of shotgun pellets, less work when they arrived. They flew in crates, Pan Am cargo, neither colonists nor slaves.

Henry met the crate.

Walt told Judy he had bought a baby chimp, and Judy looked at the painting above the mantel, oil of the lake in summer. It was night but she felt the warm breath of the sun through her dress and thought life isn’t what you see it’s what you think.

They slept with their bodies close that night, their minds going miles down separate roads which they never dreamt were separate.

Judy had seen enough hours and days to know that when things are truly strange their strangeness doesn’t appear until after the strangeness has passed. She thought of this when she was sitting on the living room floor looking into the eyes of Looee, who was
holding her fingers on the bottle with hands that had grown so much in just a few months.

The deal between Walt and Henry had been that Henry would find an appropriate place to present the chimp to him and Judy. That seemed the hardest part to Henry. He had done this a few times now. He knew to buy a small cage, rent a pickup, drive to Newark, slip cash to the right people. The laws about exotics didn’t exist in those days and quarantine was a matter of money. He knew exactly what he would do with the chimp but he couldn’t think of how to present it back in Vermont. He got his shoes shined at the airport in Newark by a really nice guy named Louis. He told Louis with the right sort of wink that he was staying at the Radisson and Louis recommended a girl who gave Henry a ten-dollar handjob that he would have paid double for. He wanted to kiss her but when he leaned forward she recoiled. He drove back to Vermont and thought there’s that jungle gym in the park for the kids, I’ll arrange that we all meet there.

FLORIDA

The World needs fruit. The World needs sleep. The World needs touch and the quick pink heat.

Podo rules the World. Podo chooses his moments.

He limps and others limp to be like him. He eats his breakfast with loaded hands, and alms drop and scatter like seeds from a shaken tree. He greets his friends and assesses the day and the day bows down to black Podo. He takes Fifi by the hips while she sucks on an orange.

He will play with children and pin their mothers.

Podo runs to the greybald tree and swings around it once and twice and does something else without thinking what it was, and it is always something to behold, fast Podo.

Outside are grass and dirt and swollen birds, high summer, there is concrete and society. Armpit heat and guilty meat, and friends who come and go.

Look to Podo if the food is taken from your mouths.

Look to him if you think all food can be yours.

He wants Fanta.

He will pound the eyes of detractors.

Show him your rosé.

A bird flies over the World.

Fifi watches Mr. Ghoul.

Mama likes Fifi.

Fifi likes Mama.

Magda slaps Bootie.

Bootie likes Burke and hitting Magda, his mother.

Podo is pinning Magda and neither really wants it.

Bootie and the new one are jumping all over Magda and Podo.

Bootie slaps Podo on the leg.

Podo is busy, sharp Podo.

Bootie and the new one want to understand.

They want it to stop, continue.

The new one is looking at Magda’s rosé getting pin, pin, pinned by Podo, and Bootie is thinking about slapping or biting the swinging balls of Podo.

Podo thinks a thought that he can taste and the World swells hot and dark.

He has finished.

Magda walks away without looking over her shoulder.

Bootie and the new one are bewildered.

Podo feels the oa, grateful Podo. Magda feels safe.

He is huge, black Podo, and he walks with black hair raised, and daylight blue and slick on his body, and his shoulders are
widening, legs surprising, he coils and uncoils with prowess and venerable grace.

There is oa in the ground and oa in the wind and everyone knuckles and bows, how-do.

Mr. Ghoul spends the morning eating onions.

Looee reached for Judy before conversation began. The little guy in the diaper and red shirt. As soon as she was near he reached out with both hands, apparently not caring if he fell from Henry’s neck. Henry introduced his burden by name as he was losing it. L-o-o-e-e he added, spelling it thus because he reckoned the woman would find that cute.

All the way to Burlington her anxiety had grown.

What will he eat she said.

I don’t know. I don’t know all that much Walt said.

She tried to calm herself by not thinking deeply. Walt had said they seemed so human. She sang and ignored the cramps in her belly.

At that moment of meeting, Looee lunged and nuzzled and squirmed and settled. He and Judy made unwritten noises and he looked at her with eyes of eagerness and purity, and she understood his hunger.

Walter she said.

Henry looked around the park, at the jungle gym and concrete.

Looee was not a conventionally cute little baby, but there was something about the fact that he had hands that made Walt and Judy feel right away that he was more than a hairy beast. And the way he moved in Judy’s arms made Walt say that’s a cute little guy right there.

Henry said just give him plain old milk and you’ll find soon enough that they’ll eat just about anything, too much if you let em. He looks good and healthy to me.

Judy carried him away like she was determined to take him somewhere better.

It was April and snow sat on the mountains.

Judy held Looee in the backseat while Walt drove to various stores after Judy said there’s all kinds of stuff we need. Looee stayed still in her arms like a newborn baby, alternately dimming and shining his eyes.

At Kmart a woman said how cute, when he was wrapped up, and screamed when she saw his face.

When they all arrived home Looee seemed awfully hot. Judy got a thermometer under his tongue and his temperature was 103.

That might be normal said Walt.

They gave him milk and bananas but through the night he grew weaker and hotter and Judy could swear he stopped breathing sometimes. She was sure he had a fever.

At dawn when things seemed worst Walt said do we take him to a doctor or a vet.

Judy said doctor without hesitation.

What on earth have you got there said Dr. Worsley, and Walt said that’s a baby chimpanzee.

The situation was inadequately explained, and Dr. Worsley said I’m just not sure you shouldn’t take him to a vet but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious, Walter.

He had a look at weary Looee and thought his private thoughts about bodies and death and how he and his medical brethren found thrills in life and love despite their knowledge of flesh and its banal truths.

He took his temperature but frankly wasn’t sure what was normal for chimpanzees.

His lungs sound congested, so as far as I can tell it’s a respiratory illness. I’ll do some reading about it.

Looee coughed a lot at home like a baby and Walt and Judy ran the shower in the bathroom and hugged him in a way his body remembered. The steam did him good and drenched them all in sweat. When Judy dried him with a towel in the bedroom on the bed, it seemed for a moment that he might be ticklish under his arms.

I think he’s smiling, Walter.

That second night felt longer than the first. When Looee slept and his chest stopped moving Judy would panic and wake him up and think what on earth have we done, who is this. He developed diarrhea and made a terrible mess of the bed.

He truly seemed pale under his hair and Walt thought that maybe they should have taken him to the vet but Walt was in a jungle of sleeplessness and confusion.

They waited, like they waited with each other when they were sick, ultimately relying on the instinct of the body to live and find its own solutions. Eventually his fever broke and his limbs regathered their twitches and kicks. The three of them slept.

Mr. Ghoul was there from the beginning, before Podo, before anyone but Mama. No one remembers as well as Mr. Ghoul that the World was once white and square.

He pulled the lever marked GO and the World grew piece by piece.

He remembers Mama who was not much bigger than her cat.