A Short History of a Small Place (15 page)

Except for Mr. Pipkin the firemen were wearing their rubber pants and otherwise just white T-shirts and they passed between them a pack of cigarettes one of the deputies had made the mistake of giving over to them. Mr. Pipkin himself had changed into his bermuda shorts and he sat on the running board with his legs crossed and one hand scratching his ankle while the other ruffled the hairs on his shin. Mr. Newberry told Daddy how Neely’s band of firefighters struck him as a sterling example of selfless civil servitude and intrepidation, and Daddy said the bunch of them together probably couldn’t put out a pilot light.

So the sheriff stood there in front of Mr. Pipkin all draped and dripping with his usual bullets and shackles and cuffs and badges and whistles, and he caught his thumbs up in his front beltloops, bowed himself out some, and said, “Well?”

Mr. Pipkin did not answer right off but picked at a sore on his leg with his fingernail and then scratched the underside of his nose before he went back to ruffling the hair on his shin, and after about a minute and a half of studying his shoelaces he looked up at the crowd of us there and we looked back at him and then he looked at the sheriff, who sort of glared in his direction, and then he reconsidered his shoelaces and generally pondered his whole shoe before he finally opened his mouth and said, “Well what?”

“We’ve got a monkey up there on top the water tower,” the sheriff told him, “and one of your men is gonna have to go up after it.”

Mr. Pipkin looked off over the sheriff’s head to where the spotlight shone on the upper section of the water tower; then he looked back at the crowd of us before he made his way to the sheriff again and said, “I don’t see no smoke and I don’t see no flame and I ain’t gonna see none of my men having anything to do with this.” Then he reached up with one hand and pushed his hat far enough down on his head so as to make his earlobes stick out into the air and turn bright scarlet like some sort of exotic fruit. “Anyway sheriff,” he said, “I don’t see no monkey.”

And Mr. Pipkin looked hard at Sheriff Burton, who looked hard at Mr. Pipkin in return, and then the sheriff opened his mouth the least little bit and hollered out, “Small!” cutting loose with it so sharply that it came back at us from off the fronts of the houses across the street, and before we could stop hearing it the sheriff hollered out, “Small, where are you?” again moving his mouth just the least little bit and not even twitching otherwise so that from behind you couldn’t swear the sheriff was the one doing the screaming.

After that one died off we didn’t hear anything right away, not that there was nothing to be heard only that nothing was being bellowed, screeched, or hollered out; it was simply being said and in an insignificant voice from a considerable distance away. The folks on the back edge of the throngs heard it first and they passed it on to the people in the middle who passed it on to us up at the front edge and we all turned around to find Mr. Small off to himself sitting in one of his own folding chairs that the sheriff had appropriated to use for the barricade and which Daddy said was located almost directly over the old eyewitness burial ground. Mr. Small sat a little forward with his hands on his knees and he kept repeating, “Right here, Sheriff, right here, Sheriff” as many times as he thought he needed to to be heard.

Still Sheriff Burton didn’t look anywhere but at Mr. Pipkin who didn’t look anywhere but at Sheriff Burton and the sheriff opened his mouth the least little bit again and hollered out, “Come ’ere,” which brought Mr. Small up off of his seat and directly into the crowd of us there who made way for him. As he walked he took his seersucker sportcoat off his forearm and worked his way into it and by the time he got abreast of the sheriff he’d also finished tucking the folds of his shirt down into his pants. Then he said, “Yes sir?” and when Sheriff Burton who looked nowhere but at Mr. Pipkin who looked nowhere but at Sheriff Burton didn’t say anything back, Mr. Small said, “Yes sir?” again. And without ever turning away from Mr. Pipkin and towards Mr. Small, the sheriff opened his mouth the least little bit and said, “Where’s that monkey, Small?”

Mr. Small drew himself upright somewhat, flattened his hair with the palm of his hand and generally groomed himself in preparation for his answer, but before he could get past “Well Sheriff” some woman in the back of the crowd started screaming and moaning like something wild and then three or four other women set in to screeching with her so that the bunch of them together sounded like a sack of cats until some one of them finally collected herself enough to say, “He’s jumped!” which was about all anybody needed to say. Nobody much seemed to feel the desire to look up and see just what had jumped from where; we all took that woman at her word and cleared out as best we could. Some of the people along the back edge of the crowd were lucky enough to make it through the barricade and they kept getting it on out into the street, but there were plenty of people that got tangled up in the rope and the chairs and the sawbucks and they clogged it up for the rest of us so that we had to be content with going down on our bellies in the grass and throwing our arms over our heads for protection. All the firemen including the firechief Mr. Pipkin rolled off the running board under the truck and the sheriff crawled up into the cab while the deputies circled around the back end of the engine and out into the road. Only Mr. Small did not go anywhere, did not even make a motion to go anywhere, but remained standing just as he had stood with the sheriff and looked just as he had looked except for the way his chin dangled a little now when it hadn’t before.

Then it hit, hit right dead on a bare spot and I said to myself, that surely doesn’t sound like a monkey, though I’d never bounced a monkey off a bare spot before to see what it sounded like. And then Daddy raised himself up a little and said to Mr. Newberry, “That was no monkey,” and Mr. Newberry said, “No, I don’t believe it was,” and we got up off the ground along with everybody else and the whole bunch of us sort of closed in and crept up on what Daddy called the impact area. The firemen and Mr. Pipkin slipped out from under the truck and back up onto the running board while the sheriff climbed down out of the cab and ordered his deputies on into the crowd. They came off the road and washed around Mr. Small like water before wading on in to where we had pretty much encircled whatever it was that had sailed off the top of the tower, which the people in front were stooped over and could see fairly well and which the people behind them could probably catch a glimpse of but which me and Daddy and Mr. Newberry could not see at all from where we were until one of the deputies finally broke through to the center where he passed about a half minute looking directly at the ground and about another half minute eyeing the people all around him and then he said, “Shit,” bent over at the waist, and came up holding a black sneaker by the laces.

Mr. Small still had gone nowhere and had hardly moved at all except at the chin, which continued to sink away from the rest of his face. Mr. Pipkin went back to sit where he had sat, the sheriff moved in to stand where he had stood, and Mr. Small just stayed where he was, which again put him abreast of the sheriff and facing up to Mr. Pipkin. Once the deputies had cleared the crowd, the one with the sneaker came up alongside Sheriff Burton and held it out for him and the sheriff grabbed at that sneaker like it was the treasure of the pharaohs and the finest thing he’d ever had the honor of taking hold of. Then he grinned and looked straight at Mr. Pipkin who did not look straight back at the sheriff but more towards Mr. Small who himself was staring full at the sheriff, or anyway at the side of the sheriff’s head, and Sheriff Burton bent the sneaker double between his hands, then shook the toe of it at Mr. Pipkin and said, “Well?”

Mr. Pipkin brought the calf of one leg up onto the knee of the other and stuck his finger down inside his shoe so as to scratch the underpart of his foot. The fireman closest to him on his right side leaned over to say a few words and Mr. Pipkin met him with his ear, which was all aflame with color by now, and heard the man out before drawing himself upright again. Whatever was said did not seem to register on Mr. Pipkin at all because he continued to poke at the sole of his foot just as he had previously before pulling his finger out of his shoe and rubbing his nose with it. Then he looked full at Mr. Small on his way to reconsidering the crowd of us behind him which had undergone a general overhaul during the uproar and so was worth some new attention, and at last he made his way to the sheriff himself, starting with the rubber toe of the sneaker, which Sheriff Burton was still pointing at him, and eventually working his way up to the sheriff’s face so that the two of them might glare at each other for the better part of a minute before Mr. Pipkin finally opened his mouth and said, “Well what?”

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It wasn’t the condition of the ladder any of them objected to, not the firemen or the deputies or the firechief, Mr. Pipkin, or even Sheriff Burton himself, and it wasn’t the height of the climb either. It was the monkey, not simply because it was a monkey but because it was that monkey, which was far and away the most peculiar creature any of us had ever come across. Daddy said when Wallace Amory jr. bought it and carried it home to Miss Myra Angelique it did not seem all that exceptional as monkeys go but just scooted up and down the flagpole and ran around the yard smirking and grinding its teeth at everybody, which Daddy said is all anybody could ask of a monkey. Then Mayor Pettigrew and Sister named it and put a suit of clothes on it, and Daddy said that’s where the trouble started. According to him, that monkey was not nearly as willing to be civilized as they were to civilize it.

Of course they called it Junious at first after their second cousin on their mother’s side. As Mayor Pettigrew gave it to Daddy, his second cousin’s mother had possessed all the venom it took to name her son Clyde Junious Bennet for no detectable member of the family in any branch at any time, and the mayor suspected that was just the sort of name his cousin could never quite overcome because he never did quite overcome it as far as the mayor could tell. Daddy said Junious Bennet was already a middle-aged man when Wallace Amory jr. was just a little boy, and Daddy said he lived three quarters of the year in Front Royal, Virginia, where he worked for a lawyer as a legal assistant, what Daddy called a secretary with pants, and then in the summertime him and the lawyer would travel down and set up office at the lawyer’s house in Salvo, which I’ve never been to myself but which Daddy tells me is a godless little sandpit and green-headed fly sanctuary just this side of Cape Hatteras which I’ve never been to either but which Daddy tells me is a bigger, more notorious sandpit with a grander, more monstrous variety of fly.

The mayor said his momma and daddy would take him and Miss Myra Angelique on vacation once a summer and they would spend three or four days at the lawyer’s house in Salvo to visit with cousin Junious. According to the mayor, Junious did not much care for the seashore or the weather there and would only go outdoors on cloudy days and even then wouldn’t let himself anywhere near the ocean as the mayor recollected it. He would walk the beach just where the dunes gave way to level sand wearing what the mayor remembered to be crepe-soled shoes and duck pants with a braided rope for a belt. And the mayor said sometimes him and Junious and Miss Myra Angelique would sit down between the dunes among clumps of sea oats, and if Junious found the weather to his liking, which the mayor said meant a sunless sky and a sea breeze that was not particularly salty or fly-infested, he would take his shirt off and stretch out on his frontside, which left his backside partway uncovered to reveal between cousin Junious’ shoulders and his waist the bushiest, coarsest, most unbelievably successful crop of hair the mayor could ever recall seeing in his lifetime. And the mayor told Daddy how him and Miss Myra Angelique would take turns touching it with the tips of their fingers because it was the sort of thing you couldn’t help but touch. Junious never seemed to mind, the mayor said, not there stretched out in the sand among the sea oats and not in the house after supper when Mrs. Wallace Amory sr. and the lawyer would play Scrabble at the dinner table and Mr. Wallace Amory sr. would sleep sitting up in the lawyer’s chair with a newspaper over his face and the mayor and cousin Junious and Miss Myra Angelique would sit all three of them together on the floor and talk and laugh while Miss Pettigrew and Wallace Amory jr. took turns combing cousin Junious’s back. And the mayor said when Miss Myra Angelique picked up that monkey for the first time and turned it over, the two of them looked at each other and said more or less simultaneously, “Junious,” which the mayor told Daddy they intended as a memorial and tribute to their cousin, who had since died somehow though the mayor did not know just how and hadn’t found out about any of it until after Junious was already in the ground.

So Junious was what they called it, and Daddy said Miss Myra Angelique decided right off that she would not have a monkey if he weren’t decent and maybe just the least bit fashion-conscious, so she rushed him on downtown to Hoopers where Miss Pettigrew figured she could outfit her monkey well enough in the boy’s department. But it first the manager wouldn’t let her and Junious in the store, not because he absolutely objected to monkeys on the premises but because he had never had a monkey on the premises before and objected to it now out of natural reflex and instinct. He got over it, however, and apologized to Miss Pettigrew who was after all a Pettigrew of the Pettigrew money. According to Daddy, he said he had not been expecting a monkey and had needed several minutes to get used to the arrival of one. But the assistant manager, who headed up the boys’ department, did not soften up and give way so readily. He was willing enough to allow the monkey into the store but couldn’t see clear to let the creature try on or even touch anything that Miss Pettigrew had not already bought and paid for. Daddy said the assistant manager did not much think his customers would put out good money for clothes a monkey had handled or worn even if only for a few seconds, which Miss Pettigrew said she herself would not be all that eager to do and so agreed to have the assistant manager measure the monkey as best he could and then point her to whatever Junious could most probably wear.