Monkey on a Chain (65 page)

There were two sharp reports far behind me. Instinctively, I threw myself into the dirt beside the road, rolled behind a small tree, and came up listening, ready to run. I heard the growl of a laboring engine down the canyon. It backfired again and then I recognized it. I dusted the pine needles off and got back on the road. A few minutes later, Jenny Murphy pulled her old Dodge van up beside me.

“You’re back! How was your vacation?”

I smiled at her. “Just fine, Miss Murphy. How’re things around here?”

“Hey, if you only talk to me in the village, you can call me Miss Murphy. If you can bring your groceries over when you go on vacation, you know me well enough to call me Jenny.”

Her tone was mock-severe. Apparently I had escalated our relationship without meaning to. I hoped it wouldn’t spread to the rest of the neighbors on the road. There were four of them. I didn’t think I could stand that many friends. “You’re right, Jenny,” I said. “And you feel free to ask any time you need a favor, too.”

“Think nothing of it,” she said. “I’ll replace your stuff soon as I get a chance.”

“Don’t bother. I just didn’t want it to spoil.”

She told me not to be silly and to enjoy my run and drove on. I pounded my way back to the house and found April in the kitchen. She had dressed in an ivory blouse with dark slacks and sandals, and she was trying to put together a supper. It was hopeless, of course. She’s a modern woman and I won’t have a microwave in my kitchen.

On the off chance that she might be interested, I gave her a glass of wine and let her sit at the kitchen table and watch while I threw together a quick meal. Medallions of beef with my version of a hunter’s sauce, mixed wild and white rice, some baby carrots for color. It took forty minutes because of the wild rice. Long enough to put a couple glasses of wine in the cook.

After dinner we sat on the deck and watched the sun drop down into Arizona. April seemed mildly depressed. I asked her what was wrong. She swirled the wine in her glass and stared at it before answering.

“Nothing, really. I feel kind of let down. I hoped I would find out who my father was. I suppose I should be glad that nobody’s trying to kill me anymore.”

I thought about that while the sky turned purple and the shadows deepened under the pines near the house. “Why do you want to know, April? Why is it important to you?”

“I don’t know. It just is. I have so little history. My country’s gone. My mother’s dead. Both of the men who might have been my father are dead. Roy killed Corvin,” she hesitated before continuing, “and you killed Roy. I’ve been disinherited. They say that life goes on, that you’ve got to keep moving. I guess I felt that if I could just know that one thing, my father’s name, I would have a place to start from. It’s hard to keep moving when you don’t know where or what you are.”

“What about Toker?”

“I don’t know how to feel about him. I thought I knew, but that was before I found out how he felt about…Vietnamese people, and before I found he’d disinherited me.”

“He was what he was,” I told her. “You should let your feelings be formed by the way he treated you, the things he did for you while you lived with him.”

“Then I still don’t know how to feel.”

I thought about that for a few minutes. “Tell me something. Suppose your father were here, on this deck. What would you say to him?”

She didn’t answer. I looked over and found her staring at me with a pale face. “No!” I said quickly. “I don’t mean it like that! I mean, just suppose he were sitting beside you. What would you say?”

“I’d ask him why he never came for me, never tried to find me. I’d ask what his life was like. I’d ask how he could abandon a little girl without even caring what happened to her.”

“And if he answered all those questions, what would you want from him? Money? Recognition?”

“It would be nice if he recognized me. But if he couldn’t, I suppose I would live with that. Mostly I just want to know.”

“I think you already do know, April. But let me help you out a bit. When Sissy was shot, the bullet went in a little higher than he let on.”

“Sissy? It was Sissy?”

I nodded in the dark. “It had to be. Phoung might have used sex against Max or Roy if she needed to, but not while she thought Sissy was alive. She loved him. He said so. Roy said so. I say so. It could only be Sissy. And look at what he’s done. He didn’t know you existed. When he learned, he found Toker and got him to find you and take care of you. He gave him the money he’d saved all those years.”

“Then he knows?”

“Sure, he knows. Do you remember how he hugged you when we left?”

“Yes!” She sounded happy for a moment, then remembered something. “Anna knows too.”

“I think so. But she doesn’t want to. And Sissy is afraid that his marriage will be over if she finds out.”

“But that’s silly! I happened long before he met her. How can he think that?”

“We don’t know what kind of marriage he has, April. If he thinks that recognizing you would destroy it, maybe it would.”

She said nothing for a long time, then shivered and hugged the thin silk blouse she was wearing closely to her. She came over and sat beside me. I put my arm around her and she nestled into my side. “Feeling better?” I asked.

“Yes. You?”

“Yes.”

She put a hand on my chest and kissed my neck. I ignored that. “It’s your turn,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“If my mother were here, sitting where I am now, what would you say to her?” She waited patiently while I thought about it.

“I guess I’d apologize,” I said at last.

“What for?”

“You know what for.”

She shook her head. “That’s not good enough. I’m Phoung, and I’m sitting here beside you. Talk to me.”

It was hard. The words tried to choke me. They wouldn’t come out. “Go on. Talk to me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “For not being able to do more. For telling Roy I saw you with Corvin. For not telling you how I felt about you.”

“How did you feel?” Her hand played lower, down my belly.

“I loved you, Phoung,” I said. “I loved you, and I let you go. I couldn’t save you. I’m sorry.”

She began to work on my belt. I took her hand away. There was nothing in there she could use.

“I knew how you felt,” she said. “I knew it all along. But there was nothing I could do either. There was always someone else. You know that.”

“It didn’t matter. I really didn’t want anything from you.”

“Not even this?” She took my hand and put it on her breast. It lay in my hand like the soft weight of a little bird, and her nipple kissed my palm.

“There’s always that,” I said. “There was always the wanting, Phoung.”

She lifted her lips to my ear and whispered, “I forgive you, you know. I never blamed you for what happened.”

I squeezed my hand gently and she put hers back between my legs. This time there was something for her to find. I turned my head and kissed her lips and her tongue found mine. She made a little noise and I put my hand under her blouse, lifted her brassiere up over the breast, and cupped her bare skin.

“Wait,” she said.

She pushed me back and straddled me, then lifted off her top and tossed her bra away. She tore open my shirt and lay back down on me, so that her nipples rested on mine. The golden monkey hanging from my neck dug into my chest just over my heart. I tried to move it out of the way, but she took my hand and placed it on her hip. I hugged her and let my hand slip under her slacks, between her panties and her skin, and cup her cheek and pull her against me. She ground against me and then murmured impatiently and pulled away. I caught at her, but she stood and pulled her pants and panties off and started fumbling at my belt. I helped her, kicked off my pants, and tore off the rest of my shirt, my shoes and socks. Then she bent over me and caught me in her hand and lifted me up and crawled on top of me again and guided me where I had dreamed of being for so many years.

I slid easily into her and she shuddered and lay still for a long moment, feeling me within her, and I closed my eyes and felt her hot moistness enclose me. She kissed my cheek and whispered. “What’s my name?”

“Phoung,” I gasped.

“No,” she said. “Phoung would never do this with you!” She rocked herself up and down my length. “What’s my name?”

“Holly.”

“There is no Holly. You made her up. She only existed for a little while, for those few minutes you needed her in the Philippines. What’s my name?”

I gave up and began moving in and out of her. “April,” I said. “April.”

Then we began moving together. She rolled over and pulled me on top of her. “Again,” she said. “Say it again.”

I said it again and again, and we made the world over new, just for the night, just for the hour. Then we held each other until it was time to sleep, and we walked inside hand in hand. She started to cuddle up against me in the dark of the bedroom, but I reached for her and said her name again.

She rolled toward me and held me and kissed my chest, but she held me away instead of holding me to her. She had a question. “About what happened at Las Colonias,” she said.

“What about it?”

“Was it the same for you? I mean the same as it was in Luzon? Did you…were you…excited?”

“It will always be the same,” I told her.

“Then I have another question,” she said. “When Roy offered you the job, the chance to leave the jungle, why did you take it? If you liked the killing?”

“I didn’t say I liked it. I said it turned me on. Not the killing, but the risk. Putting everything on the line.”

“But why leave it?”

I thought about it for a while. “I guess it’s because I don’t believe in heaven,” I answered slowly. “If I kill a man, I can’t tell myself I’m sending him to his reward. I’m just stopping him. I have to make up my own moral principles. One of them is not to do more harm to others than I have to. But first I take care of myself, my family, and my friends. In no particular order of importance.”

“I didn’t know you had a family.”

“There’s you. Sissy. Johnny Walker. That’s about it, now. A week ago I would have included Roy.”

She held me for a long time, and then she nodded and opened herself to me.

I woke early in the morning, well before dawn. April lay beside me, breathing gently. I stared up into the darkness for a long, long time, thinking about what had happened. And then I thought about the one question that had never been answered. The question of her legacy.

Where had the payoff money gone? Sissy swore he had given it to Toker. It wasn’t in Toker’s house after his death. Roy claimed never to have seen it after Luzon, and though I’d turned the Rancho de Las Colonias upside down, it was not to be found there. I stared into the dark, listened to April breathe, and waited for the sun to come up. When it did, an answer, one possible answer, came with it.

I climbed quietly from the bed and pulled on a pair of jeans. I went out to the garage and grabbed my toolbox. Then I began dismantling the red Jaguar. I was still at it two hours later when I noticed April sitting on the front steps, stark naked as usual, watching. I ignored her.

Half an hour later, I found it. Toker had removed the dashboard and formed a pocket in the wiring between the radio and the instrument package. Then he had covered the heavy canvas bag with a piece of formed plastic and screwed it into the fire wall. It would never have been found. I’d never have found it if I hadn’t been sure that Toker wouldn’t steal from April. He might not have adopted her, but he had felt something for her. He had recognized the obligation.

It was not a bad hiding place if you assumed that Toker hadn’t expected to die. He owned the Jaguar dealership. No other mechanic would ever work on the car, not while his shop was available. He could get to the jewels anytime he wanted just by telling April the car needed to be serviced. Even if there had been an accident, he could have gotten hold of the car without any trouble. And yet the stones were at a safe distance from him. Accessible, but safe.

I carried the bag into the house. April followed me. I emptied it carefully on the kitchen table. A mountain of blue and red and yellow and green. None of the stones was smaller than a quarter carat, and none was larger than three carats. That was the way Roy liked to buy. Easier to dispose of, he said.

I scooped up a double handful. They were cool in my hands. April reached over and scooped up a double handful for herself. There was a large pile left on the table. She let them trickle through her fingers back into the pile on the table. I poured my handful over her hands and she wriggled her fingers under the shower of jewels.

“Beautiful,” she said.

“They’re all yours,” I told her. “Sissy gave them to you. Toker saved them for you. Both your fathers.”

“Maybe I don’t want them,” she said, but she said it experimentally, as though to test her own reaction to the words.

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “They’re yours. You do have a history, you know, and these are part of it.”

She nodded slowly and lifted one handful after another. She held her legs together and poured them into her lap, a glittering mound that seemed to spill out of the blackness of her hair, a treasure born of a treasure. Beautiful, I thought.

Just at that moment, Jenny Murphy pushed the door open with a grocery sack in each arm and said, in rapid succession:

“Knock, knock!”

“Oooh!”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”

Then she paused, looked at us, and asked, “Can I play?”

I broke out laughing. “Ask April,” I said. “They’re hers.”

April answered solemnly. “You can touch,” she said, “but you can’t keep.”

Jenny blushed. “You all don’t mind me,” she turned and set the bags on the counter. “I was just returning some of those groceries you left with me when you took off.” She hesitated, then added, “The door was open, you know, and folks around here, well…”

“I know,” I said. I emptied my hands. “And we thank you. April, why don’t you get some clothes on?”

It took her several minutes to separate herself from the treasure. She managed to look nonchalant as she walked from the room.