New World Monkeys (27 page)

Duncan immediately regrets his cavalier attitude of the previous weeks. If only he had kept his eyes open, his ear to the ground like a good Indian brave, he may have foreseen how vigil could easily turn to riot.

Now they’ve come for recompense, the entire village descending on their front lawn. Thankfully he’d been too tired after the muddy conflict last night to drive back to the city. That would have left Lily here alone with this. In the hallway she tries to push out from behind him but he stops her with a contraction of biceps. He’ll do the talking here. Duncan takes a deep breath, reminds himself that the defining feature of tragedy is always this insoluble conflict between hero and environment. And so when he throws open his front door, it’s done with a great salting of fear and a nod to the inevitable.

“Lucky you answered.” Skinner fingers the doorbell, which is hot and smoking, bells still pealing through the house. “We were gonna start shooting,” he says and flashes the ashy black length of what appears to be an M4 rifle. Behind him, at the foot of the porch, Emmett, with the same goose-egg skull as his father, heaves up a lit torch in greeting.

Duncan feels Lily’s breasts and hands pressed to his back, her stomach curving against the line he draws in the doorway. It’s sick that he’s happiest in these moments—when she’s small and clinging to him in fright.

“We got a little business to take care of.” Skinner rests the semiautomatic in the crook of his arm with the readiness of a folded umbrella. He looks Duncan up and down, the smeared white of his eye visible despite the darkness. “There’s a killer on the loose.”

Behind him, he hears Lily choke.

“What can we do for you?”

“Search party. Change out of your skivvies and let’s go.”

Duncan looks at the gun. “You planning on using that?”

“Sure I am.” Skinner lifts the rifle again, but this time squares it against his shoulder. He aims at one of the front windows. Duncan feels Lily grab at his waist. The old man pulls the trigger. Together they brace against the destruction of glass and wood frame but instead hear the high-speed
collision of water and window. A fine vapor follows, a bit of laughter from the front lawn.

“Don’t know why, but the pig used to like it,” Skinner says in a fond voice as he lowers the water gun. “Stupid animal.”

Duncan knows his wife is going to lose it. Lily, who was raised in a house free of boys, has only conjectural knowledge of the formative role played by water pistols, firecrackers, shit talk. Instead of relief or amusement—which he finds himself overcome by—Lily is lit by anger. She shifts away from his body and draws up alongside him. Duncan spots Wakefield under the boxwoods, a couple others from the cannon firing. Most of the men are armed with flashlights. Contrary to his initial impression from the bedroom window, there are only three or four actual torches among the crowd, their wooden handles home-lathed and shifted uncomfortably from hand to hand. The smell of butane fills the air.

“Hey,” Lily says to the men at the bottom of the steps. She’s forgotten her glasses in her bedroom and squints furiously at the assembled. “This is not funny.”

Duncan is suddenly aware of her nightgown, some white cotton scrap woven together from a roll of gauze. He steps in front of her, shields her from the torchlight.

“It’s three a.m.,” she continues over his shoulder. “We were asleep.”

The men give her a long, unfriendly look, as if assessing the price she’d fetch in John Deere replacement parts.

Skinner clears his throat, makes a sound like bubbles blown in a glass of milk. “You two ever hear of a volunteer fire department?” He leans back against an unsteady porch rail. “I want you to guess: What is the key to a successful volunteer fire department, hey?”

The crowd is silent.

Skinner cups a hand to his ear.

“Volunteers?” Duncan says.

Lily punches him in the kidney.

“Correct!” The old man jumps up. “You think those firemen say,
‘Well, I don’t feel like volunteering’?” He turns to address his posse on the front lawn. “Let’s say, what happens one night when Oster Haus catches fire and—look at that—no one wants to volunteer? Everybody’s just standing around, watching the place burn to the ground?” Skinner looks back at them. “You two ever think like that, hey?”

“Christ,” Lily says quietly.

Duncan wonders if she’s as impressed as he is.

“You want to get a little in this life, folks, you got to give a little.”

In his ear Lily says, “You think any of them have gone in the back?”

In considering their current level of vulnerability, Duncan factors in this near-naked wife of his, the smashed Saab in the lean-to, the bones in the cellar, and the garden itself, which is looking more grave than garden. “Lock the door,” he says out of the corner of his mouth. “And don’t come out.”

Her crinkled forehead means she’s not tracking his plan.

“I’m going with them. You stay put.”

“Are you crazy?”

“No discussion, Lily. Just do it.” Then he turns, steps onto the front porch.

“Okay,” he says to Skinner and in doing so is aware of offering himself as either decoy or sacrifice or both. “How can I help?”

The turbid eye watches him for a moment. “Some Arab bought out the lumber mill a few years back,” he says, “but I never yet paid my respects.”

Although Duncan’s objective is to move the men off the property, he’s surprised by his sudden desire to carry one of the torches through the woods. The clan, however, considers him a potential liability. Beyond providing brute manpower he’s a downstater unfamiliar with the dense ecosystem of a hardwood forest. This opinion becomes obvious when Emmett, the silent brigadier to his father’s major, hands him a flashlight.

Skinner has divided them into groups of three and employs the mobile tactics of guerrilla warfare in approaching an unsuspecting target. Duncan admits a certain anxiety when the old man refuses to reveal the nature of their mission. His only words as they assume linear formation in the narrow band of trees,
You’ll find out soon enough.

The copse begins at the end of the driveway and meanders down to the back lots of Osterhagen. They keep to one side of it while Emmett is sent ahead as a scout to sweep south through the scrub. Duncan can follow the blaze of his torch for half a minute before the man’s swallowed by the bush.

“Emmett don’t talk a lot,” Skinner says, falling into place beside Duncan. “He’s retired now but worked maintenance on all the civil war cannons in Poughkeepsie.” In the forested darkness and torchlight, Duncan thinks the old man could be mistaken for some sort of woodland elf. A midsummer guide causing benign mischief among lovers.

They continue in silence, Skinner leaving him now and then to survey the formation of his renegade band. The only indication of his position is the occasional snap of twigs in the periphery. Duncan estimates they’re traveling about a mile east of the road where he and Lily hit the boar. And while the moon is a thick magnet tonight, drawing the bay of dogs in the distance, it fails to illuminate their path through the dense canopy of branches. The forest here has been recolonized by pioneer species, trees that have risen to cover what was once destroyed by both Oster’s timber empire and the occasional eastern windthrow. The blindness keeps Duncan on edge. His eyes are impatient, slow to adjust and lacking the reflective properties of other beasts and men. He is grateful, however, for the forgiving spring of forest floor that muffles the sound of their advance.

Skinner again drops in alongside him. “What have you heard?”

Duncan stops, listens. “Nothing.”

The old man motions for him to keep walking. “I’m talking about the Arabs.” He pronounces the
A
and the
rab
as two hard and equally detestable entities. “You hear they killed my pig?” Despite the man’s ornamental
stature among the towering growth, there’s something specious and terrifying about his conclusions.

“You know for sure?” Duncan asks slowly.

“I’m telling you, ain’t I? They brought him right to my doorstep.”

“How do you mean?”

“You heard. Ground up into pork sausage—one hundred pounds of pork sausage delivered to my door.” The old man’s breath comes in rosemary-scented puffs. “That pig alive was over two hundred pounds. This is what happens when you let those sorts into a town.”

Duncan is careful to keep his beam tracking through the understory He’s not surprised by this new and gruesome conjecturing on the old man’s part.

“Maybe it wasn’t the same pig.”

“What?”

“Maybe they sent you a different pig,” Duncan says carefully. “Like a gift. When they heard yours was gone.”

Skinner stops dead in his tracks. He turns to Duncan. “It’s people like you,” he says with a black look, “who turned this into a country of spineless chickenshits.”

There’s a ruffle of foliage and Emmett emerges from behind, his face dim and excited. Duncan recognizes the look, pure
Heart of Darkness.

“Ready.” The first, the only word out of his mouth.

Before positioning Duncan behind a stationary Chevy Nova, Skinner tells him that knowledge of his target’s disposition, weaponry, and morale figure into this surprise attack. “To get the data we needed, some members of this operation had to use deception.”

Duncan takes this to mean some of the guys must have eaten a meal at the restaurant. Clocked the dining room’s hours of service, maybe. Noted all exits. They have just emerged single file from the bush at the northern edge of the Old Mill parking lot. Emmett, receiving his word of command,
positions the men around the exterior of the restaurant building: behind vehicles, a wheelchair ramp, a cement trough full of sleeping crocus.

Duncan crouches behind the car with Skinner. His motivation at the start of the night was to get these yokels off his property, away from the garden and the remains. But he must admit he’s surprised at the coordinated effort; tucked by the rear wheel of the Nova, Duncan finds a paintball gun and cartridge waiting for him.

“This is gonna be real simple.” Skinner peers around the back bumper, signaling across the parking lot to Emmett. “Your target’s the window over the bicycle rack there. When I give the command, you shoot.”

The lumber hall is separate from the hotel building and has been converted into a dining room with picture windows cut through broad timber planking. While the place is closed, a dim overhead lamp reveals an elegant dining room, its white table linen tacked down by thick water goblets.

“You know,” Skinner says, leaning against the Chevy. “I’d like to know what the Sovereign of the Deep Wood ever did to them.” He turns to Duncan then. Beneath the red liquid quiver of the old man’s eye there is conviction that Duncan has no business denying. There is truth in there: that shit flows downhill, that a life of head butts against the world eventually comes down to one final moment. You’ve got to grab it when it comes, with one hand if it’s all you got left. Skinner gets to his feet, his septuagenarian knees popping like whipper snappers.

“Fire on the target!”

Duncan does not expect a ride home. Having fled back into the jungle like any good guerrilla, he follows Emmett about a quarter mile up the river along the railroad tracks before coming to a gravel road lined with vehicles. Barely enough time to catch his breath before the boys are shaking hands, someone claps Duncan on the back. Wakefield gives him an appreciative nod before climbing into his F-150.

Skinner motions for him to dump his paint rifle in the bed of his pick-up. “We’ll give you a lift.” The old man works up a large wad of phlegm and horks it into the ditch. Duncan swings open the truck door, hears the hinges grind to rust powder. Emmett’s already at the wheel. And sitting beside him, upright and occupying half the remaining vinyl bench, is a filthy white poodle.

When they pull into his driveway, the morning light is already greasing the windows. Duncan sits between Skinner and the door, the mess of a dog spread across their laps. With each of Emmett’s unnecessarily forceful turns of the wheel, the animal rolls off their knees and lands at their feet. Duncan has very little sympathy. The poodle’s breath smells like Chinatown in August. The entire ride, the animal has been watching him with undeceived eyes. The growl in the dog’s throat broken only by the occasional yelp as he slides to the floor mat.

“He don’t like you,” Skinner says, pulling the poodle back up by the scruff. “Where’s his goddamn collar, Em?”

Emmett doesn’t even look over at the animal. “Dunno.”

“I can get out here,” Duncan says, realizing they’re halfway up the drive. Emmett ignores him, continues until they reach the house. Skinner holds the dog back as Duncan opens the door. But as he slides out, the poodle breaks free of his master’s grip. It leaps over Duncan and lands on the driveway with the grace of a high-kicking chorus girl.

“Jesus, Murphy.” Skinner hops out of the truck behind Duncan. “I’m gonna lock that bastard in the shed.” They watch the dog make like a bandit for the backyard. “Where the hell’s he going?”

“I’ll get him,” Duncan says quickly.