Monkey Around

by Jadie Jang

  “Nah, I didn’t mean to give you that idea. It’s not open. You know, some people are … superstitious, and some people genuinely aren’t. And the people who aren’t simply don’t believe in it and that’s that. And the people who are superstitious are … weird. Once they know what I do, they treat me like the whole thing is real and they believe it. But if somebody asked them, in all seriousness, if they believed in monsters and were-animals and the like, they’d snort and—completely sincerely, feel me?—tell that person to grow up. Only the old people—and only some of them—are up in themselves enough to just be real about it.”

  I shook my head. “And the gangs?”

  “Those dudes are like anyone else. Well, maybe a little more vulnerable to magical thinking. They have a tendency to come from broken or divided homes, so they might have less … stuff from their families. And if their shot-callers believe, then everybody else acts like they believe, but it’s kind of a toss-up.”

  This was similar to what I’d experienced with Asian gangs, so I nodded. “Do all the gangs have a nagual?”

  “Not even close. But they all want a supernat, if they can get one. Most of the shot-callers have seen enough to know that it’s real. That’s why Chucha is such a coup for the San Antonios. She can fix boo-boos and bad luck just as well as I can and she’s badasser than any of them.” That was a new mood: defiantly proud guilt.

  “Well, if she’s just doing what you’re doing …”

  “That’s the problem: she’s not. I’m available to anyone in the neighborhood—anyone who comes to me, really. And I have a legit job on the peninsula with medical and dental. I’m not exclusive to 23rd St., and I won’t cover for them or help them with anything illegal. And I don’t hurt anyone unless they come after me or mine first. Chucha, on the other hand, … she’s joined them. She’s living with them and they’re paying her and she’s gonna break kneecaps and guard drug shipments or whatever the fuck those dudes are doing.”

  “Is she really okay with all that?”

  “She’s really smart, but also really naive and romantic, and sometimes incredibly childish, and Juice, the shot-caller, has romanced her. I think she honestly thinks she can write her own ticket; can be a badass and not lose her soul. And I think she’s setting herself up for a long, hard fall. But she’s doing it partly to prove to me that she’s not like me, so she wouldn’t listen to me even if I could get close to her, which I can’t as long as she’s in Fruitvale.”

  “Which is where Ayo was supposed to come in.”

  “Yeah, but she seemed to think Chucha wouldn’t listen to her.”

  “She’s right. She’s too authoritative, and knows it. And too much of a straight-arrow professor type. She’d have Chucha’s back up in five seconds flat.”

  “And you won’t, you fancy, model minority, Berkeley grad?” That was the most complicated one yet: scorn, challenge, coyness, humor, wryness, and … a bit of flirtation?

  “Don’t forget summa cum laude, dude.” His eyebrows went up. “Let’s just say … I know more about what it’s like to be Chucha than you can possibly imagine.” He still looked skeptical. A part of me didn’t want him to know about my rough side. Let’s be honest: it was the part of me that knew that boys didn’t like girls who are more badass than they are. But my monkey brain didn’t like being thought of as a fancy model minority type. In a fit of monkey pique, I said, “But if you don’t trust me, we can just forget about it.”

  And then, all of a sudden, he slumped, defeated. I don’t know if he just, in that moment, decided to show me, or if he couldn’t hide it any longer, but right then I realized that this was a last ditch effort for him, a Hail Mary pass. He really didn’t know what else to do.

  “Tez,” I said, trying for gentle, “I do know what to say to her. Or rather, I know how to say it so she’ll hear me. So … what is it you want me to tell her?”

  He heard me, but he didn’t move. He just sat there, slumped over, staring at his hands. I wasn’t sure if he was reluctant to speak, or if he didn’t know what to say. This was important, so I let the silence sit.

  At length, he turned to me and gave me a look that was purely pleading—the kind of look you never see on a guy like him: so confident, so practiced, so full of game.

  “Tell her to come home. She can have anything she wants. I won’t stand in her way. Tell her—” he broke off and slumped over even more. “Tell her she wins. Just come home.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Thursday, October 13, 2011

  Sanc-Ahh, Oakland; Chinatown, San Francisco

  My two busy days caught up to me, so I slept in Thursday morning. That afternoon I scoped out Oakland’s San Antonio district and found Chucha’s gang’s HQ, but absolutely no one was stirring. I remembered then that gangbangers tended to be nocturnal creatures. I’d been part of the daylight world so long I’d forgotten. I’d wait for night, then.

  I went to work in the afternoon; I was closing Sanc-Ahh that night and this worked out well for me, since I wanted to move on finding Bu Bu before he left town—if he was planning on leaving. This meant tapping into my supernat contacts, and Thursday evening—the start of the weekend for the young and hip—was the best time to be at Sanc-Ahh.

  Urban supernats broke into two unevenly sized groups. The first, and by far the larger, group, was comprised of those who acted as human as possible, both at home and abroad, and treated their supernature somewhat as an ethnicity. They took care of what they needed to take care of to satisfy their inner monsters, be it howl at the full moon, buy black market blood plasma, or take out a cow or two when the spirit so moved them. The young and hip (seeming) among us even enjoyed these things, the way your urban Chinese American hipster enjoys eating chicken feet and washing their hair before the new year. Tez and (mostly) I belonged to this group.

  The second, and much smaller group, consisted of folks who chose to live as monsters. For them there was no struggle with their internal nature, no lying to their nonexistent human friends, no lying to themselves that an inner monster was just a cultural tradition. They could let it all hang out, all the time. The downside, of course, is that their life choices were extremely limited. They were watched more closely than the larger group of passers, so they could only work and spend their leisure time in supernat enclaves, sanctuaries, and the twilight world of organized crime.

  I had chosen to join this group in my mid-teens, and had returned to the world of restraint, light, and opportunities a couple of years later, disgusted by many humans’ tendency to wallow in the worst part of their nature, and shaken by my own willingness to enable this with violence and mayhem. Working for Ayo gave that tendency in me a safe, constructive outlet, keeping me from being a hypocrite when I returned to pass as human in the human world. This underground party was also the group Bu Bu belonged to, and the group Tez’s sister Chucha had decided to join when she threw her lot in with the San Antonios. The group I was going to have to try to convince her to leave again … as soon as I found her.

  And this was the group I was targeting with my attention that evening: calling in five favors, starting to owe three more, and buying four expensive drinks. But nobody had seen Bu Bu, and those who had heard about him didn’t know where he was now. The best I got was from a Churel, who had apparently outbid Bu Bu for some sort of job on the meat market the day before. She must’ve been really good; she looked about five years old and tapped her front-facing heels shyly as she talked to me, scrunching up the skirts of her frilly white dress in cute little hands. I suppressed an internal shudder. She wouldn’t tell me what the job was or for whom, but it didn’t matter, since she was working for them now, not Bu Bu.

  She couldn’t tell me where he’d gone to from there, but her answers had pacified me somewhat. At least he was still looking for work in the Bay Area, and not immediately looking for passage out. Maybe he was still hoping to pay off that debt. Maybe … maybe even it was me who had scared him off from working for the Hung For Tong.
I mean, he’d apparently encountered two creatures like me on two different occasions, and somehow seen one of them accompanied by a soul-sucking shadow. Or something. Honestly, that’d be enough to dissuade just about anyone from continuing on a job. Maybe I still had time to find and pry more information from his weasely snout.

  Ayo came out of her office, and I had a brief moment of warmth—as I caught a brief glimpse of the office interior and that door—before she shut the door behind her and cut off any nascent desires the sight might’ve aroused.

  “Okay,” she said, as if continuing a conversation, “they’re coming in soon.”

  “Who?” I asked, genuinely confused.

  “The werecat dudes,” she said. I still felt—and evidently looked—puzzled. “You asked me for their number last night?”

  Oh, yeah, I’d texted her on my way to Zeitgeist that I wanted to call them. But one of the favors I’d gotten tonight was the address of their benevolent society office, and I’d been planning to make an uninvited visit. “Oh.”

  “Well, I called and they said they could come to you. I think they don’t want you going to them or having their number. I have to run out now. There’s a story I’m after ….” She trailed off absently as she swept up a few empties from the nearest tables.

  “And?” I asked, impatiently, taking them from her to the sink.

  “So I’ll be out, but I’m assuming you wanted to speak to them without me, anyway.”

  I gave her my best inscrutable look and she rolled her eyes, then swept out the door. Yes, I did want to speak to them without her. She didn’t know how to tread softly, and there was a certain freemasonry among supernats that she didn’t understand how to leverage and that wouldn’t apply to her anyway. She knew this, vaguely, and left me to do my thing with increasing frequency. I was … ambivalent about that.

  The rest of the evening seemed to crawl by without any sign of the werecats. I closed, and slowed my roll on the cleaning and post-close organizing, but still nothing. I damned Ayo for a close-fisted info-hoarder, and the werecats for stereotypical intramural paranoiac beast-men. I left at 2 am and flew directly over to San Francisco Chinatown.

  The office of their benevolent society (an unofficial organization with no apparent name) was simply the back office of a tiny tchotchke store on Grant Ave. unfortunately located exactly opposite the much larger and more popular Peking Bazaar. Their shop didn’t seem to have a name (the awning merely stated the street number) and was doing its level best to avoid attracting financial success by way of custom. The place positively screamed “front!”

  My source tonight had told me Wayland actually ran the society from the comfort of his own office, but the werecat hoi polloi were to be found crammed into the seats and crevices of this shop, and at all hours. It was their, very cramped, hangout, and also where they employed new members who hadn’t found their paws yet.

  I arrived invisibly and set up across the street to watch. The shop was dark, closed and locked, but, unlike most of the shops on this street, had no steel security gate to pull across its vulnerable windows. Probably the locals knew better than to mess with this bunch. After watching through the windows for a few minutes with human eyes, I caught several flares, although my night vision wasn’t good enough to see what deception I was tracking. I switched to cat form (housecat, mind you) and immediately clocked several shadowy human forms prowling the aisles of the shop, evidently roused by some whiff of my presence. I cursed for the thousandth time my inability to remember non-primates’ sensitive noses.

  Hm. How to begin? They clearly hadn’t been intending to honor their promise to Ayo to come see me, which irritated me. I could wait until they settled down and then knock for admittance. But they were unlikely to open to me at this hour, especially since they refused to let me come to them and refused to come to me. No, I was going to have to get hard core on these suckers.

  Monkey cheered up radically, while my rational brain urged me to reconsider. Reconsider what? Monkey wanted to know. Rational brain offered some half-baked Asian culture politeness mumbo-jumbo, but Monkey wasn’t having it.

  Still in Monkey-mode, still invisible, but back in human form, I unlocked their front door with a hair and watched as flares sparked all over my field of vision: one, two, three coming out from the back … four and five coming down the aisles to the right and left ... And maybe a sixth, already waiting in the front corner. They didn’t make a sound, and could see far better than I could.

  Time to even the playing field.

  I plucked several hairs and turned them into hot pink road flares, tossing one toward the source of each of the flashes in my eyes. I snapped my fingers, lighting them all simultaneously, and watched as six— no, seven: there had been two in the corner up front—pink-faced Asian men cried out in pain, and crouched defensively.

  While they were focused on covering their eyes (one was even groaning,) I plucked another several hairs, turned them into ropes, and leapt around the store, tangling each cat in a swirl of rope—not very securely, mind you, but it would take a redneck minute for each of them to extricate themselves.

  I started with the groaning guy to my left, but should’ve left him to last, because, by the time I got to ‘em, the last two to come out of the back room had recovered and were waiting for me. And they looked like the biggest, as well. I was still invisible, but since cats rely on their noses and ears as much as their eyes, this was hardly a hindrance to them, and both of them were staring straight at me.

  The last ones out of the office were likely to be the leaders, so I took a split second to consider my approach. In that second, these two—with the simple ease of people who have been fighting together for a long time—got the jump on me. With incredible speed, one seized my arm from the left, while the other swept around my right to block my exit.

  I tensed, but, having located, seized, and blocked me, they stood still and made no other aggressive moves. Hmm. Monkey froze in confusion. I sensed nothing but professionalism. Interesting. Monkey wanted to fight, but now it was more out of curiosity than aggression.

  Lefty, still holding my arm, demanded something in some language. It was a tonal language, that much I could tell. Something Southeast Asian, maybe?

  I sighed, and became visible. I could hear Righty taking a step back in surprise, but Lefty didn’t let go, only gasped a little. So they weren’t expecting me.

  “I only speak English, sorry,” I said. “What did you say?”

  Lefty looked over my shoulder at Righty, and they seemed to confer silently for a moment.

  “You da girl from Ayo,” Lefty said. It wasn’t a question.

  “That’s right,” I said, “And you the guy who was supposed to come talk to me tonight.”

  “So you break in my shop?” he asked calmly, but with a real stark undertone. What’s more, he was right, damn his catty eyes.

  “Were you going to let me in if I knocked?” I asked, not the only one being catty tonight.

  He eye-conferred with Righty some more.

  “Mr. Soh none of yoh business,” he said bluntly.

  Yeah, that’s what I thought. Interesting that he got right to the point, though. That was definitely the cat speaking and not the Asian man. I might make more headway if I talked to the Asian. Not that I’d been raised in any Asian culture, and Spaghetti Monster knows I tended to avoid newcomers like the plague, but I’d spent enough time around Asian Americans by now to catch the drift.

  I slipped out of his grasp and bobbed my head subtly.

  “I don’t mean to be nosy,” I said, raising my pitch a register and softening my tone, “but I’m involved with Kearny Street Workshop, an organization that Mr. Soh was sponsoring. That’s where he was killed, you know. He was there that night to visit the organization and confirm his sponsorship. So I feel somewhat … responsible.”

  I was speaking their language on two levels: predator, and hostess. To them, KSW was my territory and Wayland was a guest who had
died under my protection. I was claiming a part of the responsibility for his death.

  No part of me stopped to consider why I was doing this, despite the fact that it could potentially get me in trouble—the same kind of trouble, in fact, that the Hung For Tong was facing for being the last place Dalisay was seen. Even Monkey, a firm disbeliever in responsibility, was overwhelmed with curiosity and suspense. And the rest of me … well I couldn’t quite explain my interest. Maybe “responsibility” was part of it. Or maybe just aggression. Maybe I did feel my territory had been breached.

  All around us, the other five cats had extricated themselves and were rising and approaching. I was careful not to react.

  The two cats exchanged a quick glance again, and Lefty seemed to give in.

  “We know why he wen’ dere dat night. But we still don’t know who kill him, or why dey kill him.”

  “Did he have any enemies?”

  The cat scoffed. “Of course! But dey not kill him. No opportunity.” He paused. “And …”

  “And you don’t think any of them know how to suck out a soul,” I said bluntly.

  They all seemed to flinch as one, but Lefty nodded. “Do you know what ‘suck out a soul’?” he asked. “Ayo does research, so we want to know what she find out. Do you know?”

  I immediately knew I didn’t want to tell them that we had a lead that connected my type of creature—whatever that was—to a potential soul-sucker. “No, we don’t know yet. But we’re on it. Don’t worry. If anyone can find a candidate, it’ll be Ayo.”

  They didn’t look satisfied—who would be?—but they nodded.

  “She’ll call you the moment she has anything. And in the meantime,” I took two steps to the checkout counter and quickly wrote my cell number on a blank receipt, “call me if you find out anything else. I’m pursuing an … alternative lead, which might turn up nothing, but I’ll definitely let you know if it does.” As long as it doesn’t implicate me, I added internally.