by Ginny Rorby
The man waved for her to be quiet. The attendant came toward her, pointing toward the chair she’d just left. “You go sit out there.”
Joey took a step backward, then flushed. The only thing you can’t do is hear, Charlie had written. “I’m deaf, not retarded,” she snapped. “Don’t talk to me like that.”
“I … I’m sorry,” the attendant said, then suddenly realized that Joey had understood her. “You read lips.”
“Yours pretty well. Not his.”
The attendant looked at the manager, then back at Joey. “We’ve got a taxi coming to take you to Barstow to meet the Southwest Chief. It left L.A. on time.”
Joey’s knees wobbled, she was so nervous. She caught “taxi coming” and “Barstow.” She pretended to understand completely. “I don’t think I can afford to take a cab to Barstow. How far is it?”
“About a hundred and thirty-six miles.”
Joey unzipped her backpack and took out her wallet. Mr. McCully had sent her $250. “I don’t think I have enough to pay for the cab, but here is the number of an attorney in San Francisco. I’d like to call him.”
“You don’t understand. Amtrak will pay for the cab.”
“Really?”
The attendant nodded. “If you’d told me you were deaf…”
“I know, I should have, but I didn’t know about the change and you didn’t say anything when you checked my ticket.”
The attendant shot the manager a look, then walked Joey from the office. “Do you need to use the restroom or anything? It will be a long ride.”
The cab ride through the dark desert night was wild. The driver had been told she was deaf, so he hunkered over the steering wheel, wordlessly, and drove as if they had a fire-breathing dragon on their tail. Joey spent the ride terrified they would crash and terrified they’d miss the train. At one point, he pulled into a gas station to use the pay phone. When he returned, he said, “It’s nip and tuck,” then shrugged, got in, and sped out of the parking lot, tires squealing.
The train was sitting in the station with only one door open. As the taxi careened to a stop, the attendant waved for her to run. Joey crushed a twenty-dollar bill into the driver’s hand, flung open the door, and ran for the train.
The second she leapt aboard, the attendant waved to the engineer, slammed the door, and the train started to roll. “You waited for me?” she gasped.
He smiled, took a pencil from his pocket, and wrote, You must be pretty important, on a little pad.
“I’m not,” Joey said, tears streaming down her cheeks, “but I’m meeting someone who is.”
Mr. McCully had reserved a deluxe sleeper for her. When the attendant led her through the car and slid open the door to room B, Joey couldn’t believe her eyes. There was a sofa, a swivel chair, and her own little bathroom. The decor was a bit tired-looking, but she sank into it gratefully.
She’d missed dinner and the dining car was closed, but a few minutes after she boarded, the attendant brought her a tuna sandwich and a bag of chips. While she ate, he turned the sofa into a bed. Joey’s last thoughts, before sleep overwhelmed her, were of Sukari comforting Luke that day in the yard after he ran into the power pole. Joey hadn’t understood the signs then but she’d remembered them now. Sukari was hugging Luke and when he stopped crying and grinned, her solemn little face lit up and she signed, HURT GO. HAPPY. As the train rolled through the night, Joey’s last thought was that her own happiness depended on believing that someday, no matter what they’d done to her, Sukari’s pain, too, would end.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Though it had been less than a month since Joey learned where Sukari was, she’d had plenty of time to imagine this day. She’d tried to steel herself, but nothing in her worst nightmare could have prepared her for what she was about to see.
Dolores Miller, an attorney friend of Mr. McCully’s, and Kathy Lawson, a sign language interpreter, met her at the train station in Albuquerque. From there they drove in a rented van with a large cage in the back for more than five hours to Alamogordo, New Mexico, a small town near White Sands, where the first atomic bomb was tested, and just southeast of Roswell, where the first aliens from outer space supposedly landed.
Joey knew that if aliens had landed anywhere near here, it must have been by mistake. She’d never seen such desolation. The only color out the van window on the drive down Interstate 25 was beige. The mountains, dotted with short, dull green scrubs, were beige. The flatland, pocked with gray-green sage, was beige.
Ms. Miller drove and Kathy rode shotgun. Joey had wanted to sit in the backseat and not talk, but Kathy tried to include her by interpreting everything that she and Ms. Miller said. How warm they thought it was for early December, how long since it had rained, and so on.
At San Antonio, they took SR 380, a two-lane road that seemed to drift randomly south. There was nothing for miles before they went through the single two-house town of Bingham. Kathy pointed out that the man in the first house sold maps to the Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was tested, and the owner of the second house had a rock shop that sold “trinitite,” soil from the blast site turned to molten glass by the heat of the explosion.
Joey appreciated that they were all trying not to think about the task that lay ahead, but she finally pretended to sleep for the peace closing her eyes brought. She must have dozed off, because when Kathy patted her knee, she started.
WE HERE, she signed as they slowed to turn right into Holloman Air Force Base. A guard, absurdly dressed in jungle camouflage against such a barren background, put one hand on the large pistol on his right hip and held up his left hand for them to stop. Another guard stepped out of the little gatehouse and stood rigidly, watchfully, his rifle at the ready.
“Is this the right place?” Joey asked.
Kathy only nodded, afraid, Joey guessed, to move her hands.
Ms. Miller showed the guard a copy of the court order for Sukari’s release. Joey could see none of the conversation that ensued and Kathy’s hands remained knotted in her lap, but after a phone call, they were directed to pull into the small parking lot across from the gatehouse. A few minutes later, another armed guard wheeled into the parking lot on two of his jeep’s four wheels. He led them to the main entrance, where they were asked to produce identification and again show the court order.
Kathy jumped when the guard reached in and slapped a temporary pass onto the inside of their windshield. Ms. Miller remained tight-jawed and unflinching, staring straight ahead while they waited for the security police to escort them to the Clarke Foundation.
For most of the six- or seven-mile drive, Joey sat forward and center in the backseat. When they passed the German Air Force Headquarters they looked at each other.
“This place gives me the creeps. We could disappear and nobody’d know what became of us,” Kathy said, but signed only the first part for Joey, who guessed the rest by catching “disappear” and “what became—us.”
They passed the USAF Space Command and Surveillance Squadron, a large, dark brown cinderblock building with no windows. It was ringed by a high chain-link fence topped off with coils of razor wire. In spite of herself, Joey grinned. “Do you think this is all here because of the aliens?
Ms. Miller finally smiled. “These probably are the aliens.”
Kathy laughed and interpreted.
Joey was thinking that this must be the longest seven miles on the planet, when they made a turn onto Vandergrief Road, and there, far off to the right, on the broad flat horizon like a dead snake in the sun, she saw a long, single-story building. She knew this was it, and her heart began to pound.
The approach off Vandergrief brought them to the back of the building. They drove its length, past a series of metal doors, each with a chain-link enclosure attached.
“Dear God,” Kathy said.
Ms. Miller made a right turn past the sign that read, CLARKE FOUNDATION, PRIMATE BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH LABORATORY, and pulled into the parking lo
t. Two scruffy-looking bushes and a straight-backed chair against the front wall beneath a row of windows were all that broke the monotony of the beige building. Joey opened the sliding van door and got out.
About a half mile away, she could see more than a hundred corn cribs shimmering in the heat like a mirage on the desert landscape. She stared at them. “Ask him what those are,” she whispered to Kathy.
“Monkeys,” the guard said.
Maybe it was the dry heat, but Joey felt dizzy. Was Sukari out there? Did he say monkeys because he didn’t know the difference, or were they really monkeys?
“Not chimpanzees?”
“No, monkeys,” he said. “A thousand of them. Come this way. I want to see Dr. Fred’s face when he gets this.” The security guard grinned and waved the court order.
An old dog with fur the color of sand lifted his head to look at them as they came in the glass doors, then laid it down again and thumped the floor with his tail. They waited in the shabby lobby with the dog until the guard came back.
About midway down the corridor, standing in the only open doorway, was a short, round, wispy-white-haired old man in baggy, wrinkled gray pants held up by suspenders. Joey thought of the empty chair against the building and guessed it belonged to him. She pictured him out there till the sun came up over the roof, content to watch the jets scream across the sky, or the quieter comings and goings of the people who worked here. As they approached, she saw the stub of a cigar clamped in his teeth and his icy stare. After they passed, she glanced back and saw him crush the court order in his fist, go back into his office, and close the black-lettered door: DR. FREDRICK CLARKE. DIRECTOR. The man who owned and ran the most notorious research lab in the country was a dumpy, angry old man. If she wasn’t who she was and wasn’t steps away from taking Sukari away from him, she might not have believed it was possible for men like him and her father to exist in the world, which otherwise seemed relatively compassionate.
Inside a locker room, they were asked to dress in white jumpsuits made of Tyvek, the same material that the addition to their house had been wrapped in before the siding went on. They pulled on black rubber boots just like the ones she’d been wearing the day she met Charlie and Sukari, and they were fitted with white hoods and plastic faceplates with headbands. They looked like astronauts and she was afraid Sukari wouldn’t recognize her. But when she asked why they had to dress this way, the “Animal-Care Technician” who had joined them said that it was for protection from the chimps who spit and threw food and feces at the workers. A knot formed in Joey’s stomach. Have they turned Sukari into that kind of chimp?
They left the locker room and passed through a set of double doors marked NO ADMITTANCE: LAB PERSONNEL ONLY, into a fluorescently lit, windowless room lined with cages of screaming, howling, wide-eyed monkeys, some in barred cages, others in aquarium-like plastic boxes. Pairs of baby monkeys rushed to hug each other, then huddled, trembling in the far corners of their cages, staring at the procession with shattered eyes. Joey slowed like someone passing a cruel, crushing accident. She didn’t want to see, yet couldn’t look away. One of the babies, alone in a bare box the size of a bicycle basket, eyed them with fear and longing, then came shyly to the front and followed their progress like a mime, its pink, wrinkled palms moving along the plastic window. Joey stopped and brought a finger to touch the baby’s, but the care-tech stepped forward and shook her head.
Ms. Miller grabbed Joey’s arm at the same time. She was very pale. “I can’t do this,” she said, swaying slightly. “I’ll … I’ll be with the dog.” She spun and pitched through the swinging doors.
A hurt look came to the care-tech’s narrow face. “The work we do here saves lives.”
Kathy’s face was white and streaked with tears as she interpreted for Joey.
The baby monkey had knotted itself into the corner of its little aquarium. When Joey glanced at it again, it began to tremble. Joey put a hand on Kathy’s arm. “Are you okay to go on?”
Kathy nodded.
Though this room had recently been washed down with the black rubber fire hoses that were dripping at each end of the gray concrete room, it still reeked. Joey knew this smell—she’d smelled it on her mother and on herself. The room was saturated with an odor that no amount of Clorox could cover—the stench of fear.
Joey’s mother once had a suede coat with a fox collar. She’d kept it stored, saving it, not for special occasions, of which there were none, but for emergencies, like job interviews. She hoped that if she looked as if she didn’t really need work, they’d be more inclined to hire her. People with jobs to offer were like banks, she told Joey—the less you looked as if you needed the money, the more likely they were to want to loan you some.
The coat and its collar were probably long gone; she hadn’t seen it in years, but she still remembered the vague mothball smell, and running to greet her mother. She remembered being lifted and hugged and burying her face in the soft cloud of fur and feeling it tickle her cheek and neck. She’d been too young to wonder about the animals that had died for the coat and its collar any more than she made the link between live chickens, cows, or pigs and what she ate.
Now, crossing this room, she imagined the fox, whose fur had made that collar, one foot clamped in a steel-jaw trap, frantically trying to gnaw its own leg off. How did they ever rid the fur of that smell of terror?
As they neared the next set of doors, Joey tried to visualize what the room where they had Sukari looked like. She needed to blunt the actual moment by imagining it in stages: cages with bars like in prison, concrete floor with drain holes, windowless cinderblock walls, dripping fire hoses, and the stench. How much worse could it be than what she’d already seen? She’d made it this far, but her breath came in short gasps. Kathy must have felt the same, because she took Joey’s hand as the care-tech pushed a door open and held it for them to pass.
Entering this next room would forever remain the one moment when Joey was grateful to be deaf, though not deaf enough. The cages stood on six-inch legs and were about six feet square. The sides, tops, and bottoms were fat aluminum bars, and they were bare inside except for a narrow metal shelf for the chimp to lie on. There was a large metal box attached to each cage door for food and a stainless steel nipple for water. Each cage held a single chimpanzee. A few charged their bars, gripped them with feet and hands, and screamed and hooted. Others threw food and feces and spit at them through bared teeth. Kathy stepped closer to Joey, then maneuvered her to the center of the aisle as they followed the tech.
A few chimps ran to the bars and held out their hands with pleading looks.
“These are our Special K addicts,” the care-tech said, dodging the outstretched hands. Kathy interpreted, and must have asked what that meant, because the tech added, “They’re addicted to Ketamine, the tranquilizer we use.”
Midway down the row of cages, they came to a lab technician drawing blood from a chimp who was pressed against the back wall by the door of its own cage. As if they were a tour group, their tech stopped. “This is a new kind of cage called a ‘squeeze-back,’ which means,” she explained, “we no longer have to do a knock-down”—she stopped to puzzle how to define this for them—“you know, tranquilize the subjects for routine exams. Though, as you can see, some of the chimps that are tested daily are addicted to the tranquilizer and really miss it.” She smiled.
As Kathy’s trembling hands repeated this for Joey, the tech was hit in the shoulder with a blob of what looked like soggy brown cereal. She absently spread the slime down her arm with a gloved hand. “They fill their cheeks with water and their Jumbo Biscuits and spit that at us, too.” She shrugged.
Joey felt as if she’d lost all sensation; a numbness moved from her head to her feet and she thought she might faint. She bit down as hard as she could stand on her bottom lip, so that she’d have a physical pain to focus on. She moved forward, concentrating on one foot, then the other. When the tech stopped again, Joey stared straight
ahead. Kathy touched her arm. She turned and saw that the cages were numbered. They were standing in front of CF1029. Joey blinked to focus. The chimp was crammed into the corner of its cage, beneath its metal sleeping shelf. She could see only its legs. The same number was tattooed on one of its thighs.
The tech had a list attached to a clipboard with a plastic sheet for protection. It reminded Joey of the Etch A Sketch that Smiley had given her all those years ago. The tech wiped it with her arm, then ran a finger down the numbers and across the line. “This is the one.”
Joey’s knees were weak and offered no resistance as she sank to the floor. The chimp sat in the corner, staring blankly and rocking.
“Sukari?” Joey whispered.
There was no response, and for a moment Joey thought that either it wasn’t Sukari or she couldn’t be heard through the face shield and over the screams of the other chimps. She was turning to ask the technician if she was sure when she saw the chimp’s fingers moving.
Joey reached up slowly and took off the face shield and her hood. “Sukari, it’s me. Joey.”
Sukari stopped rocking and drew her legs in tight. She glanced at Joey just as the care-tech squatted down to watch.
Sukari screamed and jammed herself deeper into the corner, signing, NO HURT. HUG. HUG.
“Get away,” Joey cried, and shoved the tech, who tipped over and landed on her butt.
“We’re very good to these animals,” she snapped.
Kathy suddenly ripped her hood off. Her face was scarlet and she gasped for air. She turned to the tech. “That chimp signed, ‘No hurt. Hug. Hug.’”
