The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  “That’s my job?”

  She nodded. “If you don’t futz it up, there’ll be another.”

  “Another monkey?”

  “No,” she said. “Another job. This monkey’s one of a kind.”

  “And you’re sure you don’t want me to just take him to the airport and put him on a plane?”

  “I’m sure.”

  I should’ve asked why but didn’t. “Okay. When do I leave?”

  “As soon as you get your Mom’s car.” She noticed my open mouth. “This monkey,” she said, “needs as much anonymity as possible.”

  “I’m traveling with an incognito monkey in a twenty-year-old station wagon?”

  “Yes. You’d better get changed.”

  “Changed?” I knew I’d worn the suit two days in a row but I figured the first day didn’t really count.

  “You can’t be seen like that. What would a guy in a suit need with a monkey? I need a clown for this one.”

  I was opening my mouth to question all of this when Patrice came in with a thick envelope. Nancy took it, opened it, and started ruffling through the hundred-dollar bills.

  “I’ll get changed, get the car, be back in an hour,” I said.

  Nancy smiled. It was a sweet smile, one that reminded me of eighties music and her parents’ ratty couch. “Thanks, Merton.”

  The monkey and I drove southeast, zigzagging highways across Washington, crossing over the Cascades into dryer, colder parts of the state. There was little snow on the pass and the miles went by quickly.

  The monkey was in an aluminum crate with little round holes in it. They’d loaded him into the back in their underground parking garage. Two men in suits stood by the door, watching.

  “You shouldn’t need anything else, Merton,” Nancy said. “He’s pretty heavily sedated. He ought to sleep all the way through.”

  I looked at the map, tracing my finger along the route she’d marked in blue highlighter. “That’s…around seventeen hundred miles, Nancy.” I did some math in my head. “At least two days…and that’s if I really push it.”

  “Just bring his crate into your hotel room. Discreetly, Merton.” She smiled again. “You’ll be fine. He’ll be fine, too.”

  Naturally, I’d said okay, climbed into the car and set out for Roswell, New Mexico.

  When we crossed into Oregon, the monkey woke up.

  I knew this because he asked me for a cigarette.

  I swerved onto the shoulder, mashing the brakes with one clown-shoed foot while hyperventilating.

  “Just one,” he said. “Please?”

  I couldn’t get out of the car fast enough. After a few minutes of pacing by the side of the road, convincing myself that it was the result of quitting the booze cold turkey, I poked my head back into the car.

  “Did you say something?” I asked, holding my breath.

  Silence.

  Releasing my breath, I climbed back into the car. “I didn’t think so.” I started the car back up, eased it onto the road. I laughed at myself. “Talking monkeys,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Monkeys can’t talk,” the monkey said. Then he yawned loudly.

  I braked again.

  He chuckled. “Look pal, I’m no monkey. I just play one on TV.”

  I glanced up into the rearview mirror. A single dark eye blinked through one of the holes. “Really?”

  He snorted. “No. I don’t. Where are we supposed to be going?”

  “Roswell, New Mexico.”

  “And what does that tell you?”

  I shrugged. “You got me.”

  “Let’s just say I’m not from around here.”

  “Where are you from?” But it was sinking in. Of course, I didn’t believe it. I had laid aside the cold turkey alcohol withdrawal theory at this point and was wondering now if maybe I was tilting more towards a psychotic break theory.

  “Unimportant. But I’m not a monkey.”

  “Okay then. Why don’t you go back to sleep?”

  “I’m not tired. I just woke up. Why don’t you let me out of this box and give me a cigarette?”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Let’s stop somewhere, then. A gas station.”

  I looked back at him in the rearview mirror. “For someone that’s not from around here, you sure know an awful lot.” More suspicion followed. “And you speak English pretty good, too.”

  “Well,” the monkey said. “I speak it well. And I may not be from here but I’ve certainly spent enough time on this little rock you call home.”

  “Really?” Definitely a psychotic break. I needed medication. Maybe cognitive therapy, too. “What brings you out this way?”

  “I’m a spy.”

  “A monkey spy?”

  “I thought we’d already established that I’m not a monkey.”

  “So you just look like one?” I gradually gave the car some gas and we slipped back onto the highway.

  “Exactly.”

  “Why?”

  “I have no idea. You’d have to ask my boss.”

  I pushed the station wagon back up to seventy-five, watching for road signs and wondering if any of the little towns out here would have a psychiatrist. “Where’s your boss?”

  “Don’t know,” the monkey said. “I gave him the slip when I defected.”

  “You defected?”

  “Of course I defected.”

  “Why?”

  “Got a better offer.”

  It went on like that. We made small talk and Oregon turned into Idaho. I never asked his name; he never offered. I found a Super Eight outside Boise and after paying, hauled his crate into the room.

  “So are you going to let me out?”

  “I don’t think that’d be such a good idea,” I told him.

  “Well, can you at least get us a pizza? And some beer?”

  “Pizza, yes,” I said. “Beer, no.” I called it in and channel-surfed until it arrived.

  The holes presented a problem. And I couldn’t just eat in front of him. I went to open the crate.

  It was locked. One of those high powered combination jobs.

  “Odd, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “A bit.”

  He sighed. “I’m sure it’s for my own protection.”

  “Or mine,” I said.

  He chuckled. “Yeah, I’m quite the badass as you can see.”

  That’s when I picked up the phone and called Nancy. She’d given me her home number. “Hey,” I said.

  “Merton. What’s up?”

  “Well, I’m in Boise.”

  “How’s the package?”

  “Fine. But….” I wasn’t sure what to say.

  “But what?”

  “Well, I went to check on the monkey and the crate’s locked. What’s the combination?”

  “Is the monkey awake?” Her voice sounded alarmed.

  I looked at the crate, at the eye peeking out. “Uh. No. I don’t think so.”

  “Has anything—” she paused, choosing her word carefully, “—unusual happened?”

  I nearly said you mean like a talking space alien disguised as a monkey? Instead, I said, “No. Not at all. Not really.” I knew I needed more or she wouldn’t believe me. “Well, the guy at the front desk looked at me a bit funny.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Old. Bored. Like he didn’t expect to see a clown in his lobby.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine.”

  I nodded, even though she couldn’t see me. “So, about that combination?”

  “You don’t need it, Merton. Call me when you get to Roswell.” The phone clicked and she was gone.

  In the morning, I loaded the monkey back into the car and we pointed ourselves towards Utah.

  We picked up our earlier conversation.

  “So you defected? To an insurance company?” But I knew what he was going to say.

  “That’s no insurance company.”

  “Government?”

&nbs
p; “You’d know better than I would,” he said. “I was asleep through most of that bit.”

  “But you’re the one who defected.”

  He laughed. “I didn’t defect to them.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No. Of course not. Do you think I want to be locked in a metal box in the back of a station wagon on my way to Roswell, New Mexico, with an underweight clown who doesn’t smoke?”

  I shrugged. “Then what?”

  “There was a guy. He was supposed to meet me in Seattle before your wacky friends got me with the old tag and bag routine. He represents certain other interested parties. He’d worked up a bit of an incognito gig for me in exchange for some information on my previous employers.”

  I felt my eyebrows furrow. “Other interested parties?”

  “Let’s just say your little rock is pretty popular these days. Did you really think the cattle mutilations, abductions, anal probes and crop circles were all done by the same little green men?”

  “I’d never thought about it before.”

  “Space is pretty big. And everyone has their schtick.”

  I nodded. “Okay. That makes sense, I guess.” Except for the part where I was still talking to a monkey and he was talking back. It was quiet now. The car rolled easy on the highway.

  “Sure could use a cigarette.”

  “They’re bad for you. They’ll kill you.”

  “Jury’s still out on that,” the monkey said. “I’m not exactly part of your collective gene pool.” He paused. “Besides, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “What do you really think they’re going to do to me in Roswell?”

  The monkey had a point. The next truck stop, I pulled off and went inside. I came out with a pack of Marlboros and pushed one through the little hole. He reversed it, pointing an end out to me so I could light it. He took a long drag. “That’s nice,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.” Suddenly my shoulders felt heavy. As much as I knew that there was something dreadfully wrong with me, some wire that had to be burned out in my head, I felt sad. Something bad, something experimental was probably going to happen to this monkey. And whether or not he deserved it, I had a role in it. I didn’t like that at all.

  “Have you seen a monkey around here?” the California Tan Man had asked me two days ago in front of the CARECO building.

  I looked up. “Hey. I saw that guy. The one in Seattle. What was the gig he had for you? Witness protection type-thing?”

  “Sort of. Lay low, stay under everyone’s radar.”

  Where would a monkey lay low, I asked myself. “Like what?” I said. “A zoo?”

  “Screw zoos. Concrete cage and a tire swing. Who wants that?”

  “What then?”

  Cigarette smoke trailed out of the holes in his crate. “It’s not important. Really.”

  “Come on. Tell me.” But I knew now. Of course I knew. How could I not? But I waited for him to say it.

  “Well,” the monkey said, “ever since I landed on this rock I’ve wanted to join the circus.”

  Exactly, I thought, and I knew what I had to do.

  “I’ll be back,” I said. I got out of the car and walked around the truck stop. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for. The guy had a mullet and a pickup truck. In the back of the pickup truck’s window was a rifle rack. And in the rifle rack, a rifle. Hunting season or not, this was Idaho.

  I pulled that wad of bills from my wallet and his eyes went wide. He’d probably never seen a clown with so much determination in his stride and cash in his fist. I bought that rifle from him, drove out into the middle of nowhere, and shot the lock off that crate.

  When the door opened, a small, hairy hand reached out, followed by a slender, hairy arm, hairy torso, hairy face. He didn’t quite look like a monkey but he was close enough. He smiled, his three black eyes shining like pools of oil. Then, the third eye puckered in on itself and disappeared. “I should at least try to fit in,” he said.

  “Do you want me to drop you anywhere?” I asked him.

  “I think I’ll walk. Stretch my legs a bit.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  We shook hands. I gave him the pack of the cigarettes, the lighter and all but one of the remaining hundred dollar bills.

  “I’ll see you around,” I said.

  I didn’t call Nancy until I got back to Seattle. When I did, I told her what happened. Well, my version about what happened. And I didn’t feel bad about it, either. She’d tried to use me in her plot against a fellow circus aficionado.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” I said. “We were just outside of Boise, early in the morning, and there was this light in the sky.” I threw in a bit about missing time and how I thought something invasive and wrong might’ve happened to me.

  I told her they also took the monkey.

  She insisted that I come over right away. She and her husband had a big house on the lake and when I got there, she was already pretty drunk. I’m a weak man. I joined her and we polished off a bottle of tequila. Her husband was out of town on business and somehow we ended up having sex on the leather couch in his den. It was better than the last time but still nothing compared to a high wire trapeze act or a lion tamer or an elephant that can dance.

  Still, I didn’t complain. At the time, it was nice.

  Three days later, my phone rang.

  “Merton D. Kamal?” a familiar voice asked.

  “Yes?”

  “I need a clown for my act.”

  “Does it involve talking monkeys?” I asked with a grin.

  “Monkeys can’t talk,” the monkey said.

  So I wrote Nancy a note, thanking her in great detail for the other night. After putting it in her mailbox, I took a leisurely stroll down to the Greyhound Station.

  When the man at the ticket counter asked me where I was headed, I smiled.

  “The greatest show on earth,” I said. And I know he understood because he smiled back.

  Copyright © 2010 by Ken Scholes

  Books by Ken Scholes

  PSALMS OF ISAAK

  Lamentation

  Canticle

  Antiphon

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  Long Walks, Last Flights, and Other Strange Journeys

  Driving Mimes, Weeping Czars, and Other Unusual Suspects

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  Ten years after my parents died, my therabot, Bob, informed me that I should seek help elsewhere. I blinked at his suggestion.

  “I’ve already tried chemical intervention,” I told his plastic grin. “It didn’t work.” I scowled, but that did nothing to de-brighten his soothing, chipper voice.

  “Booze doesn’t count, Charlie.”

  “I tried weed, too.”

  Bob shook his head. “Nothing therapeutic there, either, I’m afraid.” He sighed and imitated the movements of pushing himself back from his imitation wood desk. “You are experiencing what we like to call complicated grief.”

  Complicated grief. As if I hadn’t heard that one before.

  Dad had died badly. He’d been on one of the trains that got swallowed by the Sound back on the day we lost Seattle. He’d called me from his cell phone with his last breath, as the water poured in, to let me know he wasn’t really my father.

  We lost the signal before he could tell me who he actually was. Naturally, I calle
d Mom. She answered just before the ceiling of the store she was shopping in collapsed.

  Both parents in one day. Fuck yes, complicated grief.

  And a side helping of unknown paternity.

  Bob continued. “Ten years is a long time, Charlie. I want you to call this number and ask for Pete.” His eyes rolled in their sockets as his internal processors accessed his files. My phone chirped when his text came through. He extended a plastic tentacle tipped with a three-fingered white clown’s glove. “I hope you find your way.”

  I scowled again and shook his offered hand. “So you’re firing me as a patient?”

  “Be well,” he said. His eyes went dead and his hand dropped back to the artificial oak surface of his desk.

  I met Pete in an alley on the back of Valencia, behind an old bookstore that still dealt in paper. I transferred funds to an offshore account that then moved it along, scrubbing the transaction as it passed through its various stops along the way before his phone chirped. When it chirped, he extended a smart-lock plastic bag to me. A small, withered blue thing sloshed about in it. At first, I thought it was a severed finger or something far worse. (Or better, depending upon one’s fetishes.) I held the bag up to the flickering light of the dirty street lamp.

  The blue thing looked like an asparagus tip, only it wriggled.

  “Find someplace safe and quiet,” Pete said. “Preferably indoors with a lock. Eat it with water.”

  “I’m not putting this in my mouth.”

  Pete shrugged. He was a scrawny kid, his tattooed face stubbly in the dim light, long red hair cascading over his shoulders. “Doesn’t matter to me. But the wild blue yonder are especially good for your situation. Complicated grief, right?” I nodded because his eyes—one brown and one bright yellow—told me that he probably knew it from experience. “Eat this. Spend a weekend sweating and naked on the floor. You’ll be a new man.”

  “Naked and sweating?” I looked at the baggie again, then back to Pete. “And how do you know Bob?” I couldn’t imagine a therabot needing a dealer.

  Pete smiled. “We’re colleagues.”