Bad Monkeys

by Matt Ruff

  What sort of people were they?

  Old. They were my aunt and uncle on my father’s side. My father had been fifteen years older than my mother, and my aunt was his older sister, so to look at her you’d think she was my grandmother. My uncle was even older.

  Was it awkward for you, staying with your father’s sister?

  Not really. My father was completely out of the picture at this point; he’d cut ties with the rest of his family the same time he walked out on us. And my aunt wasn’t anything like him. She’d been married to my uncle and living in the same house since the end of World War II.

  How did they feel about you coming to live with them?

  If there’d been some other option, I don’t think they’d have volunteered to let me stay with them as long as I did, but they never complained about it.

  So you got along with them?

  I didn’t really have a choice. They were the most nonconfrontational people I’d ever met: you couldn’t pick a fight with them if you tried. And it’s not that they didn’t have rules, but their way of getting you to behave was to make it impossible for you not to.

  Like my uncle, right, he was the kind of guy who liked to have a glass of whiskey before he went to bed. I thought that was a pretty good idea, so the second night I was there, I snuck into his study after he went to sleep and helped myself. And I didn’t take much, but the thing about guys who drink every day, they know exactly what’s left in the bottle they’re working on, and if the level is off by even a quarter inch, they notice.

  Now, if my mom had caught me drinking, especially her stuff? She’d have been in my face about it in two seconds flat. My uncle never said a word—but the next day, I passed by the study and heard drilling inside, and that evening when I went to fix myself another nightcap I found a brand-new lock on the liquor cabinet. A big lock, fist-sized, the kind you can’t pick.

  They were like that with every bad thing I did. They never lectured me; they assumed I knew right from wrong, but if I insisted on doing wrong, they found some way to lock out that choice.

  One morning my aunt asked me if I’d like to come help out at the store. Normally there’d have been no chance, but I was already so bored that I said OK. At the end of the day she gave me fifty cents, which seemed pretty cheap for eight hours, even if I did spend most of that time flipping through magazines. Next day, same deal. The day after that, I bailed out around noon, and instead of waiting to get paid I swiped a couple dollars from the till. Then that night before bed, I went to put the two bucks into the drawer where I kept my other wages and my Officer Friendly money, and instead of the twenty-six dollars that should have been there, I only found twenty-four. It was obvious what had happened, but I pulled the drawer out anyway and shook it upside-down, just in case the rest of the money had gotten stuck somehow. A single quarter fell out.

  Your pay for the half-day you’d just worked?

  Right.

  Did you say anything to your aunt?

  What would I have said? No fair stealing back what I stole from you? Anyway I had to hand it to her, keeping a step ahead of me that way. And no energy wasted on yelling. It seemed, I don’t know, efficient.

  But it was also frustrating. If I haven’t made it clear already, there wasn’t a lot for me to do in Siesta Corta, and once you took away the stuff I shouldn’t be doing, life got really dull really fast.

  The low point came about ten days in. My aunt and uncle didn’t own a TV—of course they didn’t—but they did have a lot of books in the house, and one day in desperation I started rooting through their library. Now I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. I wasn’t illiterate, and I wasn’t allergic to books the way some people are, but still, on my list of preferred leisure activities, reading anything more demanding than Tiger Beat ranked somewhere down around badminton and pulling taffy. But there I was, on a perfectly good Friday afternoon, curled up in an easy chair with a Nancy Drew mystery in my lap.

  I wouldn’t have guessed you’d be a Nancy Drew fan.

  I wasn’t, really. I was a Pamela Sue Martin fan. She was the actress who played Nancy Drew on television—had played her, until she got kicked off the show for being a troublemaker. She was one of my role models. On TV she was squeaky-clean, but in real life she had a reputation for being a bad girl who wouldn’t take shit from people. She’d been in Playboy, and done R-rated movies—just that year she’d starred as John Dillinger’s girlfriend in The Lady in Red. So because of Pamela Sue Martin, I had this image of Nancy Drew as a sort of closet bad seed, cooler than she had any right to be.

  The book turned out to be strictly G-rated, but I got sucked into the story anyway, and by the time I came up for air, most of the afternoon had gone by. Which freaked me out when I realized, because, you know, sitting in the same spot for hours, barely moving, that’s the kind of thing Phil would do.

  You were worried about turning into your brother?

  Yeah. I know it sounds comical now, but at the time? That really was a panic-inducing thought for me. So I got up right then, went and got my money, and made a beeline for the highway.

  What about your promise to Officer Friendly?

  Well, I wasn’t really going to run away. It was more like a test run—kind of a hitchhiking feasibility study. Turned out to be good timing, too, because while I was standing there by the roadside, I spotted something really interesting.

  It was a girl, about my age. Mexican, but with a cigarette in her mouth, which marked her as a member of my tribe. She was sitting out next to the diner, along the wall where they kept the dumpsters. She’d gotten a bunch of empty produce crates and built them into a sort of hunter’s blind, and she was hunkered down in there with a pile of green rocks. Then I got closer and saw that the rocks were actually oranges. The girl had a homemade slingshot, and she was using it to fire these unripened oranges out across the road.

  At cars?

  That would have been cool, but no, across the road, at the gas station on the other side. There was a guy over there, Hispanic like the girl but older, eighteen or nineteen. He was supposed to be minding the pumps, but what he was actually doing was taking a late-afternoon nap. Or trying to; every time he started to nod off, the girl would cut loose with another orange.

  She didn’t try to hit him directly; that would have given the game away. Instead she aimed for the gas-station roof, which was made out of tin. Each orange would make this big thunderboom when it hit, and the guy would jolt awake and come running out from under the roof overhang just in time to get beaned by the orange rolling down. Then he’d stand there rubbing his head and shouting up at the roof, daring the orange-thrower to come face him like a man.

  I watched this happen like five times, and each time, I fell a little more in love with the girl. I kept moving closer to her hiding place, too, until I was right on top of her. “Jeez,” she finally said, “crouch down or something if you’re gonna be there. He’s not that dumb.”

  I joined her in the hunter’s blind. She gave this big sigh, like she didn’t really want company, but then she offered me her cigarette pack. I went to take one and realized they were candy cigarettes—so, maybe not a member of my tribe after all. But I took one anyway, just to be friendly.

  “So is that guy your brother?” I asked.

  “My stupid brother,” she said. “Felipe.”

  Her brother was Phil, too?

  Yeah. Weird coincidence. And not the only one: her name was Carlotta. Carlotta Juanita Diaz. “I’m Jane Charlotte,” I told her, and she nodded like she already knew that, and said, “You’re staying with the Fosters.”

  “For now,” I said. “What about you?”

  “I’ve always lived here. My parents came up from Tijuana when Felipe was a baby.”

  “Your family owns the gas station?”

  “And this place.” She jerked her thumb at the diner. “And my dad’s a deacon in the church.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Important people.”
>
  “Yeah, we’re the kings and queens of nowhere, all right.”

  Across the way, Felipe had settled back into the lawn chair he was using for a cot. Carlotta handed me the slingshot. “Remember,” she said, “aim high.” I did, and I did manage to hit the roof, although instead of rolling back the orange popped up over the peak and fell down the other side. No matter: Felipe jumped up just the same, and this time, instead of going back to his siesta, he ran inside the gas-station office. When he reappeared a moment later, he was dragging an extension ladder.

  “So Carlotta,” I asked, “how long have you been out here doing this?”

  “You mean like today, or just in general?”

  “This is a regular thing for you?”

  She shrugged. “There’s no movie theater in town, so I gotta make my own fun…Here we go.”

  Felipe had gotten the ladder set up and started climbing. Carlotta waited until he was on the roof, then used one last orange to knock the ladder away. Game over.

  “So,” she said, “you want to get ice cream?”

  Carlotta’s parents both worked in the diner. Her mother ran the cash register and waited tables. Her father managed the kitchen—although Señor Diaz’s management consisted mainly of sitting around, reading the Bible and the sports pages, and occasionally yelling at the cooks for not moving fast enough.

  “Hey you!” he called, as Carlotta led me in the back door. “Where have you been?”

  “Walking to and fro on the earth,” said Carlotta, with a nod to the Good Book in her father’s lap. The crack earned her a scowl that could have come from the Old Testament God Himself.

  “That’s not funny, Carlotta. Your mother has been looking for you. She needs help out front.”

  “Yeah sure, in a minute,” Carlotta said. She ducked into the walk-in freezer, leaving me alone with Jehovah.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Jane.”

  Señor Diaz cleared his throat like he was going to spit. He started to return to his Bible study, then looked up again and gave me this long, thoughtful stare.

  “You’re the new girl,” he finally said. “At the Fosters’.”

  “Yeah, that’s me. The new girl.”

  “You’ll be staying with them a while?”

  “Looks like.”

  “So you’ll be going to school here, then.”

  I hadn’t given it any thought, but of course he was right. The prospect didn’t thrill me. “I guess so.”

  He nodded. “And how are you planning to get to school?”

  “I don’t know. I guess…Is there a bus?”

  “Ah! A bus!” He waved the idea away. “Why would you want to take a bus to school?”

  “Well…”

  “I’ll tell you something—Jane, is it?—the school bus here, it’s not very good.”

  “No?”

  “No. I would never let my daughter take the bus. We drive her to school. You could ride along with her, if you’d like.”

  “I could?”

  “Yes. In fact, I think that would be an excellent idea.”

  It sounded like an OK idea to me, too, but there was obviously a catch. “Well,” I hedged, “of course I’d have to ask my aunt and uncle first…”

  “Oh, I’m sure they won’t object. You just let me talk to them. Here!” He stood up, and dusted off the stool he’d been sitting on. “Here, sit down, relax! Would you like some ice cream?”

  Later, Carlotta told me what was up. The previous spring, she’d been kicked off the school bus twice for fighting, and after the second time, the driver refused to let her back on without a written apology. But Señor Diaz wouldn’t hear of it: “He wanted the bus driver fired, you know, for violating my civil rights? But the superintendent wouldn’t do that, so now my father wants to send me to a private school, only he wants the superintendent to pay for it. So we’ve got this lawsuit, but until we win, I’ve still got to go to the public school.” But not by bus. Instead, Carlotta’s mother would drive her to school in the morning, and her brother would pick her up at the end of the day. “Which is OK, except it means a lot of waiting, especially in the afternoon. Felipe can’t leave the gas station before somebody else takes over for him, and some days that’s not until five or six.”

  “So you’ve just got to hang out at the school until then?”

  “Well, I don’t have to—I could walk back, it’s only like two miles—but my father gets real mad if I do that. He says it’s too dangerous, especially now, with the death angel.”

  “The who?”

  Most newspapers referred to him as the Route 99 Killer—an anonymous somebody who’d been traveling up and down the highway for the last year, grabbing kids out of rest stops while their parents were distracted—but a couple of tabloids, noticing that he only took boys, had given him a new name.

  “The Angel of Death,” Carlotta said. “Like the one in Egypt, who killed the firstborn sons? And I told my father, ‘Hey, I’m not a boy, what do I have to worry about?’ but he said, ‘What if the guy makes a mistake? You think once he gets you in his car and sees you’re a girl, he’s just going to let you go?’”

  Which explained why Señor Diaz wanted me riding along with his daughter: he figured with someone to keep her company, she’d be less likely to get bored and go for a stroll along the roadside. Plus, of the two of us, I was definitely the more butch-looking, so if the worst happened, chances were the Angel would take me.

  Señor Diaz sounds like a great humanitarian.

  Eh, you know. Parents. I couldn’t really bring myself to be offended. Anyway, this is going to sound twisted, but it was kind of exciting, thinking about the danger. I mean that’s one reason people believe in the bogeyman, right? It makes the dark more entertaining.

  And it’s not like I thought we were ever actually going to run into the guy. If I had any doubts on that score, they disappeared the minute my aunt and uncle said OK to Señor Diaz’s offer. I had to figure if there was any real risk, they’d have made me take the bus.

  Instead, first day of school, my aunt got me up extra early so I’d be ready when Carlotta’s mom came by. That was the only time I had second thoughts, when my bedroom door banged open at five a.m. Half an hour later I was in the car, and by quarter to six Carlotta and I were in front of the school, eating candy cigarettes with a handful of other early birds.

  Around six-fifteen the school librarian showed up. She let us into the building and had us come upstairs to the library until classes started. Then after final bell, we went back up there and killed time until Felipe came with his pickup.

  Did the school library have Nancy Drew?

  A full set. The Hardy Boys and the Bobbsey Twins, too. Carlotta was nuts about the Bobbsey Twins, which I never got—she really was a strange girl in a lot of ways.

  What about your classes? What were those like?

  Boring.

  Did you make any other friends?

  Not really. I tried to find a bad crowd to fall in with, but Carlotta with her sugar Pall Malls was the closest thing to a real j.d. that the place had to offer. Most of the other kids, I don’t want to say they were dumb hicks, but they were dumb hicks. So I stuck with Carlotta, and we made our own fun.

  And did this fun include amateur detective work?

  Not deliberately. You’re talking about the janitor, right? Me getting wise to him, that was mostly an accident.

  What happened?

  The school was only running at about sixty percent capacity, so to save money, an entire wing of the building had been closed down. The closed wing was officially off-limits, but of course that was just an invitation for students to try and break in; Carlotta and I had already talked about getting a crowbar from the gas station so we could go exploring.

  Then one afternoon I was on my way to the bathroom when I saw the janitor open up one of the connecting doors that led into the closed wing. He went inside and pulled the door shut behind him, but I didn’t hear him relock it. It seemed
like a golden opportunity; I almost ran back to the library to get Carlotta, but then I thought about it a little more and realized that it was maybe more than one kind of opportunity.

  See, one thing I was definitely missing in Siesta Corta was dope. And it was making me crazy, because I was in the middle of goddamned farm country, and I knew people had to be growing it. But nobody would tell me who. Carlotta was no help; the only controlled substance that ever passed her lips was communion wine, and not much of that. I had higher hopes for Felipe, but when it came to drugs he turned out to be even more straitlaced than his sister. The one time I tried to raise the subject with him he just gave me the evil eye.

  You thought you might have better luck with the janitor?

  Sure. I mean, four o’clock in the afternoon, the guy goes into an abandoned part of the building. What for? Not to mop floors. And he wasn’t carrying any tools, so he couldn’t be doing repairs. So what’s that leave?

  Any number of things, I’d imagine. But I take it you were hoping for vice?

  You bet I was. And we’re talking about a young guy with long hair and a Jesus beard. So what kind of vice was he likely to be into?

  But it wasn’t what you thought.

  No, actually, it was what I thought. It’s just, it was also more than what I thought.

  Past the connecting door was a long hallway lined with empty classrooms. The janitor was in the last room on the left, but halfway down the hall I could already smell the pot. Good stuff, too—he obviously knew the right people. So I tiptoed down there, trying to work out how to play this. I figured I could either go in casual and friendly—“Hey, can I get a hit off that?”—or I could be a hard-ass and threaten to turn him in if he didn’t give me his whole stash.

  Which approach did you decide on?

  I couldn’t make up my mind. I didn’t know the guy at all, right, so I had no idea how easily he’d scare, or share. And meanwhile—I was standing right outside the room, now—I started hearing these monkey noises.