Specimens
Monkey In the Woods
When I first heard about it, I was like, “Yeah, ok.” Then my brother told me he’d actually seen it swing from branch to branch off into distant trees. I liked the idea of it even if it wasn’t true. But I eventually saw it, a few days after Christmas, staring down at me from high in a maple only a few hundred yards behind the school. It had a white beard and bushy white eyebrows, a little embroidered vest, a red fez with a chin strap. Its canines were curved. The tail was long and ended in a Q, like the beginning of a knot. Its foot hands clung to a branch, and its free hand pointed a finger at me. It screamed, eyes bulging, and I fled.
I’d seen that monkey only 5 months earlier. It was part of a traveling summer carnival that set up in Brightwaters every year, two towns East. The scene was corn dogs, scum bags and sketchy rides, one of which was called The Round Up. It used centrifugal force by spinning people so fast they stuck to the wall of the contraption and then the bottom fell out. This kid in my class, Leacock, took a turn at it and puked. The vomit went right down the curving row of spinners and smacked each one in the face. I stayed away from those rides due to a story I’d heard on my transistor radio. It was about a girl who went on a summer carnival attraction called The Twister and got her long hair caught in the machinery. The Twister twisted it right off her head along with her scalp.
There was an organ grinder making the rounds at the fairground of the carnival in Brightwaters, and he had a monkey on a thin, six-foot chain. It stole people’s food and if they complained, the thing would climb up their clothing and punch them between the eyes. My brother got punched by it and he said its fist was hard as a nail. The last night before the carnival pulled up stakes and moved on, I was there, and saw a dark-haired woman come stumbling out of the crowd and whirling lights in a red dress. She had her hand to her face and blood was seeping around her fingers. Somebody she knew called to her, “Joan, what happened?” and she said, “That fuckin monkey bit my face.”
That woman, Joan, had them call the cops on Giacomo (that was the monkey’s name). I stayed as long as I could, but my father was sitting in the Biscayne out under the tall dark trees, reading the horse paper, and I promised him I’d be back in an hour and a half. The cops arrived as I was running to the car. On my way, I stopped for a moment and wormed into a crowd that had formed around Giacomo and his owner. The old man was cowering at the center of the ring. People were red in the face, screaming at him. The monkey intermittently laughed and bent over to pat its ass, long tail wriggling like a snake. The chant, “Kill it,” chased me as I raced across the dirt parking lot.
*
At Christmas time, two nights prior to the big day, snow falling outside the living room window, by the glow of the tree’s blue light, my brother whispered to me so the adults in the dining room drinking wouldn’t hear, “Martin Gompers saw a monkey in the woods today.”
“Where?”
“Pretty far in. Almost to the sugar sand, swinging from branch to branch like Tarzan.”
“Gompers is an idiot,” I said.
You’d think, right then, though, when my brother told me what Gompers said, I would immediately recall the incident at the carnival with Giacomo, but no, I never did. Months had passed and it was Christmas time and snowing and we were free from school and presents were in the offing. Besides, Gompers was a large lumpen nitwit with a bowl haircut and buck teeth. In gym class one day he strangled me until I managed to kick him in the shins and run. I never put it together that the woods the sighting took place in was large and ranged East across two towns and ended right at the field where the Brightwaters carnival was held each summer.
In the days after Christmas, when kids were in the snowy woods trying out new BB guns and hiding from their parents, there came further reports of a monkey. This time from a reputable source. Supposedly the beast threw a handful of acorns down onto Daisy Cooper, girl genius. She thought it meant the monkey was hungry. The next day she brought apples and peanut butter sandwiches to the same spot near the bend in the stream where the sassafras trees grew. She looked up and told the monkey to come down and eat. The monkey screamed at her until she left. After I heard that story, I pictured her at night, in her pajamas, in her bedroom, writing about it in her diary.
Two weeks went by, and at least every other day there was a new sighting either in the woods or around the houses on its perimeter. There was one Wednesday when there were 4 sightings. My brother kept me apprized of all the monkey gossip. He was two years older and had friends. On New Year’s Eve, all the neighbors came to our house. My mother played the piano, and the drinks were flowing. I stole some whiskey sour from the blender and ate a handful of maraschino cherries. Mr. Makanan from next door was half in the bag, which was halfway to how far he usually was in the bag. He was talking to my father and I walked over and sat down.
“Did you hear all the hubbub about a monkey in the woods behind the school?” he asked and then burped with his mouth closed. I nodded and my father shook his head. Makanan had blubbery lips and was a tad breathless. Still he pressed on and said, “I was at the carnival this past summer and there was an incident wherein a woman I happen to know, my secretary, was assaulted by the organ grinder’s monkey. I tell ya, that monkey bit the wrong woman. Joany’s a bitch on wheels. Had the cops there, the whole thing. She was threatening lawsuits. The owner of the carnival made a deal with her. If he killed the monkey and he let her watch it die, would she relent on the legal action? She agreed.”
Makanan pulled himself to his feet, ice cubes clinking in his glass, and said, “Be back with a refill.” I was intrigued by the story, but it was late, past midnight, and I leaned back and into my father. The cigarette smoke and the faint aroma of machining oil that never left him were like a magic sleep perfume to me. We watched the snow outside, fat flakes falling through the light of the streetlamp across the way. I eventually dozed off, and was somewhere between sleep and waking when I heard above the low music and conversation of the guests Makanan’s voice. Even as deep in as I was, I could tell he was yet more loaded. I heard and envisioned whatever he spoke.
He stayed with Joan and her two sons until after the carnival had closed down and the rides were locked up. In the pitch dark, they were ushered by the carnival clown, fake nose and make-up still on him, into a clearing in the woods beyond the field. Someone handed him a flashlight that hardly cut the night. Giacomo’s owner was there and three of the carnival workers who ran the rides, each had a shot gun. The carnival owner had a pistol in a holster on his belt. Giacomo’s hands were tied with cord behind his back. He stood against the trunk of a giant oak lit by the headlamps of a tractor. Joan’s kids were crying at the fact that their mom was going to have a monkey killed. She told them, “Shut it.” They grew quiet but the tears still rolled. “Gentlemen?” she said.
“Ready,” said the head of the carnival.
The organ grinder dropped to his knees as the three shot guns rose to aim dead center on Giacomo’s heart. The monkey somehow knew it was in a bad spot and its teeth were chattering. The owner took out his pistol and aimed as well, but before he could give the order to fire, the organ grinder said something, one word, a command in whatever language was his, and in an instant, Giacomo was free. Before the cord that had bound him hit the ground, he was streaking toward his firing squad.
One stupendous leap and he was on the face of the middle shooter. With his back foot he kicked the double barrel of the shotgun and it went off and sprayed the first shooter’s knee, ripping his pants to bloody shreds. With a wild scream from both the monkey and his victim, the middle shooter’s left eye came out of its socket on the sharp fingers of Giacomo. The head of the carnival stared in astonishment, his mouth wide and dark as a cavern’s. The monkey used the one-eyed man’s shoulders as a platform from which to leap up and grab a low hanging branch. While the poor middle shooter fell to the ground to join the first shooter, the third shooter took aim. Before he could pull the trigger, a prodigious rain of monkey shit fell on Joan, her sons, the three shooters, the organ grinder, the head of the carnival and Mr. Makanak.
As the snow subsided, so did sightings of the monkey. He may have been hiding among the thick branches of a pine. That was my brother’s theory. I didn’t want to picture Giacomo dead, that snarling face finally slack with peace at the blue heart of a snow drift he’d fallen into from the branches high above. I don’t think Gompers ever gave up on seeing Giacomo. I bet if I were to run into him today, he’d lean close to me, suck on those big fucking horse chompers, and whisper with a misty chaser of spit, “There’s a monkey in the woods.” A touching report came from Dean Fuscia, who lived next to the school. He said he was walking home one night in January, and in the light of the upstairs window in the house across the street from his, where the old woman who sometimes went door to door through the neighborhood and asked for a glass of gin, lived, he saw the monkey plain as day and it was done up in a blue dress with puffy shoulders and a high collar.
The other person who wasn’t willing to let Giacomo become a memory was Mrs. Cooper. She, of course, stole into Daisy’s room while her daughter was in school, and read every word of the girl’s diary. Daisy was a good writer, I remember from being in class with her, and I’m guessing she rendered her affection for Giacomo in terms she never would for her mother. In any event. Mrs. Cooper brought it to the PTA and demanded someone do something about it.
“What do you want me to do?” asked Mr Torrey, the principal.
“Hire a hunter.”
Torrey laughed, but Mrs. Cooper stoked monkey fear throughout the neighborhood at every Tupperware party and after church, and eventually Torrey was forced to make a compromise. His plan was to get a few of the men whose kids went to the school together and go out in the woods with guns and hunt the monkey down. Daisy’s mother agreed to his proposal. Somehow my father got roped into the hunting party. It was not his kind of thing by a long shot, but my mother forced him to it out of a sense of civic duty. “Shit,” was what he said to her to confirm he’d participate. At the end of February, on a 55-degree Saturday, sunny, with a slight breeze, the hunt was on. Kids were not allowed in the woods. It had been announced at school over the loudspeaker before the pledge on Friday morning. Any kid caught in the woods on Saturday would have detention for the summer during summer school hours. The thought of spending July and August locked up every morning in a hot room with nothing to do but stare at the concrete walls was enough to keep us away.
On Sunday morning, while he drank coffee and read the horse paper, I asked my father if they shot the monkey.
“Yeah, we bagged him,” he said.
“Did he die fast?”
“Not fast enough for my money. It was pretty cold out there.”
“Did he cry?”
“I don’t know. What’s his name, the guy with the mustache and glasses brought his 22 rifle. The monkey was in mid-air. The guy, oh yeah, Mr. Donnely, hit him right in the chest. The monkey dropped into the pond. We fished him out and the cops took him away.” He lit a cigarette and went back to his paper, working figures in the margins with a stub of a pencil. What my father told me was reported by Torrey to the PTA at the very next meeting, garnering a round of applause. I imagine Mrs. Cooper’s triumph was undercut by the fact that her daughter now disliked her even more.
The draw of life’s current was strong and eventually pulled me on, but not before I spent a day or so wondering how Giacomo had gone bad. I wondered what happened to the organ grinder. He wasn’t much of a draw without the crazy monkey. Who needed an old man who didn’t speak English wandering around a fairground playing songs on a box with a crank handle? The tunes were stale like something from a splintered, rickety carousel. What made the monkey so angry? I don’t think the old man abused him. He wasn’t afraid of Giacomo but instead treated him like a son he didn’t know what to do with. Before my reverie was over, I pictured the monkey, in pajamas, in his room at night, writing in his diary about Daisy Cooper.
*
A few years passed and I was 17, a senior in high school. The carnival stopped appearing in Brightwaters the year I was 14, which would have been 1969. I remember because I was gonna ask Daisy to go with me. Instead we hitch hiked to the beach. That last year at home, I got a job working in a metal shop down by the tracks on the way to Babylon. It was at that job that I met Tom Mason. 40 – 45, maybe? The guy never wore a shirt unless it was freezing out. He’d work on the grinder and sparks would bounce off his flesh. Tom had a big ego and big muscles. He had twin dragon tattoos that grew up from his abdomen and intertwined while their twin maws flashed sharp blue teeth poised to bite his nipples. A scary dude, but fun enough to talk to at lunch or for a smoke break.
One day, when I got back from lunch early, he was sitting outside against the wall of the shop. I stopped and bummed a cig off him. He said to me, “Did I tell you about the time I helped execute a monkey?” The instant the words left his mouth I thought of Giacomo. I sat down next to him. “Where?” I asked. Holding his cig in two fingers, he pointed over his head due East. “Right over here in Brightwaters,” he said. “Was it Giacomo?” I asked. He laughed. “Yeah, did you know that little fuck knuckle?”
I nodded. “I was there the night he bit that lady’s face.”
“Get the fuck out,” he said. “Yeah I worked there running one of the rides.”
“Which ride?”
“The Round Up.”
“You mean where you go in circles and then the floor falls out?”
“That’s it.”
I told him the Leacock story and he said, “Oh, yeah, I could make at least one person puke per session just how I adjusted the speed and then slammed on the breaks. After they’d stagger off, I’d just throw some saw dust on the puke and rev it up again for the next crowd.”
“The way I heard it,” I said. “Giacomo got away.”
“Who told you that?”
“I forget.”
“Nah, we shot the crap out of old Giacomo. To be honest, nobody felt too bad about it. He was a monumental pain in the ass. Steal your cigarettes, your wallet, your booze, and if you weren’t careful, your girl.” I pictured Daisy in her bikini with her thumb out on the side of the road, Giacomo pulling over in a Corvette Stingray to pick her up. Tom went on, “He’s buried in a little clearing of trees just beyond the field where the carnival was held. He was shot up pretty bad, and we buried him on the spot where he fell. The organ grinder knelt down next to the body and straightened Giacomo’s puffy pants and little bowler derby with the chin strap. He placed a big rock on top of the grave, telling us, “So he does not rise from the dead.”
“Wait,” I said. “Giacomo didn’t wear like a little jacket and fez?”
“I never saw him in that,” said Tom. It struck me that if what Mason was telling me was true, then all my memories of Giacomo were false, including my sighting of him in the maple tree. If not the monkey, what did I see?”
When I got home from work that night, I found my father out back, grilling his meal of a hundred meats – burgers, hot dogs, sausage, chicken…He was just getting the meat on, so nobody was outside with him at the picnic table yet. I told him I knew that story he told me about the death of Giacomo the monkey was a lie. He flicked his cigarette into the grill, dropping the ashes with a masterful touch between a sausage and a chicken leg.
At first, he didn’t remember the incident, but eventually his mind came around to it. “We never went in the woods that day. We sat in Torrey’s office and drank scotch, a bunch of us. It was a lot of fun. Then he made us swear to tell our kids that the hunting party had taken care of the monkey.”
“He never believed in Giacomo?” I asked.
“He never gave a shit whether there was a monkey or not. In his office that day, a bunch of the guys from the neighborhood getting bombed on his booze, he told us that he was in the Break Out at St. Lo. He was a messenger and had to run for miles on dead bodies to get a message back to Patton whose Third Army was reinforcing. After that, a monkey in the woods is the least of your problems.”
On Sunday, the only day both of us were off from work, my father drove us over to the field in Brightwaters. We took a couple of shovels with us and we went back into the woods and found the clearing Tom Mason had told me about. Right in the middle of it there was the rock the organ grinder had placed on Giacomo’s grave. I dug and he smoked and then he dug and I smoked, and eventually we found the monkey’s remains. There was still a lot of hair and the bones were full of shot. The skull was shattered and yet still clung together. We found his bowler derby, the elastic band intact.
“Think of all the stories people told themselves and others about this monkey,” I said. “Even Daisy,” I thought. “Even me.”
My father looked down at what was left of Giacomo and then up into the trees. “You know, there’s always a monkey in the woods,” he said.