The Monkey Bites

 So read the stained, hand-lettered sign on the front door. 

    Ace sat with his back to the room and appeared to be reading a small prayer book. Actually, he was tearing out the pages one by one and eating them, chewing slowly, and looking up at the ceiling of his cage as if he was memorizing the text. Billy, the Winsock’s owner and bartender, said he only ate one or two pages a day—it was not as if he was hungry. Billy fed Ace every time he fed himself. In fact, he fed Ace first like he was worried about being poisoned; a fair concern because he treated the cook like dirt.

     It bothered Bea to see Ace locked up like that. It was obvious that he was constantly pissed off, unlike most captive monkeys, who sank into apathy after a while. If anyone but Billy approached the cage, Ace screamed and flung himself around inside. If you put your hands anywhere near his reach or grasp, there would be blood. He once bit off and ate a drunk’s little finger.

     The day he escaped, she helped him by not saying anything as she watched him slip out the unfastened wire door. He scrambled soundlessly up the cage and across a shelf full of stemmed glasses that never even shuddered. From there, he reached the open transom over the door that led to the alley. He paused a moment as if mentally packing, and fixed Bea with his hooded golden eyes, vanishing before she could blink. He was gone an hour before Billy missed him.

     Goldy dropped her tray the last two inches onto their table to wake up the drunks and impress people with just how hard her job was. Billy, startled from his newspaper spread out on the bar, looked around and gave a little shriek, seeing the open cage door. He had no one to blame or lash out at because he was the only one who could deal with the brute without losing a digit or a pint of blood. He was livid, not because of any fondness for the animal. Ace had been collateral for a bar tab run up by a guy who used to be a regular but had to leave on short notice because of some complication with the sheriff. It had been two years and Billy still hoped to collect having some notion that monkeys lived at least as long as people did.

     He cursed and took the cage, which needed cleaning, down from the shelf and out the door to the alley, as if he thought the deadbeat might be waiting there with Ace. When he came back inside, he was carrying the scalped prayer book and handed it over when Bea reached out for it, as if by prior agreement. The first third of the pages were gone, and the cover was dark with hamburger grease and redolent of monkey piss. Murph made her put it on the floor while they ate their grilled cheese and tomato soup lunch, hoping she would forget it but confident that she wouldn’t. She didn’t.

     Bea was not quite four when Ace made his break for freedom. She thought she saw him from time to time, high in the trees around Wampus Pond. He stole food all over town, and some folks made a point of leaving leftovers out on the porch to see if it would disappear overnight. “Leaving bite for Ace” and reporting on whether it was taken became a common point of gossip. It was bigger news when someone said Ace made off with a whole pie left cooling on a windowsill. This was nonsense because she didn’t think Ace could lift a whole pie and make off with it clean. Jump in, splash around, and eat a third maybe, but not the whole pie. Ace wasn’t much bigger than your average apple pie, at least by weight. The vet said he was a Barbary Ape and not a monkey at all, but the distinction was lost on Ace, Billy and the patrons of the Windsock. 

Ace was vindicated when Maryann Phelps was found dead of a heart attack, lying flat on her back in the McCarthy’s kitchen garden, a smug look on her face and one of Ginny McCarthy’s prize-winning cherry pies upside down in the dirt beside her.

     All summer after the escape, Billy would go down to the park with a bag of stale popcorn and a six-pack of beer and sit and smoke and drink. He never brought a net or a bag with him. Did he think Ace would listen to reason and accompany him back to the bar and his cage? Billy would kill the whole six-pack and lie back on the bench and nod, the bag of popcorn spilling out for the pigeons and squirrels to make bold with as he snored. He would wake up as darkness fell, and a band started tuning up in the hall across the street and he would see that the popcorn was all gone and swear to folks that Ace had paid him a visit.

        Then came the day that Bea found Ace dead. Frozen stiff as a cob. 

“What I don’t understand is how we weren’t friends when you were alive.”

“Think, child. How would we have communicated? Me, in this body,” he waved his long arms over his head and danced in a circle, “and jailed as I was.” 

Ace had been locked in a cage on a shelf behind the bar at the Windsock for half of Bea’s life. All of two years. He escaped to spend the entire spring, summer, and fall living and dying free. 

“Who was it helped you that day?”

“You did.”

“What?” Bea’s mouth was wide enough to catch bugs and stretched into a grin.

“Billy was about to feed me. He unlatched the cage door, and some hellion stood on her table and yelled, “Billy! Where’s my damned coke?!” The people howled and carried on and Billy hastened to serve you and shut you up, pestering the other patrons. You saw me. Watched me go and never ratted me out."

“I remember that. Easter Sunday, last year. Murph and Tam and I were ducking the churchers with breakfast at the bar.”

“A fine tradition.”

“Will I always remember you? Even when I get old, like Murph?”

“Make it your business, the past. I have.” 

His patchy brown fur had filled in and gone dense once he was free to roam and feed as he needed. It had gone from a dusty rug to a pale silky gold as the nights turned cold, which was no longer a concern for him, dead as he was. His yellow eyes burned in his coal-black face. 

Fully feral, he still clung to the habit of seeking out the people and their fires, even a candle, and hovering right at the margin of light and dark. The best place to see without being seen. Upon his demise, he’d discovered that “Rest In Peace” was a predictably stupid human construct. The energy of the universe was not to be squandered and Little Bea became his charge. To himself, he muttered, “You will grow to be a formidable old woman if they don’t kill you.”

Close to midnight, she crouched behind the dense hedges and watched as a shirt just visible by a back porch light, plucked its arms free of the clothesline. The shirt never touched the ground but was whisked up above the sagging rope, and in three hop-scotches, slithered up into the dark reaches of the towering pine the rope was attached to. Bea scuttled back along the hedges on all fours for a bit, then at a barefoot lope through the wet lawns leading home. Anyone who got up before dawn might see a single line of small footprints. Fox? dog? Gone in first light. 

She eased the screen door open silently, wiped her feet on the rag rug, and slipped under the covers. The night rhythms of the cottage never hitched. The kitchen faucet dripped into a glass in the sink. The ceiling fans turned in slow motion no matter the season. Murph snored from the bedroom under the far eaves. Ace had already come and gone, leaving the shirt stuffed under her pillow. 

“I wish you hadn’t put it on.” She was squinting at the needle in the lantern's light. “I don’t have any blue thread this dark. Red will have to do.”

“Are you insinuating that I am unclean?” The ape made an aggressive strut in her direction, teeth bared. “Grubby brat!”

“I’ve never seen you take a bath.” 

“What makes you think that I’d permit you to witness my private ablutions?”

“And what’s with all the ten-dollar words? Ablutions?”

“Cleansing. Bathing. Who else would teach you your language to its fullest? Them?” Ace swiveled his head on his shoulders in the direction of the cabin. 

Her aunt and uncle had given Bea permission to sleep out in the tent in the yard on her promise that she would not go wandering after dark. An easy promise to keep. The shirt snatching had been the day before, and she needed a private evening to stitch up the message. She had decided that using all capital letters would convey a clear directive and crossed the H with two precise stitches, careful to split the six strands of thread with the needle on the downstroke. 

“They have all the words they need. More kind ones than you. And they are my people.”

Ace clutched his interlocked fingers to his chest, looked at a distant point, and nodded. She knew that this was as close to an apology as she’d ever get. After all, he was a beast. 

She had reached the R in HER and still had a long piece of thread riding the needle. Nell would have chided her for wasting thread. Ace had rolled onto his back, growling softly and making clawing motions in the air with his black fingers and toes. He hummed a few bars of Claire de Lune, the tune the young woman had been playing on the upright when her husband slammed the cover on her fingers. No word why or warning.

“What will you do to him if he hurts her again?” Bea asked.

Ace yawned widely, showing her his fangs. “Your wish is my command.”

“Could you corner him in the privy and bite his nuts off?”

“Very fitting.” Ace washed one hand over the other and somersaulted place. 

Bea nodded and bit off the thread, just shy of the knot. She held out the blue flannel sleeve and turned it so Ace could see along the seam. Armpit to cuff, in neat block letters: 

DONT HIT HER ANYMOR. 

She had started the red message too close to the top and ran out of room.

Ace picked at the cloth delicately and nodded without judgment. “The message is clear.” He scratched his belly with his long, black fingernails and slitted his golden eyes. “I’m rather hoping he ignores it.”

“I hope so too.” Bea smiled as she folded the shirt lengthwise and rolled it up tight.

“Here. Don’t bother with the clothespins. Just drop it in the grass. Ace plucked the bundle from her hand and slipped out the tent flap without a backward glance. 

Annabea tucked her little canvas chatelaine under her pillow, burrowed down into her sleeping bag, and fell into the dreamless, blameless sleep of the innocents. Had she ever gotten close enough to the man she would have known that she had lit the fuse for the death and destruction to come.