“You can’t be with her if you’re dead. She’s not that kinky.”
“Point taken.”
“You have your sunglasses?”
I patted my shirt pocket. “Yeah.”
“Did you use some of my sunscreen?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Geek.”
I said, “I’ve been thinking….”
“It’s about time you started.”
“I’ve been working on the new book.”
“Finally got your lazy ass in gear.”
“It’s about friendship.”
“Am I in it?”
“Amazingly, yes.”
“You’re not using my real name, are you?”
“I’m calling you Igor. The thing is…I’m afraid readers might not relate to what I have to say, because you and I—all my friends—we live such different lives.”
Stopping at the head of the porch steps, regarding me with his patented look of scorn, Bobby said, “I thought you had to be smart to write books.”
“It’s not a federal law.”
“Obviously not. Even the literary equivalent of a gyrospaz ought to know that every last one of us leads a different life.”
“Yeah? Maria Cortez leads a different life?”
Maria is Manuel Ramirez’s younger sister, twenty-eight like Bobby and me. She is a beautician, and her husband works as a car mechanic. They have two children, one cat, and a small tract house with a big mortgage.
Bobby said, “She doesn’t live her life in the beauty shop, doing someone’s hair—or in her house, vacuuming the carpet. She lives her life between her ears. There’s a world inside her skull, and probably way stranger and more bitchin’ than you or I, with our shallow brain pans, can imagine. Six billion of us walking the planet, six billion smaller worlds on the bigger one. Shoe salesmen and short-order cooks who look boring from the outside—some have weirder lives than you. Six billion stories, every one an epic, full of tragedy and triumph, good and evil, despair and hope. You and me—we aren’t so special, bro.”
I was briefly speechless. Then I fingered the sleeve of his parrot-and-palm-frond shirt and said, “I didn’t realize you were such a philosopher.”
He shrugged. “That little gem of wisdom? Hell, that was just something I got in a fortune cookie.”
“Must’ve been a big honker of a cookie.”
“Hey, it was a huge monolith, dude,” he said, giving me a sly smile.
The great wall of moonlit fog loomed half a mile from the shore, no closer or farther away than it had been earlier. The night air was as still as that in the cold-holding room at Mercy Hospital.
As we descended the porch steps, no one shot at us. No one issued that loonlike cry, either.
They were still out there, however, hiding in the dunes or below the crest of the slope that fell to the beach. I could feel their attention like the dangerous energy pending release in the coils of a motionless, strike-poised rattlesnake.
Although Bobby had left his shotgun inside, he was vigilant. Surveying the night as he accompanied me to my bike, he began to reveal more interest in my story than he had admitted earlier: “This monkey Angela mentioned…”
“What about it?”
“What was it like?”
“Monkeylike.”
“Like a chimpanzee, an orangutan, or what?”
Gripping the handlebars of my bicycle and turning it around to walk it through the soft sand, I said, “It was a rhesus monkey. Didn’t I say?”
“How big?”
“She said two feet high, maybe twenty-five pounds.”
Gazing across the dunes, he said, “I’ve seen a couple myself.”
Surprised, leaning the bike against the porch railing again, I said, “Rhesus monkeys? Out here?”
“Some kind of monkeys, about that size.”
There is, of course, no species of monkey native to California. The only primates in its woods and fields are human beings.
Bobby said, “Caught one looking in a window at me one night. Went outside, and it was gone.”
“When was this?”
“Maybe three months ago.”
Orson moved between us, as if for comfort.
I said, “You’ve seen them since?”
“Six or seven times. Always at night. They’re secretive. But they’re also bolder lately. They travel in a troop.”
“Troop?”
“Wolves travel in a pack. Horses in a herd. With monkeys, it’s called a troop.”
“You’ve been doing research. How come you haven’t told me about this?”
He was silent, watching the dunes.
I was watching them, too. “Is that what’s out there now?”
“Maybe.”
“How many in this troop?”
“Don’t know. Maybe six or eight. Just a guess.”
“You bought a shotgun. You think they’re dangerous?”
“Maybe.”
“Have you reported them to anyone? Like animal control?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Instead of answering me, he hesitated and then said, “Pia’s driving me nuts.”
Pia Klick. Out there in Waimea for a month or two, going on three years.
I didn’t understand how Pia related to Bobby’s failure to report the monkeys to animal-control officers, but I sensed that