TOWARD
FEEDING THE ANIMALS
To leave the stockade, it now became clear, they would have to go through the souvenir-cluttered emporium of the main building. Intimidated, Hugo pushed a dollar through the window of the donations booth, murmured a greeting at the bored woman inside, and shoved John-John through the turnstile and into the gift shop. The sickeningly sweet smells of peanut brittle and pralines assailed them, and Hugo stumbled toward the door like a man who has narrowly survived a mugging. John-John apologetically stumbled after.
The Monegals drove until dark, then found a second-rate motel consisting of ten or twelve separate cabins where they stopped for the night. Hugo left John-John sitting on the bed watching television and returned about twenty minutes later with a pair of barbecued-pork sandwiches wrapped in translucent wax paper. At eleven he made his son turn off the television and go to bed. Then, like a paid hospital orderly, he sat in a cheap, imitation-leather chair opposite the bed, cleaning his fingernails with a penknife in the faint illumination coming through the cabin’s only window.
* * *
John-John awoke convinced that the rhesus from Ritki’s was perched on the chest of drawers near the cabin’s bathroom. His father was not in bed with him, and when he hitched himself into a sitting position against the headboard, he saw that somebody, or something, was indeed staring across the room at him. His stomach dropped, but he did not cry out. Instead, his hand crept through the darkness to turn on the floor lamp next to the sagging bed.
Click!
In the electric light’s yellow glare John-John saw a mirror in which his own dark face was reflected. The expression on the face betrayed his fear.
Hugo was gone. Further, the Dodge Dart was not in the parking lot outside the cabin. Benumbed by this inexplicable desertion, John-John stood in the open doorway staring at the small, swordfish-shaped neon sign burning red and violet above the motel’s office building. He stood there for a long time, watching automobiles go by on the highway and waiting for one that looked like the Dart. He felt no panic, for he believed implicitly that Hugo would return for him.
Eventually a Florida state trooper arrived at the motel. He came to John-John with Hugo’s room key and the news that his father had just had a serious automobile accident several miles to the west.
* * *
Later, after Hugo had died without recovering consciousness, the Monegals were able to reconstruct the sequence of events culminating in the accident. John-John and the state police were instrumental in providing the details that made this story cohere.
Possessed by a desire for vengeance, Hugo had waited for John-John to fall asleep. At last convinced that the boy was dozing, or perhaps even spirit-traveling, he had left the motel and driven back along the highway toward Ritki’s Gift & Souvenir Emporium. Before reaching the compound, however, he turned onto a side road, a mere red-clay gash in the pine forest, and parked. Darkness and clustering foliage concealed the car.
Carrying the Remington 30.06 he had bought in Wyoming for his hunting trips and poaching expeditions with Pete Grier, Hugo climbed the little hill behind the animal ranch. At the top of the hill, crouching beneath the fanlike branches of the trees, he had a clear moonlit view of the cage containing the rhesus monkeys. He took a sighting and fired. One of the monkeys—ironically, the female—slammed into the back of the cage, almost as if it had been thrown against a wall, and the entire compound erupted in a hysterical chirping, howling, and braying.
As Hugo stumbled back down the hill, a battery of klieg lights flashed on, illuminating the entire complex and a formidable swatch of highway.
John-John’s father fled the scene, obviously intending to return to the motel, but driving recklessly fast. Three or four miles from Ritki’s he was intercepted by a trooper going in the opposite direction. The trooper braked, wrestled his car about, and set off after the Dart at high speed, siren and tires screaming. The night came alive with the spooky, peacocklike cries and the revolving blue strobes of one willful machine prodding another to the brink of self-annihilation. Even when the superior horsepower of the state vehicle had plainly decided the outcome of their contest, Hugo kept gunning the accelerator. The result was that the Dart capsized, fired one rear tire off its rim into the woods, and pinned Hugo beneath the steering column and the spectacularly dimpled