louder now, hooting instead of whistling. The attic began to creak softly, making a noise like footsteps.
“Please, Daddy?” Petey asked, only loud enough for his father to hear.
“Yeah,” he said. “Terry, let’s go.”
“I’m not through with this—”
“I said let’s go.”
It was her turn to look startled.
They had taken two adjoining rooms in a motel. By ten that night the boys were asleep in their room and Terry was asleep in the adults’ room. She had taken two Valiums on the ride back from the home place in Casco. To keep her nerves from giving her a migraine. Just lately she took a lot of Valium. It had started around the time National Aerodyne had laid Hal off. For the last two years he had been working for Texas Instruments—it was $4,000 less a year, but it was work. He told Terry they were lucky. She agreed. There were plenty of software architects drawing unemployment, he said. She agreed. The company housing in Arnette was every bit as good as the place in Fresno, he said. She agreed, but he thought her agreement to all of it was a lie.
And he was losing Dennis. He could feel the kid going, achieving a premature escape velocity, so long, Dennis, bye-bye stranger, it was nice sharing this train with you. Terry said she thought the boy was smoking reefer. She smelled it sometimes. You have to talk to him, Hal. And he agreed, but so far he had not.
The boys were asleep. Terry was asleep. Hal went into the bathroom and locked the door and sat down on the closed lid of the john and looked at the monkey.
He hated the way it felt, that soft brown nappy fur, worn bald in spots. He hated its grin—that monkey grins just like a nigger, Uncle Will had said once, but it didn’t grin like a nigger or like anything human. Its grin was all teeth, and if you wound up the key, the lips would move, the teeth would seem to get bigger, to become vampire teeth, the lips would writhe and the cymbals would bang, stupid monkey, stupid clockwork monkey, stupid, stupid—
He dropped it. His hands were shaking and he dropped it.
The key clicked on the bathroom tile as it struck the floor. The sound seemed very loud in the stillness. It grinned at him with its murky amber eyes, doll’s eyes, filled with idiot glee, its brass cymbals poised as if to strike up a march for some band from hell. On the bottom the words MADE IN HONG KONG were stamped.
“You can’t be here,” he whispered. “I threw you down the well when I was nine.”
The monkey grinned up at him.
Outside in the night, a black capful of wind shook the motel.
Hal’s brother Bill and Bill’s wife Collette met them at Uncle Will’s and Aunt Ida’s the next day. “Did it ever cross your mind that a death in the family is a really lousy way to renew the family connection?” Bill asked him with a bit of a grin. He had been named for Uncle Will. Will and Bill, champions of the rodayo, Uncle Will used to say, and ruffle Bill’s hair. It was one of his sayings... like the wind can whistle but it can’t carry a tune. Uncle Will had died six years before, and Aunt Ida had lived on here alone, until a stroke had taken her just the previous week. Very sudden, Bill had said when he called long distance to give Hal the news. As if he could know; as if anyone could know. She had died alone.
“Yeah,” Hal said. “The thought crossed my mind.”
They looked at the place together, the home place where they had finished growing up. Their father, a merchant mariner, had simply disappeared as if from the very face of the earth when they were young; Bill claimed to remember him vaguely, but Hal had no memories of him at all. Their mother had died when Bill was ten and Hal eight. Aunt Ida had brought them here on a Greyhound bus which left from Hartford, and they had been raised here, and gone to college from here. This had been the place they were homesick for. Bill had stayed in Maine and now had a healthy law practice in Portland.
Hal saw that Petey had wandered off toward the blackberry tangles that lay on the eastern side of the house in a mad jumble. “Stay away from there, Petey,” he called.