Apeshit

  Power crackled around Loki’s fingers, spreading to engulf his body. He breathed menace.

  “Friends!” interjected the Englishman. “Countrymen! And you two, too! There’s enough power between you to turn this whole place to goo.”

  Both pairs of eyes flickered in his direction, and then back at each other.

  “Look here, lads. Mebbe I can be of assistance. If I can help the Chinaman find what he’s looking for, there’s no need for all the blood and gore, and for all your precious honor, none will look askance.” He waggled his eyebrows.

  The Monkey King did not look away from Loki. “I seek the perfect beer. Help me find it, and you will earn my gratitude.” He pulled the empty beer bottle from the remnants of his robes and handed it to the Englishman.

  “Why, all the clues you need are here, on the label of your beer!”

  “I do not know your barbaric script.”

  “Well, then, let’s see. This says, ‘Gold Monkey, Victorious Brewing Company, Triple Ale.’” He handed the bottle back to Sun Wukong. “Ale is the Yank’s abbreviation for Alabama. That’s where you’ll find your perfect beer for sale.”

  “Good. Then it is to Alabama I must go.” The Monkey King turned to the Englishman and bowed. “My thanks.”

  “Not so fast.” Loki still glowered and glowed dangerously. “There is still the matter of your tab.”

  “I have no money.”

  “Then I’ll take something in trade.”

  Sun Wukong spread his arms. He had nothing. His passport was gone. His purse was gone. He had even lost his bullwhip in the raging lava.

  “I’ll take the hat,” Loki said.

  When the Monkey King had gone, leaping high into the sky and somersaulting in the direction of Iceland, a fox slunk out from behind the bar, shifting as she walked.

  “Well played,” she said.

  The Englishman bowed. “All the world’s a stage,” he said, “but this play’s nearly ended. Shall we be off to America, to see a god offended?”

  A fox’s playful yips joined his puckish laughter, while Loki looked up cheap air fare on the Internet.

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Sun Wukong walked along a lonely country road. Dust covered his feet and ankles, and gravel from the road got into his sandals. The sun sat high in the sky, and though it was not yet noon, the heat rose in waves from the broken gravel roadway. On either side of the road were deep drainage ditches, whose muddy bottoms spawned tall reeds and insects, and beyond those lay endless fields of tobacco, alfalfa and corn. Mosquitoes swarmed around his head, and black flies clung to his arms and legs, even as he swatted them. He immediately regretted giving up his ridiculous hat.

  Within an hour he was tired. Within two, he was parched. Within three, he had become woozy from the heat. He had seen not a single person in all that time.

  And then, from up ahead on the road, he heard noises. He hurried up a long, low hill, and as he approached the top, the noises resolved into a voice.

  “You turn me loose, y’hear? You turn me loose right now or I’ll kick the stuffin’ outta you.”

  The sounds of a scuffle increased, and Sun Wukong broke into a run, hoping to intervene. Perhaps, he reasoned, a grateful person might actually be of some assistance in his quest. But when he reached the top of the hill, he stopped and stared. It wasn’t a person there at all, but a rabbit, who had managed to get both his front paws and one rear paw stuck in a large, vaguely human-shaped lump of tar with a straw hat stuck atop what might be a head. Still, the rabbit could speak, so it might be able to help.

  “Hello,” said the Monkey King, bowing to the trapped rabbit.

  The rabbit nodded in Sun Wukong’s general direction. “Howdy. Don’t mean to be rude, but I can’t shake hands right now. Or much of anything else.”

  “This is as regrettable as it is understandable. Perhaps we can be of mutual assistance to one another?”

  “Yeah, that sounds great! Anything you need, I’ll find a way to get it to you. Just help me get…” The rabbit gritted his teeth as he pulled, stretching the tar, but not managing to escape.

  “Yes, of course.” Sun Wukong looked around for something he could use to help pry the sticky tar off the rabbit, or the rabbit out of the tar.

  “Hurry, hurry!” The rabbit struggled frantically, rolling around and kicking with his one free foot. “Fox’ll be here soon, and if he find me like this…”

  With a mighty kick, the rabbit launched both himself and the tar dummy into the air, and toward Sun Wukong. The Monkey King turned just in time to put up his hands, keeping the tar from slapping against his body.

  “What have you done?” he roared.

  The rabbit stretched his neck to look around the lump of tar at Sun Wukong. “You’re not stuck, are you?” His eyes were wide. “Oh, no! Fox’ll get me for sure!” He thrashed in panic, and soon both of Sun Wukong’s feet were stuck as well.

  Once the Monkey King was thoroughly trapped, the rabbit carefully extracted his limbs from the tar. The fur on the three paws was coated with Vaseline. He pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and cleaned off his fur, all the while ignoring the Monkey King’s curses. Once his hands were clean, he reached into Sun Wukong’s robes and extracted the beer bottle.

  “Well, what do we got here? The perfect beer?” The rabbit poked at the label with one paw. “Victorious Brewery in Downingtown, Pennsylvania. Thank you.”

  He slid the beer bottle into his vest pocket, and bowed formally to Sun Wukong. Then he wheeled a motorcycle out of a nearby briar patch, kicked it into life, and within a few seconds was lost to sight.

  Sun Wukong struggled with the tar dummy until he was exhausted. Hours passed. The sky began to dim—a blessed relief from the sun, but on the off chance that someone drove down this road, they were more likely to strike him than rescue him. Then, just as dusk set in, he heard the sound of tires on gravel. The oncoming car sped up the road, showing no sign of slowing until the very last moment. It pulled into a skid, spraying the Monkey King with hot gravel and coming to a stop a fingers-width from his face.

  The door of the sports car opened and a man staggered drunkenly from within.

  “Oi, mate,” he said. “You awright?”

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Once again a reluctant passenger in the mad Englishman’s Aston Martin, Sun Wukong rubbed and picked at the tar on his feet and hands. He flexed his toes and bemoaned the loss of his favorite sandals in the hungry maw of the tar dummy.

  Downingtown, he learned, was not in Alabama. Nowhere near Alabama. The Aston Martin made good time, notwithstanding the driver’s need for frequent rest room breaks and easy distraction with truck stop waitresses and truckers. Still, the rabbit had had a significant head start, and they were unable to catch up to him.

  It was a cool Sunday evening when an Aston Martin pulled up next to me at a red light. The driver hit the horn a couple times and rolled down his window. My spousal unit lowered the window at her side. The driver was a merry looking fellow. A crazed looking Asian man sat next to him.

  “Hullo, luv,” the driver said, “I fear I’ve gotten turned ‘round. It’s Victorious Brew Pub where I’m bound.”

  I laughed. “Follow me.”

  My spousal unit gave me an odd look. It had been a strange day, and this was not the first query I’d gotten about the brewery. Earlier in the day, a rabbity sort of fellow on a motorcycle had stopped me outside the supermarket to ask. Not long after, two people showed up on my doorstep, a beautiful Japanese woman with a fox fur draped over her shoulder with a stunningly striking Scandinavian man on her arm. I gave them directions.

  “That writer’s thing of yours is tonight,” my spousal unit said, “isn’t it? I want to come.”

  So we arrived together, me and my spousal unit and the mad Englishman and the Monkey King in his tattered silk robes. We climbed the steps to the front door.

  “Finally!” Sun Wukong said. “Finally I have found the Gold Monkey
!”

  This was my first clue that this was the culmination of a course of events I had set into action with a drunken statement months before.

  Unexpectedly, the Englishman placed a hand on Sun Wukong’s chest, barring his entrance. “I’ve got bad news, but I must insist, I act now in loco parentis: the sign here says, ‘no shoes, no service.’”

  The Monkey King ranted and raved, but his friend was adamant.

  “There’s some stores nearby,” I said. “You can get shoes.” I gave them directions. “I’ll save a couple seats for you.”

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  I was, as usual, running a bit late, and the rest of my writer’s group was already there. They’d gotten a big round table in the corner. As we walked toward them, I got the uncomfortable feeling of being watched. I was not wrong. The rabbity fellow was there, sitting at a table near the door. The Japanese woman was with him, as was the pale Scandinavian guy. He scowled at me. Three others sat with them: an old black man with laughter in his eyes, a raven-haired woman with a beakish nose, and a man with greyish brown hair and a wolfish grin. He caught my eye, and my tattoo itched. The coyote tat, not the other. Like it was alive under my skin.

  And I remembered the feather and the fur that I’d found in the back seat of my car, along with the empty bottle of Gold Monkey, and started putting the pieces together.

  I needed a drink.

  I introduced my spousal unit to the group, and we placed our order. She was drinking Hop Devil. I asked the waiter for good bourbon, and failing that, whatever was most similar to good bourbon. He gave me something called Old Horizontal. It would have to do.

  I was finishing my second by the time Sun Wukong returned. He was wearing jeans and a kelly green Philadelphia Eagles t-shirt—the Eagles emblem centered over a football. The tattered silk looked better. I waved them over, and signaled the waiter.

  “I’ll have another of these,” I said, “and I’ll get these guys’ first round.”

  Sun Wukong nodded at me, then turn his head with a certain majesty toward the waiter. He clasped his hands on the table in front of him, his fingers interlaced, and when he spoke, it was with calm anticipation. “I seek the Gold Monkey.”

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Sun Wukong seemed gratified by the cheer raised by several of our number, and for a few moments, the fear that sat in the pit of my stomach eased. At least, it did until the waiter returned with pint glasses a-foaming. He set a glass in front of the Monkey King, who gazed at it with longing. He enclosed it in his wrinkled hands and held it up in front of it his face. He breathed in its scent. He raised it to his lips. He tilted the glass.

  Gulp after gulp, the golden liquid disappeared between the Monkey King’s lips.

  I held my breath.

  Nobody else at the table yet knew what was at stake. They did soon.

  The Monkey King slammed the glass on the table. It shattered in his fist. Beer splashed out of the other glasses on the table and into the nachos. The table cracked.

  “This,” he said, “is crap. I was promised the perfect beer, and it is crap! I have traveled the world, fought my way through jungles and tar balls for the perfect beer, and it is CRAP!”

  Behind the Monkey King’s howl of rage, I could hear laughter, yipping and cawing and howling as the Monkey King rose to his feet with fists clenched and murder in his eyes.

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  I could tell a tale of wisdom and bravery, where through sheer force of will and wit, I overcame the Monkey King’s rage and saved the day. I could, but it would be lies, and my spousal unit has a mean back-of-the-hand. What can I say, I married an Italian. And she’s the one who saved us. All I did sit there, frozen in terror, imagining all the grizzly ways my spousal unit and my friends and everyone else in the restaurant were going to die. And I’ve got a vivid imagination.

  My spousal unit, who had been taking a sip of her beer at the time of the Monkey King’s outburst, was the only one whose beer was still standing, as it were. She stood up, reached over and stuck it in front of the Monkey King’s face.

  “Try this one,” she said.

  He seized it angrily from her hand and chugged it.

  “Not bad,” he said. He shouted for the waiter.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Bring more of this. Many more.”

  “What were you drinking?”

  “Hop Devil,” my spousal unit said. “I’ll have another, too.”

  Many rounds later, the Monkey King stared into a fresh glass of Hop Devil Ale. “I do not understand. This is not the perfect beer. The balance is all wrong. It is a bit bitter, and far too hoppy. I can barely taste the malts. Why do I love it so?” He put his head in his hands. “And why is the Gold Monkey so bad? It was supposed to be perfect.”

  “It is perfect,” I said, a half-dozen Old Horizontals under my belt. “That’s the problem. It’s like the Platonic Forms, the so-called Golden Mean—something that’s so idealized that it ceases to be anything but an ideal. Beauty comes from deviation from the mean, and is far from universal.”

  “Ah.” The Monkey King nodded sagely, and wandered off to find the vat. He would not rest, we understood, until he drank the vats dry. We ordered another round, while there was still beer to be had.

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  We are a group of modest indulgence, but this was an unusual circumstance, and we’d all sworn to leave our keys untouched until the morning. We could hear from the frantic whispers of the staff that Sun Wukong had gotten into the vats, and bets were laid as to just how many he would drink dry.

  “He will drink them all.”

  The speaker tossed a handful of beads on the pile. He grinned at me, and sat between me and my spousal unit.

  “He will drink them all.” A stack of krone fell to the table. A ten thousand yen note followed, and then some pound notes, and a wrinkled old one dollar silver certificate. The dark haired woman laid a single black feather on the stack before she sat with us, and finally, a dark, wizened hand produced an embroidered silk purse, heavy with gold coins.

  We sat and drank and talked and laughed, this group of writers and ancient tricksters, long into the night, as, one variety after another, the Victorious Brewing Company ran out of beer. When the beer and the staff were exhausted, a well sated Sun Wukong joined our merry band. He burped loudly, then congratulated us all on a jest well played.

  The mad Englishman bowed. “The pleasure’s ours, my cheeky monkey, to synonymize you with a donkey.”

  Alison stared at him. “That has got to be…” She clapped her hands over her mouth, still too wise to risk angering a god.

  “…the worst rhyme ever!” Paul finished, not nearly so wise.

  “There’s hardly a Shakespeare round these times from which this Puck might draw his rhymes.” He glared at me. Pointedly.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, though I didn’t quite understand how I could be responsible for Puck’s poetic failures. Still, I blushed and looked away, and that’s when I noticed it.

  It sat, shining gold and beautiful, atop the stack of bar bets in the middle of the cracked table.

  “What’s that?”

  It was a stupid question, and nobody bothered answering. It was an apple. A beautiful, perfect apple, made of solid gold. I wanted it. No, I needed it. More than anything I had ever seen, I needed it. And I was not alone in this.

  Loki was the first to find his voice. “She found out.”

  “Yes, she did.” The fox woman swallowed nervously. Her fingers twitched, reaching of their own volition toward the golden apple. She clasped her hands together and shoved them into her lap.

  “Yes.” Starkly beautiful and beautifully mad, Eris, Goddess of Discord and architect of the Trojan War, stepped from the shadows. “Yes, she did. It’s okay, you’re all forgiven for forgetting to invite me to the party. See? I’ve even brought a nice, shiny present. For whichever one of you that can keep it.”

  Ah, but that’s a diffe
rent story. For another time.

  ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

  Much to his embarrassment, Bernie Mojzes (The Taste of Gold) has outlived Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Janice Joplin and the Red Baron, without even once having been shot down over Morlancourt Ridge. Having failed to achieve a glorious martyrdom, he has instead turned his hand to the penning of paltry prose in the pathetic hope that he shall here find the notoriety that has thus far proven elusive. In his copious free time, he co-edits an online magazine known variously and non-exhaustively as Unlikely Story, The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, and The Journal of Unlikely Cryptography. Should Pity or perhaps a Perverse Curiosity move you to seek him out, he can be found at http://www.kappamaki.com, wherein one might find a list of other titles to avoid.

  (back to table of contents)

  ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

  MONKEY BUSINESS

  by Frank Roger

  The bus creakingly ground to a halt and the driver said in a raspy voice, “Urumbatti.” About a dozen passengers grabbed their bags and backpacks, and got off the bus, mostly tourists, young people clad in shorts and T-shirts and sporting trendy hairdos. Rutger Tarquini followed their example. He didn’t wear the typical tourist “uniform”, but he realised his white skin would mark him as a tourist anyway.

  Urumbatti attracted its share of tourists, but it was too small to harbour any hotels or even guest houses, so most visitors stayed in one of the bigger towns in the area and took the bus when they wished to explore the village’s unique sights and features. Urumbatti was still a traditional village, deservedly renowned for its artistic craftsmanship, especially its woodcutting. Moreover, the village’s location at the rim of the tropical rainforest turned it into an ideal operating base for eco-freaks eager to get a taste of unspoiled nature. The romantic Makhaaba Falls were another hot tourist attraction.