Banging the Monkey

by Tod A

  “Watch me,” Frank spat. “You’re just his little whore, sent to do the dirty work. Tell Yow to go fuck himself.”

  “That not polite words, Frank.” Kala kept moving toward him. “You use to be a gentleman.”

  Frank turned and scaled the ladder toward the roof. “Come and get me.”

  Kala came forward fast and my adrenaline kicked in.

  “You stay right there, Cowboy. That your name, right, Cowboy?”

  I backed into the office, waving my crutch like a senior citizen.

  “You move one more centimeter and I put this kris inside you.”

  She paused to admire it. “So beautiful, no? Such craftsmanship.”

  My limbs had turned to rubber.

  She spun about and flew up the ladder after Frank.

  Every instinct told me to flee and fade into the crowd. Yet something pulled me up after them.

  As I reached the roof Kang-Kang went black: no electric city. A great cry rose from the distance, then cheers and applause. Red steam spumed up from the caldera like a fountain of blood. The only other light came from the random flash of rockets. Kala and Frank stood facing each other in the heavy drizzle.

  “I come to give you one more chance, Frank.”

  “I gave Yow my final answer.”

  “I don’t want to kill you, Frank.”

  “Oh, but I want to kill you.”

  Kala smiled the smile of someone who loved her job. “Good luck.”

  She lunged forward with the kris.

  Frank caught her wrist and twisted it aside.

  Kala grabbed his throat with her other hand.

  Frank was a big man, but Kala was taller, and she held the knife. They struggled on the rooftop, dark shapes against the volcanic glow.

  “Oh, you want to dance with me?” Kala sang. “How sweet.”

  “Fuck you.”

  She thrust her knee gracefully into his crotch.

  They fell back against an air conditioner vent and Frank’s eyes bulged.

  As they stepped apart, Frank was unsteady on his feet.

  “Thanks for the dance,” he rasped. “Cunt.”

  He looked down. His belly was leaking red.

  “Now look what I do,” Kala said, pouting. “I spoil your lovely shirt.”

  As Frank turned, I saw the handle of the kris protruding from the small of his back.

  The roar of the distant throng swelled and fell away, like breakers in the dark.

  Kala rolled her eyes. “This party dead. Time to go.”

  “Don’t go,” Frank gasped, wrapping his arms around her. “Just one more dance.”

  “Give up, Frank. This party over.”

  “Don’t be like that, Kala,” he rasped. “We can still have a little fun.”

  He fell upon her, and she staggered backward under his weight.

  Step by step he pushed her backward toward the skylight. She couldn’t seem to squirm loose. The smile left her face. Her eyes grew wide.

  “Frank, darling,” she hissed, between clenched teeth. “You messing my dress.”

  She lurched sideways, and they reeled in an awkward pirouette. Frank fell backward, pulling Kala with him onto the skylight. Glass panes shattered on the warehouse floor thirty feet below. The skylight’s tin frame sagged beneath their bodies. Their labored breathing hovered above the distant festival din.

  “It takes two to tango,” Frank said.

  She was face-down, her mouth inches from Frank’s, her body inches from the abyss. She struggled to free herself, but still he clutched her in his death-grip. Glass fragments rained down like broken icicles into a crevasse.

  “Come here, Cowboy. I want to talk to you,” Kala called, craning her neck to make eye-contact. One hand clung like a bloodless talon to the window frame; the other stretched back toward me, clutching at thin air.

  I inched forward.

  “Let’s talk business,” she said. “Mr Frank history, you can easy see. In a minute all his life will be drain away. Mr Yow need a new man on Madu now.”

  Frank’s laugh ended in a bloody cough.

  “You help me, Cowboy, I swear I help you.” Kala said.

  I thought of Frank’s villa, his lifestyle, the skull full of cash. I recalled my life of struggle in New York. I thought of Blake. I thought of my book.

  Then I remembered Welsh Mick and Sanjaya. And I remembered Tripod.

  “Me?” I said. “Help you?”

  “Yes,” Kala pleaded.

  “No. Fuck you, you murderous bitch.”

  I leapt forward, slamming down the crutch—a short, sharp shot to the back of the neck—no fear, and no mercy.

  The metal groaned. The frame gave way. They vanished into the void.

  For a few minutes the rain stopped and the moon peered through a hole in the clouds. The volcano’s fire cast the city in red. I stood silent and stunned, listening to the muted thrum of the festival. There was a distant cheer. The electric city was back.

  I hobbled toward the skylight. I couldn’t look. Yet I had to look.

  There they lay in the ugly embrace of death, Kala’s body splayed across Frank’s, both of them impaled upon countless spires. Her platinum wig lay on the floor, spattered in red.

  With her last ounce of strength, Kala lifted her face to look at me. Was that a grimace or a smile? I didn’t want to know.

  I ran.

  I ran because I wanted to live. Logic might have told me that Kala could not have survived the fall—but logic had deserted me. Adrenaline pumped through my bloodstream, masking the pain from my shattered ankle. I scaled rooftops, shimmied down fire escapes, threw myself across divides. All the while I felt Kala’s hot breath hot on my neck. Falling down into a terrace bar, I landed among a party of ex-pats slurring Christmas carols. I left them open-mouthed, and escaped downstairs into the mad mob on the streets. The rain came down even heavier than before.

  I stumbled, I tripped, I ran. I was nearly trampled by a bright blue King Kong. I slammed into a drunk, and his bottle shattered at my feet. Then by some miracle—in the midst of all this, like some apparition—came Wulan. She was as drenched and breathless as me. Her smile lit up the darkness.

  “Mr Mark,” she laughed. “Wulan is so glad to see you okay! I arrived to Joro yesterday. I paid the baksheesh to the judges. I was all day at the polis station today. Then I searched for you at Mr Frank’s and at Mr Cooney’s. I did search for you for so long.”

  “Thank you, Wulan. Thank you. But I need to hide. No time to explain. Please take me.”

  She took my hand and led me through the rain into the heart of Kang-Kang.

  { 17 }

  Paradise Lost

  I awoke to a QUEER AND DEATHLY QUIET. An eerie half-light filtered through the hole in the curtain, projecting an inverted image of the empty gang outside the window onto the wall above the bed. Wulan slept peacefully beside me, her ribcage slowly rising and falling under the sheet.

  The festival was over. No more music or laughter. No jet engine roar or motorbike racket, no TV blather or radio blare. The temples and mosques and churches were still. The people of Madu were in hiding. It was Kum Sati: the day of silence.

  I crept outside to get my bearings and was startled by the crunch of crystals underfoot. I wiped the grit from my eyes to make sure I wasn’t still dreaming. As we slept, it seemed the island had been blanketed in snow.

  The gangs of Kang-Kang were bleached of color. Everything was swathed in grubby white—the roofs, the roads, the trees, the motorbikes and palms. A sickly light struggled to penetrate the clouds hanging like mourning rags over the sky.

  The sun rose warily, spilling strange tints onto the muted landscape. From nearby came a twee electronic melody—Jingle Bells. Someone had forgotten to turn off their phone. The tune was soon cut sho
rt. A sour breeze swept down off the mountain and a few pale flakes drifted into my hair. It wasn’t snow.

  Kebakaran flashed. Brute thunder breached the stillness and the earth trembled underfoot. Plumes rose from her dark cone.

  If only it had been a tropical blizzard—some freak meteorological phenomenon, like a rain of frogs. But this was no blizzard. It was soberingly clear what it meant: the demons inside Kebakaran had not been dispelled. Where there was ash, there was fire—and likely more ash and fire to come. It was time for me to go.

  A filthy pye-dog slunk along a concrete wall, its black snout curling at the sulfur-tainted air. Another tremor sounded—long and potent, like a bass note from a cathedral organ. The dog looked furtively around, then slipped through a gap in the wall.

  I went back inside.

  “Wulan, get up. It’s time to go.”

  She stretched languorously, and made a confused noise: half yawn, half question.

  “Wulan, I’m leaving. You’re coming with me.”

  “Coming? Coming where?”

  “I don’t know where. But we can’t stay here.”

  “You are leaving Madu?”

  “We’re leaving Madu, Wulan. You and I. Hurry up and get dressed.”

  She sat up and looked at me, finally awake.

  “Leave Madu?” She made it sound like boarding a rocket for Mars.

  “Look outside your door. There’s a volcanic eruption . Wake up. We need to go.”

  “Mr Mark,” she said, smiling. “Kebakaran has done this thing so many times before. Madu is home.”

  “Home? I don’t know what that word means.”

  She looked at me. “You can have a home. This can be your home too.”

  “That’s very generous of you, Wulan, but this building might not be here tomorrow.”

  “Don’t worry. Wulan makes good offerings and the gods take care of us.”

  “I’d love to meet these gods sometime, I really would.”

  “The gods saved you from your illness. You told it to me yourself.”

  “I don’t know what I said. I was fucking delirious.”

  She turned to face me. Her eyes said everything.

  “You took care of me when I was sick. You paid my baksheesh. You shared your bed with me last night. And for all of those things I’m very grateful. You have been a great friend and I thank you for all of your kindness. But I’m not your boyfriend. I can’t be anyone’s boyfriend right now. And I’m not Sid from Sheffield, so please don’t give me that fucking look.”

  She turned to the wall and wiped her eyes.

  “I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that.”

  She rose and went to the window, nagging a lock of hair.

  “Where will you go?” she said. “To America?”

  I counted out twenty thousand euros from Frank’s money pouch and placed it on the bedside table.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “Away from here. And if you trust me at all you’ll come with me. Cooney has a boat. There’s room for you. Please come, Wulan.”

  “I must stay to look after my family. I must take care of the guest house.”

  A tree branch cast its shadow on the window blind. She traced its jagged lines with a finger.

  “I’m sorry, Mr Mark. I do not know the correct English idiom for this situation.”

  “Neither do I.”

  I counted out twenty thousand euros from Frank’s money pouch and placed it on the bedside table.

  “What is this?” she said, picking up the stack of euros.

  “It’s the money I owe you,” I said. “Plus a little extra for all your trouble.”

  “But this is far too much. I cannot accept.”

  “It’s a present. Use it to help rebuild your guest house or something.”

  She turned away. “Thank you, Mr Mark.”

  “Merry Christmas, Wulan. Take care of yourself.”

  Her face was still turned away as I walked out the door.

  “And you, Mr Mark.”

  Kang-Kang, all of Madu, seemed deserted. Yet I sensed that behind each crack in a wall or window-blind, there were eyes silently watching.

  I kept to the gangs, aware of the sound of my own breathing, knowing that somewhere out there could be a kris with my name on it. I kept telling myself that Kala was dead. Because if she wasn’t, I knew that each footprint I left behind me formed a trail that would lead her straight to me.

  “Jingle bells, jingle bells,” I whispered under my breath.

  I made toward the port as best I knew how. I could only hope that Cooney hadn’t left yet, that some residue of sympathy had made him hesitate. Eddies of ash swirled across my path.

  The silence only amplified any noise which violated it. The crunch of my sandals in the dust, the rustle of dead palm leaves above, and the low moans of thunder, were the only sounds that broke the hush that hung over the island.

  Beneath it all was a subsonic drone, like the slow scraping of bows across colossal contra-basses, deep in the pit of the earth. The vibrations reverberated in the base of my spine.

  It was impossible to say what time it was. The sullen clouds lingering above the city left only a pale strip of light along the horizon. I’d lost my watch and mobile phone in the chaos of the night before. I slogged doggedly along the road, wiping ash from my eyes.

  I hadn’t seen another soul. But I kept hearing the distant jangling of bells and I couldn’t shake the feeling I was being followed. I picked up my pace, continually glancing over my shoulder.

  “Jingle bells, jingles bells.”

  It was like walking on fragments of safety glass. Cinders sliced my feet. Soon my ankles were a mess of scrapes and cuts. The air stunk of burnt matches. The hue of the sky had shifted to a sick, chemical yellow. Enormous black thunderheads plumed upward from the volcano, thousands of feet into the sky, crisscrossed with gashes of lightning.

  I left the outskirts of the city behind, following what I remembered to be the route to the harbor, a winding road skirting polluted inlets and clumps of feeble mangroves. Islands of plastic bottles, flip-flops, and other garbage poked through the gray volcanic scum floating on the water. Here, Madu’s detritus found its final resting place.

  Some poor spooked creature watched me pass, its yellow eyes glowing in the shadows of the mangrove roots.

  A cold drizzle began to fall. Soon the silt under my soles turned to sludge and my feet grew heavy. Again and again I had to stop to shake off the gray slurry from my sandals and my crutch. As the rain fell, a thick fog rose up from the ground and the visibility plunged.

  I kept hearing those little bells through the rain. Each time the sound seemed to draw nearer.

  I told myself Kala couldn’t have survived the fall. I had seen them both die, hadn’t I? But there was something supernatural about her—almost superhuman. As I limped through the gray volcanic waste, I took out Buster’s jackknife. ‘Fuck it,’ I thought. ‘When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.’

  There was a brief break in the rain and I heard the bells again, this time very close. Instantly all bravado deserted me. I was no hero, just a fool out of my depth.

  I hid behind a crumbling spirit house among the mangroves. Crouching down, I flipped open my meager blade. The bells grew closer.

  Suddenly a clammy snout was at my neck, and a hot tongue slathering my face with dog-spit.

  “Tripod, you goddamned cripple! You scared me shitless!” I laughed into the wind.

  There was another groan from the mountain and the rain came down anew. But I didn’t care. Tripod and I limped along together through the murk and the muck, two of a kind.

  We found Cooney at the harbor, clearing ashy slop from the deck of the Titanic II.

  “I was wondering if you’d turn up,” he said. “Getting ready t
o shove off.”

  Then he caught sight of Tripod.

  “No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The dog ain’t coming.”

  “What am I supposed to do, leave her here?”

  “The dog ain’t coming.”

  “She’s got nowhere else to go.”

  “I said the miserable thing ain’t coming aboard. Bloody bad luck.”

  “There’s no such thing as luck. Even if there was, how could our luck get any worse?”

  He looked up at the sky.

  “Oh, bugger you both,” he said. “Come help me clear away this wretched gunk.”

  He tossed me a broom.

  Disasters come in all sizes, I guess. In the end, the Mount Kebakaran eruption brought limited casualties—a dozen dead, a ruined rice harvest, some sunken fishing boats, and a few thousand asphyxiated chickens. Eventually, the rains would wash away the ash, plants would sprout anew, and life would go on much as it had before.

  Bad things happen to good people all the time. My life was simply another minor disaster, one of many. I was still in mourning for the end of my marriage. After every catastrophe the cost is tallied—whether for lost love, forgotten ideals, or the dreams that slipped through your fingers as the years flew—and the mind is forever marked with the scars of forfeiture.

  Bad things happen to bad people too—though not nearly often enough. The bastards of the world occasionally get their just deserts, but plenty get away with their crimes, and not many appear to lose much sleep over it. Bankers steal, presidents lie, oil executives spill petroleum into the sea, laughing all the way to the bank. Futures are squandered, life savings are siphoned away, nature is raped, innocent lives are snuffed out. Yet rarely do the perpetrators pay the price. Poetic justice seems to exist mostly in fairy tales.

  True, Frank met with an unpleasant end, and Kala too—you could call it an eye for an eye—but how many human lives equal a razed forest?

  And Hitler finished up rather unglamorously, of course—with his brain splattered across the bunker wall as the Red Army closed in—but was justice served?

  In real life the punishment is rarely commensurate with the crime. I guess that’s why they invented fiction.