by Jeffrey Ford
On Sunday morning, while he drank coffee and read the horse paper, I asked my father if they shot the monkey.
“Yeah, we bagged him,” he said.
“Did he die fast?”
“Not fast enough for my money. It was pretty cold out there.”
“Did he cry?”
“I don’t know. What’s his name, the guy with the mustache and glasses, brought his .22 rifle. The monkey was in midair. The guy, oh yeah, Mr. Donnely, hit him right in the chest. The monkey dropped into the pond. We fished him out and the cops took him away.” He lit a cigarette and went back to his paper, working figures in the margins with a stub of a pencil. What my father told me was reported by Torrey to the PTA at the very next meeting, garnering a round of applause. I imagine Mrs. Cooper’s triumph was undercut by the fact that her daughter now disliked her even more.
The draw of life’s current was strong and eventually pulled me on, but not before I spent a day or so wondering how Giacomo had gone bad. I wondered what happened to the organ-grinder. He wasn’t much of a draw without the crazy monkey. Who needed an old man who didn’t speak English wandering around a fairground playing songs on a box with a crank handle? The tunes were stale, like something from a splintered, rickety carousel. What made the monkey so angry? I don’t think the old man abused him. He wasn’t afraid of Giacomo but instead treated him like a son he didn’t know what to do with. Before my reverie was over, I pictured the monkey, in pajamas, in his room at night, writing in his diary about Daisy Cooper.
A few years passed and I was seventeen, a senior in high school. The carnival stopped appearing in Brightwaters the year I was fourteen, which would have been 1969. I remember because I was gonna ask Daisy to go with me. Instead we hitchhiked to the beach. That last year at home, I got a job working in a metal shop down by the tracks on the way to Babylon. It was at that job that I met Tom Mason. Forty, forty-five, maybe? The guy never wore a shirt unless it was freezing out. He’d work on the grinder and sparks would bounce off his flesh. Tom had a big ego and big muscles. He had twin dragon tattoos that grew up from his abdomen and intertwined while their twin maws flashed sharp blue teeth poised to bite his nipples. A scary dude, but fun enough to talk to at lunch or for a smoke break.
One day, when I got back from lunch early, he was sitting outside against the wall of the shop. I stopped and bummed a cig off him. He said to me, “Did I tell you about the time I helped execute a monkey?” The instant the words left his mouth I thought of Giacomo. I sat down next to him. “Where?” I asked. Holding his cig in two fingers, he pointed over his head due east. “Right over here in Brightwaters,” he said. “Was it Giacomo?” I asked. He laughed. “Yeah, did you know that little fuck knuckle?”
I nodded. “I was there the night he bit that lady’s face.”
“Get the fuck out,” he said. “Yeah I worked there running one of the rides.”
“Which ride?”
“The Round Up.”
“You mean where you go in circles and then the floor falls out?”
“That’s it.”
I told him the Leacock story and he said, “Oh yeah, I could make at least one person puke per session just how I adjusted the speed and then slammed on the brakes. After they’d stagger off, I’d just throw some sawdust on the puke and rev it up again for the next crowd.”
“The way I heard it,” I said. “Giacomo got away.”
“Who told you that?”
“I forget.”
“Nah, we shot the crap out of old Giacomo. To be honest, nobody felt too bad about it. He was a monumental pain in the ass. Steal your cigarettes, your wallet, your booze, and if you weren’t careful, your girl.” I pictured Daisy in her bikini with her thumb out on the side of the road, Giacomo pulling over in a Corvette Stingray to pick her up. Tom went on, “He’s buried in a little clearing of trees just beyond the field where the carnival was held. He was shot up pretty bad, and we buried him on the spot where he fell. The organ-grinder knelt down next to the body and straightened Giacomo’s puffy pants and little bowler derby with the chin strap. He placed a big rock on top of the grave, telling us, “So he does not rise from the dead.”
“Wait,” I said. “Giacomo didn’t wear like a little jacket and fez?”
“I never saw him in that,” said Tom. It struck me that if what Mason was telling me was true, then all my memories of Giacomo were false, including my sighting of him in the maple tree. If not the monkey, what did I see?
When I got home from work that night, I found my father out back, grilling his meal of a hundred meats—burgers, hot dogs, sausage, chicken . . . He was just getting the meat on, so nobody was outside with him at the picnic table yet. I told him I knew that story he told me about the death of Giacomo the monkey was a lie. He flicked his cigarette into the grill, dropping the ashes with a masterful touch between a sausage and a chicken leg.
At first, he didn’t remember the incident, but eventually his mind came around to it. “We never went in the woods that day. We sat in Torrey’s office and drank scotch, a bunch of us. It was a lot of fun. Then he made us swear to tell our kids that the hunting party had taken care of the monkey.”
“He never believed in Giacomo?” I asked.
“He never gave a shit whether there was a monkey or not. In his office that day, a bunch of the guys from the neighborhood getting bombed on his booze, he told us that he was in the Break Out at St. Lo. He was a messenger and had to run for miles on dead bodies to get a message back to Patton whose Third Army was reinforcing. After that, a monkey in the woods is the least of your problems.”
On Sunday, the only day both of us were off from work, my father drove us over to the field in Brightwaters. We took a couple of shovels with us and we went back into the woods and found the clearing Tom Mason had told me about. Right in the middle of it there was the rock the organ-grinder had placed on Giacomo’s grave. I dug and he smoked and then he dug and I smoked, and eventually we found the monkey’s remains. There was still a lot of hair and the bones were full of shot. The skull was shattered and yet still clung together. We found his bowler derby, the elastic band intact.
“Think of all the stories people told themselves and others about this monkey,” I said. Even Daisy, I thought. Even me.
My father looked down at what was left of Giacomo and then up into the trees. “You know, there’s always a monkey in the woods,” he said.
The Match
I got a letter in the mail and read it while I ate dinner at the kitchen counter. Lynn, working on her mosaic, sat at the table by the sliding screen door, cracking green plates with a monkey wrench. Between the bashings of dishware, bird sounds came in from outside and a cool breeze sifted through.
“Listen to this,” I said to her.
She lifted her goggles and turned to face me.
“From the way I’m reading it, the university says that if I want to continue teaching part time, I have to pass a test.”
“Like the SAT?”
“No, it says I have to wrestle an angel. And they give me a date and time as to when this is all going to go down in the basement of the university library. It informs me here that the hallway will be darkened.”
She barely heard the end of it from laughing. “Who sent you that?”
I shook my head.
“It has to be somebody from work, one of the other teachers.”
“It’s on official letterhead from the president’s office.”
“That doesn’t mean shit,” she said. “And besides, wrestle an angel? The only thing you’re wrestling is your pants when you try to get into them.”
“I was on wrestling in high school, but I sucked pretty bad. I do lift weights every other day, though.”
“You’re 65, you just got over hip surgery not too long ago, you’ve got diabetes, and you’re overweight.”
�
��I’ll grab him by the throat and choke him out. Feathers’ll fly.”
“What are you getting so excited about? It has to be a joke.”
“It’s like the story from the Bible. Jacob wrestled the angel.”
“Why?”
“I forget. I just know he was old, had two wives, two servants, and they were on the lam for some reason.”
“Two wives?” said Lynn.
“A metaphor for teaching Composition.”
Through the week, I contacted, by email, the few professors I was friendly with and asked if they’d sent the letter. Everyone of them told me the same thing, “No, it was the administration. You really do have to wrestle an angel.”
“How come no one tells you about this when you get hired?” I wrote back.
All of them used this exact phrase when responding—The surprise is half the battle. I asked them to tell me about what it was like, but, of course, they all swore they were sworn to secrecy. Their advice: “Hire a trainer.”
“In case you forgot, in my previous position, I was a full professor with an extensive list of publications,” I wrote back to them, but by a lack of response, it was obvious they didn’t give a shit.
Lynn was against the idea of me getting a trainer. “Tell them to fuck off and just start getting your social security. It’s two part-time classes, not like you’re pulling down six figures. Kick back and write a novel, join a club, volunteer at the hospital.”
“It’s only a grand for a trainer,” I said.
She scowled as only she can.
“You should see these guys who have obviously beaten the angel,” I told her. “They still have their jobs. Flimsy dudes. All nerdy. Not only them, but there’s a woman, Kay Cass, who’s confined to a wheelchair, and she’s an adjunct who’s been there longer than me, so she must have beaten the angel too. It can’t be that fuckin’ hard.”
“So, why do you need a trainer? Ditch that idea.”
“What, and train myself?”
“You can do it,” she said.
“Well, I do have two weeks. That should be enough.”
That night was a Friday, so we sat out on the porch and got hammered on wine. Me, red. Lynn, white. We played the little cylinder of a music box on Pandora’s Nat King Cole station. It was spring and things were starting to blossom. The stars were out. The dogs and cats lay around us, sleeping. We reminisced about our long-ago days at the Colonial Motor Inn on Vestal Parkway in upstate New York. “Those were the days,” she said, and I had a flashback of cooking hot dogs in a toaster oven in the bathroom, pissing on noodles in the toilet, and shaving on ketchup-puddled plates.
“Remember when Tom caught that guy peeping in the windows, ran him down in the graveyard, tied him to a chair, and threatened to shoot arrows into him?” she asked.
“Oh yeah, memories to warm an old age,” I whispered. It got quiet then while we listened to “The Very Thought of You,” Nat belting it out into the lonesome Ohio darkness, across the sprouting fields. When he was done, she asked me, “So, when’s training start?”
“I have to take this seriously,” I said. “With that money, I can put off retiring until I’m 67 or 68 and get more from Social Security for those later, golden years.”
“Pushups?” she asked.
“I figure that’s out of the question.”
“Jogging some every day? Maybe, walking? . . . Crawling?”
“A brisk walk to the mailbox in the evening,” I offered.
“What’s your overall plan?”
“I’ve been thinking about it and decided the preparation should be more philosophical, you know, spiritual.”
“Meditation?”
“Maybe.”
The next day, despite a crushing hangover, I dove into the internet and looked up angels. I saw a depiction of an angel from the 15th century carrying what looked like a frisbee, pics of Bruno Ganz from Wings of Desire, the archangel, Michael, done up in armor with a sword—typical Christian vision of a badass. There were baby angels dragging Christ to heaven, white wings amidst the clouds, Charlie’s Angels, and a piece by Maimonidies on Wikipedia about how “disembodied minds exist which emanate from God and are the intermediaries between God and all the bodies [objects] here in this world.”
I turned the computer off and took a nap. It was summer vacation, no more marking papers for a while, no more Composition. The whole angel thing seemed ridiculous after my research. I just wanted the days to pass in mundane majesty, reading obscure books, writing stories, watching Lynn work in the garden during daylight, and drinking with her on the porch at night. After that, I rarely gave the angels another waking thought.
I did, however, dream of one. Every couple of nights, I’d be teaching at the University of the Land of Nod, the class made up of all the hard-case students I’d ever had in Comp. classes stretching back forty years. Sitting in the front row was this angry kid who had been diagnosed with a terminal disease—his heart grew more brittle by the day and would eventually just shatter. He knew he was going to die in the next five years. Stevie was his name. Bitter as could be and who could blame him?
Sitting behind him was Cindy, the girl who, when she got her period, suffered amnesia. She never knew what the fuck was going on. What can you do? When all was said and done, I gave her a B. The suicide and the murderer were in the row behind her. The former only wrote out contracts for First Alert, the latter, about a dragon named Flamer. The guy without legs, who rode around on a skateboard and walked on his hands, was in the back up on top of one of the desks. There were another ten, one more disconcerting than the next. But, hey, I’m a veteran, so even in dreamland I just buckled down to it. First up was a lecture on the difference between abstract and concrete detail.
Two nights later, I was back to teaching in my sleep in the basement of the library. In the middle of talking about gerund phrases, the classroom door opened and in walked a guy in a brown cassock; white wings jutting out the back. His hair was scraggly and his halo was a sick green, blinking on and off as if God’s grace was shorting out. He came to one of the empty seats, sat and faced me.
“You’re late,” I said. “Class has already begun.”
That’s when I noticed his face was totally fucked up. Rumpled and twisted, his lips resembled a parrot beak, and his eyes were looking in completely opposite directions. The sight of him was so startling, I withdrew two steps to the blackboard.
“Saint Drogo at your service,” he said. “Here to train you.”
The students were all trying not to look at the horrid saint. My first thought was that he might actually be the devil. “I never asked for a trainer,” I said.
“Send the students home. We have work to do.”
“I think I’m supposed to be teaching them.”
“Come on, let’s get a move on,” he said. He did this trick where he was both at the back of the classroom and at the exit in the front at the same time. As the students walked, staggered, hobbled, and crawled into the darkness outside the door, he’d smack each of them in the back of the head and they’d ascend swiftly as if picked up by the funnel of a black tornado. The last out was the kid who I recalled had written about the death of his brother—“Flattened like a pancake by a truck on a street in Brooklyn.” Part of that paper was about his having lived chained to a radiator for the rest of his childhood. Drogo gave him a boot in the ass. The darkness swept him away. The door slammed closed behind him.
The saint approached me and I sat in my chair behind the desk to feel less exposed. He thrust his face in mine and said, “Let’s get one thing clear. I know I’m ugly as sin, but I can help you prepare. Do you have any idea who you’ll be wrestling?”
I shook my head, averting my gaze from him. His halo buzzed and sparked.
“Metatron.”
“Metatron? Isn’t that a Transformer?”
> He backed off a little, “No, you’re thinking of Megatron. This is Metatron, the cause of causes, the primordial, the tenth and last emanation, the prince of the present, angel of the veil, ancient of days. If angels had a god, he would be it. But they don’t ’cause there’s only one god.”
“I’m having a hard time following you,” I told him.
“I know. At the bottom it all just gets murky and then what the fuck?” He flapped his wings twice and said, “Let’s get started. Metatron was only ever known to speak one thing: ‘I have been young, also, I have been old.’”
“What’s that mean?”
“Don’t worry. Nobody knows. What you need to remember, though, is that his skin is fire, his eyelashes are lightning, his breath has the corrosive properties of Time. At the center of his mind is the first moment of the universe, a light so powerful it will make the blind see, and then blind them, only to cure them and blind them again.”
Drogo snapped his fingers and I was sitting at a rooftop bar. The angel was making drinks with a sweating chrome shaker. “I call this one Purple Deuces. Two parts fruit of paradise. One-part earthly desire. A jigger of the Holy Ghost’s regret, a dash of the tears of Eve. And there you go.”
“What’s the name have to do with it?”
“That fruit of paradise makes you shit purple.” And to my horror, I did, all the next day. I wanted to tell Lynn how my dreams were affecting reality but it sounded pretty insane. So I kept it to myself. Two nights later I was back at the rooftop bar. Drogo was mixing the Deuces. “OK, let’s get started,” he said and poured the chilled purple syrup into a martini glass—garnished with a piece of dried quince at the end of a toothpick. “Tell me more about the kid with the heart of glass.”