by T. C. Boyle
‘Yes,’ she said aloud, ‘home to your tree.’
They were in the cage, squatting on the damp concrete. She’d just taken him for a walk to the ISLAND, which was ICE, only ICE, and all the ground around it was white with the pellets that flung themselves down out of the sky like tiny white pebbles. It was a perplexing moment, a hard moment, and he was trying to make sense of it. Why wasn’t Guy in the cage and not him? Why wasn’t he at HOME in his bedroom instead of Guy? Or better yet, in his TREE? Why was she here with him when for so long she hadn’t been? And why was the BIG MAN lurking somewhere out there in the hallway or in the house at the bottom of the hill where he lived and slept and ate and kept his dart gun and his stinger and the stick he rapped your knuckles with? Why wasn’t he gone? Why couldn’t he be the one?
But more, and worse: what was happening now would happen tomorrow and the next day and the day after that until all the days were gone and she was gone and the BLACK BUGS were gone, and he was here inside these walls until the time he once knew from the face of the clock and in the long arcing trail of the sun was no more.
ROADRUNNER
The song she was thinking of, the song that came into her head out of nowhere, was ‘Roadrunner’, one of the best driving songs of all time, along with ‘Radar Love’ and ‘Born to Be Wild’. She had it on her mix tape the day she left Santa Maria with her pulse racing and her stomach shrunk down to nothing, and she didn’t know what it was exactly – the vocalist didn’t so much sing the lyrics as speak them in a flat, uninflected tone – but once it got into her head, she couldn’t get it out. She supposed she must have heard it on the student station at some point in the previous week, which was essentially all she listened to once she got home from work to face the bleakness of her apartment that was a kind of shadowland that didn’t feature Sam or Guy or anything else she really cared about. She watched TV sometimes, in the numb way she always had, and she was back to eating Top Ramen most nights because she was too tired to cook and didn’t want to waste the money going out. If she read, it was in the field – Sarah Hrdy’s new book on the role females played in primate societies, journal articles, In the Shadow of Man (for the fifth time) – though without Guy and with Sam stuck in a cage, there was no field, not for her, anyway. She wasn’t progressing or learning or advancing science in the slightest, and she wasn’t getting her degree either. As depressing as it was to admit it – and she would never mention this to her mother or Guy or anybody else – she wasn’t much more than a zookeeper, a jailer, a hoser of shit and scrubber of walls.
The last time she’d seen Guy – it was three months ago now – he’d been at a crisis point himself and things hadn’t really improved since. He’d sent a chill through her when he told her Moncrief had raised the possibility of selling off the chimps to one of the biomed labs (‘But not Sam, never Sam, don’t worry’). But she was worried. More than that: she was terrified. ‘Let’s take him,’ she’d said. ‘Let’s just put him in the car and drive away.’ Yes. Sure. But that wasn’t going to happen. She watched his face recompose itself around a hard little nugget of no and are you crazy?, even as he scrambled for excuses and everything she felt about him went careening off a cliff like a runaway car.
In the interval, Dr Moncrief said nothing about his plans – certainly not to her, because why would he? – and things went on as before, though she hated feeling on edge all the time. She and Guy talked a couple of times a week on the phone – he was still waiting to hear about his grant proposals to set up video cameras in the chimp barn and record any spontaneous signing the chimps might do and all the rest of it – and he promised to come visit at the end of the semester. Which was soon, very soon, but he hardly even asked about Sam because the Carson thing was dead all over again and Sam nothing more to him now than a subject in an experiment that could – maybe, might, hopefully – revive his career. Truly? She almost didn’t care whether he came or not.
It was mid-May, the fields lush, the trees in leaf and the air heavy with pollen. She discovered she had allergies – itching eyes, dripping nose – and she’d never seen so many bugs in her life, bugs of every description, from the ones that bit and stung to those that seemed programmed to bat around your face every time you stuck your head out the door. There was sun, though, and it came like a small miracle after the long, winnowing blast of her first winter away from the coast. As soon as the ice had melted, she’d started taking Sam and some of the other juveniles out to the island where they could go off-leash and roam free, clambering up the tree trunks, rolling in the dirt, chasing birds and squirrels and abandoning their senses to nature. Chimps didn’t swim, couldn’t swim, couldn’t even be taught to, and so there was no worry about their escaping.
Then there came a day that seemed almost like a return to winter, overcast, temperatures in the fifties and a steady rain falling all morning while she slogged through her chores in the chimp barn. Sam, impatient as always and fiercely jealous of any attention she might give to the others – even so much as taking the hose to their cages to shoot faeces down the drain – clung to the bars of his cage and chattered at her the whole time she moved up and down the aisles. She was thinking there was no way she could take him out to the island – Dr Moncrief was afraid of the chimps getting sick, insisting that everybody who came in contact with them, techs and grad students alike, was up to date on their TB shots and strictly prohibiting any activities in the rain for fear the chimps would catch a chill. But then the sun poked through at two or so and she changed her mind.
She wound up taking Sam and two of the other juveniles out in the rowboat – Alice, who’d been cross-fostered with Dr Markowitz until Moncrief pulled the plug on her project too, and Hobart, a young male who’d been home-reared by a pair of Peace Corps volunteers who’d brought him back from Africa and quickly realised how inadequate they were to the task – along with a hamper of snacks and the odd toy or two. The clouds fell back, the sun sparked off the water. There was the smell of the blooming biota of the pond and the manure the farmers used on their fields, mixed with a sweet, heady scent of flowering things and the pollen they released in the air – which had her sniffling and rubbing her eyes, though she’d taken a Dristan tablet as a precaution. The chimps had no such problem, apparently immune to the allergies that had made her life miserable – more miserable, that is – over the past few weeks. They sat quietly, trying to moderate their excitement in the face of their consuming fear of the water, but then, when they were halfway there, a pair of Canada geese came sailing in for a landing, and all three of them went absolutely wild, pawing at the water and hooting in chorus, and whether it was because they were affected, as she was, by the birds’ beauty and grace, or simply that they wanted to throttle and devour them, she didn’t know, but she pulled hard on the left oar and swung wide of them while the chimps splashed and trailed their fingers in the wake.
That had been one of the things that most surprised her the first time she read Goodall – the fact that chimps, which had previously been assumed to be vegetarians like gorillas and orang-utans, not only ate meat but actively sought it out in coordinated hunts in the treetops. Guy had showed her a film one night of wild chimps hunting and killing their preferred prey – red colobus monkeys – and the sheer savagery of it came as a shock to her, especially since her only experience at that point was of Sam, who seemed so harmless, an innocent with his little white tail tuft and big searching eyes who only wanted to cling and cuddle. Sam was with them that night, though she wondered if it was appropriate for him to see the film, which might be too disturbing for him and confusing too (WHAT THEY? he would ask, for which she would have no explanation, since everything they were doing depended on Sam identifying as human). In any case it hadn’t mattered since he’d promptly fallen asleep in her lap while Guy, who’d brought the footage and projector back from school, was threading the film through the rollers.
She was sipping a glass of wine and idly stroking Sam’s back and the swee
t spots behind his ears, when a scrum of adult chimps appeared on the screen. They were standing erect and staring up into the treetops, gesturing excitedly. The camera jumped in a quick blur of ascending leaves and branches to reveal what they were tracking – a troop of monkeys in the treetops. The chimps immediately split up, one climbing in pursuit, the others stationing themselves below the surrounding trees to prevent escape on the ground. Within minutes they’d isolated a mother with an infant clinging to her breast. One chimp – the dominant male – chased her higher and higher till finally there was no place to go and he made a swipe at her, catching her by one leg. In the next instant he snatched the baby away and dashed out its brains, then tore the mother open and began feeding on her while she was still alive even as the others clamoured for their share. ‘Pre-moral,’ Guy had said. ‘You have to have our consciousness to consider such niceties as pity and mercy, but not to worry, we let the guys down at the slaughterhouse take care of that for us.’
When they got to the island – when they were still a boat’s length away, actually – all three chimps made mighty leaps to the near bank and scrambled off, hooting out their joy. For her, this was the best part of what had become an increasingly depressing job. To see them free like this, even for a couple of hours, lifted her up too. If chimps were the intellectual and emotional equals of three-and-a-half- to four-year-old children, then wasn’t it beyond cruel to lock them up? She thought of her niece, of Sophie – was there anybody on this earth who would justify locking her in a cage? It was wrong. It was obscene. And to stick tubes and needles in them on top of it?
She watched the chimps a while, then gazed out over the pond to the shore and the martialled rows of crops beyond and settled into her thoughts. Guy was coming. Guy was coming and he was going to plead and wheedle yet again and spin out schemes Moncrief was only going to reject, and that was their big hope? If he succeeded and Moncrief relented, the best-case scenario was just more of the same. And what was going to happen in five years? Ten? The chimps couldn’t be placed in zoos – they were too accustomed to people, and when paying customers came to the zoo, they wanted to see wild animals, not cigarette-cadging, finger-spelling demi-humans who might as well have been the winos they’d stepped over to get to the subway. They couldn’t be sent back to Africa either because they wouldn’t have the skills to survive in the wild – they’d be at the mercy not only of the indigenous chimps but of people too, who would try to capture them all over again, this time for sale as bush meat and trophies, since the live trade had dried up. Some cultures – the Chinese, for one – paid a premium for chimps’ hands and feet, which they used in their quack medicinal concoctions or for totems or trophies. Talk about obscene.
That was when she glanced up and saw that the rowboat was missing. Hobart was sitting there at water’s edge, playing with a stick, using it like an egg-beater to froth the surface, but Sam and Alice were nowhere to be seen. She rose slowly, not yet alarmed, scanning the island for them – it was small, no more than an acre and so chimp-stripped the sight lines were clear and she could take in the entire thing at a glance. She scanned the treetops – nothing – and in the next moment, trying not to panic, she ran towards the place where the boat had been. She shot a look in both directions, up and down the muddy shore, thinking Sam and Alice must have dragged it somewhere – playing house maybe, using it for a sandbox – before a movement on the other side of the bay caught her eye.
It was the boat. Sam and Alice were in it, and although the operation of oars and oarlocks eluded them (one oar trailed in the water, the other floated behind it, adrift on its own), they were using their cupped hands as paddles, Sam on the right side, Alice on the left. She called out to them, shouted their names in anger, shouted ‘Bad!’ and ‘You come back here!’ but it had little effect. She saw them pause to glance back at her, then say something to each other – hands in motion, just the sort of thing Guy would die to capture on film – then turn back to paddling. They reached the shore a minute later, Sam flashing his big, toothy, triumphant grin and hesitating only to sign, YOU PLAY ME, before tugging Alice by the hand and humping across the grass in the direction of the farmhouse.
It was 200 yards to shore. The air was crisp, the water freezing. And there was the complication of Hobart, who’d have to be abandoned, at least temporarily. She never hesitated, stripping to panties and bra and plunging in, the water so cold it made her face ache, thinking with every stroke that Dr Moncrief was going to kill her, that the chimps would be run over on the main road, that the police would chase them down and shoot them like wild beasts or Sam would grab hold of some random passer-by the way he had with Jody back in Santa Maria. Or bite. He was perfectly capable of biting if the mood took him. Two hundred yards. It was nothing – four laps in an Olympic-sized pool – but it seemed to take forever. And when finally she did reach shore, she couldn’t seem to get her balance, her feet fighting for purchase in the mud, reeds slapping at her face and thrashing her arms. She tripped, fell twice, and then she was on the lawn and sprinting up the path to the farmhouse.
There was no one there, a small mercy. Mrs Moncrief had gone to see her sister in Des Moines for a few days and had taken her car, and Dr Moncrief must be at the university because his car was gone too. (‘You can call me Donald,’ he’d told her after the first week, ‘because we don’t really need to be that formal, do we?’, but she never had called him by his first name, nor would she: to her he was Dr Moncrief, period, which was as familiar as she wanted to get. The truth was, he creeped her out. The way he looked at her, the way he always seemed to find an excuse for putting a hand on her shoulder or elbow or the small of her back as if guiding her to some place she’d never been before, possessive and condescending at the same time. Yes. And here she was in his yard. In her underwear.) Didn’t he have class today? She couldn’t remember. But where had Sam got to?
She worked her way round to the front of the house – freezing, absolutely freezing – and saw nothing amiss, no broken glass, no door left ajar or knocked off its hinges. She knew how Sam thought – he wouldn’t run off randomly into the fields when the temptation of a fully stocked kitchen was right there before him. He and Alice had gone straight for the house and if they weren’t outside, then there was only one place they could be. She climbed the front steps, her wet hair stinging her shoulders, and tried the front door. It was open.
The room was exactly as she’d remembered it, the knotty pine, the armchairs, the throw rugs, nothing disturbed, nothing out of place. TV. Wood stove. Antimacassars on the chairs. She caught the scent of the air freshener – Spring Meadow – that brought her back to that first day when she’d steeled herself to knock at the door, not knowing what to expect, and something else too, something darker, earthier. Shivering, she stood just inside the door, feeling like a thief, listening for the smallest sound. Chimps weren’t subtle, but she could picture them hiding in the closet or behind the couch, holding their breath – hilariously, chimp humour – till she left and they could ransack the place with real dedication. Then she crossed the room to the kitchen, pushed open the door, and there they were.
Alice was up on the counter, rifling the cabinets, a box of Froot Loops in one hand, a second box – Cinnamon Grahams – tucked under one arm. Sam stood in front of the refrigerator, both doors open wide and the buttery glow of the interior light softening his features. There was a bright white smear of cream cheese on his chin, and he clutched a half-eaten package of hot dogs to his breast. A carton of eggs lay smashed on the linoleum at his feet in a puddle of ketchup and milk and what looked to be raw chicken livers. He gave her a guilty look, pushed the doors closed and jammed the remainder of the hot-dog package in his mouth, as if afraid she’d take it away from him, while Alice, pretending nothing was amiss, settled down on the countertop, threw her head back and began shaking Froot Loops into her mouth.
There were so many things wrong here she could barely think. She was on the verge of hypothermia and ne
eded to get into some clothes right away, but her jeans and sweatshirt were out on the island, and she’d have to row back there to get them – with one oar – which she couldn’t very well do without first coaxing Sam and Alice back up the hill and into the chimp barn and then fetching and securing Hobart, after which she’d have to clean up the mess here before Dr Moncrief got back, which could be any minute now for all she knew… It was all too much. ‘Bad,’ she scolded, ‘you bad boy, and you, Alice, you bad girl,’ and she felt utterly ridiculous, as if she were seeing herself from afar, in a dream or movie or some other simulacrum of real life, because this wasn’t exactly the sort of inter-species communication she’d yearned for, not even close. No, this was the language of the pet owner, the circus trainer, the language one species used to subject another, and what could she expect in reply? Excuses? Apologies? A treatise on impulse control?
Sam signed, COME HUG.
Alice just sat there, working her jaws. Did she look guilty? Aimee didn’t know her well enough to make that determination, but Alice must certainly have known right from wrong, if situational ethics even applied when cages and will and punishment were involved. Was it wrong to escape, to feed yourself, to be yourself ? It didn’t matter. All that mattered now was imposing her will on these two animals – that’s what they were, animals – and getting them back in their cages and hiding her own culpability because she was the one who’d ultimately allowed all this to happen.
NO, she signed, NO HUG. And then raised her voice, angry now, furious: ‘You get out of here, back to the barn, back to your cage – now! You hear me?’
For the longest moment he didn’t react – didn’t move – though she knew very well he’d understood her. It could have gone either way. He was in a state of high excitement, adrenalin surging through him, pushing the limits, and he wanted to disobey, wanted to assert himself, because who was she to presume to control him when she was so much the weaker and slower? But he did feel guilt, did feel remorse – and love, love for her – because his eyes softened and he got down on the linoleum tiles, right in the middle of the stew of shattered eggs and all the rest, and prostrated himself, face to the floor, arms outstretched, palms up.