Different Dreams

by Tory Cates

  If Stallings had paid off on time, he could have held on to the I-35 property and continued with Landell Acres. But all that had changed. Now, rather than an appreciating piece of property he owned a godforsaken monkey ranch! Worst of all was knowing that even if he did manage to sell off the property today, it would only be a holding action. The real battle would be to get enough together to pay off that note coming due at the end of May. Desperation was a bad—no, Cameron amended his thinking—it was the worst position from which to bargain.

  Cameron began fuming again. Not only at his own stupidity in having been duped into a bad deal, but at that woman’s incredible gall, threatening to call the press on him if he did something so outrageous as attempt to recoup a fraction of his losses. As he pulled into the reserved parking space outside of his office, two images of Malou sprang unbidden into his thoughts.

  The first was of that plump lower lip she’d insisted upon nibbling away at. He wondered how it would taste. And the second was of those impossibly long brown legs. How would they feel wrapped about his own?

  Cameron slammed the claret-colored door and stormed into his office. This was going to be one hell of a day.

  * * *

  “What’d the slimewad say?” Ernie asked eagerly the instant Malou walked through the door of the research station.

  Though Malou had taken a long walk through the compound trying to steady herself, her voice still trembled when she relayed the verdict. “He wants to sell them. All of them.”

  “All of them?” Ernie repeated incredulously.

  Malou nodded.

  “Jeez, I could tell the guy was a hard charger, but Attila the Hun?”

  “I told him I’d get press coverage. That the world would know what he was up to.”

  Ernie nodded thoughtfully. “How’d he take that threat?”

  “Not well. Not well at all. There’s something dangerous about Cameron Landell. Something very unsettling.”

  Ernie paused and studied Malou. He had his glasses on now. They were thick and made his eyes shrink away to two tiny raisins behind them. “Pretty ruthless guy, huh?” he finally asked eagerly. “Wouldn’t hesitate to stoop to anything that would accomplish his ends?”

  “Well . . .” Malou hesitated. For some reason she couldn’t bring herself to agree with Ernie’s blanket indictment. The coldly objective, scientifically trained part of her brain wouldn’t allow it. That part of her had sensed in Cameron Landell something far different from the cutthroat entrepreneur she wanted to believe he was. Not only that, but if she let herself think about it long enough, she feared she would begin to doubt that the danger she’d sensed pouring off of Cameron Landell had anything at all to do with the monkeys. Still, Ernie was watching her anxiously, eager for her to agree to his assessment. She obliged him. “He might,” she agreed tentatively.

  “I knew it the minute I set eyes on him,” Ernie elaborated dramatically. “I said, here is one bad hombre who only cares about money and not at all about how he gets it.”

  “I’m not sure I’d go that far,” Malou equivocated.

  “You wouldn’t? You heard about his latest development? His exalted Landell Acres?” Ernie asked snidely. “He put it right smack in the middle of the nesting grounds of Texas’s only native bird.”

  “That’s true,” Malou allowed, “but it was inevitable that someone would build there. The city’s already pushed out to the edge of that area.” Malou couldn’t believe that she was actually defending Cameron Landell.

  “And Landell is pushing it a few steps closer to the edge,” Ernie concluded, slipping into the white lab coat he always wore when he worked. He clucked his tongue against the back of his teeth and headed to the back of the building and his air-conditioned lab.

  Malou shook her head. This had been a thoroughly perplexing and bewildering day, and it had only begun. Though fascinated by the labyrinthine complications of macaque society, she had never been able to deal with the frustrating intricacies of human interaction. Her usual reaction to them was to escape, which is precisely what she did. She grabbed the tennis hat she wore to protect her from the south Texas sun, her notebook, and a jug of water and headed back out to the compound.

  Far down the fence line, she spotted the stocky figure of Jorge Maldonado, Stallings’s Mexican foreman. A lifetime of hard physical labor had left the foreman knotted with muscles and as weathered as the stump of an oak tree. He wore a campesino-style wide-brimmed straw hat with a small ball dangling off the back that jerked up and down as he worked on a tear in the fence. His horse, a beautiful chestnut mare, was tethered nearby.

  Though Jorge’s English was limited, he had managed from Malou’s first day at the ranch to communicate to her his distaste for los monos, the monkeys. He was hewn from the Mexican cowboy vaquero tradition that dictated that the only animal a true man ever had any truck with was the horse. Jorge considered her and her monkeys a galling nuisance. Reluctantly, Malou walked over to him.

  “Buenos días,” she hailed him.

  Jorge turned away from his labor and glared at her. That was the extent of the cordiality she had ever seen Jorge extend to anyone other than Mr. Stallings, to whom the menacing foreman had been slavishly devoted.

  Fishing through her entirely inadequate Spanish vocabulary, Malou tried to communicate that Ernie’s shower was broken. “La ducha de Ernesto, no funciona,” she tried. “Cuándo reparar?” Though she knew she was butchering the language, apparently Jorge understood what she was asking. He began shaking his head in a vigorous negative.

  “No repair. New jefe say no repair.”

  Thank you, Mr. Cameron Landell, Malou thought wearily. From the deep frown furrowing Jorge’s face, it was clear that the foreman had shifted his loyalties to the “new jefe,” the new boss, who now owned Stallings’s property. He turned his thickly muscled back to her. Malou, turning up her palms in resignation to the language and emotional barriers between her and Jorge, went on into the enclosure. Ernie would have to keep using her shower.

  Dozens of crouched monkeys were quiet as they concentrated on foraging enough edible plant matter from the stingy earth to sustain life. With an expertise born of painful practice, they stripped spines from cactus pads and picked the tender shoots out from the middle of saber-sharp yucca plants. For Malou it was a miracle. Few primatologists ten years ago had seriously believed that the 150 monkeys who’d been transplanted from the serenely cool Storm Mountain could survive on a patch of south Texas brushland where summer sun could broil the land with 130-degree heat.

  She tried to imagine what old Kojiwa must have thought when he’d been unloaded ten years ago in his new home. He might have landed on the moon for all the resemblance the desolate landscape bore to the piney mountain refuge where he’d grown up. Where respectful tourists had made the long uphill trudge to the mountaintop feeding station simply to see him and his troopmates silhouetted against the Kyoto skyline and to offer selected tidbits of rice cake, nuts, and pickled vegetable. Where, long ago, the fearless samurai warriors had brought their mistresses so that they too might enjoy the snow-muffled tranquility of Storm Mountain and, if they were lucky enough and patient enough, catch a fleeting glimpse of the “old men of the forest.”

  Then to find himself brutally thrust into a world of heat, dust, and strange predators must have been an incomprehensible ordeal for the old one. Malou had heard the history of the relocation many times. For the first few weeks, the troop had been able to do little more than lie panting in the sparse shade offered by scattered spiked plants. Death had been an ever-present companion in those first terrible weeks. Kojiwa had watched five members of his own family, the Miwata clan, die horrible deaths. Two had died after eating the bright berries of the coyotillo bush. Bobcats, rattlesnakes, and drought claimed the other three as well as a dozen more from the other five families that composed the troop.

  Gradually they’d learned how to get past the stinging spines of the cactus to the surprisingly palat
able pads beneath, and to seek relief from the battering heat in the water of the pond. They not only survived, they thrived. In short, they astonished the doubters with their incredible adaptability.

  Malou’s reverie was interrupted by soft sucking sounds. A new mother, Tulip, who had borne her first infant, Mesquite, several weeks earlier, was already starting to teach the cocoa brown bundle to walk. Placing Mesquite gently on the ground, she backed away, then made sucking sounds to encourage her offspring to try toddling to her. The baby, however, wasn’t able to manage even one step before a cluster of adult females, mostly Mesquite’s aunts, gathered around wanting to hold and play with the infant. At that point Tulip, with the protectiveness characteristic of macaque mothers, rushed forward and snatched her son up, the walking lesson over for the day.

  The chastened monkeys, led by Tulip’s sister, Tawny, backed away for a moment as Tulip hugged the baby to her breast. One by one, though, they cautiously approached their sister and began grooming her. Soon Tulip, exhausted by her vigilance of the past weeks, was lulled into a slumberous state by the feel of Tawny’s expert hands combing softly through her fur. As soon as Tulip’s head lolled onto her shoulder and her lilac eyelids fluttered shut, the other aunts stealthily crept forward, reached out curious hands, and surreptitiously stroked the baby at their sister’s breast.

  Malou jotted down the details of the aunts’ strategy. Any other day she would have been vastly amused by their caginess, but there wasn’t much that could make her smile today. After making her notes, Malou picked up her binoculars again. Far away from the central area where the majority of macaques clustered, she spotted Jezebel.

  Malou adjusted the focus and zeroed in more closely on the new mother to see if she still had her baby, Bambi, with her. Thank God, she did.

  Jezebel had never formed the alliances that other adult females had built among themselves. Instead, she’d always preferred to traipse after the peripheral males, the troop’s outriders. Males other than the troop leader and a few subleaders were only tolerated by the troop until they reached puberty, at around five years of age. After that age, they were banished to the edges of the compound. Here they served as the troop’s early warning system. With no mother to link her into the female’s social structure, Jezebel had gravitated toward the other troop outcasts. Her search for male companionship had earned Jezebel the name given to her by some long-gone resident manager. Now, even with a baby, Jezebel was still tagging along after the lone males who perched in the branches of tall trees far from the heart of the troop they’d been exiled from.

  Along with all the other impossible wishes she had been making since Cameron Landell had pulled off in a cloud of dust, Malou wished that the errant Jezebel were just a bit more like the overprotective mother, Tulip. Jezebel’s baby dangled from her belly by only the scrawniest fistful of fur as Jezebel clambered up a tree in search of a playmate. Malou’s heart stopped when, eight feet off the ground, the weak infant lost its grip and fell to the grassy earth.

  “That’s it,” Malou sighed. She tried to keep all human intervention in the troop to an absolute minimum, but she couldn’t stand by any longer while Jezebel neglected her baby. She was halfway to the fallen baby when she noticed a furred form ambling stiffly in the same direction.

  It was Kojiwa. Jezebel scrambled down the tree, ever eager to interact with her adopted father. Kojiwa picked up the infant and examined it closely, expressing great interest in little Bambi, who stared up at him with the huge dark pools of his eyes. Like a spoiled child who wants only the toy that another child has, Jezebel soon snatched her son away from Kojiwa and began suckling it. The baby fed hungrily. As if he were satisfied that his mission had been accomplished, Kojiwa returned to his spot in the shade and kept up his watch over the troop he had once led.

  That crisis resolved and her energy flagging, Malou went back to the research station. She trudged through the next several days. Unable to sleep well and barely able to eat, she seemed to have already entered a period of mourning for the monkeys that Cameron Landell planned to sell off.

  Only Ernie kept her from complete despair. Oddly, the lower her spirits plunged, the higher Ernie’s rose. He carried on with his experiments, even whistling as he went. Malou figured he must be one of those rare humans who thrived on adversity.

  During the long, sleepless nights, Malou would imagine herself presenting all manner of irresistibly persuasive schemes to Cameron Landell for keeping Los Monos open. These imaginary presentations always had the same conclusion, though—Cameron Landell sneering at her naiveté.

  Even worse than the imagined one-sided debates were the moments when Malou did manage to drift off. Inevitably then the dream would return. She would be staked down in the middle of a barren plain. The day would be overcast, the light diffuse. For no reason that she could discern, Malou could feel her heart pounding with terror. Then suddenly, bursting out of the foggy distance, would come a claret-colored chariot drawn by a white horse the size of a Clydesdale. Strain as she might, Malou could neither break free nor even see who drove the chariot that was thundering toward her.

  It was upon her in a flash. Just as the mighty horse’s hooves seemed poised to trample her to death, they dissolved as if made of snowflakes. Then the rest of the horse and the chariot dissolved and, in the way of dreams, she was no longer staked down on a foggy plain, but was lying, naked and warm, upon a bower of pillows looking into a pair of thickly lashed eyes brown as espresso coffee.

  It was too dark to see the rest of his face, but Malou was no longer straining to do so. She was submitting gladly to the delights being wrought upon her yearning body by heaven-guided hands and tongue. They caressed her in ways beyond her imagining, anticipating what would give her the most sublime pleasure and providing it. It was all so wonderfully weightless, so superbly tantalizing. Malou surrendered her will to the stranger moving over her with such a skilled grace that it was more like a dance than lovemaking. A tireless, always surprising modern dance. That association invariably jolted Malou out of her dream.

  In the troubled moments between sleeping and waking, she realized that her dream lover had been Cameron Landell. Worse than that, she realized that she still hungered for him, for his hands, his lips, to finish what her imagination had started. By the time she was fully awake, Malou could succeed in banishing such despicable thoughts and concentrate again on how truly odious Cameron Landell was.

  It was at the tail end of just such a disturbing dream, five days after her first meeting with the man who had inspired all this psychic turmoil, that Malou dragged herself out of bed shortly after dawn. There was no use in trying to court sleep that would not return. She dressed in a clean pair of khaki shorts and a cream-colored jersey top. As she tiptoed outside, she could hear Ernie snoring away happily down the hall, oblivious to the bad news that was coming soon. News that Landell had found labs eager to buy experimental animals that came complete with nearly four decades of genealogical records. She had expected it to arrive already.

  She hurried outside, anxious to check on Jezebel and the infant, Bambi. With Kojiwa’s constant prodding, Jezebel had assumed enough of her maternal duties to keep her baby alive, but little else. She didn’t spend any time cuddling the child or encouraging it to discover which of the bits of food that fell from her mouth were edible. She didn’t do any of the things that the other mothers did that would help their babies survive and grow into accepted members of the troop. Malou was glad that the infant was a male because, with Jezebel as a mother, any female child she bore would be doomed, as Jezebel herself had been, to a life as an outcast trailing after the peripheral males for company.

  The troop was still sleeping. That was good. Malou scrutinized the sleepers, from the pale pink faces of the infants clutched by their mothers to the scarlet faces of the old-timers. Malou didn’t become alarmed until, on her second visual roll call, she still hadn’t spotted Jezebel but had noticed Kojiwa awake and clearly distracted. He too wa
s searching the troop and having just as little luck as Malou was.

  “You fleabrain,” Malou whispered to herself, convinced that Jezebel must have left the safety of the troop to sleep off at the edge of the enclosure with the peripheral males. Traversing the boundary of the two-hundred-acre compound was no Sunday stroll, but Malou knew she’d have to do it if she wanted to put her mind at rest about Jezebel and her baby.

  She didn’t have far to go before she found Jezebel. Approaching from a distance, Malou wondered what the silly creature was doing lying there in the high grass. And why she was ignoring the pitiful whimperings of her baby huddled next to her.

  A pulse of urgency suddenly beat through Malou. She dropped her field notebook and ran. Her binoculars pounded against her as she ran faster. She reached the fallen monkey and dropped to her knees. Jezebel’s amber eyes were open, staring blankly. Malou fumbled for her wrist and fought to find a pulse beating through the animal’s body. There was none. Malou gently laid poor Jezebel’s paw down upon the earth.

  Bambi snuggled against his mother’s side, trying to rouse her. Malou picked up the baby, cradling him against her. He was a female, Malou could see that clearly now. The newly orphaned baby clung to her soft jersey top, burrowing in its folds for a teat to suckle.

  The infant’s futile, wordless plea for life was what finally undid Malou, what broke through her shock and unraveled the tight skein of control she’d wound within herself. All of it—the sleepless nights, the missed meals, the broken dreams—returned to haunt her, bringing the tears with it.

  With the same feeling of an unreal shift from one scene to another, totally different and unexpected one that had marked her dreams of the past five nights, Malou felt herself being lifted from the ground. Still sheltering Jezebel’s baby in her arms and still sobbing uncontrollably, Malou looked up into a face bare inches from her own. For the first few seconds, all that registered were a pair of espresso brown eyes. They reflected back every fiber of the pain she felt. Stronger at that moment than even her dislike of the man whose arms encircled her was Malou’s overriding need to be comforted. She collapsed her head against Cameron’s shoulder and wept out the grief in her heart.