Trials of the Monkey

by Matthew Chapman

  ‘Attracts.’ Present tense.

  As I read on, however, panic blossoms in the pit of my stomach. The article clearly states that the last performance of the Scopes Trial was on Monday, last Monday, three days ago.

  I read the article again. Apart from the headline, everything is in the past tense!

  As documented in the Desmond/Moore biography Darwin, Charles Darwin, who was either a hypochondriac or permanently damaged by his trip on the Beagle, probably the former, wrote a note to his new doctor in 1865, listing his symptoms:

  ‘For 25 years, extreme spasmodic daily and nightly flatulence, occasional vomiting, on two occasions prolonged during months. Vomiting preceded by shivering, hysterical crying, dying sensations or half-faint, and very copious very pallid urine. Now vomiting and every passage of flatulence preceded by ringing of ears, treading on air, and visions. Focus and black dots, air fatigues, specially risky, brings on the Head symptoms …’

  A trifle compared to how I’m feeling.

  I pay as fast as I can and rush back to my room. I grab my notebook with the tickets pinned inside, and, with churning stomach, head for the bathroom. I sit there and stare in horror at the tickets.

  They were for last weekend.

  I’m a week late!

  The central event of my book lies irretrievably in the past. I missed it, and it won’t happen again for another 360 days!

  I start walking around the room, banging into the Jacuzzi and muttering, ‘How did this happen? How did I make this incredible mistake? What the hell am I going to do?’ I’ve told Tom, my publisher, about the idea of spinning the whole book out from the re-enactment—‘the hub from which all the spokes of the book will radiate’ and all that bullshit—and he liked it. He liked it a lot, in fact.

  ‘Excellent idea,’ he had said. ‘It gives it a centre, gives it unity.’

  Now there’s no centre and no unity and I’m out here floating in a vacuum, incompetent and faint, dots before the eyes, head symptoms, ringing ears. I’ve even got the copious and pallid urine.

  A friend of mine taught parachute jumping in California. In every group there was one arrogant prick who wouldn’t listen to instructions, bragged about his fearlessness, and mocked those more cautious than himself. Sometimes when the time came for this character to make his jump, my friend would say, ‘Okay, jump!’ and then as the man hurled himself from the plane, he’d yell, ‘No, wait!’

  Hopeless though it was, they all tried to get back into the plane, clawing at the air, trying to turn back time. This is how I feel. There must be a way to go back—and yet I know there isn’t. The Beagle has left for the Galapagos, I just tripped out the door without a ’chute, I’m irredeemably ruined. This is a disaster.

  I hurry over to the gas station across the way and buy some cigarettes. Light up. Feel sicker. I don’t smoke. I can’t handle this. I sit down and consider. But what is there to consider? It’s a catastrophe, no way to pretend it isn’t. I know how this happened. When I booked the tickets I was so obsessed by my script—with making money, with staying afloat, with scrabbling for respect and meaning!!!—that I made a rapid and completely erroneous assumption: the real trial ran over two weekends with a week in the middle and I assumed the weekend of the re-enactment would coincide with the date of the last weekend. Instead, just to exacerbate an already severe condition of existential panic, these psychic Baptists chose the first weekend, hoping to tip me over the edge.

  But even this reasoning does not work. Today is Thursday, July 23. The real trial was completely finished by July 22, which was a Tuesday. There is no excuse. A balanced person would have checked the tickets for the play and then booked the flight. I didn’t have time, I just snatched up a phone and …

  Time! This is the problem. I don’t have time to reflect. I don’t have time to reserve airline tickets on the right day. I don’t have time for anything, not even for my own daughter, not even for this book, not even for my own rage. Maybe my brain is being consumed by its own unfulfilled ire—the corruption of politics by money, the Pope’s attitude to contraception, corporate phone systems which prevent you from speaking to a human being, fat little men who sneer at you around their cigars, the barbarity of the death penalty, I could go on—so many peeves large and small locked corrosively inside my brain because I have no time to vent them.

  Late? It’s astonishing I got down here at all.

  I’ll have to lie, it’s the only solution, it’s what I’ve always done.

  Who’ll know if I was here on the wrong weekend? Who’s going to check? I’ll find the woman who directed the play, I’ll get the script, I’ll talk to Sheriff Sneed and ask him how it went; I’ll imagine the play.

  I call Denise. I want to tell her what has happened and then burst into tears. I know she’ll be sympathetic. I don’t tell her. We talk for a few minutes and then I begin to feel nauseous and hang up. If I decide to tell the lie, what am I going to do down here for five days? I lie down and then get up—and trip over the Jacuzzi again.

  If only I believed in God. Here is a moment tailor-made for prayer. I’m on my knees already! My first book, and I’ve screwed it up before writing a single word of it! God help me!

  I get up and again trip over the Jacuzzi. It’s everywhere.

  That’s the problem: it’s none of the above, it’s just there’s too much stuff in my life, too many projects, too much pressure, too much confusion, too many green Jacuzzis!

  Fine! I’ll move rooms. Action of some kind! I’ll finish my script! Clear the decks, get ready for the next storm. I move to a pair of rooms on the other side of the motel—there’s plenty of rooms because no one’s here, they were all here last weekend, enjoying themselves, making sceptical jokes and having atheist sex (silent orgasms, none of that ‘Oh, my God!’ nonsense)—all this while I toiled over my wretched script about New Yorkers tearing each other’s throats out.

  I set up my computer and start to work on the script, thinking if I can just concentrate on one thing for an hour, this panic will subside. But I can’t and it doesn’t. I keep going back to my stupidity, my lack of organisation, the consequences.

  What if I lie about the play and get found out? Clearly no one in Dayton is going to like the book. Suppose someone reads it and busts me. ‘He wasn’t even down here for the show! He’s an atheist and a liar!’ I remember reading about a reporter who wrote a touchingly realistic piece about teenage junkies, won a Pulitzer, and then it was discovered there were no teenage junkies. She’d made it all up. She was ruined.

  I’m ruined. This is the end.

  I lie on the bed and go to sleep. An hour or two later I wake up feeling more optimistic. I’ve been punching myself in the head since I was five. I’ve recovered before, I’ll recover again: a nasty blow, down but not out.

  I decide to go see the editor of the local newspaper. I’ll do some research into the boy who just got killed on the tracks. No getting up off the canvas for him.

  ‘Bizarre,’ says the editor. ‘We are the pedestrians-killed-by-trains capital of America and we don’t understand it. Sometimes it’s suicide, sometimes it’s someone gets stuck on a bridge and tries to outrun the train, and sometimes, like this one, it’s a mystery. Everyone says he was a good boy, didn’t do drugs, honour student, happy at home, no girl trouble. An accident? There’s a massive light on the front of these trains and the horn is deafening. How can it happen?’

  He shakes his head, confounded. The evening of his death, the boy played with his young niece and then stayed up to watch TV while the rest of the family went to bed. A couple of hours later, a train driver saw a figure walking away from him along the track. He hooted his horn—a teenage boy turned and glanced over his shoulder into the bright light, then turned, raised his arms—and took it. Within five seconds he was dead. He had changed his clothes as if to meet someone. That’s all anyone knows.

  He gives me the phone number for Gale Johnson, the director of the play, and of Joe Wilkie, a scienc
e teacher at Dayton High. I think it might be interesting to interview whoever now occupies the Scopes position down here.

  I go back to the hotel and call Sheriff Sneed. I remind him of his offer to let me ride with one of his cops. ‘Sure,’ he says, ‘you come on down any ol’ time you like.’

  I pick Friday night. That should be amusing. Next, I call Kurt Wise. He’s taking a group of Bryan College summer students on a Cave Geology Tour on Saturday afternoon and invites me to come along.

  Spelunking with Christians—who could ask for anything more? Things are looking up.

  Now I call the director of the play, Gale Johnson. Gale agrees to have lunch with me on Friday. She sounds defensive.

  That evening, I dine at the Western Sizzler along the highway on the other side of town. I get talking to two high school girls, Christina and Samantha. Both knew the boy killed on the tracks but not well. Samantha’s father and uncle died by train, the father a suicide. Christina is a Pentecostal and tells me about speaking in tongues.

  ‘You have to open yourself to the Lord, let him come in you, speak through you. I had a friend took all kinds of drugs, liked them, but she said speaking in tongues was the best high she ever had.’

  Samantha, who admits she’s been through a ‘bad’ phase, catches my eye and winks as if to say, ‘Yeah, right.’

  I go back to the hotel and call Denise. I tell her how I’ve managed to miss the re-enactment. She is silent for a moment. I can imagine her in our apartment overlooking the East River, but I cannot quite imagine the expression on her face. Is she concerned, as I am, that I am losing my mind?

  ‘This is incredible, Matthew,’ she says, and I think I can hear her smiling.

  ‘No, it is, it is …’

  ‘As we say in Brazil, it looks like you’ve stepped on the ball here.’ This is a soccer metaphor: a player who steps on the ball, trips, and falls headlong.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘That’s how it looks, doesn’t it?’

  ‘No, it is incredible. How did you do this?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She can hold back no longer. I hear her start to laugh on the other end of the phone. I start to laugh too, and fall in love with her again.

  When we have finished laughing, she says, ‘Well, it’s funny. That’s good. The book should be funny.’

  ‘I’m not sure it should be this funny,’ I say, and she starts to laugh again. She isn’t worried, you see. She has faith.

  I wait until 11:30 to go to the Best Western bar. Half an hour of speed-drinking is all I can take, never mind the addition of potentially lethal moonshine. The bar is more crowded; several rednecks surround Emerson perched around his bar stool. Right next to him is a stocky grey-bearded man slumped forward on the bar, asleep. His arms are folded in front of him and his face rests on the surface. His mouth, which is squashed out sideways, lies in a small puddle of dribble and emits a steady, restful snore audible above the juke.

  Emerson turns toward me with glazed eyes. ‘Ah, tharyare,’ he says. ‘Gotcha moonshine. Me an’ my buddy here,’ he indicates the sleeper, ‘had to go up the mountain.’

  ‘So,’ I say, looking at the comatose man, ‘good stuff?’

  Emerson studies his companion for a moment, considering, then looks back at me with his small, hard eyes.

  ‘It is,’ he says. ‘Course it’s different for me, I’m three hundred pounds, I can take it.’

  He produces a brown paper bag and slips it to me. I look inside. There’s a jam-jar in there about a third full of clear fluid.

  ‘Let me pay you for this,’ I suggest.

  ‘I had to go up the mountain,’ Emerson repeats with a distant expression. ‘Missed a night’s work, but it’s okay, you’re a good guy.’

  I offer again to pay.

  ‘I wouldn’t take your money. Went up the mountain, missed a night’s work, but I wouldn’t take your money, no sir.’

  I buy everyone a drink. One of the rednecks, Mike, the toughest looking of them all, and buzzing with inebriation, asks me what I’m doing in Dayton. I tell him I’m writing a book about the Scopes Trial.

  ‘Shee-it,’ he says. ‘Drink that moonshine.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘No, man,’ he says irritably, as if I should know the etiquette of moonshine consumption, ‘take it to the fucking john.’

  I do. I drink. To my surprise, it’s excellent. I have friends in New York who’ll spend a hundred bucks for a spindly bottle of grappa. This moonshine is better than any grappa I ever drank. It’s smooth and interesting with a faint, leady, car-radiator aftertaste. And it’s strong. I sit down and take another sip. Even before the liquid touches my lips, the fumes rise up my nose and make my eyes water.

  Why am I surprised it’s so good? I remember a junky friend of mine responding to an anti-heroin campaign on TV by saying, ‘Of course, the one thing they don’t tell you is it feels great. Why else would so many people do it? If they’d just acknowledge that one fact up front, they might get somewhere. Instead they give you half the truth and leave you to find the rest out for yourself.’

  I recap the contraband and go back out into the bar.

  The mood is different tonight, a slight hint of violence under the raucous good humour. I keep going off the radar. A man I was talking to a minute ago turns and looks at me in surprise.

  ‘What are you doin’ here?’

  ‘I’m just here. This is where I am.’

  ‘Well let me tell you sumpin. If it crawls on its belly, walks or flies, I’ll shoot the sumbitch.’

  ‘That so?’

  ‘Yeah. Love to hunt.’

  ‘Okay. Good …’

  Mike launches into a long story about a Rottweiler and a man named Fluff—pronounced Flurrff. Fluff had a beard, though I can’t remember why this was relevant, and didn’t believe the dog was as tough as everyone said it was. One night in a bar, he bought it a beer and started tormenting it.

  ‘He kep lookin’ between its legs an’ slappin’ it in the balls. Shee-it! That dawg, as true as I tell ya, that dawg jes kep lookin’ over his shoulder like “Whas this guy doin’?” An’ everyone was tellin’ Flurff to lay offa that dawg, but he jes kep on with “This ain’t no tough dawg” and slappin’ its balls ‘round, an’ all of a sudden, as God is my witness, that dawg turn and done sunk his teeth into Flurff’s leg an’ we couldn’t pull him off. Sumbitch took it over the head with bottles an’ God knows what else … wouldn’t let go. Somebody ran out an’ grab a two by four an’ started whackin’ it over the head. Sheee-it! Flurff? Eighteen stitches in the leg—the Lord knows I’m tellin’ the truth.’

  Everyone shakes their head and laughs. There’s a few moments of nostalgic silence, then: ‘If there’s one thing I’m proud of in my life,’ says Emerson, as the laughter dies down, ‘it’s what I did today. I was pallbearer at a funeral and the grass was so slick I thought we was all gonna go over. I was on the back like a brake.’

  Everyone falls silent. Fluff is forgotten. Emerson stares at his beer. ‘Federal laws,’ he says, sadly. ‘You can’t bury no one on their motorcycle no more.’

  ‘He had a bike?’ someone asks.

  ‘He did not,’ says Emerson.

  No one says anything for a while and then another redneck stumbles over and shows me a straight-edge razor he just bought. It’s old and rusty but still sharp.

  ‘That’s a beautiful straight-edge,’ I say, gauging the distance between myself and the door. There’s no logic in here. Subjects rise up out of nowhere and disappear halfway through. I never heard so many suicide stories. The best is about a man who shot himself under the chin, blew the top of his head off—and lived.

  ‘Now he’s bald on top ’cause they grafted some of his back onto the top thar.’

  ‘That’s amazing,’ I say.

  ‘What’s amazing?’ asks Mike, who was telling the story.

  ‘Well, you know, that he blew the top of his head off and lived.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what
’s amazing,’ says Mike, eyeing me narrowly. ‘That evolution bullshit. That’s what’s amazin’. You don’t believe that evolution bullshit do you?’

  ‘Yes, I do, you hillbilly, redneck moron, and furthermore my great-great-grandfather was Charles Darwin,’ is what I feel like saying. Instead I shift from one foot to the other and in a low, cowardly voice say, ‘Well, you know …’

  ‘You do,’ he says, grinning ominously. ‘You believe that sheeit!’

  ‘Well, there does seem to be some evidence.’

  ‘Yeah? So how come I ain’t never seen no monkeys around here? I ain’t seen no monkeys around here, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  He moves closer.

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘Okay, then let me ask you sumpin else. If we came from monkeys how come there’s hundreds of monkeys in the world an’ you don’t never see no man come outta one of ‘em?’

  How to begin to answer?

  ‘Let me buy you a drink,’ I suggest.

  ‘Bull-sheeeit! Tha’s what evolution is. Bull-sheeit,’ he insists, grinning at me furiously. ‘You believe in that sheeit?’

  Am I going to be forced on my knees to admit to a literal interpretation of the Bible? Is Fluff to be called to work his magic on my testes? I realise that I’m profoundly and strangely drunk. I skid my eyes toward the barmaid, who, mercifully, claps her hands together and says it’s time to close. Everyone deflates. Emerson revives the snoring man. He looks around, bemused. He has a pleasant, flat face with almond eyes that won’t focus.

  I bid a swift goodnight and hurry along the wall back to my room, clutching my jar of moonshine.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Stumped

  Having been ejected from boarding school at the age of fourteen, I moved back home to the mill house. By then my mother’s drinking was persistent and depressing. She still cooked well, but it was accompanied by the frequent hiss of uncorking cider. I began to drink with her on occasion.