Monkey Island

by Paula Fox

  Clay’s mother was put on an earlier shift for a week, so Mr. Garrity and Clay were alone in the kitchen in the evening. At first Clay felt relieved by a kind of calm silence between them as they both went about fixing their supper. But when his father didn’t say a word while they were eating their hamburgers and baked potatoes, Clay made up a story about a lost dog following him home, because he wanted to hear a voice, even if it was just his own.

  His father kept his head bowed over his plate. Was he listening? At last Clay said, “Daddy? Could you say something?”

  His father stood up so quickly his chair fell to the floor with a bang. He came quickly to Clay’s side and crouched down and put his arms around him tightly. Clay could barely breathe. “I’m sorry,” his father said over and over again.

  Later, when he leaned down to kiss Clay goodnight before turning off the light on the table next to the bed, he took a five dollar bill from his jacket pocket and tucked it under the pillow. “That’s for you to buy something nice tomorrow,” he said. “Maybe that ring puzzle you liked that we saw yesterday in the stationery store.”

  Stationery store. Those were the last words he heard from his father. He was gone the next morning, and he didn’t come back.

  People came to the apartment—a colleague of his father’s from the magazine that had folded; Maggie, his mother’s rich friend; their next-door neighbors, a couple whom they hadn’t seen much of since his father had lost his job; and finally the man from Missing Persons, who came twice.

  His mother continued to go to work at night. She had to, she told Clay. You can’t live in a place like this without money, she said.

  She gave a key to the neighbor woman to look in on him during the night. Clay wondered if it was his father’s key. Most mornings she managed to get home in time to make him breakfast. In school, he thought of her sleeping in the broad daylight while the cars honked on the street below their windows.

  There was no word from his father. “Is he dead?” Clay asked one evening.

  “I think he’s looking for work,” his mother said. “I’m sure he’s going to find a job so he can take care of us and … the new baby.” She glanced at him. “You don’t look surprised,” she said.

  “I heard you one night,” he said. “I heard about the baby.”

  She looked away from him, her hands gripped in her lap. “I’m sorry you heard about it that way,” she said.

  Not more than a few weeks after that conversation, his mother had to stop work. The doctor said she might lose the baby if she kept on the way she was going, working too hard and not getting enough sleep. During the days she went out, “to get help,” she told Clay. That’s when he first heard about Social Services and aid for dependent mothers and minors. He was a minor because of his age.

  He thought of himself as another kind of miner, one who went deep into dark, airless passages beneath mountains, searching for something.

  Now he kept moving during daylight. He didn’t think about much except making himself invisible so that the security guard, the teenagers who hung out in the corridors and stairwell, and the people who gathered in clumps in the lobby during the afternoons and evenings wouldn’t notice him at all.

  On the fifth night that his mother didn’t return, he had just gotten the knot undone on Mrs. Larkin’s plastic bag when she suddenly opened the door. He gasped.

  “Take it easy,” Mrs. Larkin said. Clay glimpsed Jacob sitting on a bed, watching the screen of a small television set with the sound turned off, his feet turned out like a duck’s feet.

  “What’s going on here?” Mrs. Larkin asked. She reached out and grabbed Clay’s hand. “Where’s your mother?”

  He couldn’t answer. His throat had closed up.

  “I wondered who’d been going through my garbage,” she was saying. He realized from her voice that she wasn’t going to be angry.

  “She went away to look for my father,” he managed to say, but his words ran together and he wasn’t sure, from watching her face, that she’d understood him. She was still holding his hand, but her grip loosened. He could have pulled away. For the moment, he didn’t want to.

  “Come on in,” she said. “I’m going to give you a bit of supper, late as it is, and you’re going to tell me what’s up.”

  Jacob slowly turned his head to look at Clay. He was a grown-up man, but Clay knew that his body and head were only a costume. He didn’t see or hear too well. He often moaned like a seal. But he could smile, and he smiled now at Clay and waved at him with one of his big lumpy hands that was like a work glove full of sand.

  “That’s right, Jacob,” Mrs. Larkin said. “Wave to him so’s he’ll know he’s welcome.”

  There was a real stove in the room, although it was very small, like a toy stove, and Mrs. Larkin towered over it. Soon she had filled a bowl with pea soup and put it on a little table, along with a spoon and two pieces of dark bread covered with margarine. She took a chair to the table and said to Clay, “Go to it.”

  As he looked at the food, Clay was afraid he might shout with the hunger he suddenly felt and that had been, somehow, postponed until this very minute. He ate everything. When he’d finished, he looked up to see that Jacob had fallen over on his side and was moaning. Mrs. Larkin took hold of his shoulders and set him upright as though he was a big doll.

  She turned to Clay. “Tell me,” she said.

  “She didn’t come back,” he said.

  “Since when?”

  “Five days,” he answered.

  “You’ve been alone all this time?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Did you go to school every day?”

  He shook his head.

  Mrs. Larkin gripped her hands together.

  “Clay, I think we have to do something about this. You know, your mother’s going to have a baby. She shouldn’t be out there … wandering the streets.”

  A shaft of fear went through him. Like his hunger, the fear had been postponed until now. The two people he knew best in the world, who knew him best, were gone, hidden somewhere in the vast city.

  He guessed Mrs. Larkin would get hold of someone like Miss You-can’t-fool-me, and she would ask him questions he couldn’t answer. Or worse, a policeman would take him to an unknown place, and when his mother came back, he’d be gone. Then all three of them would be lost to one another.

  “She’ll be back,” he said in a whisper.

  “In the morning, I’ll make some phone calls,” Mrs. Larkin said. She was staring hard at him and she must have seen the fear he felt. “There have to be phone calls,” she said, and reached out to pat his shoulder.

  “She’s gone away before,” he said quickly. “And I’ve got food. I just didn’t eat it because … there was a lost dog in the stairwell and I gave it to him.” That dog again, he thought, remembering the story he’d made up to tell his father. His alibi dog.

  Mrs. Larkin went to adjust a pillow behind Jacob’s back, and he suddenly flung his arms around her and hid his face in her neck.

  “There, there …” she said absently, stroking his thin, stiff hair.

  After a moment, she turned back to Clay. “You’ll have to be alone tonight,” she said. “Unless you’d like to bring in a blanket and sleep on the floor? You’re welcome to do that, but Jacob makes a fearsome amount of noise at night and it would keep you awake.” She looked at Clay silently. Then, as though she’d made up her mind, she said firmly, “No, I won’t wait till morning. I ought to do it now. You could watch Jacob for me, and I’ll go down to the lobby and call the police to tell them your mama is missing.”

  “She isn’t missing,” Clay protested. Why had he been so stupid as to tell her about the five days?

  “Yes, I’ll do that,” Mrs. Larkin said. “It might take a while if there’s a lot of people lined up for the phone. But it’s late, so maybe there won’t be. It’s awful you’ve been by yourself with all the trash doing their nasty things all over this place.”

&nb
sp; “All right, I’ll watch Jacob,” Clay said, feeling his breath coming fast. “But I’d like to get a book I’m reading from my room. I’ll come right back.”

  “Okay, Clay,” she said.

  He could see she believed him and he felt bad about what he was going to do, almost as bad as he felt about the fear and uncertainty of it.

  He went next door to the room. On the rack, next to the white blouse and blue skirt his mother wore when she had to go to agencies and sign papers so they could get help, was his beige corduroy jacket. He had never worn it around the hotel, because someone would have taken it from him. Next to the jacket, hanging by a loop on a hanger, was his old down jacket. He could hardly get into it anymore, it was so tight, and he decided to leave it there. In one of the two suitcases where he kept his clothes, he found a cotton shirt and a necktie he hadn’t worn since the Christmas program at school last December. That was before his father had lost his job, before everything had happened. He put on the shirt hurriedly but dropped the tie back in the suitcase. Then he remembered the twenty-eight dollars and the three quarters, and he stuffed the money in a pocket of the jacket.

  He heard footsteps in the corridor and he peeked out the door and saw Mrs. Larkin leading Jacob toward the bathroom, both of them looking down at Jacob’s slow-moving feet. Clay glanced around the room. You could hardly tell anyone had been living in it except for the two suitcases, a box of books, the few clothes on the rack, and his mother’s rumpled coat on his cot.

  He made sure his key was pinned to the inside of his pants pocket before he opened the door. He could have taken the elevator, which was in the opposite direction from the bathroom, but even in the daytime he and his mother seldom used it. “A poison box,” she had called it. You could get caught in it with someone who might do something terrible to you. Sometimes the elevator stopped between floors, and you’d have to stay there an hour until it was fixed, reading all the things people had written on the four walls, even on the ceiling.

  He went to the stairs and looked down. He didn’t like them, although you had a chance to escape, which you didn’t have if you were in the elevator. Often there were big kids leaning against the railings smoking dope. But as he made his way down cautiously to the lobby, he passed only one old woman carrying a greasy bag from the fast-food ribs-and-chicken place down the street. She didn’t look at him.

  There were some people standing near the elevator in the lobby, yelling and laughing loudly, and at least seven people lined up at the wall phone. Mrs. Larkin would have a wait if she decided to leave Jacob alone and call the police. But, Clay thought, she probably wouldn’t.

  He walked straight out the door. When he was well away from the hotel, he jammed his hands in his pockets. It was a lot colder than he’d expected.

  2 Outside

  Clay shivered and looked straight up. Suspended above the buildings, in which people lived and worked was a luminous yellow glow as if the city was a banked fire. Above that was the huge black sky that covered everything. The neon signs of closed stores cast out fishing lines of light onto the shadowed street. In restaurants, he glimpsed a few late diners, most of them alone at their tables. In little grocery stores that stayed open all night, he saw people clutching plastic bags of fruit or cartons of milk, silently handing money to clerks.

  He kept close to the buildings, watching out for a policeman who might stop to ask him what he was doing out alone so late. A clock in the window of a jewelry store showed the hour: 11:50. People walked swiftly, as though they were hastening home before something happened. Across the street, he glimpsed a group of tall boys in baseball caps and billowing nylon jackets. They weren’t hurrying. They were shouting words, always the same four or five, as if they knew no other language to hurl in insult at the sky, at cars, at windows behind which, at those sounds, sleepers would be yanked from sleep just as Clay had been in the middle of the night in the hotel. That was when raging voices penetrated the walls with those same words that said, This is what human beings do on toilets and together in their beds. It was a great howling that kept Clay and his mother awake until it mumbled away into silence. He went quickly to the corner and turned to the left.

  A car alarm shrieked somewhere ahead of him. His father had once remarked that car alarms told car thieves which were the best cars to steal. His mother had laughed. He pictured his mother laughing—her head would go back, her eyes would squeeze tight. Her laugh had been merry and slightly hoarse.

  “Where you going?” demanded a voice.

  An old man with a blue cloth tied around his head was looking down at him, one of his hands gripping a small shopping cart full of sacks.

  “To get aspirin for my mother,” Clay said.

  “Yeah. They’re not going to sell you no aspirin. They’re not going to sell you nothing. Get on home.”

  Clay ran to the end of the block and turned another corner to find himself on a broad avenue. At that moment, the lights on the marquee of a movie theater went out. A public telephone booth stood near the entrance. He felt the quarters in his pocket. Who could he call? He stood near the booth and watched as a man drew an iron gate in front of the lobby of the theater and locked it. The man suddenly coughed violently, took a large handkerchief from his inside jacket pocket, and covered his face with it as he walked away. Could he see through the handkerchief? Clay wondered. He looked at the telephone.

  His father’s mother lived in Salem, Oregon. His father had told Clay about her. She hadn’t spoken to Lawrence Garrity since he’d told her he was marrying Angela Vecchia. “Italian,” she’d said. “You’ve ended our family line, pure English until this! I’ll have nothing more to say to you. And if you have children, I’ll have even less to say to them.”

  What was less than nothing? His mother’s parents were dead. There were some cousins in Florida, but he didn’t know whether they were his mother’s or his father’s. The Garritys were a very small family, just three people.

  He went on until he came to a house that stood between two tall buildings. It had a little stoop, and he went up the stairs and sat down on the marble threshold inside the doorway. He imagined calling his grandmother in Oregon and saying, “I’m half Italian. Would you tell the other half what to do?” He almost smiled.

  It was so late; yet the longest part of the night was still ahead. He wasn’t too cold, but he knew he would be later on. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the portal.

  He didn’t know how long he’d slept. But he knew what had waked him, thumps from inside the house. It had grown colder, and he shivered constantly as he bent his head toward the door. Someone was descending stairs. He got to his feet, took two steps at a time, and hit the sidewalk running. He didn’t look back to see who it was who had come out.

  He walked on. The part of the city he had come to was much darker than the area where the hotel was. He saw what he thought were warehouses. There were empty buildings, old tenements with their windows boarded up and a few narrow old houses, their stoops collapsed in heaps in front of them, their windows filled in with cement blocks. A dog emerged from an alley, whined as it looked at him, then backed away and fled down the street. Perhaps it was his imaginary dog.

  He came to an opening in a long railing. There were steps leading down to an alley that was lined with dented garbage cans. He stayed there a few minutes, perhaps longer, gripping the railing as he half dozed. A cat’s mewling might have been part of a dream. An ambulance siren snapped him fully awake. He rubbed his eyes as it tore by, its lights flashing, its siren wailing like a crazy person in a well.

  Clay wandered on, crossing streets, turning corners, his legs aching. When he asked himself where he was going, he shut his eyes very hard for a moment, and then walked faster.

  At some point, he had to pee. He found an alley where the air smelled dead and close like very old garbage. Standing there, hidden from the street, trying to breathe shallowly, he had what was almost a vision, or a kind of mist of memory, of bein
g lifted up by his father in the dark warmth of a room, of being carried to the bathroom, where a tiny night-light in a floor socket gave off an amber glow, and his father murmuring, “That’s good, my sweetheart. You can sleep right through now.”

  He felt his jaw clamping and he shook his head. He mustn’t remember anything for a while.

  In the few cars that sped past, he could see huddled indistinct figures. At the end of a long block, a tall man stood beneath a streetlight, gesturing and shouting to himself.

  Then he saw directly ahead a small triangular park like an island in a stream. There were trees, a few with mustard-colored leaves that looked dead in the light of a street lamp. Hedges grew along an iron railing on the farther side. It was a shadowed place with patches of blackness. Leaves covered most of the paths, and an overflowing trash basket stood at the entrance.

  He crossed a street and waited a moment as he heard a very faint murmur—there, and not there—whispers fading into nothing. Now he could see that the black patches were cardboard boxes and heaps of bundles and that there were many long pieces of cardboard lying about on the ground and beneath benches.

  There were people in the park. On a nearby bench, an old woman lay doubled over, apparently asleep, black plastic bags gathered around her on the bench and on the ground, like big black stones. On another bench across from her, a young man was lying, his head half off the edge, one bare foot sticking out, a shoe on the ground just beneath it. Deeper into the park, he now made out other bodies, some upright, some lying down. This could be a place where he might sleep too. He could drag a piece of cardboard under a hedge.

  He found a long piece, but the branches of the hedge were too close to the ground and too scratchy for him to burrow under. A few feet away stood a van he hadn’t noticed until then. He could see it was the kind that had a side opening, although it was closed down. The van was parked between two paths, on a patch of dead grass. The odd thing about it was that the tires had been removed, and it stood on thin wheel rims.