An Excerpt from Hit Monkey

I took the Barrett sub-machine gun to the garage, placed it on the truck seat, then covered the body with a sheet of warped plywood and scraps of lumber.  I fastened magnetic signs to the doors that said “U-Kall and I-Hall” and drove away from my home, my former haven against the perils of my past.  I’d killed before but not an American citizen.  It was clear that we’d been the target of an assault by professionally trained forces.   I held it deeply against them.

I opened the cell phone Max had given me and speed-dialed, thinking that cell phones didn’t dial or contain a bell, but we still used those terms.  Language was lagging behind technology.  I remembered the words of my trainer-the warrior needed the heart of a poet.  The true poet, he said, had the heart of a warrior, seeking beauty amid a world of suffering and injustice.  Regardless of victory or defeat, a warrior never knew peace.  He had to find joy in small things-leaves rustling in a breeze, the scarlet clouds of a sunset, mist rising from a waterway.  When a warrior or a poet died, everyone else moved up a notch.

Max answered tersely.

“Plant shop,” he said.

“Flower delivery,” I said.

“Carnations?”

“Redbud,” I said.  “Redbud, redbud.”

I waited while Max digested information he didn’t expect, the kind he hadn’t heard in years.  An emergency call.

“Delivery time?” he said.

“Now.  Back entry.”

I hung up, which is impossible with a cell phone, and drove slowly across town, coming to full stops when necessary, slowing for the yellow lights, aware that many fugitives are busted on routine traffic stops.  An old trick of mine to remain calm and focused was the mental recitation of the poem “In Kentucky,” written in 1902 by James Hilary Mulligan.  I repeated it like a mantra.

Mulligan read the poem aloud at a banquet honoring the Kentucky legislature and the Lexington Leader reported that the poem was very well received with a grand napkin salute.  I’d never heard of a napkin salute, grand or subdued, and I wondered what that entailed as I followed West Fourth to Jefferson, then hung a left onto Sixth, past the apartment complex where it dead-ended.  I cut my lights and circled into the parking area of a closed sports facility.  The nearest light came from a single bulb behind the Hope Center off Loudon.   For the middle of Lexington, it was dark as a cow’s insides.

I stared at the dark and gloomy grounds of Eastern State Hospital.  The place was the second oldest mental health hospital in the country, built in 1817, and welcoming its first patient to the “The Lunatic Asylum” five years later.   They changed its official name twelve times, but kept the entrance on Fourth Street.  When I was a kid, any outrageous stunt that my buddies and I carried out-rigging a bicycle jump ramp over a bonfire or lighting a firecracker in our mouths-was swiftly admonished with the ubiquitous adult threat:  “Keep that up and they’ll send you to Fourth Street.”  In high school we used to cruise by the grounds hoping for a glimpse of a genuine lunatic but all we saw were sad people staring into space.  The hospital grounds held thousands of unmarked graves and Max had deemed it the ideal place to dispose of corpses.  It was perfect, he said, what’s a few more bones to a stew?

I called my son Bobby and left a message to stay away from the house, there’d been some trouble and it wasn’t safe.   As kids, my brother and I used to fight over who would answer the phone, believing it to be a kind of honor.  He was three years older and usually won.  We never let our sister answer.   She died in a car wreck at age fifteen.  My brother disappeared the next day, and the family never saw him again.  I went to Max’s house and stayed there until the funeral.

Car lights flashed twice then doused and Max parked his Caddy beside my truck.  He emerged wearing a tuxedo, hair tightly pomaded in place, his face shut down around itself like a bunker made of flesh.

“Nice outfit,” I said.

“How many?”

“One guy,” I said.

“I’m too old for the old days.”

“Look at it this way,” I said, “guy in the back won’t ever say that.”

I filled him in quickly, emphasizing his wife’s unexpected arrival and what I’d learned about the monkey.  His grim anger took an extra focus when I told him about the assault team.   I dropped the truck’s gate and showed Max the dead man’s face.

“Never seen him,” Max said.  “Looks like a Fed.”

“It’s the haircut,” I said.  “And the baby face.  But I think he’s military.”

“You got the snippers?”

I handed him a pair of metal shears.  He calmly cut the fingertips off the guy’s hands and dropped the stubs in a mason jar of lye.  Over the years, we’d learned to abide with each other’s preferred roles.  He trusted me with everything but liked to personally render his enemies unidentifiable.  He worked quickly, experience having informed him exactly where to separate the fragile bones with little effort.  When he finished, I shut the jar and retied the plastic around the body.  We pulled it off the truck and positioned the head directly behind the front tire.  Max got in the cab.  He shifted to reverse, rolled backwards over the head, shifted to first and drove forward.  He did this three times then joined me.  Bone and matter protruded through the plastic.

Carrying deadweight is difficult, but we managed, Max holding the lighter end of legs and feet.  I draped as much of the torso over my shoulder as possible, and hoped bodily fluids wouldn’t leak down my back.  The moon was on the wane and stars were scattered overhead like distant crystals dumped from a sack.  We used a line of windbreak trees as cover, pushed through some scrubby brush and crossed the gravel railroad bed, the greasy rails gleaming in the dim light.  We reached the hospital’s fence and dropped our load.  I went back to the truck for shovels, a bolt cutter, a manual sod cutter, two bottles of water, and a bag of empty beer cans, remembering that each time I’d performed this dismal chore, I’d hoped it would be the last and how the nature of that kind of hope was never good.  The last drink.  The last cigarette.  The last corpse.

I cut the fence as Max leaned against a post, contemplating the sad state of his dress shoes.

“Twelve-hundred fucking bucks,” he said.

“You know they started making PF Flyers again?”

“Yeah, but not in half sizes.  Cheap bastards.”

“What’d I drag you of out of?” I said.

“My wife’s idea of upward mobility.  She’s on more boards than a sawmill.  I forgot what this thing was tonight.  Same bunch of fat heads saying the same shit.  You know there’s no sincerity in the world any more.”

“A sincere lack, I’d say.”

“You’re in rare form,” Max said.  “But I forgot, you always get this way.”

I finished opening the fence, and strewed the empty beer cans around like pollen.   Hospital security would find the hole eventually, but they’d figure it was teenagers and stitch the fence back together.

“Listen, Big,” Max said, “no more deliveries here.  The loony bin is moving.  The university is taking all this over.  Politicians did a land swap.”

“Where’d they do that, flea market at the Civic Center?”

“Frankfort.  Point is, they can’t do nothing till they dig up all the graves.  Put them on ice and identify them.  Next of kin.  All that shit.  They got a fucking Cemetery Club.”

“Get your wife on the board.”

“I remember now,” he said.  “Tonight was the Pyramid Society.”

“Mummies.  They last forever.  You know I met a girl the other day-”

“You met a girl?  Holy shit.  You ain’t had pussy since pussy had you.”

“It wasn’t like that.  She told me dead people took years to rot because of food preservatives.”

“What is she?  A mortician?”

“Grab the feet.”

We maneuvered the body through the gap in the fence and entered the eerie grounds of the hospital.  Weeds and fescue flourished.  We stood on thousands of unmarked graves as if the planet was nothing but a vast cemetery.  Nothing moved or made a sound.  The land was still.  Ghosts didn’t haunt these grounds, Max and I did.

We found a suitable spot dip in the earth, a natural sinkhole made by the water table.  I used the sod cutter to peel away twelve-inch swaths of grass.  Max spread his handkerchief on the ground, a futile effort since it only protected a fragment of one buttock when he sat.

“Let me get this straight,” he said.  “You got a scientist, two kids, and that damn monkey living with you.”

“Not exactly with me, but yeah.  They’re there.”

“Why didn’t you kill the monkey at your house?”

“Same reason you didn’t.  Too messy.  Draws the law.”

“So will a gunfight.”

“I can’t stay there for a while.”

“I know, Big.  Hurry up while I think.”

I set aside the sod cutter and started digging.  The soft earth came up easily and I worked fast, concentrating on the effort as an antidote to my circumstances. Despite not getting along with Bobby, I was shattered by loss when he moved out.  It wasn’t his leaving so much as something deeper-the end of my day-to-day necessity as a father.  One day I had a heart attack, no other explanation for the constriction in my chest, the gasping for air, the sudden outbreak of sweat and fatigue.  I drove to the Emergency Room where they rushed me straight to the head of the line, past a drug overdose, two stabbings, and a snakebite victim who suddenly ran out of the hospital.  Young cheerful people put me on a gurney and fastened five electrodes to my chest.  Another guy inserted wires into the electrodes and ran a feed to an EKG machine.  They ferried to me Radiology for a chest X-ray.  Within thirty minutes I was told there was nothing wrong with me, that in fact I had a slightly smaller heart than normal, which was very good.  A doctor informed me that the symptoms of a panic attack and a heart attack were extremely similar.  He said I should see a doctor for medication, maybe a psychologist.  They released me with the electrodes stuck to my chest like targets surrounding my little heart.

I left the hospital wrapped in a shame so toxic I wondered if it left a poison trail.  What bothered me most was the size of my heart.  Smaller than normal.  Maybe that’s why my wife died and my son wore a dress and I could calmly dig a shallow grave for a man I’d shot to death.

I cut the rope and unrolled the body.  Max and I stripped it of clothes and nudged it in the hole.  The head was wrecked beyond a dentist’s best work.  Max  shoveled dirt while I rested.  Every so often he tamped the dirt down by walking around in it, leaving prints from his tiny feet.  I joined Max, my big boots working overtime, and we danced a jig on the grave.  More dirt, more jigs, until most of the earth had been returned.  I carefully unrolled the sod and began fitting it into the slot of earth.

“If I die before you,” Max said, “there’s something I want you to take care of.”

“Talk to your lawyer and your wife.”

“I tried.  They wouldn’t listen.”

“I won’t either,” I said.

“I want to be buried in Israel.”

I stopped working.  “You telling me you’re Jewish?”

“No,” he said.  “But Jerusalem’s got a high rate of resurrection and I like my odds.”

“Always figuring angles.”

I pressed the sod carefully along the edge of the actual grass, then poured water along the edges, scooped the remaining dirt and scattered it about.  We carried the bloody plastic and the tools to the truck.  Max went to his car and returned with a flask, offered me a drink, which I refused.

“What I don’t understand,” he said, “is how you just quit things.”

“Not that hard.  Just the first three days mostly.”

“My wife says I’m drinking more.  I told her so was she.  She laughed and opened a bottle of that fucking white wine she favors.  I said what’s the point of sending a boy to do a man’s job, and got the bourbon.”

“Ever drink an Old Fashioned?” I said.

“I don’t know, probably.”

“It was invented over in Louisville.”

“Fuck Louisville,” he said.

“Fuck you, Max.  Next time kill your own monkey.  This is pretty much a mess.”

“If it ain’t, it sure missed a good chance to be one.”

We sat silently for a minute.  I don’t believe in nostalgia but briefly I felt good sitting with my oldest friend contemplating the next move after the final stage of decirculating an enemy.  The Milky Way turned the sky gray in patches.  Max’s lower lip was drawn tight to his teeth and I knew the machinery of his brain was ready to unleash itself.

“They want the monkey,” he said.  “Fine, we ransom it back.  I’ll set up the details.  You take the monkey and go to a house I got in the country.  It’s owned by someone who doesn’t exist.  Wait for my call.  Bring the monkey in.  We make the exchange.  Half the cut’s yours.”

“Where’s the house?”

“Up by Sadieville.”

“In town’s no good.”

“Six miles out,” he said.

“How secure?”

“Dirt road in, dirt road out.  No neighbors for three miles any direction.  It’s a good place to hide.  Food.  Electric. Water.”

“Cell phones work out there?”

“In places, yes.  You have to find them.”

“How many rooms?” I said.

“You planning on taking that whole crew?”

“Can’t trust them if I don’t.”

“Plenty of room here.”  He waved his hand to indicate our secret cemetery.  “They’ll mix right in.”

“No,” I said.  “They’re not against us.”

“You getting soft?”

“I’m not the one wearing a tux.  What’s the Pyramid Club?”

“Horse people.”

“We better go.”

Max wrote down the directions to the safe house.  He gave me a front door key from his wallet and told me the combination to a gate lock.  He took a final swig and got out of the truck.  Before closing the door, he leaned back in, his clothes and face dirty, his breath coming in harsh little gasps, his eyes hard as hammers.

“Watch your topknot,” he said.

“Watch your own.”

He ambled to his Caddy and drove away.  I waited till he was out of sight, then headed for an industrial park where I threw the bloody plastic in a dumpster.  The clothing I left in another dumpster in another area, and dropped the jar through the grate of a sewer.  I took the truck through a 24-hour drive-through car wash, then ran through it again.  Finally, I drove to my neighborhood, parked four blocks away and slipped through the darkness.  I saw three cats, a raccoon, and a nighttime jogger.  My house seemed safe enough.

I retrieved my truck, parked in the garage and moved through my home like a burglar until certain the ground floor was secure and empty.  I knew the staircase, each tread that creaked, and worked my way up carefully, using the handrail to hold my weight.  Dread and Baldy slept.  The monkey stared at me.  I nodded once and moved to my own room where I found Shawnelle sleeping in my bed.  No female had slept there other than my wife.  I stared at her form humped beneath the old quilt, and didn’t know what to do.  I had no couch and my bathtub was too small.  I wasn’t up to sleeping in the back of my truck.

It was 3:30 a.m.  I set my watch alarm for 4:30 and lay in the hall between the two rooms, sidearm at my side.  I thought of all the poor sad sons-of-bitches incarcerated at Eastern State where they used handcuffs, straitjackets and electroshock therapy.  Conditions were so unsanitary that thousands of patients died from diarrhea and dysentery, then were buried in unmarked graves.  I wondered how many had been admitted for nothing more than a panic attack.