Matt Ruff - Bad Monkeys

“Jesus, Phil, are you trying to piss me off?”

He swore he wasn’t, but he kept doing it anyway, and pretty soon I told him to take a hike. Goddamned Phil…Nine times out of ten, you know, talking to him made me feel better, but that tenth time left me wondering why I even bothered. I spent the rest of my break alone at home, sacked out on the couch with a bottle and my post-Ganesh drug stash, watching spy shows on cable.

When I reported back to work, Arlo Dexter was still alive. Eleven a.m. on a weekday morning, Annie and I were watching from the Rose & Cross as he opened up the model-railroad store.

“So is that his shop?”

“He runs it,” Annie said. “But his grandmother holds the lease and pays for the inventory. She covers the rent on his apartment, as well.”

“Generous grandma. Did the organization check her out?”

“Yes. She’s not evil, just lonely.”

“What about employees?”

“He doesn’t have any. Not many customers, either. He’s not what you’d call a people person.”

“So basically the store is just a private playroom for him.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“And what’s our play? We just hang out while Arlo fools with his trains?”

“That depends,” Annie said. “I spoke with True earlier this morning, and he told me that Cost-Benefits is divided on how to proceed. Some members feel that we should continue to watch and wait. Others, including True, think that this is taking too long. They’d like to provoke Dexter into making a move, if we can come up with some way of doing that.”

“You mean if I can come up with some way of doing it, right? Is this my final exam?”

“Do you have any ideas?”

“Yeah, actually…Did your son like model trains?”

Her expression got all brittle again, but then she said: “Model planes. Billy wanted to be a pilot when he grew up.”

“OK, planes, same difference. The point is, you’ve been to a hobby shop.”

“We went every Saturday.”

“And the geeks who ran the place, you remember how they reacted to having a woman in the store?”

She nodded, seeing where I was going. “Yes.”

“Yeah—and those guys probably liked having customers.”

Annie turned back to the window and looked down at Arlo’s shop. “You want me to go in?”

“No,” I said. “Let me mess with him. I’ve got a mood I feel like sharing.”

A taxi sat just up the block from the model-railroad store, its driver working the Daily Jumble and picking at a carton of chicken vindaloo that had come from Catering’s kitchens. If Arlo made a break for it, the taxi would help track him, or, if necessary, run him down. That was the plan, anyway, but there was a wrinkle. As I crossed the street, this black guy approached the cab and tried to hire it, and when the driver belatedly flipped on his off-duty lamp, the black guy took it personally. They were arguing as I slipped inside Arlo’s shop.

The front of the store was packed with shelves and display cases, but the back was given over to a huge train layout, complete with model scenery and a scale-model town. Arlo stood in front of the layout reading a magazine, while toy passenger and freight trains made an endless circuit of the town.

I gave the door a good slam. Arlo jumped and dropped his magazine.

“Hi there!” I said, in a loud and cheery stupid-chick voice. “Do you sell trains here?”

Instead of answering, Arlo just stared, wide-eyed, as if he expected me to whip out a gun and shoot him on the spot. That should have been a hint, but I was way too pleased by his reaction to pick up on it.

“Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to scare you…But can you help me out? I need to get my brother a birthday present…Oh, neat!” On a shelf to my right was a stack of boxed miniature evergreen trees. I grabbed one off the bottom and brought the entire stack tumbling to the floor. “Whoops!” Bending to pick up the trees, I slammed my butt into the opposing shelf, scattering more boxes.

This broke Arlo’s paralysis. He came dashing up the aisle, but stopped short as I straightened up again.

“Sorry,” I repeated, waving my hands at the mess. “Maybe I’d better leave this for you, huh?”

“What do you want?” Arlo said. He had a high voice, and sounded like he might break down crying at any moment.

“Well like I said, I need a birthday present for my brother. I mean, between you and me, he’s been kind of a shit lately, so it’s not like he actually deserves anything, but lucky for him I’m not the type to hold a grudge…Anyway, this last year he’s gotten into the whole toy-train thing, so I wanted to get him some stuff.”

“What kind of trains?”

Reverting to stupid-chick mode: “Oh, you know, the kind with wheels?”

“What scale?”

“Scale?”

“HO? O? N? Z?”

“You see, this is why I had to come to a brick-and-mortar store instead of just buying off the Internet. I have no idea what you just said.”

“The scale of the trains. HO is 1:87. O is—”

“One to eighty-seven what?”

“It’s a size ratio. HO-scale model trains are one eighty-seventh the size of real trains.”

“Oh…Well, I’m not sure. I know the trains he’s got are small, but I’ll be honest, I was never that good with fractions…What scale are those?” I raised my arm to point; Arlo ducked sideways as if my finger were the tip of a spear, which gave me an opening to move past him. I walked up to the train layout. “Yeah, these look about right…” One train was approaching a bridge near the edge of town; I plucked the locomotive from the track, sending half a dozen passenger cars plunging into a river gorge. “Is this HO size?”

Arlo’s cheeks were billowing in and out, and he’d just about bitten his lower lip off. “Sorry,” I said again. “This is the right size, though, I’m almost sure…Do you have any like this?” Unable to speak, Arlo gestured to a nearby display case—and immediately regretted it.

The display case was locked, but by jiggling the glass doors I managed to knock over a couple of the train cars inside. I turned to Arlo: “Could you open this up for—”

“No.”

“I just want to look at—”

“No.”

“OK.” I shrugged, and jabbed a finger at a random locomotive. “What’s that one called?”

“The Burlington-Northern.”

“And that one?”

“The Union Pacific.”

“And that one?”

“The Illinois Central…Listen, I don’t have time to name every—”

“Ooh! What about that one up there?”

“The Southwest Chief.”

“That one’s pretty slick. Does it come in other colors?”

“No, it doesn’t…Now I’m really kind of busy this morning, so if you aren’t sure what you want—”

“What about monkeys?” I said.

“Wh-what?”

“Monkeys.” I smiled at him. “It’s freakish, I know, but when we were kids my brother was a big-time Curious George fan, and he never totally outgrew it. Do you have any trains with monkeys on them?”

“No. I don’t have anything like that. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

“What about a case?”

Arlo bit his lip again.

“You know,” I continued, “like a carrying case? Since my brother got into the hobby, he’s made some…interesting new friends. So I thought he might like a case to carry his trains in, when he goes to visit them. You got anything like that, say about this big? In a nice black, maybe?”

A phone began to ring in the store’s back room. Arlo turned his head towards the sound. “You want to get that?” I asked him. It was obvious he did—at least, he wanted to get the hell away from me—but it was just as obvious he was afraid of what might happen to his toys if he left me alone with them. “It’s OK,” I assured him. “I promise I won’t touch anything while you’re gone.”