Matt Ruff - Bad Monkeys

We spent the rest of the ride haggling. A part of me was thinking, this is ridiculous, but in spite of myself I was warming up to the guy, so it was a serious haggle. In the end we settled on twenty-five dollars, plus I promised that if I did decide to run away when the month was up, I’d call him first to give him a chance to talk me out of it. Getting me to agree to that last part, that was a sharp move.

How so?

Well, he’d gotten me to like him, right? As much as I liked any adult at that age. But at the same time, I wasn’t stupid either, I knew in his job he must deal with hundreds of kids, most of them a lot more screwed up than me, so who knew if he’d even remember me in a month. And if I did call him up, and he said “Jane who?”, I knew I wasn’t going to enjoy that. But a deal’s a deal, so the only way for me to not call him was to either not run away, or wait until things got bad enough that I’d feel OK about breaking my word.

So that’s how I ended up at my aunt and uncle’s place. How I ended up staying there.

They lived in Siesta Corta, which is Spanish for “wake me if anything happens.” It was a wide spot on the road between Modesto and Fresno, with everything a truck driver or a migrant fruit-picker could ask for: a gas station, a general store, a diner, a bar, a fleabag motel, and a Holy Roller church. My aunt and uncle ran the general store.

What sort of people were they?

Old. They were my aunt and uncle on my father’s side. My father had been fifteen years older than my mother, and my aunt was his older sister, so to look at her you’d think she was my grandmother. My uncle was even older.

Was it awkward for you, staying with your father’s sister?

Not really. My father was completely out of the picture at this point; he’d cut ties with the rest of his family the same time he walked out on us. And my aunt wasn’t anything like him. She’d been married to my uncle and living in the same house since the end of World War II.

How did they feel about you coming to live with them?

If there’d been some other option, I don’t think they’d have volunteered to let me stay with them as long as I did, but they never complained about it.

So you got along with them?

I didn’t really have a choice. They were the most nonconfrontational people I’d ever met: you couldn’t pick a fight with them if you tried. And it’s not that they didn’t have rules, but their way of getting you to behave was to make it impossible for you not to.

Like my uncle, right, he was the kind of guy who liked to have a glass of whiskey before he went to bed. I thought that was a pretty good idea, so the second night I was there, I snuck into his study after he went to sleep and helped myself. And I didn’t take much, but the thing about guys who drink every day, they know exactly what’s left in the bottle they’re working on, and if the level is off by even a quarter inch, they notice.

Now, if my mom had caught me drinking, especially her stuff? She’d have been in my face about it in two seconds flat. My uncle never said a word—but the next day, I passed by the study and heard drilling inside, and that evening when I went to fix myself another nightcap I found a brand-new lock on the liquor cabinet. A big lock, fist-sized, the kind you can’t pick.

They were like that with every bad thing I did. They never lectured me; they assumed I knew right from wrong, but if I insisted on doing wrong, they found some way to lock out that choice.

One morning my aunt asked me if I’d like to come help out at the store. Normally there’d have been no chance, but I was already so bored that I said OK. At the end of the day she gave me fifty cents, which seemed pretty cheap for eight hours, even if I did spend most of that time flipping through magazines. Next day, same deal. The day after that, I bailed out around noon, and instead of waiting to get paid I swiped a couple dollars from the till. Then that night before bed, I went to put the two bucks into the drawer where I kept my other wages and my Officer Friendly money, and instead of the twenty-six dollars that should have been there, I only found twenty-four. It was obvious what had happened, but I pulled the drawer out anyway and shook it upside-down, just in case the rest of the money had gotten stuck somehow. A single quarter fell out.

Your pay for the half-day you’d just worked?

Right.

Did you say anything to your aunt?

What would I have said? No fair stealing back what I stole from you? Anyway I had to hand it to her, keeping a step ahead of me that way. And no energy wasted on yelling. It seemed, I don’t know, efficient.

But it was also frustrating. If I haven’t made it clear already, there wasn’t a lot for me to do in Siesta Corta, and once you took away the stuff I shouldn’t be doing, life got really dull really fast.

The low point came about ten days in. My aunt and uncle didn’t own a TV—of course they didn’t—but they did have a lot of books in the house, and one day in desperation I started rooting through their library. Now I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. I wasn’t illiterate, and I wasn’t allergic to books the way some people are, but still, on my list of preferred leisure activities, reading anything more demanding than Tiger Beat ranked somewhere down around badminton and pulling taffy. But there I was, on a perfectly good Friday afternoon, curled up in an easy chair with a Nancy Drew mystery in my lap.

I wouldn’t have guessed you’d be a Nancy Drew fan.

I wasn’t, really. I was a Pamela Sue Martin fan. She was the actress who played Nancy Drew on television—had played her, until she got kicked off the show for being a troublemaker. She was one of my role models. On TV she was squeaky-clean, but in real life she had a reputation for being a bad girl who wouldn’t take shit from people. She’d been in Playboy, and done R-rated movies—just that year she’d starred as John Dillinger’s girlfriend in The Lady in Red. So because of Pamela Sue Martin, I had this image of Nancy Drew as a sort of closet bad seed, cooler than she had any right to be.

The book turned out to be strictly G-rated, but I got sucked into the story anyway, and by the time I came up for air, most of the afternoon had gone by. Which freaked me out when I realized, because, you know, sitting in the same spot for hours, barely moving, that’s the kind of thing Phil would do.

You were worried about turning into your brother?

Yeah. I know it sounds comical now, but at the time? That really was a panic-inducing thought for me. So I got up right then, went and got my money, and made a beeline for the highway.

What about your promise to Officer Friendly?

Well, I wasn’t really going to run away. It was more like a test run—kind of a hitchhiking feasibility study. Turned out to be good timing, too, because while I was standing there by the roadside, I spotted something really interesting.

It was a girl, about my age. Mexican, but with a cigarette in her mouth, which marked her as a member of my tribe. She was sitting out next to the diner, along the wall where they kept the dumpsters. She’d gotten a bunch of empty produce crates and built them into a sort of hunter’s blind, and she was hunkered down in there with a pile of green rocks. Then I got closer and saw that the rocks were actually oranges. The girl had a homemade slingshot, and she was using it to fire these unripened oranges out across the road.

At cars?

That would have been cool, but no, across the road, at the gas station on the other side. There was a guy over there, Hispanic like the girl but older, eighteen or nineteen. He was supposed to be minding the pumps, but what he was actually doing was taking a late-afternoon nap. Or trying to; every time he started to nod off, the girl would cut loose with another orange.