Michael Bishop - No Enemy But Time

When the complex itself hove into view (a pair of single-story, whitewashed buildings with tile roofs and heavy Spanish beamwork), Hugo swung off the highway into the gravel parking lot. Behind the larger of the two buildings was a bamboo stockade—a fortress projecting into the pines—and behind the stockade loomed a densely forested hill. Despite its being Friday evening, Hugo’s green-gold Dodge Dart was one of only about four cars in the immense parking area.

“You want some papaya juice, don’ you, Johnny?”

“No, sir. Not really.”

“Well, I do. Come on.” Hugo gestured the teenager out of the car with his pipe and led him toward a gangway beside the main building. A huge red arrow on the wall directed father and son to a turnstile, which squeaked as they pushed through. Inside the stockade a metal rack containing peanuts caught Hugo’s eyes, and he dropped a quarter into the coin box and handed John-John one of the small brown paper bags. “You can feed the animals, okay? Maybe cheer you up.”

They strolled between a pair of green metal rails describing a mazelike path through the compound.

Gravel crunched underfoot, and the glassy twitterings of caged birds reverberated in the hush of the evening. Hugo halted John-John briefly before a wire-fronted cage in which a coyote lay, its tail immersed in its own water trough. Elsewhere peacocks strutted, a pair of llamas nibbled hay, rattlesnakes coiled in dirty glass display cases, a burro drowsed, and a slew of half and three-quarter-grown alligators, like the victims of some bizarre massacre, lay sprawled atop one another in a scum-filled concrete basin. Hugo was utterly heedless of the stench, but eventually, to his son’s relief, he tired of the coyote’s listless behavior and ambled away over the gravel to another small green cage.

RHESUS MONKEYS( MUCACA MULATTA )

COMMON TO INDIA

LIKE PEANUTS BUT MAY BITE

Here two monkeys occupied a cramped ledge, one a shy female and the other a male with one leg dangling into space. The male lay prone, the neon-bright callosities of his buttocks exposed. Hugo told John-John to give the female a peanut, but her stare seemed to disconcert the boy, as did the casual posture of her mate, and he yielded the bag to his father.

“What’s the matter?”

“They’re prisoners, Papa. I feel guilty standing here. They’re like furry little people who’ve been put in jail for no good reason at all.”

“It’s no worse for them than the others.”

“It’s worse.”

“Okay, okay, está peor , Johnny.” He chewed his pipe stem, dug in the paper bag. “Maybe a peanut’ll make this little lady feel better, what do you think?”

Hugo extended a peanut through the wire mesh, but the female moved so suddenly to accept it that he was startled and dropped it into the bottom compartment of the cage. Undismayed, the rhesus dropped from the wooden ledge, retrieved the offering, and faced away to crack and eat it. Hugo, laughing, flicked another peanut through the screen.

“Look, Johnny, tiene hambre . She’s hungry.”

The sound of cracking shells aroused the male, who promptly sat up, hiding his bruised-looking derrière beneath him and noncommittally working his muzzle. Balanced on the edge of his perch, he put his small, delicately fashioned hand through the wire—but stared off into another section of the compound, as if too proud to acknowledge to either himself or anyone else that he was begging.

“ Ven aquí,” Hugo urged the loftily uninterested rhesus. “Come get your cacahuate , eh?”

Haughtily the monkey turned his head and looked at Hugo. Attention fully engaged, he reached ever farther toward the Monegals, leaning against the wire so that his hairy shoulder was outlined in the mesh.

His upsettingly human fingers closed on the peanut—then, deliberately, let it fall into the gravel at Hugo’s feet. This disdain for the offering, John-John could see, had struck his father as an insult, one more slight in a chain of slights initiated by Jeannette’s steady progress toward a career independent of the Monegal family unit. How else explain Hugo’s reaction to an event of no objective magnitude whatever?

“What’s the matter with you?” he shouted at the rhesus. “They feed you so good you can turn up your nose at a nice plump peanut?”

He bent to pick up the peanut. Swiftly—so swiftly that John-John scarcely had time to blink—the male rhesus grabbed the bowl of Hugo’s meerschaum pipe and wrenched it from his mouth. Shielding the stolen pipe with his body, the monkey retreated to the back of the cage and, casting guarded glances over his shoulder at the two human beings, proceeded to bang the pipe against the sleeping ledge.

“ ¡Hijo de puta!” Hugo exclaimed, grievously hurt by the creature’s duplicity. He threw himself against the cage and reached through the wire for a handful of reddish-brown rhesus hair.

“Papa! Papa, don’t !”

The male spun about madly, sprang forward in a rage, and drove Hugo back. Mouth wide open, the rhesus displayed a set of glistening yellow fangs and a liver-colored throat. The female shied into a corner, but her mate, growling, clung to the wire mesh and taunted the human beings, who were in embarrassed terror of him. John-John glanced about the compound to see if anyone else had observed the rhesus’s attack and their clumsy withdrawal. No one had.

“Goddamn little gook!” Hugo exclaimed in English, echoing the abusive language of men who have served in remote corners of the world. “Give me back my pipa ! My pipe, you thief!”

Unimpressed, the rhesus disengaged his hands and feet from the wire and leapt back to his plank, where he sat on his haunches chewing the pipe’s briar stem until, audibly, it splintered. Hugo’s favorite pipe, a comfort and a crutch from the days he had manfully struggled to give up cigarettes.

“We’ll tell them inside,” John-John suggested. “We’ll tell the manager what’s happened.”

But Hugo flung the bag of peanuts aside and stalked angrily through the gravel toward the compound’s exit. The boy followed. They passed other cages, other animals, an aviary, a small stable with ponies, and turned a final corner to find themselves facing another sign and a second turnstile.

To leave the stockade, it now became clear, they would have to go through the souvenir-cluttered emporium of the main building. Intimidated, Hugo pushed a dollar through the window of the donations booth, murmured a greeting at the bored woman inside, and shoved John-John through the turnstile and into the gift shop. The sickeningly sweet smells of peanut brittle and pralines assailed them, and Hugo stumbled toward the door like a man who has narrowly survived a mugging. John-John apologetically stumbled after.

The Monegals drove until dark, then found a second-rate motel consisting of ten or twelve separate cabins where they stopped for the night. Hugo left John-John sitting on the bed watching television and returned about twenty minutes later with a pair of barbecued-pork sandwiches wrapped in translucent wax paper. At eleven he made his son turn off the television and go to bed. Then, like a paid hospital orderly, he sat in a cheap, imitation-leather chair opposite the bed, cleaning his fingernails with a penknife in the faint illumination coming through the cabin’s only window.

John-John awoke convinced that the rhesus from Ritki’s was perched on the chest of drawers near the cabin’s bathroom. His father was not in bed with him, and when he hitched himself into a sitting position against the headboard, he saw that somebody, or something, was indeed staring across the room at him.