T. Boyle - Riven Rock

The morning flew. He’d started off at the White Street house, where they’d installed Mr. McCormick to get him away from the disturbing influence of the other patients, and then he’d gone on to McLean and now he was late, cutting across the lawn out front of the administrative building on a day that was like a wet dishrag, though it was the last week of April and he would have sacrificed to the gods to see a ray of sun — he was late and hurrying and he didn’t give a damn for the fact that he’d left his hat and overcoat back in the nurses common room and the cuffs of his good Donegal tweed trousers were soaking up the damp like a pair of fat swollen sponges tied to his ankles. He should have, because when the tailor came over from Ballyshannon and settled into the rooming house down the street from them and his mother said he should take advantage of the opportunity and have one nice suit made because if he ever hoped to work with his brains instead of his back he’d have to look like one of the quality, he’d laid out eighteen dollars for it. Eighteen dollars in good hard Yankee coin he’d earned at the Boston Lunatic Asylum scraping blood, vomit and worse off the walls. And here it was, wet through in the shoulders and crawling up his shins and sure as the devil it was going to shrink, but what did he care? It was two minutes to eleven, the hair was hanging wet in his eyes and Dr. Hamilton was waiting for him. If things worked out, he could buy six suits.

It wasn’t like him to be late — it was unprofessional, and Dr. Hamilton was a stickler for the “three p‘s,” as he called them: punctuality, propriety and professionalism — and O’Kane, already wrought up, felt like a piece of fat in the fryer as he charged across the wet lawn. He was sweating under the arms and the hair was dangling like rope in his face. It wasn’t like him, but he was behind his time because he’d gotten distracted over at White Street, and then in the back ward, and all because of the apes. Apes and monkeys, that is. They were all he could think about. And it was funny too because this was the kind of day that got the violents stirred up — it wasn’t just the full moon, it was any change in the weather, even from perpetual gloom to a driving downpour — and as he hurried across the lawn he could hear Katzakis the Mad Greek and the one they called the Apron Man hooting at one another from the maximum ward, hooting just like apes. Violents he knew inside and out — he ought to after seven years in the profession — but his experience with hominoids, as Dr. Hamilton called them, was limited. And why wouldn’t it be? South Boston, Danvers and Waverley weren’t exactly tropical jungles.

In fact, aside from the usual boyhood encounters with the organ-grinder’s monkey, the sideshow at the circus, the zoo and that sort of thing, he’d only come within spitting distance of an ape once, and that was in a barroom. He’d gone into Donnelly’s one afternoon for a pint and a chat, and when he looked up from his beer there was a man sitting beside him at the counter with a one-eyed chimpanzee on a leash. For a shot of rye whiskey and a beer chaser the man got the chimp to pull out his organ and piss in a beer glass and then drink it down as if it was the finest eighty-six-proof Irish — and smack his lips to boot. When the man had chased his third shot he gave a look up and down the bar and said he would challenge anybody in the place to arm-wrestle the thing for half a dollar — this scrawny half-bald one-eyed little monkey that stank like all the souls in hell boiled in their own juice and then left out in the sun for a week after that — and there was a lot of elbowing and obscene commentary from the patrons as they worked themselves up to it. Finally, Frank Leary, a big squareheaded loudmouthed bull of a man who worked for the railroad, took him up on it, and the thing pinned Leary’s wrist to the bar in half a second and wouldn’t let go of his hand till there were tears in his eyes.

The experience didn’t exactly qualify O‘Kane as a hominoid expert, as he would have been the first to admit, and he’d spent a painful hour in the library after work yesterday squinting into an encyclopedia in the vain hope of learning something — anything — that might impress Mrs. McCormick. Or, if not impress her, at least keep the level of humiliation down to a minimum if she suddenly took it into her head to grill him on the subject. The library was an alien place to O’Kane, damper than a Chinese laundry and three times as cold, the lighting hominoidally primitive and the illumination offered by the encyclopedia on the subject of apes nearly as dim. “Apes,” he read, “are intelligent animals and are more closely related to man than any other living primates. They are popular zoo and circus animals. They also have figured widely in the legends and folktales of many countries.” After a while he pushed himself up, replaced the book on the shelf and ambled over to Donnelly’s to fix this vast reservoir of knowledge in his brain with the aid of a mnemonic whiskey or two.

And now he was late and his one good suit was crawling up his shins and he was wondering how he was going to break the staggering news to Mrs. McCormick, the Ice Queen herself, that apes were popular zoo and circus animals. But as he reached the verge of the lawn and vaulted the retaining wall there, crossed the flagstone walkway and started up the steps of the ad building, the multifarious marvel of his congested brain surprised him — the apes flew right out of his head and he was thinking about California. Or he wasn’t thinking about it, not exactly — he had a vision, a sudden vivid recollection of a place there, date palms shimmering beneath the golden liquefaction of the sun and orange trees with fruit like swollen buttocks and a little bungalow or whatever they called it snug in the corner — and this was odd, more than odd, since he’d never in his life been west of Springfield. It took him a minute to realize it must have been one of those orange crate labels he was calling up, the ones that make you want to throw down the snow shovel right that minute and catch the next train west. But there it was, real or illusionary— California —hanging in his head in all its exotic glory where the apes had been a moment before.

And then finally, as he stepped through the big beveled-glass doors and into the dim paste-wax-and-coal-dust-smelling hall, he thought of his own Rosaleen, his sorrow and his joy, his sweet, randy, pugnacious, clover-lipped bride of three months and mother of his green-eyed boy, Edward Jr. What was she going to think when he told her they were moving to California for the sake of Mr. Stanley McCormick, late of the McCormick Reaper Works and the International Harvester Company, Mr. McCormick and a troop of apes? And what was her mother going to think and her cauliflower-eared brothers and her quibbling old stump of a father who’d wanted to skin him alive for getting her in trouble in the first place? As if it was all his fault, as if she hadn’t seen her chance and taken it — and hadn’t he done the right thing by her, and wasn’t she at that very moment sitting snug in the walkup on Chestnut Street with her baby and her new curtains and everything else a woman could want?

He passed by Dr. Cowles’s office at a stiff-legged trot, swiping at his hair and wrestling with his tie and trying to contort his shoulders to fit the sodden confines of the suit, and it was all he could do to flick a little wave at Miss Ianucci, Dr. Cowles’s typewriter. Miss lanucci was a spaghetti twister from Italy who couldn’t seem to find a shirtwaist big enough to accommodate her appurtenances and who never ceased touching her lips and crossing and uncrossing her legs whenever O‘Kane got a chance to stop in and chat with her — which was every time he passed by unless he was on his way to a fire. People were always grousing about the immigrants — the I-talians this and the Polacks that, the Guineas and wops and bohunks, and his father was one of the most vocal and vehement, though he’d come over himself in an empty whiskey barrel aboard a transatlantic steamer not thirty years ago — but for his money they could let in all the Miss lanuccis they wanted. And wouldn’t that be a job, standing there at the bottom of the gangplank, and passing judgment on this one or that: Nah, send her back — she’s flat as an ironing board. Her? Yeah, we’ll take her. Come on over here, miss, and step into the examining room a minute won’t you? A man could create an entire race, a whole new breed based on tits alone — or hips or legs or turned-up noses and pinned-back ears. Look what they’d done with dogs….