T. Boyle - Riven Rock

“But he can’t have gone far — and he’s got almost ninety acres of his own to run around on… but I was just concerned, if, well, there’s any possibility of what we discussed before, if he might try to—”

“You idiot,” the doctor shouted, and there was no vestige of control left in him, “you unutterable moron. What do you think? Why do you suppose we keep him locked up? He could be lying dead under any one of these damned bushes even now, and here we are standing around jawing about it. Action, that’s what we need, not a bunch of lame-brained questions and what-ifs. We’ve got to. got to—” and then he broke off abruptly and darted away in the direction of the garage.

Night fell, and still no sign of Mr. McCormick. On regaining his senses, Hamilton decided against involving the police for fear of possible repercussions, but all the neighbors within a one-mile radius were warned and all available men, including the Dimuccis, were called out to help with the search. The number of flashlights was limited — two from the house and one from Roscoe’s trove in the garage — and the laborers went poking through the brush with lanterns and torches held aloft, despite the risk of fire. Roscoe had gone for Nick and Pat and they joined the search too, but O‘Kane, smarting from the way Hamilton had assailed him and still carrying a lingering grudge against Nick, went off on his own with one of the flashlights.

It was the dry season, the tall grass of the fields parched till it turned from gold to white, the frogs thick along the two creeks that merged on the property, clamorous in their numbers, filling the darkness with the liquid pulse of their froggy loves and wars. O‘Kane followed Hot Springs Creek south to where it joined with Cold Stream and then traced that back north along the Indian ceremonial grounds the estate had swallowed up, thinking that Mr. McCormick might have been attracted to the water or the thick growth of reeds and scrub oak that shadowed the banks — he could have crouched there for a week and no one would have found him, and certainly not in the dark. The beam of the flashlight — a gadget O’Kane had never even seen till he came to Riven Rock — picked out the odd branch or boulder, flattening it to two-dimensionality as though it were pasted to the wall of darkness, and O‘Kane stumbled among the rocks of the streambed, blinded by the light. He kept his balance the first few times, but then a rock skittered out from under his feet and he pitched forward into the waterborne rubble, cradling the flashlight to his chest and skinning both knees in the process. He lay there recumbent a moment, thinking of rattlesnakes, evil-eyed and explosive, and gave up the streambed for the cultivated paths.

He saw the flickering lights in the distance, heard the occasional shout — in English and Italian both — but he ignored them. Searching alone, weary now, tired of the whole business, he made his way back toward the main house, skirting the lawns and plodding mechanically through the Clover Garden, past the hothouses and the looming blocky rear wall of the garage till he was close enough to the apes to smell them. The hominoids, that is — the monkeys and baboons that were unlucky enough to provide the grist for Hamilton’s theoretical mill. O‘Kane had observed enough of the doctor’s experiments by now to form an opinion, and his opinion was that they were bunk. Aside from running the monkeys through the big wooden box with the gates in it, all Hamilton and his seedy-looking assistants seemed to do was make the monkeys fuck one another — or anything else that came to hand. Once, O’Kane had seen the wop lead a stray dog into the communal cage, and sure enough, the monkeys came chittering down from their perches and one after another fucked the dog. They threw a coyote into the cage. The monkeys fucked that. They tossed an eight-foot-long bull-snake into the cage. The monkeys fucked it and then killed it and ate it. As far as O‘Kane could see, the only thing Hamilton had established was that a monkey will fuck anything, and how that was supposed to be applied to Mr. McCormick and all the rest of the suffering schizophrenics of the world, he couldn’t even pretend to guess.

But he was drawn toward them now, almost irresistibly, the potent reek of the close air beneath the trees, the susurrus of their nocturnal movements, a sound like a distant breeze combing through a glade lush with ferns. The sound calmed him, and for a minute he forgot about Mr. McCormick and forgave the monkeys their stink. And then, all in an instant, he came fully alert.

The monkeys had begun to hiss and chitter the way they did in daylight, the noise sailing out to him and rushing back to roost again in the darkness ahead. He quickened his pace, shining the beam off the great twisted branches of the oaks and then catching the wire mesh of the big central cage that rose up into the crown of the trees. There was movement at the top of the cage, and there shouldn’t have been, all the monkeys put to rest in their individual cages at nightfall, but they were noisier now, much noisier — the gentle rustling of a moment ago become the jangling rattle of steel padlocks and cage doors straining against their latches — and he could see the tiny bodies flailing themselves to and fro behind the mesh. The light shot round in his unsteady hand, a root grabbed for his foot, and he was trying to understand, to fathom what was happening, when suddenly every hominoid in the place was screeching loud enough to raise the holy dead.

What was it? There, high in the branches of the central cage, the movement again. He stepped closer, the screeching, the stench, struggling to steady the light, and then, as if in a sudden vision, it became clear to him. These were no monkeys in the branches — they were too big, much too big. These were no monkeys, but apes, the rutilant naked one, white as any ghost, and the shaggy hunkering split-faced one, and their hands moving each at the place where the other’s legs intersected, two hands flashing in that obscene light until O‘Kane, who now truly had seen everything, flicked it off.

Mercifully.

The headline, set there for all the world to see in bold 30-point type, hit Katherine like a slap in the face. Her cheeks reddened. She felt the water come to her eyes, and her heart was suddenly beating at her ribs like a caged bird: LOVE Is LOYAL, HOPE Is GONE. And it got worse, much worse: SOCIETY FAVORITE CLINGS TO DEMENTED HUSBAND: HE’S ENSCONCED IN MANSION AT MONTECITO; WIFE COMES TO VISIT BUT CANNOT SEE HIM. She looked up at Carrie, whose face showed nothing, and then at her maid, Louisa, who looked as if she’d swallowed a live rat, and then finally at her hostess, Mrs. Lavinia Littlejohn, who’d just handed her the paper, already folded back to page 19. Mrs. Littlejohn was wearing that vacant smile Katherine’s mother seemed to be afflicted with more and more these days, as if smiling for a woman of her generation were some sort of twitch or tic. “I, um, thought you’d want to see it, dear,” Mrs. Littlejohn said, and the smile wavered a moment, uncertain of itself, and then came back stronger than ever.

Katherine held herself absolutely rigid, staring down at the newsprint in her lap until the letters began to shift and meld, and then, in her embarrassment, she looked up to survey the room again. Louisa was just vanishing through the door to the front parlor, where a dozen women were striding energetically to and fro, putting the finishing touches to banners and placards and chatting softly among themselves in the way of troops going into battle. Mrs. Littlejohn was still watching her, still smiling her autonomous maternal smile, and Carrie — Carrie Chapman Catt, Katherine’s special friend and comrade-in-arms — was studiously looking out the window. “I don’t know what to say,” Katherine murmured, “it’s so… humiliating to have my privacy violated like this. I feel like I’ve been raped.”