T. Boyle - Riven Rock

They found Dr. Hamilton fussing around a pile of odds and ends he meant to keep, the chute with the doors at the end of it, a couple of the smaller cages, a pegboard he’d used to gauge the monkeys’ intelligence. “Gil!” Dr. Brush boomed, bobbing through the fog to seize Hamilton’s hand. “I’m late, I know it, but it was for the main and simple reason of this damned fog, and I hope you’ll forgive me, but I’m here now and I’ve met everybody and I’m raring to go.”

“Nat,” Hamilton said, shaking with one hand and adjusting his spectacles with the other. “Yes, well, the weather’s been unusual. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

“Pah!” Brush returned, waving a big flipperlike hand. “No inconvenience to me, for the main and simple reason that I’m here to stay. California. God bless it. But what’s this — leftover monkeys?”

He was pointing to a small cage set atop the psychological chute. In it, O‘Kane saw, were the two remaining hominoids, a pair of rhesus monkeys the doctor called Jack and Jill. They were runts, even for monkeys, and though they’d been displaced and seen all their companions exiled and their home of the last several years demolished, they still had the spirit to fuck — which is what they were doing at the moment, black lips drawn back in erotic transport, the cage swaying rhythmically to the persistent in-and-out motion of the monkey on top, presumably Jack, but you never could tell. That much O’Kane had learned about hominoids.

Hamilton seemed a bit fuzzy. “Yes,” he said, gazing down on them, “the last two. Jack and Jill. I’d had half a mind to take them with me, but now I’m not so sure. The zoo down in Los Angeles is filled up with them — rhesus, that is — and I can’t seem to get rid of them in any case.”

The big doctor huffed a few times. His cigar had gone out, but he still clutched it with his teeth as if it were the last link of a breathing tube and he a sponge diver wending his way along the bottom of the sea. “Why not set ‘em free? Let ’em go. Liberate ‘em. For the main and simple reason that they’re sentient creatures, just like you and me, and it’s a cruelty to keep them caged up like that, and the climate here’ll support ’em, I don’t doubt that, for the main and simple—”

“Yes, I’ve thought of that,” Hamilton said. “Haven’t I, Edward?”

O‘Kane hadn’t the faintest idea what Hamilton had or hadn’t thought of, but he nodded his head anyway.

“Well?” Brush demanded. “And so?”

Hamilton took his time, the fog settling in, the fire of demolition snapping and roaring off in the distance. He looked down at the copulating monkeys. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned after all these years of study,” he sighed, “it’s that they’re nothing but dirty stinking little uncontrollable beasts. Set them free?” He looked up. “They don’t deserve it.”

It was about that time that Giovannella came to O‘Kane with the news that she was pregnant. She wasn’t Giovannella Dimucci anymore, but Giovannella Capolupo, married, at her father’s insistence, to a little hunched-over wop with a single black eyebrow drawn like a visor across the top third of his head. Guido, his name was, Guido Capolupo. He had a shoemaker’s shop in a back alley in Spanishtown, with a cramped little cell of an apartment above it, which was convenient for O’Kane, who was then living at a boardinghouse not five minutes away.

Giovannella, sleek and beautiful, with her eyes like chocolate candies and her feet primly crossed at the ankles, sat waiting for him in the parlor under the watchful eye of the landlady, Mrs. Fitzmaurice. It was a Saturday afternoon, 2:00 P.M., and he’d just come back from his half-day shift at Riven Rock and collapsed into his bed like a jellyfish, utterly drained after a long night of celebrating somebody’s birthday at Menhoff‘s, he couldn’t remember whose. He closed his eyes. And in the very next instant there was an impatient rapping at the door and who was it? Mrs. Fitzmaurice. And what did she want? There was a young lady downstairs for him.

“Giov,” he crooned, crossing the carpet and taking her hand, feeling better already, and he couldn’t kiss her there in public, though he wanted to, and he couldn’t read her chocolate-candy eyes either. “What do you say?”

“I’m pregnant.”

At first it didn’t register on him. The sun was fat in the windows and outside the streets were placid and inviting, all the long Saturday afternoon stretching languidly before him. Since he was up, he was thinking of maybe suggesting a stroll up to Menhoff‘s, for a little hair of the dog. He blinked. Tried on a smile.

Giovannella was beaming suddenly. “I thought you’d be mad, Eddie, but I’m so happy.” She gave his hand a squeeze, though Mrs. Fitzmaurice, studiously watering her geraniums at the far window, was watching like a moral executioner, ready to pounce at any hint of impropriety.

O‘Kane wasn’t following. “Mad? About what?”

“You’re the father, Eddie,” her voice soft as a heartbeat. “Didn’t you hear me? I’m pregnant.”

In the next moment he had her out the door and they were stalking up the street, pedestrians trying not to stare, the streetcar clanking by, a roadster parked at the curb, a sedan beyond, an old Reo beyond that. His blood was surging, and it wasn’t all bad. He was angry, of course he was angry, but there was a crazy exhilaration to it too. Sure the kid would be his — her husband, Guido, looked to be about a hundred and twelve years old though she insisted he was only thirty-six, and how could she have relations with a guy who looked like that, even if he was her husband? Of course the kid was his — unless she’d been fooling around with somebody else, and if she fooled around with him why wouldn’t she fool around with somebody else? But no, it had to be his, and it would come out with fair hair and sea-green eyes, he just knew it, and Baldy Dimucci and this Guido would hit the roof. There’d be a vendetta. Sicilian assassins. They’d crawl through the ground-floor window at night, brutally dispatching Mrs. Fitzmaurice and old Walter Hogan, who spent half his life snoring in a chair by the front door, and then come up the stairs and cut his own miserable throat.

Someone honked a bicycle horn. The greengrocer — Wilson — came out from behind a display of muskmelons and threw a pan of water in the gutter. “You’ll have to get rid of it,” O‘Kane said.

Giovannella stopped dead in her tracks, Giovannella the fury, Giovannella the lunatic. The candy melted out of her eyes. “What did you say?” she demanded. “I think my hearing must not be so good.”

The fat-ankled woman from the Goux Winery waddled past them with three kids in tow. A man with a panting dog almost ran into them. People were everywhere, swells ambling up the street from the Potter, women shopping for groceries, kids darting in and out of alleyways with balls and hoops. “Not here, Giov,” he said, and he wanted to take her by the arm and steer her someplace, someplace quiet and out of the way, but he couldn’t do that, because she wasn’t Giovannella Dimucci anymore — she was Giovannella Capolupo and he had no right to touch her. In public, anyway.

Suddenly she lurched away from him, her face twisted and ugly, and broke into a clumsy trot, fighting the weight of her skirts. He gave it a minute, inconspicuous Eddie O‘Kane, just another guy out for a Saturday-afternoon stroll, and then made his way up the street after her. By the time he got going, she was already a block ahead of him, still kicking out her skirts in an awkward trot, her head bobbing like a toy on a spring, people stopping to turn and stare after her. O’Kane quickened his pace, but not so much as to attract attention.