Evan Hunter - The Moment She Was Gone

Sitting with our backs to one of Mr. Alvarez’s coops, the birds making their soft subtle sounds behind us, she told me that traveling to places like India and Indonesia had been difficult at times, but she knew she’d remember it forever, and felt certain she’d go back again...

“I know that with all my heart, Andy.”

It was a calm, lovely evening, the end of what had been a surprisingly cool day in June. Dusk was fast approaching in Manhattan, even-gloam was almost upon us. When we were children, we used to come up to the roof all the time, to watch the sun set over Manhattan. We used to look to the West, and watch the sun going down behind the GW Bridge. There were hardly any tall buildings on the Jersey shore back then. My sister and I would hold hands as the sun gradually disappeared and dusk gathered. We were holding hands now as well, the pigeons gently murmuring behind us.

“I wish you wouldn’t keep running off all the time,” I said.

“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said, “ all the time! I’ve only been gone twice And I always come back, don’t I? You should come with me next time. You want to be a writer, you’d learn a lot.”

“Well, a writer,” I said.

“You really would have enjoyed the sex show I went to in Bangkok,” she said, and waggled her eyebrows like Groucho Marx. “There was a woman who popped Ping-Pong balls out of her vagina...”

“Disgusting,” I said.

“... and another one who pulled out a series of small metal balls on a chain. Another woman used her vagina to blow a toot on a toy bugle...”

“Please, Annie.”

“I’m telling you the truth. One woman even stuck a cigarette in there, and lit it, and smoked it. With her vagina! I mean it. Blew smoke rings from her vagina! Anything but what it’s meant for, right? God, I hated Bangkok! The air was so polluted, my eyes burned all the time. You know what they do in Thailand, Andy? Pregnant women drink the milk from young coconuts so their babies’ll be born with lovely skin, did you know that?”

“You’re making all this up.”

“No, it’s true. They have schools that train monkeys to climb trees to bring down young coconuts.”

“What else do they do in Thailand?”

I was smiling. I knew she was inventing all this. I was thinking, she’s the one who should become the writer.

She smiled back at me, tapped me playfully on the hand to let me know she was telling the absolute truth. In the West, the sky was already beginning to turn red and orange and yellow.

“The people burn the peels of mandarin oranges to keep mosquitoes away from their houses. So they won’t get malaria. That’s what I’m going to do the next time I go there. Burn orange peels. Instead of taking those stupid malaria pills.”

“I wish you wouldn’t go away again,” I said.

“You can come with me,” she said. “Do you know there’s a fine for chewing gum in Singapore?”

“I’ll just bet there is.”

“Stop it, Andy, I’m serious! You can get a fine for chewing gum! And in Yo Jakarta, a bell... which do you like best, Andy, I’ve heard it pronounced three ways. Joe Jakarta, Yo Jakarta, and even Georgia Carter, which sounds like a stripper, doesn’t it? I prefer Yo Jakarta, it sounds softer, doesn’t it, Yo Jakarta? Do you remember the trouble Daddy had with the names in The Once and Future King? When he read it to us at bedtime? All those strange medieval names! But in Yo Jakarta, a bell peals at bedtime, to remind the women to take their birth control pills. They sound a second bell an hour later.”

“The second one is called coitus interruptus, ” I said.

Annie laughed.

I knew she was making all this up.

“In Bali,” she said, “if a person is buried in the ground, he won’t go to heaven. That’s why it’s important to be cremated. But if you live on the side of a mountain, it’s all right for your body to be laid out on the ground to decompose in the sun. That’s because mountains are holy.”

The sun in the Western sky was rapidly dipping below the horizon. We sat side by side with our backs against the pigeon coops. It was such a good time of day. It was so good to have Annie home again.

“There’s a temple in Bali where menstruating women aren’t allowed to enter,” Annie whispered, as if telling an enormous secret now. “There’s a big sign out front, I mean it, this isn’t a joke. Because it’s a holy place. I’ll take you there sometime, it’s called Uluwatu, and it’s supposed to be full of these little gray monkeys that are holy. I went in, anyway. They told me later I shouldn’t have. Because that day, there was only one monkey in the temple, instead of the hundreds that were supposed to be there. In fact, they call it The Monkey Temple. But there was only one monkey that day. Because I had my period, and went in, and angered the gods. Was what they told me later.”

“Who told you? The guides?”

“No, not the guides.”

“Then who? The gods?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Well, who, Annie?”

“I don’t remember. Somebody told me. Who remembers? Anyway, what difference does it make? I never listen to what they say.”

“What who says?”

“Whoever,” she said, and waved one hand on the air, as if brushing away a fly. “I’d go crazy if I listened to them.”

I turned to look at her. Her face was stained by the setting sun. In the gathering dusk, she shook her head, and then closed her eyes. Behind us, the pigeons were muttering softly.

“Do you remember when Daddy used to read to us at night?” she asked.

“Oh yes.”

“Do you remember when Archimedes the owl taught the Wart to fly?”

“I remember,” I said.

The sun was almost gone.

“Do you remember Cully the hawk? And the two falcons, Balan and Balin?”

“Yes, Annie, I remember.”

“Do you remember the wild goose Lyo-lyok?”

“Yes, oh yes.”

“It used to be such fun,” she said. “Flying.”

In September of 1985, my sister started a new rock group named The Gutter Rats, and was preparing for a tour through Dixie. A tour!

You have to understand that this so-called rock group was in effect a garage band with pretensions. I don’t know how they managed to find a booking agent, and I don’t know how he succeeded in getting jobs for them throughout the South, but they did, and he did. His name was Wallace Hennessy, Wally to my sister and the four other members of her group. I met him only once and remember him as a huge and flatulent man in his early forties, wearing a rug that looked like a fright wig.

There was a black girl named Pearl in the group (she played keyboard) and a lead guitarist and bass guitarist who were also black and whose names were either Teddy and Freddie or Perry and Lennie, I forget. There was also a white drummer named Stephen. As she had with The Boppers, the group we formed when we were fifteen, my sister played tambourines and sang. You will remember that in that earlier effort, I played bass guitar, which is the equivalent of choosing geology as the course to fill your science requirement. I mentioned this to either Freddie or Lennie, one old bass-guitar player to another, heh-heh, get it, Fred, Len, little poke in the ribs there, get it? Not a smile.

In January of 1986, Wally booked The Gutter Rats on a tour that ran them through Virginia and the Carolinas, and then swung through Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, before heading into Florida where they would play Tampa, St. Pete, and a few towns in the Everglades. As rock bands go, they weren’t too bad. They were merely amateurish. In that respect, and again because our lives — my sister’s and mine — seem to run all too often along parallel lines, my writing wasn’t too bad, either, it was merely amateurish. Or maybe it was bad and amateurish. But at least it never got me in trouble. The band did get Annie in trouble.