two hours later, at early dawn with the rain still falling. There was no way he was going to leave this warm house. He went back to sleep again, and slept until midmorning.
It was a gray, rainy day, and he was enormously pleased to remain where he was for the time being. He spent the day lolling about nude, giving the house and its contents a thorough investigation. From time to time he would go down into the basement to bring up more mason jars of canned food, and fix himself snacks. By afternoon the kitchen was filled with empty jars everywhere one looked, and he busied himself for a time washing out the jars and packing them away in cartons he'd found in the basement. When he left, he would rearrange the shelved goods so that things would not appear to have been tampered with.
He spent a few minutes gazing out the windows at the wet, heavy sky and the muddy fields. There was no traffic whatsoever. His huge belly full, his body rested, he turned on the television set with the sound off, and became tumescent while watching a young actress on one of the soap operas. He started to masturbate, but it seemed like too much trouble and he stopped, realizing that he was going to have to have a woman very soon.
After a while he turned the sound up on an obviously rigged game show, thinking what enjoyment it would give him to rip the host's heart from his fatuous body. The monkeys jumped up and down and squealed with excitement, and he shook his huge head in amazement.
He was not a fan of movies or television, but on occasion he would watch TV, invariably transfixed by the spectacle of the monkey people and the small, strange window through which so many of them experienced the world.
Was this really what they did each night in those cozy, snug homes in the suburbs? He was perpetually fascinated by the monkeys ... by their life-styles and Weed Eaters and miniature golf courses and county fairs. They were as remote a species to him as he was to the normal man, and he could drive through their clusters of tract homes at night and be vastly entertained just trying to imagine what their tax-paying, lawn-tending lives were like behind those ornate front doors.
He had no frame of reference for “family.” No sense of common bond. No remembered childhood pleasures of the hearth and home. To his mind these gibbering, monkeylike fools were as alien as visiting other-worlders. He'd sometimes drive stolen vehicles through the suburbs of whatever city he was in, captivated by the warmth of the lights in those darkened homes.
Often he would see a family watching the box, perhaps visible through their open curtains, and the sight never failed to mesmerize him.
“—a way you can earn up to a million dollars a year just by letting your friends and neighbors in on the secret. And best of all—'
“—order before midnight tonight and you'll not only get those wonderful steak knives, but you'll also get, absolutely free, and at no charge, this marvelous potato peeler as well—'
“—remarkable low price of only twenty-nine ninety-nine. With these spectacular new miracle wipers, you will never again have the problem of—'
“—earn while you learn this richly lucrative business from the ground up. In a moment we'll introduce you to the man who pioneered the dynamic no-money-down method of purchasing—'
“—Gabe, I want you to go ahead and rub it all over the hood. That's right. Just rub in anywhere on there. Now, Margo, you rub your side. There you go. Start in anywhere and cover those hoods with wax. We're going to let both coats set under the hot lights, and in a few minutes we'll come back and take a look at—'
“—lost over a hundred pounds with this amazing new product. There was never any between-meal hunger because of the—'
“—many who wished they could play but didn't have time to study the piano. Now you can start in playing songs right away! It only takes—'
One scam after another. Political scams. Snake oil scams. Art scams. Music scams. Costume jewelry scams. Every greed-targeted con job, bogus shuck, and jive sting that had ever been conceived of was right there on that weird tube.
The monkey people scammed each other all day, scammed themselves all night, and in between they watched people scamming one another on a little box. They were idiots!
He turned the channels. Puzzled somewhat, as always, by the obvious insincerity of the hair-care hucksters and car salesmen and televangelists whom he perceived as parts of the same great network of con games:
“God says we must wage
He switched to another channel where a beautiful dancer moved across the small screen to a driving hard- rock audio track. An incredible montage of graphic images blinked above and behind her. The combination of the music and the imagery was intensely compelling and he turned the volume up. It was sensual, somehow, the way the pulsing rock pounded in tempo with his own strong heartbeat, and without thinking, it brought him to his feet and he was aping the movements of the dancer—Chaingang Bunkowski was dancing to MTV! Almost five hundred pounds of lard and muscle bouncing and boogieing across Mrs. Irby's floor. Another first! Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski rocking out stark naked. What a sight!
He didn't like the next video and he switched channels again and got a man extolling the virtues of B-12 spray packets, switched again and a woman, an actress on one of the daytime soaps, sat sobbing for the camera's eye.
Chaingang had all the actor's gifts, among them observation and memory, talents that he had in enormous abundance. An actor prepares by observing, for example, and his powers of observation were unequaled, but he hated those humans who were the object of observation—yet he found them fascinating. Even when he was not incarcerated, he preferred to spend most of his time alone, having little stomach for personal interaction—and yet so closely had he observed his fellow humans, and so painstakingly had he filed away the memory of their behavior patterns, that he could mimic them precisely—and on cue!
The soap opera actress wept, and Daniel Bunkowski allowed himself to remember the sadness of his past, contorting his fat, rubbery mask of a face in a mocking parody of the close-up on the screen, holding his huge head as she held hers, shaking with sobs the way she was, as he opened the fawcett on a waterworks of weeping. He killed the audio of the television set, and the sound of his crying filled the Irby home.
It was strangely pleasant and he gave in to the emotion, milking it at first as an actor would, enjoying the fact that his dimpled cheeks were covered in real tears and not glycerine. He soon realized that this thing he had never done in his entire adult life, this inarticulate expression of pain or distress known as crying, whether ridiculous or not, was tinged with genuine sadness that such an act was a rare outpouring from all that remained of his humanity.
At precisely 0600, almost to the sweep of the second hand, Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski was up like a shot, charged with electrical energy, moving, quickly waddling through the Irby house doing his cleanup chores. The kitchen spotless, the empty mason jars cleaned and stored out of sight, the shelves re-dressed and rearranged, the house restored to its pristine state, his clothing cleaned and dried, he shaved meticulously, showered luxuriously, and—having made a last top-to-bottom sweep of the house—was out of there by 0800.
The dancing clown bear made its way across the road without incident and deposited his heavy gear in the same patch of wild honeysuckle where the baby mice once lived. He watched the road for a while, halfway hoping to see a vulnerable motorist chug by in a nondescript pickup. Watching the house where he'd taken such a pleasant R & R.
The Bunkowski one-man family picnic had stored fuel away the way a camel stores water for the desert: and it was all he could do to tear himself away from the basement. Mrs. Irby's boned chicken and dumplings, baked beans swimming in brown sugar, barbecued spare ribs in hot sauce, corned beef and cabbage—he didn't need a vehicle, he probably had enough gas to fart his way to his destination. What a feast!
By noon he was well around the long curve of Willow River Road, and nearing Waterton's city limits. The blue feature was marked “Jefferson Sandbar.'
After the preceding day's heavy rains, the new day had turned bright, and although the weather was cool, the sun felt good. By midday the breeze had abated. He could see the sandbar now. The river was still as a flat desert of brown glass. Voices carried from around the curve.
