Skeleton Crew

heart thumping, as if he had discovered a deadly pygmy. Then he saw its silence, the glaze in those eyes, and realized it was some sort of toy. He moved forward again and lifted it carefully from the box.

It grinned its ageless, toothy grin in the yellow light, its cymbals held apart.

Delighted, Hal had turned it this way and that, feeling the crinkle of its nappy fur.

Its funny grin pleased him. Yet hadn't there been something else'? An almost instinctive feeling of disgust that had come and gone almost before he was aware of it? Perhaps it was so, but with an old, old memory like this one, you had to be careful not to believe too much. Old memories could lie. But... hadn't he seen that same expression on Petey's face, in the attic of the home place?

He had seen the key set into the small of its back, and turned it. It had turned far too easily: there were no winding-up clicks. Broken. then. Broken, but still neat.

He took it out to play with it.

'Whatchoo got, Hal?' Beulah asked, waking from her nap.

'Nothing,' Hal said. 'I found it.' He put it up on the shelf on his side of the bedroom. It stood atop his Lassie coloring books, grinning, staring into space, cymbals poised. It was broken, but it grinned nonetheless. That night Hal awakened from some uneasy dream, bladder full, and got up to use the bathroom in the hall. Bill was a breathing lump of covers across the room.

Hal came back, almost asleep again... and suddenly the monkey began to beat its cymbals together in the darkness.

Jang-jang-jang-jang—- He came fully awake, as if snapped in the face with a cold, wet towel. His heart gave a staggering leap of surprise, and a tiny, mouselike squeak escaped his throat. He stared at the monkey, eyes wide, lips trembling.

Jang-jang-jang-jang—Its body rocked and humped on the shelf. Its lips spread and closed, spread and closed, hideously gleeful, revealing huge and carnivorous teeth.

'Stop,' Hal whispered.

His brother turned over and uttered a loud, single snore. All else was silent...

except for the monkey. The cymbals clapped and clashed, and surely it would wake his brother, his mother, the world. It would wake the dead.

Jang-jang-jang-jang—Hal moved toward it, meaning to stop it somehow, perhaps put his hand between its cymbals until it ran down, and then it stopped on its own. The cymbals came together one last time—jang!—and then spread slowly apart to their original position. The brass glimmered in the shadows. The monkey's dirty yellowish teeth grinned.

The house was silent again. His mother turned over in her bed and echoed Bill's single snore. Hal got back into his own bed and pulled the covers up, his heart beating fast. and he thought: l'll put it back in the closet again tomorrow. I don't want it.

But the next morning he forgot all about putting the monkey back because his mother didn't go to work. Beulah was dead. Their mother wouldn't tell them exactly what happened. 'It was an accident, just a terrible accident,' was all she would say. But that afternoon Bill bought a newspaper on his way home from school and smuggled page four up to their room under his shin. Bill read the article haltingly to Hal while their mother cooked supper in the kitchen, but Hal could read the headline for himself—TWO KILLED IN APARTMENT SHOOT-OUT. Beulah McCafiery, 19, and Sally Tremont, 20, had been shot by McCaffery's boyfriend, Leonard White, 25, following an argument over who was to go out and pick up an order of Chinese food. Tremont had expired at Hartford Receiving. Beulah McCaffery had been pronounced dead at the scene.

It was like Beulah just disappeared into one of her own detective magazines. Hal Shelburn thought, and felt a cold chill race up his spine and then circle his heart. And then he realized the shootings had occurred about the same time the monkey—

'Hal'?' It was Terry's voice, sleepy. 'Coming to bed?' He spat toothpaste into the sink and rinsed his mouth. 'Yes,' he said.

He had put the monkey in his suitcase earlier, and locked it up. They, were flying back to Texas in two or three days. But before they went, he would get rid of the damned thing for good.

Somehow.

'You were pretty rough on Dennis this afternoon,' Terry said in the dark.

'Dennis has needed somebody to start being rough on him for quite a while now, I think. He's been drifting. I just don't want him to start falling.'

'Psychologically, beating the boy isn't a very productive '

'I didn't beat him, Terry for Christ's sake!'

'—way to assert parental authority '

'Oh, don't give me any of that encounter-group shit,' Hal said angrily.

'l can see you don't want to discuss this.' Her voice was cold.

'I told him to get the dope out of the house, too.'

'You did'?' Now she sounded apprehensive. 'How did he take it? What did he say?'

'Come on, Terry! What could he say? You're fired?'

'Hal, what's the matter with you'? You're not like this—what s wrong?

'Nothing,' he said. thinking of the monkey locked away in his Samsonite. Would he hear it if it began to clap its cymbals'? Yes, he surely would. Muffled, but audible.

Clapping doom for someone, as it had for Beulah, Johnny McCabe, Uncle Will's dog Daisy. Jang-