The sitter that long winter was a huge. sleek black girl named Beulah. She fawned over Hal when Hal's mother was around and sometimes pinched him when she wasn't. Still, Hal had some liking for Beulah, who once in a while would read him a lurid tale from one of her confession or true-detective magazines ('Death Came for the Voluptuous Red-head,' Beulah would intone ominously in the dozy daytime silence of the living room, and pop another Reese's peanut butter cup into her mouth while Hal solemnly studied the grainy tabloid pictures and drank milk from his Wish-Cup). The liking made what happened worse.
He found the monkey on a cold, cloudy day in March. Sleet ticked sporadically off the windows, and Beulah was asleep on the couch, a copy of
Hal had crept into the back closet to look at his father's things.
The back closet was a storage space that ran the length of the second floor on the left side, extra space that had never been finished off. You got into it by using a small door--a down-the-rabbit-hole sort of door--on Bill's side of the boys' bedroom. They both liked to go in there, even though it was chilly in winter and hot enough in summer to wring a bucketful of sweat out of your pores. Long and narrow and some-how snug, the back closet was full of fascinating junk. No matter how much stuff you looked at, you never seemed to be able to look at it all. He and Bill had spent whole Saturday afternoons up here, barely speaking to each other, taking things out of boxes, examining them, turning them over and over so their hands could absorb each unique reality, putting them back. Now Hal wondered if he and Bill hadn't been trying, as best they could, to somehow make contact with their vanished father.
He had been a merchant mariner with a navigator's certificate, and there were stacks of charts in the closet, some marked with neat circles (and the dimple of the compass's swing-point in the center of each). There were twenty volumes of something called
That day, with the sleet ticking hypnotically off the roof just above his head, Hal worked his way all the way down to the far end of the back closet, moved a box aside, and saw another box behind it a Ralston-Purina box. Looking over the top was a pair of glassy hazel eyes. They gave him a start and he skittered back for a moment, 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.
