Fear Nothing

There is, of course, no species of monkey native to California. The only primates in its woods and fields are human beings.

Bobby said, “Caught one looking in a window at me one night. Went outside, and it was gone.”

“When was this?”

“Maybe three months ago.”

Orson moved between us, as if for comfort.

I said, “You’ve seen them since?”

“Six or seven times. Always at night. They’re secretive. But they’re also bolder lately. They travel in a troop.”

“Troop?”

“Wolves travel in a pack. Horses in a herd. With monkeys, it’s called a troop.”

“You’ve been doing research. How come you haven’t told me about this?”

He was silent, watching the dunes.

I was watching them, too. “Is that what’s out there now?”

“Maybe.”

“How many in this troop?”

“Don’t know. Maybe six or eight. Just a guess.”

“You bought a shotgun. You think they’re dangerous?”

“Maybe.”

“Have you reported them to anyone? Like animal control?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Instead of answering me, he hesitated and then said, “Pia’s driving me nuts.”

Pia Klick. Out there in Waimea for a month or two, going on three years.

I didn’t understand how Pia related to Bobby’s failure to report the monkeys to animal-control officers, but I sensed that he would make the connection for me.

“She says she’s discovered that she’s the reincarnation of Kaha Huna,” Bobby said.

Kaha Huna is the mythical Hawaiian goddess of surfing, who was never actually incarnate in the first place and, therefore, incapable of being re.

Considering that Pia was not a kamaaina, a native of Hawaii, but a haole who had been born in Oskaloosa, Kansas, and raised there until she left home at seventeen, she seemed an unlikely candidate to be a mythological uber wahine.

I said, “She lacks some credentials.”

“She’s dead-solid serious about this.”

“Well, she’s way pretty enough to be Kaha Huna. Or any other goddess, for that matter.”

Standing beside Bobby, I couldn’t see his eyes too well, but his face was bleak. I had never seen him bleak before. I hadn’t even realized that bleakness was an option for him.

Bobby said, “She’s trying to decide whether being Kaha Huna requires her to be celibate.”

“Ouch.”

“She thinks she probably shouldn’t ever live with an ordinary dude, meaning a mortal man. Somehow that would be a blasphemous rejection of her fate.”

“Brutal,” I said sympathetically.

“But it would be cool for her to shack up with the current reincarnation of Kahuna.”

Kahuna is the mythical god of surfing. He is largely a creation of modern surfers who extrapolate his legend from the life of an ancient Hawaiian witch doctor.

I said, “And you aren’t the reincarnation of Kahuna.”

“I refuse to be.”

From that response, I inferred that Pia was trying to convince him that he was, indeed, the god of surfing.

With audible misery and confusion, Bobby said, “She’s so smart, so talented.”

Pia had graduated summa cum laude from UCLA. She had paid her way through school by painting portraits; now her hyperrealist works sold for impressive prices, as quickly as she cared to produce them.

“How can she be so smart and talented,” Bobby demanded, “and then…this?”

“Maybe you are Kahuna,” I said.

“This isn’t funny,” he said, which was a striking statement, because to one degree or another, everything was funny to Bobby.

In the moonlight, the dune grass drooped, no blade so much as trembling in the now windless night. The soft rhythm of the surf, rising from the beach below, was like the murmured chanting of a distant, prayerful crowd.

This Pia business was fascinating, but understandably, I was more interested in the monkeys.

“These last few years,” Bobby said, “with this New Age stuff from Pia…well, sometimes it’s okay, but sometimes it’s like spending days in radical churly-churly.”

Churly-churly is badly churned-up surf heavy with sand and pea gravel, which smacks you in the face when you walk into it. This is not a pleasant surf condition.

“Sometimes,” Bobby said, “when I get off the phone with her, I’m so messed up, missing her, wanting to be with her…I could almost convince myself she is Kaha Huna. She’s so sincere. And she doesn’t rave on about it, you know. It’s this quiet thing with her, which makes it even more disturbing.”

“I didn’t know you got disturbed.”

“I didn’t know it, either.” Sighing, scuffing at the sand with one bare foot, he began to make the connection between Pia and the monkeys: “When I saw the monkey at the window the first time, it was cool, made me laugh. I figured it was someone’s pet that got loose…but the second time I saw more than one. And it was as weird as all this Kaha Huna shit, because they weren’t behaving at all like monkeys.”

“What do you mean?”

“Monkeys are playful, goofing around. These guys…they weren’t playful. Purposeful, solemn, creepy little geeks. Watching me and studying the house, not out of curiosity but with some agenda.”

“What agenda?”

Bobby shrugged. “They were so strange….”

Words seemed to fail him, so I borrowed one from H. P. Lovecraft, for whose stories we’d had such enthusiasm when we were thirteen: “Eldritch.”

“Yeah. They were eldritch to the max. I knew no one was going to believe me. I almost felt I was hallucinating. I grabbed a camera but couldn’t get a picture. You know why?”

“Thumb over the lens?”

“They didn’t want to be photographed. First sight of the camera, they ran for cover, and they’re insanely fast.” He glanced at me, reading my reaction, then looked to the dunes again. “They knew what the camera was.”

I couldn’t resist: “Hey, you’re not anthropomorphizing them, are you? You know — ascribing human attributes and attitudes to animals?”

Ignoring me, he said, “After that night, I didn’t put the camera away in the closet. I kept it on a kitchen counter, close at hand. If they showed up again, I figured I might get a snapshot before they realized what was happening. One night about six weeks ago, it was pumping eight-footers with a good offshore, barrel after barrel, so even though it was way nipple out there, I put on my wet suit and spent a couple of hours totally tucked away. I didn’t take the camera down to the beach with me.”

“Why not?”

“I hadn’t seen the damn monkeys in a week. I figured maybe I’d never see them again. Anyway, when I came back to the house, I stripped out of the neoprene, went into the kitchen, and got a beer. When I turned away from the fridge, there were monkeys at two windows, hanging on the frames outside, looking in at me. So I reached for my camera — and it was gone.”

“You misplaced it.”