The monkeys stake their claim
Michael Czyzniejewski In our town, we have monkeys. Like most cities have squirrels and rabbits scurrying about, we have monkeys, little brown-andwhite ones with long, curled tails. We don’t know what they’re called, where they came from, or why no town in North America has them except us. But on any given day, if you walk from your house or apartment to the park or the Kroger or downtown, you’ll probably see at least a dozen of these monkeys, climbing trees, traipsing across lawns, crossing the street; sometimes, a flattened monkey will appear in the middle of a road, but it’s rare, as they’re quick and they’re smart. They’re a part of our town, a part of the landscape, a part of us. They’re our monkeys, and unless you grew up someplace else, you don’t even notice them. Speaking of squirrels and rabbits, we’ve never had those, not ever, not that anyone can remember. No woodchucks, raccoons, or skunks, either. It’s just monkeys, monkeys and some random birds, high up in the trees, on the ledges of tall buildings, at the top of the water tower. We can’t say for sure what’s happened to these other animals, why we don’t have both, monkeys and woodland creatures, living together in harmony. There are lots of open spaces, forest preserves and fields and the undeveloped marshland behind the mall, ideal places for habitation. Just monkeys, though. Even the birds are rare, fewer and fewer every year, too, their nests higher and higher, more and more out of reach. Someone once theorized it’s urine, some strong brand of monkey pee that keeps the other animals away, pheromones so
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powerful that nothing else dare cross the lines. Just nature, one species dominating the other. It’s disturbing if you think about it too much, but it’s not often that anyone does. We don’t get to see the bunnies and chipmunks, but on the good side, we don’t stumble upon skunks in our trash cans, either. We’re lucky to have monkeys in most ways. Monkeys are different. They make us unique. The monkeys are what make us special. Out of nowhere one year, our dogs and cats started disappearing. At first, it was the strays, and we thought it must be the dog catcher, enforcing the leash law, just doing his job, what our tax dollars went to. Not until the yard dogs started to go did anyone suspect foul play. Even then, no one was bringing up the monkeys. It was probably the dog catcher again, bending rules to meet quota, to fill the cages. Or maybe a coyote or mountain lion had wandered into town. Perhaps somebody’s kid was playing sick jokes. Even now, after everything, it’s hard to say the monkeys were involved. No one had seen a monkey carry off a dog. No one was even sure a monkey could carry off a dog. Some of the missing pooches were boxers, Dobermans, one an Alaskan husky. A monkey the size of a Chihuahua couldn’t possibly wrestle away one of these larger species, we thought. They weren’t even suspects. Then What if it’s a group of monkeys? someone said at the city council meeting. What they meant was, what if the monkeys were working together? What if they were organized? Nobody wanted to believe it. They were our monkeys. The lived in our yards and in our trees and in the rafters of our garages. They carried their babies on their backs. They ate the crab apples and kept the skunks away. Why would they want the dogs and cats gone? Dogs and cats were no threat to the monkeys. It couldn’t have been the monkeys. There had to be a better explanation. When the Cheneys’ twin toddlers went missing, it was time to get to the bottom of the monkey question. No one could
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deny it. Talia and Tanya had been known to antagonize the monkeys—several neighbors reported chasing and taunting— and years before the twins were ever born, the Cheneys had been cited for keeping a monkey in their house, luring one into a large canary cage with a Zagnut bar, keeping him as a pet for nearly a month, a strict violation of village ordinances. But that’d been years ago. The twins were three, four the next Friday, and the monkeys couldn’t have been holding a grudge, not for that long. This would imply plotting. Plotting and the biding of time. But, the sheriff conceded, if enough monkeys could conspire to carry off a Doberman, even more monkeys could decide to steal threeyear-old twins. It was almost better to think about a stranger, a nefarious man, maybe a drifter, than to blame the monkeys. After all, they’d been around forever. They were cute, black saucer eyes floating in white puffy fur. Besides, if they did it once, they could do it again, and no one wanted to think this was the start of a pattern. A week after the Cheney twins disappeared, no leads on their whereabouts whatsoever, a man came into town, a stranger. He walked down the middle of the street like he was leading a parade, and after holding up traffic for three blocks, he settled at the Corner Diner at the crossroads of downtown. He had a cane in one hand, but didn’t use it, and on his back, he carried an old Army pack; it was as big as him, as big as a pair of three-year-old twins. He was older than most people in town, but he looked beat down, like maybe he wasn’t as old as he appeared, just too many hours in the sun and too many nights on park benches. His beard was long and white, or possibly blond, maybe even dirty. He could have been forty or sixty or eighty. No one wanted to get close enough to find out for sure. What struck us most about the man was, on his way into the diner, while crossing the sidewalk, the mysterious man kicked
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one of the monkeys. It was a small one, the man lifting it off the ground and into the diner window, where the animal smacked into the glass, slid down, then ran off in a wild screech. Already on alert because of the missing twins, everyone knew this was a person of interest. This was someone we had to keep an eye on. The man sat at the counter and ordered six sides of bacon, a triple stack of blueberry pancakes with whipped cream, plus a pot of coffee. When the waitress asked what type of toast he wanted, the man asked if they had something called “assaleeak,” which they didn’t. The waitress asked what it was, if it was like whole wheat, and the man said it was an Eskimo fry bread. The cook, listening from the kitchen, reminded the man he was in Ohio, that we didn’t serve Eskimo fry bread in diners in Ohio, and the man, standing up, talking to the entire restaurant, announced, “But yet you have thousands of monkeys running wild in your Ohio streets.” If anyone’s attention wasn’t on the man before, it was now, especially when he added, “That’s why I’m here.” The man, as he consumed his feast, told the story of the monkeys. They, like him, were from Alaska—Alaskan plains monkeys, he called them—and he’d been looking for them more than half his life. He told us that when he was nineteen, he was on an expedition in the northernmost part of Alaska, drilling into the ice, pulling out samples from deep down, water frozen thousands of years ago. He was with scientists, soil scientists, and he was there to carry things, to set up camp, and to hold a gun while they did their work. This was bear country, and food had been scarce. As it turned out, he needed that gun, as not only did a bear come, but worse, two bears—a grizzly and a polar—both about the same time. It’s rare they ever meet in the wild, but once in a while, they will, especially when they’re hungry. The man, as he told it, shot once at each bear, each coming from opposite directions. But what’s one bullet to a hungry, charging bear?
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Throwing snowballs would have done as much good. The bears converged in a rage, ravenous, a white giant and a brown giant, clashing on the white plain in pitch darkness. The man said he was able to escape, but the scientists, stuck in their tents—maybe awake, maybe not—had no chance. “And then the monkeys came and killed the bears?” someone asked. The man shook his head as if to say Of course not, shoving buttered toast, rye, into his mouth. And when someone asked what the fighting bears had to do with the monkeys, the man said that after he ran off—ran south for three days straight without stopping—he came across a village. It was a village by a river, twenty huts and large structure in the middle that served as a church, the village he and the scientists had gotten supplies at just a couple of months earlier. Around two hundred people had lived in this village—Inuits, Eskimos, some salmon fishermen who’d settled with a wife—and an entire lot of monkeys. But when the man returned, having just escaped the bears, he didn’t find any people, just the monkeys, the entire lot of Alaskan plains monkeys. There was no blood, no mangled people, no sense of a struggle. All of the villagers’ belongings—including everything they would need for a journey: packs, coats, snowshoes—were still there, too, in the huts, in their proper places. The people had not gone anywhere, not on their own power, and they weren’t to be seen. They’d, in the two months, disappeared. Moments after arriving, nothing but monkeys and empty huts around him, a helicopter landed in the center of the village—a routine supply chopper—and the man got on, told the pilot that there was nobody else there, nobody left. The pilot flew the man back to Point Hope, where he told the authorities the story. Another expedition was formed, first to find the scientists, or at least their camp, which they did, and then the village, which was
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empty—of both the people and the monkeys. In just a day and a half, all the monkeys had gone. Nobody believed the man about the monkeys, it turned out, as they couldn’t find any trace—no footprints, no droppings, no claw marks in the wood. The rangers thought the man was crazy, and who could blame them? Monkeys didn’t live in Alaska. But like he’d said, monkeys didn’t live in Ohio, either. When the man had heard about the twins, that a strange group of indigenous monkeys was perhaps to blame, he set forth, knowing he’d found what he’d been looking for. “And so what are they doing here in Ohio?” the cook asked. “Hiding from me,” the man said. For the first time in a week, there was hope. The man never said that he was going to find the twins, not even when he was asked point blank. He never said how he was going to deal with the monkeys, either. He seemed like a tough guy, though, in the fire and back a few times, and after years and years of looking for the monkeys, we all assumed he had a plan. Plus, he had that pack—bigger than two of him put together—and we pictured something in there, though none of us knew what. We just had a feeling things would get better, that everything would be all right. Maybe the twins would reappear. Our pets, too. And maybe, just maybe, we could keep our monkeys. The last part seemed unlikely, but we didn’t blame ourselves for talking about the old days, the way things were, when man and child and pet and monkey could walk down the street and not be afraid of one another. That’s what hope was all about: Imagining the bestcase scenario. Our best-case scenario was for things to be the way they were. The next morning, the door to the man’s motel room was found open, the man not inside. We looked for him in the
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diner, the rest of the downtown, and in the woods, and after an exhaustive search, went back to his motel room. Still no man, but in the bath tub we found his pack, his man-sized pack. We also found one of the shower curtain loops torn, and all the motel amenities—the soaps, the coffee pouch, the shampoo and conditioner minis—spread around on the ground. There had been a struggle, a standoff, more likely, and the man had lost. We waited till nightfall for the man to return, hoping he’d show up, our monkey problem solved, but he never came back, and the monkeys were still out there. Everywhere. We looked inside the pack then to see what the man had brought with him, but all we found were phone books, phone books from cities spread out across the Western states, from Juneau to Boise to Dodge City, phone books dating as far back as forty years. There were a change of socks and thermal underwear, and in the front compartment, an old tin cooking set. That was it. No weapons, no maps, no compass. The man seemed like he was a fraud. Like he was crazy. Like he didn’t know anything about any monkeys. Maybe he was a gifted storyteller, or maybe he just wanted a free breakfast and place to sleep (which he got). But in any case, we put his pack on the bed, turned off the light, shut the door, and went home, wondering if things were going to get worse. The next day, however, things got a little better. One of the twins, Talia Cheney, wandered into town, walking down the middle of the street, just like the old man had when he first arrived. Everyone gathered on their lawns, in front of their businesses, and on the corners, watching her amble, by herself, toward her house. No one said anything, no one offered her a ride. The entire five blocks, the three-year-old, now just a day from four, made her way home. She opened the gate leading to the walk, climbed the three stairs up to her wooden porch, and knocked to tell her
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parents she was back. When her mother opened the door and saw her standing there, without her sister but there nonetheless, she screamed, and we’re sure it was a scream of relief and of terror all at the same time. The mother, Jean Cheney, grabbed her daughter, made one pass with her eyes across the landscape, then closed her door. We didn’t hear from the Cheneys after that, not for over a week, and to this day, we’ve never found out what happened. Talia did not speak of it, or maybe she didn’t know. She could not tell where her sister was, if the old crazy Alaskan man had saved her, or if the monkeys were involved in any way. She was just back, a single child instead of twins, and from then on, that’s how we lived, with one Cheney girl instead of two. A curfew was imposed, and of course, no one let their children out alone, not during the day, not on the way home from school, definitely not after dusk. Pets were kept under lock and key, and even adults were told to travel in packs of three. The Corner Diner closed at nine instead of eleven, and the bars and pool halls shut down early, too, a three-drink limit imposed (though nobody kept track). No one went anywhere they didn’t have to, and if they did, they were armed, all concealed-carry laws unofficially suspended. We kept an eye at the end of town, hoping one day for Tanya Cheney to appear on the horizon, maybe even the old man from Alaska. But they never did. Talia turned four, then five, then six, and by then, nobody thought of her sister, the one who didn’t come back, but if they did, they kept it to themselves. By that point, all else seemed back to normal. More and more birds returned that spring from the south, and stray cats, once in a while, could be seen bolting into a dumpster, from the darkness of an alley. Kids started to play in their yards again, still in groups, but it was progress. The bars went back to closing at two, and while the Corner Diner had gone out of business, the chain coffee
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shop that replaced it stayed open all night, a few tables out on the sidewalk, right in the open, with no apologies to the monkeys or anyone else. And once, nearly three years after two Cheneys disappeared and only one came back, while I was walking home from the bar, I nearly stepped on something that darted from a dark doorway, across the sidewalk, behind the rear tire of a parked car. At first I thought it was a monkey, which scared the shit out of me, but as I continued onward, trying to keep my head down, I couldn’t help but glance back. I expected, again, to see a monkey, and in my head, I formulated an apology, something to say in case it made trouble. I’d had at least one too many at the bar, mind you, and this was the first time I’d been alone on the streets at night in years. An apology was the least I could do. It’s the only thing I could think of. Looking at me from behind the rear tire wasn’t a monkey at all, though, its little humanlike face staring up, its black mouth smiling like it knew more than I did. Instead, behind that tire, I spied the long face and long ears of a tiny rabbit, its nose twitching and its whiskers vibrating, its chest heaving. I’d never seen a live rabbit before—only in movies and in books—and it took me a moment to realize what was really occurring. I stopped walking and turned to go back, to tell the rabbit I was sorry for scaring it, that it was going to be all right, but I didn’t, at that moment as afraid of the rabbit as it was of me.