You gon run off? Well, gon, if you want.
Blood went thick behind his eyes. John Brown awaited him in the tree’s shade. His lined wrinkled body seemed to be cracking, fragmenting, into puzzle pieces of shadow. Hatch was not afraid. He needed to see, he wanted to see. He got down from his bike, slow and deliberate. His feet moved even more slowly over the gravel, as silent as house slippers. He opened the metal latch of John Brown’s gate, entered the yard, and let the latch close behind him with a clanging sound like that of a crowbar against a radiator.
See the monkey?
The day calm and vacant. Full afternoon heat. A few fluffy white buffalo clouds. John Brown’s face and chin jutted up at the tree, his eyes closed. He put movement in his body. Slow, a riverboat — plodding along blindly to some hidden rhythm, bent forward against the still and heavy heat, face blank and empty.
Hatch inched backward.
John Brown stepped from the tree’s shade into bright light, raggedly breathing, as if he had just completed a cross-continental swim. He opened his eyes — sun in the pupils, two horizons — and thrust his face close. To see Hatch better? Photograph his thoughts?
Boy, I ask you a question.
Flying spit peppered Hatch’s cheeks. Words hovered, rising, steamlike, from John Brown’s bright face. An ancient face crisscrossed with stiff wrinkles, rusty rails. The old man’s long rigid finger pointed up into thick foliage, where a wide blade of light slashed through the leaves. Hatch looked in wonder. Squinted into the flaming green.
The sky relaxed. Then he saw it, the monkey. Tiny eyes looking off into the clouds. Shoulders hunched up to its ears. Tail hooked over a branch. A hanging ornament.
The monkey shuddered, stirred.
My God! John Brown said. All gravity lifted from his face. His mouth fell open, unhinged.
The monkey took a deep breath, then extended his wings in the sun, which lit them like screens, put them on display. Hatch could see every tracing of vein — miniature roads — every bumpy muscle, and the delicate framework of bone under the skin. The wings were thin, almost transparent.
With effortless arrogance, the monkey began moving his wings backward and forward — all comfort and ease, the wings light and flexible — a timed and measured fanning that gradually built up to a quick and constant haze that caused the air around Hatch to quiver, his heart to beat without mercy.
Toilet Training
I
Few cars and fewer people. The sun perched, hawklike, on a rooftop corner. The sky blue and silent. Hatch gazed into the rich expanse of his shadow and felt challenged. Something flared up inside him. With spring in his legs, he bolted through the strange but familiar constellation of streets. A strong staying breeze, an uneven blowing at his ears. His eyes straining against their sockets, needles pricking his lungs, and the sidewalk grabbing for his ankles. He ducked inside a doorway and sat down hard on the stoop. Head bowed, feverish, he struggled within.
The sun grinned down. What up, homes?
Hatch removed the water pistol from inside his jacket pocket, shielded his eyes, and sighted along the barrel. Curled his finger around the trigger and gently squeezed. The sun steamed from the blast of cool liquid, trembled, but remained lodged on the rooftop. Frowned down into Hatch’s face and spewed sharp angles of light in retaliation. Hatch drew back, defeated.
A small figure moved in the hollow of an autumn afternoon. Jacket, a backward apron; sleeves tied around his waist. The sun waited, half-swallowed by the horizon. But he walked quietly, drawing reassurance into himself with each step, his sneaky shadow slithering along behind him.
II
Cosmo squats behind the hedge, claws dangling at his groin like wicked catcher’s mitts. The dome of his head visible above the green edge, a half-risen half-fallen sun. His hair crinkled and greasy like fried bacon. The sky brightens. Sunlight darts inside the hedge. Dungarees ignite, boots glisten. A rat scuttles through the grass, unaware.
In one movement, Cosmo crashes through the hedge, lands, froglike, and levels a claw. The rat is still and lumpy, a sack of loose rocks. Cosmo rubs his claws with joy. The rodent recovers and rushes for the grass. Too late.
Cosmo snatches up his prey, cranes his neck, and begins lowering the rat headfirst into his mouth. The rat’s front feet pedal in air. Buckteeth snap at Cosmo’s lips. But the front feet and the buckteeth and the head disappear inside Cosmo’s mouth, a fuzzy sword. A gurgling sound announces its descent. The butt wiggles. The hind feet stroke Cosmo’s cheeks. The tail whips.
Cosmo blinks, hard, squaring his mouth. The feet twitch a little. Cosmo brings both claws to his mouth and forces the rat inside, its tail gyrating between his lips. He sucks it up like a string of spaghetti, throat pregnant.
Carpet, coffee table, chairs, love seats, paintings, couch, and walls — all submerged in the liquid glow of television, which thins out, a few blue-white strands, ghostly ripples, the farther it travels from the source.
How come those Indians don’t pull out they arrows? Hatch asks. Is they chicken?
Nawl, Cosmo says. If they pull out they arrows, then those cowboys will come back to life.
If Cosmo regurgitates the rat, will it come back to life?
He scratches away spittle with a bladed fingernail, long, sharp, and shiny in the sunlight. Continues to squat, awaiting birth.
III
A thick fuzzy night. Coming out of the hot street, made hotter by a golden low-hanging moon and hundreds of blazing streetlamps. Hatch pushed the door open with his fingertips, the water pistol tight in his other hand. He entered and closed the door behind him. Wide-eyed in the darkness. Mamma was usually home to greet him when he made it in from school. On rare occasions Cosmo would arrive before her. At the far end of the room, French doors, open just enough for one to edge through sideways. A sliver of slanted light, a thin line of carpet luminous. The jacket still tight about his waist, Hatch pushed his keys deep inside his pocket, then wrapped both hands around the water pistol and walked toward the beacon of light. The dark put a hand against his back and shoved. He fell heavy to the floor, hammer to anvil, chin-first, pistol still in hand, the weapon plowing a short path through the carpet, raking up fibers. He shut his eyes against the pain. Spun his head and laid his jowl against the plush springy softness of the carpet. Shook inside as if some strange force were gathering.
Sometimes you just irritate the shit out of me. Cosmo started round.
Hatch raised his head and flicked open his eyes. Something stepped into the edge of his vision in the angle of light. He didn’t move. Followed the something with his eyes. Blinked in details. Old-man shoes. Sharply pointed. With whorls of perforation. Baggy pants with fine creases. Knee-length blazer. Silk polka-dot tie. Fedora. Hatch’s body trembled with something it could not let out.
Yo! In front of him now, glaring down.
The pistol was ice between his palms.
Yo!
I’m all right!
I didn’t ask if you was all right.
So.
Say what?
He didn’t say anything.
Did you say something?
Nawl.
Cosmo flexed his soles, stretching the leather, talons threatening to burst out. I didn’t think so. He threw the door wide. Shadows fled. Hatch waited until he was absolutely certain that Cosmo had quit the room, then squeezed his eyes tight.
IV