Butterneck. Jesus.
She just laughed and finished cleaning her revolver and put it back into the box.
You’ve been talking to my mom, I said.
She locked the box and threw away the key, which was good because just that morning I’d gotten out of bed and made my coffee in the dark, heavy with the knowledge that if I had a gun, I’d stand in front of my easel and finally get something interesting on the canvas.

You actually fucked him, I said. What was up with that, I said.
I forget, she said.
Your mom said to call her, she said.
It’s your dad, my mom said when I called.
You told whatshername about Butterneck and so on, I said.
What is it, a state secret, she said?
What about dad, I said.
I flew out to Portland and rented a car and drove over.
On the drive out, I gave up on finding a good radio station and thought about painting. The problem was, I had sold my very first painting. I started painting with nothing in mind, just for the hell of it, and a friend of a friend sees the pictures, abstract oil paintings, likes them and they are selling and suddenly I’m a painter.
I watch the road but I see my paintings. I see one in particular. Still in the beginning stage, zinc white and prussian blue scribbled over the surface of a fairly big canvas, meter wide and something more than that tall, paint mixed with quartz sand, something I like to do for texture. In fact, I prefer mixing in sawdust, but I was out of sawdust and had this big bag of sand.
The sand gives it an interesting texture too; it’s not… I can’t get the decay look I’m going for, with sand, but in the beginning I thought it would work on a different level, from a different angle. But when I tried to scrape the canvas with the palette knife, it didn’t work like the sawdust had and that frustrated me and then someone came in and watched me work and I tried to explain something to them and suddenly I had this out of body experience, saw myself standing there and had this profound sensation of, who am I trying to kid?
So my dad’s monkey problem actually came at a good time is what I’m saying.
Hey, Butterneck, my mother said.
Your dad’s watching the TV, she said.
You actually really have monkeys? I asked her reflection in the mirror on the ceiling above her head.
Like I said, in the garage. She moved her head a little in that direction, but it was near bedtime and she was already in the iron lung, which restricted her mobility. But he can’t take care of them anymore, she said. He has to have them six more months to qualify for the government apery phaseout subsidy.
He started an apery so the government would pay him to stop, you’re serious.
You hungry? I haven’t been shopping. Check the freezer if you’re hungry, maybe something in there. Out of the way Spooky or we’ll give you a dirt nap, she said to the cat.

Do I have to go in there right away? I said.
I didn’t go in today, since you were coming. Plus I was tired. So they’re hungry. They get cranky. I mean, they’re cranky as is. You’ll want to wear the suit.
So I left her in the living room with her hissing bellows breathing for her and went out to what had been our garage. The shop. The shed, whatever. Ceiling high enough to accomodate the Winnebago they had planned to travel the country in after retiring, until my mother’s health went one way and my father’s another.
Climbed into the suit, this robust biohazard suit hanging there on a rusty nail. They were in locked cages and the windows were barred but the door to the garage had still been reinforced and had additional locks installed and an automatic closing mechanism added up at the top, because these were hardcore monkeys. They could probably go through sheetrock like I don’t know what if they got out of their cages and then what.
I unlocked everything. I waved at the house, sure my mom was watching from one of the mirrors she had set up all over, and went inside.
Four dozen hungry rhesus monkeys. What else can I say? Four dozen deliquent monkeys migrating from apery to apery, cynical, or jaded or whatever monkeys get. Full of hatred, full of new tricks they picked up at each new place they stayed, safecracking, petty robbery, and so on.
You get filthy rich like this: the government is phasing out monkey breeding and pays you to stop raising them. In order to collect that money, you have to establish a history of monkey farming. The government does not, however, track what happens to the monkeys once a farm closes down. So monkey farms are established over and over again with the same monkeys. They are a traveling circus, staying in one place the minimum length of time for a farmer to qualify for the benefits, then moving on.
They seem to know all of this, and resent that they aren’t getting their fair share..
I could hear my mother saying, They can smell fear as I entered the room.
Absolute silence. The silence when a pandemonium stops suddenly.
Four dozen pairs of monkey eyes on me, minus an eye here or there, cause, you know.
I fed them. Food into slits into trays. They threw some at me, fuck you, go hungry then. Most ate it, though. I hosed down the floor as well as I could. I had never smelled anything that bad.

I showered in the suit outside the garage and left it hanging on the wall, then showered in the house three times before I ran over to the supermarket for food.
Need anything else? the cashier asked me.
Thanks Carol, I said. I’m fine.
Yeah, she said.
See you later, I said.
Two weird things there: a woman talking to me and me noticing.

When I got home the ice cream I had bought at the store ended up melting in the sink because I had to go find my father.
My mother said, your father’s wandered off.
You still awake, I said.
The flashlight on the freezer in the garage. That has the best batteries, she said.
I got the flashlight and didn’t think to put the icecream into the freezer.
I had always been afraid in the woods at night. But this time it was easy. Harmless. The woods were harmless. I knew where the scary animals were locked up. I had the key in my pocket.
I listened for a while. First, only the wind in the evergreens. Then, the crack of someone stepping on a dry branch. After a few minutes I found my father in that direction.
Yo, dad.
You can never have too much wood son, he said. He had an armload of firewood.
Let me help you with that, I said. Not even in July can you have too much firewood, I said.
Gather your own goddamned firewood, he said. Who are you anyway. If you’re a government inspector the monkeys are in the monkey barn. The apery.
I’m your son, I said.
He looked at me. Of course you are. Losing your sense of humor? he asked. Oh man, if you want funny, you ought to see those forms I had to fill out for this project. 1040 instructions are nothing compared to that. Compared to those forms, the 1040 is a laundry list.
I gathered wood and we walked back to the house and I waited until he fell asleep before I went to bed. Because, you know. I sat there in the dark looking out at the quiet woods, listening to the bellows of my mother’s iron lung, listening to my father talk himself to sleep.

I’m seventy five years old and I have apnea. You know what apnea is? she said. You know who should get apnea? Premature babies get it. Infants get it. My doctor tried to call it senile apnea. There’s one senile person at my house, I told him. And it ain’t me. I’m tired all the time, she said. I’m sick of being tired all the time.

Two more weeks of this and I would be able to sell the monkeys and my parents could cash their government subsidy check. I’m going to the DVD place, I said.
Monkeys fed?
Monkeys fed, I said.
Hello I’m Tiffany rang up my DVD rentals after I filled out the application form and showed her my license and she dialed the number I gave her to verify it and my father answered and told her some sort of wiggy shit of some kind and I said That’s my father judging from the expression on your face, I’m taking care of him and helping phase out a project he’s working on and she said okay.
And she said, so that explains why I haven’t seen you around here before. Because I would’ve noticed you.

And my mom likes flowers so I got a few pots of azaleas because they grow good in the soil out there and I missed them where I lived and got good service from Heather at the nursery.

Within a week I’m getting my groceries half-price, DVDs for free and tulip and daffodil bulbs are planted up both sides of my parents’ driveway, and it’s a hundred yards from the road to back in the trees where their house is. Meaning, those are a lot of bulbs. Because, you know what? There’s just something about me.

They don’t know what. Just, something. Something mysterious. Charisma.

Don suit. Unlock door. Enter, bar door, relock door, all locks. Pocket keys. Zip pocket. Put water into water containers. Put food through slots into trays. Hose down floor. Examine monkeys for wounds and sores, from a safe distance. Examine the coded nylon bands on their wrists to verify identity.

Don’t give them names, my mother said. Don’t give them names, my father said independently of that. He was in and out. Some days, he knew who we were and what the deal was with the monkeys. It’s easier to part with them when it’s over. I was thinking, I could adopt the fuckers and make them my heirs and name each one after myself and name and it would still be easy to say goodbye.

It turned out to be easier than I expected.

It was the routine that nailed me. Get up, slide mother out of iron lung, feed parents, feed monkeys, hose down apery, hose down suit, shower, fuck Carol before her shift started at the supermarket, shower, run over and fuck Tiffany on her lunch break, run home give everybody lunch, shower again, fuck Heather after she gets off work, run home, feed everyone again.

How much do you know about pheromones? Did you know the pheromones in monkey piss make you irresistable to women? The pheromones in monkey piss make you irresistable to women. And this as well: the pheromones in women drive caged monkeys wild.

You can probably see where this is heading.

The monkeys woke me up at night, screaming. Bedlam. I walked out to the apery, warm thoughts of Carol, Tiffany and Heather mixing in my head with the knowledge that it was not a sustainable situation so enjoy it while it lasts.

The old one, Moses because he looks like the Ben Hur actor, Charleton Heston, white hair, white beard, he was hanging from a hook in the ceiling, hanging by the strap on his wrist. I saw him through the apery window. Everyone else was rattling the bars of his cage. Brutus was using his food tray, raking it back and forth along his bars. Then Clayton picked it up. And Caesar Romero. And Shatner.

So I went in without the suit. And I forgot to relock the door. Moses was limp, you see what I’m saying? And the rest were locked up tight. Except he wasn’t, and they weren’t.

Ten monkeys hit you at once, you fall down. They were out the door in three seconds, all of them. I expected them to vanish forever into the woods, but they ran straight into the house. I had left the front door open, because it locked automatically when you closed it.

I got up in time to see the last monkey disappear into the house.

The door closed behind him. My father started yelling something. Monkeys screeched.

The door wasn’t one of your kick-innable doors. I tried, but it wasn’t. What’s in the garage, I thought. Freezer. Winter tires. Coats. Shoes. Camping chairs. Barbecue. Excellent idea, let’s break the door down with a tank of compressed gas.

Finally found the chainsaw and fired it up. Cut the door out around the lock and swang it in. The refrigerator door was open and five or six monkeys were going through it. They all knew what a chainsaw was though. When you up against monkeys, a chainsaw is not bad to have, remember that.

My father wandered out of the back of the house with a bunch of monkeys on him. He was all bloody. I made them jump off. Rev that sucker up and you have their attention. My idea was to herd them into a room and lock it off and I don’t know, knock-out gas or something.

My ears were ringing from the chainsaw, so it is understandable that it took me a while, a brief but indeterminate length of time, a “while”, brief but too long, to hear the ones inside the iron lung.

Their faces were pressed up against the thick glass portals. They were screeching, you never heard someone screech like that. My mother was dead by then. They fucked up the bellows somehow and they just kept pumping air into the iron lung, increasing the pressure, which for my mother was like one long exhale.

The machine was making a sound like machines make in movies before they explode. I unplugged it and the air slowly leaked out. The monkeys inside were dead or unconscious. I had the rest herded into the back room, and two monkeys here in my mother’s iron lung. I was conflicted, as you would be. I mean, the iron lung, can’t beat it as a place to confine a monkey. Thick steel, armored glass. On the other hand, locking monkeys up with my mother’s body seemed disrespectful.

The ambulance arrived at the same time as the police. I told the police the monkeys were dangerous and just shoot them if they gave any trouble. The ones in the iron lung might be faking it, I warned.

So what happened, sir, exactly? A police officer asked.

You want the long version or the short version, I asked. I’m kind of in shock. Let me take a breath.

Another police officer came over. A woman. Nice black hair. Badge. Gun, radio, all that other shit on her belt. Bullets and so on. Take it easy, Johnson, she said to the other one. Let me talk to him.

Hi, she said. I’m Officer Cook.

One ran off into the woods, my father said. I’ll go find it. He wandered out into the dark with a flashlight.

We should dress those wounds sir, said a medic.

Attend to her first, I’ll be back, he said.

Hi, I said to Officer Cook.

Call me Brenda, she said.