MONKEY SHINE
Linda Meigel
Rat-ta-ta-tat! Tat-tat! Tat! Tat! I
close my eyes. Rat-ta-ta-tat! Tat-tat!
Tat! Tat!
Lifting
my feet off the bike's pedals, coasting, rat-ta-ta-tat!
Bobby Bonds—picking rhythm in the spokes of my bicycle’s wheel. Bobby Bonds—a major
record breaker and as far as I was concerned one of the best baseball players
in the Major Leagues, right up there with Willie Mays. He was never a Pirate or
a Phillie to their loss, especially the Phillies. If only they had Bobby Bonds they
would have been all right. Yep. A Pennsylvania team with Bobby Bonds would have
made my entire world all right.
Instead,
good old Bobby had to settle for the spokes of my bicycle's wheel, and sheathed
in a plastic card sleeve tucked in a shoebox beneath my bed.
“They
ain’t shut!”
I glance to the right, surprised,
yet not surprised to see Ethan riding alongside me; Ethan Jones on his brand
new Schwinn Sting-Ray, Cherry Picker red, better known as Jingles. He got the
bike for Christmas. It came with a little bell on the handlebar that his ma had
insisted on out of concern for her one and only child on the dangerously busy
streets of Bradford. Where a hen could lay her nest and hatch eggs before a car
would pass by.
My bike Old Blue was put
together from bikes folks were throwing out and spray-painted blue so it matched.
It prob-ably even had a few parts from one of Ethan's old bikes mixed in. It
was dinged, scratched up, all beat to hell, but it had a banana seat, a sissy
bar on the back, and butterfly handlebars; and that was all I cared about.
Ethan's
bike might have been new, but it was already losing its sheen. A few more
dings, scratches, it'd be caught up to mine in no time. My buddy Ethan believed
in breaking in a bike just like breaking in a baseball mitt, and he took his
beating all to hell, serious.
“They ain't shut now,” I shot
back, directing my gaze eastward, eying the sun peeking up over the tree line. “We're
gonna be late,” I observed matter of fact. Like I really had a handle on the
sun's position and what time it might be.
Ethan veered his bike inward,
forcing mine to swerve sharply to the left. “Let's ditch.”
He had suggested we ride our
bikes to school that day; meet up on Tractor Lane, a dirt road little over one
lane wide running parallel to Route 55. It cut through Donaldson's farm and ran
back of Gabrielsen's. Tractor Lane wasn't named formal, meaning there was no sign
to make it so. It just was—being the back road the plodding tractors took. It
used to be the main road way back before my grandfather was born; running its
course from the coal mine through Shantytown, which was the original Bradford,
ending out back of the current Bradford's Town Hall.
It wasn't the quickest way
into town, but it sure was the most interesting. The scenic route as my pa
referred to it, offering plenty of opportunities for popping wheelies and
skidding out.
“I don't know about you, but I
don't plan on spending my summer grounded.” With less than two weeks left of
school, what Ethan was proposing was nothing short of dirt-stupid.
“Billie, you're the biggest
chickenshit I know. Race ya!” he shouted.
CHAPTER ONE
WELCOME TO BRADFORD
POP. 753
That’s what the sign just outside of town read. The number
never changed. Not when little Sarah Parkins was born and not when old Mrs.
Taft died. I suppose, give or take, more or less, it was all the same.
You'll find Bradford nestled between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre,
right off the northern branch of the Susquehanna River. Route 55 west off of 81
will take you straight on into the heart of town, turning into Main Street, stretching
about a half mile lined with shops and service type businesses, ending in a
loop like the eye of a needle with the Town Hall smack dab in front of you. The
only way out—being the way you came in, pure and simple.
We had pretty much what any other small town would have.
There was the bank, Bradford Savings and Loan; a grocery store; the Five and
Dime; a hardware store; movie house; Pancake Cottage; a pizza parlor; and an auto-repair
shop, which was Pa's. My father could fix anything that had an engine,
including tractors and lawnmowers. He learned to fix cars in the army. He used
to tinker at home, but in the army he learned to fix them good.
What I remember the most about
Bradford is sparkling clean streets and old-fashioned light poles, hanging
baskets filled with cascading flowers adorning each and every one. The gazebo
in the park where folks gathered every year to watch the Memorial Day and
Fourth of July fireworks show, or listen to the locals playing music: sunny
days, kids riding bikes, playing kickball in the street, lemonade stands, building
forts in the woods. It was home, and I guess in some ways it still is.
Pa once said, “When
you're raised by a small town, you can’t never really leave it behind. It’s in
your blood. Small towns take care of their own.”
And that was especially true of Bradford. Regardless of their
circumstance, everyone had a roof over their head, food on their table, and
clothes on their back. “Small towns take care of their own.” Pitching in and charity was
a natural state of being: smiling faces, greetings from friends and neighbors,
everyone knowing everyone else. Yep, you might not have liked them all, but you
sure knew them.
Bradford was safe, like reaching home base during a game of Ringolevio.
It was no wonder folks looked the other way. I guess there’s always a price to
pay.
After school we headed on over to my pa's shop with the
intention of bumming a couple of bucks for a slice of pizza and a bottle of
pop, followed by some snake hunting down by the river; Ethan's itinerary for
the afternoon.
Ethan and I met when his parents moved to Bradford from
Williamsport when he was six. Ethan’s pa landed a job with some big insurance
company in Scranton and the small town of Bradford seemed like the perfect
place to live, with a twenty-mile commute and a zero crime rate. That is, if
you didn’t count the occasional shoplift at the Five and Dime. And that was
usually the result of some kid “sowing
his wild oats,” as my grandpop would say.
I could never figure out why anyone would risk it. If caught,
the Town Council would call a meeting. They’d make you pay back whatever you stole
and perform community service, like clean every glass bowl on every street
light in town. Then you were punished by your parents and that was the worst,
on account of how they were suffering from public humiliation at the time. The
bigger the punishment they laid on you, the more they saved face with the rest
of the folks in town.
Ethan was bigger than most kids and stronger too. Those who
called him fat learned early on that Ethan's fists gave back as good as he got,
so unless you were real stupid, nothing more was said. That didn't make him a
bully though. He minded his own business and mine too, because we were pals,
the very best of pals.
I leaned Old Blue up against the outside wall of the shop,
while Ethan kicked down Jingles’ kickstand. He rang the bell on his handlebar
as he was apt to do whenever he got on or off his bike.
“Down, Jingles, easy girl,” he commanded of the bike while
gently patting the black vinyl seat.
“Jingles. What a stupid-ass, wussy name for a bike,” I
remarked half under my breath.
Ethan glared at me, his eyes challenging mine. “What'd you
say?”
“I said—it’s a stupid, wussy, girlie name for a bike.”
Ethan spoke softly to his bike, “He doesn’t mean it,
Jingles.” Then back at me, “Do ya, Billie?” grinding my name out through
clenched teeth.
We locked eyes and I wouldn't budge. I meant it all right.
Jingles. What a faggot name. At least Old Blue had some dignity, like a
faithful old hound dog. Still, I couldn't think of any other kid that could
ride a red bike named Jingles, sporting a sissy girlie-bell, and not get his
ass kicked. And if nothing else, I had to give Ethan that.
My gaze slid to the side. “You know I don't mean nothing.”
I walked over to the shiny red bike, my hand hovering just
above the bell. I glanced back at Ethan—who nodded his consent—before ringing
that bell. “Jingle all the way, man.”
I found my father where he spent most of his time, flat on
his back beneath Pete Hodges’ old Buick.
“Pa?”
A pair of long, lean legs bent up at the knee as my father
propelled the creeper out from underneath the Buick. Green eyes punched through
a face streaked black with grease.
“What you boys up to?”
“Ethan wants to get some pizza and pop before we go snake
hunting,” I replied. Not quite sure why—I couldn’t just ask it for myself. Why—I
figured the odds of my actually getting the two bucks would greatly increase if
it were all Ethan's idea, which it was anyhow, yet, still.
My father rose, wiping his hands on an old grease rag which
dangled out from a once blue, now stained beyond any recognizable color,
coverall pocket. He smiled, white on black, shaking his head slowly. “I don't
know, Billie. You best head home. There's a storm brewing.” He sniffed the air,
nostrils flaring as he walked toward the overhead door.
Ethan and I followed, looking upward as he looked up at a
crystal-clear sky, deep powder blue, with not a cloud in sight. The wind had
picked up slightly, but that was about it. For all intents and purposes, it
appeared to be the perfect spring day.
My father sniffed the air once more before pointing to the
ridge of mountains lying off to the east. “You smell that? Like metal rubbing
wet wood. Storm's coming in from the east. You boys best hightail it. Tell your
ma, I'll be home for supper.”
Ethan threw me a glance, telling me he thought my father had
been sucking on one too many exhaust pipes. I knew different. Both my father
and grandfather knew things. That was a fact. So if either one of them said, “It’s going to rain,” then without a doubt, it was going to rain.
And so it did, coming in from the east, blowing hard; a whirlwind,
stealing through the Appalachian canyons and valleys like a bandit. A black
mass of swirling gases moving with purposeful intent ever closer to Bradford,
to home. Bolts of lightning flashed jagged, splitting the sky asunder, followed
by ground-shaking peals of thunder. A good storm was certain.
Ethan and I had just parted company. And as I pulled up the drive,
I could see my grandpop rocking on the front porch; prompting me to set my bike
into a long skid, fishtailing a whole mess of dust and debris up into the air.
When the dust cloud finally settled, I was left standing
astride my bike, handlebar in hand, grinning from ear to ear. I expected to see
my grandfather grinning as well, taking pleasure in my antics as he was apt to
do and reflecting back on his youth; except, he didn’t acknowledge my presence.
Just kept rocking and staring up at that sky as if he were in some kind of
trance.
Disappointed, I let Old Blue drop hard to the ground and
sprinted up the porch steps to plant myself at the top. I could have sat right
next to him in an old stick-chair my mother bought from some hill people a ways
back, but I wasn't looking to be tortured. At the time Ma bought it, she said
it served an “aesthetic purpose.”
“Well, it’s sure not
serving a sitting purpose,” Pa had said.
“It’s a portent,” Grandpop announced in a low ominous tone,
the only acknowledgment that I was even there, “a demon’s eye.”
I had never seen my grandfather act
so mysterious and it made me look up at that sky. “How so, Pop?” Ever since my
twelfth birthday a few months back, I figured I was old enough to drop the Grand.
His eyes remained fixed on rambling
black clouds painted with fiery streaks of red. “See that, boy? There’s blood
in the sky.” His arm extended, a bony finger pointing at what couldn’t help but
be seen. “That there’s a demon’s eye, all black and flashing, swirling in a
pool of blood, and it’s a coming. It’s a coming strong.”
The wind whipped up fierce as if to
offer proof to his words. Trees swayed and dipped, bending low to the ground,
losing entire branches. Little mini tornadoes filled with leaves and brush
raced across the yard. Even my heavy tire swing danced a wild jig.
“Hear that, boy?” Pop leaned down and
poked me with that bony finger. “Listen,” he whispered as if someone was going
to hear him and it wasn’t a right thing to give an ear to.
At first I didn’t hear anything save the whistling of the
wind and the rattling of the shutters on the porch windows.
“Listen,” he insisted.
So I did, real hard, and I’ll be damned there it was. A tingling on the wind, like I
could hear every wind chime on every porch in town. And that seemed a funny
thing to me being how our house was near about five miles outside of town, and
our nearest neighbor lived at least a half mile away.
“That there tingling you
hear . . . that’s the sound of the Monkeys coming. They come
dancing through the storm with silver bells tied about their ankles. That’s
your warning, boy. They’re a coming to steal the little ones. Mark my words. You
stay close to home. You watch little Georgie, cuz them Monkeys, they takes what
they want, and they ain’t never givin' back.”
Then he looked me straight in the eye
until the light that shone in his own got all dull and glassy, like from a
fever or the drink. It wasn't like he was my grandfather at all, but one of those
crazy folks you hear about roaming the city streets, muttering to themselves,
and waving their arms in the air.
Yep, Pop was touched in the head, been
so as long as I could remember. Ma said he was never the same after Grandma
died. At times he seemed perfectly fine. Then there were those times like now.
He’d stare off into space, acting all strange, “talking nonsense,” as Ma would say. Lately, he’d set off to
wandering. Ma would call Pa, and he’d have to fetch Pop home again.
Pop's eyes broke off first, focusing
back on the approaching storm. His mouth started moving like when he was working
tobacco, building it up into a fine wad of spit. Then the words came out,
hoarse sounding words. Low, so I could barely hear; and pulled, like they were
coming from deep in his throat, like he was casting a spell.
“Monkey Shine, Monkey Shine, don’t shine your light on me.”
It wasn’t the saying of it. Monkey Shine was a kid’s game,
and every kid in Bradford played it one time or another, myself included.
Images of a ritual game—I had long since outgrown—flickered through my mind: Children
standing in a circle holding hands; the Monkey in the middle, hands covering
his eyes, twirling around. The ring of children, circling counter to the chosen
Monkey, reciting:
“Monkey Shine, Monkey
Shine, don’t shine your light on me.
Monkey Shine, Monkey
Shine, I’m blind and I can’t see.
Monkey Shine, Monkey
Shine, you just let me be.
Monkey Shine, Monkey
Shine, please don’t eat me.”
At the end, the Monkey in the middle would remove his hands
from his eyes. He'd curl them up into claws. Growling, he’d chase after the
screaming, laughing children; claiming his victim, the new Monkey in the
middle. Yeah, we all knew it, we all played it, and just like “Ring Around the
Rosie,” we never knew where it came from.
No, it wasn’t the saying of it that set the hairs to dancing up
on the back of my neck. It was the way in which it was said.
“Ned!” Ma stood in the doorway wiping
her flour-covered hands on her apron. She was a small woman. I was her height
at the time. She had little bones like a bird, skinny, but real strong. She could
chop firewood and sometimes . . . when she and Pa had at
it . . . well, I was sure glad I wasn’t wearing his shoes that’s
all I can say, just like I’d hate to be in Pop’s shoes right then.
“You’re scaring the boy half to death
with that talk,” she pronounced firmly.
I could see that her hands were
shaking, and her face looked as white as the flour on them. I suppose I should
have given it some thought, but at the time it wasn’t about my mother or Pop.
It was all about me, and being scared of some stupid sing-song, Monkey Shine,
school-yard rhyme, was the last thing I'd admit to.
“Nahhh. . . . It’s
okay, Ma. I ain’t scared.”
“Billie, it’s, ‘I am not scared.’
Remember, ain’t, ain’t a word,” she
corrected with a smile. My mother had this thing about talking proper. She'd
say, “Talking proper shows folks you were brought up right.” She wouldn’t tolerate
cussing either, even from Pa.
“Now, both of you get in this house
before you get struck by lightning. Help Grandpop up,” she commanded.
I scurried to my feet, handing Pop
his walking cane before offering him an arm up.
My grandfather’s right leg got busted
up pretty bad during the Second World War or the “big one,” as he was apt to call it. He
narrowly missed a landmine; it blew a whole bunch of shrapnel into him just the
same. He got sent home afterwards.
Pa said it took Pop almost six months
to walk again. Said he used to be a large strapping man before he got all shrunken
down. “That’s what a war will do to you, Son. If you’re lucky enough to live
through it . . . you're never the same.”
My father served in ‘Nam, along with
my uncle Johnny, Pa's older brother. I was four years old when Pa came home.
Uncle Johnny never came home at all. My little brother Georgie was born Pa's
first year back. My mother claimed my father had only to look at her to set
Georgie baking in the oven.
The flour on my mother’s hands was a telltale
sign that something good was baking in an altogether different oven. One I
could appreciate. I set my nose to twitching the air.
“Did you make an apple pie, Ma?” I
asked hopefully.
Her floured fingers riffled playfully
through my hair. “Of course not, you think one is enough for all my men? I made
two,” she added with a sparkle in her eye.
I raced into the house like a madman,
all ready to gobble down a fresh baked apple pie, completely forgetting I was
supposed to tell her that Pa would be sitting for supper that night. My father
was the only mechanic in Bradford and with the exception of Sunday, the Lord’s
Day of rest, rare was the time he sat for supper.
“Billie-boy! I just put them in the
oven!” she called after me.
Georgie let out from school a half
hour following me. Without fail, you'd find my mother standing outside on the
front porch waiting for his school bus to arrive. It could be a storming
blizzard and there she’d be, paying no mind to the icicles hanging off her long
black hair.
She had a bird’s eye view of the bus
stop at the end of our long winding driveway, though as you came up toward the
house there was a blind spot; the cause being a humongous, overgrown rhododendron
bush. Ma would watch Georgie come up the drive, and whenever she lost him to
that bush, she’d hold her breath and tap her foot until she saw him reemerge on
the opposite side. She did the same with me up till I was eleven.
Pa had to tell her to stop. “Gracie,
you’re embarrassing the boy.”
My mother was like that. She worried
something awful.
And that was fine when it came to
Georgie. She could worry all she wanted about him. He was seven, Ma’s last, her
baby. Sometimes I'd goad him, call him, “mama’s baby,” just so I could
see his puny fists flying like a windmill. I’d laugh and he'd cry, because,
after all . . . he was just a baby. Ma would yell scolding, while
Georgie smiled all sneaky like, pleased that I was on the business end of it.
Heck, it was worth it.
Georgie come flying off the school bus
with papers in hand, waving, running down the pebbled drive. Ma smiled big when
he came out of the blind spot, calling out to him, “Run, Georgie, run! You have
to beat the storm!”
And sure enough it was upon us, growing
dark as night with fast rolling black clouds, bass booming rumbles, and ground
shaking peals; bolts of lightning streaked across a sky that looked ready to
burst wide open; all indications that the storm was certainly going to be the
winner of this race.
Squealing with mock fear, she urged
Georgie onward. “You have to race the rain, Georgie! You can do it! That a
boy!”
I stood looking out the screen door
just as the sky broke; swollen droplets of water splattered against pine
boards. Georgie bounced up the porch steps, leaping into Ma’s out-stretched
arms. She hugged him close while laughing and twirling him around. “You did it,
my little man. I knew you could.”
Together they walked into the house
with Georgie’s mouth flapping a mile a minute about all the junk he did at school,
leaving me to wishing I was a little kid again.
Pop sat at the parlor window watching
as the rain led an aerial assault, bombarding the porch and front yard with a
barrage of pellet-sized drops. I parked myself right along-side him.
There was the makings of a small pond
where the ground wasn’t quite level. I kept an eye on my bike, figuring it’d
make a pretty good measuring stick. Within minutes, the back tire was
completely covered with water.
I took to remembering when Georgie
and I used to play outside in the rain. “As long as there’s no lightning,” Ma would say. Once it thundered, we
were hauled back inside.
I remember one time in particular
when Pa was home. He came outside with a bar of soap, saying, “Might as well
put all this water to use.”
That was a grand time. I stripped
down to my skivvies, dancing barefooted and scrubbing in the rain. Eventually,
a buck-naked Georgie came toddling out, and before you knew it, so did my
father and grandfather; Pa in his boxers, and Pop in his red long john bottoms.
We were like a bunch of heathens out there, half-naked, with the exception of
Georgie that is, dancing and leaping about. Grandma was alive back then. She
and Ma stood out there on the front porch laughing until they were crying.
Yeah, that was back in the day, before
acid rain made its appearance on “Sixty
Minutes.” One story was enough to put an end to our rain dancing. When my mother
first told me about acid rain, I
thought one drop was enough to burn a hole straight through my skin. Till this
very day, if we get caught in the rain, my mother has them clothes washed
clean.
She came to stand beside Pop, bending
her head close to his, whispering in his ear, “Don’t you even be thinking about
scaring Georgie with those tales.”
Pop kept his eyes glued outside,
though he answered her just the same. “They ain’t tales, Gracie. You’ve lived
long enough in this town to know that. You watch them, girl. Watch them close.”
Ma shook her head and walked away.
I thought since Pop was old he was
naturally touched in the head. I later learned it was the secrets that made him
that way, kept for so long, hidden, buried. They try to come out when you’re
old. You can’t hold them back. You’re just not strong enough.
That’s how it all began, with the
storm; Pop’s portent.
That was the summer of ‘76, when the
Monkeys took Georgie.
