Chicago Noir

Monkey head by M.K. Meyers

Grand & Western

On the hottest summer night Perryman had experienced in Chicago or maybe anywhere, he sat on the front stoop and watched boys assemble on bikes at dusk in front of the convenience store. Assemble may have been too orderly a word. With the introduction of just one more boy, movement would ensue. When that occurred, the boys began their nightly circling of the block. Leisurely pedaling their tiny bikes designed for much smaller children, they could have been a circus act in the making, one in which jackals, without the guidance of a trainer, attempted the complicated task of filling time.

With each pass, the boys gained the collective confidence of a mob, which provoked them to widen their circle to adjacent blocks until they ran into another group of boys, also out exploring the limits of circumference fate had provided. When the groups met, they might skirmish, a little bantering and shoving, but surely, Perryman thought, they’d all get back on their bikes because it was too hot even to fight.

A hot cap of air that would not lift had descended upon Perryman’s block. Everyone who couldn’t get out of town was compelled to live under it. The entire neighborhood had moved outside. Standing or seated in metal folding chairs, in clusters or alone, the old, the very old, and women accompanied by their young arranged themselves and their provisions, coolers of drinks and food at their sides, as if preparing to lay siege to their own homes.

The men stationed themselves alone, one hip supporting them in a metaphor of what the men imagined themselves to be, what Perryman had once imagined himself to be, a pillar upon which their families stood upright and off the ground. Alone from each other and their families, at distances that looked prescribed, these men smoked cigarette after cigarette, like sentinels. In the intermittent dark spaces between streetlights, they resembled solitary fireflies. Around them the neighborhood might have been lifted whole from an earlier part of America’s short life, when people without TV or radio to separate them were reported to have mingled more. With time not yet fractured into tiny bits, they were said to have been more amiable and languid, and generally, although they didn’t live as long, were said to have had a better time.

Around 10:00 that night a tribe of boys from another neighborhood passed down the block on bikes and slowed. Dressed alike in white T-shirts and tan short pants, they’d dyed their sneakers to look cut from the hide of a leopard or giraffe. With a quick thrust, one of the boys stuck a rubber monkey head, broken and roughly abused, on top of the decorative hood ornament lifted from a Mercedes that Bobby Pando, the block’s drug dealer, had bolted to the nose of his Ford panel truck.

Everyone on the block knew Bobby Pando’s love for his Ford panel truck extended beyond the Mercedes hood ornament. For its side Bobby commissioned a mural of a deer, or an animal with horns, standing atop a hump of green. Perryman had developed a nodding acquaintance with Bobby, one predicated on the understanding that Bobby Pando did not live on Perryman’s block; Perryman lived on his. Often Bobby Pando strolled the block with his mate Stevie B. or the fellow called Mr. Panfish, and whenever he saw Perryman, he waved and called out, “Lou,” which was not Perryman’s name.

“Yo, Lou, what’s new with you?”

“Nothing, Bobby, nothing’s new.”

“Lou, if nothing’s new, that’s something.”

Once, gesturing him closer, Bobby cupped his hands to whisper directly into Perryman’s ear.

“Lou,” he said, “from now on, and I’ve talked this over with the guys,” he thumbed air in the direction of Mr. Panfish and Stevie B., “you have nothing to fear on this block from anyone my age.”

Perryman circled the day on his calendar, marking it: Limited Good News.

All that was left of the monkey head to let the world know it had been a monkey’s head was one ear, a patch of raggedy black fur running across the crown of its head, and two near-enucleated button-shaped oogly eyes. There was its ear-to-ear toothy grin, but that could have belonged to any species, a small bear, say, or raccoon. It was remarkably little evidence to go on, but someone called out, just after the kids left, “Look at the monkey,” and when no one disagreed, like the proving of many things, that first naming became what was thereafter called truth.

Coming back from whatever crime had recently engaged him, Bobby didn’t see the monkey head immediately, but when he did, being drunk and happy and carrying an aluminum bat, he took a swing at it. He missed badly, smashing in one of his truck’s headlamps and a chunk of its ornamental grill. All talk on the block ceased. Bobby had taken a big enough cut to fall down, and he did. The solitary men returned weight to both legs and approached the truck from all sides. Perryman moved with them.

A drunk’s mood is a delicate thing, and Bobby’s, as he righted himself from his fall, was no longer cheerful. Darkening, he turned to face the grinning monkey head. Always overeager at the plate — and elsewhere, too, some of the girls on the block muttered — Bobby swung again, this time harder, again falling and again landing his swing on the Ford’s ornamental grill, more of it now in the street around him than on the Ford.

With difficulty, he picked himself up, and the foreign tribe of boys, back from some skirmish, set their bikes down and cautiously, as Bobby still had the bat, joined the loose circle of men around him.

When Bobby Pando looked from boy to man to boy to man, Perryman looked with him and saw faces made even more passive and blank by the intensity of their curiosity about what might happen next. Bobby turned from them to what was left of the rubber monkey’s head, and looking into that face, pondering those oogly eyes and that ear-to-ear grin, appeared to be attempting to stick a finger in and take the temperature of the depths of some unfathomable confusion, perhaps his life.

There was just so much time a drunk needed to reflect on confusion, and Bobby, lunging sideways, took another cut, a good one, not at the monkey, but at the inner ring of boys. They easily danced back, swelling with a collective laugh, then settling, their mood now darkened, as they focused on the threat that was Bobby Pando.

But the gyro in Bobby’s head had gone all topsy. It spun him and he went down hard, bat skittering free with a diminishing sound, a clank, clank, clank of aluminum on asphalt that drew the outer circle of men closer together. If they wished they could have reached out and grasped each other’s hands.

Perryman checked his watch. It was close to 10:30, and Bobby, flat on the street, groped through shards of his ornamental grill and glass from his headlamp for the bat. Right then is when Perryman heard, and men standing around him later confirmed, a kind of hissing sound. The sound came from Bobby Pando. Some men said later, when they tried to explain, that it sounded almost like a song. “It undulated,” one fellow offered, “sort of like a song.”

Bobby tried to right himself. He was just beginning to assemble the complicated series of activities that would eventually, if accomplished in the correct sequence, enable him to stand, when a meaty kid, larger than the rest, evidently starting from down the block because by the time he reached Bobby he was traveling that fast, drove his bike over Bobby Pando. It was quick. A thump-thump as the bike passed over Bobby’s back. And the song? Then everyone heard it. To Perryman, it sounded uncomplicated as death might turn out to be, just a quickly diminishing gush as something sang itself free from Bobby Pando’s chest.

Panfish and Stevie B. assisted Bobby into his van, and Panfish slid into the driver’s seat to squeal away, not with anger or urgency, but insolence. They peeled off, the monkey’s head still in place, its one near-intact oogly eye facing forward.

When it was quiet again, or a city block’s equivalent of quiet, the women, first one, then all, gathered their children, folded chairs, and closed coolers. They moved slowly because it was far too hot to move otherwise, but they moved, retreated inside or to screened front porches, and Perryman did, too, a shadowy shape joining other shadowy shapes looking out.