At the Heart of the Universe (44 page)

Thinking,
It's a way of making contact with her again now. Of starting to repair the damage.

“Pep? Shall we?”

He senses Clio has shifted, and is doing something new. “Why not? Let's go!”

“
Yes
!” Katie cries. “Thanks, Mom, thanks, Daddy. C'mon!”

They start up the path toward the monkeys.



Soon they are farther up the mountain than on their first try. Declivities. Crevasses, sheer ups and downs. Long stretches through jungle, longer stretches up flights of ancient stone steps carved into the mountain like characters into oracle bone, steps so small that only Katie and Xiao Lu can put their feet straight out on them while Pep and Clio either have to go up on tiptoe or place their feet sideways like, Pep thinks, a couple doing ‘The Stroll' at a sock hop at Mount Carmel Church when as a teenager he first fell in love with being in love.

It is not a well-travelled way. Yet there are signs that at one time, when there were hundreds of temples on the mountain, it was. Every so often the path opens up to an astonishing sight. Once, a waterfall above a thundering stream, spanned by the remains of an arched stone bridge to a toy pagoda perched on an escarpment of granite. The jungle shrouds it all around. Xiao Lu leads. This stretch of path is badly neglected. She carries a large leather bag and takes out of it a long, wide knife, like a machete, and starts hacking through the bush.

The path shadows the stream, steeply up. The mountain, like a live beast, rises. The stream, fighting the rise and riding it too, carves more deeply into gray granite veined with lava-black basalt, and woven with stretches of light-colored and water-worn coral rock they've seen in temples and museums from Beijing to Chengdu. It looks friable, but is not. Soon they are so high up that they can see, on a nearby peak overlooking a sheer drop down thousands of feet, a crest of unrelenting snow.

Sometimes they cross the stream on log bridges. Clio looks at Pep anxiously, but he assures her that he is fine. His heart is beating with the slow, steady pulse of a pachyderm, his balance is exquisite, his fear is gone. He crosses effortlessly.

They stop to drink from the stream. Willow and bamboo grow where the rock gives way to soil. Filtered noon light sprays over the splashes of water, creating doomed tiny rainbows. The moisture and heat send up the scent of rich earth, mixing with that from succulent boughs of eucalyptus. No one talks. Clio finds herself staring at the machete Xiao Lu has placed on a flat rock as she washes her face and armpits. She'd like to wish it away. They move on.

After walking for a few more minutes Xiao Lu stops and signs to them to listen. At first they hear nothing. Then, faintly, screeches, like the distant sounds of big birds. Xiao Lu gestures to them to hurry. Katie jumps up and down and grabs Pep and gives out a screech of her own. She follows close behind Xiao Lu through a stretch of eucalyptus and fern, and then into a narrowing corridor between two high cliffs.

The screeching in the trees gets louder. Xiao Lu gestures to them to hurry on ahead.

Katie follows right after her, digging into her little backpack for the crackly bags of Goldfish, hurrying to get them into her hands so the monkeys will be attracted. She walks in the direction of the sounds, Goldfish in open palms like an offering.

High on a limb a monkey appears, screeching loudly, waving his arms wildly, as if calling his friends to meet these new travelers in bright-colored shirts and hats. Before anyone can say a word, another appears, and another, and soon there are ten, twenty, thirty, more, jumping around the intertwined tree limbs like frantic kids at a playground. They are small, about the size of the Macys' little cockerpoo, their fur in shadow a cinnamony color, but in sunlight a bright, fluffy blond. They have only stubs for tails, and little half-moon rims for ears poking barely out of their furry heads. Their faces, set in bowls of blond fur, have pug noses and thin, expressive lips. Eyes, large as sand dollars and set close together, give them the look of clowns, puzzled by the colorful little circus troupe of humans who are standing there staring up at them with such happy looks on their own pasty faces.

“They're so cute!” Katie shrieks, walking toward the first cluster.

The lead monkey, a big, tough, scarred male, looks down on them curiously, and with a cry launches himself out of the tree and onto the back of the lead human.

Pep feels the weight of the animal and at first is scared but then laughs. And then he hunches over—wiry fingers are searching here and there all over his body. He puts both his hands up to hold on to his hat, which the monkey is trying to get in under. But while his hands are occupied with his hat the monkey switches to the pocket of his Hawaiian shirt. Before he can slap it away the monkey rips the whole front flap of the pocket off the shirt and tries to dig for whatever is inside—his stash of aspirin and Ambien—and then he throws them away and lunges for the fanny pack.

Scared and furious, Pep smashes the monkey in the face. It flies onto the ground and leaps back up into a tree. “Watch out! They're vicious!”

Now another monkey is at his fanny pack. Pep swings at it with all his might but it's quick, and he misses, spinning around and barely staying on his feet.

The monkeys are at the others. One lands on Clio's backpack and tries to claw its way into the contents. Clio screams and spins in circles to try to throw it off.

Katie is screaming horribly—“Help, help, help!”—curled up in a ball, her hands over her head, trying to hold on to her bright-yellow beaked cap. The monkeys are like vultures over a corpse, ripping into her backpack for the glittery packets of Goldfish, trying to rip the whole pack off her back.

Pep and Clio rush to her. Pep bashes at the monkeys in rage, Katie screaming and Pep trying to cover her up with his big body and feeling Clio standing astride them both, screaming. He looks around and sees her, hat gone and backpack hanging, smashing at the monkeys with a big branch, but for every one that falls back, another comes forward, clutching, shrieking, trying to bite, clawing to get.

Total chaos. Pep gets up to help Clio, but a monkey slips in onto Katie, who screams louder. Pep dives on her again to protect her, shouting to try to scare them away, trying to beat them off with fists, going on instinct to save his little girl.

All at once Xiao Lu is there, swinging her machete, hacking at the monkeys.

Blood spurts out of one. Shrieking, one arm hanging, it scurries off to the base of a tree and cries out horribly.

The others seem even more enraged by the blood—screeching so loudly that the sound is overwhelming, echoing around the narrow rock corridor the monkeys have chosen—and attack even more viciously.

Xiao Lu is shouting, swinging her machete, ripping at monkeys in a wild fury.

Clio is terrified that the blade will hit her. She tries to protect herself from her, scurrying away like a desperate crab, leading her away from Katie.

But Xiao Lu is swinging with skill and power. She slashes another monkey, and another. Clio manages to beat back a third one with her stick. It flees, and she's able to stand and, for a second, assess.

Another monkey, the large, scarred male, has leaped down onto Xiao Lu's back and bitten her. Xiao Lu gives a bloodcurdling scream and drops the machete. It clatters on a rock. She twirls around so that the monkey is thrown off. It jumps around on the ground and then races again toward Xiao Lu. On her knees, she shields her face, her chest.

Clio grabs the machete and as the monkey leaps up toward Xiao Lu swings the blade with pure fury and catches the monkey with a slashing blow to his leg. He cries out and falls, blood running out, dark blood.

There is a moment of quiet. The pack of monkeys retreats back up into the trees. They watch as the big male staggers toward Xiao Lu, who is huddled against a boulder. He gets closer and closer. Clio sees the fear in Xiao Lu's eyes and, as she looks directly at Clio, the plea. Clio slashes at the monkey, who slips away but falls.

Clio corners him and, staring down into the beast's clown face, starts screaming and hacking at him, cursing and crying at the top of her lungs. The monkey is on his back, staring up at her. There is still a light in its eyes, but with a final vicious blow Clio splits its skull. The pink brains splatter on the gray rock of the mountain. There is blood everywhere—on the machete, on her hands and shirt and shorts and arms and legs. Shocked, overwhelmed by the killing, she stares at the bloodied machete in her hands.

She lifts her head. The other monkeys are bouncing around up in the trees like big swarming bees, screeching and gesticulating. One of them shakes Xiao Lu's umbrella like a spear. From their perches they start to throw things down at the humans—branches, bunches of leaves, their own feces.

Pep and Katie surround Clio. Except for scratches and ripped clothes, they're unhurt, amazed, relieved.

“Jeez, those are bad monkeys! And look—one of 'em has my
hat
!”

High in the dark green, in the midst of the brown-golden patch of monkeys, is a flash of bright yellow, Katie's beaked cap with the chicken logo. A monkey is waving it back and forth, as if threatening them with it.

“Oh my,” Clio says, “look.”

Xiao Lu is propped up against the cliff. Her bag is in tatters, spilling ripped rolls of calligraphy and broken brushes. One arm hangs limply at her side. Her shirt is torn, bloodstained. She stares up at Pep, her last thought:
black fire cursed mountain...



Pep has inspected Xiao Lu's bloodied arm and back. There are bite marks and a long wound—starting in her back, going around her shoulder and down to her elbow. By applying his clean spare socks, iced with stream water, as pressure dressings, he has managed to stop the bleeding. He has cleansed the wound with alcohol, applied a whole tube of Neosporin antibiotic ointment, and is now finishing up with a startlingly white sterile gauze dressing, thinking,
God knows what those monkeys have been chewing and doing.
Finally the super first aid kit that Orville Rose put together for him has come through. Xiao Lu seems a little confused, maybe in shock.

The dead monkey looks enough like a person that they keep Katie away from seeing it, the split skull, the hacked-off arm, the gashed belly—on top of the attack itself, the sight would be too traumatic for her. The other monkeys have vanished, their high-pitched cries rising and falling in waves, crashing against the big silence of the mountain. Pep has rearranged the monkey into a rough peaceful order in the bottom of a shallow grave they dug with the machete.

“Can I see him now, Dad?”

“Not a good idea, Kate-zer. The way you love animals, it'll upset you a lot.”

“No, it won't. Mary always says it's the law of nature when animals kill each other. I've seen 'em there, on the farm. I'll be okay.”

They let her take a look. Standing between the two of them, Katie is somber, and silent, but dry eyed. Finally she sighs. “One thing,” she says, staring down at the grave. “Those monkeys are no joke!”

Clio and Pep smile. Pep covers the corpse with dirt, starting with the face.

Katie stares at Clio, whose hair and clothes are covered with monkey blood and dirt, her freshly washed face and arms, in contrast, a strange lily white.

Clio smiles and takes Katie's hand, and Pep's, and they go to Xiao Lu, who is still propped up against a rock. “Shay shay,” Clio says, “thank you.” Through gestures she goes on, “You saved her life, and our lives too.”

Xiao Lu nods, bows her head, understanding, saying, “Shay shay.”
She goes on speaking frantically, gesturing with one arm, hoping they understand: “I'm so sorry! I've been here so many times and they never attacked me! I don't know why, this time—maybe because you're so strange to them, the bright colors, the white skin. I'm so, so sorry!” She puts a hand over her face, clearly ashamed and shocked.

Clio gestures to Pep and Katie to kneel down and reach out their hands and take Xiao Lu's good hand and shoulder to make a circle. For a moment they are silent.

Then they drop hands and Xiao Lu tries to get up to lead them out but with a cry of pain she slumps back down. She seems confused, and gestures that she can't walk.

“We'll have to carry her,” Pep says. “The fireman's carry—from Boy Scouts.”

He shows Clio how to hold her hands so that each hand grabs one of his wrists, and his hands grab hers, making a kind of seat between them. They indicate to Xiao Lu that she has to sit on the hands, and with Katie's help she does. They start back down the mountain, the new mountain down, the dark mountain of danger defied, a mountain of late afternoon, of dying summer sun.

The Fireman's Carry doesn't work—the path is cut for single file. Pep indicates that he'll carry Xiao Lu on his back. Clio asks if he's well enough for that. He says he feels fine. They help her up. She slumps down on his back, one arm around his neck, the other in a sling made from a shred of his shirt. She feels surprisingly light.

The rains catch them. They are limping along down the mountain when the day's monsoon comes up suddenly. At first the cool drops feel good on their bruised and cut skin, and on their sweat-soaked clothing, and they keep walking. But the sun is blocked by the storm clouds, and the wind seems to come from Mongolia. The cool rain starts to feel cold.