Photo by Jeremy Bezanger on Unsplash
“Who doesn’t fucking love monkeys?” is what I should have said.
Or even just, “Who doesn’t love monkeys?”
But, what I said was, “Who doesn’t love fucking monkeys?”
Christ, it was just an error of inflection, but now every five minutes some goddamn pervert pulls into the gas station wanting to see monkeys fucking. Or worse. I swear to God — and that’s not just an expression, I mean, I literally swear to almighty God — that I had no idea there were people who were into that.
I’m not even supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be at UC Irvine right now — right now — starting a PhD in Agronomy. (See now, I would normally, feeling the way I do right this minute, have said a PhD in fucking Agronomy, but Christ, that would probably bring a busload of weirdo wheat fetishists out looking for whatever the fuck they would want to see done with wheat.
Surely it can’t be the profanity, per se. I know shouldn’t swear so much, aloud or in print, but, I mean, what… shoot? I don’t smoke (anything), I hardly drink, I’m almost never rude to anybody, and I’m fucking stuck here in this goddamn — Lord, maybe actually God-damned? — filling station and roadside zoo — I swear to God that it’s a real thing — for who knows how long, no end in sight, so what the fuck else am I supposed to do? Seriously, just being objective: you’ve got an actually well-meaning, decent guy who wants to go to even more school so he can make next to nothing (by prevailing God-Bless-America standards) as an agronomist (and no, I’m not going to fucking explain what that is if you don’t already know, because goddammit and you can fucking google it) and yet here I still — still — am, babysitting this decrepit-ass, two-pump gas station and taking care of this raggedy-ass barn full of monkeys, snakes, and alligators. And a one-eyed donkey named Old Wednesday. And a two-headed turtle named Lucky — Ain’t that just so fuckin’ funny? — that as God is my witness is actually alive and in that grubby-ass pond but won’t ever fucking come out when a tourist pays the five bucks to see it. No fucking refunds. Sorry. Shit out of Lucky. And that’s not my wonderful rule, either, so, please God don’t be blaming me for that. I just mind this fucking place and take the money and hose down the pens and feed those bored, evil-tempered fuckers. And I’m sorry for all the profanity. God almighty.
Seriously, though, it has begun to occur to me that it might just be the, you know, taking the Lord’s name in vain stuff.
So, first, no, obviously I don’t believe in bullshit like that. I might not be one of the obnoxious brand of atheists (who’re really just to religion what gay conversion therapists are to gay sex), but I’m not a moron, and I don’t believe the God of Creation sits around (or floats around, or whatever) listening to every bit of blasphemy I toss off and deciding how to punish me for it.
And, yet. Here I am.
Like the blog post, it seemed like such a good idea at the time. Uncle Rudy said if I would come help him with the filling station and the zoo for a year, he’d pay off my student loans and I could go off to Irvine free and clear. Uncle Rudy is 96, and a giant of a man. My grandfather’s brother. He was in the War. My grandfather was a Methodist preacher. We’re all Methodists. Except for Rudy, who may be something else. We signed a contract. A no-shit, actual contract. stay for a year and help him run the filling station and the zoo, and he pays my student loans. Everybody says he’s rich. I think maybe he’s the devil. I’m thinking maybe there’s invisible ink on that contract that says something like, “Hail Satan, you are mine forever.” Not really. But maybe.
Nobody comes down this road anymore. We hardly sell any gas. There are Twinkies on the rack older than me, and the Coca Colas are so old I think they probably have actual coca in them. The zoo is the only thing that ever brings anybody in.
Turns out, Rudy’s idea of helping out was me doing all the work in the station and the zoo. He sits in his house in the woods behind the zoo and watches Judge Judy and Fox News all day. Once a day, at closing time — 5:30 sharp— he comes out of his house to take whatever’s in the till. It’s always jack-shit, and he always complains. Lately, he’s made dark comments about bringing me in not having been such a good idea after all. Like it’s my fault that this shit-hole monkey Valhalla isn’t making a fortune. I’m thinking, oh God, what if he stiffs me? Who’s going to make a damn-near-hundred-year-old-seven-foot-tall-World-War-Two veteran pay his punk-ass great nephew’s candy-ass college debt? So, I think, I can fix this. I’ll post about this freaky-ass retro roadside zoo in the middle of freaking nowhere, and every rich hipster in Brooklyn will want to post selfies with the monkeys and the two-headed turtle. We’ll be rich. Or at least Rudy will, and he can buy out my academic indenture.
“Who Doesn’t Love Fucking Monkeys?”
I posted that over a photo of the zoo, shot right at dusk, golden twilight on the long, low building, a luminous sky over darkening pines, World Famous Dixie Highway Roadside Zoo of Wonders painted in flaking black letters a yard high on the white corrugated metal wall, flanked on the left by an American flag and the right by a Rebel flag. You can’t make this shit up. It was by-God-National-fucking-Geographic. “Who Doesn’t Love Fucking Monkeys?”
Maybe I’ve had a stroke. That could explain it. I flooded the hipstersphere with the post. If you post it, they will come. Good God.
As soon as I saw the first wild-eyed comments, I took down the post. That was yesterday. I pleaded with every deity I could think of (even praying to the spirit of John Wesley, like some kind of cargo-cult Metho-Catholic), begging them to nip it before it was too late. But of course it was already too late. My psychotic blurt had already been screen-shotted and Instagrammed and Tweeted and now it’s everywhere, an obscene fly caught in cyber-amber.
I was sick with worry all morning, but by this afternoon I started to think maybe my prayers had been answered. Then, just after five o’clock the first two cars pulled up. Out of state. Not there for gas or antique Twinkies. By the time they’d rolled to a stop, I already had the lights off in the filling station and the front door locked. I went out the back door, locked it, and came in here with the animals. I mean, I figured somebody needed to guard them. Once I was in the zoo, I locked the big barn doors behind me and shut off the lights and dragged the old beige metal folding chair to the center aisle between the parallel rows of barred stalls. The monkeys didn’t make a goddamn sound. Cars are still pulling up. You don’t want to know what these people are like, and I’m not going to describe them.
But, here I am.
Funny thing: there’s no internet in the Zoo of Wonders. There’s no WiFi, and the weak-ass cell signal we get in the filling station from the lone tower within miles of here — the one that stands, hand to God, atop the unmarked remains of Weeping Mary Missionary Baptist Church, burned to the ground in 1965 by men in white sheets — cannot penetrate the white-painted sheet-metal surrounding me. I always used to eke about half an M&M’s-worth of pleasure out of seeing some gawping, giggling tourist try and fail to post a selfie from inside the zoo. It was a tiny, guilty pleasure, and I honestly always felt bad for it, for the scorn and the sneered schadenfreude, but I did not repent, and I was not contrite. God almighty. I’d be live-streaming this if I could, but I can’t.
People keep walking up, talking loudly and laughing. They try the zoo door, call out asking if anybody’s there, knock on the door, pull at the handle, and pound on the door. They make monkey noises.
By the time I’d been in here almost half an hour it was starting to sound like a crowd. When you’ve been in this God-forsaken place for as long as I have, more than three or four people sounds like a stampede, but still, this was sounding like a lot of people. Dozens maybe. Might have been five, but it sounded like dozens. And then, out of nowhere, my pocket vibrated, and the muffled musical chord of my phone alarm ripped the air like a guffaw at a funeral. It was my 5:30 alarm. Quittin’ time! I squeezed it silent through my jeans, but there was a drop in the noise outside, and I could tell that somebody near the door got still. I dug my phone out and toggled it to silent. After a few seconds there was another rattle of the handle and another bang on the door. Rudy’d be coming out for the money any minute. I sat still, and the monkeys were dead silent. The rattler gave up and the noise rose up again. Somebody shouted something about Fucking monkeys!
It was about then that I heard the voice I expected, strong and deep, not the scratchy, whispy voice of a man nearly a hundred years old, but the rich voice of old teak that cut across the crowd: “CAN I HELP Y’ALL?” Uncle Rudy’s voice sucked the noise out of the crowd, like his voice had used theirs as a megaphone. They were left as utterly silent as if they’d been suddenly dropped into cotton. The monkeys all looked up and stared his way without making a sound. Lucky’s heads poked silently out of his pond. The would-be monkey-fuckers, not ten feet away, were held at bay by nothing but the white-painted corrugated metal that still touted so seductively the uniformly-silent, intently-staring captives surrounding me. Where a moment before, the crowd had hooted and jeered like a hundred hyenas, all I can hear now is the gravel-shuffling of a few pairs of sneaker-clad feet and the low mumbling, as if in supplication, of what might be the voices of one Camry-load of wannabe-deviant video gamers. And get this: Rudy says, “WE CLOSE AT FIVE, BUT Y’ALL HAVE COME SO FAR. WE CAN OPEN UP. LET ME FIND MY GRANDSON. HE’LL LET YOU IN.”
It’s twilight, and because I shut off all the lights before I hid in the barn with the animals, it’s dim inside. Rudy says, “LET ME FIND MY GRANDSON,” and every animal eye in the zoo turns to look at me, I kid you not. Old Wednesday — who looks older than Rudy, who smells like fermenting fish and creaks like an asthmatic iron bellows when he breathes, who takes one step at a time like a man learning to walk on stilts, and who announces his presence with sound and smell so powerful that what few tourists we ever get just leave (even if they’ve paid to see the two-headed turtle — which they don’t know they won’t) — is suddenly standing next to me, without making a sound, smelling like nothing more than fresh hay, staring at me with his single eye.
Rudy gives the barn doors a yank as if to slide them apart, but I’ve locked them from the inside, and he gets nothing but a clang. The monkeys look at the door, but Old Wednesday stares at me. “I DON’T KNOW WHERE THAT BOY’S GONE,” Rudy intones, sounding like he’s turned himself into one of those massive wood-cased British stereo speakers from the ’70’s that audiophiles write poetry about. Would-be-monkey-fucker feet shuffle some more. “WELL, LET’S TURN SOME LIGHTS ON AND I’LL SEE IF I CAN’T GET Y’ALL INSIDE.”
I hear him lift the lid on the metal box that houses the main switch for all the lights in the Zoo of Wonders. It’s a lever that looks like it should turn on a turbine that would power a city. It makes a sound like a gyroscope when he shoves it up and thunks the contact into place, and for an instant the whole zoo, the filling station, and the gravel parking lot blaze like they’ve been hit with every searchlight from Blitz-era London. I know it can’t have been true, but I swear to God I saw every monkey pupil contract in that one moment, tiny luminous globes that shrank to blazing pinpricks. Yeah, I know, but I damn well did.
And then the main blew.
Sparks like that last scene from The Natural, when Robert Redford’s character belts the homer into the lights and blows them all out. (If that’s what happened in The Natural. I could be mis-remembering it. The movie, not the zoo.) Big bright sparks, like the ones from industrial welding torches, showered down all over the zoo, and the single boom was the clap of thunder that Cecil B. de Mille would’ve put behind Charlton Heston’s Moses if he’d only known. Normally thick with humidity and heavily perfumed with almost-visible clouds of dung and urine-damp straw, the air now felt cracklingly dry. The smell was fiercely tangy, all ozone and burnt metal.
Old Wednesday was still staring at me.
“For God’s sake,” I said, “he’s not my grandfather. Not that it makes any difference, but he’s my grandfather’s brother.” Old Wednesday stared for another ten seconds — time it: ten seconds is a lot longer than you think — and turned his head toward the locked doors.
I don’t know what made me look, because they were still utterly silent, but that’s when I saw the monkeys filing out through a still-smoking hole, high in the back wall of the barn.
Rudy’s just started laughing, and Old Wednesday’s staring at the door. Like I say, I’d be live-streaming this if I could. Or, if I were at UC Irvine I’d be heading out for beers with the friends I don’t now have.
If I did have WiFi or cell service, I’d live-stream this and just let it run. You’d know as soon as I do how it ends. Monkey-fucking seems unlikely. I’m just going to sit here in the twilight and see what happens.
Jonathan McLelland practices architecture and teaches in Tuscaloosa, where he lives with his family. His work has been published in RUST Keepers, Every Day Fiction, Defenestration, and The Bacopa Literary Review.