The Ape Man's Brother Read online

  The whole thing began to get to Big Guy. The whole thing being the world we were living in. He just couldn’t understand it. He discovered alcohol, and he could drink a lot of it. That stuff was to him like nectar to a bee. He became bourbon’s bitch. He was so drunk most of the time The Woman began knocking on my door late at night to ask if she could sleep on my couch while he raved and cursed in our ape-man tongue. Sometimes when he drank up all the hotel room booze, he climbed out the window, down the side of the building and into the street, and away he would go, dressed in clothes but not wearing any shoes.

  He drank his way from one end of town to the other. One night he climbed over the walls of the zoo, bent bars, and let all manner of wild animals out. It was kept out of the papers, but a couple of tigers ate a bum and two orphans who were sleeping under a bridge. They weren’t tax payers, so it was easy to sweep under the rug. Way Big Guy saw it animals were supposed to be free. They could kill or be killed in a wild world situation, but cages, that bugged him, bugged him big time. In a way, I think he came to see the hotel, and even the whole of New York, as nothing more than a kind of cage that held him back from where he wanted to be, from the life he wanted to live.

  Me, I was digging it. I got so I kept my body hair trimmed close, dressed nice, wore a monocle and a top hat and very nice suits. I took to going to jazz clubs, learned to play the bongos, smoked big cigars. I liked having an evening martini, wearing my bathrobe and slippers. I even did a little record album with a couple of those cool jazz cats; one of them on bass, one on sax, and me beating the skins. I got so I could lay down quite a few French phrases and a smidgeon of Italian. And there was another thing. Me and The Woman, all those nights she slept on my couch… Well, we got close. We talked about The Big Guy. We worried about him. We cried over him. We hugged each other in sympathy. In short time I was laying the pipe to her like I was running a gas line from here to Cuba. We didn’t mean for it to happen. It just did. The Woman told me that before I took her to bed, she and The Big Guy hadn’t had sex in three months. He had found a substitute for sex: whisky, beer, wine and vodka, as well as his favorite, bourbon, and sometimes a little rubbing alcohol taken from the medicine cabinet over the sink. He had even been known to drink hair oil. He had the itch bad.

  He had also became a bigger spectacle and public disgrace. Shedding his clothes. Running naked through the streets. Climbing the Empire State building, all the way to the top where the zeppelin dock was. Swimming in public fountains, pulling one of the stone lions down from its pedestal at the New York Public library. Just got hold of it and yanked that big sucker off its pedestal and broke it to pieces. He even swam out to the Stature of Liberty. Can you imagine that. I can’t swim at all, but he swam all the way out there, climbed it because he can, had a hot dog from a vendor, and swam back; all of this done without a stitch on, just like in the old days.

  Here’s something I’m really ashamed of. I began to be embarrassed of The Big Guy. My best friend. My brother. We had done a lot of things together in the old days that were no worse than the things he was doing now, in the new days. Bless me, but I was starting to shake my head and cluck my tongue. To be honest, I really enjoyed banging his old lady. That doesn’t mean I quit feeling for him. Late at night, holding The Woman in my arms, after I had drunk my martini and had my fun with her, I would think. Shit, that’s tough on the old boy, me with his girl and him not knowing, and me not telling, and her not telling. But that didn’t change me. I stayed the same. That sweet, warm, woman and the cool, clean sheets, and the toilet where you could sit and read without fear of being attacked by some manner of beast, were much too satisfying to want to give up.

  …

  Now, I told you about that red-headed man who had loved The Woman and thought he was going to end up with her, but after The Big Guy came along, he might as well have been the balls on a brass monkey. She had no interest in him, and now, of course, her interest was in me. Or at least it was to some degree. I won’t kid you. Sometimes I would awake and find her missing from my arms. She would be sitting in a chair by the great open window that led out on the veranda that overlooked the light-winking city, naked, her blonde hair dangling, the moonlight nestled in those scars on her shoulders, her breasts spear-tipped from the cool air, and I could tell she was thinking about The Big Guy. Somewhere, maybe he was thinking about her. It was hard to say. He seldom came back to the hotel anymore, which is why he didn’t miss her from his bed. He slept atop buildings, or in the park, or on a bench, usually clutching a bottle of booze in a brown paper bag. I had brought him home many a time in that condition, until I finally gave it up. Nothing changed him. I even talked to him about The Woman. I didn’t mention that me and her were doing the nasty—though I would never have thought of it that way in the wild—but it didn’t change him. I like to think had he come to his senses that me and The Woman could have shook hands and just been friends and they could have gone back together, the way it was supposed to be. But he didn’t change. The alcohol had numbed his senses—a lot. But he knew something wasn’t right between me and him and him and her, even though he didn’t know it was what it was; he trusted us both too much for that. I could tell the way his beautiful eyes rested on me that he knew our friendship was washing up on the rocks, yet I’m certain he didn’t actually suspect me of such treachery as taking from him the thing he loved the most in the world, The Woman; well, that and his freedom, his desire to go back to the way things were. I think he might have been willing to share her, and maybe The Woman would even have gone for that—she was progressive, but it just didn’t occur to him that she needed him in her arms and in her bed. Like I said, that ole John Barley Corn had him by the nuts.

  I have wandered again. I was telling you about the red-headed man.

  You see, Red, as most people called him, never gave up on The Woman. One look at her and you would know why. She was a stunner, as I have said, but there was something else about her. It was—and this is going to sound like a cheap romance story—her soul; it reached out to you and embraced you. Corny as that sounds, I don’t know any other way to describe it. She was something. For Red, though, I think it was that he thought he had her locked down, and when the lock broke, he couldn’t accept it. Maybe if he had been the one to break it off he would have been fine. He was that kind of guy. Everything on his terms. Only thing was, The Big Guy wasn’t interested in terms. Red knew that any interference there would just lead to him having his head pulled off like a grape plucked from the vine, so he bided his time. When things fell apart for The Big Guy and The Woman, he was waiting, and I am certain (without actual evidence, I admit) he was the one who finally leaked the lion diddling event to the public. We were told at first it was destroyed. Another time were told it existed, but that it was lost, and finally that it was stolen. And then it showed up. I think Red bought it from someone, maybe the director who had gone into advertising. I can’t say. But he got his hands on it.

  That wasn’t what happened first, though. That wasn’t the first brick pulled from the pile. There were several. I guess I should have snapped to it, but I admit that I had been for the most part civilized and my instincts were not as sharply honed as they once were. Two or three times I thought I was being followed, and had noticed someone in the streets that I had seen twice earlier that day. New York is a big city, but people cross paths with one another now and again, so I didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t until The Woman and I had come back from a party, a little liquor-buzzed and hot to trot for the old bed room, when I smelled something. We had just come in through the door, and even though I was a bit drunk, and as I have said, civilized, something kicked in. I got a whiff of someone having been in our hotel room. Not a maid. I knew all their scents, and had had relations with several before me and The Woman took up together, and once or twice when she was out of town. This was the scent of a man with too much cologne. I peeled The Woman off of me, told her to wait, and sniffed about. My sniffing eventually led
to a little camera fastened into a light fixture over our bed. Way it was rigged, when you turned on the light it came on and started snapping pictures, and when you turned it off, it still snapped for awhile. That way it had you in full light, and then, because our window always had the big curtains thrown back, and there were lights from the city resting on our bed, we could be easily photographed doing whatever we were doing, and frequently we were doing a lot.

  At first, I was elated, thinking I had found the camera before any photos could be taken. Then it occurred to me that the only reason I knew someone had been in the room was the cologne. A strange thought passed through me. What if, with my senses dulled, I had missed somebody having entered our room before, when they weren’t wearing cologne? The camera could have taken many photos, and it only had to have its film replaced from time to time, something that could easily be done when we were out of the room. What if there were already photos of us?

  I pulled the camera out and showed it to The Woman, who gasped. You see, there was some part of us that played like this was all a momentary fling. That when it came right down to it, all was right with her and The Big Guy, or soon would be, but that camera made us realize otherwise. We knew he didn’t know and that things weren’t right between them, and if he saw photographs of us together, it might be too much for him. He might turn savage, or even do something to himself. He just wasn’t right anymore.

  “Perhaps it’s blackmail,” The Woman said.

  I nodded, thinking perhaps that was it. I suppose The Big Guy could have had someone do it, to check up on us, but that didn’t seem likely. Unlike me, he never learned guile. I learned it when we lived in our lost world, and I had perfected it in civilization. Maybe whoever had set this photographic trap would want money instead of showing it to The Big Guy, but I tell you, right then I had a hunch who it was and what it was about. It came to me like a tick crawling into my arm pit that Red was behind all this, that he had hired someone to follow us, and to plant that camera, and what he wanted wasn’t money. He wanted revenge.

  [12]

  Yeah, I hadn’t thought of Red in ages, but right then I knew down deep in my bones, it was him, and what hit me the hardest was that there was something for him to find, something he could let The Big Guy see so that it harmed his pride and took away the only reason he had allowed himself to be hoodwinked into coming to this world.

  The Big Guy trusted us, especially me. We had been brothers since he was a baby. Right at that moment I felt the way I should have felt all along. Like a traitor.

  I smashed the camera on the floor.

  But you know what? I still went to bed with The Woman.

  The next day that lion bumping film was released and seen in private by a number of newspaper men who reported on it. It wasn’t seemly for it to be shown to the public, and wasn’t, at least at that period in time. But it was written about, and a few stills were published in the rags, and though they weren’t explicit, it was clear what was going on. Shots of the dead lion facing us, its tongue lagging out of its mouth, The Big Guy clutching its tail, lifting it into position for… Well, it was obvious. There had been the rumors before, but now there was the film. I told you how it is with money, how it offered lots of insulation. But The Big Guy took a hit with the public. Not that he cared, but that’s what happened. Our two movies were removed from circulation, and even to this day they are seldom shown, and only on late night television.

  But the day it hit I found out about it in the morning paper. I tried to hide it from The Woman, but too late. She saw it. It made our souls and stomachs sink, and you would think we would just lock our hotel room door and hide. Or maybe at least have the guts to somehow talk to The Big Guy, own up to what we had done, and try to commiserate with him over the news, though that part about the lion probably didn’t bother him the way it would others. For him, that was an accepted ritual. And once, it had been for me as well.

  As I said, you’d think we’d do that, commiserate with The Big Guy, but we didn’t. We took the cowardly way out and tried to make things better for ourselves. We went out for a drive. It’s not that we weren’t concerned, but we were determined to not let some asshole with a camera ruin our life, and like I said, we were cowards. We drove outside of New York and into the country. There was a nice place there where we could have a picnic. We parked the Packard and rolled our blanket on the ground, set out our picnic basket stuffed with very fine foods, a thermos of good wine, as well as a thermos of Italian coffee. We had paper plates and cups, and we ate and laughed and kissed, trying to make our worries go away, but the truth is they hung over us like a rain cloud even though the sky was clear and beautiful. After awhile we lay back on the blanket, in each other’s arms, digested and looked at the sky. I rose up on one elbow to pry off the thermos lid to the coffee, and that’s when I saw him.

  The Big Guy. He was a pretty good distance away, on a hill covered by trees. In the tallest tree, mostly hidden by leaves, he sat in the fork of a limb and watched us.

  I knew then that Red had not only had the camera put in my hotel room, but that most likely shots from that camera had been put in an envelope and somehow slipped to The Big Guy, just as we feared.

  The Big Guy knew I saw him. He dropped from the tree, light as a bird, disappeared behind the hill. I expected he would come rushing down that hill to destroy us at any moment, and I didn’t intent to put up a fight, not even to protect her.

  The Woman had seen him as well. She had tears in her eyes.

  We waited.

  He didn’t come rushing down after us.

  I heard a car start up behind the trees and race away.

  I could tell by the sound of the engine that it was his Buick, the one he hardly drove and really shouldn’t drive at all. The Big Guy could do many things, but he never really learned to drive too well. He was always being pulled out of ditches and having to pay other drivers for banging up their cars. But he had been smart enough to ease up behind that hill silently, get out and climb that tree. Now he didn’t care. About anything was my guess.

  You want to know what hurt me the most right then? That he didn’t even have the courtesy to kill us.

  [13]

  After that, it was over with me and The Woman.

  I decided what I had to do was confront The Big Guy, lay it all out and hope he didn’t yank off my leg and beat me to death with it. I desperately wanted to make amends. But he wasn’t in his room. I couldn’t find him. I walked all over the city, took taxies and trains to his favorite haunts, but nothing. I must have gone through every bar in New York City that next week, but I couldn’t find him. The Woman had gone back to their room to wait for him, to hope for the best. But he hardly ever went there. Up until the other day he didn’t seem too concerned about where she was, or even where he was. But I could imagine him seeing those photos, my hairy ass on top of her, doing the deed. It made me sick to my stomach.

  I didn’t really want to see her again, but I went to her and told her that I had searched everywhere, and had pretty much given up.

  “Any ideas?” I said.

  “The hospitals,” she said.

  “Beg pardon?” I said.

  “He may have been injured. You know how he drove. He may be in the hospital.”

  Well, that got me to a phone right away. I started checking around, and sure enough, we found him. Downtown, right near the hotel, in a hospital room. Two broken legs, a broken arm, smashed ribs, and a concussion. He’d been there all week, under an assumed name. He hadn’t done that, a doctor had, knowing there was so much publicity afoot concerning the film of him and the lion. It was a damn noble thing to do, I thought, though later I found out he sold his story to one of the cheap-ass rags, and for not that much money, I might add.

  When I finally saw the police report a couple days later, it was revealed that he had driven down a hill on his way back into the city at top speed. A motorist behind him said, “He just yanked the wheel to the left, off th
e curve, and over the side of the big hill. The car flew like a plane. Was in the air all the way down until it hit a brick fence around a sheep farm. Tore that fence down, and one of the sheep died of a heart attack. It didn’t do the car any good either.”

  The Good Samaritan drove to a nearby farmhouse, called the law and an ambulance. That’s how The Big Guy ended up in the hospital, wrapped up like a mummy, his legs lifted in traction. The nurse told us that three days later he came around, but they couldn’t get him to eat or drink. He seemed to want to die. They finally used heavy drugs to put him completely out, help him deal with the pain. I thought, yeah, the pain. The only thing he was pained about was seeing me and The Woman together like that. Broken bones were nothing to him.

  After he was knocked out, they kept him that way, ended up hooking him to a feeder tube and an IV. We went and sat by his bed, and when they tried to make us leave because visiting hours were over, we wouldn’t. They finally gave up and let us stay. The Woman held the hand of the arm that wasn’t broken, and I just sat in my chair with tears in my eyes and looked at him.

  The Good Life had ruined all three of us.

  …

  One morning, The Big Guy still on the mend, The Woman at the hospital with him, I went to see Dr. Rice, and laid out my plan. I said, “Doctor, The Big Guy, he’s not doing so well. Civilization hasn’t taken with him like it has with me. He needs to go back.”

  The old man nodded. He said, “And back he shall go.”

  Remember, the location of our home on the world in the mist had been kept secret by Dr. Rice, and a couple of other individuals, including the navigator, one Bowen Tyler. Red and a few others had been on that trek, but they were all trusted individuals, except for Red, who had been there due to the fact he was then The Woman’s boyfriend, and a known hunter and tracker. He could find his way through the jungle, but no one thought he knew the path to our world across that vast ocean, so any knowledge he had wasn’t a great concern. And at that moment, no one knew where he was. Nothing had actually been proven to suggest he had been the one behind the lion-fucking leak, or for that matter, the camera in our room, so there was nothing to do legally, though it was in the back of my mind to give him a visit if I got the chance so that what was inside of him could be found painting the walls of his abode, wherever that was.