Monkey Mountain
The summer my brother got mad we slept under our beds. The wood was cold on our cheeks and sometimes we licked it, pretending it was ice pops. We would have stayed there all day if our mom didn’t push her broom under, stirring the dust into our eyes and noses. But no matter how cold or how hot it was, we always played on the hill. Our house backed up against it, and from the top it was a good ten or twelve feet into the woods below. We rolled our trucks and matchbox cars, our sister’s dolls, ourselves, and even old Peanut Butter down the hill. His woof was loud and soft, loud and soft, all the way down. We loved the hill against our backs, our shoulders, our knees, the sky turning slow, warped, as we stared up from the bottom.
It was Marvin, my brother’s idea. When I scrambled up the hill for the fourth time that morning, panting like Peanut, he squirted me with the garden hose. It was brown and faded like a shoe bottom, and water leaked out a little in the middle.
“Fucker.” I made my way toward him, arms out, as the water pelted my face.
“What, it don’t feel good?” He let his lower lip, pink as bubble gum, drop as he directed the water into his mouth. Some of it ran over unto his chin. “I got an idea, Reggie.”
“You ain’t had one good idea all summer.” I wiped my face with my forearm, off my bare chest. We didn’t wear shirts on those days, and mom didn’t complain. Less laundry to keep clean.
“You remember when we went to the water park last summer?” He asked, as if I could forget it. It was the only good thing about last summer. We went with our church group, the same group that asked my mom not to bring us back again until we learned our manners. There were slides of all sizes, ones that felt like you were falling from the sky and others that spun you in circles so fast you didn’t know which end hit the water first. I still dreamed at night about flying on the water, like a raindrop down my window. But we never could string enough days of manners together.
“What? You find out a way to sneak on the church bus?” I lurched forward and turned the hose on him.
“Stupid ass.” He pushed me on the ground like I was nothing and wet me once more for good measure. Then he aimed the hose at the hill. “We make our own water park, see?”
“I ain’t rolling in that shit.” I watched the hose make a muddy ravine down the hill. “That exactly what it look like, too, like when Grandma Hill’s toilet pipe backed up in the yard.”
“No it don’t.” He watched the ravine became wetter and wetter. “It look like chocolate milk.”
I guess a case could be made for both, but I still wasn’t rolling in it. I watched as Marvin backed up toward the house, got a good running leap, and belly flopped down the hill. The hill wasn’t wet enough, and he had to paddle himself down about halfway there.
“You look like a shit skunk,” I said when he climbed back up, a big mud stripe from his chest to his pants. “You are one stupid motherfucker.”
“It just need to be wetter.” He turned the hose back on a rested it on the edge of the hill. That someone wouldn’t see what we were doing and smack our asses into next week didn’t occur to either of us at the time, although I expected more of Marvin. But Marvin, Marvin was always thinking. Even those rare times I thought to warn him, I never did, because I could never wait to see what he did next.
After a puddle winder than our bodies had settle in the dirt, Marvin backed up again.
“Reggie, make sure that ain’t no root coming out of the ground.” He pointed toward the middle of the hill, and I stood near the edge, straining to see what he was talking about. I never thought a step ahead of Marvin, which is why I wound up on my stomach going down the hill when he came over and pushed me.
“It’s good, right?” Marvin stood at the top of the hill, hands on his hips. Somehow he would graduate high school and sell insurance, although the years in between he would angry.
“Yeah, it’s good.” The mud was cool on my skin. I stuck my thumb up and scrambled up the hill while Marvin wet it down for himself.
“What are you doing?” Our sister Ursula had come out of the house holding a glass of Kool-Aid. Ursula was quiet and usually stayed in her room with her dolls. She had barrettes all over her hair of turtles and bunnies and kittens and when they were on her head they were in her hand, her pets. She was too small and too sweet to bother sitting on and tickling.
“You wanna take a ride down chocolate mountain, sista?” Marvin laid on his back, his head hanging over the lip of the hill. He pushed himself off, his feet out in a V, his arms up in the air.
“It’s fun,” I assured her. “Go put your bathing suit on so you don’t get your dress dirty.”
I wet the hill as Marvin climbed up and got one more slide in before Ursula plopped her bottom on the top of the hill. Marvin gave her a push, and she screamed all the way down.
“Shut up, Ursula!” Marvin hissed, glancing back toward the house. “You want to get us in trouble?”
Our pop slept during the day for his shift at night, which is a big reason why Marvin and I were always outside, even in the dead of winter. Plus, with his belt, he could lay a strip on our ass that looked like a piece of bacon. Marvin listened until he realized he wasn’t hearing nothing. Then he wet down the hill again.
“Watch—the piece du-a resistance.” He flung the hose down by Ursula, who picked it up and drank from it. Marvin was taking French in school, but that’s not the same as learning it. He backed up toward the house and took another running start. At the edge of the hill he planted his hands and flipped over. But he hit the hill funny with one of his shoulders, and by the bottom of the hill he was holding it against his body as if it was going to fall off.
“What happened?” I scream-whispered to him. When he didn’t get up and slid down the hill on my butt to him.
“I think I broke it or something.” He grimaced, holding it like it was a sick puppy.
“Let me see.” I reached out to touch it. Marvin smacked my hand away.
“I tell you, Reggie. I can’t move it. It feel like it gonna fall off.”
“Maybe you just popped it out or something.”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head.
“What are we gonna do?” I looked up toward the back of the house, where Ursula stared down at us.
“Nobody gonna find out about it. Help me up.” I linked my arms around his waist and pulled. “You see, Reggie, there’s a clinic downtown. It don’t cost no money. Jefferson gone there when he had the flu. We can walk down there and let them take a look.”
“That clinic far away.” The mud had begun to dry a little on my chest and shoulders, and was whitish silver. Like fairy shit.
“We can walk it.” He started toward the woods.
“Like this?” I gestured toward my mud-caked body. But he was already going.
I looked up at Ursula, who stood watching us, hose in her hand. Still on.
“Ursula, turn off the hose, go in the house, and get cleaned up.” I waved her back from the hill like I was directing a plane. “Don’t let anybody see you, and don’t say nothing.”
Marvin was really hurt. He didn’t have to say it. I caught up and we walked through the woods. It was the middle of the afternoon, and sweat ran little paths through the mud on our bodies before drying up. When we came out of the woods and behind the school, the asphalt was hot on our bare feet and we had to walk in the grass.
“You think you hurt now, just wait until we get home and Mom seen what you done to the hill.” My feet hurt from the rocks and heat. Each step, my patience with Marvin was going.
“What I done? You rocked chocolate mountain too, brother.” He spit on the sidewalk. It was foamy. I hoped they had a water fountain at the clinic. It was in a little storefront sandwiched between a thrift store and a dentist office in a run-down shopping center, although at the time I knew nothing for comparison. The farthest I’d been anywhere was that water park, and that was maybe an hour away.
Marvin went up to the receptionist and I stared at the posters on the walls of black babies, Hispanic babies, something about prenatal testing. There was a couple of women in there, too, pregnant, an older lady with a scarf on her head and no eyebrows. It was nice and cool inside, the air condition and linoleum and vinyl-seat chairs, and I’d almost wished Marvin had fucked up his arm sooner. I looked at National Geographic and Dirt Bike Rider and wished I had a shirt to tuck them under and take them home. When they called Marvin I was so into an article about African tree frogs that Marvin hit the side of my head with his good hand.
“Come on, Reggie.” I decided to take the magazines in the room with me but instead of reading I wound up spinning on a stool while Reggie sat on the bed. It wasn’t really a room, and it wasn’t really a bed. There was a curtain that separated Reggie’s bed from a bunch of other beds in one big room. A nurse came in and took Reggie’s temperature blood pressure, like they did once a year at school.
“What happened to you?” she asked, but she didn’t seem really interested. She wrote something down on a chart while Marvin explained he fell riding his bike. “Where’s your mother?”
“At work,” he lied. “We tried to call her but we couldn’t reach her. It hurt so I came here.”
“What’s your phone number?” She looked up at him finally. She wasn’t pretty. Her head was kind of fat and square and she had thin lips. “We can’t perform any treatment without parental consent.”
“Shit,” Marvin said, drawing out all the letters like he was spreading honey on a cracker. We had walked all that way for nothing. The nurse disappeared behind the curtain, and we watched her white shoes walk around, meet up with a pair of brown shoes, I was guessing the doctor’s.
“Marvin Jessup is a hold,” we heard her voice. “No parental consent. What kind of moron receptionist did the temp agency send, anyway? Can’t she see he’s not eighteen?”
“What’s the problem?” A male voice asked.
“Possible separated shoulder, maybe break.” The feet shuffled a little. “You should see those monkeys. Who knows where they came from.”
The male voice stifled a laugh. The feet walked away. I looked at Marvin. His eyes were slits, his jaw clenched.
“Whachyou looking at, monkey?” His eyes narrowed even more. I laughed, but he didn’t.
When Mom came, she heard her voice first, beyond the curtain. Apologizing for us, laughing nervously. It didn’t take me long to figure out what probably happened¾Ursula's muddy bathing suit in the tub¾or worse, on the floor of her room or on her bed, our mother giving her that look, the look that could melt glass. I could feel the heat of it outside the curtain. When she appeared, still in her Saturday clothes, she touched Marvin’s head, it disappearing into his thick hair, before she reared up and smacked it.
“We’ll talk about this when we get home.” She frowned. “Reggie, get up.”
I stood by the bed with my magazines as my mom sat down on the stool. She looked too big for it. It seemed to want to escape her, sliding a little across the floor without her permission, her jeans tight against her calves. She stood up again.
“Reggie, sit down.” I took back my spot and decided to leave the magazines on the floor. I would have to find out about those tree frogs another time. If there would be another time, another place where I could get my hands on some magazines. Maybe when we went back to school and could use the school library, if my manhood wouldn’t be threatened by going into that old dusty book room where the newest books were ten years old.
“What the hell did you think you were doing?” My mom shook her head in the front seat, occasionally glancing at Marvin in the back seat. The doctor had snapped his arm back into his shoulder like he was squeezing a nutcracker. For a second I could see the white all around Marvin’s eyes and then it was over. Good as new, the doctor had smiled, peeling off his mud-stained gloves. “Just what the hell is wrong with you two? You wait until your father hears about this.”
But Marvin wasn’t hearing anything. He was staring out the window, his mouth set like concrete. Marvin, who couldn’t shut up to save his life, not at a funeral, not even when he was asleep. He stayed mad like that, and when he opened his mouth it was to say something about the white man, how oppressive he was to our people. How we needed to rise up. He found our grandfather’s glasses, these ones with thick black frames, and knocked the glass out. He wore them and carried a book by Malcolm X he had wanted for his birthday. The hill dried by September and nobody knew nothing for it. But as it got cooler, darker at night Marvin sat on the curb in front of our house, on the bench at the bus stop, outside the old pool hall, and he wasn’t Marvin anymore. It wasn’t because of his glassless glasses, either. He just stared at people, eyes thin, just daring you, daring you.
Jen Michalski's first collection of fiction, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, is available from So New (2007), her second is forthcoming from Dzanc (2013), and her novella MAY-SEPTEMBER (2010) will be published by Press 53 in October as part of the Press 53 Open Awards. Her chapbook CROSS SECTIONS (2008) is available from Publishing Genius. She also is the editor of the anthology CITY SAGES: BALTIMORE (CityLit Press 2010), which won a 2010 "Best of Baltimore" award from Baltimore Magazine. She edits the literary quarterly jmww, and is cohost of the monthly reading series The 510 Readings in Baltimore. |
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