And the monkey just sat on the bar all that night. I don’t know what made me think of that, Earl. Just something weird. I’m letting my mind wander.”

“That’s perfectly fine,” I said. I took a drink of my drink. “I’d never own a monkey,” I said after a minute. “They’re too nasty. I’m sure Cheryl would like a monkey, though, wouldn’t you, honey?” Cheryl was down on the seat playing with Little Duke. She used to talk about monkeys all the time then. “What’d you ever do with that monkey?” I said, watching the speedometer. We were having to go slower now because the red light kept fluttering on. And all I could do to keep it off was go slower. We were going maybe thirty-five and it was an hour before dark, and I was hoping Rock Springs wasn’t far away.

“You really want to know?” Edna said. She gave me a quick glance, then looked back at the empty desert as if she was brooding over it.

“Sure,” I said. I was still upbeat. I figured I could worry about breaking down and let other people be happy for a change.

“I kept it a week.” And she seemed gloomy all of a sudden, as if she saw some aspect of the story she had never seen before. “I took it home and back and forth to the Am Vets on my shifts. And it didn’t cause any trouble. I fixed a chair up for it to sit on, back of the bar, and people liked it. It made a nice little clicking noise. We changed its name to Mary because the bartender figured out it was a girl. Though I was never really comfortable with it at home. I felt like it watched me too much. Then one day a guy came in, some guy who’d been in Vietnam, still wore a fatigue coat. And he said to me, ‘Don’t you know that a monkey’ll kill you? It’s got more strength in its fingers than you got in your whole body.’ He said people had been killed in Vietnam by monkeys, bunches of them marauding while you were asleep, killing you and covering you with leaves. I didn’t believe a word of it, except that when I got home and got undressed I started looking over across the room at Mary on her chair in the dark watching me. And I got the creeps. And after a while I got up and went out to the car, got a length of clothesline wire, and came back in and wired her to the doorknob through her little silver collar, then went back and tried to sleep. And I guess I must’ve slept the sleep of the dead—though I don’t remember it—because when I got up I found Mary had tipped off her chair-back and hanged herself on the wire line. I’d made it too short.”

Edna seemed badly affected by that story and slid low in the seat so she couldn’t see out over the dash.