Hokkaido Highway Blues by Will Ferguson Read Free Book Online Page B

potatoes, and what appeared to be old corn cobs. The monkeys were small—not much bigger than large house cats—grey, short-tailed, and obsessed with fleas.
    This was the first time I saw monkeys without a cage between us. They walked on their knuckles, just like zoo monkeys, and they looked just as smelly I watched them for a few minutes, and I soon made an important social observation of my own: Monkeys are miserable little bastards. They spent their time biting, screaming, and picking on each other. The hierarchy was continually being reaffirmed, from the gnarly old ruler who prowled the beach looking for smaller monkeys to terrorize, to the toddlers who got battered about by everyone. There was little social interaction that didn’t involve cruelty or intimidation; even the ones who were grooming each other were obviously gossiping viciously about their neighbors.
    Monkey Harmony is about as smooth as it sounds. Every few seconds somebody would bite someone else and the bitee would run, screeching like a band saw on sheet metal. A barrelful of these vile little creatures would not be fun, it would be mayhem. Loud mayhem. I did like the babies; clinging to their mothers in wide-eyed wonder at the world around them, chewing fretfully on leathery nipples and hugging onto mom for dear life whenever one of the mean-spirited males chased their mothers away.
    When not fighting, the monkeys crouched around, picking invisible bugs from each other’s hair and then chewing them with great exaggerated jaw movements, as though they were eating wads of toffee and not, say, an insect the size of a speck of dust. (Do you even need to chew a flea? Can you chew a flea? You should be able to swallow the average flea whole, right?)
    It was not a very holistic society. Many were picking at their anuses. Occasionally they would flick bum-gunge at each other just for spite. Sometimes they flicked it at us, the viewing public. Bullies and bad personal hygiene: It was high-school gym class all over again.
    Not once, the whole time I was there, did I see a single monkey wash a single goddamn potato.
    The Professor and his wife were making notes and counting monkeys. I wandered away. The beach had formed as a washout from a small stream, and I followed it back into a tangle of vines. In a clearing I came across an abandoned plyboard building. No one lives on Kojima, so this sway-backed, falling-down structure must have been an old research station.
    The vines of the jungle were slowly embracing the shack, tendrillike, and it looked as though one good kick would take it down. A lordly old monkey was sitting on his haunches on the corrugated tin roof, eying me with undisguised hostility. I held his gaze a heartbeat too long and he lunged, teeth-bared, with a horrible monkey scream. I fell over myself trying to get away, but it was a bluff and the monkey swaggered off, leaving me alone amid the green-leaf scent of the jungle, drenched in sweat and high on adrenaline.
    The forest was thick with must and the smell of wet rot. A tree had fallen across the path, a great waterlogged, fern-festooned rain-forest turd of a tree trunk. And, as I stepped over it, something slithered through the tall grass below—and across my ankle.
    I froze, foot raised, arms out, poised like the Karate Kid. I heard a voice squeak from somewhere in my chest, “Oh no.” I was trapped, hopelessly trapped, until someone came along and rescued me or until my leg atrophied and fell off. A serpent was somewhere down there , near my foot. I stood in premature rigor mortis as my mind frantically flipped through my Rolodex of options. There didn’t seem to be many open to me.
    I eventually solved my dilemma in the only rational way possible: I ran away without once touching the ground. That’s not true of course. I did touch the ground, but in a quick, high-stepping manner known among native islanders as the Humorous Panic Dance. I also screamed, “Get away get away get away