Madonna of the Apes by Nicholas Kilmer Read Free Book Online Page A

down here so he wouldn’t forget. I used operating funds, and left the receipt in the thing. He’s bad enough we might have to do something.”
    Fred nodded. Floyd thought he was wanted, and in fact he might be wanted. If they took him to a public hospital, or to a veteran’s hospital, next thing you knew, he’d become public property. Social workers, in all due mechanical sympathy looking into his history, might next discover that he’d taken a lam from some rougher institution in Montana or Bangkok.
    “We might want to vote on it,” Fred said. “But as long as he’s not hurting anybody, or threatening anyone, I’d as soon let him be.” Eddie shrugged. “It might work itself out,” Fred said. “He’s not carrying anything, is he?”
    Eddie shook his head. “We checked his room while he was out. I looked through his pockets when he came in. It’s like he doesn’t mind. He’s like a child, thinking about something else. You can do anything. Try to search me, you’d better think again.”
    The room Eddie sat in, the vestibule or whatever it might be called, was as bare of decoration as a robbed motel room. They’d painted the walls white but they looked gray. The kitchen, such as it was, was not visible from here; nor were the two other downstairs rooms, one in which Floyd could be locked down if that seemed to be what he needed, and another in which the men kept the TV, a pool table, some comfortable chairs from the street, and a bookshelf with enough to read if you wanted to read.
    Behind Eddie a calendar picture hung, a glossy photo, representing
Springtime in the Rockies.
It was from July of a former year. It had been left here by a former tenant, Henry, who had said it represented a place he would rather be, and whose body had been taken from the river last fall.
    It was Fred’s shift at the desk tonight. They took it in eight-hour watches, with some men working more watches in lieu of contributing money to the operation. Fred owned the place, along with the bank; but he lived there and he did his shift like the others. So at ten he took over from Eddie, who went upstairs to sleep.
    Eddie had left his comic book on the desk, and Fred read that until it was finished. He read it again, translating it into a Hmong dialect for practice, then once again, translating it into French. The fourth time through, struggling to recapture his acquaintance with a Tibetan tongue, he found the American concepts refusing to make the transition into the high clear regions, even though both cultures were equally comfortable with cruelty and unlikely gods.
    The men came and went. It was a rule that everyone’s business be kept private. The place was to be a staging ground, not a halfway house. If people began discussing each other’s business, friendships and enmities might develop, as well as relationships that suggested mentoring, discipline, dominance and submission, or even love. It was not to be a prison, camp, or monastery, but a place where men whose training had molded them to do well by exercising anti-social skills, struggled to turn their inclinations and expectations to patterns more closely resembling those of Main Street. It was meant to be an alternative to living on the street. It was meant to be safer, if less interesting.
    They got together once a week for an hour and talked through anything that needed considering. When a man didn’t show up for a week or more, unless he had made prior arrangements his room was declared vacant. He’d moved on, or been jailed, or gone back to Cincinnati, or nosed under the surface of the black river.
    No one would settle down here because no one
could
settle down here. The idea was that you had to want to get out and into something better. But Fred, who had invented the system, seemed to have settled down in the room upstairs, like the abbot of a Godless monastery that boasted only two rules: No women in the rooms, and Mind your own business. Whatever might happen if