juice off my mouth with the back of my hand. “Mmmmmm. That was good, man.”
Leon laughed. “We’re in charge today, guys,” he said. “No one to give you bad boys a break. Boo hoo.” He copied me, gulped Bo’s smoothie down in front of the old guy, then licked his lips.
Sweeny and Bo looked at each other like they didn’t believe it. Then Bo pointed at us and rubbed his two pointer fingers against each other.
Shame, shame. That’s what that means when they rub their pointers back and forth.
“It’s not your day,” I told them. “Everyone went to town to celebrate a birthday. Know what that means? Leon and I get a little payback time.”
Then Leon went too far. As usual.
He gave Bo a little slap across the face. Not a hard slap, but it seemed to stun him. Leon laughed. “Think you haven’t been asking for it?”
Again, I couldn’t just stand there. I pulled his arm back. “Careful, Leon. Don’t hurt ‘em.”
He snickered. “What are they gonna do about it?” Leon raised his hand and gave Sweeny a slap. It made a loud smack, and the old guy’s head snapped back.
This wasn’t good. Leon and I have been working here ever since we got out of the can. Six or seven months, taking care of these guys. So far, we’d done okay. I didn’t like these dudes any more than Leon did. But why look for trouble now?
Leon gave Sweeny a slap on the cheek. “How’s that feel, buddy?”
Sweeny lowered his head sadly and rubbed his fingers together. “Shame, shame.”
Leon laughed and raised his hand to give Bo another face slap.
“Leon, you’d better not—” I started.
But I didn’t get to finish my sentence cuz Bo grabbed Leon’s arm up by the shoulder—and yanked him off his feet. I let out a cry as he whipped Leon over his head and sent him sailing into the wall.
Leon groaned as his body slammed hard into the wall. The whole house seemed to shake, and a stack of DVDs toppled off their shelf onto the floor.
Leon climbed up slowly, looking kind of green. And before he could catch his breath, Sweeny jumped off his bench, shot forward, and head-butted Leon in the gut. Leon went ooof, just like in the cartoons, and his face turned from green to blue. Breath knocked out, definitely.
These old chimpanzees weigh about 200 pounds. They’re over five feet tall, you know. And adult chimps are several times stronger than humans.
They’re big and ugly and dangerous, which is why people send them here to The Haven. They’re only cute ‘til they’re six or so. Then they turn into big, hairy monsters.
I guess it was some lamebrain in Washington who had the idea to open a retirement home for chimpanzees back in the Louisiana woods. When we heard about it in the prison, we laughed at first. Then we started to get angry, thinking about these chimps living in luxury with their DVDs and wide-screen TVs, their playrooms, three meals a day served to them on trays in their puffy armchairs and five acres of woods to play in behind their house.
That made us angry when we looked around at what we had.
The ugly, old chimps were living high on the hog, all right. And every day, we got the slops.
Did Leon and I have a chip on our shoulders when we started working here? Like I said, we just needed jobs.
But now some bad feelings were out in the open, and we had to tie things up and push ‘em all back. Like trying to get toothpaste back in the tube.
Leon was still kinda purple, wheezing and holding his chest. I had to deal with these monkeys.
I stepped forward, thinking hard, trying to look tough. But what looks tough to a monkey?
Bo glared at me, a big, toothy grin on his ugly face, waiting for me to make a move, I guess. Or planning his next one.
Behind us, the other chimps were going nuts. Leaping up and down, screeching and howling, heaving their smoothie glasses at each other. I saw Frankie—good old Frankie—crouch down and take a big dump on the living room floor. Guess he was upset.
Pretty soon, I knew the shit would be flying.
Holding his stomach, Leon pulled himself to a sitting position. He was moaning and groaning. You wouldn’t like it either if a 200-pound monkey took a dive into your belly. “Wayne, we gotta get help,” he choked out. “Can’t let this get…out of control.”
We had an agreement with the prison. It was in our rule book. Call ‘em up in an emergency, and they’ll send the guards running.
But I knew those dudes. Believe me, I knew them too well. They’d come shooting like it was the first day of deer season. I don’t know about you, but I always think it’s good to avoid a bloodbath before lunch, if you can.
“We can control ‘em, Leon,” I said. I started to tug him to his feet. He groaned again, rubbing his middle.
I had him standing up, teetering a little, when I saw Bo and Sweeny leap out the open window. One followed the other, and they didn’t look back.
No, we don’t have bars on the windows. Cuz this isn’t a cage, remember? It’s a haven. Besides, what chimp in his right mind would ever leave a cushy setup like this?
“Ohmigod! Ohmigod!” Leon kept slapping his forehead and staring at the window. “I’ll kill ‘em! I’ll kill the both of ‘em!”
Bad attitude. I was about to tell Leon that his bad attitude got us in this mess to begin with. For a moment, I couldn’t decide whether to start packing my suitcase, or go after the two fugitives.
But I’m a hopeful kinda guy, and I really wanted to stick around. So I motioned for Leon to follow me. “We can bring ‘em back. They’re probably waiting for us in the garden.”
Leon glanced all around crazily. I don’t know what he was looking for. A weapon? Then he narrowed his eye like he was trying to focus on the situation in hand. And he followed me out the front door.
The screen door slammed behind us. Sounded like a gun going off, and I jumped. I took a breath and told myself to cool out because I had to be the thinking one.
The heat hit us like a tidal wave, and I felt the first trickle of sweat at the back of my neck. The air felt thick and steamy. “They ain’t waiting in the garden,” Leon said.
“There they go.” I pointed just as the two chimps disappeared into a stand of red mangrove trees. Leon and I took off, jogging after them. We ran right through the whirring column of buzzing swamp flies and kept going.
I could hear the two chimps chittering to each other, all excited like. I knew that’d make it easy to follow them. One small break.
“Wait,” Leon said, pulling back on my shoulder. “We need something.”
“Like what?” I said.
He
