KANDREA CLARK LIBIN

THE MONKEY GOD



Frankie watched the flakes fall outside her window. Wheeler Peek, thick with snow, glowed in the early light of day. On the mesa, a mere dusting of white cob-webbed the brown and green earth. Fairy dust, Frankie thought and shivered from the cold. Noticing the wood from the stove had burned up, she cupped her hands to her mouth, snaked into her jeans under the covers. Though not unheard of, no one expected snow in town this late in the season. Frankie wondered if she should wake her mom, so they could watch snow crystals evaporate on a crocus blossom the way they had last spring. Her mom had called it a revelation. Frankie turned the word around in her mind, sounding out the syllables.

And then she remembered: it was her birthday.

“I’m seven,” she said aloud to no one in particular.

She wondered if her mom had remembered and was making blueberry pancakes. But the house was quiet. She had had probably forgotten, again.

Frankie decided she would look for fairies and mediate on the revelation that had occurred right outside her window all by herself. She packed her supplies: one flashlight with dim yellow light and old batteries; jacks; one hand-me-down pocket knife with dull blade; three keys that didn’t open anything that anyone could remember; one playing card—the jack of hearts; one white horse with purple mane and tail; matches; one snow globe. She foraged for a pair of matching clean socks, but only found two mismatched droopy socks, one with pink hearts, the other blue and frayed at the toe. She grabbed a pair of underpants, rolled them up, then folded the socks into a ball and stuffed them in the bottom of her bag.

Frankie rummaged in an old tea tin and found her necklace from the Himalayas that Maharaji had blessed. Running the strand against her cheek, she pressed her lips lightly to each polished bead. She thought of Maharaji in the mountains of India, before he left his body. His laugh. Beard. Blanket. Toes. She had kissed those toes many times. He was smiling at her now. She breathed in the sandalwood of the beads and saw monkeys giggling and whispering secrets in her ear. Blue cows. She could hear Sanskrit chants, calling her from a far off memory.

Holding the beads against her heart, Frankie whispered, I am like the wind. No one can own me. I belong to everyone. No one can hold me. The whole world is my home. All are my family. I live in every heart. I shall never leave you. I am asclose to you, as you are to me.

Placing the necklace carefully in a pouch, she decided she would give it to a fairy as an offering. In a trunk at the foot of her mattress, Frankie found her favorite dress with tiny glass beads sewn into the shiny, emerald satin trim that attracted fairies like humming birds to colored sugar water. She pulled the dress over her undershirt and jeans. The zipper was busted so she fastened the safety pin closed, pricking her skin. Only a tiny spot of red, she sucked at her thumb, briefly, and that was that. She threw a hooded sweatshirt on over her dress and laced up her boots.

She was almost ready.

Frankie tiptoed into her mom’s room (not a room really, just a wine-red, velvet curtain, futon, and dresser). Her mom and Hari Das were asleep. One of Hari’s naked legs and one of her mom’s naked arms stuck out from under the quilt. Frankie noticed Hari’s chest move slowly up and down under the covers.

The night before Hari Das had sat out in the moonlight as he whittled a stick.

“I hope you don’t mind if I stay around for a while,” he said.

Frankie wasn’t sure if it was a question or a statement of fact; besides, she wasn’t sure if she minded. Hari Das was a nomad at heart. That was what her mom told her. He never stayed in one place too long.

“Are we nomads, Mama?” Frankie had asked.

“We used to be,” her mom said. “But when you turned six we settled down so that you could go to school.”

They had been travelers.

They had started in Paris, visiting friends. Frankie and her Mom and her older brother, Finn, stayed with a family on a barge on the Seine River. Her brother stayed on in Paris with their friends to go to school and learn French fluently and drink café au lait from a bowl. Frankie and her mom drove with friends to Spain where they stayed with more friends. But they never saw a bull fight. Frankie and her mom took a ferry to Tangier. She could still remember the boat ride: dolphins diving in the waves to greet their arrival and the delicate peeks of Africa in the distance.

In Marrakech, Frankie slept on the rooftops in the heat of summer. The morning call to prayer woke her at dawn as the voices echoed through the medina. She could remember sleeping in a tent in the desert, riding camels, and how she could almost touch the round, orange moon, it seemed so close.

After a while, Frankie’s mom told her that she was searching for enlightenment and the only way to find it was to go on a pilgrimage to India. Frankie didn’t ask what enlightenment was, but she knew it was something important. Valuable. She pictured a golden vase or an ancient scroll with Arabic lettering buried in a chest in the desert. Or maybe it was a place—a magical city tucked into the hills where people made wishes that actually came true. In the Himalayas, they prayed every day to Hanuman, the Monkey God.

Time passed and eventually they made their way back to the States. After riding buses, sleeping on floors, couches, hitching rides, they ended up in an ashram in the mountains and high desert of New Mexico. On their first morning, Frankie’s mom sipped tea and gazed out at the mesa, the mountains. “I’m home,” she said, and they never left.

“But what about enlightenment?” Frankie asked.

“All I had to do was look inside.” Her mom sipped her tea. “It was there all along.” “Inside you?” Frankie pictured a jewel that glowed inside her mom’s heart.

“Like Dorothy, in The Wizard of Oz,” said her mom and wrapped her arm around Frankie, who imagined her mom in ruby slippers, clicking her heels.
Soon after, Finn arrived on an airplane from France. They drove three hours to meet him at the terminal. They held up a color penciled sign: Bienvenue Finn! He had longer hair and had grown three and a half inches, but in every other way he was exactly the same. He had the same brown spot, the size of a pea, on the lobe of his right ear. He wasn’t a replacement sent from outer space. Finn told Frankie he had missed her and gave her a snow globe with the Eiffel Tower and tiny people wearing berets inside. He shook the globe, then placed the flat part in Frankie’s palm, and it was snowing in Paris, rays of light streaming through the glass.

In the beginning they stayed in the ashram and helped with chores. In a special room there was a statue of Hanuman, just like the one in India. He was a large monkey, shiny and white. Frankie helped dress him in shimmering silk clothes. Her mom and best friend Tulsi sewed outfits for him with fabric they brought from India. They used silk thread. When they clothed him, they had to follow a special ritual. It was much more elaborate than dressing a doll. Frankie would offer the monkey oranges and sweets. He especially liked candy: Red Hots, jawbreakers, gumballs, red licorice sticks, and Good and Plenty were his favorites. He could fly, and he was very brave. A warrior. In her dreams, Frankie flew with Hanuman. As she held his hand, they soared over the Rio Grande to the Great Gorge and the far away hills of blue unicorns. As they floated in the night skies, boys in brightly colored turbans waved as they rode by on magic carpets.


The week before, late at night, Frankie listened as her mom and Tulsi sipped tea in little glasses, the sweet smoke from their Indian cigarettes trailing into her room. They thought Frankie was sound asleep. Finn had taught her to lie perfectly still, like a dead person, in case she was ever attacked by a bear. It took a lot of practice. If Frankie lay perfectly still and concentrated, she could hear her mom and Tulsi’s hushed voices as if she was holding a paper cup with a string attached, up to her ear, and they were speaking into a paper cup on the other end of the string.

“He called,” her mom said. “Out of the blue.”

There was a pause.

“Says he’s moving to New York.’

“Gave up on Hollywood did he?” said Tulsi.

“Says he’s had enough of television. Says there all sell-outs.”

“I knew he’d never make it there.”

“Says he’s going back to the theatre.”

“Well, la-di-da,” Tulsi said.

“He wants to take them back east. To go to school. Says he might be able to swing private school.”

“Where the hell has he been all these years?”

“Says he doesn’t want his kids praying to a monkey.”

“He can’t just show up out of the blue and claim them.”

“Well, the thing is—maybe it’s not such a terrible idea. He says he wants to make up for lost time. Says he sorry. I mean—he is their father after all. It might be good for Finn. Both of them, actually. I mean— it would just be for a while.”

There was silence. Then someone turned on a faucet.

“Nothing permanent,” her mom said.

Frankie could hear water running, dishes clattering. No one said anything for a while.
Frankie wasn’t sure if the picture she had of her father was real or made up. She hadn’t seen him since she was three. A Polaroid picture of the there of them was bleached out by the sun. Frankie wondered if he was rich and famous and what his new apartment in New York would look like. Maybe he would set up a room just for her with a canopy bed. The kettle whistled and someone turned on music, humming low and drowning out their whispers.

The previous summer, Hari lived in a tent on the hill behind the temple. He set up camp between two tress where he could watch the sun rise. For a few weeks he had taken care of a rich real estate mogul’s ski chalet. They had all slept in the king size waterbed and watched The Seven Samurai, surfer movies, 007, on a gigantic screen. Maybe Hari had given up on being a nomad for good, but Frankie couldn’t say for sure. Now, she watched him turn over in his sleep in the reflection of the mirror on her mom’s dresser. Frankie raided her mom’s jewelry box. Inside were treasures from her life as a nomad. She found a gold bindi and stuck it on her forehead. A third eye. Now she could see the fairies with x-ray vision through the sagebrush and pinion. She looked at herself in the mirror. She knew everyone would ask her if she felt different. That’s what everyone always asked on your birthday. She nearly forgot she had cut off her hair to her chin.

|A bob, her mom called it. She told Frankie it was a sin to cut off such thick, beautiful hair, but Frankie insisted. And then her mom decided she would bob her own hair. A lesson in detachment, she said. When Frankie asked her what she meant, her mom said it would be a lesson in letting go, not holding on to things that were not even real anyway.

“Everything changes, Cricket,” her mom said. “Nothing stays the same.”

Hari told them they looked like twins. Her mom said they had been flappers from the roaring twenties in a previous life. In a carved wooden box, Frankie found their cut off braids her mom had saved. She dropped the braids in her bag.


Outside the snow was beginning to melt. Frankie thought of her brother, Finn, who had gone camping in the hills with his best friend. It would be cold up on the mountain and she hoped they hadn’t frozen to death or lost a toe to frost- bite, but Finn was an expert at surviving in the wilderness. Sometimes he told Frankie survival tricks he learned from Billy and Thoreau at the Pueblo, like how to dig a hole and bury yourself in snow until you were rescued. But then she remembered how mad she was that he had gone off and left her on her birthday. He promised to make it back for cake, but Frankie figured he would forget too, just like her mom and Hari probably had forgotten. She found a stick and plotted her itinerary by drawing a map in the thin layer of snow with the tip. She didn’t know precisely where she was going, but she knew she was going somewhere, and she didn’t need Finn or her mom or any of them now that she was seven and she decided she would make a peanut butter sandwich in case she was gone for a while.


Frankie was so focused on charting out her plan that she almost didn’t hear the car pull up. It was a car she didn’t recognize—shiny and blue, with mud on the tires. The car sat there for a while, with the engine running. Eventually, a man stepped out from the driver’s seat. He wore sunglasses and held a map in one hand. Frankie figured he was a tourist. Her mom’s boss, Jimmy, at the café, had told her a few things about tourists. There were good tourists and bad tourists. “We all benefit from being courteous to the good tourists,” Jimmy said.

The man stood outside the car, door open, engine running.

“Hi there,’ he said. The map flapped in the breeze.

Frankie continued to sketch her route, which would take her along the Rio Grande and the old stage coach trail down to the hot springs, while she figured out if this man was a good tourist or a bad one. Bad tourists wanted to buy up lots of property for condominiums, build an airport in town, and destroy the environment; good tourists helped the economy by keeping the ski mountain afloat and throwing away cash on art, fancy dinners, B & Bs. But Frankie realized that Jimmy hadn’t told her how to tell the good from the bad.

“Hi,” she said. Frankie didn’t want to be rude in case he was a good tourist.

“That’s a beautiful dress,” the man said. “Going to a party?”

“Not exactly,” Frankie said. She wasn’t sure how much to reveal to a tourist.

The man crouched down. “Is this a treasure map?” He traced the lines with his fingertips.

Frankie wondered if her mom and Hari were awake yet. She glanced back at the house.

“I’ll go wake my mom,” she said.

“Did you know that map makers are called cartographers?”

Frankie looked at the man. She didn’t know that word, and she didn’t like it when grown-ups knew things that she didn’t know.

“That’s what you are,” he said, “a cartographer.”

“That’s obvious,” Frankie said, looking back at her work.

“That the river?”

“Yup,” she said, and tried to make sure he knew he had just asked the dumbest question in the whole wide world.

“And what’s this here?”

“That trail leads to the pueblo.”

“I was thinking of going by there, the Reservation,” the man said as if it were the most incredible coincidence.

“That’s for tourists. You a tourist?”

”I’m visiting,” the man said. “Just passing through town.” He looked back at the house. “So is it a house or a bus?”

“Both. It’s made of real adobe. Not fake. We lived in the bus and then built on the adobe part all by ourselves. And I helped.”

Frankie started to head back to the house to wake her mom and Hari. “I have to ask you something,” he said. She stopped and turned. He lifted his sunglasses onto the top of his head. His eyes were green and yellow. “Something I have to ask you,” he said again.

The sun was bright now, glaring.

“I’ll get my mom,” said Frankie and started to turn back to the house.

“Only, I’m not sure if you’re big enough to understand.”

“I’m seven,” Frankie said.

“Well, that certainly is pretty big.”

“My mom is probably up now.”

“Okay,” he said. “But I don’t think you need to bother her. I think you’re big enough to handle this all on your own.” He shrugged. “It’s up to you though.” Frankie didn’t move. “You see, I’m a bit lost,” he said with a slight wave of the map. “I thought maybe you could help me? You are a cartographer after all.” “Okay,” Frankie said. Her voice stuck in her throat and her mouth felt dry.

The man looked out at the mesa and squinted. “I didn’t expect snow this time of year,” he said.

“I better get my mom,” she said, trying to sound as casual as she could.
“What I need to know is how to get to the blinking light,” he said as if he didn’t hear a single word she said. Frankie knew where the blinking light was. Everyone in town knew that. “Can you help me?” He paused and folded up the map. “You can go tell your mom, but I’ll have you back in no time. Before she wakes up, most likely,” he told her, smiling. His front tooth was crooked. He had the beginning of a beard.

Frankie looked back at the house. The man was right, she thought. They probably were asleep. They weren’t making pancakes. They had forgotten all about her birthday. She looked back at the man, who smiled expectantly, waiting for a reply.

“I know how to get there,” Frankie said.

He leaned down and put out his hand. In his green and yellow eyes, Frankie could see her own, miniature reflection, floating above his pupils. She dropped her stick and took his hand and walked a few steps. Then she let go, ran back and grabbed her bag.

He held the front passenger door open.

“Shot gun?” he said. She knew her mom never allowed her to sit in the front seat, but she climbed in anyway and held her bag in her lap. “Buckle up,” he said, and she pulled the strap across her shoulder. The man leaned in to help her fasten the buckle and tug the belt tight across her waist.

They pulled out, the man turning the steering wheel with his right hand,

the left adjusting the rear view mirror.

“Which way, Scout?” he asked.

Frankie pointed right, and realized she didn’t know what to call him.

“What’s your name?” she asked, hoping the question wasn’t rude.

Turning on the windshield wipers to clear a film of water, the blades fanned across the glass, and he clicked them off.

“I’m your Daddy,” he said, putting both hands on the wheel to make the turn, slowly, through the heavy mud. “I’m your Daddy,” he said again, “and I’m here to save you.”

Frankie looked out the car window and watched as the snow dissolved in

the late morning sun.