Seize the Night

because it mistook him for the boy chick of Wisteria Jane Snow. Mom was its creator, which in monkey circles made me the son of Frankenstein. I heard the wrench ring dully off the side of Bobby's skull, though not a fraction as hard as the rhesus would have liked, because it hadn't been able to get in a good, solid swing as it was leaping.
    Then somehow Bobby had it by the neck, both hands around its small throat, and the beast let go of the wrench to pry at Bobby's choking hands. Only an extremely reckless monkey hater would have attempted to use a gun in these close quarters, and so as Doogie continued to slalom from curb to curb, Sasha put down the window at her side, and Bobby held the invader toward me. I slipped my hands around its neck, under Bobby's hands, and got a strangulation grip as he let go. Though this all happened fast, too fast to think about what we were doing, the snarling-gagging-spitting rhesus made its presence felt, kicking and thrashing with surprising strength, considering that it wasn't getting any breath and the blood supply to its brain was zero, twenty-five pounds of pissed-off primate, grabbing at our hair, determined to gouge our eyes, tear off our ears, lashing its tail, twisting fiercely as it tried to pull free. Sasha turned her head aside, and I leaned across her, trying to choke the monkey senseless but, more important, trying to shove it out of the Hummer, and then it was through the window, and I let it go, and Sasha cranked the glass up so fast that she almost pinched my hands.
    Bobby said, “Let's not do that again.”
    “Okay.”
    Another screeching fleabag swung down from the roof, intending to enter through the broken window, but Roosevelt whacked it with a sledgehammer-size fist, and it flew away into the night as though it had been fired out of a catapult.
    Doogie was still putting the Hummer through quick serpentine maneuvers, and at the tailgate, the monkey hanging upside down from the roof rack swung back and forth across the unbroken window, as if it were a clock pendulum. Orson tumbled off his feet but sprang up at once, snarling and snapping his teeth to remind the rhesus of the price it would pay if it tried to get inside.
    Looking beyond the tick-tock monkey, I saw that the rest of the troop continued to give chase. Doogie's slalom trick, while shaking loose some of the attackers, had slowed us down, and the bright-eyed nasties were … gaining on us.
    Then the sass man stopped swerving, accelerated, and rounded a corner so fast that he almost stood us on end when he had to jam the brake pedal to the floorboard to avoid plowing through a pack of coyotes.
    The monkey at the tailgate shrieked at either the sight or the smell of the pack. It dropped off the Hummer and ran for its life.
    The coyotes, fifty or sixty of them, parted like a stream and flowed around the vehicle.
    I was afraid they would try to come through the broken window.
    With their wicked teeth, they would be harder to hold off than mere monkeys.
    But they showed no interest in canned people meat, racing past, closing ranks again behind us.
    The pursuing troop rounded the corner and met the pack. Monkeys shot into the air with such surprise that you would have thought they were on a trampoline. Being smart monkeys, they retreated without hesitation, and the coyotes went after them.
    The kids turned backward in their seats, cheering the coyotes.
    “It's a Barnum and Bailey world,” Sasha said.
    Doogie drove us out of Wyvern.
    The clouds had cleared while we'd been underground, and the moon hung high in the sky, as round as time.

27
    With midnight still ahead of us, we took each of the kids home, and that was totally fine. Tears are not always bitter. As we made our rounds, the tears on the faces of the children's parents were as sweet as mercy.
    When Lilly Wing looked at me, with Jimmy in her arms, I saw in her eyes something that I had once yearned to see, but now what I saw was less fulfilling for me here in time present than it might have been in time past.
    When we got back to my house, Sasha, Bobby, and I were prepared to party, but Roosevelt wanted to get his Mercedes, drive home to his handsome Bluewater cruiser at the marina, and craft a pirate's patch out of filet mignon to cover his swollen eye. “Children, I'm getting old. You go celebrate, and I'll go sleep.”
    Because he was off duty at the radio station, Doogie had made a midnight date, as if he'd never doubted that he would come