Rupee, Look at the Stars
by Todd M.A. Wandio
The sun had set on the sleepy town of Carbon Creek. The three stray cats and the lone mangy dog had long since retreated from the warmth of the asphalt to the cool back alleys of the main street. They were digging in the dumpsters, rummaging through the throw aways of the shop owners. They wisely avoided the Golden Dragon Restaurant, recognizing something familiar in the scent given off by the meat scraps, recognizing as one does an omen when one sees one. The cats settled for fish products from the tavern kitchen. The dog munched hungrily on a pork chop bone.
In the town center, bathed in the amber light of the mercury vapor lamp was the Calliope B. Withered Memorial Park, basically a patch of grass with a single oak tree surrounded by a cotoneaster hedge. A white cow munched hungrily at the grass. The town council had voted in favor of leaving the cow be, since she was not harming anything, nay, she kept the grass short and even fertilized, albeit too much at times. Still, her munching saved the town money since they didn’t have to look after cutting the grass themselves, or worse yet, have to hire someone to do it. They did hire someone to come collect the cow patties, so that people would feel free to visit the park without fear of shoe soiling.
In the same Memorial Park, beneath the single oak tree sat a park bench with wooden slats for a seat and back, wrought iron for the supports painted green to match the green park. It was a favorite spot for old men and the odd stay at home mom, since it was quiet in the park; since the cow was a quiet, apparently contented thing; since the tree offered shade from the scorching summer sun, and in the winter the cotoneaster hedge, barren of leaves, still prohibited the biting wind from stinging faces.
Across from the town center was the main street of town. The necessities could be purchased in the shops along the street. And if one were tired or hungry they could rest at the tavern, or the Golden Dragon Restaurant, and they often did despite the rumors about the fine eating establishment owned by Jackie Chan, the ex-football hero. If they were simply in need of a nice cup of coffee, there was the Coffee and Donut Shop, right beside the bakery. The baker and his lovely though ample wife ran the establishment serving what was reported to be the freshest donuts and the most refreshing cup of coffee for a hundred miles.
Most of the shops boasted steady business and repeat clientelle. The shop owners themselves supported one another through free advertising, the sharing of sales flyers, buy one here get one free there cupons, and such. It was a small town, everyone had to stick together to make things work.
Rupee’s Shop of Curiosities was the only exception to the rule. In a seeming wall of defiance, the shopkeepers of main street, Carbon Creek kept the meek shop owner of Rupee’s on the outside of business affairs in town. If they were sponsoring a halloween sale, Garth Pipke was the only shop owner not invited to put his share in. Christmas sales went on, with special give aways, yet Garth was never once asked to contribute, even though his shop would have much to offer, being, as its name suggested, a shop of curiosities.
The thing of it was, Rupee’s Shop of Curiosities was said to have a curse on it. Anyone who dealt with the shop owner lived in fear of being tormented by frequent misfortune. Some had been said to have died from the ringing of the bell when opening the door, even if they had just opened the door to throw in the mail. Not just the shop owners, but people throughout the town avoided Rupee’s Shop of Curiosities like it was a plague of the most horrid and unimaginable affliction.
Garth Pipke, inch-thick glasses making his eyes appear as if they were gazing through the far end of a fish bowl, rang the bell at the front desk of the R.C.M.P. detachment office. Cy Benberg high tailed it for the mens’ room, and the other officers immediately exited the building for the safety of their police cruisers. That left the town- custom-ignorant Sgt. Levesque to attend to the bell, despite a pile of paperwork he just couldn’t seem to get a handle on.
"And, how, uh, may I be of, uh, service to you?" Levesque began in his usual rough english.
"You see, my good seargent, it so happens that I manage the Shop of Curiosities, curiously enough," he chuckled to himself, and Levesque sighed. "Yes, well, it...it is very difficult to explain the situation to you without showing you. Perhaps you should visit the shop this morning, let us say at half past the hour? Yes, quite. I shall see you then." Garth finished, looking more like an agitated guppie all the time. Without waiting for an answer the odd man turned on his heel and left the building, leaving the bewildered Levesque standing there, jaw a-droop.
Seemingly out of nowhere, the detachment filled again with uniform clad bodies. There was a buzz of gossip, some of it expletive regarding the parentage of Garth Pipke, regarding the strange goings on in his curious shop, regarding his intimate relationships with small furry creatures. Levesque supposed that none of it was true, yet he listened with an ever growing interest.
Just as his interest peaked, Levesque noticed the time and left for the only establishment in Carbon Creek with which he was not yet acquainted, Rupee’s Shop of Curiosities.
Entering the shop, he was astounded at the apparent lack of order in the place. Things were stacked, hung from overhead lights, shoved in sideways on shelves and piled ceiling high on the grungy grey carpeted floor. The manner of the curiosities in the shop was equally as orderless. Here a book on ancient greek mythology, there a pen and pencil set in a leather covered box, the pen missing; a stuffed spider monkey perched on the antiquated cash register. Levesque poked at it with his pointer finger and was rewarded with a savage bite from pin sharp teeth of the creature.
"Rupee, no!" admonished Garth Pipke from somewhere deep in the bowels of the shop, behind a pile of what looked to be used throw rugs, but could as easily have been rubish in Levesque’s way of thinking. The monkey chittered an angry retort and covered its head with its hands. Levesque examined his bitten digit closely, concerned about rabies or tetanus.
"I apologize for Rupee, Sgt. Levesque. He isn’t accostomed to being poked at by strangers. Thinks he’s a human." Pipke walked over and shook the seargant’s hand, and Levesque winced as he contacted the sore finger. He could imagine himself in a hospital bed being told that the finger was gangrenous and had to be removed. He imagined his career being over, him being forced because of lack of funds to work at the Gas-n-Go and live in Carbon Creek for the remainder of his life, which wouldn’t be very long, since he would die of boredom long before he reached a ripe old age.
"And what may I do for you today, Mr. Pipke?" Levesque began, dispensing with the niceties and cradling his finger more than was necessary.
"Well, good sir, it seems my polly has been stolen." Pipke responded his eyes looking like rusty eggs through the fish bowl lenses. Pipke was gaunt and would have passed for the corpse at any accident site, Levesque thought.
"Polly?" he repeated, taking out his notebook and jotting down the word.
"Yes, my prize parrot is missing."
Levesque wrote that down as well.
"Can you...describe this...ummm...Polly."
"Quite, yes. She is variecoloured, though a number of feathers have torn out, she has glass eyes(though I wanted desperately to keep the real ones) and..."
"Sir, I...ah, begged to pardon but is this...Polly...ah...like the monkey?"
"Oh, heavens no. Polly is mounted on a pedestal. I would certainly hope she weren’t alive. Quite frightening, that thought. Frightening. Quite."
"No, seargent, Polly is a perfectly preserved specimen of a now extinct form of South American parrot. And, my good sir, she is missing."
Levesque looked about the room, wondering how one would know if something were missing or just lost amidst the wreckage of the place. He was about to ask when the monkey leapt from his perch on the cash register and onto the officer’s shoulder, leaned over and took a bite out of Levesque’s ear lobe. Levesque reacted by swatting at the creature, knocking it across the room and against a shelf of intricate glass ornaments which shattered.
"Rupee!" Garth Pipke wailed, bounding over to the monkey chittering angrily, though favoring its left leg.
Levesque’s first reaction was to mumble an apology and to attempt to help the creature. His second reaction was to feel his ear where the creature had bit him.
His third reaction was to contact Kass Haas, the town by-law enforcer, and have him take the monkey into immediate custody.
Needless to say, Garth Pipke was incensed. He petitioned Kass to let the monkey go, though he would hear none of it. Kass was about as busy as the town on a Sunday evening, and this was big news for him. He kept the primate in a cage built for a small dog and fed it corn flakes. He would neither allow Pipke to take the monkey, nor to visit it. The animal was in pound, he said, and would only be released following a full investigation.
"But you don’t understand, my shallow minded knave. Rupee is a wild Bornean Tree Monkey. He can no more abide being caged than you or I could abide being sealed alive in a coffin." But his arguments fell on deaf ears. The monkey would not be released, it was currently property of the Town of Carbon Creek.
Garth hadn’t enough money to hire a lawyer, so he went to the legal aid office and requested a cheap one. What he got was Iris Kneudsen, a full figured woman recently divorced from her husband, Olaf following an incident involving a cocktail waitress in Olds, a motel, and a bottle of expensive perfume on Mother’s Day. Needless to say, there is no appeasing the anger of a woman spurned on Mother’s Day.
Iris came at the right price, and she was a go getter. She marched down to the town office and demanded that her client be given visiting rights to the monkey, quoting some section of the criminal code. The clerk at the counter was befuddled and allowed the visit to occur while he contacted the more responsible authorities, who told him the visit should not occur. This the clerk relayed to the odd couple, Iris towering over and around Garth, a man who seemed hardly there at all by comparison. The couple were unperturbed and the visit continued.
Upon seeing his monkey companion, Pipke was brought to tears. The creature was a withered shell of its former, robust self. The leg which Levesque had damaged was untreated, and had already begun to heal improperly. Rupee barely had the strength to respond to her owner, as he put his finger through the cage. Still, the odd little primate was able to gently nip at the man’s finger in its traditional form of greeting. It was clear to all present, except perhaps for the foolish clerk who had just made the mistake of placing a hand of restrain on the shoulder of Iris Kneudsen and was now paying for it with a sudden spell of unconsciousness due to a nasty elbow in the jaw, that the monkey was clearly dying. Iris took charge and grabbed the monkey cage. Garth pined away and opened doors for his lawyer, helping take his companion to the waiting AMC Gremlin. Together the team spirited the creature away to a veterinarian in Red Deer who had agreed to see the monkey only if they brought it to the back door of his house.
When Levesque arrived to bring the visit to a halt, he found the clerk out cold and the monkey gone. His temper rising, he got into his vehicle and sped out of town, not certain which direction he should go, but by coincidence heading straight for Red Deer.
He would not have found the abductors and their ward, had they not run out of fuel just kilometers outside of town. Iris had managed to flag down a farmer, and had convinced him, by sheer force of dominant will to siphon some of his purple gasoline into their depleted tank. This he did, and they would have been off and running again had the farmer not run diesel in his farm vehicles. So, abandoning the Gremlin, the two grabbed their things, as well as the monkey in the cage, and headed cross country.
Levesque, in the meantime had found the abandoned car, had established that, yes, the farmer had indeed misfed diesel to Garth Pipke, whom he knew only vaguely from seeing him in church; that indeed Pipke had the monkey and that he was with a full bodied woman Levesque recognised as Iris Kneudsen. Following the direction pointed by the farmer’s crooked finger, Levesque aimed his police issue Bronco for the nearest road off the highway and travelled at breakneck speeds to catch his quarry.
It didn’t take long. Iris had sprained her ankle rather badly on a gopher hole, and it was more than Garth could manage, what with a combersome monkey cage and a fullsome woman to support. Still they were struggling along when Levesque called for them to stop and invited them toward the road.
They obliged more willingly than one might suspect, assuring Levesque that there was no need for handcuffs, and politely thanking him for making sure they didn’t bash their skulls on the door rim as they entered the back seat of the Bronco. By this time, Rupee was panting, but otherwise still as a statue. Tears welled in the eyes of Garth Pipke, and were magnified for Levesque, spying through the rear view mirror because of the effect of Pipke’s too-thick glasses. Though he was somewhat sympathetic with the Curiosity Shop’s owner, inside he felt a grim satisfaction at the monkey’s demise.
The creature died incarcerated, although Pipke was allowed the monkey as a cell mate for the time he was held on a charge of misappropriation of County property. Upon the death of Rupee, the charges were dropped, and Pipke released. Since he would not part with the carcass of his tiny primate companion, he was allowed to take the creature with him upon release.
Then things just got plain wierd. Something inside Garth Pipke had snapped. While on the surace he was the same polite, if slightly off kilter Englishman, it was rumored that at night his shop lights would turn on at midnight and stay on until the wee hours of the morning.
The rumors were, for once, true. Pipke had slipped into a condition so manic that he most likely should have been hospitalized. He had purchased a book on taxidermy as was attempting to immortalize his monkey’s corpse. It being his first time, he was doing a rather garish job of it. The finished product looked the cross between a football and the Frankenstein monkey. About the only part he got right were the eyes and that menacing bite, which after all both had to be perfect, being prosthetic replacements. Still, in Pipke’s mind, Rupee was looking more fit of late, perhaps wanting of a bath, which he gave her, but more fit certainly than the withering caged specimen he had brought home.
The curiosity shop fell into disrepair soon after the recreation of the monkey. Word began growing of a resurgence of the curse, and this time it appeared to bear a grain of truth. Since Pipke owned the property and contents of the shop, it could not be cleaned out, so its insides gathered dust, and the closed sign on the door was diplayed permanently. Garth had taken to long walks with his companion, which he had fitted with a pair of child’s roller skates and a leash, and which he pulled along behind him as a child would a wagon. He would talk to the monkey as he walked, commenting on the beautiful flowers when he was in fact looking at a perfect specimen of a brick wall, saying how lovely it was to see children playing in the park when the only thing in the park was the town cow.
Of course things continued to deteriorate, and Garth fell to drinking. In order to support his habit he was forced to sell the Curiosity Shop. Thus, without home nor livelihood, he fell totally into disrepute in an alley, behind a blue dumpster, swilling the cheapest wine on the market, petting his ugly recreation of a monkey and mumbling barely coherent niceties to the imaginary passers by.
"S’nice, sittin’ here ‘n this park, Rupee." He patted the monkey’s head. It fell over onto its back, staring up into the night sky, its menacing maw agape at the wonders of the univers.
"What? What you lookin’ at, Rupee?" He set the monkey upright and again it fell to it’s back. Garth removed the roller skates and tried again. This time the monkey stayed put.
"Y’know, old friend, you an me, we’re kinda ‘like, you an me." He moved his arms in circular motion, searching his booze enshrouded mind for the words he wanted, didn’t find them, so sighed groggily. He set down his bottle of Grape Contessa, perhaps the sweetest, certainly the cheapest vintage available. As he did, his hand knocked the garish stuffed monkey to its back. He left it where it fell.
"Oh, so you’re interested in 'stronomy, heh?" Garth leaned back and looked up at the sky, which began to spin violently, as did the buildings around him. He fell over, then righted himself, looking at his feet and trying to regain his equilibrium. The monkey appeared to be laughing at him. This was one indignity he could not abide. His own best friend turned on him. His last, best friend laughing in his face.
"Oh, go ahead, laugh." He stood, brushed himself off, straightening his pencil thin tie so that it was perfectly off center.
"You just lay there and laugh and look at the stars." He coughed and spat something foul onto the ground, barely missing the monkey.
Turning his back on his companion, his obsession, his nemesis, he shuffled away to another alley, or another park bench, or another town. A constant string of imaginary friends and wonderful scenes.
"Look at the stars, Rupee. Look at the stars."
