Monkey on a Chain by Harlen Campbell Page B

He poured for me, then looked over his shoulder at the door and quickly tipped the bottle over his glass.
    “Scotch and milk?” I asked him.
    He smiled guiltily. “Gather ye rosebuds…”
    I shrugged and sat. The scotch was smooth.
    April broke the ice. “What makes you think this Roy Rodgers was my father? My real father?” she demanded.
    “So you told her?”
    “In for a penny,” I said.
    He sighed. “I don’t know if he was or not. It might explain some things, but it would raise other questions.”
    “What questions?”
    He wouldn’t meet her eyes. He acted embarrassed. “About Toker,” he said. “About why he adopted you.”
    I knew what he meant. That had bothered me ever since April first told her story. She looked her question at me.
    “Toker was prejudiced,” I told her. “He didn’t like the Vietnamese.”
    “The gooks, you mean,” she said.
    “Yes.”
    She took her time to let it settle in, then began to tremble. “So all the time, when I was calling him Dad, he was looking at me and thinking…” Her cheeks were wet.
    “You don’t know what he was thinking,” I said. “Nobody does. People change.”
    “That’s why, then,” she said softly.
    Why he had never filed the papers, she meant. But I wasn’t so sure.
    “What was your mother’s name?” I asked. She gave the answer I was afraid of.
    “Phoung.”
    Miss Phoung, we’d called her. She had been Roy’s woman, in a way. Sissy had found her and she lived with him until he bought it, then transferred her loyalty to Roy. For a while, I’d thought I was in the running. But I hadn’t been. And now it was sinking in, slowly and painfully, that she was dead. The girl sitting opposite me was all that remained of her. April had sat on my deck and told me her mother was dead, killed in one of the war’s smaller spasms of violence, and I’d shrugged it off. I felt a sense of shame for that. I shrugged it off, too.
    Phoung had been a slight girl, very pretty, about twenty when I first met her. There was a trace of French in her ancestry from an earlier generation of the war. When Roy left, she had inherited the house we used as our headquarters in Saigon. Had he left her with more than the house?
    “Still doesn’t mean anything,” Walker said. “You know how it was then, man. Lots going on. People coming and going all the time. Only one it couldn’t be, for sure, is me.” He smiled at her.
    April looked at me and began to blush.
    “Not me,” I said quietly. “I never slept with Miss Phoung.”
    Walker was still making a joke. “Don’t be too sure,” he said. “You did some powerful drinking in those days.” Then he noticed April’s blush. “Uh, oh.”
    I stood and walked away. There was a phone on a table under the window. I memorized the number automatically, then stared out at the night. “No,” I told the room behind me. “I’d have remembered that. Miss Phoung was like…she was something I couldn’t ever have. I had other women. Sometimes I brought them there, to the house. And Miss Phoung was a lady. She always treated…I mean, she knew how it was with me.” I felt my train of thought slip completely away. It wasn’t possible to explain what it had been like for me, not even to Walker. I had been too young then, and I was too old now. I blinked rapidly and rubbed my eyes.
    Walker cleared his throat. “Woman’s mother said it was the cowboy,” he said. “She ought to know. And you sure ain’t no cowboy. So, say it was Roy. What does that mean?”
    I turned and walked back to them. April sat in her chair with her knees pressed closely together, her hands in her lap, her eyes cast down. I felt very tired. “I don’t know. What does it mean?”
    “Why would Roy kill Toker? Why would he try to kill his own daughter? It doesn’t make any sense.”
    “Maybe he ran out of money.” But even as I suggested it, I knew it was wrong. Roy would never run out of money. “Maybe he ran out of luck.”
    Walker