A sedated Father Bannon slept soundly on the hospital bed, which was better for him, because his face was a mass of welts and bruises, including a heavily stitched upper lip that protruded like a beak. Jason felt guilty, looking at the broken body of a real priest, not the imposter that Jason pretended to be, who agreed to conduct mass because Jason had no clue, and now this man of the cloth had paid for Jason’s fraud. The chimpanzee had intentionally decided not to kill Father Bannon, although he could have easily done so: the point was to cripple the father and make an example out of him.

“I’m sorry, father, but visiting hours are limited.” The nurse, who wore white nylons to match her uniform, escorted Jason to the waiting room outside. Jason’s black clerical uniform, with the black shirt and white collar, was the only reason had even been allowed in to see the gravely wounded priest.

Jason stepped outside the critical care ward and his shoulders slumped at the thought of what the priest had suffered, and the long, difficult recovery ahead of him.

“Father Jason! Thank the good Lord yer okay!” Sister Mildred, accompanied by Maureen, jumped up off of the waiting room couch. “How is he?”

Jason took in a deep breath. “The ape who beat him wanted to make an example out of him, hurt the man as badly as possible without killing him. I feel lousy, because that was supposed to be me in there.”

“Why would you say that?” Maureen asked, and when he looked at her brilliant red hair, Jason saw that she wore the black satin ribbon that he bought her for Christmas.

“I’m the one who fought back against the RAPE goons, who continues to run the kitchen even though the mayor tried to shut us down. I’m the one who decided to hold mass as a ‘screw you’ to the mayor.” Jason motioned them over to the side of the room so they could speak more confidentially. “Whoever showed up planned to beat down the priest, make an example out of him, but had no idea there were two priests at St. Michael’s, and he brutalized the wrong one.”

The light came on in Sister Mildred’s eyes. “That’s why ya sent us out fishin’.”

“You might want to go back fishing. I’m afraid I’ve started a war, and it’s not over.” Jason ran his hand through his hair and massaged the back of his neck. He had no idea when he took over the shelter that it would lead to this. “The ape who beat Father Bannon will have realized he got the wrong priest, and he’ll be back.”

* * *

The monkey looked like a capuchin, perched on a bare tree limb behind the glass, but Jason wasn’t certain exactly what species was. He and Gramps were at Kendall’s Monkey Bar in Nampa, Idaho, where there were live monkeys in a glass booth behind the bar.

“Okay, Gramps, moral question. I’m running the shelter in the game, and I defied the mayor to keep serving food, so he sends the goons in, but I fight them, then they do a raid on the church and I fight them again, killing and wounding a bunch, and now it’s all-out war.” Jason took a sip of his beer and thought. “What if I had just turned the other cheek? Let the mayor’s goons push me around, not hold mass. Father Bannon wouldn’t be beaten to a pulp, five men wouldn’t be dead, plus who know how many other killed and maimed last night.”

“You always have to stand up to bullies. If they retaliate, and other people get hurt, that’s on the bullies, not on you.” Gramps watched the little monkey scamper over the dry tree standing in the glass booth. “The one part I don’t get is turn the other cheek.”

“But that makes sense, though,” Jason objected. “You can’t go your whole life trying to get revenge, seeking to even the score.”

“True, but remember you said that you felt you had no choice as a teacher but to take insults and abuse? Like the kid who calls you a fag—in the real world, you’d sock him in the mouth, or insult his mother, but as a teacher, you have to take it, and that kid will keep coming back to your class.” Gramps shook his head. “I’m convinced a man is not meant to just sit and take abuse—the healthy response is to fight back.”

“But you can’t punch somebody just because he insulted you.” Jason looked at his grandfather to see if he agreed.

“That’s the healthy way. I did time in jail, and everybody in the jail was unfailingly polite. Do you know why that was?” Gramps looked at Jason expectantly.

“You did time in jail?” Jason learned more about his grandfather every day: he had no idea the man had spent time in jail. “Well, maybe you were in with white collar criminals, accountants who embezzled, a priest caught drunk driving, that kind of thing.”

“I wasn’t in Super Max, but the bloc was full of drug dealers, drug users, and thieves, including one guy who used to rob stores with a shotgun to support his heroin habit.” Gramps leaned forward and pointed at Jason. “If you insulted anybody, or disrespected them, you were looking at a beatdown. Everybody knew that, so everybody was polite. If you turn the other cheek, then the world becomes full of rude assholes, like the kid who calls you a fag because he knows there are no consequences, but if he thought you might bust his teeth, he’d learn to watch what he says.”

“But then you’d have people constantly socking each other, getting into brawls. It’s chaos.” Jason drained his mug of beer and ordered another.

Gramps shook his head from side to side. “No. Remember when they said that if people could carry guns that there would be shootouts everywhere, and that you’d walk down the street to constant gunfire? You’d bump into somebody, so they’d pull out a gun and start shooting?”

“That never happened,” Jason’s completed his grandfather’s thought for him. “As the saying goes, ‘An armed society is a polite society.’”

“You’re not meant to take abuse. That’s why you want to get F.U. money.” Gramps drained the last of his Meyers’s rum and soda, then raised one finger to the bartender for another.

“Go ahead, I’m curious to hear what you mean by F.U. money.”

Gramps bore the same smile he did every time he became enthusiastic about a topic. “Of course, that stands for ‘fuck you’ money, or maybe ‘freedom unlimited’ money. The idea is that you have a stash of money, which could be the money you have in your index funds, so that you can tell the boss to shove it. You tell him to get that punk kid out of your class, or you’ll quit. You’re not afraid to get fired, because you’ve got money in the bank. You start to live fearlessly.”

Jason could see Gramps’ point. “Yeah. I need the job, so I just take shit. That’s probably why my blood pressure is high.”

Gramps patted Jason on the shoulder. “Yes. That’s why I want you to get out of teaching. That’s the way you want to live life—fearlessly.”

* * *

Jingle Bells. Jason always played Spanish music in his Spanish classes, and during his first year near Christmas he was shocked. Imagine hearing a song to the tune of “Jingle Bells” only the singers are singing, “Rattlesnake, rattlesnake, rattle all the way.” When Jason first heard the song, and cascabel, which they were singing, was Spanish for “rattlesnake,” he thought he was losing his mind. Then he realized that in English, a rattlesnake has rattles, but in Spanish a rattlesnake has little bells, like jingle bells.

Jason woke. He was hearing a jingle bell, which he had installed inside the drain pipe outside the rectory window. Father Milligan’s killer had climbed the drainpipe outside the rectory, so Jason figured the murderer would follow the same path again. His automatics lay beside him, as well as the snubbies, and the shillelagh.

The room was dark and still, lit only by the light of a quarter moon filtering in through the window. Jason heard a scratching at the window, a sign that someone was opening it. He picked up both automatics and felt to make certain that the safeties were off. He heard the window slide open, but painstakingly slowly, so that he would not have heard it if he were not listening for it. Someone stepped onto the couch, then onto the floor, followed by another person stepping on to the couch. When he saw the first shadow move around the table toward the bed, he found that he was holding his breath for fear of making any noise. Several more shadowy figures approached his bed, and Jason realized they were not humans, but were mandrills.

Five mandrills circled his bed. Jason had built a shelf over the window, long and wide enough for him to sleep on, so he wasn’t in his bed, but looking down on it from the other side of the room.

The five mandrills began stabbing into the form on the bed, which Jason had shaped out of pillows and blankets, launching into a silent fury of stabbing. He was reminded of the scene in The Wizard of Oz where the flying monkeys tear apart the scarecrow, which is exactly what the mandrills did to the mock figure on his bed, stabbing into it repeatedly with butcher knives that glinted in the moonlight, ripping through the sheets and pillows.

Jason leaned over and aimed both automatics, then squeezed the triggers. He saw the mandrills clearly in the flares erupting from the muzzles of his guns, and fired repeatedly, sending empty casings bouncing into the ceiling, which was just three feet above him on his platform above the window. The first two shots dropped two mandrills, and when the others turned before they realized what had happened, Jason blasted them, too. The fifth mandrill started to run back to the window to escape, but Jason fired on it with both automatics, and continued to drill it as the monkey crawled across the floor.

Jason practiced with the .45 automatics yesterday, going out to the abandoned warehouse, and it seemed to have paid off. Both pistols were locked back on an empty magazine, a sign that he was out of ammunition, but five dead mandrills lay sprawled over the bed and floor. Jason pressed the magazine releases, causing both magazines to slide out of the butts of the automatics and clunk onto the wooden platform that he lay on.

A gunshot barked from beneath him, lighting up the room with a brief flash, and he was slow to realize that someone on the couch or at the window was firing up through the shelf overhanging the window where he lay. He was even slower to realize that he’d been hit in the upper back by his left shoulder blade.

Jason grabbed his snubbies and rolled, as several more shots were fired in quick succession, peppering the shelf that he lay on, and zipping through the spot where his head rested a moment earlier. He leaned over and fired blindly below him, and was gratified by a growl signifying that he’d hit somebody.

The platform beneath him rocked upwards, splintering from an explosive impact that nearly sent him into the ceiling. Then the shelf he lay on was yanked out from beneath him, torn out of the wall, and Jason found himself falling through the air, rolling as he fell to the ground. As he spun in the air, like pig on a spit, he saw the chimpanzee on the couch, with a .38 revolver in his hand. When Jason hit the floor, landing more solidly than he ever had in his life, pain erupted through his lower back, an intense wave of pain that caused him to yell in agony. A rain of debris followed, landing on him and the floor around him. His automatics clattered on the floor, while the broken bits of the shelf he slept on fell over his chest. One of the snubbies spun like a pinwheel on the tile, while the other seemed to have disappeared. The shillelagh was last to clatter onto the floor, landing among empty .45 shell casings.

The chimpanzee hopped down from the couch and opened the cylinder on his revolver, ejecting empty brass onto the floor, that landed with a hollow tinkling.

“You have been a pain in the ass,” the chimp snarled. He removed cartridges from his pants pocket and calmly began inserting .38 cartridges into the cylinder of his revolver. “Always defying the mayor. Always have to be difficult. Roughing up the mayor’s men. What happens when other people get then idea they can stand up to the mayor? Somebody should have popped you a long time ago.”

The chimpanzee closed the cylinder, clicking it shut. The eyes sunk deeply beneath his thick brows glowed, and his lips formed a snarling grin. He raised the revolver and pointed it at Jason, who realized that he couldn’t feel his legs, and was powerless to move.