The Monkey was a tinker. Terrence Clifford Hawkins, that was his real name, made him sound all dignified and intellectual, not like a man who wore overalls and workman’s boots with a hole in the heel. But he was the Monkey to most everyone, even the dock supervisors who’d sooner crack a tooth than crack a smile.

Loved takin’ things apart, seein’ what was goin’ on inside. He was real mechanical-like, could fix a busted washin’ machine in less than an hour. Not them fancy ones like my people got in their basement...no, the ones we had back then, with the rollers that squeezed out the water and like to take a finger off if you weren’t watchin’, though you were right fancy then if you were lucky 'nough to have one. I know 'cause my dear George surprised me for our anniversary one year. To this day, don’t know how he paid for it and not too sure I want to know, neither. I suspect he and some of the neighbors were runnin’ moonshine for the River Boys, but I didn’t ever ask and he didn’t see fit to say.

I was just damn grateful not to have to keep scrapin’ my knuckles on that old washboard. And when it broke down, the idea of goin’ back to that washin’ board upset me so much I made George drag the Monkey outta his work shed right then, to get the thing runnin’ again. Don’t know what he did, 'xactly, and it was wont to bind up if you didn’t feed it just right after that, but it worked and that was all that mattered.

The Monkey was fearless, too. Guess you’d have to be if you were tinkerin’ with things that 'splode if you look at 'em wrong. Even when smoke would swallow him up, you’d hear his great shoutin’ laugh. “Yessir, she’s a firecracker!” he’d say. Can’t count the times I’d be over to their place havin’ tea with Francesca, me and Hetty and Phyllis and Agnes, and the Monkey was somewhere in the basement, fiddlin’ with the 'lectricity. That was when it was still new and no one was quite sure what to make of it, though all of us with the new houses had it. Seemed closer to magic than anythin’ made by a man, and we gave it the same distance we gave that Houdini fella’s contraptions when he was up to the Lewis and Clark 'Sposition in ’05.

Not the Monkey, though. You could always tell when he was fiddlin’ with it, 'cause Francie’d be wound up tighter than a banker’s watch and the lights would flicker and sometimes the smell of afternoon rain’d come driftin’ up the stairs. If he blew out the fuses, though – and he did more often than the days in the calendar – she’d stand at the top of the stairs and holler at him 'til she looked like she had the pox.

Her daddy named her Franscesca – means “Frenchwoman” in Italian, since Francie’s momma was a French lady from someplace she called Belly Veen…'cept she laughed whenever I said Belly Veen, and would shake her head and say, “Non, mon petit” – and I guess Francie got her temper from her daddy, too, 'cause she’d light the Monkey up with a string of cuss words like to turn his hide to leather. Most of it was Italian and probably French, but cuss words sound like cuss words in any language, whether you know it or not.

“Zita, zita…nessun danno fatto,” he would say and kiss her on her angry forehead, and when I asked her what zita meant, she just shook her head and pressed her lips together so hard they turned thin and pale. Thought he was sayin’ somethin’ he shouldn’t’ve been sayin’ to her, and threatened to box his ears the first time I heard it, but then Rufus and George both laughed when I lit into him, and Rufus put a hand on my shoulder to keep me from beltin’ him. “No need to go beatin’ the tar outta the Monkey,” he said. “ 'Sides, Francie’ll probably beat it outta him herself.” Turns out it meant “no harm done”, though Rufus wouldn’t tell me what zita meant, either, just laughed real soft when I asked. Don’t know how Rufus knew no Italian, though I guess workin’ with the Monkey, they were likely to learn a bit of all the languages he knew.

Had a good mind, the Monkey did. Guess that’s what he liked 'bout the tinkerin’. Lordy, he’d sure get a kick outta all my people’s gadgets. Didn’t have this stuff in our day, all these mechanical contraptions that beep and buzz and whistle. Guess everybody these days has all that, but it wasn’t that way back then. 'Course, there were cars then, though we called 'em horseless buggies for the longest time and they sure didn’t look nothin’ like what my people drive around now.

Now, the Thompsons – they had that big mansion up on Syracuse – they were the first people in Cathedral Park to get one. A car, I mean. Doc Thompson went off to Seattle one week and came back with one of those Stanley Steamer contraptions that had all the menfolk talkin’ 'bout it for weeks. Left their wives alone after work and spent the better part of the evenin’s in the Doc’s driveway, talkin’ and drinkin’ and tellin’ tales taller’n the Sequoias over on Pier Point. That is, 'til Agnes marched over there and threatened to pitch her Daniel out in the street if he didn’t get home right then and well, I guess the rest of us took her lead and did the same.

'Course, the Monkey fell in love with that newfangled buggy. Francie clamped him hard on the arm whenever they’d pass by it on the street but there wasn’t nothin’ she could do to make him stop lookin’. If you saw him when that car was nearby, you’d see that glint in his eye, like his mind was turnin’ over how to get his hands inside to see what made it tick.

Didn’t take long for him to get his chance, neither. Those Steamers were real quiet-like, not like that Model-T the pastor over in Kenton drove through the parade, but it was hard to control. Could launch like a bottle rocket down the street if you didn’t have the trick of the throttle. George called it a locomotive without the rails, though his eyes lit up nearly as much as the Monkey’s when he said it. I guess they weren’t teasin’ neither, 'cause that summer, Doc lost control of the Steamer and liked to’ve killed Vivian St. Claire in her buggy. Let the throttle out too much, he said, and came up behind Vivian’s buggy like he was gonna crawl right over it. Spooked the horses so bad they bolted down Baltimore Hill and the wheels came clean off. Now, I never liked Vivian much, with her nose so far in the air she was liable to catch it up in tree branches, but I sure felt sorry for her when Rufus and the Monkey and her husband Richard pulled her outta that mess. Oh, she was all right, more shaken than anythin’ and a good dose of Doctor Thompson’s best brandy took care of that, but that surprised look on her face didn’t go away for days and there wasn’t 'nough left of her buggy to fix.

Doc Thompson wanted nothin’ to do with his fancy contraption after that. When Vivian’s horses bolted down the hill, he kept goin’ east, barely hangin’ onto the steerin’ wheel, and drove himself right across his own lawn and into those rosebushes he was so proud of. He was gonna sell what was left of it to a fella over in Laurelhurst but the Monkey talked him outta that and they traded the Steamer straight across for a bottle of Scotch the Monkey had stashed somewhere.

Well, Francie didn’t want nothin’ to do with that Steamer, neither, and she made sure he knew it. Cursed him in Italian and French and somethin’ else I’m not even sure was a proper language, hollerin’ so loud that Hetty and I would sit on the porch sippin’ our tea and gigglin’ like a couple a fool girls from a block away. Not that it mattered. George and Rufus and Daniel and Richard and the rest spent their time over at the work shed in her backyard and after awhile she just gave up and invited the rest of us over. She needed the solidarity, after all, and there isn’t nothin’ better than the cold disapproval of the neighborhood women for punishin’ the menfolk. Her back porch turned into the Mason-Dixon Line that summer, with the husbands crowded into that dirty shed workin’ over that old Steamer and the Sewin’ Circle in Francie’s parlor schemin’ revenge that none of us intended to carry out.

'Round July, they had that thing put back together and pushed it out onto the street. We were sittin’ on the porch – Agnes announced it was too hot in the parlor so that the menfolk would hear and not think we were movin’ out there to watch – and lookin’ everywhere but at that damn car. Don’t know that the Monkey even noticed, any more than he noticed the cold meals Francie’d been settin’ in front of him for weeks and the empty lunch buckets he was carryin’ to work each day. He climbed into that car, standin’ on the runnin’ boards like he was the mayor gonna give a speech, saluted the menfolk gathered 'round, caps in hand, then settled himself behind the steerin’ wheel.

Don’t know 'bout Francie, but I wasn’t breathin’, just watchin’ to see if he was gonna go tearin’ down the street like they say the Doc had, or blow himself to pieces like I read in the newspaper happened to that poor fella up at Fort Vancouver, 'cause those Steamers could sometimes bang like a cannon if you didn’t take care.

Well, I never heard a cannon in my life, but I bet that Steamer goin’ off in the middle of Edison probably sounded damned close to one. Sent the hood of the car straight into the air a good fifty feet and they found the steerin’ wheel caught in Mrs. Rivera’s maple tree two houses over. The Monkey was layin’ in the street, sprawled on his back and not movin’ a muscle. Seems like there was commotion everywhere and I remember thinkin’ I’d never seen grown women clear a railin’ like that; by the time we reached him, Richard and Rufus had him 'wake. Don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of the Monkey right then, those eyes starin’ outta face so dirty it looked like he’d dumped a dustbin over his head and his bare feet twitchin’ 'cause the 'splosion blasted him straight outta his boots. Nobody said nothin’ once he’d opened his eyes, not even Francie, who looked like she wanted to hug him and then do herself a murder.

And then the Monkey got that glint back in his eye, and that big grin just like always. “Yessir, she surely is a firecracker!”