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him with body lotion. She put him to bed while Walt envisioned his next day’s work downstairs. Conversations foreseen and successes planned, if this goes that way and that goes that way.
    On the weekend Walt and Looee worked in the garage.
    Walt said get me the ballpeen hammer. The one with the black handle.

seven
    Podo’s back hurts, and when he holds up a leaf to look at the ants on it, the ants grow invisible when he brings it near his face. He wonders where they are.
    Fifi walks over and touches his balls and they both feel better for it.
    Burke doesn’t want to play with Bootie. He pushes him, and Bootie thinks he is playing and won’t go away. Burke bites him.
    Magda hits Burke and sticks her finger in his eye. She too finds Bootie annoying, but he is her son. Magda complains to Podo, who bluffs at Burke and nudges Bootie.
    The rebuke stings Burke all the more because he wants to impress no one more than Podo.
    Magda shows Podo her rosé, which looks to him as pale and unwilling as the winter sun.
    He chooses to eat an apple. Fifi comes over and takes the apple from his hand, which he allows because she touched his balls.

eight
    Not all the guys were keen on Looee when Walt first brought him to Viv’s. One of them in the corner said is that a dog and Mike said that’s a monkey in a suit. Mike’s wife Cindy had been through a bout of cancer and was saved by the Blood of Christ. Mike would not want Cindy to know that he had been at Viv’s with a monkey, they’re full of disease. He watched Looee from the corner of his eye and thought of how guilty he had felt when he had tried certain things with Cindy after marriage and how the sin of the world caused good people to hurt each other, monkeys jeering at our earnest efforts to live in this quiet valley.
    Susan was friends with Cindy, and while Susan was not, in Cindy’s mind, assured of escaping damnation, she believed in an eternity blanched and rich as cream where understanding would land like feather on skin and her faith was so strong she was breathless some nights. Susan just wasn’t sure that her friend Judy was spending her days as she should, and was really, frankly, afraid of seeing her with that chimpanzee.
    So tell me what he’s like she said to Judy.
    Judy wondered if Susan really wanted to know, and she was sometimes unsure if her words had any value when Walt was not around.
    He’s just so special she said, already knowing she could never say how. He’s just so special.
    Tell me about your days, do you still read on that couch by the window or is he always … Is he clean.
    She tried to tell Susan what it was like to be surprised all the time and to feel a spread of warmth after each surprise. She tried to tell her that what he looked like didn’t matter but there was no certainty in her mind about what Looee was, and of course she looked down sometimes and saw this little hairy creature and thought is he my baby or a beast. He handed her blossoms and smiled. She could tell him to fetch his toys from the upstairs landing and he would. But he walked on all fours, always grunted before he ate, and idly put his finger in his anus and smelled his finger, sometimes licked it, although he heeded Judy on occasion when she said dirty Looee don’t do that. There was so much inhibiting Judy’s mind from following certain thoughts to their logical conclusions, and so much inhibiting her tongue from telling Susan about the contradictions and complexities of her days, that she simply tried her best to mention cute things like you know, Susan, he’s eating with a knife and fork like a real little gentleman.
    Susan’s scone was dry in her mouth and the image of a chimpanzee with cutlery made her think of hair and tongues. She wondered how big Looee was and she was aware of the pain in her cheeks as she smiled.
    Judy said we’re animal people, Walt and I. You know that. I grew up with horses.
    She wanted to say something that would keep the