Fiction: Under the Yellow Poncho

By Hank Kirton

Outside my building, down there in the parking area, I noticed a man with a bristling red beard and a black woolen cap and he was wearing one of those plastic yellow sleeveless ponchos, even though it wasn't raining (yet—it would rain later that day—the man was prescient!) and I clocked a large hump on his back that I assumed was a backpack, like he might be on a long journey or something. Maybe he was embarking on one of thosegrueling charity treks that overachievers attempt to test their endurance (and earn shit for the indigent or infirm). 

Or maybe he didn’t have a home. His unkempt appearance could’ve been evidence of a gritty, ground-level existence. I saw lots of homeless guys in my neighborhood. They were as ubiquitous as fire hydrants around here.   

But when the hump under the poncho began to move it sparked my concern. 

He’d been walking around the lot, moving through the rows of vehicles, looking in the windows like he was casing the cars for an easy score. I thought about calling the cops to report suspicious activity but I don’t really do that sort of thing. I mind my own business. It’s ingrained. I was taught that snitches and rats and busybodies were to be condemned, not encouraged.  My folks taught me that. They had traveled with carnivals for years.

I stood looking down from my living room window, the day’s first cup of coffee in my hand. I lived on the third floor, giving me a sniper’s-eye view of the man in the yellow poncho.

At first I watched him with a detached, relaxed attitude. He was just a guy slogging along early in the morning. On his way to somewhere. He was just that. 

But when the hump under the poncho started to shift and squirm, he stopped and looked around as if nervous about being seen. I was suddenly intrigued. My bland interest in the man turned nervous and acute. 

Then the thing under the poncho began to thrash and scream (it sounded like a chimpanzee scream) and he swatted it with a sawed-off hockey stick until the hump relaxed (if that’s the right word—it fell still anyway) and the man looked around (real furtive-like) and kept on walking (quickening his step asthe guilty do) and I wondered, What on earth did he have strapped to his back?

What was under the yellow poncho?

I considered calling the police again but applied the brakes to that notion. It was too late anyway, he was gone. Besides, it was none of my damn business (my parents were looking up at me with pride). 

But I couldn’t let it go.

My first impression (that the man had a living chimp strapped to his back) lingered in my mind. The idea was absurd, of course, but goddamn it, the size and movement of the shape and the sound of the scream just reeked of chimpanzee. 

Maybe the man had stolen it from a circus or a zoo and was attempting a surreptitious getaway. But there had been nothing in the news about such a theft. 

Maybe the man had rescued it from an animal testing lab. Maybe he was an animal-rights saint, smuggling the poor creature to greener jungles.

Maybe he just had a friendly ape companion and was giving his simian pal a piggyback ride and the scream denoted harmless excitement and fun.

Or maybe it wasn’t an ape at all. 

Maybe it was a child.  

I didn’t want to consider that so I didn’t.

It was an ape. The man merely had a restless chimpanzee under his yellow poncho.

There.

Hank Kirton lives in New England and has worked in factories, kitchens and warehouses in several states. He writes fiction to amuse himself.