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By Root 2373 0

the most part they all walked upright, though Larry, the biggest and oldest of them—he was over forty!—still occasionally regressed to the déclassé habit of knuckle-walking. Larry was a huge, fat, dark-furred chimp. He wore a red-and-black-checked flannel shirt and jeans, like a lumberjack. Lily, the female, was smaller and lighter, and wore a blue dress with white polka dots and a silver crucifix around her neck. Clever was twenty-five years old when I met him—about my age now—and he was smaller and shyer than Larry and Lily. Clever was an introvert, a dreamer. He was carelessly dressed in a red T-shirt and sweatpants. Clever had been the subject of a previous—and failed—language acquisition experiment (this I will get into later, Gwen) who had been “retired” to the ranch. None of them could speak, but they were all quiet, civilized, and fairly well behaved in human society.

We sat down at the table, and Rita served breakfast: spinach quiche, with toast and croissants, butter, and jam. It was delicious. The noises of chewing and slurping and of forks tinkling against plates filled the bright room. Regina, a big-personalitied and loquacious woman, did most of the talking, but her husband seemed to be closely monitoring the conversation from behind the bristly white ramparts of his mustaches.

“We founded the ranch and the organization over ten years ago,” she said. “Just after Dudley and I were married.” Her husband nodded over his coffee cup in verification of this information. “We wanted to do something kind for the animals. Provide a safe haven. Larry and Lily were the first chimps we brought to the ranch. Hilarious Larry was a circus chimp. He was captured as an infant in the Congo. They probably had to kill his parents to catch him. He’s an old chimp, now. He’s the dominant male of our little group. He’s been through a lot of bad luck in his life.”

Hilarious Larry, stonefaced and indifferent, shoved a forkload of quiche into his mouth and took a sip of orange juice.

“They made him wear a clown suit and ride a tricycle,” said Mrs. Lawrence. “He did tricks, he juggled. He would smoke cigars and drink brandy, and everybody laughed when he fell down drunk. When he was young, they removed his teeth, so he couldn’t bite.”

“Oh, my God—,” Lydia said, her hand instinctively rising to her mouth.

“We had him fitted with dentures,” said Mrs. Lawrence. Hilarious Larry smiled sardonically, showing us his false teeth. She went on: “Then the circus acquired a female chimp to be his ‘wife.’ That’s Lily. Lily was originally one of the chimps Bill Lemon raised for cross-fostering experiments in Norman, Oklahoma.” Lydia nodded. “Lily is deeply religious. She was raised in the home of a woman who brought her up Catholic—she was baptized, she had her first communion. Dudley and I aren’t religious, but we respect her faith. That’s why we built a chapel for her on the ranch. Lily goes there to pray almost every day. Rita takes her to confession on Sundays at the Catholic church in Montrose. She always feels better after she’s confessed her sins.” (I silently wondered how much sin Lily could possibly accumulate in her life of idleness on the ranch.) “The woman who had had her baptized eventually gave her back to Bill Lemon. A few years later, Lemon ran out of money and started selling off his chimps. That was in the seventies. Most of them went to biomedical research facilities. Lily went to the circus. I don’t know which is worse. They billed them as a husband-and-wife chimp act, ‘Hilarious Larry’ and ‘Hilarious Lily.’ It was disgusting. They carted them around the country in a cage in horrible conditions, dressed them up in degrading clothes, forced them to perform tricks. They were given no compensation. They were slaves. They made them sit down to ‘tea’ at a table, with a little tea set. Hilarious Larry juggled and rode his tricycle. They trained Lily to do an Arabian striptease act. They would make them sit in a set made to look like a Bedouin tent, and Larry would wear a turban and sit and clap as she took off her pink scarves, the