Chapter 18
The Birth of Monkey Spine
Author’s Note:
Throughout our time in Panama, Robert and I flat-out disagreed about exactly two things: Monkey Spine, and whether the General was from Alabama.
He was right about both.
Naturally, those were the two times I refused to listen to him.
The tropical heat was rising off the asphalt outside the Fort Clayton guard shack, sticking to the uniforms of the men on duty. Declan stepped back into the relative shade of the doorway, exhaling a long breath as his partner, Jeremiah, looked up from his clipboard.
“Declan! I was afraid I’d never see you again,” Jeremiah said, leaning against the concrete barrier. “What did the goon squad want with you?”
“Jeremiah, that was the weirdest ten minutes of my life!” Declan muttered, wiping sweat from his forehead.
“Do you remember the Bubble-Girl?”
“How can I forget, Dec? The warrant officer’s wife.”
“Yeah. That’s her.” Declan shook his head, a grin starting to tug at the corner of his mouth. “Well, they were asking me all kinds of questions about her nickname for me.”
Jeremiah raised an eyebrow. “Nickname? How well do you know her?”
“I don’t know her at all! She just started calling me Short Straw because I was the one that had to stand out there in the pouring rain talking to her. The hard part was the look on their faces when I started describing the bubbles coming out of her from everywhere. I was rolling on the floor laughing in there… and they were all just stone-faced, taking notes.”
Jeremiah chuckled, pointing a finger at him. “She’s your job from now on, you know that, right?”
“You just can’t make up rules like that, man.”
“Sure, I can. You do it in poker all the time,” Jeremiah countered with a shrug. “No one sits in your lucky chair. No one can open the window when you’re on a streak.”
“That’s luck, that’s different. There’s a psychological reason for each of those.”
“No, there’s not, and you know it.” Jeremiah leaned in, his eyes lighting up with an idea to break the monotony of the drawdown shift. “Hey—let’s make up something lucky right now and see if we can make it stick.”
Declan kicked a loose piece of gravel, thinking about it. “Okay… like what?”
Jeremiah grinned, looking out toward the dense Panama jungle lining the base perimeter.
“Monkey spine.”
Declan burst out laughing. “That’s it. Monkey spine.”
The two guards slapped a loud high-five in the humid air, completely unaware that their little joke would weave itself so deeply into the fabric of the base that a schoolteacher would still be defending it as absolute military fact three decades later.
And just like that, a myth was born.