Trials of the Monkey by Matthew Chapman

inappropriate crack to someone, just to show I’m not afraid, this habit making every trip to school sheer torture for Denise, who, though outspoken and with her own fund of illicit peccadilloes, was always a good girl in school and remains a woman who would rather fit in than not.
    The other cops now lumber to their feet, pay laboriously, and leave the restaurant. But then they too hang around outside, laughing and glancing at me. I order another glass of iced tea from the one-eyed waiter to kill more time. Somebody must commit a crime in Dayton sooner or later. Some hick must crash his pickup, prostrate himself upon the tracks, or detonate his shack while brewing moonshine. Something has to happen to distract these cops from their endless spitting and strutting. And finally it does. Their radios crackle and they all jump into their ‘veehickles’ and rush off.
    Confident that adrenaline must by now have flushed my system of alcohol, I leave the restaurant and drive into town. In the humid evening, its quiet, tree-lined streets allow one to imagine a more peaceful era, the small-town America of myth, a predelinquent time when—so long as you weren’t black—you had a better chance of dying of typhoid than from a bullet. I stop outside the courthouse and listen to summer sounds not unlike those of my village childhood in England, lawn mowers, a distant shout, the crack of a ball against a bat. I drive across Main Street and find the high school where John Scopes taught. It’s still light, so I park the car, get out, and stroll around. The school is two storeys high, a squat, long building, municipal and uninteresting. I know, however, that it has been considerably rebuilt in the last seventy-five years. I wonder how it looked on the afternoon of May 5, 1925, when the twenty-four-year-old John Scopes was playing tennis on one of the courts behind the main building.
    School term had ended four days earlier, but Scopes, who came from Kentucky, had stuck around because of a girl. Having never seen her around town before, he asked flirtatiously if this
was because she spent her whole life in church, singing hymns and praying. She replied that indeed her family was involved in the church and if he wanted to see her again he’d have to attend a church social which would take place a few days after school let out.
    John stayed and became, in the curious and sometimes painful way of these things, famous. His autobiography’s title, Center of the Storm , accurately describes his role in the affair, but only if you think of a storm as having an eye. His name became known all over the world, but in the trial itself he never took the stand and anything he said was overshadowed by the grand figures who paraded around him. Nonetheless, he was perfectly cast for the role. His father, a machinist on the railroads and an important member of the recently formed Machinists Union, was an agnostic and freethinker. A self-educated working-class man, he often read to John at night. Together, they had even read some of Darwin’s work.
    John had already had one memorable encounter with William Jennings Bryan when he delivered the commencement address at Scopes’ high school graduation. The Sunday before, John and some friends had been preached to by a minister whose loose false teeth caused him to whistle his sibilants. This had caused an outbreak of giggles, and when Bryan began his speech a week later and whistled his first s , John and three others laughed. So unused was Bryan to being laughed at that when he met Scopes in 1925, six years later, he recognised him and reminded him of the occasion.
    Between high school and college, John worked on the railroads and spent a while as a hobo before finally enrolling at the University of Kentucky. He had been teaching at Dayton High School only a year and was not a biology teacher but a general science teacher and football coach. Good-looking, charming, funny, free-spirited, and athletic, he was