"Bishop's thoughtful, sensitive portrayal represents

a major achievement in speculative fiction .... A

disturbing and sober reflection on what it means to

be human." --Library Journal

"ANCIENT OF DAYS is a solid narrative of

anthropological fiction, treating human culture,

religion, and alienation in ways that bring into

question who is the More alien: twentieth-century

Americans, or the (perhaps) last survivor of a

pre-human species of hominid. It's real stuff. The

right stuff." --Ed Bryant

"Bishop continues to deliver solid, memorable

novels that move the emotions, intrigue the mind,

and still keep your hands turning the pages."

-----Gregory Benford

"This is a fine, engrossing novel, certainly one of

Bishop's best, and with the most believable, likable

set of characters he has created yet. Bishop has

very quietly become one of the major talents in the

field." --Science Fiction Chronicle

"Michael Bishop is becoming the best SF writer in

the world." --A. E. van Vogt

TOI

A TORN DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

FOR DAVID HARTWELL,

who has ridden to the rescue More times

than the U.S. cavalry.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed

in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people ,or incidents

is purely coincidental.

ANCIENT OF DAYS

Copyright © 1985 by Michael Bishop

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book

or portions thereof in any form.

First Tot printing: September 1986

A TOR Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

49 West 24 Street

New York. N.Y. 10010

Cover art by Christopher Zacharow

ISBN: 0812531973

CAN. ED.: 0812531981

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 8428324

Printed in the United States

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I

CONTENTS

Her Habiline Husband I

His Heroic Heart 87

Heritor's Home 277

Part One

HER HABILINE

HUSBAND

Beulah Fork, Georgia

·

·

·

·

RUTHCLAmE LOYD, my ex-wile, first ca

trespasser from the loft studio ofher barn-Beulah Fork. Georgia. She was doing one

ings for a series of subscription-order por(

would feature her unique interpretations of

orders and the Holy Trinity (this particu

entitled Thrones), but she stepped away if

look through her bay window at the intru(

had caught her eye.

Swart and gnomish, he was moving

shadowy grass in the pecan grove. His

i

bined an aggressive curiosity with a kind

as il' he had every right to be there

someone--the property's legal owner, a

!

bor--to call him to accounts. Passing fr

September sunlight into a patch of shad,

one of the black boys who had turned

creek into the skinnydipping riviera of Hot

He was a little far afield, though, and

limning his upper body made him look to

3

!

C)

ught sight of the

sized house near

of twelve paint:elain

plates that

'the nine angelic

lar painting was from the easel to

Jer. His oddness'

through the tall

novements com- if placid caution,

Jt still expected

buttinsky neigh'om

a dapple of

e. he resembled

Cleve Synder's

hlepoya County.

the light briefly o haiJ3' for most

4

Michael Bishop

ten-year-olds, whatever their color. Was the trespasser

some kind of animal?

"He's walking," RuthClaire murmured to herself. "Hairy

or not, only human beings walk like that."

My ex is not given to panic, but this observation worded

her. Her house (I had relinquished all claims to it back

in January, primarily to spare her the psychic upheaval of

a move) sits in splendid-spooky isolation about a hundred

yards from the state highway connecting Tocqueville and

Beulah Fork. Cleve Synder, meanwhile, leases his adjacent

ninety acres to a cotton grower who does not live

there. RuthClaire was beginning to feel alone and vulnerable.

Imperceptibly trembling, she set aside her brushes and

paints to watch the trespasser. He was closer to the house

now, and a rake that she had left leaning against one of the

'pecan trees enabled her to estimate his height at a diminutive

four and a half feet. His sinewy arms bespoke his

maturity, however, as did the massiveness of his underslung

jaw and the dark gnarl of his sex. Maybe. she

helplessly conjectured, he was a deranged dwarf recently

escaped from an institution populated by violence-prone

sexual deviates ....

"Stop it," RuthClaire advised herself. "Stop it."

Suddenly the trespasser gripped the bole of a trec with

his hands and the bottom of his feet; he shinnied to a

swaying perch high above the ground. Here, for over an

hour, he cracked pecans with his teeth and single-mindedly

fed himself. My ex-wife's worry subsided a little. The

intruder seemed to be neither an outright carnivore nor a

rapist. Come twilight, though, she was ready f)r him to

leave, while he appeared perfectly content to occupy his

perch until Judgment Day.

RuthClaire had no intention of going to bed with a

skinnydipping dwarf in her pecan grove. She telephoned

me.

"It's probably someone's pet monkey," I reassured her.

"A rich Yankee matron broke down on the interstate, and

her chimpanzee--you know how some of those old ladies

from Connecticut are--wandered off while she was trying

to flag down a farmer to unscrew her radiator cap."

ANCIENT OF DAYS

,5

"Paul." RuthClaire said. unamused.

'What'?"

"First of all "she replied, evenly enough. "a chimpan2 zee isn't a monkey,

it's an ape. Secondly, I don't know

anything at all about old ladies from Connecticut. And,

thirdly, the creature in my pecan tree isn't a chimpanzee or

a gibbon tlr an orangutan."

"I'd forgotten what a Jane Goodall fan you were."

This riposte RuthClaire declined to volley.

"What do you want me to do'?" I asked, somewhat

exasperated. My ex-wife's imagination is both her fortune

and her folly: and at this point, to tell the truth. I was

thinking that her visitor was indeed an out-of-season skin-nydipper

or possibly a raccoon. For an artist RuthClaire is

remarkably nearsighted, a fact that contributes to the almost

abstractional blurriness of some of her landscapes

and backgrounds.

"Come see about me," she said.

IN BEULAH Fork I run a small gourmet restaurant called

the West Bank. Despite the incredulity of outsiders (as, for

instance, matrons from Connecticut with pet chimpanzees),

who expect rural eating establishments in the South

to serve nothing but catfish, barbecue, Brunswick stew,

and turnip greens, the West Bank offers cosmopolitan fare

and a sophisticated ambience. My clientele comprises professional

people, wealthy retirees, and tourists. The proximity

of a popular state park, the historic city of Tocqueville,

and a recreational area known as Muscadine Gardens keeps

me in paying customers: and while RuthClaire and I were

man'ied, she exhibited and sold many of her best paintings

right on the premises. Her work--4mly a Ikw pieces of

which I still have on my walls--gave the restaurant a kind

of muted bohemian elegance, but. in turn, the West Bank

gave my wife a unique and probably invaluable showcase

'" · 6 Michael Bishop

for her talent Until our split, I think, we both viewed the

relationship between her success and mine as healthily

symbiotic.

Art in the service of commerce. Commerce in the service

of art.

RuthClaire had telephoned me just before the dinner

hour on Friday. The West Bank had reservations from More than a dozen people

from Tocqueville and the Gardens,

and I did not really want to dump the whole of this

formidable crowd into the lap of Molly Kingsbury, a

bright young woman who does a better job hostessing than

overseeing my occasionally highstrung cooks, Hazel

Upchurch and Livia George Stephens. But dump it I did. I

begged off my responsibilities at the West Bank with a

story about a broken water pipe on Paradise Farm and

drove out there lickety-split to see about my ex. Twelve

miles in ten minutes.

RuthClaire led me to the studio loft and pointed through

her window into the pecan grove. "He's still sitting there,"

she said.

I squinted. At this hour the figure in the tree was a mere

smudge among the tangled branches, not much bigger than

a squirrel's nest. "Why didn't you shoot off that .22 i

gave you'?" I asked RuthClaire, a little afraid that she was

having me on. Even the spreading crimson sunset behind

the pecan grove did not enable me to pick out the alleged

trespasser.

"I wanted you to see him, too, Paul. I got to where I

needed outside, confirmation. Don't you see'?"

No, I didn't see. That was the problem.

"Go out there with me," RuthClaire suggested. "The

buddy system's always recommended for dangerous enterprises."

"The buddy I want is that little .22, Ruthie Cee." She

stood aside while I wrested the rifle out of the gun cabinet,

and together we went back down the sairs, through the

living and dining rooms, and out the plate-glass doors opening onto the pecan

grove. Beneath the intruder's tree

we paused to gape and take stock. The stock I took went

into the cushion of flesh just above my right armpit, and I

ANCIENT OF DAYS

7

sighted along the barrel at a bearded black face like that of

a living gargoyle.

RuthClaire was right. The trespasser wasn't a monkey;

he More near]y resembled a medieval demon, with a small

but noticeable ridge running fore and aft straight down the

middle of his skull. He had been on the cusp of falling

asleep. I think, and the apparition of two human beings at

this inopportune moment greatly startled him. The fear

showed in his beady, obsidian eyes, which flashed between

my ex-wilE and me like sooty strobes. His upper lip

moved away from his teeth.

From above the mysterious creature I shot down a dangling

cluster of branches that would have eventually fallen,

anyway. The report echoed all the way to White Cow

Creek, and hundreds of foraging sparrows scattered into

the twilight like feathered buckshot.

"I swear to goodness, Paul!" RuthClaire'shouted, her

most fiery oath. She was trying to take the rifle out of my

hands. "You've always-been a shoot-first-talk-later fool but

that poor fella's no threat to us! Look!"

i gave up the .22 as I had given up Paradise Farm,

docilely, and I looked. RuthClaire:s visitor was terrified,

almost catatonic. He could not go up, and he could not

come down; his head was probably still reverberating from

the rifle shot, the heart-stopping crash of the pecan limb. I

wasn't too sorry, though. He had no business haunting my

ex.

"Listen," I said, "you asked me to come see about

you. And you didn't object when I brought that baby down

from the loft, either."

Angrily, RuthClaire ejected the spent shell, removed the

.22's magazine, and threw the rifle on the ground. "I

wanted moral support. Paulie, not a hit man. I thought the

gun was vottr moral support, that's all. i didn't know you

were going to try to murder the poor innocentwretch with

it."

"'Poor innocent wretch,'" I repeated incredulously.

"'Poor innocent wretch'?"

This was not the first time we had found ourselves

arguing in front of an audience. Toward the end it had

8

Michael Bishop

happened frequently at the West Bank, RuthClaire accus

ing

me of insensitivity, neglect, and philandering with my

female help (although she knew that Molly Kfngsbury was

having none of that nonsense), while I openly rued her i

blinkered drive lor artistic recognition, her lack of regard i

of my inborn business instincts, and her sometimes mad

deningly

rigorous bouts of chastity. The West Bank is :

small--a converted doctor's office wedged between Glo-ria's Beauty Shopand Ogletree Plumbing & Electric, all in

the same red-brick shell on Main Street--and even arguing I

in the kitchen we could give my customers a discomfiting i

earful. Only a few tolerant souls, mostly locals, thought i

these debates entertaining: and when my repeat business

from out of town began falling off, well, that was the last

.straw. I made the West Bank off limits to RuthClaire.

Soon thereafter she began divorce proceedings.

Now a shivering black gnome, naked but for a see-through

leotard of hair, was staring down at us as my ex

compared me to Vlad the lmpaler, Adolf Hitler. and the

government of South Africa. I began to think that he could I

not be too much More bewildered and unconffortable than I .

"What the hell do you want me to do'?" i finally

blurted.

"Leave me alone with him," RuthClairc said. "Go

back to the house."

"That's crazy," I began. "That's--"

"Hush, Paulie. Please do as I say, all right?"

I retreated to the sliding doors, no farther. RuthClaire

talked to the trespasser. In the gathering dark she crooned

reassurance. She consoled and coaxed. She even hummed

a lullaby. Her one-sided talk with the intruder was interminable.

I, because she did not seem to be at any real risk,

went inside and poured myself a powerful scotch on the

rocks. At last RuthClaire returned.

"Paul," she said, gazing into the pecan grove, "he's a

member of a human species--you know, a collateral human

species--that doesn't exist anymore."

"He told you that, did he'?"

"I deduced it. He doesn't speak."

ANCIENT OF DAYS

9

"Not'English, anyway. What do you mean, 'doesn't exist

anymore"/He's up in that tree, isn't he'?"

"Up in the air, More like," RuthClaire said. "It reminds

me of that Indian, lshi."

"Who-shiT'

"A Yahi Indian in northern California whose name was

!shi. Theodora Kroeber wrote a couple of books about

him." RuthClaire gestured at the shelves across the room

from us: in addition to every contemporary best seller that

came through the B. Dalton's in Tocqueville Commons

Mall. these shelves housed art books, popular-science volumes,

and a "feminist" library of no small proportions,

this being RuthClaire's term for books either by or about

women, no matter when or where they lived. (The BrontE

sisters were next to Susan Brownmiller; Sappho was not

far from Sontag.)

I lifted my eyebrows: '"P'

"Last of his tribe," RuthClaire explained. "lshi was the

last surviving member of' the Yahi; he died around' nineteen

fifteen or so, in the Museum of Anthropology in San

Francisco." She mulled this bit of intelligence. "It's my

guess, though, that our poor wretch comes from a species

that originated in East Africa two or three million years

ago." She mulled her guess. "That's a little longer than

lshi's people were supposed to have been extinct before

Ishi himself turned up, I'm afraid."

"There goes your analogy."

"Well, it's not perJi, ct, Paul, but it's suggestive. What

do you think'?"

"That you'd be wiser calling the hugger in the tree a

deranged dwarf instead of an Indian. You'd be wiser yet

.just calling the police."

RuthCtaire went to the bookshelf and removed a volume

by a well-known scientist and television personality. She

had everything this flamboyant popularizer had ever written.

After flipping through several well-thumbed pages, she

found the passage pertinent to her argument:

"'Were we to encounter Homo habilis---dressed, let us

say. in the latest fashion on the boulevards of some modern

metmpolis--:-we would probably give him only a pass

l0

Michael Bishop .

lng glance, and that because of his relatively small stature.'"

She closed the book. "There. The creature in the pecan

tree is a habiline, a member of the species HOmo habilis.

He's human, Paul, he's one of us."

"That may or may not be the case, but I'd still feel

obliged to wash up with soap and water after shaking his

hand."

RuthClaire gave me a look commingling pity and contempt

and replaced the book on its shelf. I made up a

song--which I had the good sense not to sing aloud to

her--to the tune of an old country-and-western ditty entitled

"Abilene":

Habiline, 0 habiline,

Grungiest ghoul I've ever seen.

Even Gillette won't shave him clean,

That habiline.

I telephoned the West Bank to see how Molly was

getting on with Hazel and Livia George (she said every~

thing was going "swimmingly," a word Molly had learned

from a beau in Atlanta), then convinced my ex-wife to let

me spend the night at Paradise Farm on the sofa downstairs.

For safety's sake. RuthClaire reluctantly consented.

In her studio toff she worked through until morning. At

dawn i heard her say. "It's all right, Paul. He left while

you were sleeping." She handed me a cup of coffee. I

sipped at it as she gazed out the sliding doors at the empty

pecan grove.

THE FOLLOWING month--about three weeks ]ater--I ran

into RuthClaire in Beulah Fork's ancient A&P, where I do

almost all of my shopping for the West Bank: meats,

produce, the works. October. Still sunny. The restaurant

business only now beginning to tail off toward the inevita-ANCIENT OF DAYS

I I

ble winter slump. I had not thought of the lshi Incident, or

whatever you might choose to call it, More than three or

four times since actually investigating it. Perhaps I did not

believe that it had really happened. The whole episode had

a dreamlike texture that did not stick very well to the

hard-edged banality of everyday life in Beulah Fork. Besides,

no one else in Hothlepoya County had mentioned

seeing a naked black gnome running around the countryside

climbing trees and stealing pecans.

My ex and I chatted, altogether amicably at first.

RuthClaire had just finished an original painting entitled Principalities for

her porcelain-plate series, and AmeriCred

Company of New York, New York, would begin taking

subscription orders for this unusual Limoges ware at fifty-six

dollars a plate in early December. The artist was going

to receive an 8 percent royalty for each plate sold, over

and above the commission paid her in July for undertaking

the work. She was very excited, not solely by the money

she stood to make but also by the prospect of reaching a

large and undoubtedly discerning audience. Ads for the

subscription series, AmeriCred had told her, were going to

appear in such classy periodicals as Smithsonian, Natural

Histota,, and Relic Collector. I wrote out a check tot

fifty-six dollars and told RuthClaire to sign me up at the

first available opportunity; this was my deposit toward a

subscription. Folding the check into her coin purse, she

looked unfeignedly flustered. But grateful, too.

"You don't have to do this, Paul."

"I know I don't. I want a set of those plates. My

customers are going to enjoy eating off the Father, the

Son, and the Holy Ghost--not to mention the nine different

species of angel."

"They're not for dinner use, really. They're for display."

"A rank commercial enterprise?" I tweaked her. "Readymade

antiques for the spiritual cognoscenti who frown on

bodily functions like eating and ummmmummmmummm?

How about that'? You may be catering to an airy crowd,

Ruthie Cee, but we're both in business, it looks like--business

with a capital B."

Amazingly she smiled, merely smiled.

12

Michael Bishop

"I can see you haven't given up eating," I pursued.

"That's quite a load you've got therei"

Her shopping basket contained six uncut 'frying chickens,

four heads of cabbage, three tins of Planters party

nuts, four or five bunches of bananas, and several packages

of fresh fish, mostly mullet and red snapper. I ogled

this bounty. RuthClaire had never fried a chicken in her

life, and I knew that she despised bananas. The other

stuff was also out of the finicky pale of her diet, for in

hostile overreaction to my virtuosity as chef and restaurateur

she--not long before the end--had ostentatiously limited

her intake to wild rice, bean curd, black beans, fresh

vegetables, fruit juice, and various milk products. This

spiteful decision had not helped our marriage any, either.

"I'm having some people down from Atlanta." she

explained, rather defensively. "Gallery people."

"Oh," I replied.

We looked at each other for a moment.

"They're all invited guests, I take it," I said at last.

"You don't want any uninvited drop-ins, do you'?"

RuthClaire stiffened. "I don't teed the uninvited. You

know that. Goodbye, Paul. Thanks for taking out a

subscription."

She went her way, I mine. For somebody subsisting on

rabbit t'ood and artistic inspiration, i reflected, she looked

damned good.

I LEARNED later what had been going on at Paradise

Farm. On the morning after my overnight stay on the

downstairs sofa RuthClaire had moved a rickety table into

the pecan grove. Every evening she set it with paper plates

and uncooked food items, including party nuts in a cut-glass

dish that had once belonged to her mother. Further,

on a folding deck chair she laid out one of my old leisure

suits, altered for a figure smaller than mine, just in case

ANCIENT OF DAYS

13

the nippy autumn air prompted the trespasser to cover his

nakedness. At first, though, the habiline did not rise to this

bait. The dew-laden suit had to dry every day on the

clothesline, and every evening RuthClaire had to replace

the soggy paper dinnerware and the slug-slimed food items.

Around Halloween, when nighttime temperatures were

dipping into the thirties, my ex awoke one morning to find

the creature hunkering on the table on a brilliant cloth of

frost. The grass looked sequined. SO did the habiline's

feet. He was eating unpeeled bananas and shivering so

violently that the table rocked back and forth. RuthClaire

put on her dressing gown and hurried downstairs. She

opened the sliding doors and beckoned the fellow inside,

where he could warm his tootsies at the cast-iron Buck

stove in the fireplace. Although he followed RuthClaire

with his eyes, he did not move. RuthClaire, leaving the

glass doors open, fetched a set of sun lamps from her loft.

These she placed about the patio area so that they all shone

directly into the house--runway lights to warmth and safety.

The sun began to burn away the frost. An hour or so

later, watching from her bay window, RuthClaire saw the

habitine leap down from the table. For a moment he

seemed to consider fleeing th?ough the pecan grove, but

soon rejected this notion to stroll--head ducked, elbows

out--through the gauntlet of lamps toward the house. A

ballsy fellow, this one, and my ex was able to see quite

clearly that this appraisal of him was no mere metaphor. A

ballsy bantam in blackface.

Her heart pounding paradiddles, RuthClaire went downstairs

to meet him. This was the beginning: the real beginning.

Although over time a few clues have come my way

(some of which I will shortly set forth). I do not pretend to

know e.t'ucdv how RuthClaire domesticated this representative

of a supposedly extinct hominid species ancestral to

our own--but she was probably More alert to his feelings

and needs than she had ever been to mine. in the dead of

winter, for instance, she routinely left the patio doors

open, never questioning his-comings and goings, never

surrendering to resentment because of them. She ted him

14

Michael Bishop

whatever he liked, even if sparerib splinters ended up

between the sofa cushions or half-eaten turnips sometimes

turned up on the bottom of her shower stall' looking like

mushy polyhedral core tools. Ruthie Cee may have a

bohemian soul, but during the six years of our marriage

she had also evinced a middle-class passion for tidiness;

more than once she had given me hell tor letting the end of

the dental floss slip down into its flip-top container. For

her prehistoric paramour, however, she made allowances--

lots of them.

She also sang to him, I think. RuthClaire has a voice

with the breathy delicacy of Garfunkel during his partnership

with Simon, and I can easily imagine her soothing the

savage breast of even a pit bull with a single stanza of

."Feelin' Groovy." The habiline, however, she probably

deluged with madrigals, hymns, and soft-drink ditties; and

although she has always professed to hate commercial

television, she has since publicly admitted using the idiot

box--as well as song--to amuse and edify her live-in

hominid. Apparently, he especially enjoyed game shows,

situation comedies, sporting events, and nature studies. On

the public broadcasting channels RuthClaire introduced

him to such programs as "Sesame Street," "Organic Gardening,''

and "Wall Street Week," while the anything-goes cable networks gave him a

crash course in contemporary

hominid bonding rituals. All these shows together

were undoubtedly as crucial to the domestication process

as my ex-wife's lovely singing.

But it was not until a week or so into the new year that i

learned about any of this. RuthClaire drives to Tocqueville

to do her shopping More often than she comes to Beulah

Fork; and our chance meeting in the A&P, despite resulting

in my order for the first plate in the Celestial Hierarchy series, had made

her wary of running into me again. She

stayed away from town. I, in turn, could not go out to

Paradise Farm without an invitation. The terms of our

divorce expressly stipulated this last point, and my reference

to uninvited guests during our brief trite-h-trite in

October had stricken RuthClaire as contemptibly snide.

Maybe I had meant it to be ....

ANCIENT OF DAYS

15

Anyway, on the day before Christmas Eve I telephoned

RuthClaire and asked if I could come out to the farm to

give her a present. Somewhat reluctantly (it seemed to me)

she agreed. Although it was cold and dark when i rang the

front doorbell, she stepped through the door to greet me,

and we conferred on the porch. The Persian kitten in the

cardboard box under my arm cowered away from Ruthie

Cee, its wintry pearl-gray fur like a lion's mane around its

Edward G. Robinson face. My ex, emitting sympathetic

coos, scratched the creature behind its ears until it began to

purr.

Then she said, "I can't accept him, Paul."

"Why not? He's got a pedigree that stretches from here

to lsfahan." (This was a lie. Nevertheless, the kitten looked it.) "Besides,

he'll make a damned good mouser.

A farm needs a mouser."

"I just can't give him the attention he needs." RuthClaire

saw my irritation. "I didn't think you'd be bringing an

animal, Paul. A sweater, a, necklace, a new horror novel--anything

nonliving I'd'ye been happy to accept. But a

kitten's a different matter, and I just can't be responsible

for him, sweet and pretty as he is."

I tacked about. "Can't I dome in for some eggnog?

Come the holidays, this place used to reek of eggnog."

"I have a visitor."

"A man, huh'?"

Somewhat gravely, she nodded. "He's . . . he's allergic

to cats."

"Why can't i meet him'.)''

"I don't want you to. Anyway, he's shy."

I looked toward the carport. Although RuthClaire's navy-blue

Honda Civic gleamed dully in the sheen of the yard's

security lights, I saw no other vehicle anywhere. Besides

}ny own, of' course.

"Did he jog out here'?"

"Hiked."

"What's his name'?"

RuthClaire smiled a crooked smile. "Adam," she said.

"Adam what'?"

"None of your bee's wax, Paul. I'm tired of this inter

16

Michael Bishop

rogation. Here, hang on a sec." She retreated into the

house but came back a moment later carrying a piece of

Limoges ware featuring her painting Angels."This is the

plate for January," she explained. "Over the course of the

year you'll go from Angels to Archangels to Principalities--

all the way up to The Father--and I've seen to it that

you'll receive the olher eleven without having to pay for

them. That's my Christmas present to you, Paul." She

took the kitten's shoebox from me so that I could look at

the plate without endangering either the mystified animal

or the fragile porcelain. "See the border. That's twenty-four-karat gold, applied by hand."

"Beautiful." I said, and I kissed her lightly on the

forehead. "Bring this Adam fella to the restaurant, Ruthie

'Cee. Frogs' legs, steak, wild-rice pilaf, coq au vim anything

he wants--on the house. And for you. of course, the

gourmet vegetable plate. I'm serious now. Take me up on

this."

She returned my chaste kiss along with the kitten. 'This

is the way you behaved when we were courting. Good

night, Paul."

"Good night, kid."

On the way back to Beulah Fork the kitten began prowl-lng

all over my shoulders and thighs and miaowing obnoxiously,

it even got tangled in the steering wheel. I put it

out about a mile from Ruben Decker's place and kept on

driving.

IN JANUARY, as I have alluded, the pieces began coming

together. To my surprise RuthClaire called to make reservations

lot Adam and herself at the West Bank: they were

actually going to avail themselves of my offer. However,

even though only the two of them were coming. RuthClaire

wanted the entire restaurant, every table. If I would grant

them this extraordinary boon, she would pay me the equiv-ANCIENT OF DAYS

17

alent of a night's receipts on a typical weekday evening in

winter. I told her that she was crazy, but that if she and her

inamorato came on a Tuesday, always my slowest night, I

would donate the premises as well as the dinner to their

Great Romance. After all, it was high tirne she indulged a

passion that was erotic rather than merely platonic and

painterly.

"That's a cheap dig," my ex accused.

"How many kinds of generosity do you want from

me'?" I snapped back. "You think I like playing Pandare

to you and your new boyfriend?"

She softened. "It's not what you think, Paul."

No, indeed. It wasn't at all what I thought.

On the appointed evening Main Street was deserted but

for Davie Hutton's police cruiser, which he had parked

perpendicular to the state highway as a caution to potential

speeders. Precisely at eight, as I peered through the gloom,

RuthClaire's Honda Civic eased gingerly around the cruiser

and slotted into a space in. front of the West Bank. Then

she and her mysterious beau exited the car and climbed the

steps to the restaurant.

Sweet Jesus, I thought, it's a nigger kid in designer

.jeans and an army fatigue jacket. She's not in love. She's

on another I'm-going-to-adopt-a-disadvantaged-child kick.

Disagreements about starting a family had been another

front in our protracted connubial war. I had never wanted

any offspring, while RuthClaire had always craved two or

three Campbell's Kids clones or, failing that, a host of

starving dependents on other continents. She believed

wholeheartedly that she could paint, market her work, and parent--this was her

ghastly neologism--without spreading

herself too thin. I surrendered to her arguments, to the

ferocity of her desire for issue, and lbr two years we went

about trying to make a baby in the same dementedly

single-minded way that some people assemble mail-order

lawn mowers or barbecue grills. Our lack of success

prompted RuthClaire to begin touting adoption as a worthy

alternative to childbirth: the support of various international

relief agencies, she avowed, would compensate the

cosmic ;lan vital for our puzzling failure to be fruitful and

18

Michael Bishop

multiply. We ended up with foster children in Somalia,

Colombia, and Vietnam, and a bedroom relationship that

made nonagenarian abstinence seem shamefully libertine.

Because I had wanted no part of adopting a racially mixed

child, to bring into our own home, RuthClaire had unilat

erally

decided that sex with me was irrelevant and there

fore

dispensable. She would rather paint cherubs on teacups.

Now here she was at the West Bank with a gimpy black

teenager from Who-Could-Say-Where? Guess who's coming

to dinner ....

"Paul, Adam. Adam, Paul."

I did a double take, a restrained and sophisticated double

take. For one thing, Adam was no adolescent. More

astonishing, he was the same compact creature who had

come traipsing naked into the Paradise Farm pecan grove

in September. His slender, twisted feet were bare. At a

nod from RuthClaire he extended his right hand and grinned

agrin that was all discolored teeth and darting, mistrustful

eyes. I ignored his proffered hand.

"What the hell are you trying to pull, RuthClaire?"

"I'm trying to have dinner with Adam. This is an

integrated place of business, isn't it'? Interstate commerce

and all that. Besides, our money's as green as anyone

else's."

"His color's got nothing to do with it. Neither does

your money's. He's--" I swallowed my indigestible

objection.

"Go ahead, Paul, say it."

"He's an animal, RuthClaire, an animal in human

clothing."

"I often thought the same thing of you."

I backtracked: "Listen, Ruthie, the county health department

doesn't permit barefooted people in its licensed

eating establishments. He needs some shoes. Sandals. at least."

"Shoes are one of the things I haven't been able to get

him to wear." RuthClaire reached over and lowered the

habiline's outstretched hand, which was still waiting to be

shaken. "In comparison to you, Paul, Adam's all courtli-ANCIENT OF' DAYS

19

ness and .chivalry and consideration. Look at him. He's

terrified to be here, but he's holding his ground, he's

trying to figure out why you're so jumpy and hostile, i'd like to know myself.

Why are you being such a jackass?"

"He belongs in a zoo.--Okay, okay, not a zoo, a research

center or something. You're turning a scientific

wonder, a throwback to another geological epoch, into a

?ddamn houseboy. That's selfish, RuthClaire. That's pathetic.

There's probably a law against it."

"We'll sit over here," nay ex said peremptorily. "Bring

us two glasses of water and a menu."

"Only one menu?"

RuthClaire gave me a look that was blank of all expression;

it was also withering. Then she led Adam to a corner

table beneatia a burlap sculpture-painting (abstract) that she

had completed during the first few months of our marriage.

Once the habiline was seated, I could no longer see

his bare feet; the maroon tablecloth concealed them.

RuthClaire deftly removed the beige linen napkins, folded

into fans, that I had earlier inserted into the waiting water

glasses, for she had made up her mind that my humiliation

must continue, This was nay reward for making the West

Bank available for their preposterbus parody of a rendezvous.

I turned toward the kitchen. Livia George Stephens, my

chief assistant cook, was leaning against the flocked metal

divider separating the cashier's station from the dining

area. I had given Molly Kingsbury, Hazel Upchurch, and

nay two regular waitresses the night off. Livia George

constituted nay entire staff. One hand rubbing the back of

the other, she was sizing up our customers with a mock

shrewdness that was genuinely shrewd.

"Good to see you again, Miss RuthClaire," she said

aloud. "Looks like you brought in a friend with some

spirit in his bones. Give me a chanzt, I'll put some meat

on 'em too,"

"His name's Adam," nay ex replied. "He'd say hello,

but he's a mute. I'm sure he's as pleased to meet you,

though, as I am to see you again. I hope Paul's been

behaving himself for you,"

Livia George tiptoed around this pleasantry. "Where's

20

Michael Bishop

he stay?" she asked, nodding at Adam. "I am' never seen

him 'roun' here befoah, and I know mos' evverbody in this

part of 'Poya County."

"Livia George," I said, "they're here to eat, not to

chitchat. Why don't you go see about getting ready for

them."

"Nothin' I can do till I know what they like, Mr. Paul.

You wan' me to start cookin' befoah they put in a order?'

"I want you to get into the goddamn kitchen!"

Sullenly, her hips moving like corroded pistons, she

went. When she had gone, I strode over to the table to pour

out the water and to recite our menu items rather than to

present them in a printed folder. For RuthClaire I recommended

sautded mushrooms, an eggplant dish, steamed

pearl potatoes, a spinach salad, and a Cheddar souffid

with diced bell peppers and chives. For her tagalong

escort, however, I suggested broiled liver and onions. Side

orders of unsalted peanuts and warm egg whites would set

off his main course quite nicely, and he could wash it all

down with a snifter of branch water and branch water.

"1'1t have exactly what you recommend," RuthClaire

said. "Just bring Adam the same thing and no bullyboy

surprises, okay'? Water's all we want to drink, pure Beulah

Fork spring water."

Although I followed RuthClaire's instructions, the dinner

was a disaster. Adam ate everything with his spoon.

He bolted every bite, and when he didn't like something--the

eggplant au gratin, for instance--he tried to pile it up

in the middle of the table like a deliquescent cairn. For this

bit of creative gaucherie he at first used his hands rather

than his spoon, and he burned himself. Later. when the

food had cooled, he finished the eggplant monument. Nothing

RuthClaire said or did to discourage this project had

any effect, and there was no way to keep from looking at

their table's new centerpiece unless you let your eye stray

to Adam himself. A flake of spinach gleamed in his mustache,

ten or twelve pearl potatoes bulged his cheeks, and

he was nonchalantly pouring his ice cubes into the cheese

souffle.

I

ANCIENT OF DAYS

21

"This is his first time in a public restaurant," RuthClaire

acknowledged.

"And his last, too, if I have anything to say about it."

My ex only laughed. "He's doing pretty well, really.

You should've seen the tbod fights we had out at Paradise

Farm only a month or two ago."

"Yeah, I'm sorry I missed them."

She thinks she's Pygmalion, I marveled. She thinks she

can carve a dapper southern gentleman out of inchoate

Early Pleistocene clay. Welt. I loved the lady for the

delusions she had formed.

Unfortunately, it got worse. For dessert RuthClaire ordered

the two of them Nesselrode pudding, one of the

West Bank's specialities and major attractions. Adam lifted

the dish to his mouth and began eating of this delicacy like

a dog devouring Alpo. Alter a few such bites, however,

his head came up, his cheeks began to puff in and out like

those of a blowfish, and he vomited all over the table.

Guttural gasps of dismay or amazement escaped him between

attacks, and in four or five minutes he had divested

himself of his entire dinner and whatever else he may have

eaten earlier that day. RuthClaire tried to comfort him. She

wiped his mouth with a wetted napkin and stroked his

furry nape with her fingers. Never before had a patron of

the West Bank upchucked the extraordinary cuisine prepared

in my kitchen, though, and I may have been More in

need of comforting than RuthClaire's ill-bred habiline.

"Get him to the rest room!" I cried, much too late tO

save either the tablecloth or my equanimity. "If nothing

else, get him to the goddamn street."'

"He isn't used to such rich fare. I'll clean up the mess,

Paul. Just leave it to me, okay'?"

"He isn't worthy of it, you mean! It's like feeding

caviar to a crocodile, filet mignon to a high school fullback!

It's ridiculous! I don't know what you're trying to

do or what you think it proves!"

"Hush, Paul, I said I'd take care of the mess, and I

will."

Livia George helped her, however, and when Ruth-22

Michael Bishop

Claire left that night, she placed three one-hundred-dollar

bills next to the cash register. For the remainder of that

week the West Bank reeked of commercial disinfectant

and a faint monkey-house odor that no one but me (thank

God) seemed capable of detecting.

"SHE'S LIVING with it," I told the young man sitting at

the cluttered desk, his hands behind his head and his naked

elbows protruding like chicken wings. "She's been living

. with it since October."

"Times have changed, Mr. Loyd. Live and let live."

"It's not another man, Dr. Nollinger. It's male, I mean,

but it's not, uh, human. It's a variety of upright ape."

"A hominid'?"

"That's RuthClaire's word for it. Hominid. habiline,

something like that. A prehistoric primate, for God's sake.

That's why I drove all the way up here to talk to somebody

who might be interested."

"You could have telephoned, Mr. Loyd. Telephoning

might have saved us both a good deal of time."

"Beulah Fork's a small town, Dr. Nollinger. Avers.'

small town. You can't even direct-dial without old Edna

Twiggs homing in to say she's going to patch you through. Then she hangs on to

eavesdrop and sniffle. Times may

have changed, but bestial cohabitation's still a mite too

strong for Hothlepoya Countians. You understand me,

don't you'/"

"A habiline?"

"I want you to get it out of there. It may be dangerous.

It's certainly uncouth. It doesn't belong on Paradise Farm."

Brian Nollinger dropped his hands into his lap and

.squeaked his swivel chair around toward his office's solitary

window. A thin man in his early thirties, he ivas

wearing scuffed cowboy boots, beige corduroy trousers, a

ANCIENT OF DAYS

23

short-sleeved Madras shirt with a button-down collar, wire-rimmed

glasses, and a Wispy Fu Manchu mustache with an

incongruous G.I. haircut. Outside his Window a family of stub-tailed macaques

huddled in the feeble winter sun in a

fenced-in exercise area belonging to this secluded rural

field station of the Yerkes Primate Center, ten or. twelve

miles north of Atlanta. Nollinger was an associate professor

of anthropology at Emory University, but a government

grant to study the effects of forced addiction to

certain kinds of amphetamines on a representative primate

species had given him an office at the field station and

experimental access to the twenty-odd motley monkeys presently

taking the February sun beside their heated trailer.

They looked wide-awake and fidgety, these monkeys--"hypervigilant,"

to use Noltinger's own word. Given the

nature of his study, I was not greatly surprised.

"Why don't you write Richard Leakey or Alistair Patrick

Blair or one of the other African pateoanthropologists

specializing in 'prehistoric, hominids"?" Nollinger asked

me. "They'd jump at the chance to take a living fossil off

Ms. Loyd's hands. A find like that would secure an anonymous

scientist's fortune and reputation forever. Leakey

and Blair would just become bigger."

"Aren't you interested in fame and fortune?"

"In modest doses, sure." He refused to look at me. He

was staring at a lithograph of an lshasha River baboon in

twelve different baboonish postures, from a grooming stance

to a cautious stroll through tall East African grass.

"You don't believe my story, do you?"

"It's a little like hearing that a dinosaur has been spotted

wading in the Chattahoochee, Mr. Loyd. Put yourself

in my place."

"I'm not a crackpot, Dr. Nollinger. I'm a respected

businessman with no history of mental illness or unprofitable

undertakings. Moreover, my wife my ex-wife, I

mean--is a painter of national repute. Should anything

happen to her because you've refused to investigate the

matter, welt, the world of art will have suffered a loss as

great as that about to befall the world of science. It's your

24

Michael Bishop

conscience, Dr. Nollinger. Can you live with the consequences

of such a reprehensible dereliction of duty?" I got

up to leave.

Stroking his Fu Manchu. the young anthropologist finally

looked at me. 'Mr. Loyd, after two or three years as

a researcher, every competent scientist develops a nose for

crackpots."

"All right. Go on."

"You came in here like a crackpot. You had the identifying

minatory zeal and the traditional combative cast in

your eye." He paused. "But you don't talk like a crackpot.

You talk like a man who's bewildered by something

he doesn't know how to deal with."

"Bingo," I said.

"I don't think you're making this up, Mr. Loyd. That

would require some imagination." He smiled. "So I'll

help you out." He stopped smiling. "On one condition."

"I'm listening."

"Send me a photograph or two---all you can---of this

dispossessed specimen of Homo habilis. Use an Instamatic

or a Polaroid and get me some proof, i don't like wild-goose chases, particularly to backwaters like Beulah Fork."

"You got it," I said.

And I walked back to the parking lot past a dozen

confined communities of gorillas, orangutans, pygmy

chimps, rhesus 'monkeys, and bespectacled primatologists,

all of them equally inscrutable in their obsessive mindsets

and desires. We are fam-i-/ee, go the lyrics of a recent

popular song, but in my entire life I can recall feeling

close--spiritually close--to only one other living creature,

and that, of course, is my lovely lost RuthClaire. Why had

she taken up with a man-ape when my poor human soul

still longed for union with hers?

Imm

To GET a photograph of Adam I had to sneak out to

Paradise Farm in violation of a legal promise to RuthClaire.

I had to go prowling around the house in the numbing

winter dark. Fortunately, no dog patrols the property (otherwise,

of course, even Adam would not have been able to

sneak into our pecan grove), and I was able to climb into a

magnolia tree near the downstairs bathroom without

betraying my presence. I had neither an Instamatic nor a

Polaroid, but an expensive Minolta with both a telephoto

lens and a pack of high-speed film lbr shooting in dim or

almost nonexistent light.

Voyeurism is not ordinarily one of my vices, but when

RuthClaire came into the lavatory that evening to bathe, I

began to tremble. The waxy brown leaves of the magnolia

tree clicked together like castanets, mimicking the effects

of a brutal winter wind. I looked, let me confess, but I did

not take RuthClaire's picture. (The only extant print of her

bewitching unclad body is the one that burns even yet in

my mind.) When she lifted herself clear of the sunken

bath, patted her limbs and flanks dry with a lavender

towel, and disappeared from my sight like a classical

nymph, I nearly swooned. Each of these three near-swoons

was a metaphysical orgasm of the highest order. It had

been a long, long time.

The bathroom light went out. and a real wind began to

blow, surging through the pecan grove from eastern Alabama.

i had to hang on to my perch. Adam and I, it

seemed, had traded places, and the strangeness of this

reversal did not amuse me. The luminous digits on my

watch registered nine forty-eight. What if my habiline rival

habitually relieved himself in the woods'? What if, even in

winter, he insisted on bathing in White Cow Creek'? If so,

he would never enter this bathroom, and i would never get

25

26

Michael Bishop

his photograph. Dr. Nollinger would dismiss me as a

screwball of the most annoying sort. I had made a mistake.

At 11:04 P.M., however, Adam entered the big tiled

bathroom. He was wearing the bottoms of a suit of long

thermal underwear and carrying what looked like the carcass

of a squirrel. He climbed down into the sunken bath,

where, after turning on an ablutive flow of water, he

proceeded to rend and devour the dead rodent. He did this

with both skill and gusto. I used up all my film taking

pictures of the messy process--whereupon, spontaneously,

I heaved my own dinner into the shrubbery beneath the

magnolia tree. Turnabout, they say, is fair play ....

Later that week I sent Brian Nollinger duplicates of the

developed photographs and a long letter attesting to their

.authenticity. i added a P.S. The P.S. said, "The bali's in

your court, Doc."

THE ANTHROPOLOGY professor was one of those urban

people who refuse to own an automobile. He got around

the Emory campus on foot or bicycle, and he buinmed

rides to the Yerkes field station with whichever of his

colleagues happened to be going that way. In the middle of

March he arrived in Beulah Fork aboard a Greyhound bus,

and I met him in front of Ben Sadler's hole-inthe-wall

laundry (known locally as the Greyhound Depot Laundry)

on Main Street. After introducing Nollinger to Ben (dry

cleaner and ticket agent nonpareil) as my nephew, I led the

newcomer across the street to the West Bank, where, for

over a year, I had been living in the upstairs storage room and taking all my

meals in the restaurant proper. Although

I could have easily afforded to build a house of my own,

or at least to rent a vacation chalet near Muscadine Gardens,

I refused to do so in the dogged expectation that

RuthClaire and I would eventually be reunited at Paradise

Farm.

ANCIENT OF DAYS

27

"Take-me out there," Nollinger said over a cold

Budweiser in the empty dining area late that afternoon.

"I'd have to call first. And if I tell her why we want to

come, she'll decline to receive us."

My "nephew" fanned his photographs of Adam out

across the maroon expanse of the tablecloth. "You didn't

have an invitation to take these, Mr. Loyd. Why so prim

and proper now'.)''

"My unscrupulosity has well-defined limits."

Nollinger sniggered boyishly. Then he tapped one of the

prints. "Adam, as your ex-wife calls the creature, is definitely

a protohuman, Mr. Loyd. Even though I'm a primate

ethologist and physical anthropologist rather than a

hotshot fossil finder like the Leakeys or A. Patrick Blair,

I'd stake my reputation on it." He reconsidered. "I mean,

I'd establish my reputation with a demonstration of that

claim. Adam seems to be a healthy living specimen of the

hominid known as either Homo habilis or Homo zara-kalensis, depending on which

internationally known 'expert'

you choose to consult. In any case, your wile has no

right to keep her amazing friend cloistered away incognito

on Paradise Farm."

"That's exactly what I've always thought. Edna Twiggs

is bound to find out sooner or later, and RuthClaire'll have

hell to pay in Beulah Fork."

"I mean, Mr. Loyd, that your wife's most basic obligation

is to the advancement of our knowledge about human

origins."

"That's a narrow way of looking at it. She also has her

reputation to consider."

"Listen, Mr. Loyd, haven't you once wondered how a

prehistoric hominid happened to show up in a pecan grove

in western Georgia'?"

"A condor dropped him. A circus train derailed. I really

don't care, Dr. Nollinger. What's pertinent to me is his

presence out there, not the convoluted particulars of his

arrival."

"All right. But I think I know how he got here."

We each had another beer. My visitor sipped moodily at

28

Michael Bishop

his while I explained that the best approach to RuthClaire

might be Nollinger's masquerading as a meter reader for

Georgia Power. While ostensibly recording her kilowattage

for February, he could plead a sudden indisposition and

request a chance to use the bathroom or to lie down on the

sofa. RuthClaire was a sucker for honest working people

in distress, and Nollinger could buy a shirt and trousers

similar to those worn by Georgia Power employees at

Plunkett Bros. General Store right here in town. Once he

got inside the house, why, who could tell what might

happen'? Maybe RuthClaire would actually introduce him

to her hirsute boarder and a profitable rapport spring up

beween the habiline and the anthropologist. Twirling the

silver-blond twists of his almost invisible Fu Manchu,

Nollinger merely grunted.

"What do you think'?" I asked him.

"I might do better to go out there as an agent of the

Immigration and Naturalization Service," he replied, somewhat

high-handedly. "I think a strong case could be made

tot regarding Adam as an illegal alien."

"Is that right'? How so, Herr Professor?"

Nollinger embarked on a lengthy explanation. Purely on

impulse he had shown one of his closest friends at Emory,

Caroline Hanna, a young woman with a doctorate in sociology,

three or tour of my photographs of Adam. Nollinger

was seriously involved with Caroline Hanna, and he knew

that she would not betray his confidence. The photographs

had had a strange effect on Caroline, though. They had

prompted her to reveal that in her alter-hours work with

Cuban detainees in the Atlanta Penitentiary she had met

one hardened Havana street criminal from the 1980 Freedom

Flotilla who confessed that he belonged in prison.

either in Cuba or in Los Estados Unidos. Indeed. Uncle

Fidel had apparently released this cutthroat from a Havanan

lockup on the express condition that he emigrate and commit

fifty-seven different varieties of mayhem on all the

unsuspecting American capitalists who ran afoul of him.

Instead he had fled down the northern coast of Cuba in a

stolen army Jeep and later on loot to Punta Gorda. where.

ANCIENT OF DAYS

,29

after hiding out for almost two weeks, he forcibly commandeered

a fishing vessel piloted by a wealthy Haitian with

strong anti-Duvalier sympathies and the strangest three-man

crew that the cutthroat had ever seen.

"What was a Haitian doing in Cuban waters?" I asked

' Nollinger.

"Probably running communist guns back to the ill-organized

guerrilla opposition to Duvalier in the wilderness

areas around Port-de-Prix. Caroline says that the Cuban

told her the vessel hadn't yet taken on any cargo when he

surprised the gunrunner near Punta Gorda. He knifed the

Haitian and threw him overboard. In the process he became

aware of three half-naked enanos----dwarfs, I guess

you'd say--watching him from behind the fishing tackle

and cargo boxes in the vessel's stern. They reminded him

of intelligent monkeys, not just animalistic dwarfs, and

they made him intensely uncomfortable. With a' pistol he

lkmnd concealed in the pilothouse he stalked and mortally

wounded two of these three mute witnesses to his crime.

Their small gnarly corpses went overboard after their cap-rain's

fleshy mulano body, and the cutthroat set his sights

on the last of the funny little men scurrying about the boat

to escape his wrath."

"The gunrunner's crew consisted of habilines'?" For the

first time that afternoon Nollinger had piqued my curiosity.

"I think it did, Mr. Loyd, but all I'm doing right now is

telling you Caroline's version of the Cuban thug's account

of his round-about trip to Key West. You can draw your

own inferences."

"What happened to the last crew member'?"

"The Cubans with whom the Haitian gunrunner had

planned to rendezvous to make the weapons transfer pulled abreast of the

vessel and took the killer into custody. They

also captured the terrified hominid. They confiscated the

Haitian's boat. Our detainee in the Atlanta pen says that

these mysterious Cuban go-betweens--they were all wearing

lampblack on their faces--separated him and the surviving

crew member and shipped them both to Mariel Bay

for the crossing to the States. Caroline's informant never

/7

30

Michael Bishop

saw the funny little man again. Nevertheless, he's absolutamente

cierto that this creature reached Florida in one of

the jam-packed charter boats making up the Freedom Flotilla.

You see, there abounded among many of the refugees

rumors of a small hairy mute in sailcloth trousers who kept

up their spirits with his awkward mimes and japery. As

soon as the crossing was made, though, he disappeared

into the dunes before the INS authorities could screen him

as they finally screened those who found themselves in

Stateside camps or prisons."

"Adam?" I asked.

"It seems likely enough, Mr. Loyd. Besides, this story

dovetails nicely with the fact that your ex-wifi: hasn't had

as much trouble as might be expected domesticating--taming--her

habiline. Although he seems to have returned

to feral habits while scrounging his way up through Florida,

purposely avoiding large population centers, his early

days on a tiny island off the coast of Haiti made him

familiar with at least a few of the trappings of civilization.

Your wife, although she doesn't know it, has been reminding Adam of these

things rather than painstakingly writing

them out on a blank slate."

For a time we sipped our beers in silence. I pondered

everything that Nollinger had told me. Maybe it explained

how Adam had come from Haiti (of alt places) to western

Georgia, but it did not explain how several representatives of Homo habilis,

More than 1.5 million years after their

disappearance from East Africa, had ended up inhabiting a

minuscule island off the larger island of Hispaniola. Did

Herr Professor Noltinger have an answer for that objection,

too'?

"Working backward from Caroline's informant's story,"

he replied, "I did some discreet research in the anthropo-

· logical and historical holdings of the Emory library. First

of all, I lbund out all I could about the island off HispanJoia

from which the wealthy Haitian had conscripted his

crew. It's called Montaraz, Mr. Loyd, and it was originally

a Spanish rather than a French possession. However,

in the mid-eighteen twenties an American by the name of

ANCIENT OF DAYS

31

Louis Rutherford, a New England aristocrat in our nation's

diplomatic service, bought Montaraz outright from a military

adviser to Haitian president Jean Pierre Boyer. This

was during the Haitian occupation of the Dominican Republic,

which had declared its independence from Spain in

eighteen twenty-one. The Dominicans regard their twenty-two-year

subjugation to Haitian authority as a period of

barbarous tyranny, but one of Boyer's real accomplishments

was the emancipation of Dominican slaves. On

Montaraz, however, in Manzanillo Bay, Louis Rutherford

reigned supreme, and his own liberal sentiments did not

extend to releasing his black, mulatto, and SpanishArawak

laborers or to consider paying them tot their contributions

to the success of his cacao and coffee plantations. He

appointed a proxy to keep these enterprises going and

divided his time between Port-au-Prince and the family

estate in Vermont."

"I don't see what this has to do with Adam, RuthClaire,

or me," I said. In another hour my first customers for

dinner would be coming through the door. Further, at any

moment I expected Livia George, Hazel Upchurch, and

Molly Kingsbury to report, with my two evening-shift

waitresses close behind. Noll'inger was ignorant of, or

indifferent to, my business concerns: he wandered into the

kitchen to help himself to another Budweiser and came

back to our table swigging from the can like an undernourished

athlete chug-a-lugging Gatorade. He had his wits

about him, though. He tilted the top of the can toward me

and soberly resumed his story:

"In eighteen thirty-six Mr. Loyd, Rutherford was sent

to the court of Sa'id ibn Sultan, ,/1 Bti Sa'id, on

the island of Zanzibar off the East African coast. We

Americans were the first westerners to make trade agreements

with Sayyid Sa'id and the first to establish a

consul at his commercial capital in the western Indian

Ocean. Rutherford went along because of his 'invaluable

experience' on Hispaniola, where he had had to deal with

both conquering Haitians and defiant Dominicans, a situation

that some U.S. officials felt had parallels along the

32

Michael Bishop

East African coast, where Sayyid Sa'id was attempting

to impose his authority on the continental port cities of

Mombasa, Kilwa, and Bravanumbi. Moreover,'British moral

objections notwithstanding, Zanzibar had a flourishing slave

market; and Rutherford, as his American colleagues knew,

recognized the commercial imperatives that drove even

kindly persons like Sayyid Sa'id and himself to tolerate

the More sordid aspects of the institution, in order to turn a

· profit, it was the perfect assignment for Rutherford.

"Two years after his arrival on Zanzibar, about the time

he was scheduled to return to this country, Rutherford

caught wind of an extraordinary group of blacks--pygmies.

it was rumored, or hairy Bushmen--who had been taken to the Sultan's

representatives in the continental port city of

Bravanumbi by several Kikembu warriors and sold for

immediate shipment to either Zanzibar or Pemba to work

on Sayyid Sa'id's clove plantations. The Kikembu warriors

called their captives 'little ones who do not speak'

and claimed that they had found all nineteen of these

uncanny quasi-human specimens living in a system of

caves and burrows in the remote Lolitabu Hills of Zarakal.

The warriors had stumbled upon the system by accident,

after watching one of these funny little people, a male,

sneaking through a gulley with two dead hares and a

kaross of nuts and tubers. The hunters then proceeded to

smoke the manikins out. Four or five of the little ones

preferred to die in their arid labyrinth rather than to emerge

and face the laughing Kikembu, but the remainder were

captured and bound.

"An Omani retainer in Sa'id's court told Ruthertbrd to

go to the slave market there on Zanzibar to see these

wonderful 'monkeymen.' At present they were being kept

apart from the other slaves to spare them injury at the

hands of the larger blacks with whom they would be

competing for masters, it was also possible that outraged

potential buyers might harm them. After all, said the

retainer, you looked for strength in a slave, not delicacy or

sinewy compactness. Rutherford went to the market and

arranged to see the Zarakali imports in private. Apparently

ANCIENT OF DAYS

33

the sight of these creatures entranced him. He wanted the

entire lot. He bought them from Sayyid Sa'id's representatives

with cash and a promise to do his best to

establish a cacao-tbr-cloves trade between Montaraz and

Zanzibar. When he left the Sultan's court, he sailed around

the Cape of Good Hope in a vessel laden with silks,

spices, and a small cargo of habilines--although, of course,

nobody called them habilines in those days. They were

manikins, monkey-folk, curiosities. Rutherford hoped not

only to put them to work on Montaraz but to breed them

into a self-perpetuating population. Later, in the states, he

would exploit them--some of them, anyway--for their

novelty value."

"He never did that, I take it."

"Rutherford died on Montaraz in eighteen forty-four,

the same year Santo Domingo regained its independence

from the Haitian interlopers. His holdings on the island

were seized by followers of Pedro Santana. What happened

to the fourteen diminutive blacks who survived the

journey from East Africa--Rutherford's wife once referred

to them in a letter to the wife of another diplomat as

'endearing little elves, albeit, most likely, the offspring of

chimpanzees and debauched Zarakali niggers'--well, at

this point, their fate is unclear. We have knowledge of

them at all only because Mrs. Rutherford acted as her

husband's secretary and carried on voluminous correspondences

with her relatives in Boston and Montpelier.

I obtained some of this information, Mr. Loyd, from

interlibrary loans and photocopying services, and I'm virtually

certain that no one else in the world has an inkling

of the importance--the staggering importance of the material

I've assembled and synthesized in only two and a half weeks, it's the major

scientific accomplishment of my

life."

"Beats in.jecting macaques with No D6z, huh'?" I had

begun setting my tables, single-handedly flapping open

parachutes of linen and laying out silverware. Just as

Nollinger was about to parry my sarcasm, Livia George

appeared at the door. As the anthropologist shuffled the

34

Michael Bishop

photographs of Adam out of her line of sight, I told her,

"This is my cousin from Atlanta. He'll be staying with us

a few days."

"Nephew." Nollinger corrected me, standing for the

introduction.

"Right," I acknowledged. "Nephew."

Livia George came over and shook Nollinger's hand.

"Pleased to meecha. You're too skinny, thoah--all shanks

and shoulder blades. Stay aroun' here a few days and I'll

get you fatted up fine as any stockyard steer."

"That's a promise." I informed Nollinger. "not a threat."

"Thank you," he said uncertainly. "Thank you. ma'am."

RuTHCLAIRE DID not come to town either of the next two days, and Nollinger

stayed after me to drive him out to see

her. He was missing his morning classes at Emory, he

said, and a colleague at the field station was having to

oversee the daily amphetamine injections of his drug-addled

macaques. He could not stay in Beulah Fork much longer.

Did I want him to get Adam out of RuthClaire's life or

not? If I did, I had to cooperate. Had I summoned him all

the way from Atlanta only to confine him to my grungy

attic-cum-dormitory? Was I that desperate for a roommate?

I was ready to cooperate. Entirely at my expense my

counterfeit nephew ate nothing but medium-rare steaks and

extravagant tossed salads with Roquefort dressing. Moreover,

to amuse himself between his final meal of the day

and his own owlish turn-in time he had brought with him a

homemade syrinx, or panpipe, that he played with a certain

melancholy skill but an intemperance that sabotaged,

early on, my regard. Sometimes (he told me as we lay on

our cots in the dark) he would play the panpipe for his

experimental subjects at the field station, and the strains of

this music would soothe even the most agitated and belli

ANCIENT OF DAYS

35

cose of the males. It was an unscientific thing to do (he

conceded) becaue it introduced an extraneous element into

his observations of their behavior, but he lbund it hard to

deny them-completely, anyway--the small pleasure afforded

by his playing.

"t'm not a macaque," I replied. Both the hint and the

implied criticism were lost on Nollinger.

I was not that desperate for a roommate. So the next day

I swallowed hard and telephoned RuthClaire, explaining

that a young man who greatly admired her work had

stopped in at the West Bank to request an introduction.

Would it be all right if I brought him out'? He did not seem

to be (I) an art dealer, (2) a salesman. (3) a potential

groupie, (4) a college kid with a term paper due, or (5) an

oul-and-out crazy. I liked both his looks and his attitude.

"Is he your nept!ew, Paul'?"

"What'?"

"Edna Twiggs told me yesterday that your nephew was

staying with you."

"That's right. RuthClaire. He's my nephew."

"You don't have a nephew, Paul. Even Edna Twiggs

knows that. That's because you don't have any brothers or

sisters."

"I had to tell the home folks something. RuthClaire.

They don't rest easy till they've got every visiting stranger

sized up and pigeonholed. You know how some of them

can be. I didn't want it going around that I'd set up house

with another guy."

"Not much chance of that arrangement," RuthClaire

said. "But why this petty intrigue and deception, hon'?

What's the real story'?"

I had to improvise. "I'm thinking of selling out," I said

hurriedly. "His name's Brian Nollinger and he's a potential

buyer. Neither of us wants to publicize the fact,

though--to keep from confusing everyone if the deal falls

through. We're trying to prevent disillusionment or maybe

even gloating. You understand'?"

"Selling out'? But, Paul, you love that place."

"Once upon a time I did. I've only kept it thesi2 past

fourteen or fifteen months because I thought we might get

Michael Bishop

back together. But that begins to seem less and less likely,

doesn't it'?"

RuthClaire was so quiet I feared she had rung off. Then

she said, "I don't understand why your potential buyer

wants to meet me."

*'The part about him admiring your work is true.," I

lied. '*You know the three-dimensional paintings you did

for the Contemporary Room in Atlanta's High Museum'?

He's been to see 'em four or five times since their debut.

Come on, Ruthie. He'd like to see you in person. I told

him you would. It might help me cinch the sale."

Again she was slow to answer. "Paul, there are a

couple of reasons why I might be reluctant to give you that

kind of help." She let me mull the implications. 'AN

right." she added a moment later, "bring him on. i'11 put

aside my work and tell Adam to get lost tot an hour or

SO. ' '

She hung up before I could thank her.

Throughout this conversation Nollinger had been at my

elbow. "I don't know anything about the restaurant business,''

he said nervously. "As far as that goes, I don't

know very much about art, either."

"Do you know what you like'?"

"I beg your pardon."

"Never mind," I said. "Let's get out there."

DESPITE HIS musical talent and his advanced degrees in

anthropology and,primate behavior, Nollinger had not been

lying about his ignorance of art. I learned the dismaying

extent of his ignorance on our journey out to Paradise

Farm. Anxious that he not tip his hand too early, I alternately

quizzed and coached him as we drove. Although not

unfamiliar with such Renaissance biggies as Leonardo da

Vinci and Michelangelo, he seemed to have abandoned his

ANCIENT OF DAYS

37

art-appreciation classes just as they were forging into the

terra incognita of the seventeenth century. He knew next to

nothing about impressionism, postimpressionism, and the

most influential twentieth-century movements. He confused

Vincent van Gogh with a popular author of science-fiction

extravaganzas, believed that Pablo Picasso was still

alive in France, and vigorously contended that N. C.

Wyeth was a much better painter than his son, Andrew,

who painted only barns and motionless people. He had

never even heard of the contemporary artists whom

RuthClaire most esteemed.

"You're a phony," i said in disgust. 'She'll sniff you

out in three minutes' time--if it takes her that long."

"Look, Mr. Loyd, you're the one who concocted this

stupid scheme."

"I know," I said. "I know."

"Why don't we just tell her the truth'?"

"The truth wouldn't have got you out here," I said,

easing my car into the gravel-strewn drive in -front of the

house. "You'd still be in Beulah Fork playing your panpipe

and waiting for your next tactfully mooched meal."

Nollinger's jaw went rigid..With visible effort he swallowed

whatever reply he had thought to make. The air of

fierce inner resolve suddenly radiating from him, rather

like a lever, began to worry me.

RuthClaire met tls on the front porch, shook Nollinger's

hand, and ushered us inside. We stood about in the sculpture-studded

foyer like visitors awaiting their guide at a museum.

This was the first time I had set toot over the

threshold since September, and the faint but disturbing

monkeyhouse odor that Adam had left behind in the West

Bank was as unignorable here as mold on a brick of

cheese. Nollinger noticed it, too, the incongruous scent of

macaques in a barnlike Southern manse. RuthClaire was

probably inured to the smell by this time, but she quickly

detected our sensitivity to it and explained it away as the

wretched mustiness of a shut-up house alter a particularly

severe winter.

"I'm not an admirer of yours," Nollinger blurted. His

38

Michael Bishop

sallow face turned the color of a ripe plum. "I mean. I

probably would be if I knew anything about your work,

but I don't. I'm here under false pretenses.".

"Criminy," I murmured.

RuthClaire looked to me for either amplification or aid.

I rubbed the cold nappy head of a granite satyr next to the

oaken china cabinet dominating the hall. (It was a baby

satyr with a syrinx very much like Nollinger's.)

'I'm here to see Adam," the anthropologist said.

My ex did not take her eyes off me. "He's outside

foraging," she replied curtly. "How do you happen to

know about him?"

"Livia George may have let it slip," I essayed. "From

Livia George to Edna Twiggs to the media of all seven

.continents."

"Here," said Nollinger. He handed RuthClaire the packet

of photos I had taken from the magnolia tree outside the

downstairs bathroom. Prudently, though, he saved back

three or tour of the pictures. Without facing away from me

RuthClaire thumbed through the batch in her hands.

"You're a Judas, Paul," she said. "You're the most

treacherously backstabbing Benedict Arnold I've ever had

the misfortune to know. I swear to goodness, I actually married you! How could

that have happened'?"

To Nollinger I said, 'I'm toting up your bill at the West

Bank, Herr Professor. It's going to be a shocker, too. Just

you wait."

"You told him about Adam," RuthCtaire accused. "You

actually volunteered the information."

"i was worried about you. Grant me that much compassionate

concern for your welfare. I'm not an unfeeling

toad, for Christ's sake."

"When'.)'` RuthClaire asked the anthropologist. "When

did he get in touch with you'.)''

"Last month, Ms. Loyd."

My ex counted on her fingers as if she were trying to

compute a conception date. "It took at least four months

for this 'compassionate concern' to develop, didn't it'/

Four whole months, Paul?"

"His instincts were right in coming to me," Nollinger

ANCIENT OF DAyS

39

interjected. "You don't have any business keeping a rare

hominid specimen like Adam in your own home. He's an

invaluable evolutionary Rosetta stone. By rights he belongs

to the world scientific community."

"Of which, I suppose, you're the self-appointed representative'?''

"That's right," Nollinger said. "I mean, if you'll just

take it upon yourself to see me in that light."

"First of all, I'm not keeping Adam in my house; he's

living here of his own free will. Second, he's a human

being and not an anonymous evolutionary whatchamacallit

belonging to you or anybody else. And finally, Dr.

Nollinger, I'm ready for you and Benedict Iscariot here to

haul your presumptuous heinies back to Beulah Fork. The

sooner the faster the swifter the better."

Nollinger looked at me knowingly, conspiratorially.

"Your ex-wife seems to be an uncompromising spiritual

heir of Louis Rutherford, doesn't she'?"

"What does that mean'?v RuthClaire demanded.

"I think what he's trying to say," I said, "is that

you've got yourself the world's only habiline houseboy and you don't want to

give him. up."

"It's a lbrm of involuntary servitude," Nollinger added,

"no matter how many with-it rationales you use to justify

the relationship."

"He comes and goes as he likes," RuthClaire said

angrily. "Paradise Farm is his only haven in the whole

materialistic grab bag of environments around here. Maybe

you'd like him to live in a shopping mall or a trade-school

garage or a tumbledown outhouse on Cleve Synder's place'?"

"Or a fenced-in run at the field station'?" I said, turning

toward the anthropologist. "So that you can dope him up

with amphetamines for fun and profit."

"Wait a minute, Mr. Loyal," Nollinger protested. "I'm

on your side."

RuthClaire began tearing up the prints in her hands and

sprinkling them on the floor like Kodachrome confetti.

"These are cheap papdrazzo snapshots," she said, her

teeth clenched. She next went to work shredding the

envelope.

40

Michael Bishop

"I still have these," Nollinger told her, holding up the

prints he had palmed. "And Mr. Loyd still has an entire

set of his own."

"She feels better, though," I said, looking askance at

RuthClaire.

"Of course she does. Once we've gone, she'll have her

habiline houseboy in here to clean up the mess. It's not

many folks in this day and age who command the obedience

of a loyal unpaid retainer. She likes putting him to

use. She likes the feeling of power she gets from--"

Suddenly, surprising even myself, I plunged my fist

deep into the anthropologist's diaphragm. I would have

preferred to clip him on the temple or the jaw, but his

wire-rimmed glasses dissuaded me4issuaded, that is, my

subconscious. Nollinger. the wind knocked out of him.

finished his sentence with an inarticulate "Umpf"' and

collapsed atop the scattered photograph pieces.

RuthClaire said, "Maybe you feel a little better, too.

Not too much, though, I hope. His insults pale beside your

treachery, Paul."

"That's probably so," I admitted, hangdog.

"Please get him out of here. !'Il start soliciting bed

panners on Peachtree Street before your unmannerly

'nephew' ever lays eyes on the real Adam."

I helped Nollinger to his feet and led him outside to my

automobile. Still bent over and breathless, he mumbled

that my unprovoked assault was a classic primate ploy--especially

typical of baboons or chimpanzees--to establish

dominance through intimidation. I told him to shut up and

he did. Thereafter he kept his eyes averted: and as we left

Paradise Farm, rolling from crunchy gravel onto pothole-riven

asphalt, I saw Adam staring out at us from the leafy

picket of holly trees separating RuthClaire's property front

the road. The half-concealed habiline, I glumly took note,

was wearing one of my old golfing sweaters.

It did not flatter him.

Aq' slx o'clock that evening the sullen anthropologist

boarded a Greyhound bus for Atlanta, and I supposed that

our dealings with each other.had formally concluded. I did

not want to see him again, and I did not expect to. As for

RuthClaire, she had every reason to feel the same way

about me. I tried, therefore, to resign myself to her bizarre

liaison with the mysterious refugee from Montaraz. After

all, how was she hurting Adam or Adam her'? I must get

on with my own life.

About a week later this headline appeared in the Atlanta Constitution, which I

have delivered every morning to the

West Bank:

RENOWNED BEULAH FORK ARTIST

HARBORING PREHISTORIC HUMAN

SAYS EMORY ANTHROPOLOGIST

"Oh..lo," I said aloud over my coffee. "Oh, no."

The story featured a photograph--a color photograph--of

Adam dismembering a squirrel in the downstairs bathroom

at Paradise Farm. Not having reproduced very well, this

photo had the dubious authenticity of pictures of the Loch

Ness monster--hut it grabbed my eye like a layout in a

gore-and-gossip tabloid, afflicting me with anger and guilt.

About the only consolation I could find in the story's

appearance was the fact that it occupied a small corner of

the city/state section rather than the right-hand columns of

the front page. The photograph itself was attributed to

Brian Nollin,,er

"I'll kill him."

The Constitution's reporter had woven together a tapestry

of quotations--fi'om Nollinger, from two of his colleagues

at Emory, and from RuthClaire herself that made

41

42

Michael Bishop

the anthropologist's claims, or charges, seem the pathetic

fancies of a man whose career had never quite taken off as

everyone had anticipated: The press confer/nce he had

called to announce his unlikely discovery included a bitter

indictment of a "woman of talent and privilege" who was

obstructing the progress of science for selfish reasons of

her own. RuthClaire, in turn, had submitted to a brief

telephone interview in which she countercharged that

Nollinger's tale of a Homo habitis survivor living in her

house and grounds was a tawdry pitch for notoriety and More government

research money. She refrained quite cagily,

I noticed, from any outright declaration that Nollinger

was lying. Informed of the existence of photos, for instance,

RuthClaire dismissed them as someone else's work--without

actually claiming they had been fabricated from

scratch or cunningly doctored. Moreover, she kept me

altogether out of the discussion. And because Nollinger

had done likewise (from a wholly different set of motives),

no one at the Constitution had attempted to interview me.

Ah, I thought, there's More consolation here than I first

supposed. My ex can take care of herself ....

She would blame me for this unwanted publicity, though.

She would harden herself to all my future efforts at

rapprochement.

Despite the early hour I telephoned Paradise Farm to

apologize tot what had happened and to offer my shoulder

either to cry on or to cudgel. A recorded message informed

me that RuthClaire's previous number was no longer functioning.

I understood immediately that she had applied for

and received an unlisted number. This unforeseen development

hit me even harder than the newspaper article. Paradise

Farm now seemed as far away as Hispaniola or the

court of Sayyid Sa'id.

Before the hour was out my own telephone began ringing.

The first caller was Livia George, who, in high

dudgeon, asked me if I had seen the piece in the Constitution and wondered

aloud how my devious Atlanta relative had

managed to take a photograph of RuthClaire's mute friend

Adam in her very own bathroom. "You got a spill-the-ANCIENT OF DAYS

43

beans Peepin' Tom for a nephew," she said." 'IF he ever

comes back to visit you, Mr. Paul, Iain' the one gonna do

his cookin', let me tell you that now." I agreed that

Nollinger was a contemptible sneak and promised that she

would never have to wait on the man again.

Then, in rapid succession, I received calls from a reporter

on the Tocqueville Telegraph, a representative of

"The Today Show" on NBC, an art dealer in Atlanta with

a small stake in RuthClaire's professional reputation, and

two of my fellow merchants in Beulah Fork, Ben Sadler

and groceryman Clarence Tidings, both of whom expressed

the hope that my ex-wife would not suffer disruptive public

attention because of my nephew's outrageous blather to

the Atlanta media. An artist, they said, required her privacy. I put their

commiseration on hold by agreeing with

them and pleading other business. The reporter, the TV

flack, and the art dealer I had sidestepped ,;vith terse

pleasantries and an unshakable refusal to comment.

Then I took my telephone off the hook, dressed, and

went shopping. My neighbors greeted me cheerily the first

time our carts crossed paths, then studied me sidelong as I

picked out meats, cheeses, and produce. Every housewife

in the A&P seemed to be looking at me as she might a

cuckolded male who pretends a debonair indifference to

his ignominy. It gave me the heebie-jeebies, this surreptitious

surveillance.

Back at the West Bank my uncradled receiver was

emitting a strident buzz, a warning to hang up or to forfeit

the boon of continuous service. I replaced the receiver. A

moment later the telephone rang. It was Edna Twiggs,

who told me that RuthClaire was trying to reach me.

"Give me her new number," I said. "I'll call her."

But Edna replied, "Hang up again, Mr. Loyd. I'll let

her know you're home. I'm not permitted to divulge an

unlisted number."

Cursing under my breath, I obeyed Beulah Fork's inescapable

sedentary gadfly, and when next the telephone

rang, RuthClaire's voice was soft and weary in my ear.

"We're under siege," she said. "There's an Eleven

44

Michael Bishop

Alive news van from Atlanta on the lawn, and several

other vehicles--one of them's a staff car from the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer--are parked in the drive or along the

roadway behind the hollies. It looks like a gathering for a

Fourth of July picnic, Paul."

"Have you talked to any of those people'?"

"The knocking started a little over an hour ago. I

wouldn't answer it. Now there's a man on the lawn taking

pictures of the house with a video camera and a stylish

young woman in front of the camera with a microphone

talking about the 'deliberate inaccessibility of artist

RuthClaire Loyd.' She's said that about four or five times.

Maybe she's practicing. Anyway, I can hear her all the

way up here in the loft. They're not subtle, these people,

'they're loud and persistent."

"Call the police, RuthClaire. Call the Hothlepoya County

Sheriff's Patrol."

"I hate to do that."

"They're trespassing. They're making nuisances of themselves.

Call Davie Button here in town and Sheriff

Crutchfield in Tocqueville.",

"What if I just poke my .22 out of the window and tell

everybody to beat it'?"

"It'd make great viewing on the evening news."

"Yeah, wouldn't it?" RuthClaire chuckled wryly. "May

the seraphim forgive me, but I was thinking a display like

that might boost subscription sales for the Celestial Hierarchy series.

AmeriCred has been a little disappointed in the way

they're going."

"We live in a secular age, RuthClaire." Then I said,

"How's Adam taking all this'?"

"It's made him restless and reclusive. He's pacing the

downstairs bathroom with the exhaust fan running--to

drown out the clamor from the lawn."

"Well, I hope you closed the curtains on the upper half

of th window in there. Reporters can climb trees, too. you

know."

"Adam and I installed some blinds," she said. "No

worry there. The worry's how long this stupid encircle

ANCIENT OF DAYS

45

ment is-likely to last. I can't get any work done. Adam's

going to develop a nei-vous disorder."

"Let the law run them off. That's what the law's for."

"All right."

"You're smart enough to figure that out for yourself.

What made you call me for such a self-evident serving of

advice?"

"I wanted to let you know just how much trouble

you've caused us. you dinkhead." (But her tone, it pleased

me to note, was bantering rather than bitter.) "And one

other thing besides that, Paul."

"Okay, I'll bite."

"Adam's one failing as a companion is that he can't

talk. Maybe I just wanted to hear the silver-throated con

man of Beulah Fork do his stuff' again." She let me

ruminate on this left-handed compliment for a second or

two, then gave me her new telephone number arid bade me

a peremptory goodbye.

I sat there awhile with the receiver in my hand, but

finally hung up before Edna Twiggs could break in to tell

me I was on the verge of forfeiting continuous service.

INTERNATIONAL. MEDIA attention converged on Paradi'se Farm. Neither the Beulah

Fork police department nor the

sheriff's patrol from Tocqueville could adequately cope

with the journalists, television people, curiosity seekers,

and scientists who descended on Flothlepoya County for a

peek at RuthClaire's habiline paramour. For a time the

Georgia Highway Patrol intervened, rerouting the gatecrashers

back toward the interstate and issuing tickets to

those who ignored the detour signs: but Ruben Decker and

a few of the other residents along the road linking Paradise

Farm with town protested that they had been singled out

for citations as often as had the journalists and the pesky

46

Michael Bishop

outsiders plaguing the area, many of whom, when stopped,

produced false ID's to corroborate their claims of being

locals. At last even the highway patrol threatefied to retreat

from the scene; this wasn't their fight.

In desperation RuthClaire contracted with an Atlanta

firm to erect an imposing beige-brick wall around the

exposed sections of her property's perimeter: and this barricade,

upon its completion in May, proved an effective

psychological as well as physical deterrent to most of those

· who were stopping by for a casual, rather than a mercenary

or a malevolent, look-see. Pale arc lights on tall poles

illuminated every corner of the vast front and back yards

and portions of the shadowy pecan grove behind the house.

On two occasions RuthClaire broadcast stentorian warnings

over a P.A. system installed for that purpose and

actually fired her rifle above the heads of the trespassers

creeping like animated stick figures across the lawn. Word

got around that it was dangerous to try to breach the

elaborate fortifications of Paradise Farm. I liked that.

Meanwhile, in the absence of hard facts, speculation and

controversy raged. Alistair Patrick Blair, the eminent Zarakali

paleoanthropologist, published a paper in Nature denouncing

the notion of a surviving Early Pleistocene hominid as

"sheer unadulterated grandstanding piffle." He was careful

not to mention Brian Nollinger by name, not so much

to avoid libeling the man, i think, as to deprive him of the

satisfaction of seeing his name in print--even in a disparaging

context. Blair cited the notorious Piltdown hoax as a

veritable model of competent fiimflammery next to this

tottery ruse, and he argued vigorously that the few available

photographs of Adam were clearly of a rather hairy

black man in a molded latex mask like those designed for

his PBS television series, Beginnings. Nollinger rebutted

Blair, or tried to, with a semicoherent essay in Atlanta

Fortnightly summarizing the extraordinary diplomatic career

of Louis Rutherford and strongly condemning the

artist RuthClaire Loyd for her tyrannical imprisonment of

the bemused and friendless hominid. She was a female

Simon Legree with a mystical bias against both evolutionary

theory and the scientific method.

ANCIENT OF DAYS

47

Sermons were preached both for and against my ex-wife.

Initially, fundamentalists did not know which side to

come down on because anyone opposed to the scientific

method could not be all bad, while anyone cohabiting with

a quasi-human creature not her lawfully wedded husband

must certainly be enmeshed in the snares of Satan. By the

second week of this controversy most fundamentalist ministers,

led by the Right Reverend Dwight "Happy" McElroy

of America's Creater Christian Constituency, Inc., of

Rehoboth, Louisiana, had determined that the crimson sin

of bestiality far outweighed the tepid virtue of a passive

antievolutionary sentiment. Their sermons began both to

deride RuthClaire for her sexual waywardness (this was an

irony that perhaps only I could appreciate) and to pity her

as the quintessential victim of a society whose scientific

establishment brazenly proclaimed that human beings were

nothing More than glorified monkeys (a thesis'that their

own behavior seemed to substantiate). Happy McElroy, in

particular, was having his cake and eating it too. I audited

a few of his television sermons, but almost always ended

by turning down the sound and watching the eloquent hand

signals of the woman providing simultaneous translation

for the deaf.

Sales of RuthClaire's Celestial Hierarchy porcelain-plate

series boomed. In fact, AmerJCred reversed a long-standing

subscription policy to permit back orders of the first few

plates in the series, then announced to thousands of disappointed

collectors that this particular limited edition of

Limoges porcelain had sold out. It would violate the company's

covenant with its subscribers to issue a second

edition of the plates. However, in response to the overwhelming

demand for RuthClaire's exquisite work, AmeriCred,

in conjunction with Porcelaine Jacques Javet of

Limoges, France, had just commissioned from this world-acclaimed

Georgia artist a second series of paintings to be

entitled Footsteps on the Path to Man, which would feature

imaginative but anthropologically sound portraits of

many of our evolutionary forebears and several contemporary

human visages besides: eighteen plates in all, the

48

Michael Bishop

larger number being a concession to the growing public

appetite for my ex-wife's distinctive art. Further, this seties, this limited edition, would not be quite' so limited as

the previous one: More people would be able to subscribe.

"Congratulations," I told RuthClaire one evening by

telephone.

"It's phenomenally tacky, isn't it'?"

"I think it'S called striking while the iron's hot." "Well, I needed the

money, Paul. Having a wall built

around two thirds of Paradise Farm didn't come cheap.

Neither did the arc lights or the P.A. system. I have to

recoup my investment."

"You think I don't know'?"

"Besides, I want to do this Footsteps on the Path to

Man series. The australopithecines I'll have to reconstruct

from fossil evidence and some semi-inspired guesswork,

but for Homo habilis I'll have a living model. It's going to

be fun putting Adam's homely-handsome kisser on a dinner

plate."

"Maybe I could order five or six place settings of that

one for the West Bank."

RuthClaire laughed delightedly.

Of course, the sermons following hard upon the ncw

AmeriCred announcement were universally condemnatory.

The depths to which my ex-wife had fallen defied even

Happy McElroy's bombastic oratorical skills. He tried.

though. The title of his message on the first Sunday in July

was "From Angels to Apes: The Second Fall." Whereas

the celestial hierarchy was an ascent to pure spirit, the

blind worship of evolutionary theory--' 'Theory, mind you!"

McEIroy roared. "Unsupported theory was a footstep

on the downward path to Mammon, debauchery, and hell.

At the end of his prepared remarks McEIroy asked his

congregation to ,join with his loyal television audience in a

silent prayer of redemption for paleoanthropologists everywhere

and for their avaricious minion in Beulah Fork,

Georgia, may God have mercy, RuthClaire Loyd.

I am not a complete pagan: I joined in.

THE ATTITUDE of my own townspeople toward RuthClaire

during this period was hard to judge. Many had

resented the unruly influx of visitors in the spring and the

inconvenience of the highway patrol roadblocks and spot

identity checks. Still, most did not hold my former wife

personally accountable for these problems, recognizing that

she, too, was a victim of the publicity mill generating both

the crowds and the clumsy security measures finally obviated

by/the wall. Now the residents of Beulah Fork wondered

about the relationship between RuthClaire and Adam.

This preoccupation, depending on their ultimate' view of

the matter, dictated the way they spoke about and dealt

with their unorthodox rural-neighbor. Or would have. I'm

sure, if RuthClaire had come into town More often.

One sweltering day in July, for instance, I went into the

Greyhound Depot Laundry to reclaim the tablecloths I had

left to be dry-cleaned. Ben Sadler, a courtly man nearly

six and a half feet tall, stooped toward me over his garment-strewn

counter and in the blast-furnace heat of that tiny

establishment trapped me in a perplexing conversation about

the present occupants of Paradise Farm. Sweat beaded o0

his forehead, ran down his ash-blond temples, and accumulated

in his eyebrows as if they were thin. ragged

sponges not quite thirsty enough to handle the unending

flow.

"Listen, Paul, what kind of, uh, creature is this Adam

fella, anyway?"

I summarized all the most likely, and all the mos!

asinine, recent speculations. I used the terms AustraIopithecus

zarakalensis, Homo zarakalensis, and Homo

habilis. I used the words ape-man, hominid, primate, and

dwwf. i confessed that not even the so-called experts

agreed on the genus or species to which Adam belonged.

49

50

Michael Bishop

'Do they say he's human'?" Ben wanted to know.

"Some of them do. That's what Homo means, although

lots of people seem to think it means something else. Anyway,

RuthClaire thinks he's human, Ben."

"And he's black, isn't he'? I mean, i've read where the

entire human race---even the Gabor sisters and the Osmond

family--I've read where we're all descended from tiny

black people. Originally, that is."

"He's as black as Hershey's syrup." i conceded.

"Do you think we're descended from Adam, Paul'?

RuthClaire's Adam. I mean."

"Well, not Adam personally. Prehistoric hominids like

him. maybe· Adam's a kind of hominid coelacanth." I

explained that a coelacanth was an ancient fish known only

· in fossil form and presumed extinct until a specimen was

taken t¥om waters off South Africa in 1938. That particular

fish had been five feet long. Adam, on the other hand,

was about six inches shy of five feet. Thereibre. I did not

think it absolutely impossible for a retiring, intelligent

creature of Adam's general dimensions to elude the scrutiny

of Homo sapiens sapiens for the past few thousand

years of recorded human history. Of course, I also believed

in the Sasquatch and the yeti ....

"That's a funny idea, Paul--all of us comin' from

creatures two thirds our size and black as Hershey's syrup."

'Don't run for office on it."

Ben wiped his brow with one glistening forearm. "How

does RuthClaire, uh, look upon Adam?" He feared that he

had violated propriety. "I mean. does she see him as a

brothel"? I've heard some folks say she treats him like a

house nigger from plantation days--which I can't believe

of her. not under no circumstances--and others who say

he's More like a two-legged poodle gettin' the favorite-pet

treatment from its lady. I ask because I'm not sure how I'd

greet the little fetla if he was to walk in here tomorrow."

"i think she treats him like a house guest, Ben." (I hope that's how she

treats him, i thought. The ubiquitous spokesman

for America's Greater Christian Constituency, Inc.,

had planted a nefarious doubt in my mind.)

ANCIENT OF DAYS

51

Ben Sadter grunted his conditional agreement, and I

carried my clean tablecloths back across the street to the

restaurant.

That evening, a Saturday, the West Bank was packed,

Molly Kingsbury was hostessing, Livia George and Hazel

were on duty in the kitchen, and a pair of college kids from Tocqueville were

waiting tables. I roamed from corner

to corner giving assistance wherever it was needed,

functioning not only as greeter, maitre d'. and wine steward,

but also as busboy, cashier, and commander in chef

(ha bit).

My regular customers demand personal attention, from

me rather than from staff' members. A squib of gossip, a

silly ,joke, occasionally even a free appetizer or dessert. I

try to oblige most of these demands. This Saturday eve-rang,

however, I was having trouble balancing hospitality

and hustle. Although grateful for the crowd, by nine o'clock

I had 'begun to growl at rny college kids and to nod

perfunctorily at even my ,most stalwart customers. The

muggy summer dusk and the heat from my kitchen bad

pretty much neutralized the efforts of my ceiling fan and

my one laboring air conditioner. In my Haggar slacks and

lemon-colored Izod shirt I whs sweating just like Ben

Sadler in the Greyhound Depot Laundry.

The door opened. Two teenage boys in blue jeans,

T-shirts, and perforated baseball caps strolled in. Even in

the evening the West Bank does not require coats and ties

of its male clientele (shoot, I frequently work in the kitchen

in shorts and sneakers), but something about these two--Craig

Puddicombe and E. L. Teavers--made my teeth

grind. I could have seen them in their string-tie Sunday

best (as I sometimes did) without feeling any More kindly

toward them, and tonight their flat blue eyes and sweat-curled

sideburns incited only my annoyance. For one thing,

they had left the door open. For another, I had no table for

them. What were they doing here'? They usually ate at the

Deep South Truck Stop on the road to Tocqueville.

"Shut the door." I told Craig Puddicombe, carefully longing ice into

somebody's water glass. "You're letting

in insects.,"

52

Michael Bishop

Craig shut the door as if it were a pane of wraparound

glass on an antique china cabinet. E.L. took off his hat.

They stood on my interior threshold staring, at the art on

the walls and the open umbrellas suspended from the

ceiling as atmosphere-evoking ornament. They either could

not or would not look at the people eating. I approached

them because Molly Kingsbury clearly did not want to.

"You don't have reservations," I told Puddicombe. "It's going to be another

fifteen or twenty minutes before

we can seat you."

Craig looked at me without quite looking. "That's okay.

You got a minute'?"

"Only if it lasts about twelve seconds."

"We just want to talk to you a bit," E. L. Teavers said

earnestly, almost ingratiatingly. "We think your rights are

being violated."

Craig Puddicombe added, "More than your rights,

maybe."

"Fellas," I said, indicating the crowd, "you don't choose

a battle zone for a friendly little chat about human rights."

"it was now, Mr. Loyd, because we happened to be

ridin' by," Craig said. "For something this important you

can spare a minute."

Before I could dispute this point, E. L. Teavers. surveying

the interior, said, "My mother remembers when this

was Dr. Kearby's office. This was the waitin' room, out

here. Whites sat on this side, the others over that way.

People used to come out of the examination room painted

with a purple medicine Dr. Kearby liked to daub around."

"Gentian violet," I told him, exasperated. "It's a

bactericide.---Quick, now, as quickly as you can, tell me

how my rights are being violated."

"Your wife--" Craig Puddicombe began.

"My ex-wile," I corrected him.

"Okay, your ex-wife. She's got a hibber livin' with her

on premises that used to belong to you, Mr. Loyd. How do

you feel about that?"

"A what living with her?"

'Hibber," E. L. Teavers enunciated, lowering his voice.

ANCIENT OF DAYS

53

"it's a word I invented. Anyone can use it, but I invented

it. It means habiline nigger, see'?"

"Clever. You must be the one who was graduated from

high school. Craig .just went tk)r gym class and shop."

"I've got a diploma too, Mr. Loyd. Our intelligence

ain't the issue, it's the violation of your rights as a white

person, not to mention our traditional community standards.

You follow all this, don't you?"

"You're not speaking for the community, You're speaking

for Craig Puddicombe. teenage redneck."

"He's speakin' for More than that," E. L. Teavers said,

smiling boyishly. The boyishness of this smile was a major

part of its menace.

"We just dropped in to help you, Mr. Loyd. We're not

bigots. You're a bigger bigot than E.L. or me 'cause you

look down on your own kind who ain't got as much as you

do or who ain't been to school as long. That's big'otry, Mr.

Loyd."

"i'm busy," I said, and turned to take care of my

customers.

E. L. Teavers grabbed my elbow--with an amiable deference

at odds with the force of. his grip. I could not shake

him off because of the water pitcher in my hand. He had

not stopped smiling his shy, choirboy smile, and i lound

myself wanting to hear whatever he had to say next, no

matter how addlepated or paranoiac.

"You see, there's a hibber--a lousy subhuman--inheritin'

to stuff that doesn't, that shouldn't, belong to it. Since 'it

used to be your stuff your house, your land, your wife--we

thought you'd like to know there's people in and around

Beulah Fork who appreciate other hardworkin' lk)lks and

who try to keep an eye out for their rights."

"Namely Craig and you'?" Since finishing up at Hothlepoya

High last June, I reflected, they had been working

full time at United Piedmont Mills on the outskirts of

Tocqueville. E.L., in fact, was married to a girl who had

waitressed for me briefly. "Knowing that. lkrllas, has just

about made my day. I feel infinitely More secure."

"You never went to school with hibbers," Craig

54

Michael Bishop

Puddicombe said. "You've never had to be anything but

their boss."

"Now you've got a prehistoric one getting it on with

your wife."

"My ex-wife," I responded automatically.

"Yeah," said E. L. Teavers. "Like you say." He took

a creased business card from the hip pocket of his jeans

and handed it to me. "This is the help you can count on if

it begins to seem unfair to you. If it begins to, you know,

make you angry." He opened the restaurant door on the

muggy July night. "Better am-scray, Craig, so's Mr. Loyd

can get back to feeding his bigwigs."

They were gone.

I wandered to the service niche beside the kitchen and

set down the water pitcher. I read the business card young

Teavers had given me. Then I tore it lengthwise, collated

the pieces, and tore them again--right down the middle.

Ordinarily quite dependable, in this instance my memory f ails me. All I can

recall is the gist of the message on the

card. But to preserve the fiction of my infallibility as

narrator I will give here a reasonable faximile of the

message on that small, grimy document:

E(Ivis) L(amar) Teavers

Zealous High Zygote

KuKlos Klan--Kudzu Klavern

Box 666 Beulah Fork, Georgia

BUSINESS HAD slackened noticeably by ten o'clock. At

eleven we closed. I stayed in the kitchen for a couple of

hours after Hazel and Livia George had left preparing my

desserts for Sunday: a German chocolate cake, a carrot

cake, and a strawberry icebox pie. The work--the attention

to ingredients, measures, and mixing or baking times--kept

my mind off the visit by the boys. In fact, I was

ANCIENT OF DAYS

55

. making apurposeful effort not to think about it. A strategy

that disintegrated as soon as I was upstairs in the stuffy

converted storage room.

E. L. Teavers, a bright kid from a respectable lower-middle-class

home, was a member of the Klan. Not merely

a member, but an officer of a piddling local chapter of one

of its semiautonomous splinter groups. What had the card

said? Zealous High Zygote? Terrific Vice Tycoon'? Puissant

Grand Poltroon? Something rhetorically cyclopean or

cyclonic. The title did not really matter. What mattered

was that this able-bodied, mentally keen young man, along

with his somewhat less astute buddy, had kept abreast of

the situation at Paradise Farm and regarded it as an affront

to all the values he had been taught as a child. That was

scary. I was frightened for RuthClaire, and I was frightened

for myself for having rebuffed the High Zygote's

offer to help.

What kind of 'help" did be and Craig have in mind?

Some sort of house-cleaning operation'? A petition campaign'?

A night-riding incident'? An appeal to other Klan

organizations for reinforcements?

In all my forty-six years I had never come face to face

with a danger of this precise human sort, and I was finding

it hard to believe that it had descended upon me--upon

RuthClaire, Adam, and Beulah Fork--in the form of two

acne-scarred bucks whom, only a season or two ago, I had

seen playing (egregious) high school football. It was like

finding a scorpion in a familiar potted geranium. It was

worse than the pious verbal assaults of a dozen different

fundamentalist ministers and far, far worse than the frustrated

carping of Brian Nollinger in Atlanta. As for those

anonymous souls who had actually leaped the barricades at

Paradise Farm, they were mere sportive shadows, easily

routed by light and the echoing reports of my old .22.

That's the problem, I thought. How do you immunize

yourself against the evil in the unprepossessing face of a

neighbor'?

Despite the hour--lately, it was always "despite the

hour"--I telephoned RuthClaire. She was slow picking

56

Michael Bishop

up, but she did not rebuke me for calling. I told her about

the adolescent Ku Klutz Klanners who had pickpocketed

my peace of mind.

"Elvis Teavers?" RuthClaire asked. "Craig Puddicombe?"

"Maybe I should report this to the GBI, huh'? Sometimes

I get GB! agents in the West Bank. Usually they're

dressed like hippies pretending to be potheads. I could put

those guys on to the Zealous High Zygote and his string-along lieutenant gamete--just for safety's sake."

"Klanners?"

"That's what I'm trying to tell you."

"Were they wearing sheets'?" Hearing my put-upon

sigh, she withdrew the question. "No, Paul, don't sic

anybody on them. Let's not provoke them any further than

they've already been provoked. Besides, I'm safe enough

out here. Or so I like to think.--Do you know what's

funny?"

"Not at this hour, no."

"The day before yesterday I got a call from a representative

of a group called RAJA--Racial Amity and Justice

in America. It's a black organization headquartered in

Baltimore. The caller wouldn't tell me how he'd managed

to get my unlisted number, just that he had managed. He

hoped I would answer a few questions."

"Did you'?"

"What else could an art-school liberal from Charlotte

do'/"

"Nothing," I said.

"He had a copy of Nollinger's article in Atlanta

Fortnightly'. He wanted to know if I had enslaved Adam, il' I had Adam doing

menial tasks against his inclination or

will. it sounded as if he had the questions written down on

a notepad and was ticking them off each time he asked one

and got an answer. I kept saying No.' They were that sort

of question. The last one asked if I would allow an on-sight

inspection to verify my denials and to ascertain the i

mental and emotional health of my guest. I said 'No' to

that one, too. 'In that case,' the man from RAJA said, 'get

ANCIENT OF DAYS

57

set for More telephone calls and eventually a racial solidarity

march right in front of your sacred Paradise Farm.'

And then he hung up. When the phone rang just now,

Paul, i was a little afraid it was him again."

"Nope:" I said glumly. "Just me."

'I'm catching it from all sides." The receiver clunked

as RuthClaire apparently shifted hands. "You see, Paul,

I've offended the scientific establishment by refusing to let

their high priests examine Adam, and i've offended organized

religion by trying to make a comfortable home for

him. Now I've got Klansmen coming at me from another

direction and civil rights advocates from yet another. I'm

at the center of a collapsing compass rose waiting for the

direction points to impale me. That's pretty funny, isn't it?

There's no way for me to escape. I'm everybody's enemy."

"The public still loves you. Just ask AmeriCred."

"That's a consolation. A kind of cold one, tohight."

"Hey, you're selling More platters than a Rolling Stone.

Pretty soon you'll go platirmm. Cheer up, Ruthie Cee."

"Yeah, well, you don't sound all that cheery yourself."

She was right. I didn't. The scare inflicted upon me by

Teavers and Puddicombe had .worn off a little, but in its

place was a nervousness, an empty energy, an icy spiritual

dynamo that spun paralyzing chills down my spine to the

very tip of my vestigial tailbone. Even in the oven of the

storage room I was cold. RuthClaire and I were linked in a

strange way by our private chills. Each of us seemed to be

waiting for the other to speak.

At last i said, "Does Adam sleep with you'?" It was the

first time I had asked her this question. Somehow the time

was right. For me if not for her.

"in this kind of weather, Paul, he won't stay in a bed.

He's sleeping on the linoleum in the kitchen where it's

cool."

"You know what I mean."

"One morning I found him lying down there with the

refrigerator door open. He doesn't do that anymore." "RuthClaire!"

"What do you want me to tell you. Paul? I've grown

58

Michael Bishop

More and More fond of him the longer he's been around.

As for Adam, well, he's comporting himself More and More like a person with a

real sense of his own innate

worth. It makes a difference."

"You've finally got your own intramural United Nations

relief agency, don't you'? With a single live-in aid

recipient."

"I can unplug this phone as easily as listen to you,

Paul."

I apologized--quickly and effusively--for my sarcasm.

It was, I admitted, rude and inexcusable. It would devastate

me if she cut me oft'. My tone was mock-pathetic

rather than sappily beseeching, and she let me get away

with it. How many times had we bantered in this way in

the past? So long as I did not overstep a certain hazily

drawn line, she welcomed the familiar repartee. It was, I

knew, my one clear leg up on the uninitiated, inarticulate

Adam.

"How's he doing?" I asked, mostly because I knew it

would please her.

"He's doing famously. His manners have improved,

he's adjusted to indoor conveniences, he's stopped killing

squirrels ( I think), and I've even taught him how to sing.

He probably already had a knack for singing--plaintive

melodies that run up and down the scale like a wolf's howl

or the undersea aria of a humpback whale. He does a

moving ,Amazing Grace,' Paul, he really does."

"Bring him to the West Bank again," I said impulsively.

RuthClaire hesitated before replying. "Before this uproar,

Paul, I'd'ye jumped at the chance. Now it worries

me, the idea of removing Adam from the security of

Paradise Farm. He's happy here, and safe."

"But he's something of a prisoner, isn't he? Just like

that jerk from Emory and your caller from RAJA have

accused."

"Everybody's a prisoner of something, Paul. Paradise

Farm isn't exactly an island in the Gulag Archipelago,

though."

"Then let me treat the two of you to dinner again."

r/

ANCIENT OF DAYS

59

"Whydon't you come out here? I'll do the cooking."

"That's one of the reasons." Hastily I added, "Listen

to me, now. I just don't belong out there anymore,

RuthClaire. It isn't mine, and it hurts to walk around the

place. It's yours, yours and Adam's. Besides, didn't you

hope that eventually the rest of us would come to regard

Adam as a neighbor and a peer? Isn't that why you brought

him to the West Bank in the first place?"

Again RuthClaire was slow to answer. "He's still not

ready for that. It would have to be after dark, Paul, and

you'd have to make the restaurant off limits to everybody

but us. Just like last time."

"Deal."

"When'?"

"This coming Tuesday. Nine-thirty. It'll be good and

dark by then, and I'll still be able to serve dinner between

six and eight."

RuthClaire laughed. "The consummate businessman."

"We're two of a kind," I said. Then: "I've missed you,

Ruthie Cee. God Almighty, how I've missed you."

"Good night, Paul. We'll see you Tuesday."

RuthClaire hung up. Ten or-twelve seconds passed before

the steady buzz of the dial tone began issuing from

my receiver. I sat there in the ovenish heat listening to it.

A cricket chirruped from behind a wall of cardboard boxes---they

had once contained cans of tomato paste, bottles of

catsup, jars of fancy mustard---opposite my cot. What an idiot I was. Months

upon months ago i could have built myself

a house much nicer than the one on Paradise Farm ....

A CHASTE conviviality suffused our get-together on Tuesday

evening. There were only the three of us. Livia George

and all my other help had left at eight-thirty, and although

the odor of my customers' cigarette smoke usually lingered

60

Michael Bishop

for hours, tonight the old-fashioned two-speed fan whirling

among the umbrellas overhead had long since imparted a

sea-breeze freshness to the air. It was much'cooler than on

Saturday, and I had a sense of sated well-being that proba

bly

should have alarmed me.

As a treat, as a concession, RuthClaire had permitted

Adam to order steak, medium rare, and he sat in his place

at our corner table using his cutlery with the clumsy

fastidiousness of a child at an adult banquet. The improvement

over his previous appearance in the West Bank

was marked. He divided the meat into two dozen or More

little pieces and ate them one at a time, his eyes sometimes

nearly closing in quiet enjoyment. Further, he took mannerly

bites of potato, broccoli, or seasoned squash casserole

between his portions of steak, and he chewed with his

lips pressed together. Not even the ghost of Emily Post

could have faulted his scrupulously upright posture.

As RuthClaire and I talked, I found it hard not to glance

occasionally at Adam. He was wearing a pair of pleated,

beltless trousers of a rich cream color and a short-sleeved

white shirt with a yachting wheel over one of its breast

pockets. He had come shoeless again, an omission for

which RuthClaire again apologized, but the neatness of his

apparel and the slick-whistle closeness of his haircut (had

my ex used a pair of electric sheep shears on him?) More

than offset the effect of slovenly or rebellious informality

implicit in his bare feet. Now, in fact, I was sneakily

watching his hands, which reminded me of his feet; they

were narrow and arthritic-looking, as if his fingers had

been taped together for a long period and only recently

given their freedom. The stiffness and incomplete opposability

of his thumbs made his dogged use of knife and

fork all the More praiseworthy.

"You're a bang-up 'Enry '!ggins," I told RuthClaire.

She was tinished eating, having contented herself with a

fruit cup (no bananas) and an artichoke salad, and her eyes

rested almost dotingly on her habiline Eliza Doolittle.

"Thank you, I guess--but you're not giving Adam enough

credit. He's bright, eager to fearn, and, at bottom, naturally

thoughtful."

ANCIENT OF Days

61

"Unlike some you've known."

RuthClaire smiled her crooked smile. "Well, you'd'ye

probably done okay in the Early Pleistocene, Paul. You'd'ye

probably prospered."

"That's not nice."

"Well, you're not, either--when your mind's on nothing

but the satisfaction of your appetites. Too often it is."

- "Tonight'?"

"Not tonight. I hope. You seem to be trying hard to be

as gentlemanly as it's in you to be."

Adam finished his meal. He wiped his mouth with a

linen napkin. Then he picked up his stem of California

burgundy and tossed it off in a noisy inhalation whose

small component gulps set the apple in his throat bobbing

like a fisherman's cork. He wiped his mouth again, his

small black eyes glittering.

"Adam)" RuthClaire admonished.

Whereupon the habitine lifted his right hand and made a

startling, pincerlike movement with his fingers. This motion

he repeated, his broken-looking thumb swinging purposefully

from side to side. His thick black eyebrows,

grown together over the bridge.of his nose, lifted in sympathy,

and his eyes, too, began to "talk," coruscating in

the candlelight.

RuthClaire interpreted: "The steak was excellent, he

says. So, too, the wine."

I stared at the creature. I had never seen him use hand

signs before. He had not yet stopped doing so.

"Now he would like to know if there's a rest room on

the premises," RuthClaire continued. "He feels like a

gallon of rainwater in an elastic teacup. He'd also like to

wash his hands."

"You're making that up," I accused.

"Only the highfalutin metaphor. He really did ask if the'

West Bank has a public bathroom. Is that so hard to

believe'?"

The West Bank has only one public bathroom; it is

located in a small cinder-block niche directly behind the

dining room. For a brief moment you must step outside--

62

Michael Bishop

into a small section of alley--to reach this facility, and

you must lock the door behind you to keep other patrons or

even my restaurant employees from breaking in upon you

once you have entered. Still, complaints are few, and I do

not have the room to install a second water closet. The

county health department has approved this arrangement.

Without another word to RuthClaire I led Adam to the

w.c., nodded him inside, and returned to the dining room.

Because no one but us three was present tonight, it made

no difference it' Adam neglected to depress the lock button

in the doorknob. This, I think, was one of my halfq'ormed

intellections as I slid back into my chair and put my hand

on Ruthie Cee's.

"You've been teaching him sign language."

"Hardly an original idea. They've been doing it with

chimps and gorillas for years. They do it at Yerkes. In

fact, at Yerkes they teach some of their primates an elaborate

system of geometric symbols Called Yerkish. I checked

out some books on sign language for the deaf to teach

myself what Adam ought to learn. He's doing far better

than any of the chimps and gorillas exposed to this system,

though. It's true. I've checked the literature."

"it's amazing," I conceded.

"What convinced me to try was Adam's interest in the

woman doing simultaneous sign-language interpretations

of Happy McEIroy's sermons every Sunday morning. He

couldn't take his eyes off her. He still can't."

"You watch the program?"

"Adam's fascinated by it. The panorama shots of the

congregation, and the singing, and McEIroy's contortions

at the pulpit--they hold him spellbound. Adam first found

the channel back before the controversy that ignited some

of McEtroy's most authoritarian recent pronouncements, i

mean, I wasn't purposely tuning in to see what that man,

had to say about us. I was just letting Adam-watch whatever

he wanted to watch."

-Does he still insist on watching, knowing McElroy's

bias?"

"Oh, yes, it's probably his favorite Sunday show. Now,

ANCIENT OF DAYS 63

though, he makes ugly hand-signal suggestions when

McElroy cites the relationship between Adam and me as a

disgusting instance of contemporary moral decay. Adam hates Happy McElroy, but

he loves the way he twists

around, and the singing, and the interpreter for the deaf,

and the long shots of that heroic congregation listening to

their leader's weekly jeremiads." RuthClaire smiled another

off-center, self-effacing smile. "I can't deny him

those pleasures, Paul. I want him to know--intellectually,

anyway--there's a big, smelly, 'bustling, contradictory world

beyond the boundaries of Paradise Farm."

"He must already know that."

"Oh, he does. He's told me jumbled stories about

Montaraz, Haiti, and Cuba, not to mention the Freedom

Flotilla and his trek up through Florida, He's known More

hardships and chaos than most, but not until recently could

he communicate these experiences to anyone."'

We heard a thump at the back of the West Bank. Adam

was returning to us from'the water closet. At his elbow,

towering lumpishly over him, was a stranger. The stranger

had a .38 in Adam's ribs, and Adam's cautious step and

frightened eye told us that his knowledge of the world

clearly extended to the destructive capacity of firearms.

Perhaps he remembered the fate of his conspecifics aboard

the fishing vessel off the coast of Puma Gorda.

Both indignant and fearful, I stood up to face this new

intruder.

HE HOLSTERED his pistol in a sling under his sports

jacket and steered Adam to our table with a remorseless

meaty hand. His face, meanwhile, bore an apologetic expression

that automatically lessened my fear of him.

"Thought he might run," the man said. "Didn't, though."

64

Michael Bishop

"I think you can safely let go of him," RuthClaire said.

He did. "Dick Zubowicz, INS--Immigration and Naturalization

Service. This fella's an illegal alien, I'm afraid

he's under arrest."

A knock rattled the front door. Despite failing to secure

the door in the rear, I had locked this one. When I released

the latch and opened to the slender supplicant on the raised

sidewalk, the supplicant proved to be Brian Nollinger.

Behind him on the sidewalk fronting the Greyhound Depot

Laundry a small crowd of shadows--no More than five or

six people--milled aimlessly about, unrecognizable. My

first thought was that a sinister ulteriority underlay their

presence, my second that they were simply waiting for the

midnight bus to Montgomery. Then Nollinger swept past

me into the West Bank, and I had no further time to

consider the question.

"You've got him!" the anthropologist said to Zubowicz.

"It wasn't hard," the immigration agent replied. "He's

a pretty docile fella, really. Catchin' 'em after they ear's

always been my favorite way of doin' it, Dr. Nollinger.

Takes the edge off 'em."

I glared at my former boarder. He had led Zubowicz to

Beulah Fork, had lain in wait with him outside the West

Bank, had undoubtedly been the principal goad to the

government's decision to mount this sleazy little operation.

I'll show you how to nab the notorious habiline with a

minimum of fuss, he had promised, if you'll give me and

my sociologist friend at Emory visitation privileges once

the poor devil's interned. Nollinger paid scarcely any heed

to either RuthClaire or me; he only had eyes for Adam. To

snatch his granny glasses from his pale face, and to grind

them to powder beneath my heel, would have been a satisfying release--but I

mastered the impulse. With

difficulty.

RuthClaire stood. "Under arrest'? For what?"

"I've told you, Mrs. Loyd," Zubowicz said. "For entering

the country illegally, then for evading deportation

by fleeing INS authorities. You're an accomplice, ma'am.

You've aided and abetted."

-k

AtCET OF D^¥S

65

"Am I under arrest, too?"

"I don't have a warrant for it, only the fugitive's. If

yofi'll help us out--if you won't go contestin' or obstructin'

us in our duty--well, it's not likely you'll be slapped too

bad for your involvement."

RuthClaire looked at me. "No one's pressed any charges

yet, and they've already begun plea-bargaining."

"That's not really the term for it," Zubowicz said

softly, as if offended by the innuendo. "Our real interest's

in Adam here."

"The illegal alien," Noltinger added.

"The only surviving specimen of Homo habilis in the

entire world," i interjected. "You think your rights outweigh

his, Notlinger, because he's a unique opportunity

for bigger government grants and a measure of parasitic

fame for O1' Number One--not because he's an illegal

alien."

Adam, I noticed, was following our argument closely,

looking from face to face-as each of us spoke and running

his right forefinger along the edge of the tablecloth. His

nail had incised a narrow crescent in the material; a single

maroon thread was caught in the notch at the top of this

nail. The thread shuttled back'and fbrth with the motion of

the habiline's finger, like a minuscule red script on a

parchment of the same concealing color. What did it mean.'?

What was Adam thinking'?

"Listen. Loyd," the anthropologist retorted, "if he'd

thrown up tonight's dinner, too, you'd still be faunching to

get rid of him. I'm not the only victim of self-interest

under the West Bank's roof."

"That's what he-was doing when I found him," Zubowicz

said.

"What are you talking about?" I asked the man.

"Adam," the immigration agent replied. "He was retchin'

into the toilet bowl. Tryin' to, anyway. Couldn't get much

to come up."

"Damn it!" I said. "That's a lie!"

"You always rub too much garlic and onion salt into

your steaks," Nollinger testified. "Garlic salt, onion salt,

tenderizer--it's just too much, Loyd."

66

Michael Bishop

Adam lifted his hands, bit off the thread caught on his

fingernail, and made a series of signs for Rut. hClaire.

"It was drinking the wine so fast that did it," she

interpreted. "The steak was prepared and cooked to perfection.

He apologizes for the bad impression created by

his lapses in table etiquette. He's fine now."

"That's good," Zubowicz said, "because the prof and I

are gonna run him up to Atlanta for bookin' and arraignment."

He gripped the habiline by his hairy elbow.

RuthClaire said, "For being an illegal alien?"

"That's what I've been tellin' you."

"What if he were an American citizen'?"

Zubowicz lifted his eyebrows and smiled deferentially.

"What if what'?"

"He's my husband, Mr. Zubowicz. A minister from

Tocqueville--an ordained minister of the First United Coptic

Church of Dixie--married us in a private ceremony at

Paradise Farm over two months ago. We even had blood

tests. It's legal, I assure you. And we can prove it."

"Jesus, RuthClaire," I exclaimed, "you're ten--fifteen--maybe

twenty years older than he is!"

"That's a pretty threadbare old ploy," Zubowicz said.

"The government's gotten really tough on people who marry aliens for no other

reason than to confer American

citizenship on them. It's become something of an industry.

I'm afraid, and the penalties for taking part in these fake

marriages---marriages in name only, for devious or fraudulent

purposes, Mrs. Loyd--nowadays, ma'am, the penalties

are severe."

"i'm expecting Adam's child," RuthClaire announced.

"How fraudulent or devious is that'?"

Nobody said anything. I sat down at the table and

exhaled a sigh as profoundly melancholy as I could make

it. My ex had just given us offhand confirmation of everyone's

worst suspicions. However, unless you insisted on

regarding Adam as subhuman, underage, or mentally defective,

you could not logically continue to upbraid her for

"living in sin." She was a married woman who had

emphasized her bond to her latest spouse by cooperating

with him in the conception of a new living entity. This

ANCIENT OF DAYS

67

idea made me very unhappy. I preferred the living-in-sin

hypothesis to so dramatic a demonstration of the lawfulness

and incontrovertibility of their union.

Zubowicz turned to Nollinger. "Is it possible'?" he

asked. "I mean, can a human woman and a, uh, wetl,

a--'?"

"Habiline male," the anthropologist said.

"Yeah, what you said. Can they make a baby'? Will the

genes, uh, match up'?"

"There's precedent," Nollinger admitted. "Of a sort.

At Yerkes, not so long ago, a siamang and another species

of gibbon successfully mated when they were caged together

lot a long period. It surprised everyone, though."

He squinted at Adam. "Interbreeding between distinct

human speciesWro-Magnon and Neanderthal, for instance--is

supposed to be one of the factors responsible for the

wide variety among human physiques and face today.

Yeah," he concluded, almost resentfully, "it's possible,

Mr. Zubowicz."

I looked up. "RuthClaire, why didn't you tell me'?"

"I was going to, Paul. I didn't expect the evening to be

abbreviated by a close encounter-with a stooge from Immigration

and Naturalization."

"Mrs. Loyd," said Zubowicz, wounded. "I'm only

doin'--"

She cut him off: "Mrs. Montaraz, you mean. In private

life I'm Mrs. Adam Montaraz. My professional name's,

still RuthClaire Loyd--that's what everyone knows my

work by--but, considering your mission, tonight I'd prefer

to be called by my legal married name."

The federal agent literally threw up his hands, turning in

an oafish half-circle to escape the fury in RuthClaire's eyes.

As he turned, a missile of some kind shattered one of

the windowpanes in my front door. It grazed Brian

Nollinger's head and ricocheted off the metal divider between

the dining room and the cash register. Nollinger

dropped bleeding to his knees. Glass sparkled like costume

glitter in the candlelight.

A second missile--they were both red-clay bricks, or

68

Michael Bishop

portions of such bricks--burst through the picture window

behind our corner table, toppling a potted geranium, a tall

ceramic beer stein, and a fishbowl fill/d with colored

sand.

Zubowicz had his pistol at the ready again, but now he

was looping the barrel in circles and loudly encouraging

everyone to retreat to the rear of the restaurant. Dazedly,

even Nollinger complied, the gash on his temple leaking a

crimson mucilage. Adam loaned the anthropologist his

shoulder as, bent over like a special services commando, I

hustled RuthClaire away from my shop's battered faqade.

The squeal of an automobile laying down rubber reverberated

from one end of Main Street to the other.

A quick backward glance informed me that the shadows

in front of the Greyhound Depot Laundry had dispersed to

their own secret corners of the night. Main Street was

empty now, and I did not believe that any More bricks

would come flying through my windows. The vigilantes

had had their fun.

"They're gone," I said. straightening up. "I think we're

okay. Damn it to hell, though. Look at this mess. Just look at it."

"[NSURANCE'LL PAY for it," a voice from behind me said.

"Never knew a bigshot yet didn't have him lots of

insurance."

Three people had entered the West Bank by the same

route taken only a few minutes earlier by Dick Zubowicz.

Two of them wielded shotguns. They all wore clothing

that gave them the look of farmers in an outlandish variety

of medieval clerical garb. Winged robes of shimmering

lavender, with strange embroidered emblems and decorative piping of a much

darker purple, fell just below the

intruders' knees, revealing blue jeans and scuffed work

ANCIENT OF DAYS

69

boots in two instances and pale hairy shins above a pair of

powder-blue jogging shoes in the third. Pointed hoods--headpieces

of grandiose, almost miterlike impracticality--concealed

the faces of the three men, but for good measure

they had pulled nylon stockings over their features to

flatten and distort them.

But one of the intruders had just given himself away by

speaking, and by revealing his own identity he had inadvertently

divulged that of one of his seconds.

"Hello, E.L.," I said. "Hello, Craig."

Or maybe it had not been inadvertent at all. The robes,

the nylon masks, the lopsided ecclesiastical headgear were More for show, lor

corny Grand Guignol effect, than for

impenetrable disguise. That I could not puzzle out the

name of the Ku Klutzer in jogging shoes--a lanky character

who slouched along in a self-effacing stoop---was an

irrelevancy; what mattered was that three of my nbighbors

had worked themselves into a state of self-righteous agitation

so calculating and cold that the donning of pompously

comical costume and the trashing of my four-star backwater

card struck them as noble responses to something they

did not understand. Or understood in the half-assed way of

a street-sign painter confronting Hieronymus Bosch. (Hell,

I'm still not sure that / understand what they did or didn't

understand.) There they were, though, dressed like pious

executioners and pointing shotguns.

Unignorable.

After relieving Zubowicz of his pistol, the Klanners

produced two pairs of handcuffs, one of which served to anchor the immigration

agent to the S-pipe under the sink

in my kitchen, the other of which manacled Nollinger to

the flocked divider in the dining room. The man in jogging

shoes, who never once spoke, took care of the handcuffing,

and, as he worked, I could not help noticing the sweat

running down his legs to the tops of his shoes' perforated

ankle guards. The heat under those purple robes--! suddenly

realized they were almost exactly the color of old

Dr. Kearby's beloved gentian violet--had to be strength-sappingly

intense. What imbecility,

70

Michael Bishop

"Davie Hutton's never around when you need him, is

he?" Craig Puddicombe said, his shotgun trained on

RuthClaire, Adam, and me. "Only pops'up when you've

run a stop sign or laid down rubber in the A&P parking

lot."

E. L. Teavers chuckled insinuatingly, and I looked even

harder at the Klansman in jogging shoes. Was that Davie Button ? I could not

really tell. His possession of handcuffs

and his refusal to speak made me suspect that it was. It

also helped to explain the blatancy with which the Zealous

High Zygote's cohorts on Main Street had assaulted the

West Bank and then made good their getaway. If Davie

was with them, then they had had a free hand. Unfortunately,

or maybe fortunately, Davie had never seemed

quite so pale and etiolated as this apparition.

"Time to go," E(lvis) L(amar) Tearers said.

"Where.'?" RuthClaire asked him.

But now that Zubowicz and Nollinger were secured, the

urge to banter with or taunt us utterly deserted the intruders.

Grimly unspeaking, they herded uS out the back door,

past the rest room, and through the grass-grown alley to a small dewy hillock

from which Beulah Fork's water tower

rose into the summer darkness like a war machine out of

H. G. Wells. Adam stared wistfully up into the crisscrossing

support rods of the tower, but Teavers, apparently

sensing that Adam had it in mind to break away and seek

refuge aloft, cracked him across the temple with his shotgun

barrel.

"Go on, you goddamn hibber!" he commanded him.

"None of that hibberish monkey business!"

As NollJnger had done in the restaurant, Adam fell to

his knees. His lips curled back to reveal his canines, but

RuthClaire knelt beside him to whisper inaudible consolation.

Although Adam wobbled a little after regaining his

feet, he was soon striding as assuredly as any of us, and

our bizarre little party passed from the water tower's low

hillock into an asphalt-patched street parallel to Main.

From this street we marched into the upper reaches of

the playground of the Beulah Fork Elementary School.

ANCIENT OF DAYS

71

Crickets' were whirring enthusiastically, but otherwise the

town seemed uninhabited, a vast sound stage accommodating

the silhouettes of a few isolated Victorian houses along with hundreds of

cardboard-cutout elm and magnolia

trees.

The playground itself, on the other hand, was a minefield

in the midst of these innocuous props. Crossing it, I

kept waiting lor Teavers to blow our heads off. It seemed

pretty clear to me that he and his purple-capped henchmen

were marching us to fatal appointments. Or, at the very

least, to a tryst with tar and feathers.

'qs this how you look after the rights of a hardworking

white man'?" I asked. "Wrecking his business and terrorizing

him and his friends?"

"Shut up," Craig Puddicombe said.

"I mean, when you came in the other night, you were

concerned about my rights being violated, Is this'bow--?"

E. L. Tearers interrupted me: "That's all forfeit, Mr.

Loyd. You and your wile are traitors."

"To what'?" RuthClaire asked.

"I told you to shut up!" Puddicombe hissed. "We don't

have to explain nothin' to you!"

"Not now. maybe," Teavers added, evenly enough.

That ended the exchange. A moment later I saw a van

parked behind the softball backstop on the northeastern corner of the

playground. Two or three robed figures stood

beside this vehicle, human carrion birds in the still unsettled

dust surrounding it. The cab of a pickup protruded

beyond the nose of the van, whose decorated sides the

Klanners had obscured with a thick gouache of mud that

had long since dried and hardened. As we approached, one

robed figure made a semaphoring motion with both arms,

climbed into the van, and eased it along the backstop so

that Teavers and Puddicombe could throw back its sliding

door and prod their captives inside. Adam and RuthClaire

boarded together while I temporized on the threshold, one

foot down in the dust as an uncertain tie to the reality of

Hothlepoya County. We were about to be spirited away to

Never-Never Land.

72

Michael Bishop

"Get in," somebody said, not too urgently.

I obeyed, but looked over my shoulder in time to see the

man in jogging shoes go dogtrotting off tow'ard a portable

classroom behind the school.

Puddicombe climbed in after me and banged the van's

sliding door to. RuthClaire, Adam, and I were made to sit

on the floor in the center of the vehicle's passenger section.

Around us perched armed members of the Kudzu

Klavern: another four people caparisoned in cumbersome

purple and redolent of stale sweat. The darkness prevented

me from distinguishing the sex of each one, and their

shoes---either sneakers or penny loafers--were not much

help, either. At least one woman had come along, though,

because her high-pitched mocking laughter greeted every

· underdone bon mot dropped into the deep try of our fear

and confusion.

Now the van was bumping along at good speed.

"Coulda sworn he'd stink," one of the men said. "Expected

dead rat or wet dog, somethin' foul anyway·"

"Not this one," Puddicombe replied. "This one wears

English Leather or he don't wear nothin' at all."

The woman guffawed. From where I was sitting it was

impossible to tell to which robed body the guffaw belonged,

only that it was nervous and feminine. After a

mile or two, though, I arbitrarily assigned it to the penny

loafers.

Our van bounded from rut to rut. We did not seem to be

on paved highway. Once, our driver sounded his horn; the

sour bleating blast of another horn, undoubtedly that of

Tearers' pickup, answered it. We slowed and turned. The

penny loafers guffawed, a high-pitched outburst with no

apparent antecedent.

"Where are we going?" RuthClaire asked.

No one replied. Adam had his arm linked in mine.

Occasionally he looked from side to side as if attempting

to sort out the pecking order among our captors. I do not

believe that he was frightened. Both RuthClaire and I were

near, and with his free hand he was absentmindedly grooming

my ex-wife, picking tiny knots out of the shingled

strands of her hair.

/

ANCIENT OF DAYS

73

Eventually the van skewed to a stop. Its sliding door

popped back like the lid of a capsized jack-inthe-box.

Puddicombe, minus his nylon stocking, forced us outside.

We stood in the beams of E. L. Teavers' pickup

truck's headlights, virtually blinded by their moted yellow

glare. The van backed away, executed a precarious turn on

the edge of a trail rut, and disappeared into the night with

all its robed passengers but Puddicombe.

This frightened me far worse than anything that had

happened so far, including even the first rocketing crash of

brick against glass in the West Bank. RuthClairc, Adam,

and I were stranded in the middle of nowhere with the

Zealous High Zygote and his chief lieutenant. I looked up.

Stars freckled most of the sky. but a migrating coal sack of

clouds had begun to devour large chunks of the heavens to

the west. It seemed to me that a bottomless abyss had

opened. Over my head, under my feet--the chill of this

sensation was spookily disorienting.

The headlights cut off. From across the weed-choked

pasture Teavers said, "Bring the hibber here, Craig."

"Why'?" RuthClaire asked. "What are you going to

do,.>,,

I closed my eyes, opened them, closed them again.

When next I looked around, though, the landscape seemed

familiar. We were on Cleve Synder's property, not far

from Paradise Farm, on a piece of isolated acreage that

had never been used to grow beans, cotton, corn, or any

other crop. Not tk)r over fifty or sixty years, anyway. Early

in the century a brick kiln had operated here. What was

left was a series of red-clay mounds surrounding cisternlike

vats that plunged into the earth seemingly without bottom.

Eight years ago, according to the skinnydipper's horrified

playmates, a child from White Cow Creek had fallen

into one of the vats. An attempt to locate and raise him

had concluded with the absolute frustration of the spelunkers

who had gone down after him in winch-assisted

harnesses. Although afterward there had been some community

agitation to cap or fill in the pits, Cleve Synder had

offered to build a barbed-wire barricade with warning

74

Michael Bishop

placards at fixed intervals, and this offer had quieted the

angry uproar. Tonight, glancing about me, I realized that

either Synder had never fulfilled his promise or else the

vigilantes of the Kudzu Ktavern had undone his efforts to

make the place safe. We were in the foothills of a miniature

mountain range, far from succor, civilization, or warning

signs.

Adam, looking at RuthClaire, made a bewildered hand

gesture.

"I don't know," she replied, shaking her head.

Puddicombe slapped Adam's hands down and told

RuthClaire to shut up. Teavers, a grotesque shadow, climbed

into view on one of the nearby mounds. The mounds---it

suddenly struck me---resembled eroded termitaria on a

dusty East African plain. For a moment, in fact, in seemed

that the five of us had been translated by some fantastic

agency to the continent on which Adam's ancestors, and

ours, had first evolved. Hothlepoya County was Kenya,

Tanzania, or Zarakal. We were all Africans ....

"Tell him to get his clothes off," Teavers commanded

RuthClaire from the lip of the mound.

"Why should I tell him that?'

"Do it, damn it! No slack or backtalk!" To stress the

urgency of compliance, he fired off one barrel of his

shotgun. The ground shook, and even Craig Puddicombe joined us in hunching

away from the blast. A pattering of

buckshot sounded in the brambles of a blackberry thicket

not thirty feet away. Then everything was quiet again.

Adam took off his pleated trousers by tugging down the

zipper until it tore. His shirt he removed in similar fashion,

popping off the buttons with his fingers. Because he disdained

underwear as well as shoes, he now stood beside us

as bare and unblushing as his prelapsarian namesake--just

as, a year ago this September, he had first appeared at

Paradise Farm. How small he seemed again, how supple

and childlike.

'Okay, Craig, bring him here." To RuthClaire and me

Tearers said, "If either of you moves a step, I'll let fly

this other barrel right into your hibber-lovin' faces. Tomorrow

mornin' you'll look like fresh ground round."

ANCIENT OF DAYS

75

Puddicombe laughed and nudged Adam forward. Adam

seemed to be gripping the earth with his toes, as if walking

the lofty bough of an acacia tree. Although Puddicombe finally halted at the

base of the mound, Adam ascended to

within two or three feet of Tearers.

"Don't," RuthClaire said. "Don't do it."

I did not know whether she was appealing to Adam or to

Tearers. It made no difference. The young man in the

gentian-violet robes dropped his shotgun, grabbed Adam

by the arm, and pulled him to the lip of the vat. His

intention was clear. He was going to sacrifice Adam to the

Plutonian tutelaries of the pit. Equally clearly, though, he

had not reckoned on the sinewy strength of the habiline,

believing that his greater height and weight would suffice

to topple Adam into oblivion.

But Adam, snarling, wrested his arm free of Teavers,

sank his teeth into the young man's thigh through a coarse

layer of denim, and spun him around like a demon astride

a dervish. Teavers recognized his mistake too late to do

anything about it.

"Shoot!" he ordered Craig Puddicombe. "Shoot the

bastard I"

Puddicombe was of two minds, struggling to cover his

prisoners and to protect his friend at the same time. If he

fired, Teavers would suffer along with Adam, and I might

have the opportunity to jump him. As a compromise,

trusting his friend to overcome Adam's surprising resistance,

he backed away from the mound and leveled both

barrels of his shotgun at RuthClaire and me.

Dust billowed outward from the combat on the pit rim, a spreading

reddish-black fog in the starlight, and then both

Tearers and Adam went over the edge.

That was all there was to it. One moment they were

vigorously grappling bn the surface of their common planet,

the next they were plummeting hellward as if neither of

them had ever existed. Teavers did manage a scream as he

fell--a trail, short-lived protest--but Adam made no sound

at all; and maybe thirty seconds after they had engaged

each other, the night again belonged to the crickets, the

76

Michael Bishop

.

stars, and the coal-sack thunderhead looming like a celestial

abyss over Alabama.

RuthClaire and I held each other. Her hands were cold.

I could feel them--their coldness--through the back of my

shirt.

"I ought to kill you," Craig Puddicombe said. This

development had dumbfounded him, but he tried to talk

anyway. "This is your doin', goddamn it, this is all your

friggin' fault!" His voice was trembling. So were his

hands. He backed away from us toward the mound, picked

up Teavers' shotgun, and tossed it into the vat that had just

swallowed the two combatants. "It's people like you," he

said, choking on the words, "it's people like you who--" - The

complete articulation of this thought stymied him.

Puddicombe broke for the pickup, jumped into its cab,

and gunned the vehicle past us, nearly striking RuthClaire.

Away from the brick kiln he sped, away from the nightmare

that he had helped to create.

"We'll have to tell Nancy," RuthClaire said, her jaw

resting on my shoulder. "Somehow."

"Nancy?"

"Nancy Teavers. His wife. The girl who worked for

you once."

"Oh," I said,

For a long time we did not move. Eventually, though, I

climbed the mound and peered down into the vat from my

knees. I spent several minutes calling out to Adam and

Tearers. I even dropped pebbles into the hole to try to

plumb its depth. This was impossible. RuthClaire told me to stop, it was no

use.

Wearily, then, we set off on foot together for Paradise

Farm.

m

IT /()OK US no More than twenty minutes to complete

this .journey. When we arrived, we found a twenty-foot-tall,

gasoline-soaked cross of pine or some other fast-burning

wood blazing on the lawn. One of its horizontal struts had

already burned through, making an amputee of this self-contradictory

symbol, but neither of us was in any doubt

about the original shape of the structure. The scent of char

and gasoline, coupled with the rape inherent in the cross's

placement, lifted stinging tears to RuthClaire's eyes. She

damned the people responsible. She cursed the incorrigible

stupidity of her species.

It began to rain. Gusts of sighing wind whipped the

flames about unmercifully.-The remaining cross arm splintered

and crashed to the ground, showering sparks.

RuthClaire and I hurried along the gravel drive to the

house, where we paused to watch the storm. Lightning

flickered, thunder boomed, and finally the slashing rain

extinguished, altogether, the obscene handiwork of the Ku

Klutzers. The Zealous High Zygote was dead, i reflected:

long live Adam's surviving descendants in universal

forbearance.

Ha! I mentally scoffed. Didn't I want to kill Craig

Puddicombe? Didn't I want a vigilante's revenge on the

cross burners'?

They had cut the telephone lines. We could not phone

out. me to the authorities or RuthClaire to Nancy Teavers.

Even Edna Twiggs was ignorant of our predicament--unless,

of course, she had had something to do with it. Standing in

RuthClaire's loft, trying to undress my ex-wife for bed, I

doubted everyone in Beulah Fork. I had seen only eight

people in robes, but I imagined every single one of my

neighbors encysted in that hateful garment: a Ku Klux

Kaleidoscope of suspects.

77

78

Michael Bishop

RuthClaire, meanwhile, kept telling me to wait until

morning to venture out, I would be a fool to brave this

storm, there was nothing we could do for Adam, the cross

burners were long gone.

I brought her a bourbon from the kitchen and sat by her

on the bed until she had swallowed the last glinting amber

drop. Ten minutes later she was asleep.

I secured every window and locked every door. Then I

set off through the rain to Ruben Decker's farm a mile and

a half down the highway. My clothes, immediately drenched,

grew heavier and heavier as I walked. Two different southbound

automobiles went whooshing by, hurling spray, but

neither stopped: and I reached my destination waterlogged

and fantod-affiicted. Like a drug dream, the image of

Teavers and Adam disappearing into that voracious kiln

hole kept flashing through my head. When I knocked on

Decker's flyspecked screen door, I was on the verge of

collapse. The sight of the grizzled dairy farmer coming

toward me through his empty living room with a yearling

Persian cat in his arms seemed no More substantial or

trustworthy a vision than the muddled flashbacks that had

accompanied me all the way from Paradise Farm.

"Got to use your phone," i said. 'Got to make some

calls."

"Well, of course you do," Decker agreed, letting me

in. The silver-blue cat in his arms was purring like a

turbine.

i

DAVIE BUTTON had been patrolling the Peachfield residential

area at the time of the attack on the West Bank. ;

Later he had assisted the Hothlepoya County Emergency

Rescue Service at an accident south of Tocqueville. Upon i

being apprised of the evening's events by a dispatcher in

the sheriff's office in Tocqueville, however, he returned to

ANCIENT OF DAYS

79

Beulah. Fork and released Dick Zubowicz and Brian

Nollinger from their handcuffs, using a master key. It no

longer seemed likely to me that he had been the Klansman

in the powder-blue jogging shoes. The identity of that

person remains a troubling supposition.

Zubowicz and Nollinger spent the night on cots in City

Hall.

Button, on his own initiative, installed a large piece of

plywood over the hole in my picture window and a smaller

one over the broken pane in my door. In the morning Livia

George came in to clean up the glass, the spilled sand, the

beer-stein fragments, and the dirt from the overturned

geranium pot. The West Bank had survived. Nor was the

cost to my insurance company going to be especially high.

My premiums would not go up. In only another day or two I would be able to

open for business again.

At Paradise Farm two employees of Southern Bell showed

up to repair the telephone lines cut by the cross burners.

Law-enforcement officers from Tocqueville and agents

of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation poured into Beulah

Fork. They examined the restaurant, the softball field at

the elementary school, and the abandoned brick kiln on

Cleve Synder's property. They used helicopters as well as

automobiles. Because Craig Puddicombe had apparently

disappeared from Hothlepoya County, perhaps even from

Georgia, a description of both him and E. L. Teavers'

pickup truck went out to every sheriff's department and

highway patrol unit in the Southeast. Zubowicz and Nollinger

told their stories to investigators at City Hall: RuthClaire

and I unburdened ourselves to agents who had driven out

to Paradise Farm. It rained all morning, a slow, muggy

drizzle that did little to alleviate the heat, but by two

o'clock that same afternoon a GBI man telephoned

RuthCtaire to inform her that his agency had just made

four arrests.

"Do you think you could go back out to the Synder

place'?" he asked her.

"I dont know," she responded. "Why'?"

'We'd like a detailed run-through of everything that

80

Michael Bishop

happened while you and Mr. Loyd were . . . hostages. It

might prove helpful both in apprehending Puddicombe and

in prosecuting the Klanners who didn't stick around for

well, for the final bit of dirty work," the agent

concluded apologetically.

A reprise of the nightmare, i thought. Just what RuthClaire

needs.

"Sure," she said. "When'?"

"Niedrach and Davison are with you now, aren't they'?

Okay, good. They'll drive you and Mr. Loyd over there in

twenty or thirty minutes."

The drizzle became a steady downpour. As we rode to

the: brick kiln with agents Niedrach and Davison, a weather

report on the car radio attributed the rain to a fizzled

'hurricane off the Louisiana coast. Happy McEIroy Country,

I thought. It was my fervent hope that the storm had

had at least enough fury to cripple--for a day or two,

anyway--the broadcasting towers of America's Greater

Christian Constituency in Rehoboth, Louisiana. My mood

was vengeful, and sour. The agents in the front seat murmured

between themselves like adults outside a room in

which children are napping.

At the brick kiln we parked and waited for the rain to

subside. Our driver, Niedrach, kept the engine running and

the air conditioner going: otherwise we would have all

succumbed to the humid heat.

Looking through the rain-beaded window beside me, I i'

saw Brian Nollinger standing near the mound whose gullet

I

had engulfed Teavers and Adam. He had ridden out from Beulah FOrk with another

pair of investigators. They were

still in their car, however, whereas Nollinger was listing in

the deluge like a bamboo flagpole, his granny glasses

impossibly steamed, his Fu Manchu dripping, dripping,

dripping. I cracked my window about two inches.

"What the hell are you doing here'?" I shouted.

He looked toward our automobile. Almost prayerfully,

seeing me, he canted his head toward the eroded mound.

"Mourning," he said. "I came out here to mourn. Mr.

Loyd."

ANCIENT OF DAYS

81

Between clenched teeth RuthClaire said, "He has no

right."

Whether or not he had any right, Nollinger was martyring

himself to his alleged bereavement, turning aside from

us to squat like a pilgrim at the base of the mound. Maybe,

I thought, he does feel a kind of grief for Adam . . .

along with a More painful grief for his lost opportunities.

The sight of him hunkering in the rain annoyed me as

much as it did RuthClaire. It was true, though, that some

of the shame and embarrassment I felt for the anthropologist

was shame and embarrassment for myself. If I had not

gone to him in February, after all, Adam might still be

alive ....

"Can't you guys send that jerk back to Atlanta'?" i

asked the agents.

Niedrach looked over his shoulder into the back seat.

"He's here as a consultint. Our chief thought his expertise

might be helpful. We won't let him bug you or Mrs.

Montaraz."

This last word made me flinch. The GBI had confirmed

the validity of RuthClaire's marriage to Adam, and its

agents were careful to call her by her legal married name.

Mrs. Montaraz gave me an unreadable but far from timid

glance.

The rain slowed and then stopped. The pecan trees and

blackberry thickets began to drip-dry. The ruddy mud

around the mounds meant treacherous footing, but Niedrach

determined that if we did not mind dirtying our shoes a

little, we could begin the reenactment. He would play

Tearers' part, Davison would be Puddicombe, and Nollinger

would impersonate Adam.

RuthClaire vetoed this idea. Nollinger must sit in the

other car while the agent who had driven him out from

Beulah Fork assumed the habiline's role. Niedrach accepted

the substitution, and under a cloud cover fissuring

like the crust of an oven-bound blueberry pie we rehearsed

in minute detail what had already happened. "Teavers"

and "Adam" were careful not to get too near the open vat,

but RuthClaire began quietly crying, anyway. She shook

82

Michael Bishop

off Niedrach's offer of either a break or a postponement,

and we concluded the exercise in twenty minutes, with

brief pauses for photographs and ratiocinative conjecture.

Sunshine, suddenly, lay on the wet red clay like a coat of

shellac.

We milled around, unwilling to leave. The spot had a

queer attraction, like a graveyard or the ruins of a Roman

aqueduct.

Then, from some distance off, we heard a wordless

crooning, a cappella. The melody was that of a church

hymn, one I remembered from long-ago Sundays wedged

in a Congregationalist pew between my mother and an

older brother with a case of fidgets as acute as my own:

"This Is My Father's World." The crooning had a fever-

' berant quality that sent chills through my system--in spite

of the stifling July mugginess. RuthClaire, Nollinger. the

GB! agents, 'and I froze in our places. Bewildered, we

looked from face to face. The crooning ceased, giving way

to a half dozen or More sharp expulsions of breath, then

resumed again with an eeriness that unnerved me.

"Adam/" RuthClaire cried. She ran to the top of the

mound. "Adam, we're here!"

"Watch it!" Niedrach cautioned her.

The crooning stopped. Everyone waited. A sound like

pebbles falling down a well: another series of high-pitched

grunts and wheezes. And then, six or seven mounds away,

above the rim of the vat piercing that little hill to an

unknowable depth, Adam's head appeared! A gash gleamed

on his hint of sagittal crest; his bottom lip protruded like a

semicircular slice of eggplant. Numerous nicks and punctures

marked him.

A beat. Two beats.

Adanfs head popped out of view again.

"Atkmff" RuthClaire wailed. Descending the first mound,

she ran on tiptoes toward the one concealing her husband.

But Adam pulled himself out of the ground before she

could reach it. He was wearing, as everyone could now

see, the shiny purple robe in which E. L. Teavers had

plunged to his death. It hung on Adam's wiry body in

ANCIENT OF DAYS

83

crimps and volutes. It fit him no better than a jousting-tournament

tent, but it shone with a monarchial fire, torn

and sodden as it was. At the bottom of the interconnected

vats he had probably put on the robe to keep warm during

the rain and darkness, but now he seemed to be wearing it

as a concession to West Georgia mores. He had the look of

a sewer rat emerging from its chtbonic habitations: the

King of the Sewer Rats.

RuthClaire embraced him. He returned the embrace, and

Nollinger, the GBI agents, and I could see nothing of him

but his black, bleeding hands patting RuthClaire consolingly

in the small of her back.

"It's not so surprising he got out," Nollinger said sotto

voce, addressing me sidelong. "Just remember that his

ancestors--the ones the Kikembu warriors sold to Sayyid

Sa'id's representatives in Bravanumbi--well, they were

living in caves in the Lolitabu Hills. That's hSw they

stayed hidden from modern man for so many thousands of

years. Adam may have grown up on Montaraz. Louis

Rutherford's little island off Hispaniola, but he pretty obviously

retained some of the subterranean instincts acquired

by his modern habiline forebears in East Africa. I

mean. how many of us denatured Homo sapiens could

have survived an ordeal st)---"

"Why don't you .just shut up'?" I said.

Nollinger shrugged and fell silent, meanwhile rocking

contentedly back and lbrth in his boots, his hands in his

pockets. My initial .joy at Adam's return from the dead had'

gone off its groove, like a stereo stylus that refuses to

track. And why not'/ My rival had reappeared.

AND MY rival. I must confess, triumphed utterly. Not

long after the episode with the Zealous High Zygote &

Co., RuthClaire and Adam sold Paradise Farm back to me

and moved to Atlanta. Although convinced that most of

84

Michael Bishop

her neighbors did not share the extremist sentiments of the

Klan, RuthClaire no longer felt entirely comfortable in

Hothlepoya County. Further, she wished to' establish closer

contacts with the galleries and museums exhibiting her

work or making offers to exhibit it, and the rural lifestyle

no longer suited her purposes. As for Adam, he has adapted

to an urban environment as quickly as he adapted to the

bucolic enchantments of Paradise Farm, and the Immigra

tion

and Naturalization Service no longer wishes to deport

him to the Caribbean.

Adam paints. RuthClaire taught him. His paintings are

novelties. They sell for almost as much as RuthClaire's

own paintings of comparable size. Two of Adam's works--colorful

instances of habiline expressionism--hang in the

West Bank, gifts of no little value and decorative appeal, i

receive many compliments on them, even from people

ignorant of their creator's identity. RuthClaire contends

that Adam is still improving.

Before the Montarazes' departure from Beulah Fork I

threw them a going-away party in the West Bank. Livia

George. Hazel Upchurch, Molly Kingsbury, Davie Button,

Clarence and Eileen Tidings, Ruben and Elizabeth Decker,

Mayor Ted Notes and his wile, and even young Nancy

Teavers were among the guests. I served everyone on

Limoges porcelain plates from both the Celestial Hierarchy and the Footsteps

on the Path to Man series. The latter was still incomplete, unfortunately, but

AmeriCred had

sent me a dozen place settings of the most recent issue, "Homo habilis," with

my ex-wife's compliments. I gave

each of my guests this particular plate as a remembrance of

the evening.

Although I had prepared her a vegetable dinner, RuthClaire

ate very little. Her pregnancy had deprived her of

her appetite. She nursed her meal along until she at last

felt comfortable setting it aside in favor of a dessert cup of i

rainbow sherbet--at which point she announced to all and

sundry that although few contemporary divorces were either

civilized or even tastefully barbarous, she and I were i

still fast friends. When the baby came. Adam and she had I

ANCIENT OF DAYS

85

agreed that I was to be its godfather. Indeed, if it were a

boy, they intended to name it after me.

"Hear, hear!" everyone cried.

I stood to accept congratulations and propose a toast:

"You're a better man than I am, Adam M."

For a time. anyway, I actually meant it. It is not always

possible, I'm afraid, to be as good as you should be.

·

'0

·

·

·

·

·

Part Two

Hts HEROIC,

HEART

Beulah Fork and Atlanta, Georgia

MARRIAGE DOMESTICATES. Divorce disrup

palls. And work--not time--heals all heal

Business was booming at the West Bani,

soundly tot the first time in two years. Fur

the booming of a business can sometimes

belier than a lullaby.

I had finally managed to convince m

Claire and I were through--as man and

wistfully wary friends. After all, she was,

habiline husband, Adam Montaraz, and nc

say her devotion to the little man. He had

where I had failed to. He had moved will

He had become a successful artist in his o,

private evolution toward a kind of genteel

tication was moving right along. The Ath

would occasionally report that the Mot

tended a gallery opening, or a play, or

i

Three times I had seen Adam's photogra

i

and twice he had been wearing a tuxedo.

IF

:

I

89

ts. Bachelorhood

rtbreaks.

c. I was sleeping

my, in fact, how

soothe you even

yself that Ruth:

wife, if not as

Mth child by her

one could gain-impregnated

her

h her to Atlanta.

a,n right, and his

Southern sophis-rata Constitution tarazes had at-sporting event.

>h in the paper,

90

Michael Bishop

RuthClaire, on the other hand, had been wearing designer

maternity clothes.

Encountering such items, I would mumble, "I'm glad

they're doing well. I'm glad they're happy together."

Then I would put the paper aside and busy myself revising

a weekend menu.

As I say, business was booming.

IN EARLY December I began to decorate the West Bank

for Christmas. One day, with Livia George's help, I was

putting a sprig of mistletoe on an archway of wrapped

plastic tubing /'acing the Greyhound Depot Laundry. A

steady dristle---dristle is Livia George's original portmanteau

term for mist and drizzle--sifted down on us like a

weatherman's curse. Suddenly, out of this gloom, a silver

batchback pulled into a diagonal parking spot just below

my stepladder.

"Hey," Livia George said, "that's the fella Miss

RuthClaire brung in here las' January. You know, the one

done upchuck all ovah the table."

"Adam!" I exclaimed.

"Now he's got so uptown 'n' pretty he drivin' a silver

bullet. An' jes' look who's with him, too!"

"RuthClaire!" I cried. Even in the mist-cloaked street,

the syllables of her name reverberated like bell notes.

Embracing all around, we greeted one another. I even

hugged Adam, who, in returning my hug, gave my back

such a wrench that for a moment I thought a vertebra had

snapped. He was gentler with Livia George, probably out

of inbred habiline chivalry.

When RuthClaire and I came together, though, we

bumped bellies. She laughed self-consciously, and I knew

that her baby wasn't long for the womb. In defiance of the

very real possibility of her going into labor along the way,

ANCIENT OF DAYS

91

she and Adam had made the two-hour trip from Atlanta.

That struck me as crazy. Angrily, I told them both so.

"Relax. Paul. Even if I had, it wouldn't have been a

catastrophe."

"On the shoulder of the expressway? Like a savage or

something'.) You've got to be kidding!"

I turned to Adam. Although still far from a giant, he

was taller than I remembered, maybe because he was

wearing hand-tooled leather boots with elevator heels. I

was going to rebuke him for making the drive with his

wife so close to delivery, but RuthClaire had launched a

spirited minilecture:

"Only a tiny fraction of all the babies born to our

species have been born in hospitals, Paul. Today's world-population figures show it hasn't led to our extinction."

I whirled on her. "What if you'd had trouble?"

She patted the opaque ball turret of her pregnancy.

"Gunner here's not going to cause any trouble. 111 have

him--or her--the way a birddog bitch drops her puppies. Thwup/ Like that."

"When's it due'?" I asked, shaking my head.

"They don't really know. I've been pregnant since June

at least. That puts me early in rny seventh month."

"She safe enough, then," Livia George assured me.

Fresh-faced in the December mist, RuthClaire said,

"That's not altogether certain, Livia George. No one has

any real idea what the hfi'biline gestation period is. Or was. Adam says that

as a kid on Montaraz he witnessed a

couple of births, but he doesn't have any memory of his

people trying to reckon the length of a woman's term."

"Surely, one of those hotshot anthropologists up at

Emory has an opinion on the matter."

"I'm sure they do, Paul, but we haven't asked them.

We think I'm close. Habilines may carry their offspring no More than five or

six months, maybe even less. They're'

small, you know."

"Yeah. Even when they're wearing platform heels."

"That's to help him reach the brake and accelerator

pedals, not to pamper his vanity. Even so, we had to have

those pedals lifted about four inches from the floorboard."

92

Michael Bishop

"Jesus." I looked up into the glowering pewter sky. "A

thirty-six-year-old madonna on the brink of water-burst

and an East African Richard Petty who can barely touch

his brakes!"

"You gonna keep 'em out here all afternoon, Mistah

Paul, or can they go inside to field your cuss-'em-outs."

I gestured everyone inside and sent Livia George to the

kitchen tot coffee and hot chocolate. It was still a couple

of hours before the dinner crowd would begin arriving.

"Why didn't you telephone? I might not'ye even been

here."

"You're always here, Paul. The West Bank's what you

do."

"Yeah, but why didn't you telephone?"

"I can't help seeing Edna Twiggs sitting at the switchboard

when I dial a Beulah Fork number, AT&T reorganization

and all. I don't trust the phones--not alter last

summer,"

"So you'd risk turning Adam into your obstetrician?"

"Absolutely. You see, Paul, Adam and i have reached a

decision, i'm not having this baby in a hospital."

Unable to help myself, I rolled my eyes.

"Stop it. You belittle everything you don't understand."

"Is this going to be a hot-tub delivery'? That's one of the

latest crazes, I hear. Mama pretends she's a porpoise in

Marineland."

"Paul--"

"Birthing stools. That's big, too. You have the kid

squatting, like a football center pulling the pigskin out

from under his jersey."

Adam looked down at his crooked hands on my new

mint-green tablecloth. RuthClaire, meanwhile, spoke through

clenched teeth: "I'll never understand how we got married.

Never."

Knowing I had gone too far, I apologized.

"Neither of those methods is as absurd as you make

them out to be. Underwater delivery's nonstressful for i

both mother and child, and a birthing stool gives a woman

I

a degree of control over a process that's rightfully her

'.

I

ANCIENT OF DAYS

93

own, anyway. If your consciousness is ever raised, Paul

Loyd. ifs going to have to be with a block and tackle."

Livia George came into the dining room from the kitchen

with our hot drinks. "Had six babies 'thout a doctor 'round,"

she told us. "In a feather bed in my own house. Oldest

done hit six-foot-four. Youngest am' been sick a day."

Adam made a series of gestures with his hands, which

RuthClaire translated: "Said to tell you, Paul, that we

want our baby born at Paradise Farm. We'll even pay for

the privilege. It's important to us."

"But why'?" I asked, almost--not quite<lumbstruck.

"As soon as I check into a hospital, the media's going

to descend. It's understandable. I guess, but I can't let

them turn the birth of our baby into an international circus.

Paradise Farm's already got a pretty good security system,

and it's far enough from Atlanta to thwart a few of the

inevitable busybodies."

"RuthClaire, why don't you fly to some remote Caribbean

island'? You can afford it. It's going to be butt-bruising

cold here in Beulah Fork--not like in Zarakal or

Haiti, kid."

"What it comes down to i, well, !'11 be com[ortable out there. And what More

fitting place to have Adam's

child than the place where he and I first met?" She turned

an admiring--a loving--gaze on the habiline, and he reciprocated

with one of intelligent steadfastness.

Discomfited, I said, "You can stay out there, Ruthie

Cee, on two conditions."

' 'Two/' '

I stood up. "Just listen to me. They're easy. First, you

don't pay me a dime."

Adam and RuthClaire exchanged a look, the meaning of

which was clearly both gratitude and acceptance.

"Second, you let me find a reputable--and discreet--doctor

to help you with the delivery."

"Absolutely not! An outsider would needlessly complicate

things, and I'm going to be fine."

I told her that there was still a possibilio' she might need

help. How could I live with myself it' anything went

94 Michael Bishop

wrong? She replied that for the past six months Adam had

been reading--yes, reading--every tome on childbirth he could lay his hands

on. It was also his Opinion that the

unborn infant's gracile body--gracile, for God's sake!

--would ease its journey through the birth canal. Ruthie

Cee, a birddog bitch dropping puppies.

My forefinger made a stabbing motion at Adam. "It's a

little hard for me to credit his coming so far in six months.

You'll forgive me if l*m skeptical of his medical expertise'?"

"He's brighter than most. Paul, and he had a headstart

on Montaraz that nobody seems to want to acknowledge."

"Yeah, but he's not a doctor. And that's my second

condition."

RuthClaire stood up. Adam stood up. For a moment I

feared that they were leaving, and I cursed my show of

intractability. I was on the verge of rescinding my second condition when

Livia George gave me a face-saving out:

"S'pose / midwife Miss RuthClaire's little 'un'? How

that be'?" She fluttered her hands in front of her breasts.

"I got me lots o' s'perience birthin' babies."

Hallelujah. RuthClaire, Adam, and I all did double-takes.

It was okay with all of us, Livia George's proposal.

Something about her turn of phrase, something about her

cunning self-mockery. Our conflict thus resolved, the four

of us took turns embracing one another as we had earlier

done on the sidewalk.

I SENT the Montarazes out to Paradise Farm with a set of

keys. Livia George and I finished decorating, then stayed

on for the dinner crowd. Hazel Upchurch and Nancy Teavers

came in at 4:30. By recent standards, business was slow

and the evening dragged. At 11:30 i was barreling up the

highway to see how my new lodgers were doing.

They had not yet gone to bed. I found them in

ANCIENT OF DAYS

95

RuthClaire's old studio. Often over the past few months, I

had entered-the untenanted loft to stand in its memory-haunted

emptiness imagining just such a reunion. Now she was really back, my lost

RuthClaire.

Adam, of course, was with her. He was sitting crosslegged

on the drafting table opposite RuthClaire's low

Naugahyde sofa. He had a book between his legs and a

pair of gold-framed granny glasses clamped on the end of

his broad, flat nose. The sleeves of his baby-blue velour

shirt were rolled up, and he had unzipped it to the midpoint

of his sternum, revealing a flannely nest of reddish-black chest hair. He saw me before RuthClaire did.

"Still reading up on childbirth'?" I asked him.

He bared his. teeth at me--a smile rather than a threat or

an expression of fear--and lifted the book so that I could

see it. RuthClaire pulled herself to a sitting position with

my nappy beige rearing-bear blanket around her'shoulders.

By the door, I leaned down and kissed her on the forehead.

Then I crossed to the drafting table to find out what

Adam was reading. A small, slick paperback: The Problem

of Pain by C. S. Lewis.

"C. S. Lewis'?" I said incredulously, turning to RuthClaire.

"A habiline holdover from the Pleistocene's reading

C. S. Lewis'?"

"What's wrong with that?"

I took the book from Adam. "Your husband here--the

living descendant of a bunch of East African mole people-,is

busily ingesting a work of theology'?"

"Do you believe he can read'?"

I glanced sidelong at Adam. I knew he had mastered

sign language, I had seen him driving a car, and his eyes

were appraising me with a keenness that gave me pause.

"Sure," I grudgingly admitted. "Why not'?"

"Then why find it hard to believe he's reading C. S.

Lewis'? The man wrote for children, you know. He even

wrote science fiction."

I changed tacks. "He ought to be reading, uh, Mid-wi/kO,

Made Easy, or Benjamin Spock, or something like

that."

I

96

Michael Bishop

I

"He's done that already. Don't you understand? His

I

consciousness is emerging from a kind of mental Upper

Paleolithic· Adam's trying to find out who he is."

"More birthing-stool psychobabble?"

"Only if you choose to belittle itas such."

Adam made a series of signs with both hands, i could

not interpret them. The irony of his knowing a system of

communication of which I was ignorant underscored the

foolishness of my doubting his interest in theology. (If he

could sign, he could just as easily genuflect.)

"He wants to know if he has a soul," RuthClaire

translated.

"So do I. Want to know if/have a soul, that is."

"Your lack of a heart may imply something equally

· discouraging about your spiritual equipment, Paul."

"Very funny. It's after midnight, kid. I can't believe

we're discussing this."

"What about it? Do you think Adam has a soul'?"

"What kind of soul, lot God's sake'? An animal soul? A

rational soul? An immortal soul'? All this sort of adolescent

head game will get you is a migraine and a reputation as a

philosophical nitpicker."

RuthClaire flapped her nappy blanket. 'Skip it. You've

got all the sensitivity of a tire iron."

Suddenly dog-tired, I shuffled to the sofa and plumped

myself down opposite RuthClaire. She took pity and llapped

an end of her blanket at me. i pulled it over my knees.

"Almost like old times, hey, Paul'?"

"I can't recall having a chaperone before."

"Livia George."

"Livia George's a chaperone the way Colonel Sanders

is a spokesman for the Save-the-Chickens Fund."

RuthClaire laughed, and we began to talk. Somehow,

owing in part to Adam's absorption in his book. it was

almost as if we were alone in the wide, chilly room.

RuthClaire told me that downstairs she had seen, and had

been pleased to see, my growing collection of plates in her Footsteps on the

Path to Man series. I had arranged the

eight titles issued to date on hinged brass stands in a

ANCIENT OF DAYS

97

glass-fronted maple hutch. The plates included Ramapithecus,

Australopithecus afarensis, A. africanus, A. boisei,

Homo habilis. Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, and Homo

neanderthalensis. The habiline, first issued back in August,

bore an undeniable resemblance to the gargoyle perched

on my drafting table.

"Look," I said, "you've got ten plates in this series,

and you've already done the eight main hominids on the

road to Homo sapiens sapiens. What's next?"

"Contemporary racial variations."

"Negroes, Caucasians, Orientals?"

"That's right, ['ye already done paintings for those and

some others---Oceanics, aboriginals, and American Indians.

The final four are up in the air because there's some

unavoidable overlap. I'll probably do Eskimoes, Arabs,

pygmies, and Nordics, but I could just as easily substitute

Bushmen or Montagnards or Ainu somewhere ih there. It's

arbitrary, of course, a way to get the number of plates up

to eighteen. AmeriCred's- hollering for the last four so that

they can get the plates themselves into production. Me,

I'm sick of the whole rotten thing."

"Really'? You don't enjoy.doing them?"

"It's donkeywork, Paul. I liked doing the prehistoric

numbers, Adam's portrait and all that. But these last ten

are sheer commercial excess. AmeriCred just wants their

subscribers to keep paying through the nose for gewgaws.

I feel like a hack writing otherwise worthless potboilers."

"Enjoy your popularity. No one's twisting their arms."

"It's not that I'm doing a lousy job, it's just that these

new ones aren't contributing anything to the development

of my art. It's sate representational stuff. My audience

consists almost entirely of well-to-do old ladies and fat-cat

corporate executives looking for a 'classy' cultural investment.''

She stuck out her tongue, as if to see if there were

a piece of lint or tobacco on its tip. (Nope.) "That's why

I've been so slow to finish this assignment. Paul."

"Blame it on your pregnancy."

"I've done that. It's a lie."

"People who regret making money are nincompoops."

98

Michael Bishop

"The regret--the guilt--comes from what you do to

make it. Even you know that. Right now I'm whoring."

Adam looked up from The Problem tf'Pdin. He made a

gesture sequence loosely translatable as "Don't talk rubbish,''

then went back to Lewis's little piece of theodicy.

"Whoring'.) You didn't feel that way about The Celestial

Hierarchy, did you'?"

"Not once. Those are breakthrough paintings. I avoided

all the cliches--archangels with flaming swords, naked

roly-polies with wings on their heels, Jesus dragging his

old rugged hanging tree. I did something new. It was a

small miracle the series was successful. A bigger miracle it

ever got commissioned."

"It made you popular. You hadn't bargained for that."

"'How public,' "RuthClaire quoted," 'like a frog.'"

"That's smug elitism," I said. "It's probably insincere,

too. You pretend to despise success because there's an old

art-school attitude that figures nothing popular can be worth

a damn."

"Listen, Paul, there's a backlash against me in the

Atlanta art community because of my success. The people

who count up there, well, they see my work on these

stupid ptates as a sellout. I do, too. Now, especially."

"If that opinion takes in the plates you're proud of, to

hell with them."

"Paul. it's More complicated than that. They don't respect

what I'm doing, and I can't really respect it, either--not

these last ten examples of porcelain calendar art,

anyway."

"They're jealous."

"That enters into it, sure. But I've always thought of

myself as something of a visionary. My work for AmeriCred

has undermined all that. The worst thing about the backlash

is that I know I've brought it on myself."

The studio's overhead fluorescents flickered palely as

the wind gusted and moaned. The yew outside the twin-paned

plateglass creaked its tall shadow across our imaginations.

Even Adam looked up.

"Is that another reason-you came down here? To escape

the disapproval of the art-scene cognoscenti?"

ANCIENT OF DAYS

99

RuthClaire frowned. "I don't know." Then her spirits

mysteriously revived: "They like what Adam does. In

February, Paul, the folks at Abraxas are going to give an

entire third-floor gallery room over to an exhibition of

Adam's paintings. It'll be in place for two weeks. Promise

me you'll come see it."

"The West Bank," I reminded her. "It's hard to get

away."

"You managed to get away last February when you

dropped in on Brian Nollinger at that primate field station

north of Atlanta. Well, Abraxas is twenty miles closer to

Beulah Fork than that concentration camp for our furry

cousins." A grirnace of unfeigned revulsion twisted her

mouth, but then her eyes were facetiously pleading. 'Listen,

Mr. Loyd, I've just made you an offer you can't

refuse. Understand?"

"Yes, ma'am," I said. 'Yes. ma'am."

AND SO Adam and RuthClaire stayed with me, and Livia

George drove home with me from the West Bank every

evening to be on hand in the event that my ex-wife went

into labor. At the restaurant itself we had a prearranged

telephone signal. Adam, out at Paradise Farm, would dial

and let the phone ring once. Then he would hang up, wait

thirty seconds, and repeat the procedure. After the second

ring, no matter how busy we were, Livia George and I

would sprint up the Tocqueville Road in my Mercedes to

answer his call.

Atlanta's news media finally caught on to the fact that

the Montarazes had left the city. They telephoned the West

Bank looking for a lead. Sometimes they even sought to

induce Edna Twiggs to give them my unlisted number at

Paradise Farm. She resisted. One day at lunch, in fact, she

told me how she had turned down a bribe of money for

I O0

Michael Bishop

I

that information. Edna Twiggs, an ally! Even so, I took

the added precaution of connecting all the telephones in

;

my house to an answering machine so that in my absence

RuthClaire and Adam could monitor incoming calls. For

tunately,

no one but me ever tried to ring them up.

I was still concerned that someone in a TV van or a I

newspaper company car might try to gatecrash. The Atlanta papers had recently featured headlines about Adam

and RuthClaire. In the morning Constitution, this:

LOCAL ARTIST AND HER HABILINE HUSBAND

DISAPPEAR LATE IN HER HISTORIC PREGNANCY

In the afternoon paper, the Journal. this:

FOUL PLAY NOT SUSPECTED

IN ABSENCE OF LOCAL ARTISTS

BUT ABRAXAS CHIEF ANXIOUS ABOUT FAMOUS PAIR

The story under the latter headline reported an interview

with David Blau, director of the Abraxas Gallery. Blau

thought that the Montarazes were probably ()kay. but still

believed they should contact him or one of his associates

to confirm the fact.

"Is this fellow one of the avant-garde bigwigs who think you've sold out'?" I

asked RuthClaire.

"David's More charitable than most. He credits me with

practicing a deliberate serious-commercial split."

"Sounds like a decent enough Joe."

"He is. That's why I've got to give him a call."

"Don't," I blurted. My newfound, but still tepid, regard

lot Edna Twiggs did not permit me to trust her

totally. "Write a note. Put no return address on the envelope.

I'll mail it from Tocquevitle tomorrow morning.

He'll have it the day after."

That's what we did. While i was in Tocqueville to mail

the note, i hired a trio of private guards from a security

agency in the Tocqueville Commons Mall. The first man

came on duty that same afternoon.

Once the guards began their shifts, my taut nerves loos

ANCIENT OF DAyS

I01

ened. The likelihood of anyone's circling the farm and

coming at us by way Of White Cow Creek seemed remote.

It must have seemed remote to RuthClaire. too. She made

up her mind that she was going to have her baby in a

peaked canvas tent that she and Adam pitched beneath a

pecan tree in the back. The tent was lavender. It reminded

me of the floppy conical hoods worn by E. L. Teavers,

Craig Puddicombe, and their anonymous Klan-mates on

the night they came to kill Adam, I told RuthClaire so the

first morning after the tent had gone up, its lavender

surfaces sparkling with frost.

"You're right," she acknowledged, startled. "We bought

it at a sporting-goods store in Atlanta and I never once

thought of that. Maybe Adam did, though. Teavers's robe

may have kept him from coming down with pneumonia."

"This tent won't keep you warm. The temperature today's in the twenties, RuthClaire."

"I'll be fine."

"The hell you say. What about the baby'?"

'The child's half habiline, Paul. Habilines are traditionally,

and altogether naturally, born out of doors. The

tent's a compromise."

"Out of doors in Africa or [laiti!"

"If it's cold, Livia George can wrap the baby in a

blanket and take it straight inside."

'Then what's the point of the stupid purple tent?"

"I've already told you. Don't you listen?" She turned

on her heel and stalked toward the plateglass doors glittering

above my patio deck. I followed her, shaking my head

and mumbling curses.

ADAM CONTINUED tO read away at Lewis's The Problem of ' Pain. Too, from the

library in Tocqueville--a side trip I

made on the same day I hired the security guards and

mailed my ex's note--he had me check out some other

102 Michael Bishop

fairly basic books on religious or spiritual topics: The I

Serewtape Letters by Lewis, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress,

a young person's guide to understanding the great world

religions, an English translation of the Koran, a biography

of Gandhi, Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain,

something called The Alphabet of Grace by Frederick

Buechner, The Way of the Sufi by ldries Shah, a primer on

the Talmud, and Mortimer Adler's How to Think About

God. Pretty heady stuff tot a habiline. I had to carry the

whole lot home in a Gilman No-Tare grocery bag from our

local A&P.

Adam painted during the days, read in the evenings.

Ruthie Cee, on the other hand, neither painted nor read.

She spent most of her time sleeping while Adam worked.

Sometimes she watched him. (He was putting the finishing

touches on a huge, semiabstract landscape featuring a

tangerine-red tree that reminded me of an African baobab.)

She may have occasionally prepared a meal for the two of

them, but if she did, she wasn't regular about it. She had

no need to be. Livia George and I were scrupulous about

bringing them at least one hot gourmet meal a day.

Saturday night at the West Bank. Six or seven people

standing cheerful but also mildly impatient just inside the

door, waiting to be seated. Fur jackets or chic leather car

coats on the ladies. The men bundled in herringbone or

expensive brushed sheepskin. Cold air swirling around the

newcomers like the vapor in a frozen-food bin.

The telephone next to the cash register rang. I looked

over at the flocked divider concealing the phone. A second

ring was not forthcoming.

Oh no, I thought, not tonight,t

I smiled at a woman with a magazine-cover death mask

for a face and put one hand reassuringly on the shoulder of

her escort. Mentally, though, I counted to thirty. The

telephone rang again.

"That's it!" I cried. "That's it!"

Livia George came scurrying from the kitchen wiping

her hands on her apron. Her heavy upper arms were bare,

but she made no move to find her coat.

ANCmNT OF DAYS

103

"Gona get going', Mistah Paul," she told me, pushing

through the astonished people at the door. "Gotta he'p

Miss RuthClaire birth that beautiful baby."

She hustled out the door, down the sidewalk, and into

the front seat of my Mercedes on the driver's side. Helplessly,

I followed after, already resigned to the role of

passenger.

The trip took maybe nine minutes, Our security guard

automatically passed us through the gate, and my car's

steel-belted radials flung gravel back at him as Livia George

fishtailed us up the drive to the house. I was taking two

steps at a time toward the front door when Livvy, at the

cornet' of the house, shouted,

"Not that way, Mistah Paul! She in that purple pup

tent out back!"

"Go on!" I urged her. "I've got to grab a coat or

something!"

The warmth of the house hit me like a Gulf Coast wind.

I took a jacket from the shoulders of the baby-satyr statue

on which I had draped it several days ago, pulled it on,

and strode into the living room looking for a shawl or

sweater for Livia George. F-rom the back of a chair I

grabbed a peach-toned afghan. But on the way to the

sliding doors I hesitated.

Did I really want to see the woman I loved in the throes

of childbirth'? Sure. Of course I did. Wasn't that what

every sensitive with-it male wanted nowadays'? Men actually

attended classes to learn how to provide support at the

Moment of Truth. Some even scrubbed and put on surgical

gowns to participate in the event. If their partners were

back-to-nature advocates, they might build birthing stools

or prepare lbr underwater delivery by buying scuba-diving

gear. All I had to do was slide open a plateglass door and

go tripping across my deck to a tent in a pecan grove.

I was no longer RuthClaire's husband. The child in her

womb owed me no genetic debt. It instead owed this

paternal debt to a mute, sinewy creature right out of the

early Paleolithic. Was the arrival of this squalling relic

really an event I wanted to witness? My concern should

104

Michael Bishop

have been for RuthClaire's safety, for the health and well

being of her child--but baser impulses had me in their grip

and I hesitated.

Taking a deep breath, I went out onto my deck. The

cold hit me like an Arctic hammer stroke, but I staggered

through the pillars of my silhouetted pecan trees to

RuthClaire's lavender tent. Inside the translucent smudge

of the sailcloth, shadowy shapes stooped, straightened,

and gesticulated. Adam, I was glad to see, had taken my

PowerLite into the tent. He had even thought to carry one

of the studio's sun lamps out there, an extension cord from

the deck down into the pecan grove giving me a trail to

follow.-

A hundred yards or so beyond the tent, a quick flash of

light. I halted, blinked, looked again--but now the corridor

of sentinel pecans was empty of any intruder but the

keening wind.

"Mistah Paul, you better move your fanny fas' if you

wanna see this!"

I moved my fanny fast. After skidding in the frost-rimed

mulch, I whipped aside the tent flap, edged inside, and

found RuthClaire lying flat on her back on a mound of

blankets and ancient bed sheets spread out on a plastic

dropcloth. Adam was kneeling to one side of his wife, but

Livvy was hunkering between her legs--legs, I noticed,

bundled in a pair of those ugly knit calf-warmers worn by

women in aerobic-dancing classes---guiding from her womb

the mocha-cream-colored product of her pregnancy.

"I told you it'd be easy!" RuthClaire cried ecstatically,

letting her head fall back and laughing.

Livvy did something sure-handed to the umbilical cord,

then lifted the minuscule infant by its ankles, bracing its

back with one hand and showing it first to Adam and then

to me. It was a boy, but a wizened and fragile-looking one.

When Livvy slapped him on his angular buttocks, he

sucked in air and wailed. Surprisingly, the sound lasted

only a few brief seconds. Evolution on the Serengeti grasslands,

I later came to realize, had selected for habitines

whose newborns shut up in a hurry.

ANCIENT OF DAYS

105

"Am' he a dandy!"

I put the afghan around Livia George's shoulders. Adam

reached into the wings of the towel swaddling the baby to

* touch his son on the head. Something like a smile flickered

around Adam's lips.

"Okay." I said. "We've proved that Ruthie's game

enough to bear her child in the back yard. Now let's get

inside."

"Got a little bidness to take care of yet," Livvy said,

handing the baby to its father. She knelt and massaged the

undersides of RuthClaire's thighs; then she began to push

gently on the mother's slack, exposed abdomen, to encourage

the expulsion of the placenta. "Y'all go on in. Nothin'

else for you to do out here."

Before Adam and I could exit, however, two strangers

shoved their way into the tent.

First, a blond man in a double-breasted safhri jacket

confronted us. Behind him, balancing a portable video unit

on one denim-clad shoulder, was a slender black man.

These intruders were so businesslike about deploying their

equipment and their persons in the cramped interior that I

actually considered the possibility that Adam and RuthClaire

had hired them to video-tape their baby's delivery. If so,

they were late.

'q'm Brad Barrington of Contact Cable News," announced

the blond intruder. "My cameraman, Rudy

Starnes." The black man gave us a perfunctory nod. "Well,

well, well. Is this little fellow the Montaraz baby'/" He

chucked the newborn under the chin with a gloved forefinger.

"Looks like we underestimated the time it'd take us

to get through the woods, Rudy. The big show's already

come off."

'Sun lamp's giving us enough light to shoot by, Brad.

Maybe I can do some reenactment footage to save the

situation."

"Yeah," said Barrington. "And on-the-scene interviews."

Grimacing. RuthCtaire raised up on her elbows. "What

in pity's name do you guys think you're doing'/"

"You're trespassing," I protested. "You sneaked onto

Paradise Farm from CLeve Synder's property."

i 06

Michael Bishop

A microphone in his fist, Barrington duck-walked be

neath

the tilted sun lamp to RuthClaire's shoulder, where

he asked her if it had been a difficult delivery'.

Leaning into the mike, RuthClaire let go of a high-pitched scream. Barrington recoiled, almost doing a prat-fail. Livia George, meanwhile, had slid the glistening

placenta into a piece of torn sheet. Her entire manner

implied that the sudden appearance of the two-man Con

tact

Cable News crew was none of her affair. If nothing

else, it was preferable to a hurricane.

"Who's on security duty tonight?" I asked. (I could

never remember the guards' names.)

"Chalmers," RuthClaire replied, spitting out the word.

Barrington, looking More annoyed than abashed, ap

proached

her again with the microphone. "Don't you think

this landmark event deserves a permanent video record'?

Don't you feel any sense of obligation to history'?"

RuthClaire, her breath ballooning, said, "Don't you feel

any sense of shame, hanging over a half-naked woman

with that instrument of psychic rape in your fist'?"

A thin veil of confusion fell across the newsman's face.

"Get out of here," I told him. "My first and last

warning."

"Let's go, Brad," the black man said. "This ain't

working out." Almost certainly at his partner's bidding,

Starnes had just hauled a ton of equipment across five or

six hundred yards of wintry darkness, and nothing was

going as planned.

"Keep shooting," the blond man nevertheless told him.

"Brad--"

"This is a scoop! You see anyone down here from

Channel Five or Eleven Alive? You know anybody else

who staked out this place for three ass-freezing days'?"

"Nobody else that dumb."

I slipped outside and called for Chalmers, the guard.

That did it for Starnes. He decamped, abandoning his

associate to whatever fate the man chose to fashion for

himself. He was hiking speedily off through the pecan

grove, his equipment banging, when Chalmers came trot-i

T

ACmNT OF D^vs 107

ting around the corner of the house with his pistol drawn.

The guard started to pursue the cameraman.

"Let him-go," i said. "It's the talking head in the tent

who needs his butt run in."

Matters unraveled confusedly after that. RuthClaire was

yelling at Barrington to go away, go away, and Livia

George came out into the cold with the infant, nodding

once at the house to show us that she was taking him

indoors. Chalmers, a tall young man in an official-looking

parka, started to go into the tent after Barrington when

Barrington fell backward through the tent flap with Adam's

head in his stomach and his arms pinioned to his

sides. In a rapid-fire falsetto utterly unlike his on-the-air

baritone, he was pleading for mercy--but he landed on his

back with such an audible expulsion of breath that he

could not keep it up.

Adam was all over him like a pit bull, leaping from

flank to flank over the reporter's prostrate form, baring his

teeth at him, all the while.growling as if rabid. RuthClaire

emerged from the tent, too. Her blood-stained dressing

gown hung to her ankles, her incongruous maroon leg-warmers

visible just beneath its hem. She grasped one of

the tent's guy ropes to support herself.

In a tone of rational admonishment, she said, "Stop,

Adam. I'm okay. That's enough."

Through the fog of his rage, Adam somehow heard her.

He stopped, Barrington's body rigid beneath him, and

looked up sightlessly at Chalmers and me. Slowly--almost

shockingly--sanity returned to his eyes, and he pushed

himself off the reporter with his knuckles and stepped

away from the whimpering victim of his assault.

"I want to hold my baby," RuthClaire told him. "Take

me in."

Still trying to compose himself, Adam escorted her to

the house. Chalmers and I remained in the pecan grove

with Barrington, the guard pointing his pistol at the

newsman's head. What now? Were we within our rights to

shoot the trespasser'?

Barrington stopped whimpering. Catching sight of me

108

Michael Bishop

upside-down, he asked if he could maybe have a cup of

coffee before he called his station for a ride back to

Atlanta.

"That damn Statues. He's probably to Newnan by now."

Chalmers said, "If Mr. Loyd decides to press charges,

you won't be going back to Atlanta tonight. I'll be turning

you over to the sheriff in Tocqueville for a little quiet cell

time."

Barrington got off the ground, groaning elaborately, and

we argued the matter. If he gave me his word that Contact

Cable News would never air the least snippet of tape taken

tonight on Paradise Farm, I told him, I would forgo the

pleasure of pressing charges. I was damned, though, if I

was going to let him use my bathroom, much less serve

him a cup of coffee. Barrington grumped about the First

Amendment and Freedom of the Press, but verbally accepted

my terms.

Then Chalmers and i accompanied him to the front gate.

There, with a display of loyalty totally undeserved, Rudy

Starnes picked up Barrington in the Contact Cable News

van in which the two of them had been camping for the

past three ass-freezing days, presumably to drive him back

up the lonely highway to Atlanta.

UPSTAIRS, IN a tiny bedroom next to the studio, I found

Livia George with the new parents. In one corner was a

white wicker bassinet, but RuthClaire was sitting in an

upholstered chair nursing her baby, whom someone had

bagged up in a bright yellow terrycloth sleeper. A newt. I

thought. A salamander. I reported what had happened with

Barrington and told Livvy that I needed to go back to the

West Bank to oversee the restaurant's closing--assuming.

of course, that my employees hadn't already walked off

the job in uncomprehending anger and frustration.

ANCIENT OF DAYS

109'

"They'll be back," RuthClaire said.

"I hope so," I said. "It's hard finding good help."

"Oh, I don't mean Hazel and Nancy and the others. I'm

talking about those jerks from Contact Cable."

Abruptly, Adam stalked out of the room. I heard the

lights click on in the studio and saw a wash of yellow

lambency unroll past the nursery.

"I don't think he remembers the last time he let himself

go like that," RuthClaire said by way of explanation.

"The time he wrestled E. L. Teavers into the brick

kiln'?"

"That was self-defense, Paul, literally a matter of life

and death. Tonight, the only thing that was really at stake

was the sanctity of our baby's birth."

"Adam be awright tomorrow," Livia George assured

us. "Too much 'citement for one evening."

"He didn't even bite the bastard," I said. "Ju knocked

him down and growled."

"He went wild."

"Everybtxty goes wild now and then." I grinned. "Why,

Ruthie Cee, even you went a little wild this evening."

She shifted her hold on the baby. "We were thinking of

naming this little character for you. Keep that up, though,

and you can forget it." Gently, she began to jog the

suckling infant in her arms. "Adam sets standards for

himself, high ones. They're high because the general expectation

is that he'll comport himself like an animal

Well, his sense of self-respect demands that he never--ever--fulfill

that cynical expectation."

"Which means his standards are higher than nine tenths

of the world's human population."

"Adanfs human."

"You know what I mean. I was trying to compliment

him."

The baby--Paul Montaraz, I realized with a sudden

humbling insight--had fallen asleep nursing. He was small.

Even asleep, his mouth tugged at RuthClaire's nipple with

desperate infantile greed. Livia George lifted him up, coaxed

a burp from him, and laid him on a quilted coverlet in the

110

Michael Bishop

bassinet. RuthClaire told me that tomorrow morning the

Montaraz family would return to Atlanta and my own life

could go back to normal.

"Whoever said I wanted a normal life?"

"Look in on Adam, will you, Paul? Right now, another

person's attentions might be better medicine for his blues

than mine."

I looked in on Adam. He was sitting on the drafting

table, his legs crossed, his stack of read and unread library

books teetering at his knees. Although he heard me enter,

he refused to look up. We were alone together in the tall

drafty expanse of the studio. Despite the room's chilliness,

my hands had begun to sweat.

"Adam," I said. "Don't feel bad about going after that

'Contact Cable turkey. If it'd been me, i'd'ye bit him."

The habiline looked me in the eye. His upper lip drew

back to reveal his pink gums and primitive but powerful

teeth. I looked away. When I looked again, Adam's gaze

had gone back to his book.

'q wanted to congratulate you on becoming a father,

Adam. The kid's a crackerjack." No response. "What's

that you're reading'?"

The cloak of civility he was trying to grow into would

not permit him to ignore a direct question. He lifted the

small volume so that I could read its title. Ah, yes, The

Problem of Pain again, on which Adam had foundered

shortly after his arrival. I turn'ed the book around and saw

that tonight he had run aground on the beginning of Chapter

9, "Animal Pain."

One sentence jumped out at me as it may have already

jumped out at Adam: "So far as we know beasts are

incapable of either sin or virtue: therefore they can neither

deserve pain nor be improved by it." My belief that this

sentence may have wounded Adam was predicated on the

feeling that although RuthClaire had accepted him as fully

human, he had yet to accept himself as such.

·

"You ought to try this guy's Out of the Silent Planet." I

said. "It's a helluva lot More fun than his theology."

Adam carefully extracted the book from my two-fingered

ANCIENT OF DAYS

I I I

grip. pulled it to his chest, and then flung it past my head

to the tar end of the studio. Like a broken-backed bird, it

flapped to a leaning standstill against the baseboard. Adam

took advantage of my surprise to unfold his legs and hop

down from the table. Exiting the studio, he put me in mind

of a lame elf or an oddly graceful chimpanzee: there was

something either crippled-seeming or animatish about his

walk.

"Shame on you, Loyd," I scolded myself.

PAPA, MAMA, and Little Baby Montaraz went back to

Atlanta. The international media descended upon their home

not far from Little Five Points, a two-story structure with a

ramshackle gallery, lots of spooky gables, and a wide

Faulknerian veranda. The house became almost as famous

as the kid.

As lbr my namesake, he rapidly turned into the anthropological

prince of American celebrity. Everyone wanted a

piece of him and his parents. People, Newsweek, Lt.'fi,, "60

Minutes," "20-20," Discover3,. "Nova," Cosmopolitan,

Omni, Reader's Digest, and a host of other publications

and programs sought to report, analyze, or simply ride the

giddy whirlwind of the Montaraz Phenomenon. Indeed, it

took better than a year for the extravagant circus surrounding

the family to dismantle its tents and mothball its

clown costumes, but ever afterward, to this very day, a

half dozen or so revolving sideshows have kept the promise

(or the threat) of an even dizzier Return Engagement

before the public.

But I'm running ahead of myself. Let me back up.

in the absence of an attending physician, Tiny Paul

required a birth certificate. Because his parents had left

Paradise Farm early on Sunday morning, there was no way

for them to obtain a file form on which to apply for a

I 12

Michael Bishop

certificate from the Hothlepoya County Health Depart

ment.

On Monday, then. I drove to Tocqueville to pick up

the proper form. I filled it out while standing at the

registrar's counter. Surprisingly, this woman treated the

application as a routine matter. When I questioned her, she

told me that the form would now go to the Office of Vital

Records in the state-government complex in Atlanta.

"What about the birth certificate'?"

"Send in a three-dollar filing fee and they'll send the

certificate. It really doesn't take long."

"If I write the check, should I specify that the certificate

itself should go to the parents' Atlanta address?"

The young woman--trim, deftly mascaraed--looked at

me with a flicker of interest. "Why would they send the

.certificate to you'? Writing the check doesn't make you the

child's father."

"Then it isn't necessary?"

"Of course not."

Irritated. I sought to shock her. "What if I did happen

to be the kid's father'?"

"Then it's awfully big of you to pay the filing tee," she said, not hesitating

a second.

I grunted, pocketed my checkbook, and left.

On Wednesday, I received a long white envelope from

Atlanta, not from the Office of Vital Records but from

RuthClaire and Adam. The notes inside were both in

Ruthie Cee's weird El Grecoish hand--tall, nearsighted

characters in anguished postures--but the second of the

two was reputedly dictation from Adam. Even partly disguised

in RuthClaire's etiolated script, Adam's was the More original and the More

perplexing document:

Well-loved Namer of our Son,

We are back. but are we home? My homes keep

jumping around. Paradise Farm I love for there I met

RuthClaire. For a while now it is the only one of alt

my homes that does not jump. Tiny Paul has just

.jumped into the world from my one home that stands

somewhat still. You are like a fierce seraphim that

I

ANCIENT OF DAYS

I 13

holds down the corners of my jumping Eden. Thank

you, sir, for doing that.

I must say two More things and maybe a little else.

First, thank you for bringing me books on your card

about God and thinking on Godness. Some of these I

have regotten on my Atlanta card, so much am I interested.

Second, deeply sorry for throwing one book

-----even if it was my own--across your room in my bit,

ter fit of not behaving right. It makes me laugh a little,

with angry mirth, to say or see that title, THE

PROBLEM OF PAIN.

I am also sorry for attacking that vile man Barring-ton.

I should write to him to say so, but he should

write me to say sorry a THOUSAND times himself.

He should write Miss RuthClaire, and he should write

YOU. He should quit his name from the station that

sends him forth. God and thinking on Godness' should

quiet my anger, but (too bad, too bad) they do not.

Barrington is a man who needs better etiquette and also probably religion. So

am I. But I have a long

walk to get there.

This is my last "a little else" to ask you. One day

this year Miss RuthClaire may ask you to come see

about her seeing about me. Some doctors at Emory

are plotting now a surgery to humanize me for this

time and place. Do please come when she asksl We

will reimburse--a pretty word--all losses. If you both

agree to the niceness of using one bed during my

hospital stay, I have no argument or jealousy to put

against that wish,

Sincerely,

P.S. Miss RuthClaire has written my last a "little

else" in some anger. I must learn, she says, that no

roamed partner except possibly an Eskimo has a right "to

dispose of the other's affections." I am telling her that

I knew THAT already, and that the words "if both

agree" prove I am not disposing, without consideration,

her person. Good etiquette. Moral integrity.

114

Michael Bishop

P.P.S. Tiny Paul does well. Sleeping at night very

well. Making no noise. Good baby etiquette.

P.P.P.S. I would enjoy--greatly--a 15eh pal on

spiritual matters, but you probably lack for time?

Utterly fascinated, I reread the letter and then went

through it line by line a third time. What wouldn't a

reporter give to lay hands on this extraordinary document?

I thought briefly of letting different outfits bid for it,

but once I had rejected this course as vile beyond even mx,

notorious reverence for the profit motive, i never looked

back. Adam was no longer my rival, he was my friend.

I tried to imagine what sort of surgery the specialists at

Emory were planning for Adam, but all I could think of

· were such routine operations as appendectomy, tonsillectomy,

molar extractions, and, forgive me, circumcision·

Then it occurred to me that the doctors might be contemplating More exotic

procedures, viz.. rendering Adam's

thumbs wholly opposable, surgically removing his sagittal

crest, or maybe even increasing his body height by putting

artificial bone sections in his thighs or lower legs. The first

and third options would perhaps make it easier for Adam

to function among us, but the second was a potentially dangerous sop to either

his or RuthClaire's (vicarious)

vanity--for which reason I struck it from my catalogue.

What then'? What were they going to do to Adam'?

I folded the two notes back into their envelopes, feeling

good about having decided to consider Adam my friend.

Now it was necessary to act on that decision and enforce it

by framing a reply. I found a grungy 14-cent postcard and

wrote on it the following message:

Dear RuthClaire and Adam: I will come any time you

need me. Just ask. No sweat about throwing C. S.

Lewis across the room. i was once tempted to do the

same thing myself. I'm the wrong pen pal for discussion

of God and Godness, grace and salvation, extinction

and immortality. Even good and bad etiquette in situations

with a moral angle For that reason--not lack of

time--I can't promise anything.

Kiss the kid for me.

Love, T.P.'s Godfather

w

CHRISTMAS CAME and went. In Atlanta, the circus had

begun. I wondered if my postcard had passed under prying

eyes, thereby triggering the Montarazes' ordeal with the

press. In the future, sealed letters only.

Early in February, RuthClaire wrote to say that they had

received Tiny Paul's birth certificate. She included three

dollars to cover the cost of the registration fee. I sent the

money back. But with the bills and the note was a printed

invitation to Adam's first exhibition of paintings at Abraxas.

A wine-and-cheese reception in Adam's honor would precede

the show, and I was also invited to that.' On the

printed card RuthClaire had written, "You'd better be

here, Philistine/"

The reception was on a Tuesday evening. I closed the

West Bank after our'midday meal, gave Livia George and

the others both that evening and Wednesday off, put a sign

on the door, and set off for the Big City . . . just in time to

collide with rush hour.

Dristle kept my windshield wipers klik-klikking, and it

was almost completely dark when I finally made my way

up Moreland Avenue to Little Five Points and the Montaraz

house on Hurt Street. That house, how to describe it'? its'

silhouette oozed a jolly decadence suggesting Mardi Gras

and shrimp creole and tasseled strippers and derby-hatted

funeral processionaires. A pair of lamps on black cast-iron

poles shone on either side of the cobbled walk, their

globes like spheres of shimmery, honey-colored wax. By

their light, I saw two indistinct figures come out on the

front porch, down the steps, and hand in hand through the

misffall to my car. I let them in.

RuthClaire and Adam, of course, in boots and fleece-lined

London Fog trenchcoats. From the two of them

wafted the smells of soap, cologne, lipstick, afiershave,

winter rain, and something peculiarly oniony.

Il5

116

Michael Bishop

"Don't I get to come in?" i squinted at my invitation.

"This is a wine-and-cheese reception, not a dinner."

Adam was sitting next to me, but the lady had slid into

the back seat. "David Blau," she said, leaning forward,

"asked us to show up a little early, Paul. We're letting

you drive to throw the press off. They'll be looking for our

hatchback."

"I thought they always had your place surrounded."

"Until we got Bilker Moody, they usually did. Tonight,

thoughl the majority's already at Abraxas."

I asked about my godson. He was with the sitter, Pam

Sorrells, an administrative assistant at the gallery who had

sacrificed her own attendance at the opening to free Adam

and RuthClaire for the event. An armed security guard--the

aforementioned Bilker Moody--was also in the living

room to protect La Casa Montaraz from uninvited guests.

Bilker was nearly always present. That was the way their

little family had to live nowadays.

"Look, the show's not officially over until eleven, Ruthie

Cee. My stomach'll be rumbling like Vesuvius by then."

Adam reached into the pocket of his trenchcoat and

withdrew a McDonald's cheeseburger in its Mazola Oil-colored

wrapper. It was still warm--warm and enticingly

oniony-smelling, i glanced sidelong at this object of gastronomical

kitsch.

"Dare we offer a five-star restaurateur a treat from the

Golden Arches'?" RuthClaire asked.

"Under ordinary circumstances, only at your peril. Promise

not to tell anyone, though, and tonight I'll discreetly

humble myself."

I ate the cheeseburger.. Adam produced a second one. I

ate that cheeseburger, too. For dessert, RuthClaire handed

me a (badly needed)' breath mint. Then off we drove, a

nondescript pickup truck materializing about midway along

the block behind us and tailing us all the way to the

gallery.

THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA defines "abraxas" as

"a composite word composed of Greek letters formerly

inscribed on charms, amulets, and gems in the belief

that it possessed magical qualities."

In Atlanta, the gallery called Abraxas is an influential

but underfunded alternative-arts center in a predominantly

black section of the city. The buildings making up the

complcx--a print shop, a theater, the galleries, and the

studio wing--used to belong to a school. With the exception

of the print shop and the studio wing, they were built

early in the century in a stolid red-brick architecttlral style

giving them the grim look of a prison or an oversized

Andrew Carnegie library. Coming toward Abraxas from

the cast, you swing back and forth along Ralph McGill

Boulevard between modest, clapboard and brick houses

until you attain the crest of a hill. that plunges precipitously

toward the toot of yet another hill. Abraxas, though, sprawls

along the weedy mound of the first hill, partially obscured

by the fence of a factory parking lot, and I was cheerfully

dive-bombing the Mercedes past the gallery when Adam

reached over to touch my arm and RuthClaire cried, "Stop,.

Paul, you're missing it!"

My first good look at Abraxas left me chilled and

skeptical. A one-person show at this abandoned school, I

mused, could hardly have any More cachet or impact than

a violin recital in a one-car garage in Butte, Montana.

Adam's show was clearly small potatoes. The movers and

shakers of the Atlanta art community had granted him this

venue because his work had nothing but its novelty ("Prehistoric

human relic actually puts paint to canvas!") to

recommend it. More than likely, they had given him this

show as a courteous bow to RuthClaire, almost certainly in

the hope that she would contribute to the center's funding.

117

118

Michael Bishop

This decaying three-story shell of chipped brick and

sagging drainpipes was Abraxas'?

RuthClaire seemed to be monitoring my'thoughts. "It's

better inside. You have to park around back."

The lot had already begun to fill. We had to inch along

behind earlier arrivals before finding a space beneath an

elm tree at the end of the studio wing. Quite a crowd.

"The third-floor gallery has three main rooms," RuthClaire

explained. "Adam's paintings occupy only one of

them. Some of these people have come for the Kander

photographs or the Haitian show."

We got out and crossed the lot to a plywood ramp

leading into the old school's first-floor corridor. A security

guard saluted RuthClaire and Adam and directed us up the

cold interior stairs to the third floor. To my surprise, little

inside the building contradicted my first impression of it as

a candidate for the wrecking ball. At last, a formidable

door confronted us, preventing entry to the gallery. Adam

pressed a buzzer on the crumbling wall next to the door.

"I need a password," said a muffled male voice beyond

it.

"Chief Noc-a-homa," RuthClaire replied. This was the

name--the stage name, so to speak---of the Indian who

was the official mascot of the Atlanta Braves. It was also

the necessary password. The door opened.

"Welcome to the Deep South franchise of Cloud-Cuckoo- '

Land," said a tall, disheveled man in a frazzled, lime-colored

sweater and a gray corduroy jacket with elbow

patches of such bituminous blackness that it looked as if

they would leave smudges on any surface they happened to

touch. In fact, he held his elbows close to his sides as if to

keep from leaving charcoal blots here and there about the

gallery.

This was David Blau. He was nearly my age, but he

exuded a boyish enthusiasm that seemed to be a permanent

attribute of his character. RuthClaire made the introductions,

and we went around the corner into the director's

huge; drafty "office." In the middle of the room, a set of

unfinished stairs climbed to a jutting mezzanine that may

-.t

ANCIENT OF DAYS

I 19

have been a jerrybuilt studio loft. A lumpy sofa squatted

with its back to the steps.

People milled about between the sofa and its coffee

table, between Blau's desk and a metal desk piled high

with tabloid art publications. Other people, wine glasses in

hand. were sitting on either the steps or the sofa, chatting,

laughing, clearly enjoying themselves. Blau said they had

a perfect right. Most of them had been working hard for

the past ten days to make this opening possible. A woman

in designer jeans and high heels approached us with a tray

of wine glasses and decanters of both burgundy and white.

Each of us took a stem, and even Adam drank, sipping at

the rim of his glass as suavely as any cocktail-party veteran.

'*Hey, Paul." RuthClaire whispered, "still think this is

the Siberia of Atlanta's art world'.)''

Blau overheard her. "It's the High Museum that's the

real Siberia," he said. "Every time I look at it I se a heap

of trash-compacted igloos."

"I like it," RuthClaire said. "It's a lovely building."

'!t*s cold," Blau retorted. "Cold and sterile."

"You're not responding to the architecture, David. You're

responding to the fact that its exhibition policies are different

from your own."

"Southern artists can get shown in Amsterdam or Mexico

City More easily than at the High," Blau told me.

"The High's sate. Colorful abstracts with no troubling

political or social messages. Artists harmlessly dead or

with one toot in some collector's anonymous Swiss bank

account."

"It's supposed to be safe, at least in comparison to

Abraxas. lt's Abraxas that's supposed to be dangerous."

"Is Abraxas dangerous?" I asked Btau.

The Journal-Constitution art reporter--a young man with

the clean-shaven look of a stockbroker--interrupted this

conversation to ask RuthClaire if he could interview Adam.

RuthClaire made a be-my-guest gesture and hooked arms

with Blau and me to escort us in prankish Iockstep out of

the curator's office and into the flint gallery room. I glanced

back over my shoulder to see the reporter and Adam

I

120

Michael Bishop

I

eyeing each other with polite perplexity. Adam's, howi

ever, was feigned.

"That wasn't fair," I told RuthClaire. "That guy didn't

strike me as another Barrington."

"He'll survive. Maybe he knows sign language."

"What about Adam'? Isn't it awkward for him, too?"

"He appreciates the humor of the situation. It's the

reporter who'll blink first, believe me."

Blau swept an arm at the walls of the spacious new

chamber---careful, though, to keep his elbow tight against

his side. "Is Abraxas dangerous? Hell, yes, Mr. Loyd."

I looked around. The white plaster or Sheetrock walls

rose to a height of ten feet or so. Above them, extending

another ten or twelve feet, were the cold red bricks of the

old school's outer walls. Ceiling fans with wooden blades,

motionless now, hung down from the shadows of the loft

space. Then I dropped my eyes to the banners and paint

ings

of the Haitian exhibit.

"Witch-doctor territory," Blau said, laughing. "This is

one of the best collections of primitive Caribbean art ever

put on display in the South. We did backllips to get it."

"Expensive'?"

Blau shook his hand at the wrist. "Under this adminis

tration,

military bands receive More government money

than does the entire National Endowment for the Arts."

Dazzling tropical colors and bustling marketplaces danced

in their frames on the Sheetrock. I liked what I saw. This

painting was recognizably a portrait, that a landscape, and

this a street scene. The banners interspersed among the

paintings were More puzzling. They featured beaded or

sequined designs on long strips of silk or velvet. Even so,

their cabalistic patterns seemed right at home in a. gallery

i

billing itself Abraxas.

i

"What's dangerous about these items?" I asked.

"By themselves, I guess, not much--unless vaudun, the

Haitian voodoo religion, intimidates you. The banners you

see here are what Haitian priests and witches call vevts. }.

On the island itself, they'i'e laid out on the ground in meal

or corn flour. They're ceremonial drawings that play a role I

\

ANCIENT OF DAYS

12 I

in the creation of trance states among vaudun initiates.

Ours were made by real Haitians, of course, but they're

only replicas of the verbs you might see in one of the

canopy-covered temples during a real ceremony."

"The thing that's dangerous about this exhibit," RuthClaire

said, "is that David and the others have put articles

about the Duvalier government and our treatment of the

Haitian boat people in odd places around the room. David's

originally from Brooklyn. A radical-pinko-commie

with a monthly car payment."

Blau put one arm across his midriff and bowed.

"What made you decide' to go after Haitian art'?" I

asked him.

"To tell you the truth, Adam. He's from a little island

off the Haitian coast."

"Paul knows," RuthClaire said. "That's how we got

our surname."

"Anyway," Blau continued, "it seems that Adam's

people--the habiline remnant he was raised among--had

occasional contact with members of the vattdun cult. The

cult has its roots in West Africa, among the AradaDahomey

Kingdoms, and even though Adam's ancestors come

from East Africa, they share their continent of origin and

their negritude with the voodooists. The Afi'ican-ness of

the habilines and the majority of poor Haitians unites the

two groups. It's a mystical thing, I'm afraid."

RuthClaire said, "Paul was convinced that a show in this

old building was tantamount to deep-sixing an artist's'

work in the Chattahoochee."

"Not a bit of it," said the gallery director, taking her

arm. "Let's show Mr. Loyd what really scares the More

conservative members of our board."

We turned left into a small chamber with one strange,

inward-curving wall, and I looked a question at RuthClaire.

"Eroticism." she explained. "Radical politics upsets'

fewer people than does graphic sex or nudity."

"Especially il' it has a racial or religious angle." Blau

added.

"Right. You get red faces and resignations and withdrawn

funding pledges."

122 Michael Bishop[

"Especially withdrawn funding pledges," Blau said.

"Then why bother to show it'?" I asked.

At which point I discovered that on the chamber's curved

wall, and on the two long straight walls connecting with it,

were arrayed thirty or forty large black-and-white photographs

in simple chromium frames. A piece of Plexiglas as

big as an automobile's windshield hung eight feet off the

floor in the center of the room, and inside it was the word

STEREOTYPES

in thick, emphatic red letters, with the photographer's

name--Maria-Katherine Kander--in much smaller characters

beneath it. The photographs jumped out at me like a

sudden angry slap.

"Holy Chhst," I murmured.

"They're best taken one at a time, in small doses,"

Blau told me. "But in here, I'm afraid, you'll have to

prepare for a full-scale assault. Have a gander. We'll stay

out of your way."

So he and RuthClaire drew back so that I could prowl

along the curved wall looking at Ms. Kander's outrageous

photographs. The first I stopped at, and studied, showed

an angular black woman lying naked on her back on a

sterile white sheet. Stacked between her legs, and in turgid

piles around her thighs and belly, lay at least a dozen

tiger-striped watermelons, a veritable gang-banging team

of watermelons. The expression on the womaWs face suggested

nothing short of complacent ecstasy.

I moved on.

A subsequent photograph was a frontal nude of a black

man from the shoulders down and the thighs up. This

faceless man had a daunting erection. At an upward angle

paralleling that of his hard-on, he was holding the ebony

barrel of a submachine-gun. I blinked and moved on.

Next, an anorexic white woman in high heels and leather

panties was lowering her mouth to the head of a microphone

held out to her by a disdainful rock musician with

an electric guitar draped across his body. Yet another

./

ANCIENT OF DAYS

123

photograph featured a sunken-eyed man in concentration-camp

garb, a star of David stenciled on his arm band,

gripping the bars of a bank vault. Ingots of gold bullion--like

so many loaves of gilded bread--were visible on the

shelves behind him.

An even More elaborate photograph showed a priest in a

heavy cassock speaking to a congregation of naked parishioners,

with his fingers crossed behind his back. Some of

the people in the pews were fondling each other, while a

few of the More elderly worshipers, pathetic in their wrinkles,

frowned or slept. At the altar below the priest--the

picture had been taken from behind his head--knelt a

chimpanzee in black tie and tails, a top hat on its head. I

wondered at the length of time it must have required to

stage that one.

Blau approached. "What's the verdict?"

"They're genuinely offensive. They seem to be trying to offend me."

"They are."

"They succeed."

"If you say so," Blau replied, "yes, they do."

"Succeed in offending me'?".

"In offending you and in fulfilling the artist's intention."

"That intention being to offend'.)''

RuthClaire appeared at my elbow. "You've got it."

'*Good," I said. "Until just now I was pretty sure you

guys would regard my taking offense as middle class and

unhip."

"No," Blau conceded, "they're definitely offensive."

RuthClaire nodded agreement. "Intrinsically offensive."

"OffEnsive in an absolute sense," Blau added.

We stood there in the gallery room looking at the definitely

offensive, intrinsically offensive--offensive in an

almost absolute sense--photographs of MariaKatherine

Kander. Our abashed reverence before these disgusting

artifacts began to irk me. Their "eroticism"--I hadn't

seen anything that truly qualified--seemed to consist primarily

of exposed flesh and simulated acts of fetishistic

sodomy. Despite RuthClaire's implied disclaimer, I saw

124

Michael Bishop

them as pornographic political statements. They were rac

ist,

misogynist, fascist, anticlerical, and maybe a dozen

other things too twisted or subtle to pinpoint. Antievolu

tionary?

Pro-consumerism? I had no clear idea. But their

offensiveness was beyond question.

"What's the goddamn point?"

"Paul, try not to get ridiculously worked up over this."

"You mean there are degrees of offense that it's unhip

to take'? I thought I could get as goddamn offended as I

liked." I appealed to David Blau. "All I'm asking is

what's the goddamn point of taking pictures that are meant to offend'?"

"Really," he replied, "it would be out of bounds for

me to try to speak for Ms. Kander. Worse, you'd probably

take it as some sort of definitive statement or explanation

of her intent, which wouldn't be fair to either the artist or

you.

"Criminy!" I exclaimed. 'Who is this gal, anyway'?

Her name sounds German or Austrian. is she a Nazi'?"

RuthClaire, who had an ostensibly calming hand on my

arm, said, "I don't know her ethnic background. She's

from Tennessee."

"She doesn't live in Atlanta," I hazarded. "She'd be an

idiot to show such crap here--in this neighborhood, in a

city with a black mayor--and try to live here, too."

"She's based in New York City," Blau admitted, "but

she could live in Atlanta if she wished. Atlantans are More

knowledgeable about contemporary art than you might

think."

"Unlike your average hick from Beulah Fork'?"

"Paul," RuthClaire said, "let's go see Adam's work."

She put a little gentle pressure on my arm. "Before the

crowd:comes in."

"Wait a minute. I want to know David's interpretation

of Ms. Kander's intent."

"But that would be to preempt--"

"RuthClaire. for God's sake, let me talk to the man." I

rounded on Blau. "Look, I've got a mind of my own. You

won't unduly influence my own final stance. I'm trying to

ANCIENT OF DAYS

125

understand--to appreciate--these photographs. Isn't that

what a show is for, to prompt greater understanding and

appreciation of an artist's work'?"

Blau surrendered to my tirade. "Okay, you're passionate

about this. That's good. You deserve an answer."

I waited.

"I think Kander's attempts to offend are motivated by a

desire to heighten our outrage at the stereotypes she presents.

It's satire, Mr. Loyd, not a call to embrace what you

see as, God forbid, accurate depictions of the people

involved. Her technique forces you to reassess your basic

attitude about each image. The art's not only in her skills

as a photographer, but in the outrageous scenes she stages

for the camera. I get off on that. The young lady's droll."

"That's one word for it," I said. "But is that how

everybody who walks in here's going to interpret her

work?"

"Oh, no. Some'Il take one I°°k, turn around, and walk

out. Others won't see anything but naked flesh. For them it's pornography, and

they'll either enjoy it or scorn it as

such."

I waved at the walls. "Is thi stuff for sale'?"

"Prints are. That's how Ms. Kander makes her living.

By today's standards, they're dirt cheap---but Kander's

popular and sells in volume."

"Who's she popular with'? Voyeurs'? The artsyfartsy

crowd'?"

"Both, I guess. There's no form to fill out to buy one'.

So far as I know, you don't even have to be twenty-one."

'Where would you hang these things'? The bathroom'?"

"That's up to you. Are you thinking of ordering one?"

"Hell, no!" I virtually shouted.

Adam arrived in the company of a staff member named

Bonnie Carlin, but I was still hot about the rub-your-nose.

in-your-own-smug-prejudices strategy of Kander's "art."

Everything Blau had said about it made a kind of backass-wards

sense, but I kept telling myself that for all her

cleverness and technical skill she was really accomplishing

the Unnecessary, often for the Uncomprehending, and al

126

Michael Bishop

most always with a (pardon me) Drollery that bespoke a

superior smugness all her own.

Phooey, as Lester Maddox used to like to say.

Bonnie Carlin delivered a message--it was time to let

the clamoring crowd in--and departed. We, too, abandoned

the M.-K. Kander Room, crossing the corridor into

the third and final gallery room, where Adam's paintings

were the main attractions.

This room was like the first, but not so large. A single

darkened studio loft brooded above us. Below it, all four

wall; seemed to resonate with the vitality and prehistoric

wildness that Adam--who had even begun to wear deodorant--would

no longer permit himself to reveal in his day-to-day

relationships with others.

I saw the huge barbed baobab that he had painted at

Paradise Farm. I saw rolling silver-brown mounds that

could have been either the Lolitabu foothills or a herd of

headless mammoths on a dusty African plain. I saw grass

fires, volcanic eruptions, jags of icy lightning, and a crowd

of silhouetted human (or semihuman) forms either fighting

or feasting or copulating. I also saw a series of ambiguous

mother-and-child portraits that could have been of RuthClaire

and Tiny Paul, or of a baboon female and her capering

infant, or even of a genderless adult attacking a much

smaller figure of the same unidentifiable, but monkeylike,

species. There was also a painting of a hominid creature

with the head of a dog or a jackal or a hyena, and around

its head there glowed a brilliant orange-red light. The exhibit

as a whole communicated energy and excitement. By my standards, very good

stuff.

Demurely, Adam hung back, his hands behind him. His

eyes shifted from side to side, as if fearful that I might

ridicule this painting or maybe even take umbrage at something

and walk out. At Paradise Farm, he had had no such

qualms. Here, though, as the only artist actually on the

premises, he appeared to be suffering a terrific bout of the

butterflies.

"They're good," I told him. "I like 'em all."

The artist gave me a smile. His lips drew back to reveal

teeth and gums. Then, flustered, he pursed them shut again.

./

BY THE terms of his contract with Abraxas, Adam had to

stick around long enough to meet some of the general

public at the opening. Members of the board of directors

who had not been able to attend the reception would want

to greet him, as would some of the wealthier patrons who

always arrived late. Moreover, Blau encouraged his artists

to talk to students, impulse visitors, reporters from the

Atlanta papers, and other media people. Temperamental

aloofness could hurt fund-raising efforts.

The reception officially ended, and the crowd swarmed

in. Adam and RuthCtaire withdrew to Gallery Number

Three to receive congratulations and autograph Abraxas

flyers. As for me, I retreated to Blau's office and poured

myself the last half-glass of Asti Spumante from the only

decanter not already empty. When I had finished this, I

wandered into Gallery NumberOne.

The Haitian art was scoring heavily with tonight's visitors.

I had to reposition my shoulders every few steps to

slide through the pockets of people discussing it. Gallery

Number Two, featuring Kander's work, was also Packed.

Still flushed with admiration or embarrassment, two women

squeezed out of that chamber into the hall.

"It's a wonder the place hasn't been raided," one of

them said.

"Goodness, Doreen, the woman's making a statement." I followed Doreen and her

scandalized friend into Gallery

Number Three. The Montarazes, huddled together for

mutual protection, stood at the front of a ladderlike contraption

giving access to the loft overhead. The sight of

one of the hangers-on surrounding them brought me up

short.

There before me--in checked shirt, green knit tie, dun

pants, and fake suede jacket--slouched Brian Nollinger,

127

128

Michael Bishop

the anthropologist from Emory, the Judas who had tried to

turn Adam over to an agent of the Immigration and Naturalization

Service. He had shaved his Fu Manchu, but his

granny glasses and his air of unflappable belonging--"Why

would these people be unhappy to see me here?' '--identified

him to me More certainly than a fingerprint check. And it

was no comfort remembering that but for my own jealous

meddling Nollinger might not have come into any of our

lives, in a sense, I had created him. As an ongoing

annoyance, if not as a human being.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

Nollinger turned. "Hello, Mr. Loyd. I came to see the

show."

"How long does it take you to see it'?"

"Well--"

"You don't know a damn thing about art. You're the

kind of gallery-goer who thinks Winslow Homer was a

blind Greek poet."

"Look, if it's okay with you, I came to apologize."

"For calling me an enemy of science'?" RuthClaire

asked. "For accusing me of keeping my own private

slave?"

For a moment, Notlinger looked genuinely embarrassed.

"Yes, ma'am, I regret that. I was feuding with Alistair

Patrick Blair."

I shooed the other hangers-on away. "A scholarly feud

excuses you of slinging mud at an innocent woman?"

"I had no idea she was going to marry Adam, Mr.

Loyd. At least I believed the creature--the person--under

her roof was a living representative of Homo habilis. That

was More than Blair was willing to concede. Give me that

much credit."

"Are you still shooting monkeys up with No D6z?"

That was a rabbit punch. The whites of Nollinger's

weary eyes swung toward me. "I concluded those researches

long ago. i've been trying to get a grant for some

field work outside the States. But this isn't an easy time to

find funding."

"So you showed up here to put the pinch on RuthClaire

and Adam, I take it."

ANCIENT OF DAYS

129

He shook his head, less in denial than in pity for the

depth of my pettiness and suspicion. But one amazing

consequence of this exchange was that RuthClaire had

actually begun to turn a sympathetic eye on the man. She

lacked the constitution for a sustained grudge. A character

trait from which I, too, bad benefited.

Nollinger gestured at the painting nearest us. "I'll tell

you the truth. Another of my reasons for coming was

professional. You see, I've always taken an interest in

documented cases of the creative impulse in collateral

species."

The poor fool was digging his own pitfall. I decided to

lend him a hand. "What kind of cases, Dr. Nollinger?"

"Well, some years back, a chimpanzee in the London

Zoo learned to draw and paint. He became downright

proficient at putting circles and crosslike designs on canvas."

"A chimpanzee'?" RuthClaire said.

"That's right. I believe his name was Congo. They gave

him his own show. He .even sold some paintings. The

literature calls it the first documented exhibit of subhuman

art in history."

RuthClaire's eyes had narrowed. "Are you trying to tell

us that this is the second'?"

Nollinger was not an utter idiot. His face turned red.

"N-no, of c-course not. It's just that.., well, ww-we're

all primates, you know. The impulse for self-expression

may be b-basic to every primate species."

Abruptly, Adam turned and climbed the wrought-iron

ladder into the gallery loft. Once there, he squatted in the.

shadows like a lissome Quasimodo.

"Go away, please," RuthClaire said.

"Wait a minute," Nollinger pleaded. "This is a public

exhibit. You can't run me oft'."

"Have you seen the photographic exhibit?" I asked

him. Mindful of the time I had hit him, he took a step

backward. "You'll like 'em. Each and even one of them is

an insult to people of taste and intelligence."

i

"I'm trying to talk to the Montarazes."

"You're going into the Kander exhibit." l'turned

130

Michael Bishop

Nollinger around and headed him toward Gallery Number

Two. He tried to yank away, but I applied a bouncer hold

and marched him out.

Fear of creating a scene prevented Nollinger from resisting

me further. I took advantage of that scruple--at least

he had one--to deposit him in front of a photograph of an

American Plains Indian with an empty fifth of Wild Turkey

in one hand and the blonde scalp of a white girt-woman

in the other. This comatose nymphet wore only a

black-lace teddy and lay prostrate at the big chief*s feet.

"Here you go," I said. "Another fascinating instance

of the primate creative impulse."

This photograph, and the others around it, mesmerized

Brian Nollinger, and I left him there in the crowded gallery

room.

DAVID BLAU helped us escape Abraxas without running

a gauntlet of reporters. We used an auxiliary stairwell to

get away, emerging in the parking tot to find that it had

stopped raining. Water glistened on the asphalt, and the

trees dripped diamonds. In one patch of sky, a few fretful

stars were trying to blink aside the cloud cover.

We drove to Patrick's, a restaurant in Little Five Points,

and asked for a table away from the long storefront windows

facing Moreland Avenue. Here we ordered More

white wine, with a fresh spinach salad and a breast-of-chicken

entrde. Because Nollinger had rained on Adam's

parade, we had a hard time sustaining conversation.

"Consider the source and forget it," I told Adam.

"Your opening was packed. How often does that happen?"

"Rarely," RuthClaire said. "Not often at all."

"There, you see? It's a triumph, Adam. Forget about

Nollinger's fatuous faux pas."

Adam wiped his fingers on a linen napkin. Leaning back

ANCIENT OF DAYS

131

in his chair, he signed gracefully in the candle-lit dining

room. Adam (according to RuthClaire's translation) did

not regard the turnout at Abraxas as a personal triumph. At

least half the people there had taken advantage of the

respectability implicit in a gallery opening to ogle Kander's

photographs. The most knowledgeable and devoted gallery

patrons, Adam went on, had come for the Haitian exhibit.

Indeed, those who had come to see his paintings (people

like Nollinger, for instance) were motivated less by any

faith in the potential importance of Adam's work than by.

simple curiosity. What sort of Rorschach blotches would a

living hominid anachronism put to canvas'?

Half Adam's meal remained untouched. RuthClaire

reached out and gripped him fondly on one side of his neck,

massaging the taut sinews with a gentle hand. He closed

his eyes, enduring this display of affection as if unworthy

of it. Once upon a time, i knew, I would have killed to

experience such tenderness at RuthClaire's hands. Once upon a time?

From my ,jacket I removed the letters that the Mon'

tarazes had sent me in December. I shook out Adam's and

tilted it in the candle glow so that I could read it.

"'One day this year Miss RuthClaire may ask you to

come see about her seeing about me. Some doctors at

Emory are plotting now a surgery to humanize me for this

time and place. Do please come when she asks.'" Gallantly,

I did not read the parts offering to reimburse me for

my time and authorizing his wife and me to use the same

bed if we both agreed to the "niceness" of that arrangement.

"Any comments?"

"What do you want to know'?" RuthClaire finally asked.

"What kind of surgery'? When's it supposed to happen'?

When will you need me? Why so secretive'?"

.

'*You'll come'?"

"I've already said so."

RuthClaire looked at Adam. He nodded a curt okay.

"This summer," she said. "It's plastic surgery of an

exacting kind. The point is to enable Adam to speak. It

involves reshaping the entire buccal cavity--without de

132

Michael Bishop

forming his facial features." She gave her husband a

smile. "Hey, fella, I love that face." To me, she said,

"There's work to be done on his vocal cords and larynx,

too. Don't ask me to explain it all. It's already required

several X-ray sessions, a couple of plaster castings, and

more psycho-medical consultations than you'd expect a

candidate for a sex change to sit through."

"Adam's going to be able to--" I turned one hand into

a gibbering puppet. "--talk?"

"That's the basic idea."

I sat back in my chair. This particular basic idea had

never occurred to me. Adam an orator'? Picturing him

talking--like Brad Barrington or Dwight "Happy" Me-Elroy--gave me an uneasy feeling. What impact would the

ability have on him? On others'? Would my acceptance of

him--my commitment to him as a friend--gradually di

minish

as he asserted his own personality and opinions

through the medium of direct speech? Did my regard ('or

Adam have its source in heretofore disguised feelings of

superiority'?

"What's the matter, Paul?"

"'How much is this going to cost'?"

"Lots."

"That's what i figured."

"For something this crucial, we've got it to spend."

She eyed me shrewdly. "You don't approve'?"

"Sure," I said. "It sounds great. Adam and I'll be able

to commiserate about the weather.'

What was the matter with me? I bad accepted so much

else about Adam--his marriage to RuthClaire, his biologi

cal

compatability with my former wife, his developing

literacy, and even the half-pathetic sincerity of his spiritual

i

yearnings. Why couldn't I accept his desire to talk'? To put

'

my seemingly selfish reluctance in the best possible light,

I

maybe I had a faint intimation of all the trouble looming

i

ahead for us.

RuthClaire paid the bill, but I insisted on leaving the tip.

WE RETURNED in my car to the sprawling Montaraz

bordello-cum-boarding house on Hurt Street. It was too

late to play with Tiny Paul, but when we looked in on him

sleeping in his bassinet. I was startled to see his dreaming

features betray a hint of the feral self-sufficiency that only

a moment ago, leaving Patrick's. I had seen in his father's

face. All babies have something endearingly simian or

pongid about them. but there in the sheen of his night light

my godson's resemblance to a "collateral primate"--yes,

a baby gorilla!--brought the forests of the Virunga Mountains

of Uganda right into a bedroom near lnman Park.

Life is strange. I thought, and I kissed the kid so that we

could withdraw and leave him to his sleep.

RuthClaire pointed me to a second-story guestroom

wallpapered with a repeating pattern of pale green bamboo

shoots, and Adam nodded me a.friendly goodnight on his

way downstairs to drive Pan Sorrells home. Alone, sitting

on my bed, a paperback novel in my hands, I thought of

Adam's naive invitation to share a bed with his wile while

he was in the hospital--if, of course, we both agreed to

the "niceness" of the sharing.

How could I tell RuthClaire's new husband that tonight

I wanted her beside me not to ravish but to cherish, not to

penetrate but to pet'? These days, away from the West

Bank, it was loneliness rather than sexual desire that ate at

me, and that, of course, was why I kept myself so busy.

At last I put the paperback down. heel-and-toed my shoes

off. turned out the light, and stretched out to await the

onset of sleep. It delayed and delayed, but eventually, two

or maybe even three hours later, came.

i spent Wednesday with the Montarazes, most of which

we devoted to a tour of the High Museum on Peachtree

Street, and on Thursday returned to Beulah Fork.

133

134

Michael Bishop

Business continued to boom. People came in and went

out, and so did money. I yelled at Livia George, she

glared in insulted contempt at me, the dristles of winter

gave way to the hurricanes of spring, soldiers of twenty or

more nations died in almost all the senseless ways it is

possible to die, dining-room help arrived and departed,

and the president of the United States asked Congress to

okay funds for a defense force of mutant giant pandas with

which to protect the Aleutian Islands from Soviet invasion.

Something like that. I was too busy to pay More than

passing heed to weather, war, and politics.

AT LAST the summons came. I got to Atlanta on the day

after Adam had undergone the nearly six-hour surgical

procedure designed to give him the ability to speak. I

would have been there for the operation itself but RuthClaire

deliberately delayed asking me to come until the following

morning, when it was already clear that her husband was

out of danger. Whether all the tinkering would have the

desired effect remained a question of prime concern, but

not whether Adam would live or die. All this, defying the

possibility of a tap, RuthClaire had told me in a telephone

call--but when I reached Emory Hospital, I was still angry

about not having been given the chance to sit with her

during the actual surgery.

RuthClaire met me in a corridor below the pagodalike

parking tower where I had left my car. She was wearing a

white cotton blouse with scrollish cutouts in the collar, a

seersucker skirt, and a pair of Italian sandals. She had a

baby-carrier on her back, but it was empty because Tiny

Paul, not yet nine months old, was standing at her knee

gripping one of her fingers with a tentative hand.

I could not believe it. T.P., whom I had last seen

zonked in his bassinet, was walking. He wore navy-blue

/

ANCIENT OF DAYS'

135

shorts, a powder-blue shirt, and a pair of minuscule tennis

shoes with racing chevrons. There was nothing even remotely

gorillaish about his appearance today. No baby fat,

no leathery sheen on his forehead. As I approached him

and his mother along the corridor, he eyed me with the

solemnity of a pint-sized state legislator.

"Don't start in," RuthClaire said, raising her free hand

in warning. "Everything's fine."

I knelt in front of the kid to give him a gentle poke in

the breadbasket. His gums pulled away from his teeth in a

· . . well, a smarl, which is to say a smile and a snarl so

perfectly meshed that they are identical.

"He's really grown. How long's he been walking?"

"Since April, Paul. He's a dynamo. All the activity's

slimmed him down.'*

"Walking at five months? Does he talk, too'.>''

That one earned me a reproving glance. "His' father's

just had an operation to permit him to speak, and here you

are asking me if our son's-talking yet. Do you want to

make me cry?"

"RuthClaire--"

"Some children don't begin talking until they're two or More . It's nothing to

be worrying about."

"Listen, i'm sorry. I didn't mean to---"

"Come on,'* she said angrily. "Let's go see Adam."

We averted an argument by walking to the elevators at

the far end of the echoing corridor. T.P. kept up with us

with an effortless trot, like an Ethiopian conscript of the

1940s jogging to the front.

Upstairs, the nurses at the nurses' station got our names

and let us proceed down the hall to Adam's room. It was a

long walk. I used it to begin berating my ex-wife for not

calling me sooner, but she cut me off with a recitation of

all the people who had already been by to see her and lend

moral support.

"You don't need me anymore, do you?"

"Give that man a cigar. He's finally figured out the full

implications of our divorce."

'*Why call me at all, then'?"

136

Michael Bishop

"Because Adam thinks you should be here. He's trying

to be the alpha-male of our household, appointing a lieutenant

until he's well enough to return."

Like an invisible tide of warm honey, a mellifluous

laugh came rolling out of Adam's room.

"What the hell was that?" I asked RuthClaire. "Not

Adam?"

"We've got a visitor. He stopped by yesterday, too.

l'd've run him off if Adam hadn't begged me before the

operation to let the clown come calling." RuthClaire set

Tiny Paul down, and the kid trotted into his father's room.

"Come see."

We entered the room after the precocious toddler, who

was already in the male visitor's arms. Adam lay on the

bed beside them, his mummy-wrapped face tilted toward

the door. An IV bottle on a pole dripped glucose into his

bloodstream.

"Paul Loyd," RuthClaire said, "meet the Right Reverend

Dwight McElroy."

Most television evangelists, I had long ago decided,

looked like affluent mobile-home salesmen. An eye tic or

a single unruly forelock of pomaded hair was the sole

outward manifestation of the emotional kink that kept their

motors going. But McElroy, whom I had watched for only

a few fascinated weeks on his syndicated "Great Gospel

Giveaway," did not fit this mold. Prematurely gray (or

post-pubescently silver), he had the aristocratic mien of a

European count. At the same time. though, I had no

trouble dressing him out in basketball togs and putting him

at the power-forward position for a team like the Celtics.

He was too old for that, of course, but he appeared to be in

great shape--lean, muscular, alert, and, in spite of his

lank (rather than blown-dry) silver hair. facially collegiate.

Carrying T.P., the leader of the rigorously Protestant

but otherwise scrupulously nondenominational Greater Christian

Constituency of America, Inc., strcw3e toward me with

his hand out. When he smiled, the count gave way to the

down-home suggestion of a farm kid come to the big city i

in a borrowed suit, i

ANCIENT Or DAyS

137

"Just call me Happy, Paul. None of this Right Reverend

business, now. Sometimes it flat wears me out."

"Me, too." RuthClaire said.

Warily, I shook the proffered hand. "I'm not a fan of

yours. Happy. Forgive me for saying so."

"Well, I'm not a fisher of fans, Paul. I'm a fisher of

souls."

"Any bites?"

"Why, they're always biting, Paul. They're just waiting

to be fed." (I knew the feeling.) "That's why I try to keep

my lines in the water."

"And your hooks out'?"

He knew he was being baited (as the Elizabethans baited

bears, not as a southern angler readied a worm for skewering),

but he neither laughed foolishly nor surrendered outright

to my barb. He gave me an understanding smile and

bounced T.P. lightly against his flank with one artn. "And

my hooks out," he acknowledged. "The kind that don't

tear, that lilt one up into the sun." He smiled again, as if

to illustrate his meaning with a show of teeth.

I turned to RuthClaire. What was this joker doing here?

A little More than a year ago, he had condemned her from

the pulpit as a twentieth-century sodomite. He had spoken

with great force on two matters about which he undoubtedly

remained acutely ignorant, evolutionary theory and

the exact nature of RuthClaire and Adam's relationship. I

wondered if the man had any shame at all. Summarizing

my objections to his presence, I asked him if he did.

"I don't feel out of place here, Paul. Why? Well, it's

simply not possible for me to hate the sinner as much as I

do the sin. in fact, I don't hate the sinner at all. I love him."

Adam, I noticed, was watching us. His eyes were pleading

with RuthClaire to forgive their visitor--this rich,

nationally famous tool for Christ--the particular foolishness

that had wounded her so deeply a year ago.

T.P. had begun to squirm. McEIroy set him down. Then

he said, "They say your husband's a habiline, Mrs.

Montaraz. What exactly is that. for mercy's sake'? From

138

Michael Bishop

three states away, ma'am, I supposed everybody was mak

ing

a fuss over some naked monkey out of some hard-to

get-to

foreign jungle. 'A surviving representative of a

prehuman species,' that one fella said. Welt, I didn't

believe that then, and I don't believe it now."

He gestured at Adam, prostrate under a stiff hospital

sheet. "That's not a habiline. That's not a ape. That's a

man..The proof is you married him, ma'am. The further

proof of it's this gift of God hanging on your skirt. And people, Mrs.

Montaraz, I. can't he'p but love. I love

Adam. I love you. I love your little boy. If I seemed to

dump hellfire on y'all last year, that was because I hadn't

yet come to know you and Adam for the fine people you

are.

"It's likewise because I was supposing--along with

millions of other folks the wide country 'round---exactly

what the liberal press and all them high-profile network

TV folks wanted us to suppose, namely, that Adam was a

ape. A naked ape. Because that made a good story. Well,

he's not a ape. He's a man. And the only sin either of you

was guilty of is that of an appearance of impropriety in the

eyes of the press and so in the eyes of some of us who, let

me admit, should've known better'n to believe what we

saw in our papers and heard broadcast at. us over our TVs.

So I'm asking you to forgive me tot preaching you and

your husband up as an instance of this troubled country's

moral decay. Even O1' Happy's human, ma'am."

"I didn't know that," I said. "How would you feel if

instead of forgiving you, they sued?"

McElroy flicked me an annoyed look, but recovered and

again importuned RuthClaire: 'I'm quite serious about the

fullness of my sorrow over this. On the next 'Gospel

Giveaway' I do in Rehoboth, well, I'll make you a retract,

a completely sincere and thorough re-tract. It would

be my real pleasure." He paused to assess the effect of

this offer on RuthClaire. "Of course, it's my dut3., to do it,

too," he quickly added. "But it would be my pleasure as

well. i mean that."

Wearily, RuthClaire removed the empty baby-carrier

i

ANCIENT OF DAYS

139

from her back and slid it gently across the floor to the foot

of Adam's bed. Then she crossed the room and sat down

in the folding chair that McElroy had been using. T.P.

trotted after her. She collared him and absentmindedly

began knuckling his miniature Afro.

The evangelist spread his hands. "Well? Can you forgive me'?"

"It would be my pleasure, Mr. McElroy, if you'd just

leave Adam and me out of your broadcast."

"Nothing else?"

"That'd be plenty. Oh, you could find Paul a chair.

And one for yourself if you're going to stick around any

longer."

McElroy smiled, did a heel click, and departed to look

for two More folding chairs, i shuffled to the end of the

bed, grabbed my friend's toes through the sheet, and

wobbled them affectionately back and forth. He, in turn,

smiled at me with his eyes.

Considering the simplicity of his task, McElroy was

gone an awfully long time. RuthClaire took advantage of

his absence to fill me in. The man had come to Atlanta,

and specifically to the Emory campus, at the invitation of

the Institute for World Evangelism at Candler Theological

Seminary. He had been in the city three days, speaking to

seminary students and faculty at a variety of venues, including

the William R. Cannon Chapel, one of the auditoria

in White Hall, and the sanctuary of the Glenn Memorial

United Methodist Church across North Decatur Road from

Emory Village. Adam had purposely scheduled his surgery

to coincide with McElroy's visit. Indeed, he had written

the evangelist a letter explaining the operation's purpose,

asking him to look in on RuthClaire during the delicate

procedure, and requesting, too, a personal visit from the

'busy Right Reverend once the hospital staff had transferred

him to a recovery room.

Adam had improved his chances for a favorable response

by including with the letter a $250 contribution to

McElroy's television ministry. He had also worked to

pique the man's curiosity (an instance, considering the

140

Michael Bishop

national appetite for news of the couple and their child, of

almost touching overkill) by outlining for him his largely

unguided religious researches over the past' ten months.

Now, though, he wanted an authoritative pronouncement

about his spiritual state. Did he, or did he not, possess a

"SOUl"?

McEtroy had replied that of course he did. On the other

hand, he ought to give over the Biblically unsound, and

altogether soul-destroying, notion that he belonged to a

prehuman species out of which yet another prehuman species

had arisen, and so on. A belief like that, denying the

straightforward creation account in Genesis, would put the

soul in mortal jeopardy. Adam was obviously sincere in

his questing, but sadly misled about which direction to go

'by today's God-lost scientists and technocrats. McElroy

would feel privileged to counsel with Adam, even to pray

with him, while he was at Emory Hospital.

"He wrote McEIroy?" I asked incredulously. "Sent

him money'?"

"Oh, yes, most definitely. Adam's keeping his options

open. He's written letters to the Pope, the Dalai Lama, the

Jehovah's Witnesses. the chief elder of the Mormons, two

or three ayatollahs in Iran, and a couple of the voodoo

artist-priests who exhibited work at Abraxas back in February.

If it meditates, sacrifices, or prays, Adam's written

to it. Most of his correspondents reply. We have a scrapbook.

We're probably going to need another one."

Adam worked his hands free of the sheet and tried to

sign. By appearing to concentrate his will, he soon made

these gestures distinct enough for RuthClaire to interpret.

She must give over her hostility to McElroy, he advised

her, for the man was there on his own valuable time to

affirm Adam's humanity.

With a folding chair and a chair with a cushion, McElroy

returned to the room. On the cushion rested a shiny bedpan

in which two or three inches of water shimmered under the

room's fluorescents. He was able to set down this chair

without sloshing any of the water out of the pan. The

metal chair he gave to me to unfold for myself. Then he

/

ANCIENT OF DAYS

141

placed the bedparv--with a hokey flourish---on the food

tray that swung out from Adam's bed.

"This is distilled water," he said. "I got it at the

nurses' station, and it's physically pure, free of germs and

pollutants."

"Can the same be said of the bedpan?" RuthClaire asked.

"Oh, yes, ma'am. It's been in an autoclave."

"Well, Adam's already had a sponge bath, Reverend

McElroy. I gave him one this morning. There's no need to

repeat it now."

"Has he been baptized'?"

"What'?"

"Has he received the sacrament of ultimate cleanliness?

Has he been washed in the Blood of the Lamb?"

"From a bedpan'?" I wondered aloud.

McEIroy laughed. "The Lord and I make do with what's

available. In going without baptism, I tear, Adam's begun

to doubt his possession of the soul that, even now, he's in

danger of leaving in perpetuity to the Prince of Darkness. i

can't allow that, sir."

Her hands on T.P.'s shoulders, RuthClaire stared at

McEIroy as if he had proposed dousing Adam with lighter

fluid. "This is in the worst possible taste," she final.ly

managed.

"You may be right, Mrs. Montaraz. This may be in bad

taste. Damnation has the weight of public favor on its side

nowadays--it's the in thing to shoot for--but it's my

deepest feeling that your husband isn't one to go along

with the crowd simply because it's a crowd. Whyn't you

ask him what he wants'?"

Realizing, I think, that McElroy had played an unanswerable

trump, RuthClaire pulled Tiny Paul onto her lap

and numbly, disbelievingly, shook her head.

"I'll ask him, then." Looking down on Adam, McEIroy

said, "Do you wish to receive the holy benison of baptism?"

With one hand, Adam made the gesture signifying Yes.

RuthClaire shook her head again, not believing that her

husband would consent to what she regarded as a parody

of the baptismal rite--but loving him too much to forbid

him to continue.

142

Michael Bishop

The evangelist closed his eyes. He asked God to purify

further the water in the bedpan, then immersed his hands,

lifted them dripping from the pan, and ca/'ried them to

Adam's head. Dramatically, he brought them down to

gether

on the faint sagittal crest dividing the habiline's

skull into hemispheres.

"Be careful," RuthClaire warned him. "Adam's jaw is

a jigsaw puzzle of fitted pieces. If you hurt him or slow his

healing, I'll . . ." She didn't know what she would do,

but the warning seemed to get through McElroy's devout

trance to his understanding.

Crooking his elbows, easing the pressure on Adam's

head, he intoned, "Adam Montaraz, husband and father,

by the authority invested in me as an ordained minister of

* the gospel, I hereby baptize you in the name of the Father,

the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen."

"Amen," I echoed him. It slipped out, this word. impelled,

I think, by an unconscious memory of my slipshod

Congregationalist upbringing in Tocqueville. RuthClaire,

theoretically a believer, gave me a dirty look.

McElroy wiped his hands and turned to her. "I want

you to know, Mrs. Montaraz, that I've also lifted a prayer

for Adam's speedy recovery."

"Thank you."

"What about that handsome boy there?"

"What about him'?"

"Has he been baptized'?"

RuthClaire folded her arms around T.P. "You've performed

your ceremony for the day. It's time for you to

leave."

"Delay could be a mortal mistake, ma'am. It could

cause--"

"I don't think he's in any terrible danger: Baptists wait

until they're twelve or thirteen, don't they'?"

"You're not Baptists, ma'am. Neither am I. We at the

Greater Christian Constituency embrace the denomination,

of course, but my own doctrinal origins are Methodist.

We're brother and sister, Mrs. Montaraz."

Adam was signing, feebly but urgently.

ANCIENT OF DAYS

143

"No,' RuthClaire answered him. "Absolutely not. If

it's done, it'll be done in a church, with a congregation

present and a minister in his robes. And this pushy gentleman

back in Louisiana counting his take:"

When Adam persisted, she grew More vehement: "You're

overstepping what you have a right to ask! You're not the

only one in this room responsible for your son's spiritual

dispensation!"

McElroy said, "There's a Biblical injunction commanding

wives to be--"

"Get the holy hell out of here!" RuthClaire yelled at

him. T.P. burrowed into her armpit, and Adam's eyes

fluttered shut. Like me, the habiline had probably never

heard her utter an epithet stronger than "Heck!" or "Draft"

McElroy appeared ready to keep the argument going,

but a portly man and a youth in his late teens or early

twenties stopped at Adam's doorway, distracting the evangelist.

The younger of the two men reproduced McElroy's

lank physique almost exactly.

"C'mon, Daddy," he said. "Dr. Siebert's here to es-colt

you to your next lecture over in White."

"Gotta go," McElroy told us cheerily. "Adam, stay in

touch, you hear? It's been a jo5t, sanctifying you in Christ's

sweet name. The boy next time, mebbe."

"Take the stupid bedpan with you," RuthClaire said.

McElroy flashed her a look of disbelief and anger.

Before it could turn into something stronger, though, he

spoke to his son: "Come get the font, Duncan. I'm finished

with it for today."

Duncan McElroy obeyed his father, retrieving the bedpan

from the cantilevered tray and carrying it out of the

room like a wise man bearing a thurible of perfumed

incense. The evangelist gave us all a perfunctory salute,

then followed Duncan and Dr. Siebert out of the room--off

toward the elevator and another elevating session with

some of Candler's theology students.

RuthClaire, wrung out, began very quietly to cry.

OVER THE next week, RuthClaire and I visited Adam

every day, spelling each other when the other needed a

break. Livia George was managing the restaurant in my

absence and having no trouble at all, thank you. i drove

down twice to check up on her, but her efficient handling i

of matters made me feel about as useful there as a training

wheel on a tank.

Adam was improving rapidly, but his doctors would not

· yet permit the removal of his plastic chin support and the

bandages holding it in place. So he was still taking nourishment

intravenously and talking with us with sign language.

Also, he had a lap-sized electric typewriter that he

had taught himself to use by the hunt-and-peck method.

McElroy had returned to Louisiana the day after Adam's

baptism, but one unsettling consequence of the Bedpan

Ceremony was the habiline's frequent recourse to prayer.

The Lord's Prayer. The prayer of St. Francis of Assisi

beginning, "Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace."

Any number of Old Testament psalms. "Now I Lay Me

Down to Sleep." The Pilot's Prayer. The Newspaper Col-mnnist's

Prayer. A few obscure Eastern supplications, including

Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and of course Sufic

formulae. And a small anthology of weird but occasionally

moving prayers--petitionary prayers--that Adam had written

himself.

indeed, although Adam had accepted baptism in Christ

Jesus's name, the prayer ritual in his hospital room had a

decidedly ecumenical cast. Here is one of his prayers,

typed out on the little machine he used to engage in

animated dialogues with us:

Creator, awake or asleep, watchful or drowsing,

Timeless or time-bound,

144

ANCIENT OF DAYS

145

Awake fully to my so-silent cry.

Remember the long-ago dead who loved animals

and clouds,

Redeem them in your pity-taking Thought.

And those who stumbled on the edge of Spirit,

Who prowled as do hyenas, just beyond the Light,

Think them, too, into the center of the Fire,

Consume them like sweet carrion in the loving warmth

Of your Gut and Mind.

If I am all Animal, Creator,

Give my growls, my whimpers, and my barks

The sound of angels hymning praise.

Let me not sing only for Myself

But also for the billion billion unbaptized Dead

With talons, teeth, and tails to herd them

Into unmarked graves of no importance.

O Gut and Mind above and all about,

Hear my so-silent plea on their behalf

And lift them as you have lifted Men. Amen.

Alter the baptism, every visit to Adam's room concluded

with a prayer. Once, bath annoyed and impatient, I

asked him what he believed be was accomplishing with

such ritual.

On his lap machine, he typed: THERE IS NOTRUE RELIGION

WITHOUT PRAYER.

That led me to question aloud the value of religion, trUe or otherwise, and

Adam struggled to answer that one, too.

Finally, he typed a single compound word: SELF-OEHNmON.

He seemed to find it amusing that the value of a systematic

belief in a Higher Power had its ultimate ground in

one's own ego. Was that a contradiction? No, not really.

A paradox'? Probably. But, of course, if Adam felt a

greater sense of urgency about his relationship with God

than did most twentieth-century human beings, the ambiguity

of his status vis-i-vis both God and his two-legged

fellows fueled that feeling.

"You know," I told him alter reading his "Gut and

27"1

146

Michael Bishop

Mind" prayer, "you're assuming there's a rigid line separating

the ensouled from the soulless, real human beings

from humanoid animals."

Go on, he signaled.

"You've made it an either/or proposition. But what if

there's a gray area where the transition's taking place'?" LIKE THE DUSK

SEPARATING DAY FROM NIGHT'.) "Exactly."

I read his next haltingly composed response over his

shoulder: I UNDERSTAND. MISTER PAUL, THE BASIS OF HOW YOU ARGUE HERE. THE

WORRY ABOUT WHAT AN EARLY HOMINID

IS, BEAST OR PERSON. BUT MANY THINGS, I THINK, IT TAKES TO

MAKEA CREATURE HUMAN, AND IF A CREATURE IS MISSING

ONLY ONE OR TWO, I DO NOT BELIEVE IT IS RIGHT TO SAY, AH

HA, YOU DO NOT BELONG TO HUMAN SPECIES.

"Okay, Adam, if you believe that human beings have

souls, then anyone on this side---our side---of the transitional

area has one. You're safe because ,,. well, because

you've successfully interbred with a human woman." ET IS NOT THAT EASY. "Why

not?"

BECAUSE A CREATURE GOING TItROUGH ANIMALNESS TO

HUMANITY--IN THEORY, I TELL YOU--IS GOING THROUGH A

MAPPABLE SORT OF EVOLUTIONARY JOURNEY. BUT A SOUL DOES

NOT DIVtDE, IT DOES NOT BREAK. YOU CANNOT GET CHANGE

FOR IT. YOU HAVE ()NE IN YOUR POCKET OR YOU DO NOT HAVE

ONE. WHERE, THEN, DOES GOD REACH INTO THE DUSK TO GIVE A

SOUL TO ONE OF THE CREATURES ON THIS JOURNEY'? WHAT

SECRET REASONS DOES HE HAVE FOR MAKING THIS VERY MYSTERIOUS

GIFT'.)

"If God's reasons are secret, Adam, and the gift's

mysterious, maybe it's impossible to know and futile to

worry about. Maybe we'd be better off forgetting the

whole stupid notion of souls, immortal or otherwise."

DOES IGNORING SUCH HARD QUESTIONS SEEM TO YOU, MISTER

PAUL, AN ADMIRABLE WAY OF LIVING'?

"If they're nonquestions. If they don't have any answers."

Adam considered my offhand dismissal of his concerns.

Then he typed: FOR ME, MISTER PAUL, THEY ARE REAL QUES-ANCIENT OF DAYS 147

TIONS. He advanced the sheet of paper several times and added at the bottom of

the page: LET US PRAY.

RuthClaire, who had been present throughout this verbal

i and typed exchange, took from her handbag a slick little

{ paperback, The Wa), ora Pi/grim, reputedly by an anonymous

nineteenth-century Russian peasant, and began to

read aloud from its opening page:

' 'On the twenty-tburth Sunday after Pentecost-I went

to church to say my prayers there during the Liturgy. Th

first Epistle of St. Paul to the Thessalonians was being

read, and among other words I heard these--"Prav without

ceasing." It was this text More than any other: which

forced itself upon my mind, and I began to think how it

was possible to pray without ceasing, since a man has to

concern himself with other things in order to make a

living.'"

Soon RuthClaire was leading us in chanting the pip

grim's habitual prayer, the Prayer of Jesus, which goes,

"Lord Jesus Christ, have me/cy on me." Throughout this

chanting, though, I could think of nothing but how well

Livia George was getting along at the West Bank without

me.

Damn her, anyway.

AT THE Montaraz house I earned my keep preparing all

the meals that we did not take at the hospital or at off-campus

eateries. Keeping my hand in, I called this culinary

activity. T.P. ate with us on most of these cosy

occasions, growing fonder and More trusting of me with

each bite. He no longer smarled at me, he unequivocally

smiled. He was especially fond of a cheese-andbaby-shrimp

omelet that I served up one morning for breakfast.

RuthClaire and I got along like brother and sister. Nights, I kept to the

upstairs gues! room with its bamboo-shoot

148 Michael Bishop

wallpaper while she kept to the master bedroom just down

the hall. T.P. would wake me in the morning by filching

the covers from my bed with a methodical hand-over-hand

motion that left the sheet and spread piled up on the floor

like a drift of Dairy Queen ice cream. He wanted that

gourmet omelet, and I was just the man to rustle it up.

Less a godfather than an indulgent uncle, I was only too

happy to oblige.

Sister and brother, RuthClaire and I.

My stay in the Montaraz house finally reconciled me to

the fact of our divorce. In the bathroom, too many conjugal

clues to overlook: a common toothpaste tube (neatly

rolled up from the bottom), His & Her electric razors, a jar

of antiperspirant that they obviously shared. We did not

sleep together during my stay, RuthClaire and I, and the

tension between us drained away. I was at ease in the Montaraz

house, in total harmony with all its occupants.

I

Almost, anyway. How do you develop a cordial relat

tionship with a hefty, bearded young man who wears a .38

pistol strapped to his right ankle and a Ruger .45 half

hidden under a fold of his Chattanooga Choo Choo T-shirt?

This was Bilker Moody, the laconic Vietnam veteran

and erstwhile automobile repossessor who had become the

Montaraz family's chief security guard. Unmarried and

I

virtually relative-less he had adopted RuthClaire, Adam,

and Tiny Paul as surely as they had adopted him. I had

met Bilker back in February, but he had stayed almost I

obsessively out of sight during those three days, as if the

I

announced brevity of my visit required from him his con

siderate

disappearing act.

Now, however, i saw Bilker Moody every day. Al

though

he reputedly had an apartment of his own some

where,

during the week he slept in a small, bare room--at

one time a walk-in pantry--between the kitchen and the

garage. The Montarazes had agreed to this live-in arrange

ment

because it obviated the need to hire guards in shifts,

as I had done at Paradise Farm. Further, Bilker insisted

that his vested interest in his own quarters would make

him More vigilant than a guard from off the premises.

True, he sometimes took catnaps, but his experience in

ANCIENT OF DAYS

149

Southeast Asia had taught him to leap awake at the tread

of a cockroach. Besides, his peculiar circadian rhythms

made him keenest at night, when the threat of intrusion

was greatest. He was no slouch during the day, either; he

had the reflexes, instincts, and nerves of a champion jai-alai player, even if

his size argued against his having

them. He had honed his skills not only in the jungles of

Vietnam but also during daring daylight recoveries of

automobiles whose buyers had failed to keep up with their

payments. The Montarazes could scarcely go wrong engaging

a willing man of his bulk, character, and fearlessness.

Bilker Moody seemed to genuinely esteem the people

under his care. T.P. was fond of him, too, and had a

remorseless fascination for the big man's full-face beard.

Around the child, Bilker displayed the retiring gentleness

of a silverback gorilla. Usually, though, he avoided getting

involved in a play activity for fear of letting his guard slip.

Enemies of the Montarazes' privacy were everywhere.

During my stay in July, he intercepted and politely ran off

any number of curiosity-seekers. That was what he had

been hired to do. He wasn't really a babysitter.

Bilker had as little to do with me as possible. He refused

to eat the meals I fixed for RuthCtaire and T.P., but

clearly did not believe that I was trying to poison anyone.

!f he and I chanced to approach each other, he would

ostentatiously give me room to get by, sometimes muttering

a greeting and sometimes not. RuthClaire said that this

was a respectful posture that, as an enlisted man, Bilker

had automatically assumed for officers--but all I could

think as I strode past was that he was pulling the pin on,

and preparing to toss at me, a fragmentation grenade.

Didn't he know that in the late 1950s, around the time of

Elvis Presley's induction, I had spent two years of obligatory

military service as an enlisted man?

'qs it'my breath'?" I asked RuthClaire. "Too much

garlic in the blintzes'?"

"He's shy, that's all. This job is his lite."

"Shy, huh'? How long had you and Adam known him before he began spilling his

war and repo-man stories'?"

150

Michael Bishop

"He wanted a job, Paul. He had to talk to get it. He

doesn't dislike you. He just feels uncomfortable around

you, knowing you came at Adam's request, to bolster the

guard."

Late one evening, then, after cleaning up the kitchen

after yet another midnight supper, I approached Bilker's

pantry to air the question man-to-man. The door to the

pantry was ajar, revealing one wall of naked studs and a

section of ceiling composed entirely of ancient tongue-and-groove

slats. Tentatively, I rapped.

"What?" demanded Bilker Moody.

I stepped over the pantry's raised threshold and found

the big man sitting on his rollaway bed with the Ruger

trained on my abdomen. Recognizing me, he laid the

pistol down. Disdainfully.

"Thought we could talk a minute," I said.

The pantry contained a plywood counter upon which

rested a sophisticated array of surveillance equipment, a

hotplate, a General Electric coffee maker, a computer, and

a small wire rack of paperback computer manuals and

soft-core pornographic novels. A huge commercial calendar

hung over the bed. Its pinup photograph was not of a

bare-breasted nymphet but instead of a customized automobile

with mud flaps and Gatling-gun exhausts. The

company responsible for the calendar made socket wrenches.

Bilker Moody shook a handful of cartridges into his

palm from a box. He inspected each bullet tip in turn.

"I've been impressed with your performance around here,"

I told him, hoping to disarm him with praise.

He looked me full in the face, his expression altogether

grim.

"Do I rub you the wrong way, Mr. Moody'?"

"Ain't no right way to rub me. Don't like to be rubbed."

"Listen, I'm not here to put your job in jeopardy. I'm glad you're here. I

only came because Adam wanted me

to."

"Why'?"

The question surprised me. "As a kindness to RuthClaire,

I guess."

ANCIENT OF DAYS

15 I

"If Adam likes you, you can't be too big a turd."

That stopped me for a minute. Then I said, "That's

what I tell myself when I'm feeling down: 'Hey, Paul. if

Adam likes you, you can't be too big a turd.' Cheers me

right up."

"Stay out of my way."

"This time next week, I'll'ye been gone three or four

days."

"I tell you that," Bilker Moody said, unblinking," 'cause

wherever I am, that's where the action's gonna be. The

heat. You come in, I go out. It's for your own good."

"That's a little melodramatic, isn't it'?"

"You're the joker got took for the joyride down in the

Fork'? The one got that cross burned on his lawn'?"

"So you're really expecting trouble?"

"I'm paid to expect it."

"Then maybe I'd better leave you to your worlC"

"'Night," he said. "And on your way out--"

"Yeah?"

"Don't let the doorknob ream you in the asshole."

"Mr. Moody--"

"Just call me Bilker." His eyebrows lifted, maybe to

suggest that his vulgar parting shot had been intended

companionably, maybe to emphasize the irony of inviting

me to use his first name after firing that shot. He lifted the

Ruger and waved it at the door.

"Good night, Bilker. Really enjoyed our chat."

The following morning i gave RuthClaire a rundown of'

this exchange, as nearly verbatim as I could make it. She

told me that I had made a skeptical convert of Bilker; the

proof of his good opinion was that he never joked with

incorrigible turds, only those who struck him as recyclable

into relatively fragrant human beings. Thanks a lot, I said.

But I settled for it. It was better than getting fragged in my

sleep ....

RUTHCLAIRE and Adam had a big downstairs studio,

formerly a living room and parlor. Previous occupants had

knocked out the wall, though, and now you had elbow

room galore down there. In this vast space were unused

canvases, stretching frames, makeshift easels, and even an

upright sheet of perforated beaverboard with pegs and

braces for hanging their art supplies and tools. Elsewhere,

?' finished and half-finished paintings leaned against furniture,

reposed in untidy stacks, or vied for attention on the

only wall where the artists had thought enough of their

work to display it as if in a gallery.

"No More plate paintings," RuthClaire told me the

night after my visit to Bilker. "I'm off in a new direction.

Wanna see'?"

Of course i did. RuthClaire led me to a stack of canvases

near a work table consisting of three sawhorses capped by

a sheet of plywood. All of the paintings were small, no

larger than three feet by four, the majority only a foot or

two on their longest sides. RuthClaire had painted them in

drab, washed-out acrylics. They were not exactly abstract,

but neither were they recognizably representational--a troubling

ambiguity they shared with Adam's bigger and bolder

canvases.

To me, in fact, RuthClaire's new paintings looked like

preliminaries for paintings that she had not yet essayed in

final form. That she considered them finished, and regarded

them with undiluted enthusiasm, astonished me. I

wondered what to say. M.-K. Kander's photographs had at

least given me the verbal ammunition of my outrage.

Here, though, was precious little to comment on: murky

beige or green backgrounds in which a variety of anonymous

shapes swam.

"Well'?" Then, noting my hesitation, she said, "Come

152

ANCIENT OF DAYS

153

on, Paul. 'Your honest reaction. That's the Only kind that's

worth a flip."

"The honest reaction of a restaurant owner's probably

not even worth that, Ruthie Cee."

"Oh, come on. You've got good art sense."

"Let me off the hook."

"You don't like them.'?"

"If i'd fingerpainted stuff like this in Mrs. Stanley's

fourth-grade class in Tocqueville Elementary, she'd've said

I was wasting paper. That honest enough for you'?"

As if someone had yanked an invisible bridle, RuthClaire's

nostrils flared. But she recovered and asked me why Mrs.

Stanley would have made such a harsh judgment.

"For scrounging around and muddying the colors."

"The muddiness is deliberate, Paul."

I replied that as a consequence these particular ,paintings

looked anemic, downright blah.

"That's an unconsidered first impression."

"I've been staring at them a good five minutes."

"A gnat's eyeblink. Maybe you need to live with one a

while. Pick out the one you hate the least--or hate the

most, for that matter--and take it home with you."

I sighed audibly. RuthClaire's pitiful acrylics belonged

on a bonfire. Even Paleolithic cave art--the least rather

than the most polished examples----outshone these hazy

windows on my ex-wife's soul. In the almost ten years I

had known her, I had never seen RuthClaire do less chal,

lenging or attractive work. It was hard to believe that

living with one of these paintings would heighten my

appreciation of it or any of the others.

She began to explain what she was up to. Freeing the

work of pretense. Bright colors had a blunt, primitive

appeal that rarely engaged the intellect. She was after a

subtler means of capturing her audience. Artists had to risk

alienating their audience--not with violence, sacrilege, or

pornography, but with the unfamiliar, the understated, and

the ambiguou---in order to make new. Viewers with both

the patience and the openness to outwait their first negative

reactions would see what she was trying to do.

154

Michael Bishop

"But what if the paintings are bad, RuthClaire? Flat out

bad? Banal, lackluster, and ugly?"

"Then you'll never be enlightened by them, no matter

how long you hang around them. Eventually, your negative

first reactions will be vindicated." Quickly, though,

she hedged this point: "Of course, it's possible you're just

color-blind or tone-deaf to the work's real merit."

"I know spoiled pork when I smell it. I don't have to

eat it to know that it's bad."

"A gourmet chef is a gourmet chef is a glorified short-order

cook. An artist is an artist is an artist."

"That's smug, RuthClaire. Really disgustingly smug."

She kissed me on the cheek. "You've noticed how

ii small they are'?"

"A point in their favor."

"Another way of freeing them from pretense," she

said, ignoring my cynicism. "Rothko liked big paintings

because the viewer has to climb into them and participate

almost physically in their energy and movement. Well, I

want the patient viewer to climb into these canvases intellectually,

Paul--not in the clinical way that a Mondrian,

say, demands, but in the spiritual way that a decision for

faith requires."

"That's clever. You want the viewer to acknowledge

the merit of these paintings on Jaith?"

"I call the series Souls, Paul."

"Which of course explains everything."

At this juncture, altogether good-humoredly, RuthClaire

decided to end the argument. Never had we been so badly

at odds on the subject of her art, and never had our

disagreement on the subject had less effect on our good

opinion of the other. Weird.

"Let's go see Adam," she said.

THAT AFTERNOON I left the hospital, taking T.P. with

me, to give Adam and RuthClaire a little time together

alone. Our destination was a restaurant, fairly recently

expanded and remodeled, called Everybody's. It servecl

beer, sandwiches, pizza, salads, and pasta in an airy,

relaxed atmosphere perfectly suited to its predominantly

college-connected clientele.

I ordered beer and a bacon-cheeseburger for me, a Coke

and a cheeseburger for my temporary ward. T.P. sat in a

kiddie chair with a booster seat, and we whiled away forty

or forty-five minutes eating and watching the people. Traffic

plied the hill on North Decatur Road, squirrels scampered

on the dappled campus across the street, and

emerald-necked pigeons strutted the sidewalks. I felt loose

and at ease, almost ready to drowse. Staring into my beer,

I may have actually done so..: .

Someone was standing beside T.P. under the angled

skylights of the restaurant. I almost spilled my beer reacting

to the stranger's presence. Before I could stand up,

though, she sat down on the chair opposite mine.

"Hello, Mr. Loyd:" she said. "i recognized you from

the newspaper photographs. The baby's being here didn't

hurt, though. That made me look twice. Otherwise, l'd've

gone on by."

"Another tribute to my personal magnetism."

The woman wore an expression of amiable amusement.

i figured her to be in her early thirties---almost out of the

range of my serious affections. Thin-boned and tall, she

escaped looking angular. Springy amber ringlets framed

her pleasant face. She was wearing a gold-plated necklace

that seemed to be made up of' dozens of minuscule glittering

hinges. She folded her long arms on the table, and the

amber down prickling them caught the evanescent dazzle

of the tiny hinges at her throat.

155

I 56 Michael Bishop

'"My name," she said, "is Caroline Hanna." I'

I tried to get a grip on the familiarity of her name.

"You've heard of me before, Mr. Loyd. Once, at Brian

Nollinger's urging, you took some photographs of Adam

Montaraz. Brian showed those photographs to me. And it i

was from me that he got the clue to research the island of

I

Montaraz as Adam's possible point of origin."

"Nollinger," I echoed her numbly.

"You don't like him, do you'?"

"in my book, he's a world-class jerk."

"That's not entirely fair," Caroline Hanna said evenly.

I

'I'm sure it isn't. But his kindness to you, or to his

aged mother, doesn't absolve him of the dirt he kicked on

.

my ex-wile. It doesn't clear him of abusing my hospitality

:: . in Beulah Fork. To three quarters of his acquaintances, the

man may be nobility incarnate--but if all he ever shows

me is his pimply backside, well, Miss Hanna, that's what

i

I'm going to judge him by." She was looking at me as if I

I

were a sick bear in Atlanta's zoo. "I called you Miss

Hanna, didn't i? You're probably Doctor Hanna."

"Call me Caroline."

"Paul," I said, tapping my thumb against my chest.

"Anyway, I'm sorry to say that your friend Nollinger, I

back in February, even had the gall to ask RuthClaire and

I

Adam for money. He needed funds for some kind of field i

work he wanted to do somewhere."

"He'd come to apologize."

"Ostensibly. He even blew that. He started talking about

some painterly ape in England." ,

Caroline Hanna shook her head wistfully. "That's Brian,

all right."

"What can I do for you'? Would you like a beer'?"

She declined, saying that she had only wanted to get a

closer look at T.P.--he was a sweetie--and to introduce

herself to the man who had implicated Brian in the biggest

event in evolutionary science since the publication of Darwin's Origin of the

Species. She was glad to have contributed

in a small way to the unraveling of the mystery of the

origins of the Montaraz habilines. Too, she felt a certain

odd kinship with me, for we each had a peripheral impor-

/

AnCIEnT OF D^vs

157

tance to the whole affair. Of course (she hastened to add),

she was further on the periphery than I, but she could

sympathize with the muddle of conflicting feelings that a

person in my position must sometimes experience. Wasn't

she running a gauntlet of semipainful changes herself?

Ever the diplomat, I said, "Like what'?"

She apologized for prompting the question. "I wasn't

fishing for a chance to list them. honest."

"You don't have to list anything. Just tell me the most

painful of your changes. It might do you good."

Caroline considered this. Then she said, "Brian left

Emory in June. He resigned his position in the anthropology

department and left--without telling me anything. No

foul play, you understand. He let the folks in his department

know. He just didn't see fit to divulge his plans to

me."

"Another teaching or research position somewhere?"

"Not according to his department head. Brian told him

he was going to take off for a year and go overseas."

"He could always visit Alistair Patrick Blair in Zarakal."

A wan smile from Caroline. I added, "Self-possessed

women frighten him. The lack of a goodbye is the damning

proof. He's what my mbther would have called a

cad."

"She would've had every right, but I'm not your mother."

I toasted Caroline with my beer mug. "Amen to that." I

put the mug down. "But what else'? Surely, getting shut of

the biggest No-Dfz pusher at that primate field station

can't top the list of your woes."

"You know you're out of line, don't you'?"

"I do. I'm sorry. I can't help my feelings about, uh, Brian. Tell me something

that'll stir my sympathy for

him."

She started to get up. "Forgive me for butting in on you

and your godson, Mr. Loyd. I have work to do."

"Please." I put my hand on her wrist. "One More

chance. One More item from your list of worries. And I

won't be such a sarcastic bastard again, believe me."

"No, you won't," Caroline said, subsiding. "How about

this? The situation among the Cuban detainees in the

r

158 Michael Bishop

Atlanta Penitentiary has me down. Some of those people belong in prison. But

others deserve their freedom, and all

my efforts to bring about releases for them have gone for

naught. There. Do you like that one?"

"I'm in sympathy with it."

"Stupid idealist," she said, smiling gently. 'I'm going."

"Don't you want to know what I'm doing' here? With

T.P.?"

"T.P.'s the baby? No. No, I don't. It's none of my

business, and my business isn't really any of yours, either.''

Again she made as it' to stand. I

"Give me your address, then. We might be able to

redefine the limits of each other's business."

Hastily, she scribbled on the edge of a napkin. "Here's

I: a telephone number. Now, then, I've really got to get

busy."

" T.P. reacted to her move to abandon us--throughout our

talk, he had been staring at her with moony adoration--by

reaching out and upsetting his drink. I hurriedly began to

gather up napkins with which to blot the mess. In order to

get at it, I lifted T.P.'s chair out of the way.

"Do you need some help'?" Caroline asked.

"No, I've got it. Did you notice, though'? The little

bugger's stuck on you, lady. So am I."

"Hush. That's embarrassing." She spoke in an undertone

and looked around Everybody's at everybody looking

al us.

"Knocking over his cup? Nah. Happens all the time

with kids his age. Not embarrassing. People make allowances.''

"That's not what I'm talking about and you know it."

She retreated a step or two. "i wouldn't mind if you

called, though--not at all." Before I could reply, she was

gone.

A young man with bushy hair and a long apron helped

me finish cleaning up, and I sat back down. During her

fifteen or twenty-minute stint at our table, Caroline Hanna

had affected me in the powerful, nonrational way that

teen-agers sometimes collide with each other. A pulse in

my throat was working, and a film of sweat on my palms

/

ANCIENT OF DAYS

159

endangered my.grip on my beer mug. How ungrown-up, I

thought. How immature. In only a few years I would be

fifty, and here I was surrendering to--actively encouraging--the

kind of hormonal rush that sends callow high-school

aspirants to ecstasy screaming to the showers. Nobody

since RuthClaire had made me feel that way, not even

Molly Kingsbury.

Later, our bill duly paid, T.P. and I returned to the

hospital.

BACK IN Adam's recovery room, RuthClaire told me that

David Blau had invited us to accompany him and his wife

Evelyn to a nightclub near the Georgia Tech campus. The

clubSinusoid Disturbances--was on a narrow little alley

perpendicular to Spring Street. !ts main attraction was live

music, but it also featured (although only on Fire Sine

Fridays) the work of severa! avant-garde "performance

artists." These artists used music, projected visual images,

props, the spoken word, and a variety of strange choreographies

to make statements about art and life. David ranked

high among the performance artists who had given Sinus-old

Disturbances its reputation as Atlanta's leader on the

New Wave nightclub scene. His group, consisting entirely

of people from Abraxas, would be the main act at tonight's

Fire Sine Friday. That was why he wanted RuthClaire and

me to attend.

"What about Adam?" I asked.

But the habiline typed: I BE FINE. TOMORROW, AFTER ALL, I

AM UNWRAPPED. ME FOR REST AND READING.

'May I bring a date?"

This request startled RuthClaire. "A date'?"

"That's right. A woman."

"I didn't think you meant a two-legged raisin. I just

didn't know you knew anybody up here to ask."

"I've been shinnying down a knotted sheet every night

160

Michael Bishop

I've spent in your house, Ruthie Cee. Meet a lot of folks

that way."

"Well, it's amazing Bilker hasn't shot you. What's her

name'?"

"Caroline Hanna."

Just as I had done, RuthClaire struggled to locate this

name in her mental ledger of friends, acquaintances, and

so on. i let her struggle. In fact, I left Adam's room in

search of a telephone, looked up the number of the sociology

department, dialed it. and asked to be put through

to Dr. Hanna's office. Although startled to hear from me

so soon, she accepted my invitation, offering to meet me

at the Montaraz house at seven-thirty, if that would sim-

: plify our first deliberate rendezvous. Right now, though,

{ she had no leeway ibr chitchat. She had promised the

:ii 'students in her next class that she would have a test graded

for them today.

RuthClaire and I left the hospital at five-thirty, T.P.

dead to the world in my lap. Back on Hurt Street. Bilker

emerged from the garage like a troll forsaking the shadow

of its footbridge to terrorize a wayfarer. Hands on his hips,

he bulked in the sunlight, malevolently squinting.

"We're going out on the town, Bilker," RuthClaire

'said. "All of us. Set the security alarms, lock everything

up tight, and don't worry about the traffic around here. I'll

ask the Fulton County police to make a couple of extra

tours of the neighborhood, i need an escort, Bilker. Mr.

Loyd, my ex-husband, already has a date."

Even in the garage, Bilker squinted. "To where, ma'am."

"Sinusoid Disturbances. Put on some struttin' duds,

okay'?"

"For a trip to the doctor. Whose sinus trouble is it,

anyway, yours or--" He jerked his thumb at me, unable

to speak my name aloud.

"Informal clothes, Bilker. Don't worry about a single

thing tonight. Tonight's just for fun."

THE BLAUS arrived at a quarter past seven. David was

dressed like a painter, not the beret-and-palette variety but

the extension-ladder-and-gallon-bucket kind. His wife, Evelyn,

although at least forty, wore a little girl's party gown

and patent-leather shoes with buckles. The Blaus, I took it,

liked costumes.

Caroline Hanna, as good as her word, pulled up in front

of the house at seven-thirty, in a blue Volkswagen beetle. I

helped her out. and the small boy in me responded approvingly

to her neat, relatively conservative clothes. Her skirt

was a beige wraparound belted with a chairi similar in

design to the hinged necklace still at her throat. Her jersey

had stylized chevrons on its three-quarter-length sleeves,

giving her the look of a drill sergeant in the Scandinavian

Fashion Force. I walked her to the porch to meet the

others.

T.P., who was going with'us, was natty in white shorts

and a T-shirt with a polka-dot bow tie printed directly on

the material. He reached immediately tot Caroline. She

took him from Bilker and began jogging him in her arms.

Bilker looked relieved. After a bit More small talk, we

split up to drive to Sinusoid Disturbances, the Blaus taking

their car and Bilker assuming the wheel of my Mercedes to

chauffeur the rest of us.

The sidewalk fronting Sinusoid Disturbances angled by

it at such a daunting grade that as we drove past, looking

for a parking spot, I wondered if the bistro's patrons had to

walk around inside the club like sheep on a hillside,

struggling not to topple. No one would ever mistake the

crumbling, two-story building for Caesar's Palace.

"Uh. what kind of crowd do they get here?" Caroline

asked.

"David says it's a pretty weird mix," RuthCIaire replied,

her arms on the seat back. "Tech students. Punk

161

162

Michael Bishop

rockers. Kids from the Atlanta College of Art. It's mostly

the last group that gets off on performance art on Fire Sine

Fridays. Some of the punks'Il go along with it, too, but the

Tech students--the men, anyway--have a tendency to

disrupt things."

"That's too bad."

"Oh. it's not so terrible. David doesn't let it bother

him. He sees the disruptions as part of the spectacle."

Bilker. stymied by the traffic in his efforts to find a

parking space, finally let us all out in front of the nightclub.

A boy with an oversized safety pin through his cheek

opened the front door for Caroline. who was carrying T.P.

for RuthClaire. This door was a slab of stained oak with a

::: rectangular window of amber glass featuring a sine-curve

ill pattern etched into it in spooky crimson. I thanked the boy

for his courtesy, and he replied, almost as if he Were

i',i genuinely human, 'Wou're welcome." Then the door shut

behind us, and darkness settled upon our gingerly stepping

group like a coffin lid.

*'Criminy," I muttered.

But RuthClaire had my arm, and she directed Caroline

and me to a teller's cage from which a reddish glow

emanated. We were in a foyer of some kind, and at the

cage I leaned down and bought four admissions from a

young woman in cutoff jeans and a short-sleeved sweat-shirt--after

the punk at the door, a paragon of Middle

American normality.

A few More steps put us on a concrete landing just

beyond the narrow foyer. Concrete steps descended from

the landing to the floor, about twelve feet down, or you

could squeeze your way along the outside wall of the ticket

cage to a mezzanine that projected from the bistro wall

paralleling the interstate highway outside. Chairs and circular

tables crowded both the mezzanine and the main

floor below, and almost all of this furniture had the look of

radioactive wrought iron.

Higher than the mezzanine level on the club's uphill

side was a control booth for Sinusoid Disturbances's principal

disc jockey. The booth had champagne-tinted Plexiglas

windows, and a big, acorn-shaped flasher that whipped

ANCIENT OF DAYS

163

strobes of blue and white light around the interior. Loud

tousle played, and below us, flailing away at each other in

this storm of noise, jitterbugged a host of damned-looking

human wraiths.

T.P. was as awe-stricken, or as horrified, as I. He clung

to Caroline as it' at any moment she might toss him over

the rail into the cobalt chaos of the pit. RuthClaire pointed

out a table atthe far side of the club, next to the projecting

runway of the stage on which tonight's live entertainers

would pertbrm, and told us that David had reserved it for

US.

"Where is he'?" I asked.

"Backstage with Evelyn. They're setting up. It's probably

going to be another thirty or so minutes before they

come on."

A trio of dubious humanoids brushed past us on the way

downstairs. One of them bumped me in the back. Her

hairdo was by the trs chic team of Friar Tuck and Bozo

the Clown, but she hurriedly swung about to apologize to

me.

"It's okay," I said, surprised by the depth Of her anxiousness,

"That kidney never worked very well, anyway,"'

"Oh, no! I really did hurt youI"

I had to assure her that I was fine, that my allusion to a

disabled kidney had been meant solely as a joke. But even

in retreat the girl continued to apologize, and soon Caroline

and RuthClaire were laughing.

"What the hell was that all about?" I asked them.

"Really, it's not about anything," RuthClaire said. "David

says that this is the only part of the country where the

kids who go punk forget to stop saying please and thank

you. It's a cultural thing. Atlanta's punks are polite." "All of them'?"

"Well, a lot of them. That young lady there seemed to be trying to make up tYr

the ones who aren't."

Caroline shifted T.P. from one hip to the other. He was

waving a fist in time to the music, his head ticktocking

wildly. The sort of repetitive actions that wear out a person

holding a child. RuthClaire noticed and took T.P. from

Caroline, and we waited on the landing until Bilker came

164

Michael Bishop

swaggering up behind us. His gait seemed designed to

intimidate anyone who took exception to his string tie or

his undisguised contempt for Sinusoid Disturbances. Un

der

his tan jacket (whose maroon back vents occasionally

opened out like the gills of a gasping bass), he was wear

ing,

I knew, his Ruger. On duty. Ready for action.' Antici

pating

the heat.

A little melodramatic, I thought again. Bilker seemed to

have a vision of himself as a latter-day Rooster Cogburn

charging in single-handedly to rout the bad guys.

17,

ONCE ON the main floor, I saw that some of the club's

customers were not flamboyant punks but intelligent young

men and women of student age. I was probably the oldest

person on the premises. I felt a little More comfortable

here, among the kids wearing neat and modish clothes, but

I was still something of a relic among these bionic space

babies.

Then the music stopped, and Bilker allowed that the

only thing any noisier he had ever heard was a dusk-to-dawn

mortar attack on his barracks near Da Nang. He was

a country-music fan, a devotee of the no-nonsense article

spun out by Roy Acuff and George Jones. Groups like the

Oak Ridge Boys and Alabama soured his stomach. The

former did too many cutesy-poo songs, and the latter, God

save their souls, he had once seen perform at a country

music festival wearing short pants. Short pants, for pity's

sake. That was okay on a cookout, mebbe, but not on

grown men making their living in front of the public!

This was the most talking I had ever heard Bilker do.

Through his tirade, I held Caroline's hand, pinning it to

my knee under the tabletop.

Then the club's DJ spoke, and the sound system permitted

his words to reverberate over our heads like an articulate

siren:

jl

ANCIENT OF DAYS

165

"Welcome to anmher Fire Sine Friday here at Sinusoid

Disturbances, culture freaks! Comin' atcha from his plastic

cloud is Hotlanta's answer to that silver-tongued sweetie in

the White House, Bipartisan Bitsy Vardeman! O1' Bitsy's

here to ease the strain 'twixt donkeys and heffalumps,

honkies and cooler cats, mentblks and ladies fair, hetero and

homo pairs, an'--Lawd have mercy, y'all!--'twixt your

ever-lovin' bodies and your ever-iivin' SOOOOOUULS!"

This last word stretched out until it had five or six syllables

and the pitch of a freight-train whistle.

The curtains on stage parted, and the Moog-warped

melody of an old standard set to a fusion-rock beat began

to surge back and forth through the bistro. Suddenly,

seven well-endowed young women in body stockings

pranced into view, tossing their heads, rotating their arms,

and apparently trying very hard to unsocket their pelvises.

"Prepare yourselves, culture freaks," cried Bitsy Varde-man

from aloft, "for a little heartstoppin' boolaboola

from Ess Dee's very own sultry and sensual ballet corps,

the Impermanent Wave Dancers/"

The Impermanent Wave Dancers did twenty minutes of

gymnastic splits, leaps, and buttock-flinching to progressively

louder rock music. Bilker Moody watched them

with the same clinical aloofness with which a law-enforcement

officer might watch a fight between pit bulls.

T.P. enthusiastically clapped his hands. Caroline's attitude

was harder to gauge--a distrustful kind of wonder, maybe.

RuthClaire shouted, "David hates this, but it's just

about the only thing that'll get a Friday-night crowd to pay

a three-dollar cover for an evening of performance art!"

Finally, after a raucous eternity, the dancers departed,

and Bipartisan Bitsy Vardeman announced, "Okay, babies,

here tonight from Abraxas, Atlanta's Hall of Miracles

and Mirages, David Blau and the Blau Blau Rebellion!

Give 'em a hand, culture freaks! I say now, give 'em a

hand/"

App}ause was sparse, and the darkness that had descended

alter the dancers' collective exit persisted. Some

of the students near us began to grumble.

Eventually, though. David Blau's voice spoke forcefully

166

Michael Bishop

from behind the sequined curtain: "Let there be light?'

Obligingly, Vardeman spotlighted the curtain, which parted

to reveal an immense black tarp suspended .like a movie

screen at the rear of the stage. Blau, in his house painter's

costume, walked forward from the back, stopped on the

edge of the projecting runway, and stared souffully out

over the heads of his audience.

"And Adam knew Eve," he declared in actorish tones.

"And knew her, and knew her, and knew her. And the

generations of Adam began to evolve. They evolved, my

friends, toward the many likenesses of God that you may

see sitting at tables all around you."

An unexpected blackout.

In this darkness, everyone in Sinusoid Disturbances could

. hear some hurried but efficient-sounding rolling noises.

Then the footlights came on, and we could see a group

of two-dimensional cardboard figures on wheels lined up in

front of the tarp. Each cutout depicted a representative of

five different early hominid species. The figures to the left

looked noticeably More apelike than the figures to the

right--although, somewhat anomalously, the figure in the

middle had the most brutish physique. The oddest thing

about the cutouts was that through holes corresponding to

the figures' mouths, there hung limp blue balloons. Suddenly,

all five balloons inflated, obscuring the painted

faces behind them, and each balloon jiggled against the

head of its cutout as if yearning to escape skyward. Because

of the frank frontal nudity of the five hominids, this

was an especially ludicrous sight, and many of the kids

around us began to snigger.

A man of Oriental descent stepped out from behind the

figure on the far left, "Australopithecus afilrensis," he

said. As soon as he had spoken, he reached behind his

cutout, and the balloon biding its face floated straight up,

four feet or so, and bobbed to a standstill on its string.

Para Sorrells's head appeared above that of the second

figure in the line. "Australopithecus afficamts," she said.

Its balloon also climbed ceilingward, halting about a foot

above the balloon of the A. qlarensis cutout.

Then David Blau peeked mischievously from behind the

ANCIENT OF DAYS 167

third figtre. "Australopithecus robustus," he said. The

balloon attached to this cutout--the most massively built

of the five--ascended only a little over a foot. The incongruity

of the balloon's brief ascent, after the audience had

been led to expect something else, provoked laughter--as

did the creature's resemblance to a squat, seminaked gorilla.

Evelyn Blau popped up behind the fourth figure. This

one bore an uncanny and obviously deliberate likeness to RuthClaire's

hospitalized husband: Said Evelyn distinctly, "Homo habi/is." The

helium-filled balloon in front of this

cutout's face rose to a height of six or seven feet.

A black man in painter's coveralls--a young artist with

a studio at Abraxas--stepped out from behind the final

cutout. He said, "Homo erectus." The balloon belonging

to this creature, the tallest and the most human-looking of

the lot, floated upward a /hot higher than the habJline's.

Then the black man strolled down to the apron of the

stage, looked out, spread his arms, and said in a haughty,

sardonic voice, "Homo sapiens sapiens."

Mall the wise the wise. The culmination of God's evolutionary

game plan.

From the pocket of his coveralls, this man withdrew a

pellet pistol. This action prompted Bilker Moody to reach

for the shoulder harness under his coat, but RuthClaire

patted his wrist and shook her head. Meanwhile, the performance

artist with the pellet gun turned toward the cutouts, aimed his weapon, and,

squeezing Off a shot, popped

the balloon belonging to A. a/arensis. The cutout's human'

attendant rolled it off-stage. Then the nonchalant black

man popped the balloons of all the remaining hominid

cutouts, giving the person behind each figure just enough

time to push it into the wings before firing at the next

balloon. When he was finished, he pocketed his weapon,

walked to the Homo erectux cutout, and, like a hotdog

vendor pushing a cart in Manhattan, guided the last of the

extinct hominids into the wings.

Blackout.

A bewildered silence gripped the people in Sinusoid

Disturbances. Then someone--a football player from Tech?

--shouted, "What the fuckin' hell was that supposed to

168

Michael Bishop

mean?" Others at their tables began to boo, a din that

swept tidally from one end of the club to the other. Some

of the art students near us,-however, were on their feet

applauding and shouting, "Bravo! Bravo!"

Bitsy Vardeman averted a donnybrook by spinning Sister

Sledge's popular recording, "We Are Family." a hit

even before Adam's appearance at Paradise Farm. Many in

the audience began to clap their hands, sing along, and

boogie around their tables.

The lights in the club came up full. and all five members

of the Blau Blau Rebellion were revealed standing on

the stage, each one clutching a bouquet of ten or fifteen

lighter-than-air balloons. David, Evelyn, and their fellows

began distributing the balloons to various people in the

crowd, beckoning folks toward the stage or ambling out

the runway to make the transfer.

T.P. stood up in RuthClaire's lap, his arm stretched out

for a balloon. Pam Son'ells, I saw, was coming down the

runway toward us, Sister Sledge continuing to chant the

lyrics of their repetitive anthem and dozens upon dozens of

people now surging forward to intercept Para.

"Remember," she was shouting over the music, "you

mustn't take one unless you believe--"

"Believe what?" a male student cried.

"Unless you believe you're immortal! And if you take

one, you mustn't let it pop!"

"Why the hell not'.)'' shouted the same young man, who

had cleared a path to the end of the runway.

Para replied, "Because if you let it pop, you'll die."

"Oh. come off it."

"This is your soul," Para patiently explained. "If you

let it pop, you'll die within three days."

"Bullshit!"

David Blau came to the end of the runway, lifted his

cluster of balloons, and told the entire bistro. "It isn't

bullshit. Whoever accepts one of these, but fails to care for

it and lets it pop. well, you'll die almost immediately.

You'll blow away on the wind as if you never existed."

The theatricality of this speech did not deprive it of

effect. Just the opposite. It clearly frightened some of

ANCIENT OF DAYS 169

those who had come forward for balloons. David had

uttered a formula, and that formula produced the desired

result--an explosion of superstitious doubt in people who

ordinarily prided themselves on being hardnosed and pragmatic.

Even I found myself believing David's weird formula.

Some people backed away, while others shoved

forward to replace the fainthearted.

T.P. had no doubt. He wanted a balloon. "Hunh," he

said, almost toppling from RuthClaire's arms. "Hunh,

hunh, hunh I"

"Go get him one," Caroline Hanna urged me.

Para Sorrells had just about given out all of the balIoohs.

while the black man who had shot out the bobbing

souls of the cardboard hominids was handing out his dwindling

supply on the other side of the runway.

"That's okay," RuthClaire said. "Bilker'll get him a

balloon."

"No. ma'am. I got other work."

I'll do it, then," Caroline said.

"You'll get an elbow in the lip," I warned her.

Almost miraculously, a punkette with a cottony white

scalp lock and no eyebrows appeared at our table. A frail

creature in a vest that laced tfcross her midriff, she extended

her arms to T.P., who went to her as if she were an

old and trusted friend. RuthClaire gave the baby up to the

newcomer as much to relieve the pressure on her arms as

to humor T.P.

"I'll get him a b'loon," the girl growled, screwing up

one eye to look al my godson at such close range. "Friend

uh mine round there's got one awready. He don' want it.

I'll jus' give it to your nipper. Be rat back." She sounded

as il' she had a mouthful of cornmeal.

Hall' stupefied by surprise, hall' grateful to her for quieting

T.P., we watched her as she backed away to fetch the

"b'loon" from her friend. She scarcely seemed to move

her feet.

]'hen Bilker awoke. "Hey, wait a minute!"

"I think it's okay," RuthClaire said dubiously. "She

seemed lamiliar. She'll get Paulie a balloon and bring him

back in a better temper."

170 '

' Michael Bishop

"I'd better go after her," Bilker said.

Something in me was belatedly alerted to the queerness

of the situation. "Look, Bilker, you stay with. RuthClaire

and Caroline. I'll go after her."

"What's the matter'?" Caroline asked, grabbing my arm.

The people near the end of the runway engulfed the white-haired

girl, and the balloons floating above the crowd were

no More useful as markers than clouds.

"I think I know her," I said, shaking free. "That's

what's wrong with this." I plunged past Bilker. rebounded

off a Tech student who was heading for the stage, squirmed

through a gap, and, my heart pounding mightily, sidled

around the end of the runway.

Spotlights continued to rake the club's interior, and

behind me I heard RuthClaire cry aloud in anguish, ' 'Paulie/"

: Beyond the runway, I broke into an open area, but T.P.

and his abductress had already disappeared. They might

have taken any of four or five different routes, but I

headed for the nearest exit, a heavy door to the far left of

the stage. I slammed its push bar, opening it on the

intimidating whirr and rumble of the expressway.

An automobile was heading down the hill past the front

of the club, but it was hard for me to believe that the

punkette had trotted through the alley and climbed into that

vehicle in no More time than I had given her. I ducked

back inside Sinusoid Disturbances, letting the door wheeze

shut on its pneumatic retards.

Bilker was at my side. "She got away'?"

My helpless look was all the answer he needed.

"Shit!" he said. "It's a kidnapping. A goddamn

kidnapping."

"Maybe not. This place is a madhouse. She could turn

up again in a couple of minutes."

"Yeah," said Bilker. "And the goddanm Rooskies could

decide to unilaterally disarm tomorrow." His band inside

his coat, he was scanning the crowd for one face in a

shifting mosaic of faces. "Friggin' donkey brain."

"If I'm a donkey brain, you're its butt. You let RuthClaire

hand the kid over."

ANCIENT OF DAYS 171

Bilker gave me a look of malevolent contempt. "Who

said I was talkin' about yoU'/'' Someone had kidnapped

Tiny Paul, and we were at loggerheads over a matter of no

consequence. Even Bilker understood that. He grabbed my

arm and dragged me back to the table where RuthClaire

and Caroline were waiting. T.P. might be lost (for the time

being, if not for good), but he had no intention of compounding

his failure by letting someone else abduct

RuthClaire.

"What happened? What's going on'?" The women very

nearly spoke in unison. Bilker mumbled something about

our having lost the girl's trail, and RutbClaire, glancing

back and forth between her bodyguard and me. clutched

the lapels of my jacket.

"You know who it was, don't you?"

"Maybe I'm mistaken," I said, "but I think it was

Nancy. With her eyebrows plucked and her head partly

shaved. You know, little Nancy Teavers, Elvis's wife."

BtLKER SPENT the next thirty minutes charging through

the crowd at Sinnsoid Disturbances, buttonholing people to

ask il' they'd seen a skinny female carrying a kid in white

shorts. He even barged into the restrooms--tbe women's

as well as the men's--to identify the startled occupants of

the toilet stalls. His efforts were unavailing, but he kept

trying, as if single-minded persistence would make T.P.

reappear.

I telephoned the police, who dispatched a squad car and

notified the offices of several other law-enforcement units

in the area. The unitbrmed cops who arrived at the club

interviewed RuthClaire, Caroline, and me while Bilker

continued to play detective on his own.

The older of the two policemen did all the questioning.

His nametag said Crawford. He was a stocky man with a

tbrehead furrowed by years of occupational squinting and

172

Michael Bishop

skepticism. So that he could hear our answers, he talked to

us on the sidewalk in front of the nightclub. His partner,

meanwhile, descended into the pandemonium of Sinusoid

Disturbances to look under the rocks that Bilker had not

already turned over.

Aboveground, Crawford pursued his interrogation: "She

was a waitress in your restaurant in Beulah Fork'?"

"Once upon a time,"

"Why would she kidnap the Montaraz child, Mr. Loyd?"

I told Crawford about the Ku Klux Klan involvement of

Nancy's late husband, E. L. Tearers. I told him how

Adam had wrestled E.L. into the vat of an abandoned

brick kiln in Hothlepoya County. That was all it took.

Crawford recalled the story. Every city cop and backwoods

deputy in Georgia knew it. He took a note.

"Revenge'? You think her motive's revenge'?"

': 'I don't think she planned this herself," I said, "At the

West Bank, she was a sweet, hardworking kid. She liked

me. She liked RuthClaire. I think someone's gotten to

her."

*'Who'?"

"Craig Puddicombe, to put a name on hhn."

"Oh. God," RuthClaire said, slumping into me. "I

handed Paulie over to her. I put him into her arms." She

began to cry.

"On some leveL," I said, "you recognized Nancy. She

took T.P. from you, you didn't foist him on her." I

"I might as well have. I might as well've wrapped him

up in a box and mailed him to her doorstep."

"Look, you'd been entertaining T.P. all evening. The

subliminal-recognition factor made you trust that girl in

spite of her weirdo getup. You befriended her after her

husband's death, you certainly didn't expect her to betray

that friendship."

"i wasn't thinking about any o1' that!" RuthClaire cried

in frustration.

"That's my point, it was all working on you subconsciously.

So stop blaming yourself for somebody else's

villainy."

Crawford tapped the end of his pen on his notepad.

ANCIENT OF DAYS

173

"Puddicombe disappeared after that brick-kiln business.

His picture's in every post office in the Southeast, but

nobody's seen him since."

"Nancy Tearers has."

"What makes you so sure?" Crawford asked, eyeing

me from under his furrows. "For all we know, Mr. Loyd,

the kid could be living in Acapulco."

"For all we know, he could be sitting down there in

Sinusoid Disturbances with a Mohawk haircut and a safety

pin through his cheek. Nancy would've never planned

something like this by herself. But Puddicombe may'ye

convinced her that this is a way to pay back Adam and

RuthClaire for E.L.'s death--even if he did bring it upon

himself."

"Adam has to be told," RuthClaire said. "He has to

know."

Curious patrons of the nightclub, wraiths frotn the pit,

had gathered around us on the sidewalk to gawk and

eavesdrop. At last, though-, David and Evelyn Blau came

out of the bistro through these bizarre figures--with Bilker

Moody and Crawtbrd's young partner right behind them.

Mireles, the second policeman, approached his senior. "The girl in the ticket

cage says the kidnapper--the female

punk you described to us--began showing up here

for Fire Sine Fridays around the beginning of June." "Alone'.)'' said

Crawtord.

"She isn't really sure. It's dark in there, and the girl

always paid her own cover and went on in."

"She just came on Fridays'?"

"The ticket seller only works three nights a week,

which helps pin it down. She remembers her showing up

especially for Fire Sine Fridays." Mireles flipped open a

notepad of his own. "The only time the suspect ever

spoke, the ticket seller says. she asked if... uh, the Blau

Blau Rebellion was doing a gig."

"A Eib?" said David Blau distastefully.

"When she found out they weren't," Mireles continued,

"she didn't even bother to pay the cover. She left."

"A fan," Evelyn Blau said. "There's loyalty for you."

"And she came alone'?" Crawford pressed.

I II

174

Michael Bishop

Miretes had a thin, sallow face with eyes as brown as

Hershey kisses. "It's like I said, Sergeant, she was careful

to appear to be alone."

Bilker said, "I found a guy who'd seen her with somebody."

Sirens wailed in the distance. Traffic on the nearby

expressway and the bass notes thrumming through the

nightclub made the entire hill quiver like a drumskin.

"One of the yahoos who kep' yellin' during y'alt's

show," Bilker continued. "He got concerned when I told

him what happened to Paulie. He said the fi'eak that took

him would sometimes sit at a table with a bearded fella."

"More," Crawford demanded.

"He tried to play it cool--punk, like--but he couldn't

quite get it on, the look and all. Cowboy boots 'n' jeans

instead of tennis shoes and pleated baggies. Like a guy

with an eight-to-five job whose boss'd can him ii' he ever

showed up lookin' freaky."

"Craig Puddicombe," I said.

"I've got to go see A&tm," RuthClaire insisted, digging

her fingernails into my wrist.

"Somebody needs to go back to your house," Crawford }

said. "This is a kidnapping. There may be a telephone

call. That's almost always the next step, the telephone

call."

"Not if the motive's revenge," RuthClaire said heatedly.

"Not if they take him somewhere and kill him."

"I don't think that's likely," Crawford said. He explained

that a kidnapping usually pointed to a less gruesome

motive, namely, the extorting of a ransom. If Paulie's

abductors had merely wanted to kill him to punish his

parents, they could have shot him from arlCbush. They

could have run him and his guardian down with an automobile.

They could have set off a bomb on the porch.

instead, they had staged a crime requiring at least some

knowledge of the child's mother's movements, some fairly

elaborate disguises and subterfuge, lots of patience, and an

entire bistro basement full of luck. Tonight, everything,

including Adam's confinement in the Emory hospital, had

come together for them. it was even possible that the

J

ANCIENT OF DAYS

175

accidental conjunction of all these elements had provided

the couple an irresistible opportunity to act on impulse.

Now, though, they would try to cash in. Crawford staked

his reputation on the inevitability of a telephone call demanding

money and outlining a sequence of steps for

delivering the ransom.

Caroline, who had been holding RuthClaire's arm throughout

this spiel, spoke up: "You're not being clear, Sergeant.

Do you think the kidnappers planned the whole

thing in excruciating detail, or do you think they got lucky and took the main

chance'? it seems to me that their initial

motive might tip their ultimate behavior."

"I'm not being clear, young lady, because I'm not a

mind reader. Maybe they planned everything in 'excruciating

detail' for some other night, but got lucky this evening

and jumped the gun. Same difference, as I see it. They're

gonna ask for money."

There was More discussion. Bored now, the hangers-on

on the sidewalk began to drift away. Vehicles eased along

Spring Street and our own little alley in deference to the

squad car at curbside. The night smelled of engine oil and

abused asphalt. Neon streaked the floodlit edges of the

sky.

The Blaus agreed to take RuthClaire home. Bilker would

ride with them. Caroline and I would go to Emory Hospi-la}

to break the news of T.P.'s abduction to his father. The

police would send detectives to the Montaraz house, both

to protect its occupants and to monitor the unfolding of the

kidnappers' extortion strategy. If twenty-four hours went

by with no break in the case, the FBI would begin playing

the most prominent role. Meanwhile Crawford and Mireles

would continue following up leads here at the nightclub.

Elsewhere in Fulton County--as in DeKalb, Cobb, Clayton,

and Gwinnett--sheriff's patrols and municipal police

forces would set up interlocking dragnets.

Interlocking dragnets. It sounded good, but I reminded

myself that no one knew what kind of vehicle Craig and

Nancy had at their disposal. Surely, Puddicombe had not

been able to keep his friend E.L.'s pickup truck for the

past year without incurring arrest. On the other hand,

176

Michael Bishop

maybe he had changed its tag, jacked up its body, pin

striped

its hood. I gave Crawford a description of the truck

as I remembered it--a brief already on file with the Geor

gia

Bureau of Investigation--and he in turn had it radioed

around the greater metropolitan area. (Any white-haired

young woman gunning through Avondale Estates in a Ram

Charger would provoke immediate suspicion.)

Bilker told me where he had parked my car. When I

finally got the directions straight, Caroline and I told the

others good night and walked arm in arm down the sidewalk

and through an alley to a crumbling asphalt terrace.

A smelly Dempsy Dumpster occupied most of this space.

Bilker had left the Mercedes beside the dumpster with two

wheels on the terrace and two on the broken cobbles of the

alley itself. No one else had even considered competing

with him for the spot. Ignoring the effluvia from the trash

bin, I pulled Caroline to me and kissed her full on the lips.

She quickly broke away. "Men have all the innate

romance of doorstops."

RuthClaire had said something like that tO me back in

December. I wrinkled my nose and looked around. "Not

exactly the Moulin Rouge, is it?"

"Paul, please don't fantasize a friendly fuck later this

evening," Caroline said. "I'm not ready for it. Even if I

had been ready for it, the kidnapping would've changed

that."

A friendly fuck, I thought. Now there's an expression

RuthClaire would have never used. Hearing it spoken,

however, had an effect precisely the reverse of what Caroline

intended--it excited me. Maybe I was one of those

bleary-eyed lechers for whom dirty talk is an aphrodisiac.

Dirty? A single four-letter word of hearty AngloSaxon

origin'?

Maybe, instead, I was a macho bigot who believed

"bad language" was the province of males only. Me,

macho'? A bigot, maybe--but not a muscle-flexer. More

than likely, truth be known, I was simply unused to hearing

"bad language" on a woman's lips. The cultural

upheaval of the past two decades had passed me by. I was

a forty-seven-year-old southern gentleman who was only

ANCIENT OF D^YS 177

now getting straight the distinction in nuance between shacking up and Jiving

together.

"Look," Caroline was saying, "my car's still parked in

front of the Montarazes. Tomorrow when you and RuthClaire

visit Adam, one of you can drive my VW and leave it near

the sociology building." She handed me her keys. "I would like to see you

again, Paul. It's just that this isn't

the time. I can't believe you think it is."

"Life's short, Miss Hanna. This proves it."

"Ah, another disciple of the carpe diem approach." Her

voice took on a revealingly brittle edge: "You think they'll

kill him'?"

"They may." My knuckles whitened as I tightened my

grip on the steering wheel. "Puddicombe may, at least.

It's hard for me to believe that Nancy'd go along with him

on that score. I don't know what he did to entice her up

here, to get her to go punk--but they do share a common

pain."

"The fact that Teavers died."

"Right. Her husband. His friend. I thought Nancy was

free of that taint, though, i thought she'd managed to work

through everything unscathed."

What Caroline next said struck me as a kind of sorrowful

rebuke: "People who work through everything unscathed

are rare. There may be nobody like that at all, only

good pretenders. '

"Maybe so."

"I don't know whether I'd even be able to trust an

unscathed person, Paul. He---or she--wouldn't be human."

I looked at her sidelong. "The trouble is, you can't trust

a scathed person, either. You can't trust anybody."

"No," Caroline murmured. "You can't trust anybody."

We rode for a while in silence. Then i began to speculate

aloud on the kidnapping. Puddicombe had been hiding

out for a year, eluding the police and plotting revenge. On

the night of E.L.'s disappearance into the brick kiln, he

had probably lit out for Alabama in his buddy's truck.

There, after ditching the vehicle, he had lain low for a

time, probably with the active aid of fellow Klan members.

It was possible, of course, that he had left the

178

Michael Bishop

Southeast completely, striking out for the Rockies or the

California coast. But if he had, he had almost certainly

acquired another car. Teavers's pickup would have been a

red flag to every highway patrolman between Opelika and

Amarillo. Maybe, on the other hand. he had simply disguised

himself--by growing a beard, say--and had ridden

the bus.

Eventually, though, Puddicombe had returned from his

fugitive exile, migrating as if magnetized to Georgia's

capital city. in Atlanta, after all, it would not have been

hard for him to find work as a dish washer or maybe even

a garage mechanic. The biggest threat to his job would

have lain in the likelihood of someone from Beulah Fork

catching sight of him but if his work had kept him, so to

speak, backstage, that likelihood would have been a skimpy

ii one. On the street, a beard and a pair of sunglasses would

: have preserved his cover. To trip himself up, he would

have had to run a traffic light or neglect paying a bill. And

so far, Puddicombe had prudently avoided those kinds of

trip wires.

"How would he have involved Nancy?" Caroline said.

Probably a letter, I told her. He would have written only

once, and he would have stipulated a meeting somewhere

between Atlanta and Beulah Fork. At a roadhouse or a

small-town caf& he would have pressed his case, playing

on Nancy's submerged bitterness and arguing the need to

bring' about Elvis Lamar's posthumous vindication. Initially,

she may have resisted some of these arguments, but

at later rendezvous, each new meeting arranged at the one

before, she would have begun to relish the idea of avenging

her late husband--maybe not by killing anyone, but by

bringing E.L. back to lite as a worrisome force in the

Montarazes' undeserved paradise of love and success. Indeed,

she and Craig may have fallen in love themselves.

Once, after all, E.L. and Craig had been as close as

brothers, and somewhere in the Bible it was written that a

man ought to wed his brother's widow so that he can

protect her person and champion her causes.

"You know the Bible'?" Caroline asked.

"Only by hearsay. The same way Craig Puddicombe

ANCIENT OF DAYS

179

would know it. In Beulah Fork, distortions of it contaminate

everyone's thinking, mine included. We have a bountiful

legacy of high-minded misquotation."

"You think they're lovers?"

"If not lovers, sweethearts. In this day and age, probably

lovers."

"Why so certain'?"

"Nancy's only eighteen. She was widowed at seventeen.

Most of her school chums have moved from Beulah

Fork, or married, or both. When she told me she was

leaving the West Bank, she said it was to seek her fortune.

Male chauvinist pig that I am, I took that as a code word

for husband. She was bored, lonely, and vulnerable. Why

shouldn't she fall in love with Craig?"

"Or he with her?"

"Right. Craig was E.L.'s twin in a Io! of ways, and

Nancy is a pretty little girl. Or was, anyway. They're both

probably fighting to make sense of events and attitudes

that they haven't handled all that well by themselves."

"Nancy was doing all right, wasn't she'?"

"Until Craig contacted her. Until this past April."

"What about the kidnapping? Do you think they've

been following RuthClaire and Adam around, waiting for

an opportunity like tonight's?"

"Looks like it."

"Then tonight had to be a dream-come-true for your

... well, your Puddicombe Conspiracy. Everything fell

into place for them. Nancy was able to walk off with

Paulie as easily as a kid steals an apple from a produce

bin. Doesn't that strike you as--" she hunched her shoulders,

shivering in recollection--"weird?"

"But everything didn't fall into place for them. Bilker

came along. You and I came along. They had to make

some of their own luck, and they did that. Nancy's costume,

her choice of the balloon handout as the best time to

approach us, their goddamn perfect getaway." I took a

quick glance at Caroline. "What're you trying to imply?

That there's something fishy about this business'?"

"Paul, please don't take this wrong--"

"God save me, take ,,hat wrong?"

180

Michael Bishop

"I don't know RuthC)aire. I don't know Adam. For that

matter, I really don't know you. It crossed my mind--just

briefly and not very seriously--that this might be a ...

you know, a publicity stunt. To promote their art and

I

David Blau's gallery."

I

"Jesus Christ!"

"Look, Paul, I know it's backasswards and egotistical,

but for a moment I was afraid I was being made sport of."

"Sport of? What do you mean. sport of'?"

"Not after the police arrived. And not really before,

either. It's just that nothing that happened at the club

seemed real. I couldn't help thinking I was an outsider, not

getting the joke."

"The joke? What cynicism! And five minutes ago you

were berating me for hoping for a friendly fuck on the

same evening my godson gets abducted!"

"Paul, I was confessing to a doubt i had, not leveling

i

an accusation. You're turning this into something it really

isn't."

I was thoroughly confused. Our conversation had gone I

off the rails with her plea not to take her next remark

i

wrong. Had I taken it wrong, or had she impugned

RuthClaire and Adam's integrity as artists and parents? I

thumbed an antacid tablet out of a roll in my pants pocket

and inserted it under my tongue.

"Take me home, Paul. You don't need me at the hospi

tal.

Adam certainly doesn't need me there, either, i'm

sorry this has happened. I'm deeply, deeply sorry."

I took her home, to an apartment complex on Clifton,

not far from the Emory campus. My attempts to get her

talking again met with monosyllabic rebuffs. She had

wounded me by taking potshots at my friends, i had

wounded her by calling her to account for her meanness

and vanity.

Caroline's apartment building had pinkish stucco walls,

gables with casement windows, and rustic Tudor trim. I

parked beside the walk to her front porch, but before i

could even undo my seat buckle, she got out. Then she

leaned back down and gave a harsh barking little laugh.

"What's that supposed to mean'?"

ANCIENT OF DAYS

18 I

"I was about to tell you how much I enjoyed the

evening."

"Oh."

"Parts of it, I did," she said. Then she slammed the

door and hiked up her walk like a drill sergeant in the

Scandinavian Fashion Force. I waited until she was safely

inside before giving a salute and driving wistfully away.

"HE'S AWAKE," the nurse on Adam's floor said when i

showed up at the hospital tO fulfill my designated role as

Evil Messenger. "He doesn't sleep all that much, anyway,

but after Mrs. Montaraz called to tell us you were eoming, I went down there

to see if he needed to be awakened. He

didn't." A middle-aged woman with strong Germanic features

and eyes like indigo marbles, the nurse tilted her

head. "Is there anything I can do. Mr. Loyd?"

"Just make sure we're not disturbed for a while."

The nurse could not contain hei'self. "What's wrong?"

"If RuthClaire didn't tell you when she called, ma'am,

then i certainly can't tell you." Unintentionally, the words

came out like a reprimand. I patted the woman's shoulder

to soften their impact, then walked down the long, antiseptic

corridor.

Adam was sitting up in bed in the dark. He had propped

two pillows behind him, and his legs were crossed beneath

his sheet in the lotus position of an Oriental contemplative.

The IV bottle beside him, its tube running to his wrist like

a life-giving amber fuse, glinted eerily in the darkness.

The bandages on his lower face gave him the look of an

unfinished plaster-ot'-Paris bust. He sat remarkably still,

and I felt as I had felt as a small boy, approaching my

father after some terrible disobedience.

I did not reach for the light switch--maybe for reasons

of self-concealment. I stood in the doorway letting my

eyes adjust and noticing with what stoic endurance Adam's

182

Michael Bishop

own eyes were trying to allay my fears. Somehow, he had

picked up on them like a faint but acrid scent.

Don't quail from necessity, his eyes said. Come sit

down.

I crossed the room and sat down in the chair that

RuthClaire ordinarily used. But I must have appeared about

ready to bolt, for Adam lifted the arm to which the IV tube

was attached and gently patted me, as I had patted the

nurse. Go ahead, he was telling me; be as brutal as your

news demands.

'RuthClaire would have come to tell you this, Adam,

but circumstances don't allow. I'm her emissary. I'm here

to tell you what nobody--not even your own wife---could

tell you easily."

Adam's eyes grew a little larger, and he made a series

of signs that somehow permitted me to interpret them.

"No, no one's died. So far as we know. Tiny Paul's

been taken." And I told him in detail what had happened

at Sinusoid Disturbances and afterward, including the poi

lice's conviction that we would soon receive a ransom

demand and my own speculations about the identities of

the kidnappers. At the moment, though, everyone was

walking gingerly across a rope bridge over a chasm of

indeterminate depth. We would not be able to see how far

it was to the bottom until Craig Puddicombe or Nancy

Teavers called. Lamely, I concluded, "All we can do is

wait."

Adam pulled the IV tube free of the plastic connector in

his wrist and lifted himself up high enough to hook the

tube over its pole. There, it ceased to drip. My friend was

wearing one of those hospital gowns with the split up the

rear, a design feature of curious motivation. Was the split

to make it easier for orderlies to administer enemas, or was

it a sartorial aid to patients frequently victimized by sudden

diarrhea attacks'? These seemed mutually exclusive

goals, but the gowns were an immemorial hospital humiliation.

Adam managed to wear his without looking

supremely ridiculous (maybe because nudity held no terror

for him); but when he hopped nimbly down from his bed

in the garment, I found myself glancing around the room

ANCIENT OF DAYS

183

in search of a safety pin with which to close up the vent in

back. At Sinusoid Disturbances, I would have had no

trouble finding one.

"Adam, what are you doing'?"

He brushed past me to the sink and-mounted a stairstep

stbol giving him access to his own image in the mirror.

His hairy buttocks peeked through the split in his gown,

and the backs of his thighs tightened and relaxed as he

raised and lowered himself on tiptoes. It was then that I

realized be was unwrapping the gauzy cerements holding

the lower half of his face together.

"Adam!"

He shot me a warning look, motioned for me to keep

my voice down, and resumed unpackaging his jaw. He had

already discarded the foam-rubber cup for his chin, dropping

it into the sink. Only the light spilling in from the

corridor enabled him to work, but he was peeling off layer

after layer with an alacrity that suggested he knew what he

was doing. Had he been practicing for a moment such as

this'? it hardly seemed likely, but how else account for the

speed and knowledgeability of his fingers'?

I whispered, "Adam, you can't !eave the hospital. There's

not a thing any of us can do until they call."

His fingers slowed a little, but he kept unpeeling gauze.

"What if the kidnappers ring up the nurses' station

instead of the house'? That's a possibility, you know. If

you rush home to RuthClaire, there'll be nobody here to

take their call to the hospital. Nobody who can respond to

their demands, I mean." I was improvising, only improvising,

but the possibility began to sound realistic even to

me. "You couldn't talk to them, of course, but you could

authorize me to act as your spokesman. Think about it,

Adam. Somebody has to be here."

The habiline shrugged my hand away and finished taking

off his bandages. I looked at him in profile. His nose

seemed less flat, his cheekbones slightly higher, his chin a

good deal More pronounced. Not only had the plastic

surgeons reconstructed his buccal cavity, they had given

his entire face a More modern configuration. None of the

Michael Bishop

changes was severe or blatant, but together they gave him

a streamlined, Nilotic handsomeness.

Adam came down the stairstep stool so that I was

towering over him again, embarrassed by my own moronic

tallness. From a hamper he grabbed a pair of clean white

towels, which he folded double and spread out on the floor next to the bed. He

nodded me down. I knelt on one of the

towels, and he, of course, knelt on the other, turning me

back into Goliath to his humble shepherd boy.

Nevertheless, side by side, we prayed. Or, I suppose,

Adam prayed while I knelt beside him with my forehead

pressed against the edge of the mattress. "Pray without

ceasing," it says in Thessalonians, but I couldn't even

manage to get past the part about

forgiving-usourtrespassesasweforgivethosewho-trespass,

etc., without thinking of

Nancy's perfidy, or how Caroline had thought the kidnapping

might be a publicity stunt, or when I was likely to be

able to resume my reponsibilities at the West Bank. Pray

without ceasing'? I couldn't do any better than an intermittent,

"Don't let the bastards kill him, God," between

which times I fantasized slitting Craig's throat, taking

Caroline to bed, and catering the reception of an expensive

wedding party at Muscadine Gardens--not necessarily in

that order or all at once. My knees got sore, and my

kidneys ached. Somehow, though, I stayed on the floor

beside Adam for almost three hours, sharing his vigil.

At 3:57 ^.M.--I checked my watch--the nurse came to the door to report that

Adam had a telephone call.

"I tried to tell him that this was an absurd hour to call,"

she said, "but he told me if I didn't fetch Mr. Montaraz,

I'd . . . Fd 'live to regret it.'"

"It's Puddicombe," I whispered. Aloud I said, "We'll

be down there in two minutes. Go back and tell him." My

heart was leaping against my rib cage. Too often, the

parents of stolen children hear nothing from the abductors.

A break like this--a break I had desperately anticipated--was

a variety of sardonic miracle.

The nurse left, and I began banging my forehead against

the mattress in despairing joy. The son of a bitch had

ANCIENT OF DAYS

185

actually telephoned! I rocked back on my heels and mouthed

a silent thank you. Adam touched my shoulder.

"God. Bless. You," he managed.

I gaped at Adam. He had spoken, and never had I heard

a voice so peculiarly pitched and modulated. A scratchy

computer sort of voice struggling to sound human. Impulsively,

then, I hugged the little man. Holding him at arm's

length, I told him that he had better put on a pair of pants.

If we were too long getting to the nurses' station.

Puddicombe--or whoever it was--would grow nervous

about the delay and hang up. I rubbed two fingers along

the side of my nose. They came away wet.

A PAIR Of khaki trousers his only clothing, Adam accompanied

me to the nurses' station. The woman on duty

there was waiting for us with her hand over the telephone

mouthpiece.

"is there an extension?" I said.

She nodded at the glass-walled office behind the counter.

"In there. If you want to, you can cradle the receiver on

the speaker device beside the telephone, Mr. Loyd, and

it'll broadcast like a radio."

"That's good," I said. "You wouldn't happen to have a

tape recorder, too, would you?"

"One of our day nurses, Andrea, has a jam box. one of

those big silver things that young people carry around to

dealkm their elders with. It also records. Andrea leaves her

tapes in the drawer. If it's important, you can tape over

one of those--so long as you take the responsibility for

ruining a favorite of hers.'"

"Yesl ma'am."

At which point il dawned on the nurse that Adam's face

was free of its bandages. "Oh. my God! Those weren't

supposed to come off yet. Dr. Ruggiero will flay me

alive."

186

Michael Bishop

"No, he won't," I said. "Mr. Montaraz is healing

nicely."

I led Adam into the office, found the jam box, rummaged

up an unmarked tape, put it in the machine, and

pressed the record button. Then I set the telephone receiver

into the amplifier unit and depressed the lighted button on

the base of the telephone. The nurse, having observed all

this through the glass, hung up her phone and left to make

a tour of the floor. Efficient and discreet, that good woman.

"We're here," I told the caller.

"Who's 'we'?" he asked, and those two syllables identified

him for me: Craig Puddicombe. He had made no

effort to disguise his voice. (If the restaurant business ever

got too tame for me, maybe I could go into police work.)

I told Craig who I was.

"The first dude in history to let a hibber snake his old

lady."

"We were divorced when RuthClaire married Adam."

"Yeah. And you even played pimp for 'em. didn't you.

Now you're up there in the hospital holding the hibber's

hand. Jesus, Mr. Loyd, you take the cake."

"But you and Nancy took the child. What do you--"

He cut me off. "Get your tape recorders all set up? Get

a call off to the police? That why you took so goddamn

long pickin' up the phone?"

"Adam had to get dressed. His room's at the far--"

"Stuff that, Mr. Loyd." He said something to somebody

else in the room with him, but it was all muffled and

indistinct. Then he said, "Prove to me the hibber's really

there."

"How? You know he can't talk."

"He can sing, can't he'? He can hum like a rotary

engine."

"Craig, he's had an operation. His face is bandaged.

The entire lower portion of his face was remodeled."

"Yeah, well, he'll still be stump-ugly's far as I'm concerned.

Have him hum through his bandages."

I started to protest, but Adam pulled my handkerchief

out of my coat pocket, turned it into a bandanna, tied the

ANCIENT OF DAYS

187

bandanna.around his face, and stepped toward the amplifier

to hum the melody of a Cokesbury hymn.

"That's the hibber, all right. A mule brayin' into a

barrel."

"Prove to me you've got Tiny Paul," I said.

"By doin' what'? You wanna hear him scream'?"

I put my hand on Adam's arm. He stopped his unusual

humming--half lament, half yodel--and removed the bandanna.

He shook his head in response to Craig's last

question.

"Never mind," I said. "What do you want?"

"A ransom. If Mister and Missus Miscegenation give us

the ransom we want, they'll get their filthy little whatever-it-is

back."

"How much money, Craig?"

"Who said anything about money?"

The unexpectedness of this really hit me hard. What sort

of ransom required no monetary payoff'?

' "Y'all still there'?" Craig'asked.

"Yeah, we're here. State your terms. We're listening."

For a moment, Craig consulted with his accomplice.

Then, as if' reading from a manuscript, he said, "We don't

want money. We don't do violence. What we want is

what's right. You may think the brat's been taken because

his hibber daddy killed E.L., or you may think we covet

what the brat's unnatural family's built up for itself since

the hibber did that killin'. It ain't so, though, neither of

those guesses. We took the brat to make some undone'

justice get done. We took him to set some wrong things

right."

This nonsense was scaring me. "What the hell do you

want us to do, Craig'? Come on, get to the point."

"Have a little patience," the amplifier said, mockingly

polite. A sound of paper rattling. "You get the little

halfbreed back if and when you do the following stuff.

First of all, Mister and Missus Miscegenation they stop

livin' together. Second of all, they tell the papers and the

TV they've stopped. They say they regret the sinful example

they've set decent whites and blacks all over the world

by bringin' their mongrel brat into it. Third of all. they--"

I 88

Michael Bishop

"Craig," I pleaded.

"Third of all, they make a public apology to the parents,

family, and widow of E. L. Teavers, my friend. And

fourth, the hJbber gives himself up for trial on charges

of--" a meaningful pause--"uh, malicious homicide."

"Craig, E.L. was trying to kill Adam. You and your

crew had kidnapped us, for God's sake--the same way

you and Nancy have criminally abducted Tiny Paul. There's

not a court anywhere that would convict Adam of anything

but saving all our lives!"

"Ah, we was just tryin' to scare some sense into you.

Nobody out at Synder's place was gonna get kilt--not

until your goddamn hibber chucked E.L. down that hole."

"But that's what E.L. was trying to do to him, Craig!"

"Puttin' your hibber down that hole didn't kill him, did

' it'? Him and his kind lived hundreds of goddamn centuries

in caves. So puttin' a hibber down a brick-kiln hole hurts it

'bout as much as tossin' Bt'er Rabbit into a goddamn

briar patch. He popped back out, didn't he'? That provcs it."

Absurd. absurd. The boy and I were operating from

completely different sets of premises. I changed tacks: "Is

that it'? Four things to do to get T.P. back'?"

"We gotta fifth un." Our tormentor rattled his prepared

text again. "Inasmuch as Mister and Missus Miscegenation

have made beaucoups of bucks from the degenerate

elements of American society, and are richer than anyone

but the upright and godly ought to be, they've got to--"

Craig halted. His fancy lead-in had taken a little steam out

of his delivery. "Inasmuch as all that, they've got to make

contributions adding up to fifty thousand dollars to ten

different charities and political groups of our choosing.

They'll get the list on Monday or Tuesday. Each group

gets at least three thousand, but--and this is big of us,

now--Mister and Missus Hibber can decide themselves

how to ladle out the twenty thousand left over after the

first split."

"Money. It comes down to money."

"The money ain't important. Mr. Loyd. It's not for us,

anyhow. It's only 'cause they got it and don't deserve it andi

ANCIENT OF DAYS

189

need to give it to somebody who does--that's why we're

makin' 'em do it. They do it by check, too. We get to see

the canceled checks as proof it's all been done like we

asked it to be. The list comin' in the mail explains the

whole system."

Incredulously, i asked, "They won't get Tiny Paul back

until all the canceled checks come in'?"

"Not until they've split up and annulled their ungodly

marriage and lived apart long enough to show us they've

really done it."

"Craig, what's the time frame? How long are you going

to hold Tiny Paul'? There's no give-and-take in your terms.

For you. it's open-ended--but for RuthClaire and Adam,

it's a nightmare. And if they're living apart when you

finally release the baby, who are you going to release him tO*?"

"To your ex-old lady, of course. The hibber dbn't have

any rights in this."

"But how long. Craig. Play fair'with us, damn it!"

'Whey'Il know when we do, won't they'?" And he hung

up. The speaker on the amplifier was amplifying a dial

tone. No way to trace the call: It had come through the

hospital's central switching system. So Craig Puddicombe

and Nancy Teavers, with T.P. in their doubtful care, had

sunk again into the nearly impenetrable anonymity of a

metropolitan area with close to four million peoplel If, in

fact, they had not made their call from Alabama. Tennessee,

Florida, or one of the Carolinas. And even if they

were still in Greater Atlanta, they had More than a hundred

square riffles of labyrinthine territory in which to go to

ground.

Adam slumped wearily into the chair at the desk. His

voice, when he spoke, was a series of agonized croaks.

"I wish. Miss RuthClaire. Had let. McElrov. Baptize

him."

ADAM MADE up his mind to leave Emory Hospital. While

I telephoned RuthClaire, he dressed, packed a suitcase,

and faced down the bewildered night nurse with a painful

repetition of the words, "Goodbye, goodbye. Going now."

During this confrontation, he maintained the dignified decorum

of a Japanese chaFgd d'affaires. When I got off the

phone, the nurse put through a hasty call to one of Adam's

doctors, who at first voiced angry opposition to our plans

to decamp at this hour. Talking briefly to me, however, he

at last gave his reluctant consent, and the orderlies who

had been summoned to keep Adam and me from hijacking

an elevator to freedom dutifully backed off. The nurse then

rode downstairs with us, reminding Adam to eat nothing

chewier than oatmeal until Dr. Ruggiero had examined

him again and pointing out that he would not be able to

communicate as well as he wished until he had undergone

his scheduled speech therapy.

At the Montaraz house, only a few minutes later,

RuthClaire ran to Adam and embraced him.

I stood just inside the door connecting the kitchen to the

big downstairs studio. The other three men in that room

were Bilker Moody and the same pair of GBi agents who

had driven RuthClaire and me back to the Synder property

on the day after our abduction from the West Bank.

Niedrach. Davison. I couldn't recall their first names.

They wore nondescript business suits of flimsy black cotton,

almost as if they had gone shopping together and

picked their outfits off the same rack. Davison, however,

sported a beige banlon shirt under his jacket, while Niedrach

had made his own distinguishing fashion statement with a

red clip-on tie and a red canvas belt on whose buckle there

gleamed the embossed head of the mascot of the University

of Georgia, a bulldog wearing a freshman's beanie.

190

ANCIENT OF DAYS

191

Bilker.'s opinion of the GBI agentg revealed itself in the

curl of his upper lip.

At last Adam and RuthClaire separated, and RuthClaire

distractedly reintroduced everyone. I gave Niedrach the

cassette on which I had recorded Craig's ransom demands.

A tape player was produced, and the GBi men sat down

next to it to listen to the cassette. Bilker retreated to the

bar, Adam paced, and RuthClaire perched on the arm of

the divan beside Niedrach. I squatted opposite the divan on

the other side of the marble coffee table.

"... don't want money. We don't do violence. What

we want is what's right. You may th£nk the brat's been

taken . . ."

Afterward, Niedrach said, "That's the craziest--! mean, the absolutely

craziest--set of ransom demands I've ever heard."

Seated gnomishly on the white-leather wheel 'of one of

the Montarazes' high-gloss crimson bar stools, Bilker

drawled, "The reason you:re dumfuzzled is that this ain't

really a kidnapping anymore."

Niedrach raised his eyebrows. "No? What is it, then? A

dope deal'?"

"A hostage situation."

"Every kidnap victim is a hostage," the GBI agent

countered with as much tact as he could muster. "That's

tautological."

"Yeah. Logical 'cause you've been taught it. But a hostage

situation's different from a kidnappin'. Why'? For the

simple fact that money ain't the perpetrator's number-one

priority. It's the pursuit of some far-out political or ideological

goal by means of terroristic threats."

"He told us they wouldn't kill Paulie," RuthClaire said. Bilker revolved a

half-turn this way, a half-turn the

other. Because of his bulk, I almost expected to see the

legs of the stool screwing curls of hardwood up around'

themselves as they sank into the floor. "Yeah, well, Puddicombe's

cooler than any kidnapper 'cause he's got the

Great White Jehovah, Jumper of Jigaboos, on his side.

He'll take More chances than your two-bit kidnapper. If you push hint, he'll

raise the stakes."

i 92

Michael Bishop

"The stakes he's playing for are revenge," I said.

"Mebbe so. But he gets it by makin' us dance to his

fiddlin', not by crashin' the Montarazes' bank. accounts."

"So?" said Niedrach,

"We better dance to his fiddlin'. Or make it look like it,

anyway. Otherwise, he'll--pardon me, Mrs. Montaraz--he'll

off his hostage."

Davison said, "How do you know so much about it?"

"Mebbe I watch the 'CBS Evening News.'"

Niedrach stood up and shoved his hands into his pockets.

"Mr. Moody's pegged this exactly right. Now that we

know it's a kidnapping----or a hostage situation involving a

kidnap victim--the FBI's going to take over primary, responsibility

lot solving the case. We have to contact them."

"But you and Mr. Davison have been through this with

us before," RuthClaire said. "The FBI won't dump you

completely, will they?"

"I hope not. I'll try to make that very point, Mrs.

Montaraz, in telling them what's happened so far. In the

; meantime, though, it'd be smart if Adam--Mr. Montaraz,

I mean--moved out. To give every appearance of comply: ing with the sickie's

demands. Because Mr. Moody's right

about that."

Bilker stopped revolving his stool, embarrassed to find

an ally where he had posited a bungling bureaucrat.

RuthClaire said, "I just can't believe Nancy would let

anything happen to Paulie. It's unreal."

"She may be in as much danger as your son," Niedrach

said.

And so it was decided that Adam would indeed move

out of the house on Hurt Street. Niedrach would have a

secretary at the state GBI offices telephone the Atlanta

newspapers with an anonymous tip about the deteriorating

marital situation of the Montarazes. She would claim to be

a neighbor with firsthand knowledge of their troubles.

including a confidence from RuthClaire that her husband

had just agreed to a trial separation requiring his immediate

departure from the household. RuthClaire was then to

grant a tight-lipped interview omitting any mention of the

ANCIENT OF DAYS

193

kidnapping and succinctly confirming the anonymous neighbor's

separation story.

"But a separation on what grounds'?" RuthClaire pleaded.

"Anything you can think of that doesn't strike you as

too unseemly," Niedrach ,said.

Adam tried to speak, but his gravelish computer voice

would not cooperate for him. He reverted to sign language,

and RuthClaire interpreted it for the rest of us.

"Career incompatibility," she said. "We've been arguing

about Adam's career plans. I want him to keep painting,

but he wishes to enroll--" she struggled to read his gestures

correctly--"in the Candler School of Theology at

Emory. He wishes to take the curriculum leading to the

Master of Theological Studies degree. I'm to tell the reporter

that Adam has gone off the deep end on matters

God-related."

"That's great." Niedrach said. "That's inspited."

Davison wrinkled the bridge of his nose. "A habiline

religious nut'?"

Yes. Apparently so. The point of the ruse, of course,

was to get word to Craig that RuthClaire and Adam had

stopped living together. The story's appearance in print

would insure its finding its way onto local TV news broadcasts,

where Craig might be monitoring recent muggings,

rapes, street-name changes, city-council shouting matches,

and mayoral trips overseas.

"What's the chance of the TV and papers catchin' wind

of the kidnappin' itself'?" Bilker asked.

"A dust-up at a place like Sinusoid Disturbances is a

regular thing." Davison replied. "We're in the clear for

now."

Niedrach said, "Puddicombe's likely to break the news

himself. Publicity doesn't worry him, he might even like

it. So if the story leaks, Paulie won't be in any More. or

any less, danger than he already is."

Where was Adam going to move to? We mulled the

options. He needed a shelter that offered privacy as well as

a certain remoteness from the urban bustle of Atlanta.

What qualified'? A rented house in Alpharetta'? A lakeside

cottage in Cherokee County'? The monastery in Conyers?

194

Michael Bishop

"Let him come to Paradise Farm with me," I suggested.

RuthClaire said, "Wouldn't Craig look askance on that?

You're my ex-husband. You're also Paulie's godfather."

"Two castoffs commiserating." I said. "it's honky-onhibber

marriage that upsets him, not white and black males

cohabiting."

"What would that do to our cover story about his

decision to attend the Candler School of Theology'?"

Adam signed again, and RuthClaire said, "It's too late,

now, to enroll for summer term at the seminary. Besides,

the fall semester doesn't officially commence until the last

Monday in August."

"So the alibi holds," Niedrach said. "Take him with

you, Mr. Loyd. We've got an agent in Hothlepoya County

investigating the drug scene there. He can act as a go-between,

relaying inlbrmation from us to you and vice

versa. So go on."

"When'?"

"As soon as he can get ready to go. Now, if possible."

RUTHCLAIRE AND Adam went upstairs together to get

him packed lt'or his stay at Paradise Farm. And, of course,

to tell each other goodbye. Bilker and the GBi agents,

discreetly embarrassed by this turn of events, sat together

in the kitchen drinking coffee and swapping companionable

tall tales about their prowess as bodyguards and their

expertise as sleuths.

"I'll be back in an hour," I informed them.

Davison, who had draped his flimsy black jacket over

his chair, Blurted, "An hour? Where the hell do you think

you're going'?"

"To tell somebody goodbye."

I drove to Caroline's--not in her little blue beetle, but in

my big silver Mercedes. I arrived at 9:37 A.M., bleary-eyed,

funky, and anxiously aware of the deadline I had set

;mr -lllll

ANCIENT OF DAYS

195

myself. An hour? I now had only forty-six minutes. It

might take me that long to convince my hapless generative

equipment that it could still pretend to that title. It might

take me longer to convince the lovely Caroline to let me

try to convince my equipment. Wasn't I presuming too

much?

Staggering along the walk to her porch, I felt that I was

moving in a pair of tinfoil shorts. I itched. I had not slept

all night. My stubbly beard seemed to be infested with

microscopic lumberjacks sawing away at every follicle. Who--whom--was i

kidding'? I had no chance with this

lady.

Forty-four minutes.

At last, bracing myself against her door, I leaned with

one sharp elbow and alt my bathetic longing into the tiny

button that rang her bell. Her dear, melodious bell. Inside

her apartment chimed the opening eight notes of "Tara's

Theme" fronl Gone with the Wind. They chimed over and

over again because I was simply too weary to pull back my

elbow.

Forty-three minutes.

"Who is it'?" Caroline's voice cried.

"Me."

She opened her door the three inches permitted by her

safety latch. "What do you want'?"

"A friendly fee-fifofunx"

"Has anything happened'? Have they found Paulie'?"

I squared my shoulders and tried to alchemize my weary

nonchalance into concerned sobriety. "Listen, Caroline, if

you'll--"

"That's not my car," she said, peering past me. "How

am I going to get my car home'?" She shook her head.

"Damn! That's not important, is it'? The important thing is

Paulie. I'm still three-quarters asleep."

"If you'll let me in, I'll tell you all I--"

She was unfastening the chain. The door opened, and she was standing against a

backdrop of framed Broadway

posters, porcelain flower vases, and at least two copper

umbrella holders. The cool breath of the apartment's air-conditioning

rippled over me. As for Caroline herself, she

196

Michael Bishop

was wearing a yellow dressing gown that seemed to be

lined with layer upon liquid-thin layer of even paler material.

She looked and smelled like the demigoddess of a

fragrant wheat field.

"You'll have to talk to me first," she said. "You'll

have to shower. You'll have to eat breakfast with me."

"Forty-one minutes," I said. "I've got forty-one minutes." "Listen,

Mr. Loyd, there's a clock in every room but

the bathroom. You can hang your watch on the shower

spigot for all I care. If you have any sense, though, you'll

forget all about your stupid forty-one minutes and put your

watch in the bottom of one of your shoes." She pulled me

out of the doorway and shut us into the Fundy Bay briskness

of her apartment.

As matters unfolded, I put my Elgin in the bottom of

one of my shoes and deliberately forgot about it.

I SPENT More than forty-one minutes at Caroline's. I

spent More than eigho'-two minutes at Caroline's. In fact, I

didn't make it back to Hurt Street until better than two

hours after my leave-taking--but neither Bilker nor the

GBI agents could find it in themselves to scold me because

Caroline herself, fetching in old jeans and a bright yellow

tank top, had accompanied me. Alter all, she had to pick

up her Volkswagen: moreover, as a witness to the crime,

she wished to accommodate Niedrach and Davison by

recounting the event from her point of view. Wouldn't

they have sought her out eventually, anyway? ]'hey admitted

that they would have.

"Besides, RuthClaire might appreciate having another

woman around for a while today," i said. "It's not going

to be easy for her with Adam gone and only Bilker's

shoulder to cry on."

Bilker snorted, in agreement rather than indimation,

i

And when the Montarazes came downstairs,iuthClaic

k

ANCIENT OF DAYS

197

and Caroline embraced like long-lost siblings miraculously

reunited.

Adam and i, meanwhile, carried his belongings out to

my car for the trip to Beulah Fork. Bilker tent a hand.

Even on its high~performance shocks, the rear of my

Mercedes began to sag. Adam had insisted on adding to

his own tuggage at least three dozen of RuthClaire's More

recent paintings. Although fairly small, these canvases

were still affixed to their frames, and Bilker and I had to

struggle to wedge them into the trunk between the suitcases

and the pasteboard boxes.

"Adam, what's the point of taking the paintings'?" "Remembram'e," he gargled.

Because it was painful tor him to speak, I did not

question him further--but it occurred to me that he was

preparing himself for a lengthy separation from RuthClaire.

This was not a surrender to despair, however, but ah act of

faith. If he and his wife were to be reunited with their

child, they would have to accede to and of course endure

the stipulations of the kidnappers. With luck, the GBI

might break the case, but there wax no guarantee.

But these paintings--the drab acrylics that she had hopefully

entitled SouLs'--still seemed to me the least distinguished

work of RuthClaire's career. They were blatant

mediocrities. Only a uxorious husband could love them. I

scratched my head. Adam was not really the uxorious

type. but his fondness for this series--when, tot "remembrances,''

he could have taken better examples of his

wife's arl--was truly puzzling.

We got away from Atlanta shortly after noon. On our

drive down, Adam read. He had a stack of hardcover

books at his feet on the floorboard, and he seemed to pick

up, thumb through, and peruse a new one about every

fifteen minutes or so. Does God Exist? and Eterna/L/, by

Hans Kfing. God and the A,vtronomers by Robert Jastrow, God and the New

Physics by Paul Davies. The Dancing

Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav. The Reenchantmenl oJ' the

Worh/ by Morris Berman. Mind and Nalure by Gregory

Bateson. tin anthology entitled 7'he Mind's I by a pair of

editors whose names escape me. I don't know what all

198

Michael Bishop

else. I had the impression that Adam was reviewing these

texts, checking passages that he had underlined in previous

readings, rather than completely encompassing each volume

for the first time--but even this formidable intellectual

feat had its intimidating aspects. Out of respect for my

pasnger's activity, I kept my mouth shut.

At Paradise Farm, unloading the car, I finally broke my

self-imposed vow of silence: 'Adam, you know the story

you told RuthClaire to tell the reporter about the reasons

for your separation'.>''

He raised his eyebrows.

"The one about entering the seminary this fall'?"

"Yes'?" he croaked.

':It came to you so quickly, that apparent fiction. I was

..wondering if ... well, if it might really be something

you'd like to try."

"Oh, yes," he managed. 'I. Have. Thought. About. lt."

LlVlA GEORGE, Hazel Upchurch, and our latest little

waitress from Tocqueville Junior College did not .jump for

joy upon my return. An hour ago, a tour bus from Muscadine

Gardens had set down forty people at the West Bank's

front door. These people had descended like a flock of

crows, eaten a dozen different menu items, left a skimpy

collective tip, and flown away in their bus with a rude

backfire.

"Did you give them the substitutes they wanted?"

Livia George was slumped spraddledegged at a table

near the cash register. "Don' I always, Mistah Paul'?"

"Everybody was taken care of'?"

She gave me a disgusted look. "We done turned you a

pretty profit, and we done been doin' it the whole livelong

week. You jes' like a man runs up to put out a fire

when it's awreddy burnt down his house."

ANCIENT OF DAYS

199

"Livvy. you say the sweetest things."

"How's MJstah Adam'.)'. she abruptly asked, sitting up

straight and wiping her brow. ''How's Miss RuthClaire?"

"Fine," I tied. "Fine."

i made some noises about the apparent success of Adam's

operation, but beyond that partial truth I couldn't

comfortably go. To prevent any further discussion of the

matter, I helped clean up the restaurant, then stayed on for

the five-o'clock dinner crowd. Our receipts tk)r the day

were encouraging, and I drove Livia George home without

once mentioning that I had a guest in my house.

NEXT MORNING, somewhat closer to noon than to sunup,

I was awakened by the telev, ision set downstairs.

i knotted my terrycloth robe about my waist and stumbled

barefoot down the steps to find Adam sitting crosslegged

on the floor with a section of the Sunday Journal-Constitution strewn all

around him and my RCA XL100's

screen flickering with ill-defined violet and magenta images

of Dwight "Happy" McElroy's "Great Gospel

Giveaway" broadcast.

"This is my story, this is my song," sang the hundred-member

choir behind McElroy. "Praising my Savior all'

the day long!"

Shots of the choir were interspersed with wide-angle

pans of the congregation in McElroy's huge Televangelism

Center in Rehoboth. Louisiana. This soaring, baroquely

buttressed structure had been paid for by the four-bit to

five-dollar contributions of hundreds of thousands of Iow-income

subscribers to the doctrinal guidelines of the Greater

Christian Constituency of America, Inc. Despite the rad-died

colors on my picture tube, I could see quite clearly

that attending the 3-G service were More enraptured souls

than you could reasonably expect to find at the Omni

during an Atlanta Hawks basketball game. Seven thousand

200'

Michael Bishop

people? Ten? However many there were, they must have

converged on Rehoboth from every city and hamlet on the

Gulf Coast, not excluding Baton Rouge, New Orleans,

Biloxi, and Mobile. The blessed place rocked.

"Ah." I said. "Your favorite show."

Adam was already dressed. A pair of light brown bush

shorts and an orange T-shirt celebrating the pleasures of

River Street in Savannah. He handed me a section of the

paper called "The Arts."

"Turn first page," he growled, but, overnight, his speech

had become clearer and More fluid.

I obeyed. What greeted my eye on the inside page was

this headline:

MARRIAGE OF WORLD-FAMOUS ATLANTA ARTISTS ON SKIDS

AS RESULT OF HABILINE'S DECISION TO ATTEND SEMINARY

Beside the brief story was a file photograph of

Adam and RuthClaire in "happier times." namely, at

the opening of his show at Abraxas in February. My

own face was a smudge of dots among other ill-defined

faces in the background.

"That was quick, wasn't it'?"

I read the story. It quoted RuthClaire to the effect that

Adam's pursuit of spiritual fulfillmcnt had left him little

time for either Tiny Paul or her. She still loved him.

However, that very love made it impossible to deny him

what he most wanted, a chance to study at Candler

without the encumbrances of a demanding wife and

child. She had offered to support him in his quest for a

theological degree, but all he really wished was complete

freedom from family obligations. No one alive

fully understood the habiline mind, but in some respects

Adam's outlook was that of a medieval ascetic with a

calling for the priesthood. Had she not intercepted him

on his northward trek through Georgia nearly two years

ago. almost certainly he would have discovered his

spiritual bent without first marrying.

Adam grunted. "She neglects to say. That 'almost

certainly.' I would have. Remained a naked animal."

ANCIENT OF DAYS

201

"Never mind. You still end up looking like a horse's

butt, Adam. What kind of man abandons his wife and

son to begin a course of religious study'/Jesus."

"I do not care how I end up. Looking. To people

who do not know me."

"You just want Paulie back'?"

"Yes."

On "Gospel Giveaway," McElroy had launched into

a sen'non, the words rolling from him like Gulf Coast

combers in hurricane season, powerful, dangerous, unrelenting.

{Of course, there was also the ever-present

inset of the vivacious woman interpreting the sermon for

the program's deaf viewers, her hands flashing belore

her like hungry seagulls.) Suddenly, though, McElroy was

holding up a copy of the same section of the Atlanta paper

now in my own hands.

"... a continuing assault on the American family,"

he thundered, waving the newspaper at his congrega-i'

tion. "I had planned to apologize this morning for my

overzealousness last summer in castigatin' the former

RuthClaire Loyd for livin' in sin with a male creature not her husband. Well,

it's long since become evident to

everybody that this so-called ci'eature is a man. He and

Miss RuthChfire were in fact husband and wife at the

time of their apparent illicit cohabitation. That being' so,

they de.¥erved an apology from me. Why, this past week

I visited Adam Montm'az at a hospital in Atlanta and

placed my hands square on his head and baptized him'

into the everlastin' glory and the ever-glorious communion

of the Body of Christ, say Amen/"

The people in the Televangelism Center roared,

i

' 'Amen/' '

"And at the same time I unburdened my spirit of its

load of guilt and sorrow to both Montarazes. cailin'

upon then] to forgive me in the great and gracious name

of :lesus Christ. And did they forgive me? I believe they

I

did.

and I went away from that city in the conviction

that here were two righteous human bein's saved from

i

sin and despair by their faith in God and by their humble

t

devotion to each other."

'lt , -"*'""'--- '

Jill T'IIIII ri IIII

202

Michael Bishop

"To God give the glory!" a member of the audience

cried.

"But what do I read this morning but that this selfsame

couple, so concerned and carin' only five days

ago, has fallen to the epidemic of sundered relationships

ravagin' our country the way the plague once ravaged

Europe! This story wounds me so grievously because

RuthClaire Montaraz has broken her marriage for the

most incredible of reasons. And what's that, brothers

and sisters'? Why, nothing More terrible than her husband's

desire to . . . to study for the ministn,,t'' I A collective groan from the

congregation. I

Adam sprang up from the floor and punched the

button turning the set off. "That. Son. Of. Bitch," he

enunciated.

"RuthClair¢ didn't let him baptize T.P. He resents

her for that, Adam. He's trying to get back at her."

"He has misread the story. Is he . . . unable to read?

I am the one. Who has deserted my family."

"Adam, it's all a fabrication. Everything in that story."

My friend struggled to explain himself: "But he has

misread, even, the fabrication. A person working for a

Master of Theological Studies . . . is not preparing for

the ministry. That is the degree of a lay person. Mr.

McElroy should know that."

"RuthClaire balked him. That's all he knows."

"So he blackens her name from his pulpit'? For oh-so-many

viewers'? Is that what he does?" Adam stopped

pacing, rubbed his lower jaw, and pointed one bony

finger at the blank TV screen. "Dwight 'Happy' McElroy,

you are one . . . very unpleasant . . . son of bitch."

I calmed Adam down and got him into the kitchen

where, remembering the orders of Dr. Ruggiero, I prepared

him a plate of soft scrambled eggs and a bowl of oatmeal. Adam ate ravenously,

polishing off his eggs

belbre turning his spoon to the still steaming, cinnamon-sprinkled

oatmeal.

The West Bank was closed on Sundays, not so much

to honor the sabbath as to acknowledge the mores of the

townspeople who honored it. And, like God, I myself

ANCIENT OF DAYS

203

was not .opposed to twenty-four hours of uninterrupted

rest every seven days.

At any rate, that afternoon Adam and I entertained

ourselves preparing a kind of makeshift gallery display

of RuthClaire's paintings Souls in her old studio. We

organized them by dividing them into five groups of

seven canvases each, scrupulously assigning different background colors and

frame sizes to each group---after

which we hung them on the walls or propped them on

shelves or tables where they would show off to best

advantage.

Sun--warm afternoon sun--came through the dusty

Venetian blinds in zebra stripes of marmalade and shadow.

Then, when I hoisted the blinds and hooked them high,

this same sunlight flooded the entire studio. Prismatic

dazzle bounced around the room, and our placement of

the canvases, along with the energetic sunlight streaming

in, transformed them from muddy, earthbound mistakes

into oddly spectacular affirmations of their creator's

talent.

'My God," I said.

Adam pointed at this canvas, and then at that, daring

me to note how the finishes that had once seemed flat and

monolithic now had depth and intricacy. Under the mute

pastels lay eloquent patterns of shape and line, iridescent

commentaries on the otherwise commonplace surfaces

in which they were embedded.

"I never saw any of this before. It's hard to believe."

"I know," Adam said.

"Is this the way you always see them?"

"Of course not."

"But the other way . . . the other way, Adam, they're

inexcusably ugly. Hardly worth keeping."

"Sometimes they might seem so. I have even heard

Miss RuthClaire confess the same."

"A desire to undo them'? A desire to destroy them'?"

"Yes. But only when she has got . . . beyond them."

Above Paradise Farm. summer clouds pushed in dreamily

from the west. mounting one another like amorous

204

Michael Bishop

sheep. The light in the studio changed. Someone had

swaddled the sun in gauze.

"They're mined," I said, meaning the. paintings.

"They're back to normal."

Adam gave me an unreadable look. Then he patted

me reassuringly on the shoulder: Don't fret, Mister Paul.

A brief golden glory poured through the summer

clouds. Only a little less dazzling than before, sunlight

pirouetted through the studio. I looked again at RuthClaire's

paintings. Nothing doing. The infinitesimal

change in the light had somehow leached them of magic.

And no matter how hard i tried over the next several

days, I was never able to enter the studio at a time when

the light was slanting in at the necessary angle and

chromatic intensity to bring the canvases back to life.

ON MONDAY morning. Adam and I were each trying to

disguise from the other our individual senses of expectancy.

Today RuthClaire was supposed to receive from

Craig a letter stipulating the groups---charities, political

organizations--to which the Montarazes must write their

ransom checks.

At 10:30, I began to get ready to drive into town for my

luncheon business. Niedrach should have called, i told

myself. But I immediately withdrew that thought, doubting

the security of Beulah Fork's telephone lines. Craig did

not need to know where Adam had gone, only that he had

moved away from the big cupolaed house on tturt Street.

As for Adam, he was walking barefoot through my pecan

grove, contemplating his and RuthClaire's misfortune. I

went down the steps of my sun deck to talk to him.

"If anything happens here. keep me posted. Call me at

the West Bank. Even il' Livia George answers the phone,

she won't recognize your voice. She's never heard it

before." I

ANCIENT OF DAYS

205

Adam. had no chance to reply. We heard a vehicle

crunching through the gravel on the circular drive fronting

the house. Who'? Friend, foe, or unsuspecting Avon lady?

"Get inside," I said. "I'll check this out."

The habiline obeyed. In the sweltering midmorning heat,

I trotted around the house beneath the studio loft and

turned the corner just in time to see a male figure climbing

down from the cab of a glossy violet pickup truck. The

truck was ,jacked up so high on its oversized wheels that

the man's final step was a low-level parachute jump. He

caught sight of me the moment he landed. He stood staring

at me with a resolute skepticism.

"You Mr. Loyd?"

"Depends on who I'm talking to."

Neither clean-shaven nor bearded, neither a Beau

Brummell nor a hobo, the man closed the distance between

us. "A chameleon, huh'.) Well, so am I, I guess." He

halted about five feet away. His outfit was that of a

pulpwood worker--khaki-pants, blue work shin, rope-soled

shoes, baseball-style cap with a perforated crown.

"I'm Special Agent Neil Hammond. Can we go inside?"

These words lifted a weight: I shook Hammond's hand

and led him into the house through the narrow front foyer.

We lound Adam sitting on the stairs with a shoeshine kit

applying cordovan polish to the hand-tooled leather boots

(with elevator heels) that he had worn to the West Bank in

December. in his slacks and T-shirt, in his dedication to

the simple task, Adam reminded me of an elderly black

man who had shined shoes at the Ralston Hotel in Columbus

in the early 1960s. Sitting halfway up the stairs, he

nodded at Hammond and me without ceasing to rub polish

into the toes and heels of his boots. There was an air of

melancholy to his expertise, but a melancholy devoid of

self-pity.

Hammond and I watched him work. The habiline fin:

ished applying the wax, tugged his left boot on, grasped a

shoeshine brush with his bare right foot, and began buffing

the instep of the boot with an easy rocking motion that

made a whispery noise in the stairwell. This sound was

strangely soothing. Adam brought the left boot to a high

206

Michael'Bishop

cordovan shine, then removed it and duplicated the proce

dure

in reverse, wearing the right boot and brushing it with

his left foot. Hammond and I stood there beneath him in

the stairwell, entranced.

"Done," Adam said. He put the brush away and positioned

the polished .pair of boots on the step so that the

toes were even with its outer edge. They shone. They

smelled good.

Then Special Agent Hammond began to speak. He had

just arrived from Atlanta with a photocopy of the letter

addressed to the Montarazes by the kidnappers. On Saturday,

the GBI had received federal authorization to fetch

the lette'r from the U.S. Postal Service in advance of its

scheduled Monday delivery. That was how he had managed

to bring the message to Adam so early in the day. For

the past month, Hammond explained, he had been doing

undercover investigation for the Bureau's drug unit in

Hothlepoya County. Yesterday morning, though, he had

been summoned back to Atlanta to assume the role of

message runner for this particular case. He was living in a

mobile home between Beulah Fork and Tocqueville, frequenting

grubby roadhouses every evening to see if any

dope deals were going down, and periodically staking out

the Muscadine Gardens private airport to determine if any

of the aircraft coming into it were pot planes. Although it

might be wise if Adam and I kept our contacts with him to

an absolute minimum, Niedrach wanted us to know that

Hammond was our official liaison in Hothlepoya County.

"The letter," Adam croaked.

Hammond went up the steps with the photocopy, i

climbed to a position behind Adam so that I could read it

over his shoulder, it was a tight fit for the three of us--but

we arranged ourselves cosily enough, and Adam shook out

the photocopy.

"Fingerprints on the envelope have already conclusively

identified the author as Craig Puddicombe," Hammond

said.

The letter itself consisted of an introductory paragraph,

a list of the ten organizations to receive donations from the

Montarazes, and a closing paragraph directing them to post

ANCIENT OF DAYS

207

the "genuine canceled chex" in a glass case at the interior

entrance to Rich's department store in Lenox Square Mall.

The '*genuine canceled chex" had to be posted by the

second Monday in August, two weeks away, so that thousands

upon thousands of mall patrons could view them as

they entered Rich's to shop. The well-known signatures on

these checks, and the surprising fringe organizations on

their PAY TO THE ORDER OF lines, would undoubtedly stimulate

a flood of copy-cat contributions. Moreover, nearly

every young person who so much as glanced at the canceled-check

display would become a potential suspect in the

kidnapping--assuming, of course, that either the FBI or

the GBI set up continuous video surveillance of the store's

entrance.

"Which we'll certainly do," Hammond said. "Don't

worry. This isn't as clever a ploy as Puddicombe thinks.

For one thing, it's going to be very easy to' fake the

canceled checks."

I tapped the bottom of the photocopy. "It says here that

he'll consult with the organizations in question to make

sure the contributions have really been made."

"That's a bluff. Why have the canceled checks posted

in a public place if they already know what posting the

check is supposed to prove'?"

"For publicity's sake," I said. "To humiliate RuthClaire

and Adam."

Adam looked up. "Would these organizations really

take our lorced donations, Mr. HammondT' His most

fluid speech yet.

"Some are outfits of dubious probity. They might. It

seems to be this character's idea that we're to keep the

kidnapping hidden from the general public--at least for

now. That being the case, the outfits receiving the checks

would have no reason to suppose you'd sent thcm under

duress."

"Couldn't they tell their directors in private?" I asked.

"Of course. But that would entail a certain risk. If

Puddicombe had an inlormant in just one of the organizations,

well, he'd figure out pretty damn fast that we're

208

Michael Bishop

using the same line of approach with all the other groups.

The danger to the kidnap victim is clear."

"Say nothing to any of them, then," Adam directed.

"We will send nothing but genuine cashable checks."

"After Pautie's recovered, Mr. Montaraz, there are steps

we can take to recover the money, too. It's possible that a

few of these outfits, understanding the full situation, would

hand it over willingly--but it's equally likely that a couple

of them, maybe More, wouldn't mind profiting from your

ill fortune. We'd go after them through the state attorney

general's office, but it could be a very messy set-to. Even

a loud public outcry against one of these farcical bunches--Shock

Troops of the Resurrected Confederacy--might not

make them relent. It might even strengthen their will to

take on our mainstream legal apparatus."

"About the money I have no care," Adam said. "Let it

go."

Looking over his shoulder, I studied the list. In addition

to Congressman Aubrey O'Seamons, the Klairvoyant Em-pile

of KuKlos Klandom, and the Shock Troops of the

Resurrected Confederacy (STORC), Craig had specified an

odd array of praiseworthy, semirespectable, and questionable

institutions. The Methodist Children's Home in Atlanta

was cheek by jowl with the National Rifle Association

and the Rugged White Survivalists of America. Neither

Adam nor I could help noting that the last organization on

the list was Dwight McElroy's Greater Christian Constituency.

Ever helpful, Craig had provided up-to-date mailing

addresses for each and every one of these groups.

"You give twenty-three thousand to the Methodist Children's

Home," I advised Adam. "Three thousand each to

the other nine groups."

Adam said, "We do not have this much money in our

bank account, Mr. Hammond."

"If you're sure you actually want to handle this by

writing the checks." he said, "we'll deposit the necessary

amount to cover them. That would fortify our case in

seeking reimbursement from any really hard-nosed ransom

recipient. I ought to remind you, though, that if you'd let

Acmt, rr OF DAyS

209

us, we could have our documents division fake the canceled

cheeks. That'd be easy for those guys."

"Craig Puddicombe would find out," Adam objected.

"That's a very real possibility."

"Then I must ask the aid of state in making up the total

fifty thousand dollars."

"All right," Hammond said.

For a time, we sat in silence in the narrow chute of the

stairwell, stymied by the harsh reality of the letter in

Adam's hands. !s every vice a corrupted virtue, every evil

a perverted good? i don't know, but the anguish and pain

that Craig Puddicombe, a mere boy, was inflicting on the

Montarazes--and on me by my willing involvement in

their predicament--stemmed almost entirely from his pursuit

of a variety of justice that was not only blind but

tone-deaf and unfeeling. Further, he had implicated Nancy

Teavers in his militant passion for left-handed justice.

How. I wondered, could one misguided person trigger

such ever-widening chaos?-

"What now?" I asked Hammond.

"Mr. Montaraz writes the checks, addresses the envelopes,

and gives them to me to mail from a letter box in

downtown Atlanta. And then there's not much you two

fellas can do but wait."

"Two weeks'?" Adam asked. "Another two weeks?"

WHEN I reached the West Bank later that same morning,

Livia George came at me out of the kitchen with a section

of Sunday's paper roiled up in her fist like a rolling pin.

She knocked me into a chair by the door with it.

"You tole me they was fine! You tole me Adam was

healin' up real pretty 'n' evverthin' else was hunky-dory

too!"

"I thought it was, I thought il was."

"Their marriage done broke and you think that's a

210

Michael Bishop

up4ight development'? Where you get your smarts. Mistah

Paul? From a Jay Cee Penney catalogue'?" She laid the

newspaper down, flattened it out in front of me, and read

aloud the article about Adam's decision to forsake his

family for a period of intense study at the Candler School

of Theology. "I nevah figgered him for a no-'count, Mistah

Paul. Not for half a minute. Whyn't you talk him out o'

this crazy scheme while you was up there'?"

"He was all bandaged up from his operation. Neither of

them let on they were having trouble."

"Poo!"

"Look, Livvy, they waited until I'd left town to divulge

their story to the press. That was deliberate. They hoodwinked

me--to spare me the agony of their agony, I

guess."

"You go 'phone that crab-walkin' Mistah Adam and tell

him to get his fanny on back to his woman 'n' chile!"

"Nobody knows where he is, Livia George. He's moved out."

For the remainder of the day. my cook comported herself

like a woman infinitely sinned against, slamming pots

and pans around and muttering under her breath. Once,

she came all the way out of the kitchen to glare at a

red-haired man who had returned his three-minute Continental

Burger as too oniony and overcooked.

"Overcooked'?" she groused, loud enough for the customer

to hear." 'IF I had me a pasty face like that fella's, I

wouldn't eat nothin' that wasn't burnt to a crumbly char.

He get him a taste of underdone raw evver time he bite his

bottom lip."

It was only with arm-twisting charm that I herded my

Livvy back into the kitchen, and only by waiving his tab

that I mollified the red-haired man whom my cook had

publicly insulted.

In my heart, though, I blamed the entire situation on

Craig Puddicombe.

To FORESTALL Craig's using the Montarazes' failure to comply with all his

demands as an excuse to hurt their

baby. Adam wrote the tollowing letter to the editors of the

Atlanta newspapers:

in your pages this past Sunday, a story suggests my

wife and i have separated because of my interest in

theology. Although in so saying, Miss RuthClaire says

a partial truth, it is ONLY a partial truth. In whole truth,

I have broken this marriage because a person of my

subhuman species has no right to marry a Cauchsian

representative of Homo sapiens sapieJls. I rue the bad

example I have set the youth of this nation. I urge

them very hard not to give in to the temptation to

marry outside their species.

Further, Miss RuthClaire is too fine a person to

continue sharing her bed with subhuman murderer such

as I. The parents of the late E. L. Tearers of Beulah

Fork, Georgia, know of what I speak, as do his

Brothers, Sisters, Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, and his un-tbrtunate

Widow, Nancy, to all of whom I extend

heartfelt apologies t)r surviving the murderous fall

that for Mister Elvis Lamar was very fatal. I am sorry,

I am sorry.

Finally, I do hereby surrender myself to any police

or government body that does wish to arrest and

prosecute me for the malicious homicide of E. L.

Teavers. Please, O police chiefs, sheriffs, or special

agents, publish in this Letters to the Editor column

your desire so to do, and I will surrender myself to

you in the lobby of the Jourtzal-Constitution building at 9:30 A.M. on the day

alter this desire has been

printed. This I solemnly swear and promise.

Adam Montaraz

211

2 I 2

Michael Bishop

The letter appeared in the Constitution on Thursday

morning and in the Journal that same afternoon. Adam

had not let me or anyone else read it beforehand, and

although it technically fulfilled all the ransom demands not

yet complied with, I was afraid that its tone and its turn of

phrase might backfire on all of us. The letter seemed to

embody the first extended use of irony and sarcasm to

which Adam had ever committed himself.

Special Agent Hammond visited Paradise Farm shortly

before midnight on Thursday. He told us that Niedrach had

doubts similar to mine about the likely efficacy of Adam's

"Apology & Confession." If Craig were in a touchy

mood, or if he believed that Adam had somehow played

him false, T.P. might well have to suffer the consequences.

On the other hand, the letter might lead Craig to contact

RuthClaire or Adam, thereby multiplying the clues about

his and Nancy's whereabouts and inadvertently laying the

groundwork for their capture.

Southern Bell Security had cooperated with the GBI in

setting up a trap on my telephone by installing a pin

register--a device capable of holding a line open even

after the caller has hung up--in the office of the Beulah

Fork exchange, but had not bothered to try to put a trap on

the telephones in the Montaraz house on Hurt Street because

of the prohibitive number of exchanges i'n Atlanta.

So I did not see how Hammond could say that another call

from Craig might prove his downfall. In any case, it was

hard to imagine the boy calling Paradise Farm. He would

have to have a sudden prescient hunch about Adam's

current hiding place.

"What in my letter could give offense?" Adam asked

Hammond.

For someone able to grasp the metaphysical complexities

of various spiritual issues, Adam was curiously obtuse

on this score. I told him that his expression of regret

appeared to be tongue in cheek, his apology a clever

indictment of Teavers, and his offer to give himself up a

parody of genuine confession.

"You've complied with the letter but not the spirit of

Craig's demands."

ANCIENT OF DAYS

213

"How can I comply with the spirit of demands that I

abhor?"

"You can't," Hammond said. "But you can pretend

to."

"I'm not good at this pretending," Adam growled.

"Never any good at it." A tear formed in the corner of his

eye. He blinked, and the tear made a moist track down the

gully between his cheek and his habiline muzzle. "I can

no longer make-believe that I am happy apart from my

wife. I can no longer make-believe that my praying seems

helpful. I can no longer make-believe that the God of

Abraham and also of the converted Paul cares very much

about my family's terrible dilemma."

Hammond said. "We're here, Mr. Montaraz, caring as

much as we can."

Seated at my dinette table with a bottle of Michelob in

one hand, Adam broke down completely. He sobbed like

an affronted three-year-old, his fragile lower face scrunch-lng

around alarmingly. I was afraid that he was going to

undo some aspect of the surgery that had "humanized"

him.

"You should read the Book of Job." Hammond said.

Adam shrugged aside the special agent's hand. "Quiet

the hell up!" he wheezed at the unperturbed Hammond.

"My people have known two million years of trial, even

to the need of hiding away from our own descendantsbut

not even as free person in United States of America can I

escape further tribulation. Therefore, i beg you most'

imploringly, 'Quiet the hell up!' "Whereupon he flung his

Michelob bottle between Hammond and me at the refrigerator.

By some miracle, it failed to break, but beer sloshed

everywhere, splattering the linoleum, and the habiline himself

got up and left the room.

"Touchy tonight." said Hammond, not unsympathetically.

"Have you guys made any progress up there'? What

about Craig's family here in town? Have you talked to

them?"

"We haven't interviewed Puddicombe's mother or any

of the other local family members because it's our judgment

they'd try to tip him off. It's that kind of family."

II

214

Michael Bishop

'What's Niedrach doing? And Davison? And their FBI

liaison? Not a damn thing's happened since that letter

came." I was mopping the spilled beer with paper towels.

Hammond tore a couple of sheets of toweling from the

'roll and knelt next to the refrigerator to help me. "They're I

working," he said. "We're all working. Sometimes you ;

need a lucky break." He carried the pieces of sopped

toweling to the waste basket. "By the way, your friend

Caroline Hanna told me to tell you hello. She's over there

with your ex-wife nearly every moment she can spare

away from her work. A friend indeed, that lady."

Oh, God, I thought, they're comparing notes.

Aloud I said, "Thanks. So what do we do now?"

"Sit tight, Mr. Loyd. Sit tight."

ADAM AND RuthClaire had written the ten checks demanded

by Craig's letter for five thousand dollars each.

Although these were sizable contributions by the standards

of most American taxpayers, none by itself was enough to

seem especially remarkable coming from national figures

of the Montarazes' suspected wealth. The GBt agents had

dissuaded them from writing any one check for an amount

conspicuously larger than the others tot fear that Craig

would use the disparity as an excuse to make further

demands. He seemed to be enjoying the game he was

playing, as if the adrenaline rush of formulating complex

demands and having them carried out were a kind of bonus

gift for his pursuit of "justice."

By the end of the week, we learned, the Montaraz bank

in DeKalb County had begun making payments on some of

these drafts. STORC, the Klairvoyant Empire, the Rugged

White Survivalists, the Methodist Children's Home, and

Aubrey O'Seamons had wasted little time cashing their

checks. As a result, it might be possible to put all ten

canceled checks in that glass display case in Lenox Square

ANCIENT OF DAYS

215

a few days ahead of schedule. Late Friday night, in fact,

exactly one Week after the kidnapping, Hammond informed

Adam and me that the FBI had taken several discreet steps

to have the checks in place by midweek. There was no

sense delaying their availability to the kidnappers until the

second Monday in August if they had already cleared.

Whether Craig would release T.P. before Monday was problematic,

of course, but we all agreed that it was worth a

try. Meanwhile, video surveillance equipment had been

concealed in front of Rich's by specialists working in the

mall after regular business hours.

Adam and RuthClaire exchanged letters during their

separation. Bilker mailed them from random sites around

the city, while I addressed all of Adam's billet-doux to

Caroline Hanna's apartment so that she could carry them

over to Hurt Street when she went to visit RuthClaire. We

took these troublesome precautions because Niedmch believed

that Craig would interpret any sign of contact between

the Montarazes, even.from afar, as a violation of

their promise to live apart. Phone calls were also out.

Caroline and I were under no such ban, however, and so long as I placed my

calls to her from the West Bank rather

than Paradise Farm, no one hid any objection to our

talking to each other. Similarly, Caroline was careful to

call me only at the restaurant. If she telephoned during

business hours, I would clamber upstairs to my sweltering

second-floor storage room to take the call on the extension

there. Downstairs, Livia George would hang up, and Caroline

and I would jabber away like furtive teen-agers. The

heat of the storage room--with its musty cot and its lopsided

pyramids of cardboard boxes and vegetable crates--heightened

my sense of the illicitness of our hurried

conversations. But I liked that feeling. It was absurd,

feeling like a teen-ager again, but it was splendid, too. an

unexpected benefit of T.P.'s kidnapping that in full daylight

I was totally unable to square with the horror of that

event.

On Saturday night, Caroline called at )1:30, just as

Hazel and Livia George were going out the front door.

But, with only an ancient rotating floor fan to keep me

I

' e

'- ill

III

216 Michael Bishop I

from collapsing from heat stroke, ltook the call upstairs,

anyway.

"Talk to me, kid."

"Not for long, Paul. Just wanted to let you know we're

hanging on. Ruthie's unbelievably self-possessed. Me, I'm

done in."

The, too. Frazzled. Big crowd tonight."

'Adam?"

"I'm starting to worry about him, Caroline. His weird

amalgam of religious beliefs--his faith, if you want to call

it that--seems to be deserting him. He walks around my

place like Roderick Usher, morose and supersensitive.

Know what he told me this morning'? 'I'm a lightning rod

for human cruelty.' His exact words."

"That doesn't sound like him. It's self-pitying."

"it is and it isn't. I think he was expressing a degree of

concern about the people around him. It bothers him that

so many people--RuthClaire, me, Bilker, the cops and

special agents, and you too, probably--are endangering

themselves trying to help him. He feels responsible."

"Well, he could just as easily say, 'I'm a lightning rod

for human charity.' He's looking at things backwards,

Paul."

"Is he any different from the rest of us'? He takes the

good for granted. Evil thoroughly confounds him."

Caroline said, "Oh," as if a light bulb had gone on over

her head. (A 40-watter.) Before I could ask her to explain

herself, she said, "Oh.r' again. (A blinding 100-watter.)

"What is it'?"

"Do you remember how Adam apparently got to the

states'? How he was one of three habiline crew members on

a fishing boat running guns from Punta Gorda in Cuba to the guerrilla

opposition to Baby Doc in Haiti'? Only that

boat never made it back to Haiti. The Cuban I interviewed in the Atlanta

Pen!gnacio Guzman Suarez y Pefia--well,

!gnacio murdered the captain of that vessel and two

of Adam's fellow habilines. That's another instance of

violence that haunts Adam, another reason he keeps seeing

himself as a 'lightning rod for human cruelty.' We keep

ANCIENT OF DAYS

217

forgetting that he has a past that antedates his first appearance

in Georgia."

I started to object, but Caroline cut me off:

"RuthClaire doesn't, of course, but the rest of us probably

have no good idea of the hardships he's already

survived."

"I love you. kid," I said. Only the faint idiot singing of

the wires--the roaring of the voiceless inane---continued

to link us. I shifted on the sagging cot, sweat lubricating

my flanks. "You still there, Caroline'?"

"You might have had the decency to tell me that last

Saturday morning," she finally replied.

"What's the matter? Everything was okay yesterday,

wasn't it? Between us. i mean."

She lel the wires sing a tw seconds. "Paul, I got a

letter from Brian today."

"Nollinger?" My heart sank.

The very one, she admitted. The letter had come from a

city called Montecristi in a.northeastern province of the

Dominican Republic. In it, good old Brian spent tour or

five paragraphs justifying his abrupt departure from Atlanta.

His position in the anthropology department at Em-ory

had steadily deteriorated. His well-publicized quarrel

with the Zarakali paleoanthropologist A. P. Blair had put

hirn on shaky ground with his colleagues, most of whom

revered the cantankerous old fart. Nor had Brian improved

their opinion of him by accusing the artist RuthClaire Loyd

of making Adam Montaraz, the habiline refugee from the

Caribbean, her personal "slave," when, in fact. the two

had freely married each other. Unleashing an agent of the

Immigration and Naturalization Service on Adam had been

yet another regrettable mistake.

"He made plenty of 'enl. Glad to know he's begun to

regret them."

Caroline shushed me. Gradually among Brian's colleagues,

she continued, paraphrasing the letter, there had

grown the perception that he was trying to milk the habiline

controversy of every last drop of potential career benefit.

(And ineptly missing the pail.) He had further compounded

his problems in the department by belatedly developing

218

Michael Bishop

scruples about some of the experiments with primates at

the field station north of Atlanta. Did these experiments

serve any essential research purpose, or were' they instead

only a convenient means of generating grant money for

ethologists who might otherwise lack employment'.> At

last, chagrined by his own complicity in this system, he

had made loud noises about the inhumanity of his pro

tracted

stud) with stub-tailed macaques. Never again would

he exploit innocent primates for research purposes, no

matter how noble the cause. Colleagues with funded ex

periments

of their own had quite understandably interpre

ted

Brian's newfound scrupulosity as a holier-than-thou

slap in the face. His reputation as a limelight-seeking

troublemaker had taken on the dimensions of a behemoth.

"He deserved that reputation."

"Maybe, maybe not. In any case, Paul, he says that

since last summer his life has been a waking nightmare.

He says if it hadn't been for my affection and support, he

would've probably overdosed on sleeping tablets by

Christmas."

"That's touching. Considering the debt he feels he owed

you, why do you suppose he never got around to telling

you goodbye'?"

"He apologizes for that. He was afraid if he came to tell

me goodbye, he'd chicken out and stay. When he learned

that he'd actually landed a research position with an American

concern in the Dominican Republic, he didn't know

whether to cheer or to panic. It was such a drastic break

with his own past. A Georgia boy with advanced degrees

in anthropology and primate behavior. He was turning his

back on all that. He really didn't know if he could do it,

Paul."

"Looks like he managed."

"Relax, will you'? I'm not buying an airline ticket to the

Dominican. I don't love Brian. I'm just relieved to know

he's okay."

I did relax. She no longer loved the man. Why, then,

had she been so tentative about telling me that he had

written? Well, my attitude toward him precluded comfortable

talk about her former lover. She had been afraid to

ANCIENT OF DAYS

219

mention Brian's name, much less tell me about his letter.

At the same time, she had felt that to hold back word of

the letter would be to sabotage whatever degree of trust we

had so far created in our relationship.

"What the hell's he doing down there, anyway?" I

blurted.

"He's been hired by the sugar industry," Caroline said,

and I could hear her shuffling the pages of Brian's letter as

I had once heard Craig Puddicombe uncreasing his list of

ransom demands. "The plantations on which he's to work

are owned by the Austin-Autilles Corporation. They've

asked him to look into the conditions of Haitian canecutters.

The canecutters are employed on a lottery basis by the

local sugar-harvesting network. Brian's supposed to propose

cost-efficient ways of improving their lot--without

destroying the economic base of either the Haitian or the

Dominican government."

"Cripes."

"What's the matter'? Brian says he's already begun

sharing the squalid conditions of the canecutters. He's

excited. He thinks that finding a way to channel some of

Austin-Antilles Corporation's money to these people is

going to be a real challenge. He's getting to use his

anthropological background for a humane sociological

purpose."

"Challenge? It's a shortcut to crucifixion."

"Why?"

"You ought to know that better than I. You're the one

who's worked with Cuban and Haitian refugees."

"Not down there. Only here. What're you getting at?"

"Haitian politics are nasty. Dominican democracy is

fragile, and Austin-Antilles is a multinational conglomerate

that didn't get to be a multinational by sharing the wealth

with peons. Just the reverse, I'm afraid. It sounds to me as

if your friend Brian is getting caught in the middle of a

canecutting public-relations ploy. Haitian workers always

get the shitty end of the stick. It seems to be built into the

system."

"Brian thinks he may be able to do some good."

220

Michael Bishop

"Yeah, well, I hope he doesn't end up with nails in his

feet and palms."

Caroline chuckled mordantly. "Which is the first time

you've wished him anything less fatal than hanging at

dawn, isn't it?"

I admitted that it probably was. I also told Caroline that

if Brian did his job too well, and if Austin-Antilles refrained

from firing him for his presumption, he would

almost certainly be transferred to a less controversial company

enterprise on some other island. That was just the

way the Big AAC did business.

For a moment, the wires regaled me with inarticulate

arias of static. Then my caller said, "I love you, too," and

hung up. i sat there in the heat, stunned, savoring her

words.

AT PARADISE Farm. Adam was vegetating. If he wrote

RuthClaire a letter, he forgot to give it to me to mail. If he

started a crossword puzzle, he soon lost interest. His books

on theology, religious history, the philosophy of religion,

and contemporary creation theory sat untouched in their

boxes in the second-floor studio. Neit Hammond did not

come by with news, and on Sunday morning, too wrought

up by Caroline's declaration of love to sleep late, I was the

one who turned on "Great Gospel Giveaway."

What motivated me? Maybe I simply had a hunch that

McElroy would mention a recent $5,000 contribution from

Adam Montaraz. Bingo. He acknowledged it just as an

army of cleancut ushers began filing toward the altar to

pick up the collection plates. Adam, too busy trying to

think of a nine-letter word for "false piety" to glance at

the set, made no sign that he had heard McElroy acknowledge

the donation.

That afternoon, however, he fell asleep while listlessly

watching a Braves game on Channel 17. I was able to turn

ANCIENT OF DAYS

221

Off the set without rousing him, a notable achievement

because of his tendency to sleep as lightly as a cat.

McElroy's sermon that morning had been called "Energiz

ing Commitments." That was what Adam seemed to need,

but, as I say, he had not listened to the man.

On Monday morning, about ten, I left Paradise Farm

and drove into town. My first stop was at the Greyhound

Depot Laundry to pick up my tablecloths. Ben Sadler,

already looking rumpled and dehydrated, had them waiting

for me on the counter. He seemed to be waiting for me

himself. The black woman who operated his steam press--a

forbidding-looking instrument with a lid like that of a

coffin---also made a point of marking my entrance.

Uh oh, I thought. What's going on?

My subsequent conversation with Ben was curiously

aimless, though, focusing on such weighty topics as the

humidity level and hog-market prices. Strange. Ben usually

liked to provoke a verbal scrap over the deployment of

U.S. tbrces in Central America or the morality of alcoholic-beverage

licenses for local eating establishments. I started

to leave.

"Say," said Ben, "do you take Newsweek?"

"I don't subscribe. Occasionally, I'll pick it up. Why'?"

"Have you seen this week's issue'?"

"Is it out already?"

"Hy Langton, over at the drugstore, gets his copies first

thing Monday mornin'. I bought one right off. He don't

know what to do with the rest of 'em, though--put 'em out ·

for sale or stash 'em down under the register."

"Newsweek'? With the Playboys and Penthouses?" "It's a eye-opener, the new

one. Milly and me--"

nodding at the steam-press operator, who looked down in

acute embarrassment--"we'.ve been, uh, sort of discussin'

how much times'ye changed, to let a magazine like o1' Newsweek use the kinda

cover it's just used. Makes you

wonder if it's sale to send your kids down a small-town

sidewalk 'thout a blindfold."

"But you bought a copy'?"

"Well, Paul, I got it for you." Even in the heat of the

morning and the heat of the laundry, Ben managed to

222

Michael Bishop

blush. "Don't be insulted, now. It's not that I think you're

some sorta creep or somethin'. It's just that, you know,

once being' married to an artist and all, you're.more sophisticated

than a lot of folks in Beulah Fork. You know how

to take such stuff 'thout being', uh, prurient about it. Isn't

that the word, prurient?"

"For God's sake, Ben, what are you talking about?"

"Here." With one emphatic motion, he produced the

magazine from beneath his counter and plonked it down on

the folded tablecloths.

The cover of the magazine slapped me hard. but I kept

my expression as noncommittal as I could. Let Ben and

Milly invent a reaction rather than simply relate it. The

gossip mills would grind no matter what i did.

And the cover on the new Newsweek'?

To be succinct, it consisted of a startling photograph of

Adam and RuthClaire standing side by side, frontally nude,

Adam to the left, RuthClaire to the right. Adam had his

hand raised in a venerable human gesture signifying "Peace"

or "I have no weapon." My ex-wife, although visible

frontally from head to toe, was standing with her left leg

slightly extended and her body canted a little bit toward

Adam's. Eye-catching as they were, the couple occupied

only the vertical right half of the cover.

The other half contained a pair of clocks side by side

beneath the second three letters of the Newsweek logo.

One clock had the initials u.c. in its center, the other the

abbreviation A.D. Under the clocks, in eerie shadow, hung a

translucent Plexiglas model of the continent of Africa,

while at the bottom of the photograph, going from left to

right beneath the suspended continent and the primeval

couple, floated a string of islands representing the Greater

and Lesser Antilles. From the island Hispaniola shot out a

sequence of arrows demarcating the wake of a fishing boat

on its way past Cuba to the tip of Florida. A legend

superimposed beneath the feet of Adam and RuthClaire

proclaimed:

THE NEW PHOTOGRAPHY

An Art in Militant Transition

ANCIENT OF DAYS

223

"Bet this gets a lot of bluenoses to cancel their subscriptions,''

Ben said. "Whaddaya think, Paul?"

I was still not ready to say anything, but Ben was

probably right. Whoever had taken this photograph had not

bothered to air-brush the pubic hair or the private parts of

my ex-wife and her husband. That was why I thought I

knew the photographer's identity. I flipped to the cover

story at the heart of the magazine. Scanning its lead and

several subsequent paragraphs, I found the name MariaKatherine

Kander over and over again. In fact, two of the

photographs accompanying the article were relatively tame

portraits--i.e., the models were either in shadow or

semimodestly draped--from the same show at Abraxas

that had featured Adam's paintings and the multicolored

work of various Haitian artists. I had stepped into a timewarp

flinging me back to February.

"Did you know they'd done this, Paul? Had their pictures

taken in the altogether?"

"No. No, I didn't."

It was hard to imagine RuthClaire consenting to such a

portrait. She was as naked in this Newsweek cover as I

had ever seen her during our .decidedly unconventional

marriage. Midway through that marriage, she had made up

her mind that regular intercourse with me had about it all

the irresistible romance of changing a flat tire on a '54

Chevy jalopy. It was not that she was puritanical or cold,

it was simply that for her sex had become a time-consuming

process best left to people with nothing More important to

do. Her knowledge that I was probably never going to

father her child had reintbrced this cavalier attitude in her.

If procreation was out, and pleasure had long ago fled,

why bother? At any rate, the last time I had seen her

without a stitch was the night that I had climbed into a

magnolia tree on Paradise Farm to take pictures of Adam

in the downstairs bathroom. She had been infinitely More

provocative in that setting. In the Kander photograph, she

seemed to be representing Womankind for an alien eye

that might not otherwise grasp the concept.

In a sense, of course, that was exactly the point.

I put the magazine on the tablecloths and gathered up

224

Michael Bishop

the whole shebang in my arms. "Thanks for the Newsweek. Ben." Then I staggered

across the street with my burden.

I dumped the tablecloths into a chair and told Livia

George that, once again, she would have to handle the

luncheon crowd without me. "Go on," she said, waving a

hand. Nothing I did, or failed to do, could surprise her

anymore. So with the rolled-up Newsweek in one hand, I

exited the West Bank and climbed into my car.

Nell Hammond's jacked-up purple truck was parked in

front of my house at Paradise Farm. The man himself was

in the living room with a stack of Newsweeks balanced

precariously on one of my More fragile-looking end tables.

Hammond was holding the magazines in place with the

heel of his hand. Adam was perched on the edge of a

wingback chair across from the GBI agent, looking penitent

and befuddled. My own copy was clutched in my fist

like a billy club.

"You've seen it," Hammond said. "You've seen the

day's major disaster." He gestured at the stack of magazines.

"I saw it about an hour ago, when I went to the

drugstore to buy my wife an anniversary card. I bought

every Newsweek in the damn place. Mr. Langton thinks

I'm a first-class pervert, too. It's probably blown my

cover." He shook his head. "My cover blown by a magazine

cover. Funny, huh'? I went to every magazine rack in

town buying the damn things up, Mr. Loyd, but the damage

has already been done. People here remember Mrs.

Montaraz--they remember her well--and a lot of the magazines

that went out on the racks were snapped u[ for

souvenirs, let me tell you. Tomorrow. the folks who have

subscription copies'Il get theirs. There's no way to put a

lid on a thing like this. It's a public-relations disaster of

colossal proportions, it's a blow to everything we've been

trying to do in this case." He lifted his hand from the

magazines, and they slid to the floor in a cascade of

whispery thumps.

Adam and RuthClaire, Adam and RuthClaire, Adam

and RuthClaire.

i looked at Adam. "What the hell did you two think you

were doing, anyway'?"

P,,amm: --smmmmm

ANCIENT OF DAYS

225

"They've contributed to what's sure to turn out to be

the most collectible issue--cover intact, of course--of Newsweek magazine,

ever," Hammond said, nudging the

pile with his boot. "That's one of the things they've done. Newsweek'Il get

More letters than they've ever received,

and nine tenths of 'em will be from outraged old ladies,

concerned mothers, angry preachers, and so on. Subscript'i'ons'll

get canceled, sure, but every damn newsstand copy

will be gone before the day's out.

"Do you remember how that flaky Beatle and his Japanese

old lady made an album called Two Virgins back in the

late sixties? They had themselves shot buck-naked for the

album cover. Nobody at their damn company wanted to

use the photographs, but the flaky Beatle insisted. At least

they sold the damn things in brown envelopes, though.

This--" he kicked one of the fallen magazines--' 'is being

sold right out in front of God and everybody with Time and Woman's Day and

Field and Stream. And by 'God

and everybody,' I do mean ever3.'body. Little Bobby, Innocent

Little Susy, Sweet Old Aunt Matilda, and, probably

worst of all, Crazy Craig Puddicombe."

Adam, his hands clasped between his knees, looked up.

"Neither RuthClaire nor I had any inkling this photograph

would appear--" gesturing vaguely--"as it so upsettingly

has."

"But why did you pose for something like this?" I

asked.

"In April, Mister Paul, long before my surgery, this

M.-K. Kander person came to Atlanta on business at

Abraxas. About 'shooting' RuthClaire and me, she inquired.

The idea of the Primeval Couple had great appeal

to her. Mister David did introductions. And Miss RuthClaire

and this M.-K. Kander person, they took to each other

very fast. So when her new friend suggest we pose in way

you see, my wife has no great objection. Nor I. So our

photographs got taken in gallery room where Ms. Kander

had her February show. A little later, she kindly sends us

prints of very same one that this magazine has given

horrible honor of its cover." Adam sought my eyes. "Never

226

Michael Bishop

did we expect this picture to appear anywhere but in

M.-K. Kander private porttblio. This, then, is great shock."

"It's a disaster," Hammond reiterated.

I opened out my scrolled copy and held it up. "But why

like this, Adam'? Why did she want you to pose like this?"

His growl tentative, Adam said, "The set-up was greatly

symbolic. The Primeval Couple, as I have said. My name

is Adam, and I am a habiline with origins going deeply

.back beyond those of even Biblical Adam. So said MariaKatherine.

Miss RuthClaire, to the contrary, is modern

woman with life in technological times. So, again, said

M.-K. Kander. Our marriage, she told us, unites past and

future of species in exciting new Now." He paused. "Maybe

this symbolism lacks clarity, but in standing naked beside

.my wife I saw no great harm for this talented picture-taking

person. Early Adam and somewhat later Eve. Miss

RuthClaire thought it--you may be surprised--very funny

and also enjoyable."

I stared hard at the magazine cover. "This pose reminds

me of something, Adam. But what'?"

"Maria-Katherine patterned this composition after the

plaques sent out into cosmos aboard Pioneer 10 and I1

spacecraft. They, too, you remember, feature naked male

and female side by side, the male with left hand raised, On

those plaques, of course, male is taller than female, and

islands at bottom are not Cuba and so on, but the sun and

planetary bodies of our solar system. A miniature of the

spacecraft is shown leaving third such body and flying off

between Jupiter and Saturn into cosmic ocean. Again, it

was M.-K. Kander person's idea to use this pattern. A

Plexiglas model of Africa hangs to right because humanity,

it seems, did begin there. Miss Maria-Katherine made

this continent artifact herself."'

Hammond twisted his cap in his hands. "You had no

idea this photograph was going to crop up as a Newsweek cover?' '

"They would have known," I said, defending them, "if

the cover story had been about themselves. The editorial

staff would have informed them. But this issue's cover

story is about the new photography, and the only release

ANCIENT OF DAYS

227

the editors probably needed was one from the Kander

woman authorizing them to use this particular photograph."

"If we had known they were going to use it," Hammond

said, "we would have told them what was going on

down here. We could have asked them to deep-six the

damn thing or at least delay it another week. There's

nothing that topical about 'The New Photography,' for

God's sake. They could have waited."

Adam stood up, thrust his hands deep into the pockets

of his slacks, and, balancing on one leg, picked up a copy

of Newsweek with the toes of his other foot. The magazine

dangled there like a startled sea creature yanked from its

natural element. And then Adam disdainfully dropped it.

"I am very unhappy with this ambitious photographer

person," he said. "I am very unhappy, indeed."

I RETURNED to work. Hammond remained at the house

with Adam. At six o'clock thfit evening, the agent telephoned

the West Bank and told me that something had

happened and that he and Adam were leaving tot Atlanta.

"Wait a minute. I want to go with you."

Livia George was at my elbow beside the cash register.

"This got somethin' to do with Miss RuthClaire gettin'

jaybird-skinny on that magazine'?"

"Hush, Livia George."

"City did this to 'em. City made 'em think they could

shuck their clothes/'or some hotsy-totsy nashunal magazine."

"Damn it, woman, get out of my ear for a couple of

minutes!" I had my hand over the telephone's mouthpiece.

A couple at a nearby table peeked up at me, disapproving'

of my language and tone.

Hammond's voice said, "This isn't your affair any longer,

Mr. Loyd. Niedrach's just called. We've got to go."

"T.P.'s my godson. You can't close me out. Give me

ten or so minutes and I'll be there with you."

228

Michael Bishop

"We're leaving."

"1'!1 follow."

"That's your prerogative."

"The Montaraz house on Hurt Street?"

"Goodbye, Mr. Loyd."

"What happened? Did Craig call? Did someone see

him?"

But all I had in my ear was a busy signal. I barged into

the kitchen, to which Livia George had sullenly retreated a

moment ago, and found her slicing tomatoes into a salad.

Hazel Upchurch was sautding mushrooms in a cast-iron

skillet. Debbie Rae House, my new waitress, was picking

up a tray of water glassses.

"Pray," I commanded the three women. "I don't know

what the hell good it'll do, but pray. Pray for T.P." Then

I was gone.

DESPITE THEIR head start, I caught up with Hammond's

pickup between the two exits sandwiching Newnan, Georgia,

on 1-85. The sun was lowering itself rung by rung to

the western horizon, but daylight still fingered above the

heat-browned meadows flanking the interstate, and traffic

was still brisk in both directions. Doing eighty, I had to hit

my brakes to keep from overshooting the agent's truck,

and my own car almost got away from me belbre I was

able to bring it under control and follow Hammond and his

habiline passenger into Atlanta without further incident.

We parked across the street from the Montaraz house and

went inside.

Adam and RuthCtaire embraced.

Niedrach was present, Davison was not. In the latter's

place were two men in sports jackets and spiffily creased

slacks; neither of these men had yet hit his fortieth birthday.

One had stylishly long hair that just touched his collar

in back but stayed well off his ears: he was pink-cheeked

ANCIENT OF DAyS

229

and clear-eyed, after the fashion of a second lead in a B

movie of the 1940s. The other man had an astronaut's

conservative haircut, a nose that had once been broken,

and a shovel-shaped mouth that sometimes seemed to move

as if it had a will distinct from its owner's. Feds, these

fellows. Latter-day heirs of the late, unlamented J. Edgar

Hoover.

Bilker Moody introduced these men as Investigator Tim

Le May (the B-movie second lead) and Investigator Erik

Webb (the shovel-mouthed astronaut). They had taken

over the case on the Saturday afternoon following the

kidnapping, but Niedrach had stayed on to coordinate their

investigation with local police departments and the antiterrorist

unit of the GBI. Given federal jurisdiction over most

kidnappings, this was a somewhat unusual arrangement,

but Niedrach's familiarity with Klan tactics and his intimate

knowledge of the events precipitated last suinmer by

the Kudzu Klavern had argued tellingly for his uninterrupted

involvement with this case. I was glad to see him.

He was wearing his bulldog belt buckle and a navy-blue

windbreaker that made him seem out of uniform. He looked

like the fatigued, seedy uncle or:the younger, More dapper

federal agents.

Adam approached him. "What has happened?"

"The bastard phoned," Bilker Moody said, his upper

arms straining the sleeve bands of his sweaty banlon shirt.

"We've got a tape," Le May said. "Come into the

kitchen and we'll play it for you."

We filed into the kitchen. The tape machine, with two

sets of headphones, was connected to the wall phone

beside the door leading to Bilker's pantry headquarters.

Still, it was possible to sit at the kitchen table while

listening to or taping a call, and Adam and RuthCtaire sat

down at the table with Niedrach, Le May, and Webb.

Hammond, Moody, and I found convenient corners into

which to we

Table of Contents

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