No Enemy But Time

by Michael Bishop

  * * *

  One afternoon Jeannette seated John-John backward in a shopping cart and pushed it up an aisle after Anna. Excited by so much bounty, the girl had skipped over the grimy softwood floor to the shelves of breakfast cereal and the small wire racks containing packets of Kool-Aid. (Yesterday morning Jeannette had found her in the kitchen over a bowl of Cocoa Puffs and a jelly jar brimming with a sweetened, artificially flavored drink the color of thin antifreeze.)

  “Anna!” Jeannette said. “Anna, we have plenty of those things!”

  At the end of the aisle appeared another shopping cart, its operator a fiftyish woman who had hidden her hair in a bright blue scarf and fairly effectively concealed her ample figure in a turquoise chemise. This woman smiled at Anna—a long-legged child with perfect skin and Natalie Wood eyes—and turned to remove a canned item from the shelf across from the cereals. When she saw John-John, however, she stayed her hand and studied the boy quizzically. Then she backed her cart out of the aisle and headed for a frozen-food locker out of Jeannette’s field of vision. Jeannette could hear one of the locker’s glass windows sliding in its aluminum grooves.

  Strange, she thought, suddenly uneasy. Very strange.

  It grew stranger. Right there in Rivenbark’s Grocery the woman in the blue scarf initiated a game of Cops and Robbers. She made a point of following Jeannette and the children up and down the high-ceilinged old store’s several aisles, pausing when they paused, trundling when they trundled. This game continued right up to the moment that Jeannette wheeled her cart into her daddy’s checkout lane. Bill was not behind the register, however, and the woman came cruising up behind Jeannette as if, by some unlikely coincidence, they had concluded their shopping at the same time.

  “You’re Bill’s daughter, aren’t you? Bill and Peggy’s little girl, Jeannette?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m Mrs. Givens.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Jeannette said, extending her hand.

  Mrs. Givens ignored the proffered hand. “You met me when you were younger, four or five times. I know you.”

  “Oh. Well, I—”

  “What kind of husband did you marry?”

  “Ma’am?”

  Quite gracefully for one so big-boned and meaty, Mrs. Givens squeezed past her shopping cart and slipped her hand into John-John’s hair. Her fingers twisted the nap; not viciously, but not sympathetically, either. “What kind of hair do you call this?” she asked, leveling an inquisitorial stare at Jeannette.

  “Hey,” said Anna, “get your hands off my brother.”

  Jeannette was too taken aback to speak.

  “What kind of hair do you call this?” Mrs. Givens insisted, closing her hand on a tuft above the child’s left temple. John-John’s eyes were as big as horehound jawbreakers. He yanked his head aside without dislodging the woman’s grip.

  This movement prompted Jeannette to strike. She slapped the other woman’s wrist so stingingly that John-John was freed. “I call it head hair!” she raged. “I call it head hair because it grows on his head. If it grew on his elbow, I’d call it elbow hair. Listen, what’s the matter with you? You’ve gotta be—” She stopped, her heart doing somersaults and her hand trembling.

  Bill Rivenbark slipped in behind the checkout counter, flustered. Mrs. Givens, ignoring his arrival, unknotted her blue scarf and swept it from her head in a single dramatic motion.

  “It’s not hair like this,” she told them quietly. “Or like yours, Jeannette. Or like your little girl’s.” She looked at the grocery’s proprietor. “It’s not hair like yours, either, Bill.”

  “Listen, Kit, why don’t you change places with Jeannette and let me check you out.”

  “I don’t want what’s in this basket.”

  “Yes, you do,” Bill told her. “You certainly do.”

  “I don’t want what’s in the basket and I probably won’t be coming in here again.” She made an elaborate circuit around the other checkout counter and pushed her way through the dingy screen door with the Wonder Bread placard mounted in its upper half.

  “Did you see what she did? Did you hear her? God, Daddy, it was unbelievable!”

  Bill Rivenbark shook his head, then began ringing up the items in Jeannette’s basket. He usually deducted five percent from the total of each bill, an amount not a great deal larger than the sales tax.

  “Daddy, I’m sorry, I really am. Scratch one customer, I guess.”

  “Her? Hell, Jeanie, good riddance.”

  But his restrained manner, his attention to the prices on the canned goods and packaged meats moving under his hands, made her realize that the possibility of losing Mrs. Givens’s business disturbed him. He did not want it to—he was ashamed that it did—but he could not conceal the fact that he was upset, both by the silly woman’s defection and by his own inability to support his daughter without compromise. Jeannette was embarrassed for him. Various threats to his livelihood—inflation, new competitors on the outskirts of town—had made a coward of him, or at the very least a tightwad; and this was especially galling when she considered that, to demonstrate her filial loyalty, she had forbidden Hugo to shop at the base commissary, where the food prices, even after her father’s grudging discount, were a great deal less expensive. Maybe the problem wasn’t entirely mercantile. Maybe her father, for the same reason Mrs. Givens had made a fuss about John-John’s hair, found it hard to accept the boy as his grandson.

  Appalled, Jeannette grabbed up the groceries Bill Rivenbark had absent-mindedly sacked and broke for the door.

  “What’s the matter, Mamma?”

  She turned to face Anna. “I don’t know, child. Here. You put the groceries in the stroller while I fetch John-John.” She gave Anna the sack, lifted John-John out of the shopping cart, and, giving her father a wan smile, backed out of the store onto the elevated sidewalk. What was the matter with people? Why were they so frightened of one another? When would it end?

  One of the old men on the bench said, “Say, Wesley, you think John-John’s ever gonna get as tall as that nigger over at the state university?”

  “What’re you talkin’ about? He ain’t been over there in four or five years, that nigger.”

  Jeannette, busy maneuvering the stroller down the steps to the street, glanced over her shoulder at the farmers. “ ‘What’re you talkin’ about?’ is a helluva good question. Do you senile old coots have any idea what you’re talking about? What you’re really talking about?” She banged the stroller the remainder of the way down and had Anna wedge the groceries into the seat beside John-John.

  “Wilt,” said Wesley’s companion. “Wilt the Stilt.”

  “Nah,” said Wesley, tugging at his sweat-stained felt hat. “Bill’s grandbaby ain’t ever gonna get that big. He’s a runt, John-John is, but we might could put him at shortstop for the Dodgers.”

  “Call him Pee Wee Monegal.”

  “Yeah, he’s already big enough to play for ’em.”

  “The Dodgers?”

  “Hell, yes, the Dodgers. ’Bout the right hue, too.”

  Delighted with this repartee, the old men laughed together, cackling like crazy people.

  “Jesus,” Jeannette said under her breath.

  “What’s the matter, Mamma?”

  “Nothing. Let’s go home. I’ve got to get supper on.”

  Crossing the carrot-colored cobbles of Main Street to the empty stucco carcass of the Pix Theatre, Jeannette looked back and saw her father’s portly silhouette in the grocery’s doorway. He seemed to be a prisoner behind the rusty mesh of the screen.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A Death

  But man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infamy of his nature.

  —Sir Thomas Browne

  THE NIGHT EXPLODED. I ascended from my dream to find Genly stretched out on the hilltop not more than five or six fee
t away. My pistol was not in my holster but wrapped about two of the unfortunate habiline’s fingers. I crawled to him in the dark—the moon had long since gone down—and discovered that although he had shot himself through the lungs, he was still conscious, still painfully breathing. His black eyes, tiny pools of ink in a cadaverous face, stared up at me with neither recrimination nor recognition. As I eased the .45 out of his limp hand, I made a clumsy attempt to read his pulse.

  Curiosity killed this cat, I thought.

  Another portion of me replied, Curiosity and your own goddamn stupidity, Kampa.

  I could have cried. What restrained me was my terror of the Minids, who scrambled from their hovels or crept cautiously toward me from their resting places on the cold hillside. They encircled me and their dying comrade, but did not venture beyond an imaginary barrier about ten feet away. Helen and Emily were the only exceptions to this superstitious timidity. Without waiting to assess the others’ reactions they glided like wraiths to my side and knelt with me over Genly’s prostrate form. Although I expected moans and teeth-gnashing from them, their behavior, despite their bewilderment, was exemplary, low-keyed and seemly—as if they understood that an unrestrained outpouring of grief or rage would further traumatize the dying male.

  At last, when Emily put her lips to her husband’s furrowed forehead, I did cry. The habilines apparently had no tears—not for emotions, anyway—and their dry-eyed faces ringing us about seemed a shadow-gallery of gargoyles and carven masks. I was a stranger here. Then the faithless lady lifted Genly’s hand and with a kind of reminiscent tenderness held it between her thighs. Genly shifted his gaze, and a froth of blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth.

  “Genly, Genly, I’m sorry—”

  I do not remember all that went through my mind then or shortly afterwards, but my foremost thought was that Genly was suffering. I ought to put the .45 to his temple and pull the trigger.

  Technologically disadvantaged, the Minids did not understand the mechanical operation of firearms. Few of them, however, doubted that my automatic was a potent death-dealer. Even Genly in his curiosity and presumption had understood that much; he had simply not counted on dealing that fatal card to himself. So when I raised the Colt to his head, the Minids grunted their disapproval even as they cowered away into the darkness.

  Beside me, Emily put one lank, hairy arm around her husband’s head, while Helen, angry, made insistent chattering noises and jostled my gun hand. I engaged the pistol’s safety and backed away.

  “He can’t recover, Helen. There’s no way Genly’s ever going to be well again. You’ve got to let me ease him along, ladies. All I want to do is ease him along.”

  Helen ceased chattering and stared at me. Under the implications of that stare, I withered. Shot down by an Eolithic princess who popped the heads of tree mice between her fingers and performed most of her excretory functions in public. Even though I believed then, and still believe today, that Genly deserved the merciful blitz of a bullet to the brain, I withered. Emily and Helen were holding out for life when the choice was not between life and death, but between a quick death and a needlessly protracted one. Because they would not let me shoot Genly, he would have to modulate by painful degrees toward his inevitable dying. That process was not one I was going to be able to watch.

  “Listen, Helen—”

  When she jostled my hand again, I stood up, removed the clip from my pistol, scattered cartridges right and left, and held the weapon before me like a defanged cobra, a creature no less hateful for having been rendered harmless. The night was chilly, probably no more than fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit; and, half-naked to the stars, I was a candidate for either pneumonia or hypothermia. I wanted a good warm, woolen blanket and a bottle of whiskey or ouzo. My tears were streaming, and I tried to staunch them with my forearms and the back of my wrist.

  Goddamn rod, I thought. You’ve turned poor Genly into his own assassin. You’ve made me an accomplice. . . .

  I stumbled away from the dying habiline and the two Minid women. The other members of the band, wearing expressions of imbecilic incomprehension, reeled back to let me by, and I began circling a small section of the hilltop, winding my body about itself the way a discus thrower does. At last I caught myself up and hurled my pistol out over the savannah toward Mount Tharaka. It spun away into the night like a stone from a catapult. I was rid of it. This knowledge frightened as well as relieved me. For the sake of a quixotic scruple I had set my entire life at risk. Did Genly, or anyone else, give a damn . . . ?

  * * *

  Genly was a hardy soul. Although he finally fell unconscious, he took all night to die. Considering the nature of his wound, my first-aid kit (a grab bag of bandages, painkillers, and placebos) was powerless to aid or ease him, and I made no second attempt to intervene. Afraid to go too far afield as well as to remain too close at hand, I spent that night hiking up and down the hillside and along its serpentine parapets of stone. At dawn I returned and found only Emily still keeping vigil.

  By this time Genly had begun to resemble the mummy that death would make of him. His skin was taut on his bones, his hair brittle and lackluster. When he died, Emily, who knew, made a blood-clabbering keening sound, her head thrown back and her cry half the howl of a canid and half the desperate threnody of a human being. All the Minids came out to listen, and to watch, and to feel the fingers of mutability grapple at the mortal handles of their hearts. One of their own was dead.

  Ceremony?

  Yes, there was ceremony. To have witnessed it, Alistair Patrick Blair would have given up his post in President Tharaka’s cabinet. To have prevented its cause, I would have foregone the chance to give flesh to my dreams. These were sacrifices that neither Blair nor I had the option of making, however, and the ceremony commemorating Genly’s passage from death to some uncertain transcorporal realm took place in my presence rather than the paleontologist’s.

  First, the Minids knew that they must remove the corpse from their city. If they did not, the smell of decomposition would summon vultures, hyenas, and other carrion eaters. Second, the habilines remembered Genly as he had once been. In mourning the rigid, unblinking state into which he had lapsed they also mourned their own mortality. Conscious, or preconscious, our protohuman ancestors suffered an acute tristesse that could only have derived from an intuition of the inevitability of death: “One day Genly’s fate will be mine. What does this mean?”

  Not long after sunrise, the women spread out across the steppe and gathered the wild sisal called ol duvai by the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania as well as by their Sambusai cousins in Zarakal. Later the women anointed Genly’s body with the juices of this plant, a natural antiseptic and painkiller. They covered him from head to foot and canted his corpse onto its side in order to reach every part of him. Wherefore medicine for a dead man? Did they wish to spare him the unknown agonies awaiting the newly dead deeper in the domain of nonexistence?

  But the females had played out their role. Genly’s body hair was gummy with sisal juice, his brow a piece of parchment spread with mucilage. Now the males moved in, and I with them. Fortunately no one sought to prohibit or discourage my involvement. As the youngest hunters, Roosevelt and Fred bore the brunt of transporting Genly’s corpse down the hillside to the savannah, but the rest of us helped when the going got particularly treacherous. Beneath New Helensburgh the Minids rested briefly, girding themselves for a trek to the southeast—in the direction of Mount Tharaka, the throne of their world.

  The travois on which we had brought the warthog back to our citadel lay at the base of the hill. I signaled to the habilines that, if we still had a good distance to go, Genly should be laid upon the travois. After debating this matter with glances and subtle eye narrowings, the Minids agreed to my suggestion. I insisted on gripping the forward poles of the sledge and dragging my dead friend’s body to wherever his compatriots wished it to go. Again no one gainsaid me. The other Minids, carrying staves or clubs, acted as outri
ders, and for approximately three miles we trudged in disorderly procession across the grasslands to a solitary baobab.

  Here, to my surprise, Alfie, Malcolm, Roosevelt, and Fred struggled to install the corpse in the tree, as high among the great rootlike branches as they could lodge it without risking their own lives. Exempt from this labor by virtue of age, past service, or (in my case) fatigue, Jomo, Ham, and I looked on. We made ourselves useful by surveying the surrounding countryside for enemies, predatory gatecrashers. At last poor Genly sat slumped in a niche of baobab boughs, and the other Minids, sticky with sisal balm, cascaded to the ground one after another to offer their heartfelt obeisance to the corpse. I expected singing, but there was none until all the Minids except Ham had retreated to a patch of bush nearly a hundred yards from the tree. I withdrew with the majority, but I kept thinking that if a lion or a sabertooth or even a pack of wild dogs caught Ham out there alone, he would soon join Genly in the problematical Never-Never Land of Habiline Heaven.

  Then Ham began to sing. His tired old throat gave out a rasping keen that went on and on, focusing the implicit meaning of the entire veldt on the baobab beneath which he stood. I shuddered to hear his song, shuddered to think that I might actually understand the immemorial impulse giving rise to such homage. Then Ham stopped singing and came sauntering toward us on his bandy legs, a naked, defenseless gnome paradoxically dwindling in stature the farther behind him he left the baobab—as if the reality of his person paled before the ideal embodied in his lofty, sour song.

  I then expected the Minids to set out for New Helensburgh, to take back to their women confirmation of Genly’s tree burial. From dust to dust, from treetop to treetop. But even as the day drew on past noon, we remained in our blind of scrub plants and gall acacias. To stop the throbbing in my temples, I sat down and hung my head between my knees. Roosevelt and Fred paced back and forth in the undergrowth, heedless of the heat, impatient for a break in our vigil. Excitedly they signaled this break themselves by hooting softly and crowding forward to the edge of the thicket.