No Enemy But Time

by Michael Bishop

  “What are you doing?” Johnny demanded again.

  “Having the huckleberries scared out of me. What are you doing, Master Monegal?”

  “You’ve taken my tapes out of their shoebox and copied them, haven’t you? You’ve made your own cassettes. Why?”

  Instead of answering, Jeannette shuffled the long galley sheets together. Johnny glided across the room and took them from her hands.

  EDEN IN HIS DREAMS

  The Past Through Oneiromancy, A True Story

  Jeannette R. Monegal

  A VIREO PRESS BOOK * * New York

  This book was about him, and Jeannette had neither informed nor consulted him. She had put his skin on a typewriter platen, rolled it into place, and, if he knew anything about her literary inclinations, banged out one of those “inspirational” tomes that lay waste subject and author alike. The lares of candor and the penates of depth analysis were the tutelary deities of such writers, and Jeannette had sacrificed him to these gods.

  Angrily riffling the galley proofs, Johnny picked out words like allopatric, endocranial, speciation, and collective unconscious. His own name was on nearly every page, with passing or extended references to Seville, Spain; Van Luna, Kansas; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Fort Walton Beach, Florida; and New York City. At last he let the pages go and watched them sideslip to the carpet in a random scatter.

  “It’s scheduled to appear this fall, isn’t it?”

  “I was going to tell you.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as everything was set. I’d intended it as a surprise, a tribute to what you’ve suffered, John-John.”

  “Oh, I’m surprised. Yes, ma’am, one thing I am is surprised. Goddamn! am I surprised.”

  “Johnny—”

  “I was going to see it when it came out. I’d be strolling along Sixth Avenue past the goddamn Vireo Press bookstore, and pow!—like a karate chop to the windpipe—I’d see Eden in His Dreams by my very own mamma. That’s when I was going to see it, that would’ve been the surprise. Lord, Mamma, I feel like throwing you out the window without even opening it. How’d that be for a surprise?”

  “Johnny, please.”

  “I like your title, though. It’s a helluva lot classier than your last one. It’s a rip-off, too, of course—but a subtle rip-off.”

  Jeannette had called last year’s book for the Vireo Press I Couldn’t Put It Down, and I Was Sorry When It Ended. It had been a collection of whimsically philosophical essays about American reading habits since the advent of commercial television in the late 1940s. At least three different reviewers, working on three different urban newspapers in three different cities, had independently arrived at the same five-word notice for Jeannette’s book (“I could, and I wasn’t”), but it had sold nearly forty thousand copies in hardcover and ten times that in paperback. The success of this book, her second, had enabled Jeannette to pioneer a totally independent life without taking Anna out of college or putting John-John to work evenings as a busboy or carhop. She undoubtedly believed that a little gratitude was in order.

  “Listen,” she began, calmly enough. “Listen, Johnny—”

  “If you go ahead and publish this, Mamma, I’m going to . . . I can’t believe you’ve done this, I really really can’t—”

  “Johnny, two-thirds of my advance money is spent. I’ve missed my deadline twice.”

  “You said you were doing a book on Dust Bowl days in de heart ob de heart ob de country.”

  “Stop it. I was. I am. But this took me over, John-John, it took precedence, I intended it as a—”

  “Yeah, I know. A tribute.”

  It was a “tribute” that marked a rupture in their relationship as vast and unbridgeable as the Great Rift Valley itself. Jeannette, he told himself, was not really his mother; she had never viewed him as anything other than a social experiment, as some people might gingerly indulge a proclivity for pedophilia or peach-flavored soda pop. For sixteen years he had been her personal experimental subject. It was past time to end his mother’s experiment and to discover who he was without her aid or intervention.

  “Do whatever you want,” he told the woman at the drafting-board desk. “Publish it, don’t publish it. You’re never going to see me again, anyway. Not ever, mujer.”

  “You’re sixteen, Johnny. You’ve got another year of school. Do you think you’re ever going to—”

  As if constrained by weight limits other than those dictated by his own size and strength, he packed light. His mother—the woman named Jeannette Monegal—watched him, but he had nothing more to say to her and got out of the apartment as quickly as he could.

  * * *

  Dressed for the mid-morning chill of April, he caught a taxi across the George Washington Bridge into Jersey. This trip cost him dearly, so he hitchhiked into Paterson, riding high in the cab of a West Point Pepperel semi. The driver, a burly man with a soft southern accent, had a rattlesnake skin stretched across the dashboard. The skin resembled a dingy cellophane scabbard, and the hitchhiker put his hands between his legs to keep from accidentally touching the discarded sheath.

  The driver grinned a great deal but talked only intermittently. In Paterson he agreed to carry the hitchhiker right down the turnpike into Dixie, if only his passenger would sing to keep him awake. The driver preferred songs that were either sprightly or obscene. Or both. “La Cucaracha” proved to be one of his particular favorites, and the hitchhiker sang it virtually without letup for the first sixty miles on the turnpike.

  “That’s pretty,” the driver told him. “What’s your name?”

  “Kampa,” said the hitchhiker. “Joshua Kampa.”

  “Right,” the driver responded, wringing the steering wheel as if it were a dishrag. “Only a Mexican could sing ‘La Cucaracha’ the way you do. . . .”

  Chapter Twenty

  A Disappearance

  HELEN WAS THE ONE WHO FINALLY MADE a clear sighting of the creatures that had been following us for the past two days, and she informed the rest of us by throwing back her head and emitting a single ear-splitting bark. To the east, not more than two hundred yards away, I saw three small figures looking at us from the lip of a wedge-shaped kopje. They scrambled out of view as soon as Helen’s cry reached them, but I no longer had any serious doubts about the identity of our pursuers.

  A large band of gracile australopithecines—A. africanus—had been moving almost parallel to our own line of march, using the high patches of savannah grass and the oasis-like islands of thorn trees and acacias as blinds. Since my arrival in the Pleistocene I had seen only a few representatives of this supposedly well-distributed hominid species, always at a great distance. Although I had seen members of the allegedly rarer A. robustus at closer range, circumstantial evidence suggested that both species were rapidly dying out.

  Alfie and the other Minids wasted no pity on the australopithecines. Now that they understood how close our tag-tails had drawn, they seemed to be considering the wisdom of a sally against them. A nervous alertness informed everyone’s behavior; the men kept exchanging glances and making noisy feints in the direction of the graciles, who, after skeedaddling to deeper cover, remained altogether out of sight for the next hour or so. As I had not wanted to shoot a chalicothere, neither did I wish to join a war party against our hobbity shadows to the east.

  Helen came to me and peered into my eyes as if trying to communicate a profound or frustratingly complex notion. We had paused for a moment on the edge of an arroyo, and I stared down into the cracked stream bed trying to arrange my intuitions into a sensible pattern. What did Helen want to convey? I had no idea. She, as if to prompt me to comprehension, patted one lean, hairy breast and made a mewling sound. Again, shrugging my shoulders and opening my hands to demonstrate my bewilderment, I wished fervently that she could speak. Charades have never been my forte.

  “Helen—Helen, I don’t know what you want.”

  Helen retreated from me, leapt down into the stream bed, and began
following it northward, back the way we had come.

  “Helen, what are you doing?” I cried. “Where are you going?”

  The other Minids seemed unperturbed. I jumped down into the gully and trotted after her, but she waved me back without ceasing to retreat from us. When she clambered up the eastern bank, plunged into a thicket some thirty or forty yards farther on, and completely disappeared from my vision, my heart sank. I was astonished and hurt. Later, with more facts at my disposal, her departure made sense, but at the moment it struck me as arbitrary, erratic, and maybe even suicidal. The last glimpse I had of her was a flash of vivid red from the bandanna about her neck, and that red seemed frighteningly portentous.

  Reluctantly I followed the others.

  Afternoon sloped into evening. What was going on? How had I offended Helen? By failing to understand her? By refusing to make bellicose gestures at the band of A. africanus shadowing us? Had Helen’s disillusionment with me sent her off across the savannah in search of another husband? Pathetically egocentric, these questions pinched at my forebrain and hung on like angry crayfish. Reason would not shake them loose. I began to wonder if I could survive without Helen.

  * * *

  Toward twilight we approached a water hole on whose opposite bank stood a female black rhino and her hairy calf. They snorted at the water, nuzzling it with vaguely prehensile lips. The evidence of their hides—splotched, mud-caked, rubbery-looking—suggested that they had already enjoyed a good wallow and were now just fooling around, keeping other thirsty animals at bay by refusing to depart. Swarms of bot flies danced about their impervious bodies, looking for dry places to alight.

  Ham led us down to the water hole to drink, and the rhinoceroses’ piggy eyes strained after our outlines while their big purse-shaped ears absent-mindedly tracked our chatter. Much to my relief, they did not attempt to chase us off.

  When the Minids and I had finished drinking, Malcolm took up watch in a tree.

  The darkness had a tincture-of-iodine quality about it, and my anxiety over Helen’s desertion had begun to take on a hysterical edge. Unable to sit still, I paced the western shore of the water hole. Alfie and the others divided their attention between me and the rhinos, which finally lumbered up the opposite bank and out onto the evening grasslands.

  Suddenly Malcolm hooted a warning from his tree, an urgent warning, and I hurried to join him aloft. All the other Minids took cover, too. Soon I was installed in a pale, polished tree fork higher than Malcolm’s lookout, and I saw that a pack of giant hyenas was approaching the two departing rhinos. Above Mount Tharaka the full moon—a huge, luminous brood ball—heaved into view, spotlighting the confrontation on the veldt.

  The hyenas’ joint purpose was to induce Junior to charge, thereby separating him from Mamma and making it possible to gang-tackle him. To this end, two of the hunger-crazed hyenas danced in, swatted the calf on his fuzzy fanny, and darted away. Mamma blustered from place to place, trying to disperse the hyenas, but because they saw far better than she or Junior did, they could easily skitter out of her path. In fact, her huffy offensive maneuvers seemed to be wearing Mamma down. Junior jostled along in her lee whenever he could, but his mother’s increasing frustration and bad temper kept deflecting her into stupid games of tag with their tormentors.

  Most of the hyenas, I noticed, were sitting some distance away, watching. Their eyes were yellow agates in the moonlight. The dog work of harassment they left to a pair of agile bullies who stood nearly four feet high at their shoulders. The noise from this scrimmage—the lunges, snorts, and foot feints—seemed somehow remote. Abstractedly I wondered if a kill on either side would take my mind off Helen, and if the Minids could get in on the spoils. So far the contest had engendered only sound and surliness, most of it from Mamma.

  This changed. When the female thundered to her left to rout one lean hyena, Junior rashly attacked the renegade nipping at his flank on the right. His charge took him forty or fifty feet toward the hyenas lounging in the low grass east of the water hole. Several of these creatures sprang up to capitalize on his folly. Almost before I could blink, the calf was down, thrashing and squealing as a pair of his assailants dragged him along by his skinny tail and one hind leg. The remaining hyenas rushed in to rip open Junior’s belly.

  The calf’s high-pitched protests turned Mamma around. Stampeding to his rescue, she bayonetted one monstrous hyena with a dip of her snout. With a resounding crack that probably signaled a broken spine, the wounded animal flipped brains over butt to its back. As the other hyenas scurried for safety, Junior was able to regain his feet. He trotted to Mamma for consolation. The set-to was over, for the hyenas had lost the will to test the huge female again. Secure in their triumph, Mamma and Junior angled off into the bush. Their departure was dignified, even lordly.

  Once they had gone, the hyenas moved in to tear the guts out of their fallen mate. Jockeying for position, they nudged the carcass, quarreled viciously with one another, and fed.

  Alfie, in the tree next to mine, periodically hurled a piece of debris at the hyenas—a fruit husk, a scab of bark—but with more symbolic than real effect. The hyenas went on gorging themselves. As they were finishing up, several of them broke away and crept down to the water hole to drink. Stranded aloft, we intensified our efforts to drive them off, hurling whatever came to hand: rotten limbs, nuts, berries, old birds’ nests, the works. We also assaulted the hyenas vocally, carrying on like banshee divas at an operatic wake.

  This aggressive strategy boomeranged. The hyenas—the entire pack, at least a dozen—withdrew from the roiling water hole without really surrendering it to us. They either prowled the edges of the thicket or lay in the grass out of missile range. Our dissonant abuse did not greatly upset them. They were prepared to wait us out.

  Vultures settled out of the air, as if from the mother-of-pearl uterus of the moon, and the night kindled with insect song and lethargic wing beats.

  We were under siege, the Minids and I, and it occurred to me that in times of trial a resourceful people nearly always finds a means of allaying its fears and bolstering its courage. Usually either an acknowledged leader (F.D.R., say) or a person with a special attention-focusing talent (Betty Grable, for instance) steps in to nerve, comfort, and cheer the demoralized multitudes, by oration or tap dance.

  None of us was in a position to tap dance. But because the Minids required this kind of psychological boost, I decided that I must speak to them in the forceful and reassuring tones of a storytelling patriot. Or maybe I simply needed to reassure myself. In any case, I told them a tale, a spur-of-the-moment tale, that probably ought to be called “How the Reem Got Her Horns.”

  * * *

  “Once upon a time,” I declaimed, furiously free associating, “the rhinoceros had no horns at all. Further, in those distant days she was known by her Creator, Ngai, as the reem rather than as the rhinoceros. This later word, O habilines, implies the possession of a horn that the reem did not yet have.

  “I want to tell you how she got it.

  “Yes, in those days the reem was a miserable, defenseless creature whose great size was her only seeming asset. In truth, she could seldom use her size to good advantage because she was slow, hard of hearing, and near-sighted to boot. All the other animals, including even the hares and the hyraxes, taunted her with impunity. It had not taken them long to discover that her armor plating was something of a sham, for her skin was thick only at the underlayer. Provided one knew just where to strike, the reem could be made to bleed like a hemophiliac.

  “One day the dog, an ill-bred jackanapes, amused himself for several hours at the reem’s expense. He nipped her flanks, chewed her toes, and, every time he took a turn beneath her belly, tickled her teats. By late afternoon several more animals—the behemoth and a retinue of lesser bullies—had joined this game, and the poor reem was soon a rucksack of tears and shapeless fatigues. Slumped on the ground, she waited for darkness to drive her tormentors to their beds.


  “Later, when they had departed, the reem resolved to petition Ngai for aid. He had overlooked her when distributing such self-protective necessities as speed, cunning, ferocity, and camouflage, and she was determined to upbraid him for his carelessness, to shame him into playing her fair. Despite her weariness, then, she set off before dawn to visit the Creator in his dwelling on the slope of Mount Tharaka.

  “Many days elapsed between her departure and her arrival, and the Creator, disguised as a highlands blue monkey, saw her coming even before she had reached the foot of the great mountain. He remembered how he had inadvertently slighted her on the Sixth Day of Creation, and his irritation at being reminded of this negligence prompted him to climb into a tree. From this vantage he hurled a fusillade of fruit at the ugly creature lumbering up the wooded draw toward his dwelling.

  “The reem endured the Creator’s fit of pique. Eventually he stopped flinging missiles and asked her in an aggrieved tone what she wanted of him. The reem was glad to be asked. She explained her predicament—the shame of her defenselessness—and demanded a boon to offset the handicaps with which he had so pitilessly encumbered her life.

  “ ‘Very well,’ said Ngai. ‘Go back down to the plain and practice your running.’

  “The reem did so. She discovered that the Creator had given her speed of a kind. In short bursts she could run as fast as the antelope. However, she tired easily, and it struck her that animals with more endurance would still be able to trifle with her, to treat her as meanly as they liked. She returned to Mount Tharaka and bearded Ngai in a garden of fragrant succulents.