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 up, but she did not rebuke me for calling. I told her about the teen Ku Klutz Klanners who’d pickpocketed my peace of mind.
“Elvis Teavers?” RuthClaire asked. “Craig Puddicombe?”
“Maybe I should report this to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, huh? Sometimes I get GBI 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, RuthClaire 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’d managed. He hoped I’d 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, if 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 mental and emotional health of my guest. I said ‘No’ to that one, too. ‘In that case,’ the RAJA man said, ‘get set for more phone calls and 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—but kind of a cold one, tonight.”
“Hey, you’re selling more platters than a Rolling Stone. Pretty soon you’ll go platinum. 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 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 wait for the other to speak.
At last I said, “Does Adam sleep with you?” It was the first time I’d asked her this question. Somehow the time felt 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 say, Paul? I’ve grown fonder and fonder 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 off. 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 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.
“Famously. His manners have improved, he’s adjusted to indoor conveniences, he’s stopped killing squirrels (I think), and I’ve 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. Then she said:
“Before this uproar, Paul, I’d’ve jumped at the chance. Now it worries me, the idea of removing Adam from 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.”
“Why don’t you come out here? I’ll do the cooking.”
“That’s one of the reasons.” Hastily I added, “Listen, 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?”
“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 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.” 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. Maybe ten seconds passed before the steady buzz of the dial tone began issuing from my receiver. I sat in the ovenish heat listening to it. A cricket chirruped from behind a wall of cardboard boxes—they’d once held 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 my other help had left at eight-thirty, and although the odor of my customers’ cigarette smoke often lingered 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 probably should have alarmed me.
As a treat, as a concession, RuthClaire let Adam order steak, medium rare, and h
e 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 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 wore 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 sneakily watched 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 ’Iggins,” I told RuthClaire.
She had finished 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 learn, and, at bottom, naturally thoughtful.”
“Unlike some you’ve known.”
RuthClaire smiled her crooked smile. “Well, you’d’ve probably done okay in the Early Pleistocene, Paul. You’d’ve 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.
The habiline lifted his right hand and made a startling, pincerlike movement with his fingers. This motion he repeated, his broken-looking thumb swinging smartly 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 Adam. I had never seen him sign before. He continued doing so.
“Now he’d like to know if there’s a restroom 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 said.
“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—into a small section of alley—to reach this facility, and you must lock the door behind you to keep other patrons or even the restaurant employees from breaking in upon you once you have entered. Still, complaints were few, and I didn’t have room to install a second water closet. The county health department had approved this arrangement.
Without another word to RuthClaire I led Adam to the WC, nodded him inside, and returned to the dining room. With only the three of us present, it made no difference that Adam neglected to depress the lock button in the doorknob. This was one of my half-formed thoughts 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 done 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 should learn. He’s doing 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 McElroy’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 wide-angle shots of the congregation, the singing, and McElroy’s contortions at the pulpit—they spellbind him. Adam found the channel back before the controversy that ignited some of McElroy’s most authoritarian recent pronouncements. I wasn’t purposely tuning in to see what he had to say about us, simply letting Adam watch whatever he wanted to watch.”
“Does he still insist on watching, knowing McElroy’s bias?”
“It’s his favorite Sunday show. But now he makes ugly hand-signal suggestions when McElroy cites my relationship with Adam as an example of latter-day 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 Happy’s jeremiads.” RuthClaire smiled another off-center, self-effacing smile. “I can’t deny him those pleasures, Paul. He should know—intellectually, anyway—that there’s a big, smelly, bustling, contradictory world beyond 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 lately could he share those experiences with anyone.”
We heard a thump at the back of the West Bank. Adam was returning from the water closet. At his elbow, towering awkwardly over Adam, was a stranger with a .38 in Adam’s ribs. Adam’s cautious step and frightened eyes affirmed that his knowledge of the world clearly extended to the destructive capacity of firearms. Maybe he remembered the fate of his conspecifics aboard the fishing vessel off the coast of Punta Gorda. Both indignant and fearful, I stood up to face this new intruder, who holstered his pistol in a sling under his jacket and steered Adam to our table with a remorseless meaty hand. His face bore an apologetic expression that automatically lessened my fear of him.
“Thought he might run,” the man said. “Didn’t, though.”
“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 rear door, I had locked the one in front. When I released the latch and opened to the slender supplicant on the raised sidewalk, this person proved to be Brian Nollinger. Behind him on the walk fronting the Greyhound Depot Laundry, a small crowd of shadows—five or six people—milled about. My first thought was that a sinister ulteriority underlay their presence, my second that they were waiting for the midnight bus to Montgomery. Then Nollinger swept inside past me, and I had no further time to consider the question.
“You’ve got him!” the anthropologist said to Zubowicz.
“It wasn’t hard,” the INS agent replied. “He’s pretty docile, really. Catchin’ ’em after they eat’s my favorite way of doin’ it, Dr. Nollinger. Takes the edge off ’em.”
I glared at my former boarder, who had led Zubowicz here an
d lain in wait with him outside the West Bank. He had influenced the government’s decision to mount this operation. I’ll show you how to nab the 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 little heed to either RuthClaire or me; he only had eyes for Adam. With difficulty, I mastered an impulse to slap his granny glasses off his pale face and grind them to powder under my heel.
RuthClaire stood. “Under arrest? For what?”
“I’ve told you, Mrs. Loyd,” Zubowicz said. “For entering the country illegally and then fleeing INS authorities, and you, ma’am, aided and abetted him.”
“Am I under arrest, too?”
“If you help us—if you don’t go contestin’ or obstructin’—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,” Nollinger added.
“The only surviving specimen of Homo habilis in the entire world,” I interjected. “You think your rights outweigh his, Nollinger, because he’s a unique chance for bigger government grants and a measure of parasitic fame for ol’ Number One—not because he’s an illegal alien.”
Adam was following our argument closely, looking from face to face as each of us spoke and running a 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 forth with the motion of Adam’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,” Nollinger 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.”
Ancient of Days Page 7
