“That’s what he was doing when I found him,” Zubowicz said.
“What are you talking about?” I asked the man.
“Adam,” Zubowicz said. “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 rub too much garlic and onion salt into your steaks,” Nollinger testified. “Garlic salt, onion salt, tenderizer—it’s just too much, Loyd.”
Adam bit off the thread caught in his fingernail and signed at RuthClaire.
“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 Adam 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 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 said, “you’re ten—fifteen—maybe twenty years older than he is!”
“That’s a threadbare old ploy,” Zubowicz said. “We’ve gotten really tough on folks who wed aliens just to confer American citizenship on them. It’s become something of an industry, and the penalties for taking part in these fake marriages—for devious or fraudulent purposes, Mrs. Loyd—well, nowadays the penalties are severe.”
“I’m carrying Adam’s child. How fraudulent or devious is that?”
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. But unless you insisted on seeing 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 new spouse by cooperating with him in the conception of a new living entity. Sadly, 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? Can a human woman and a, uh, well, 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 said. “Of a sort. At Yerkes, not too long ago, a siamang and another kind of gibbon successfully mated when they were caged together for a long period. It surprised everyone, though.” He squinted at Adam. “Interbreeding between distinct human species—Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal, for instance—may’ve been one of the factors responsible for the wide variety among human physiques and faces today. Yeah,” he concluded, almost resentfully, “it’s possible, Mr. Zubowicz.”
I looked up. “RuthClaire, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’d planned to, Paul. I just 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 now Mrs. Adam Montaraz. My professional name’s still RuthClaire Loyd—that’s what everyone knows my work by—but tonight, considering your mission, call me by my legal married name.”
Zubowicz threw up his hands and turned in an oafish half-circle to escape the fury in RuthClaire’s eyes. As he turned, a hard object shattered one of the windowpanes in my front door. It grazed 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—both were red-clay bricks, or brick fragments—burst through the picture window near us and toppled a potted geranium, a tall ceramic beer stein, and a fishbowl full of colored sand. Zubowicz had his pistol out again, but now he looped its barrel around urging everyone to retreat to the rear of the restaurant. Dazedly, even Nollinger complied, the gash on his temple leaking a crimson mucilage. Adam loaned Nollinger his shoulder as, bent over like a special services commando, I hustled RuthClaire to the back.
The squeal of an automobile laying down rubber reverberated from one end of Main Street to the other. A backward glance told 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 again, and no more bricks, I assumed, 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.”
“Insurance’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 wielded shotguns. All three 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 jeans and scuffed work boots in two instances and pale hairy shins above powder-blue jogging shoes in the third. Pointed hoods—headpieces of grandiose, miter-like impracticality—concealed the men’s faces, but they had also pulled nylon stockings over their features to flatten and distort them. But one intruder had 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. The robes, the nylon masks, the lopsided ecclesiastical headgear were more for show, for 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 stoop—was an irrelevancy. What mattered was that three of my neighbors had worked themselves into a state of self-righteous agitation so calculating and cold that donning pompously comical costumes and trashing my four-star backwater cafe struck them as noble responses to something they just did not understand, or understood in the half-assed way of a house painter viewing Hieronymus Bosch. (Hell, I’m still not sure that I understand what they did or didn’t understand.) Now, dressed like pious executioners, they stood pointing shotguns.
Unignorable.
After taking Zubowicz’s pistol, the Klanners produced two pairs of handcuffs, one of which served to anchor the INS 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 spoke, took care of the handcuffing, and, as he worked, I could not help noticing sweat running down his legs to the tops of his shoes’ perforated ankle guards. The heat under those purple robes—I realized they were almost exactly the color of old Dr. Kearby’s beloved gentian violet—had to be strength-sappingly intense. What imbecility.
“Davie Hutton’s never around when you need him, is he?” Craig Puddicombe had trained his shotgun 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 coldly, and I stared harder at the Klansman in jogging shoes. Was that Davie Hutton? 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 assault
ed the West Bank and then made good their getaway. If Davie was with them, then they’d 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) Teavers said.
“Where?” RuthClaire asked.
But now that Zubowicz and Nollinger were secured, the urge to banter with or taunt us deserted the intruders. Grimly unspeaking, they herded us out the back door, past the restroom, 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 up into the tower’s crisscrossing support rods, but Teavers, sensing that Adam had it in mind to seek refuge aloft, cracked him across the temple with his shotgun barrel.
“Go on, you goddamn hibber!” he cried. “No hibberish monkey business!”
As Nollinger had done in the restaurant, Adam fell to his knees. His lips curled back to reveal his canines. RuthClaire knelt beside him to whisper 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. 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 for Teavers to blow our heads off. It seemed clear to me that he and his purple-capped pals were marching us to fatal appointments, or, at the very least, to a tryst with tar and feathers.
“Is 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 how—?”
E. L. Teavers said: “That’s all forfeit, Mr. Loyd. You and your wife are traitors.”
“To what?” RuthClaire asked.
“I said, ‘Shut up!’” Puddicombe said. “We don’t have to explain nothin’ to you!”
“Not now, maybe,” Teavers added, evenly enough.
And then I saw a van parked behind the softball backstop at 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. Its 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 semaphored 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 in the dust as an uncertain tie to the reality of Hothlepoya County. These clownish thugs were about to spirit us away to Never-Never Land.
“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 toward 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, four more people caparisoned in cumbersome purple and redolent of stale sweat. The darkness prevented me from distinguishing the sex of each one, and their shoes—sneakers or penny loafers—were not much help, either. At least one woman had come along: Her high-pitched mocking laughter greeted every underdone bon mot dropped into the deep fry of our fear and confusion.
Now the van was bumping along at good speed.
“Coulda sworn he’d stink,” one of the men said. “I 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 sat, 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 Teavers’s 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 answered. Adam had his arm linked in mine. Occasionally he looked from side to side as if trying to sort out the pecking order among our captors. I don’t think he was scared. Both RuthClaire and I were near, and with his free hand he absentmindedly groomed my ex, picking tiny knots out of the shingled strands of her hair.
Eventually the van skewed to a stop. Its sliding door popped back like the lid of a capsized jack-in-the-box. Puddicombe, minus his nylon stocking, forced us outside. We stood in the beams of E. L. Teavers’s pickup truck’s headlights, virtually blinded by their moted yellow glare. The van backed away, executed a wild turn on the edge of a trail rut, and vanished into the night with all its robed cargo but Puddicombe.
This frightened me far worse than anything that had happened so far, including even the first burst of brick against glass in the West Bank. RuthClaire, 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 eat big chunks of the western heavens. A bottomless abyss opened over my head and under my feet, and the chill of this sensation spookily disoriented me.
The headlights cut off.
From across the weed-choked field, Teavers said, “Bring the hibber here, Craig.”
“Why?” RuthClaire asked. “What do you mean to do?”
I closed my eyes, opened them, and closed them again. When next I peered about, though, the landscape seemed familiar. We stood on Cleve Snyder’s land 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 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 cistern-like 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 those 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 Snyder had offered to build a barbed-wire barricade with warning placards on it, and this offer had quieted the angry uproar. Tonight, glancing about me, I realized that either Snyder had never fulfilled his promise or else the vigilantes of the Kudzu Klavern 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 hush. Teavers, a grotesque shadow, climbed into view on a nearby mound. The mounds—it struck me—resembled eroded termitaria on a dusty East African plain. For a moment, in fact, it 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 shed his clothes,” Teavers ordered R
uthClaire from the mound lip.
“Why should I tell him that?”
“Do it! No backtalk!” To stress the urgency of compliance, he fired one barrel of his shotgun. The ground shook, and even 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, Teavers said, “If either of you moves, I’ll let fly this other barrel right into your hibber-lovin’ faces. Tomorrow mornin’ you’ll look like fresh ground round.”
Puddicombe laughed and nudged Adam forward. Adam seemed to grip the earth with his toes, as if hiking the high bough of an acacia tree. Although Puddicombe finally halted at the mound’s base, Adam ascended to within two or three feet of Teavers.
“Don’t,” RuthClaire said. “Don’t do it.”
Was she appealing to Adam or to Teavers? 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 meant to sacrifice Adam to the Plutonian tutelaries of the pit. But, equally clearly, he had not reckoned on the sinewy strength of the habiline, believing that his own greater height and weight would suffice to topple Adam into oblivion.
But Adam, snarling, wrested his arm from 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 understood his mistake too late to do anything about it.
“Shoot!” he ordered Puddicombe. “Shoot the bastard!”
Puddicombe was of two minds, struggling both to cover his prisoners and to protect his friend. If he fired, Teavers would suffer along with Adam, and I might have a chance 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.
Ancient of Days Page 8
