Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  Dust billowed outward from the combat on the pit rim, a reddish-black fog in the starlight, and then both Teavers and Adam went over the edge. That was all there was to it. One moment they were grappling on the surface of their common planet, the next they were plummeting hellward as if neither had ever existed. Teavers managed a scream as he fell—a frail, short-lived protest—but Adam made no sound at all; and maybe thirty seconds after they’d begun to tangle, the night again belonged to the crickets, the stars, and the coal-sack thunderhead looming like a celestial pit 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 should kill you,” 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 wavered. So did his hands. He backed away from us toward the mound, picked up Teavers’s 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. He broke for the pickup, leapt into its cab, and gunned the vehicle past us, nearly striking RuthClaire. Away from the brick kiln he sped, away from the nightmare he’d helped to create.

  “We must tell Nancy,” RuthClaire said, her chin 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 called out to Adam and Teavers. I dropped pebbles into the hole to try to plumb its depth. This was impossible, and RuthClaire told me to stop, it was no use.

  Wearily, then, we set off on foot together for Paradise Farm.

  It took 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 horizontal strut had already burned through, making an amputee of this self-contradictory symbol, but neither of us had any doubt about its original shape. 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 wind whipped the flames about. The other cross arm splintered and crashed down, 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 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 Mrs. E. L. Teavers. Even Edna Twiggs was ignorant of our predicament—unless, of course, she’d had something to do with it. Standing in RuthClaire’s loft, trying to undress my ex-wife for bed, I suspected 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. RuthClaire, meanwhile, kept telling me to wait until morning to venture out, I’d be a fool to brave this storm, there was nothing we could do for Adam, the cross burners were long gone. I brought her 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, locked every door. Then I set off through the rain to Ruben Decker’s farm, two miles down the highway. My clothes, immediately drenched, grew heavier and heavier. Two different southbound automobiles went whooshing by, hurling spray, but neither stopped, and I reached my destination waterlogged and fantod-afflicted. Like a drug dream, the image of Teavers and Adam disappearing into that hungry kiln hole kept flashing through my head.

  When I knocked on Decker’s flyspecked screen door, I nearly crumpled to the porch. 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.”

  “Of course you do.” Decker let me in, the silver-blue cat in his arms purring like a turbine.

  Davie Hutton had been patrolling the Peachfield residential area at the time of the attack on the West Bank. Later, he assisted the Hothlepoya County Emergency Rescue Service at an accident south of Tocqueville. Upon learning of the evening’s events from a dispatcher in the sheriff’s office in Tocqueville, however, he returned to Beulah Fork and released Dick Zubowicz and Brian Nollinger from their handcuffs, using a master key. It no longer seemed likely 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.

  Hutton, 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 exorbitant. My premiums would not go up. In only another day or two, I could open for business again.

  At Paradise Farm, two men from 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 to examine the restaurant, the softball field at the elementary school, and the abandoned brick kiln on Cleve Snyder’s property. They used helicopters as well as cars. Because Craig Puddicombe had apparently left Hothlepoya County, maybe even Georgia, a description of both him and E. L. Teavers’s 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 not alleviate the heat, but, by two o’clock that same afternoon, a GBI man telephoned RuthClaire to inform her that his agency had just made four arrests.

  “Do you think you could go back out to the Snyder place?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Why?”

  “We’d like a detailed run-through of everything that 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 McElroy Country, I thought. I hoped fervently that the storm had had enough fury to cripple—for a day or two—the broadcasting towers of the Greater Christian Constituency of America in Rehoboth, Louisiana. My mood was vengeful, and sour. The agents in front murmured to each other 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 saw Brian Nollinger standing near the mound whose gullet 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. “What the hell are you doing here?” I shouted.

  He looked toward me. Almost prayerfully, he canted his head toward the eroded mound. “I’m mourning. I came out here to mourn, Mr. Loyd.”

  Between clenched teeth, RuthClaire said, “He has no right.”

  Even so, 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 something like 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. But some of the shame and embarrassment I felt for the anthropologist was shame and embarrassment for Paul Loyd. If I had not gone to him in February, Adam might still be alive. . . .

  “Can’t you guys send that jerk back to Atlanta?” I asked the agents.

  Niedrach looked over his shoulder at us. “He’s here as a consultant. Our chief thought his expertise might be helpful. We won’t let him bug you or Mrs. Montaraz.”

  I flinched at this word. 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, we could begin the reenactment. He would play Teavers’s 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’d driven him out here took Adam’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 off Niedrach’s offer of a break or a postponement, and we concluded the exercise in twenty minutes, with 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 reverberant quality that sent chills through my system—in spite of the stifling July mugginess. RuthClaire, Nollinger, the GBI 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.

  Adam’s head popped out of view again.

  “Adam!” RuthClaire wailed.

  Descending the first mound, she ran on tip-toes 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 crimps and volutes. It fit him no better than a jousting-tournament tent, but shone with a monarchical fire, torn and sodden as it was. At the bottom of the interconnected vats, he had no doubt put on the robe to keep warm during the rain and darkness, but now seemed to wear it as a concession to West Georgia mores. He had the look of a sewer rat emerging from its chthonic habitations: the King of the Sewer Rats.

  RuthClaire hugged him. He returned the embrace, and Nollinger, the GBI agents, and I saw 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. “His ancestors—the ones the Kikembu warriors sold to Sayyid Sa’īd’s agents in Bravanumbi—well, they lived in caves in the Lolitabu Hills. That’s how 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 clearly retained some of the subterranean instincts acquired by his latter-day habiline forebears in East Africa. I mean, how many of us denatured Homo sapiens could have survived an ordeal so—”

  “Why don’t you just shut up?” I said.

  Nollinger shrugged and fell silent, rocking contentedly in his boots, hands in pockets. My initial joy at Adam’s return from the dead had gone off its groove, like a stereo stylus that refuses to track. My rival had reappeared.

  And my rival triumphed utterly. Not long after the episode with the Zealous High Zygote & Co., RuthClaire sold Paradise Farm back to me and moved to Atlanta. Although convinced that most of her neighbors did not share the extremist sentiments of the Klan, she no longer felt comfortable in Hothlepoya County. Also, she wished to establish closer contacts with the galleries exhibiting her work or making offers to exhibit it, and the rural life-style no longer suited. As for Adam, he adapted to an urban environment as quickly as he had adapted to the bucolic delights of Paradise Farm, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service ceased trying to deport him to the Caribbean.

  Adam painted. RuthClaire taught him. His paintings, true novelties, sold for almost as much as her own paintings of similar size. Two of Adam’s works—colorful pieces of habiline expressionism—still hang in the West Bank, gifts of no little value and aesthetic appeal. They elicit many compliments, even from people ignorant of the artist’s identity, and RuthClaire contended from the first that Adam had real talent.

  Before the Montarazes left Beulah Fork, I threw them a going-away party in the West Bank. Livia George, Hazel Upchurch, Molly Kingsbury, Davie Hutton, Clarence and Eileen Tidings, Ruben and Elizabeth Decker, Mayor Ted Noles and his wife, and even 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, 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 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 appetite. She nursed her meal along until she at last felt easy setting it aside for a dessert cup of rainbow sherbet—and then announced to all and sundry that although few contemporary divorces were civil or even tastefully barbarous, she and I were still fast friends. When the baby came, Adam and she had agreed that I would act as its godfather. Indeed, if it were a boy, they intended to name it after me.

  “Hear, hear!” everyone cried.

  I stood to 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.

  PART TWO:

  His Heroic Heart<
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  Beulah Fork and Atlanta, Georgia

  Marriage domesticates. Divorce disrupts. Bachelorhood palls. And work—not time—heals all heartbreaks.

  Business was booming at the West Bank. I slept soundly for the first time in two years. Funny, in fact, how the booming of a business can sometimes soothe you even better than a lullaby.

  I had finally managed to convince myself that RuthClaire and I were through—as man and wife, if not as wistfully wary friends. After all, she was with child by her habiline husband, Adam Montaraz, and no one could gainsay her devotion to the little man. He had impregnated her where I had failed to. He had moved with her to Atlanta. He had become a successful artist, and his private evolution toward a kind of genteel Southern sophistication was, well, efficiently evolving. The Atlanta Constitution would occasionally report that the Montarazes had attended a gallery opening, or a play, or a sporting event. Three times I’d seen Adam’s photograph in the paper, and twice he had been wearing a tuxedo.

  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’d set 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 facing 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 hatchback pulled into a diagonal parking spot just below my stepladder.