Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  Erzulie, barefoot, plunged into the wall of foliage without any further ado, but Adam called her back. We had to unload and fasten on our backpacks, which contained canned goods, cooking utensils, water bottles, bedding, fresh clothes, and all our recording and photographic equipment. RuthClaire had even brought some art supplies for the habilines. I could hardly blame her—they rarely received Federal Express or United Parcel Service deliveries. Everyone wore a backpack but Erzulie. Adam—his carry-frame in place, his top hat at a jaunty angle, his walking stick a foot taller than he—reminded me less of a voodoo spirit than of a Victorian chimney sweep. Into what sooty recesses of Montaraz did he intend to lead us?

  Actually, Erzulie did the leading. By sore-footed necessity, I brought up the rear. As a result, I could never even see the chemise-clad habiline. She was always thirty or forty yards ahead. To prevent me from being outdistanced and abandoned, Caroline had to lag well behind RuthClaire and Adam, occasionally signaling for rest stops. I had thought myself in better shape. Discovering the truth about my physical condition was a new source of resentment and chagrin.

  I began to think that Caroline and the others had set out to humiliate me, not only on this fatiguing hike but earlier that morning at the beach cottage. How many jokes had they told about me? How many laughs had they milked from silly speculation about my response to Erzulie’s presence on the porch? Was it possible that the three of them—Adam, RuthClaire and Caroline—constituted a clandestine ménage à trois?

  “Paul, you’re as red as a beet,” Caroline said. “Stop right there.” She poured some water onto her neckerchief and wiped my forehead and temples. For a moment, I let her. I was too tired to resist. RuthClaire and Adam came back on the unmarked trail to see what was happening. Their faces had outline but no definition. Their features were amorphous blurs against a revolving backdrop of emerald and turquoise. One of them asked me if I wanted to lie down with my head propped against a sleeping bag.

  “No. You’ll dump crickets on me—crickets, red wigglers, a tub full of dirt.”

  “He’s out of it,” RuthClaire said. “He needs to lie down.”

  I grabbed the wet neckerchief out of Caroline’s hand and flung it at a nearby tree. “Bitch! Two-timing bitch!”

  “She’s trying to cool you off,” RuthClaire told me. “You’ve gotten overheated. It’s not your fault. We didn’t give you time to get used to it. It’s too much too soon.”

  “I’m Adam and you’re Eve,” I said. “Who are these other people? I’ve never seen them before.”

  “Lie down, Paul. You’re delirious.”

  “I’m delightful. I’m delicious. I’m delovely.”

  Caroline, whose name I couldn’t then recall, turned away, and a dwarf in a blue dress and a white scarf limped out of the higher woods to peer into my nostrils from below. A cockatoo screamed, or a blood vessel in my temple hissed. I waved the dwarf in the chemise out of the way and sat down next to the tree. I was breathing hard, and I was angry. My new wife had disappeared. My old wife was kneeling in front of me. Beside her crouched a chimney sweep trying to unbutton my collar. (Did my chimney need cleaning?) His fingers poked me in the throat. I knocked his hand aside. As soon as I did that, though, a lid of some kind slid over the sky, blotting out sound and color alike. During this extended eclipse, my temples went in and out, as if my brain were struggling to breathe in a suffocating darkness.

  Then a familiar female voice said, “The bastard’s still in love with you.”

  Although the voice was familiar, I didn’t recognize it. I may not have even heard it. I may have simply imagined it . . . .

  I awoke sitting in the same spot. The light dappling the forest floor betrayed the fact that my delirium had lasted two or three hours. Noon had come and gone. Erzulie hunkered at my side with a thermos cap of orange juice. Seeing her, and no one else, panicked me. My wife, my ex-wife, and my ex’s husband had absconded, leaving me alone in an obscure upland glade with a wizened hominid woman whose name, Erzulie, was also that of a major voodoo goddess of the Haitian religion. Erzulie Freda, an imaginative yoking of the eternal female and the Virgin Mary. Why was this queer little person staring at me as if I had upset the balance between divinity and the material world?

  “Bwah,” she said. “Bwah!”

  That was pidgin French, wasn’t it? Bois. Didn’t that mean “wood”? Well, of course, there was a wood all around us, trees and shrubbery and vines. What could be more obvious? But when Erzulie said, “Bwah!” again, touching the thermos cap to my bottom lip, she was commanding me to drink. I slurped the orange juice greedily, grateful for its cold sweetness and for a brief reprieve from my panic. Then the panic came back.

  I was lucid, I was refreshed, and I was scared. I pushed the thermos cap away and levered myself up against the tree trunk. I shouted Caroline’s name—two or three times. Then I called for RuthClaire and Adam. Erzulie grimaced, turned her back on me, and sat down on an outcropping of rock, embracing her knees with her thin, hairy arms.

  “I’m here,” Caroline said, sliding down a mossy incline next to Erzulie’s rock. “Are you all right?” She hugged me.

  “I don’t know. I could have died. You guys ran out on me.”

  Caroline said she’d never been more than forty or fifty feet away, that Erzulie had stayed by my side to moisten my brow with makeshift compresses, and that we were now only ten minutes away from the habiline village. RuthClaire and Adam had each been back two or three times to check on me. If any had believed me in danger, they would have carried me to the Jeep and driven me to the hospital in Rutherford’s Port. But my fever had departed with the application of a second compress, and it had seemed to Adam that an hour or two of sleep, even if delirium-induced and fitful, would restore my physical and emotional equilibrium. My forehead was still cool, Caroline noted, touching me, and I looked a helluva lot better. Adam had been right.

  These explanations did not appease me. Maybe the rest had restored my physical equilibrium, but I was an emotional shipwreck. In two days I’d toted up more grievances against Caroline than in our previous five months of marriage. Our working holiday was going to hell in a canvas backpack. I was the victim of gross neglect and an odious conspiracy of sexual exclusion. Using slightly blunter language, I told Caroline so.

  She stared at me aghast. “You’re kidding.”

  “I know what I know, Caroline. I feel what I feel.”

  “Paul, you could run this country. You’re as paranoid as the first Duvalier.” I saw her waging a fierce internal battle to keep her composure from falling in ruins. “Maybe we shouldn’t have left you sitting here. You’ve had some weird fever dreams, old boy, and even though you’re awake again, you’re still under their brain-damaging influence.”

  “Old boy?”

  “Look, if I can forgive you for something you revealed while talking out of your head—if I can do that, even though it hurts like hell to find out—well, old boy, you can have the decency to forget the nonsense you dreamt sitting under this tree!” Both fists clenched at shoulder height, she began to cry.

  My stomach flip-flopped. “Something I revealed?”

  “You’re still in love with RuthClaire! You called her Eve and yourself Adam. Me, you called a two-timing bitch. Then you said you didn’t know who I was. Adam, either. In the sad little love pit of your subconscious, it’s just you and RuthClaire, world without end, amen.”

  “Caroline, stop.”

  “You think finding out something like that doesn’t hurt? My gut’s in an uproar, my nerves are knotted, and the irony of ironies is that from your paranoid point of view, I’m the perfidious two-timer—me, not you!”

  “Caroline—”

  “Just shut up? Every time you open your mouth, you put another foot in it. If you were a centipede, you’d’ve gagged to death by now.”

  “That’s not bad, kid.” A wan chuckle escaped me.

  “I’m not bad. There’s nothing bad about me. I’m so goddamn s
aintly I can go on living with a yahoo still in love with a woman happily married to someone else.”

  Erzulie, whom I had virtually forgotten, made a hacking noise and spit into the leaves beside her rock. Then she got spryly to her feet and vanished into an uphill hedge of foliage. Caroline wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her blue work shirt.

  “I didn’t know what I was saying,” I began.

  “You did when you accused me of neglecting you—and, for God’s sake, when you accused me of getting kinky with Adam and RuthClaire.”

  “I meant when I called myself Adam and RuthClaire Eve. A man’s not responsible for all the crap in his subconscious. I loved RuthClaire for a long time. We lived with each other for ten years. I was still in love with her when we divorced. I’ll never utterly eradicate those feelings. I really don’t think you’d want me to, either, as long as you realize that here and now, it’s all you, Caroline. My jealousy, my unfair resentments—they just go to prove it.”

  “Hey, sport, that’s just hugely comforting.” But, her sarcasm aside, Caroline did appear comforted—or, if not comforted, then mollified. She had spent her anger. She had disillusioned me of the belief that I was the victim of a conspiracy.

  “Caroline, I’m sorry.”

  She smiled grudgingly. She put her arm through mine. “Come on, you jackass,” she said. “Let’s walk on up to Prix-des-Yeux.”

  “Prix-des-Yeux?”

  “The habiline village. We’re almost there. RuthClaire and Adam are waiting for us. The habilines, too, I guess.” Prix-des-Yeux means Eye-Price or Eye-Prize. In the special lingo of vaudun, the term connotes a state of mystical clairvoyance obtainable only by practitioners at the highest level of faith. Arm in arm, then, Caroline and I climbed toward that state—even though neither of us believed.

  RuthClaire, Adam, and the habilines were not the only ones waiting for us when we arrived ten minutes later. Also on hand in the hidden village a hundred yards from the top of the mountain was Brian Nollinger. Once an anthropologist at Emory and a former beau of Caroline’s, Nollinger sat on a rosewood log next to the crude peristyle of the village houngfor, or voodoo temple. After we emerged into the ragged clearing encompassing Prix-des-Yeux, Brian stood up, turning his wide-brimmed hat in his hands like a steering wheel. I looked at Caroline. She looked at me. God blast me for a green-eyed fool, the first thought into my mind convicted her of a premeditated infidelity.

  “Hello,” the interloper said. He wore bush shorts, hiking boots, calf-high socks, and a khaki shirt with epaulets and three or four button-down pockets.

  Caroline said, “My God, Brian, what are you doing here?”

  “That’s what I was going to ask you about him,” I told Caroline. “Please don’t try to pretend you didn’t know he was here.”

  “But I didn’t—”

  “That’s insulting. You must think I’m an idiot.”

  RuthClaire, hearing this exchange, came out of the houngfor in front of which Brian had been sitting. A voodoo temple generally consists of a thatched enclosure with walls about two thirds of the way to its ceiling. The roof, as on this one, is wimpled with palm fronds. Hanging on cords beneath the ceiling is an eclectic jungle of sacred objects, including colored bottles, dried gourds, tin trinkets, and hand-carven mahogany charms. Exiting this shabby peristyle, RuthClaire walked straight across the small clearing to Caroline and me.

  “She didn’t know he was here, Paul. He got here about fifteen minutes ago. He followed us from the cottage.”

  Tentatively, Brian approached. As if afraid that I might leap forward to bust him in the chops, he halted about five feet behind RuthClaire. The wispy Fu Manchu that he had shaved off before showing up at Abraxas for Adam’s first formal exhibit was back again, but two or three days’ growth of patchy stubble had started to encroach upon it. In another few days, his beard would cover most of his lower jaw, with only the Fu Manchu’s dubious head start to mark it out from the newer sprouts. His hat, the kind that an African big-game hunter might wear, continued to turn in his hands—I was reminded of a bus driver trying to escape a crowded parking lot.

  “That’s true,” he said. “I have a French motor scooter, very quiet and economical. I’d been watching the Montaraz beach cottage ever since Blair got here. When he left yesterday, I feared Adam had canceled any plans to come up here again. Why would a restaurant owner or a vacationing sociologist want to visit the Rutherford Remnant? But I hung on through the night, and this morning, pop! a habiline woman appeared at your cottage and five of you piled into a Jeep and drove up here. For once, I found the damned turnoff. Three or four earlier times, you gave me the slip. It’s the turnoff that flummoxes me. I keep puttering by it. It’s just a tear in the roadside foliage.”

  “We knew you were on Montaraz,” RuthClaire said. “But we thought you were working on the Austin-Antilles coffee plantations.”

  “I am. How do you think I bought a motor scooter down there at import prices?”

  “You’re supposed to be in the Dominican Republic,” Caroline said, “doing demographic studies of the canecutters. To take that job, you left Atlanta without even telling me goodbye.”

  Christ, I thought. Caroline’s really cleaning out her psychic cupboards today. . . .

  “Caroline, I wrote you about not saying goodbye, and I did do demographic work in the Dominican. But I took that job to escape a bad situation at Emory and to position myself close enough to Haiti to do independent research on the Rutherford habilines. As soon as I could, I finagled a transfer from the Austin-Antilles sugar operation to the coffee ranches here on Montaraz.”

  “Doing what?” Caroline asked. “Installing punch clocks for the peasants?”

  “Supervising the construction of concrete drying platforms, Caroline. They’ve had them since the thirties on Haiti itself, but the workers here on Montaraz have always resisted the washing and drying process. Austin-Antilles was afraid to push them too hard for fear of provoking work stoppages. About three months ago, I implemented an education program with the help of the Pan American Development Foundation. A month ago, we actually got platform construction under way.”

  “What’s demographic about that, Brian? Where does your anthropological background come in? How does it help the laborers themselves?”

  “Not much maybe, but it’s the job that got me transferred over here. It’s valuable work economically, Caroline—it benefits the company. But my ulterior motive was to find Adam’s people. I’ve searched this island many times since March, using my work as cover, and when the Montarazes settled here, I knew it was only a matter of time. Blair came. And then, icing on the cake, you and—” He gestured at me.

  “Caroline’s husband,” I said.

  “Icing on the cake?” Caroline mocked. “Because you could finally get what you wanted, namely, unauthorized access to the habilines.”

  “With you and Mr. Loyd along, it wasn’t hard to follow you up here, if that’s what you mean. Mr. Loyd was so slow I had to sit down every couple of minutes to keep from stepping on his heels. Finally, he cracked up and went down on his fanny for a couple of hours.” He put his hat on, tightened its draw string under his chin, and stuffed his hands into his bush-shorts pockets. “I’m glad you’re okay, Mr. Loyd. I hung back a while, to figure out what was going on—but when Caroline returned to you and the two of you started arguing, well, it didn’t seem fair to sit there listening, so I made a big circle around you and came on up here to Habiline City.”

  “Prix-des-Yeux,” RuthClaire corrected him. “You think following people without their knowledge is less despicable than eavesdropping on them?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Why didn’t you come to our cottage, knock on the door, and ask us to bring you here? Didn’t that ever cross your mind?”

  “I knew you didn’t want to see me, Mrs. Montaraz. You ducked me in the market one day.” He shook his head. “Don’t deny it. Don’t apologize. Anyway, if I’d done that, if I’d come to
you and asked you to bring me up here, would you have done it?”

  “Of course not,” RuthClaire said.

  Brian Nollinger shrugged, then glanced about to see if anyone was sneaking up behind him to knock him senseless with a monkey-coco club.

  I glanced about, too. On the sides of the houngfor sat squatter’s huts of cardboard, plywood, scrap metal, palm thatching, and broken cinderblocks. These dwellings might have been transported in from Shantytown in Rutherford’s Port—except that whoever made them had refrained from using any tin or glass, and had not employed any scrap metal on their roofs—because the habilines had no wish to disclose their village’s location to searchers in small aircraft. And so Prix-des-Yeux had an earthy drabness and a natural green canopy concealing its modest environs from aerial snooping.

  “Now you’re here,” RuthClaire asked Nollinger, “what do you intend to do?”

  “Study the habilines. With your permission, I’d like to do field work here.”

  “With our permission? You did all you could to avoid asking for it, mister!”

  “But now that I know where the Rutherford Remnant makes its home, surely you’ll let me follow up. I admire Adam. I’m sympathetic to his people’s desire to live out their lives as an autonomous community. Most of my work has been in primate ethology, yes, but that’s not an inappropriate background for such research. I’m strong on method, a good organizer, and can do whatever I put my mind to, given a chance. Supervising the construction of coffee-drying platforms proves that. Moreover, I’m able to—”

  “Brian, old boy, you’ve got a job,” I said. “So just skip the self-serving resume.”

  “What you lack,” RuthClaire told him; “is discretion and a basic regard for others’ feelings. To you, these people—” waving at the temple and nearby shanties, a township barren of visible inhabitants—“well, they’re nothing but subject matter. As I’m nothing but an obstacle to research and Adam’s only a means to personal advancement.”