Now back in print—a powerful science fiction masterwork from the Nebula Award-winning author of
What if a living specimen of
From these dramatic speculations, Michael Bishop creates a complex story spanning several years in the late 1980s and intertwining the lives of many fascinating and/or exasperating characters, including…
and
Over the course of
A rare combination of science fiction, noir mystery, and comedy of manners,
When volume thirteen of
Michael’s fellow writers must have also liked the story. “Her Habiline Husband” was a finalist for the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America. But just as had happened a decade earlier when Michael’s “Death and Designation Among the Asadi” and “The White Otters of Childhood” knocked each other out of contention, he had another story (“The Gospel According to Gamaliel Crucis”) of novella length on the Nebula ballot in 1984, resulting in a likely splitting of the Bishop vote. In any case, neither of his two finalists won the award.
In an email exchange about the novella, Michael revealed that its title owes an obvious debt to John Collier’s short novel
Writing “Her Habiline Husband” as a stand-alone story, Michael had no early plans to expand it into a novel. Only later did he decide that there was “more story to the story” and sit down to write two additional parts to complete the novel, with the original novella as its opening section.
“I’ve never altogether trusted the idea of expanding a story to novel length by injecting a metaphorical air hose and inflating it from within,” Michael responded when asked about the “expansion” of the novella into
(In this regard, I, and many other readers, believe that Bishop does succeed in that very aim in
Bishop’s first attempt at this form of expansion has its embodiment in the 1979 novel
I think it illuminating to note that this form of expansion exactly follows the pattern of Theodore Sturgeon’s 1953 novel,
In addition to acknowledging John Collier and William Faulkner for influencing the original novella, Michael credits several writers of hard-boiled detective fiction for shaping the substance, style, and format of the resulting novelization: “Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald go almost without saying, but I must also point to the popular series that I was reading in the early 1980s, namely, the Jacob Asch novels by Arthur Lyons and the Spenser novels by Robert B. Parker. Incidentally, I’ve always felt that Lyons’s work, in particular, never garnered the acclaim that it deserved.” This influence manifests undeniably in the second section of the novel, “His Heroic Heart,” where the story shifts from Beulah Fork, the bucolic small west Georgia town setting of “Her Habiline Husband,” to the bustling “mean streets” of Atlanta with its art-gallery and nightclub scenes.
Concerning the novel’s title, Michael admits, “Once I’d finished the writing and most of my revisions, I had no idea what to call the entire book, but David Hartwell, who often came to my rescue while editing my work, suggested
So what about the novel itself?
It begins in a peaceful pecan grove in the rural South and ends on the serene beach of a remote Caribbean island. In between, important questions are asked by the central character, and by extension, the author. What does it mean to be human? Is our humanity in our genes or in our actions? Does every living creature have a soul? Is that soul a gift from a divine spirit, or is it simply biological?
In a 2003 public radio interview, Michael said, “What I was attempting to do with Adam [the novel’s central character] was to show, in some respects, through a single individual, the evolution of an entire species, an entire race of creatures who are moving towards both sentience and spirituality. How did it happen that human beings came to have a sense, a feeling of connectiveness to the Sacred? I wanted to take a look at a creature who came out of a background that many of us would consider primitive and deprived, and yet, at the same time, show that there is something in that individual that is yearning toward something else. When he finally reaches a situation where he has a degree of safety, these questions come to the fore in his own mind. How can one person go through life never asking these questions at all, and another person spends his or her entire life asking them? Adam was one of those individuals for whom these questions had a great deal of significance. And until he could answer them to his own satisfaction, he didn’t feel that he had completed himself as an authentic creature, whether that happened to be a creature of God or a creature of Nature.
“Adam evolves during the course of the novel from being a very primitive creature to [becoming] perhaps the noblest individual in the whole book. He attempts to confront all of the aspects of contemporary society and to incorporate those things in himself, to judge them, to test them, and to evaluate them. His nobility arises from actually transcending some of the faults that we have as a society now, but he does that consciously, and not as a completely primitive individual.”{
Among his several published novel-length works, Michael considers
This first new print edition of the novel in more than eighteen years strengthens my hope that a new generation of grateful readers will discover
RuthClaire Loyd, my ex-wife, first caught sight of the trespasser from the loft studio of her barn-sized house near Beulah Fork, Georgia. She was doing one of twelve paintings for a series of subscription-order porcelain plates that would feature her unique interpretations of the nine angelic orders and the Holy Trinity (this particular painting was entitled
Swart and gnomish, he was moving through the tall shadowy grass in the pecan grove. His movements combined an aggressive curiosity with a kind of placid caution, as if he had every right to be there but still expected someone—the property’s legal owner, a buttinsky neighbor—to call him to accounts. Passing from a dapple of September sunlight into a patch of shade, he resembled one of the black boys who had turned Cleve Snyder’s creek into the skinnydipping riviera of Hothlepoya County. He was a little far afield, though, and the light limning his upper body made him look too
“He’s walking,” RuthClaire murmured to herself. “Hairy or not, only human beings walk like that.”
My ex is not given to panic, but this observation worried her. Her house (I had relinquished all claims to it back in January, to spare her the psychic upheaval of a move) sits in splendid-spooky isolation about a hundred yards from the state highway connecting Tocqueville and Beulah Fork. Cleve Snyder, meanwhile, leases his adjacent ninety acres to a cotton grower who does not live there. RuthClaire was beginning to feel alone and vulnerable.
Imperceptibly trembling, she set aside her brushes and paints to watch the trespasser. He was closer to the house now, and a rake that she had left leaning against one of the pecan trees enabled her to estimate his height at a diminutive four and a half feet. His sinewy arms bespoke his maturity, however, as did the massiveness of his underslung jaw and the dark gnarl of his sex. Maybe, she helplessly conjectured, he was a deranged dwarf recently escaped from an institution populated by violence-prone sexual deviates….
“Stop it,” RuthClaire advised herself. “Stop it.”
Suddenly the trespasser gripped the bole of a tree with his hands and the bottom of his feet; he shinnied to a swaying perch high above the ground. Here, for over an hour, he cracked pecans with his teeth and single-mindedly fed himself. My ex-wife’s worry subsided a little. The intruder seemed to be neither an outright carnivore nor a rapist. Come twilight, though, she was ready for him to leave, while he appeared perfectly content to occupy his perch until Judgment Day.
RuthClaire had no intention of going to bed with a skinnydipping dwarf in her pecan grove. She telephoned me.
“It’s probably someone’s pet monkey,” I said. “A rich Yankee matron broke down on the interstate, and her chimpanzee—you know how some of those old ladies from Connecticut are—wandered off while she was trying to flag down a farmer to unscrew her radiator cap.”
“Paul,” RuthClaire said, unamused.
“What?”
“First of all,” she said, evenly enough, “a chimpanzee isn’t a monkey, it’s an ape. Second, I know nothing at all about old ladies from Connecticut. And, third, the creature in my pecan tree
“Boy, I’d forgotten what a Jane Goodall fan you are.” This riposte RuthClaire declined to volley.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked, somewhat exasperated. My ex-wife’s imagination is both her fortune and her folly; and at this point, to tell the truth, I was thinking that her visitor was indeed an out-of-season skinnydipper or maybe a raccoon. For an artist, RuthClaire is remarkably near-sighted, a fact that contributes to the almost abstract blurriness of some of her landscapes and backgrounds.
“Come see about me,” she said.
In Beulah Fork, I ran a small gourmet restaurant called the West Bank. Despite the incredulity of outsiders (as, for instance, Connecticut matrons with pet chimpanzees), who expect rural eating establishments in the South to serve nothing but catfish, barbecue, Brunswick stew, and turnip greens, the West Bank offered cosmopolitan fare and a sophisticated ambience. My clientele comprised professional people, wealthy retirees, and tourists. The proximity of a popular state park, the historic city of Tocqueville, and a recreational area known as Muscadine Gardens kept me in paying customers; and while RuthClaire and I were married, she exhibited and sold many of her best paintings right on the premises. Her work—only a few pieces of which still remain on the walls—gave the restaurant a kind of muted bohemian elegance, but, in turn, the West Bank gave my wife a unique and probably invaluable showcase for her talent. Until our split, I think, we both viewed the relationship between her success and mine as healthily symbiotic.
Art in the service of commerce. Commerce in the service of art.
RuthClaire had telephoned me just before the dinner hour on Friday. The West Bank had reservations from more than a dozen people from Tocqueville and the Gardens, and I did not really want to dump the whole of this formidable crowd into the lap of Molly Kingsbury, a bright young woman who did a better job hostessing than overseeing my occasionally high-strung cooks, Hazel Upchurch and Livia George Stephens. But dump it I did. I begged off my responsibilities at the West Bank with a story about a broken water pipe on Paradise Farm and drove out there lickety-split to see about my ex. Twelve miles in ten minutes.
RuthClaire led me to the studio loft and pointed through her window into the pecan grove. “He’s still sitting there,” she said.
I squinted. At this hour the figure in the tree was a mere smudge among the tangled branches, not much bigger than a squirrel’s nest. “Why didn’t you shoot off that .22 I gave you?” I asked RuthClaire, a little afraid that she was having me on. Even the spreading crimson sunset behind the pecan grove did not enable me to pick out the alleged trespasser.
“I wanted you to see him, too, Paul. I got to where I needed outside confirmation. Don’t you see?”
No, I didn’t see. That was the problem.
“Go out with me,” RuthClaire said. “The buddy system’s always recommended for dangerous enterprises.”
“The buddy I want is that little .22, Ruthie Cee.” She stood aside while I wrested the rifle out of the gun cabinet, and together we went back downstairs, through the living and dining rooms, and out the plate-glass doors opening onto the pecan grove. Beneath the intruder’s tree we paused to gape and take stock. The stock I took went into the cushion of flesh just above my right armpit, and I sighted along the barrel at a bearded black face like that of a living gargoyle.
RuthClaire was right. The trespasser wasn’t a monkey. He more nearly resembled a medieval demon, with a small but noticeable ridge running fore and aft straight over the middle of his skull. He had been on the cusp of falling asleep, I think, and the apparition of two human beings at this inopportune moment startled him. Fear showed in his beady, obsidian eyes, which flashed between my ex-wife and me like sooty strobes. His upper lip moved away from his teeth.
From above the mysterious creature, I shot down a dangling cluster of branches that would have eventually fallen anyway. The report echoed all the way to White Cow Creek, and hundreds of foraging sparrows scattered into the twilight like feathered buckshot.
“I swear to goodness, Paul!” RuthClaire shouted, her most fiery oath. She was trying to take the rifle out of my hands. “You’ve always been a shoot-first-talk-later fool, but that poor fella’s no threat! Look!”
I gave up the .22 as I had given up Paradise Farm, docilely, and I looked. RuthClaire’s visitor was terrified, almost catatonic. He could not go up, and he could not come down; his head was probably still reverberating from the rifle shot, the heart-stopping crash of the pecan limb. I wasn’t too sorry, though. He had no business haunting my ex.
“Listen,” I said, “you asked me to come see about you. And you didn’t object when I brought that baby down from the loft.”
Angrily, RuthClaire ejected the spent shell, removed the .22’s magazine, and threw the rifle on the ground. “I wanted moral support, Paulie, not a hit man. I thought the gun was your moral support, that’s all. I didn’t know you were going to
“‘Poor innocent wretch,’” I repeated incredulously. “
This was not the first time we had found ourselves arguing in front of an audience. Toward the end, it had happened frequently at the West Bank, RuthClaire accusing me of insensitivity, neglect, and philandering with my female help (although she knew that Molly Kingsbury was having none of that nonsense), while I openly rued her blinkered drive for artistic recognition, her lack of regard of my inborn business instincts, and her sometimes maddeningly rigorous bouts of chastity. The West Bank is small—a converted doctor’s office wedged between Gloria’s Beauty Shop and Ogletree Plumbing & Electric, all in the same red-brick shell on Main Street—and even arguing in the kitchen we could give my customers a discomfiting earful. Only a few tolerant souls, mostly locals, thought these debates entertaining; and when my repeat business from out of town began falling off, well, that was the last straw. I made the West Bank off limits to RuthClaire. Soon thereafter she began divorce proceedings.
Now a shivering black gnome, naked but for a see-through leotard of hair, was staring down at us as my ex compared me to Vlad the Impaler, Adolf Hitler, and the government of South Africa. I began to think that he could not be too much more bewildered and uncomfortable than I.
“What the hell do you want me to do?” I finally blurted.
“Leave me alone with him,” RuthClaire said. “Go back to the house.”
“That’s crazy,” I began. “That’s—”
“Hush, Paulie. Please do as I say, all right?”
I retreated to the sliding doors, no farther. RuthClaire talked to the trespasser. In the gathering dark, she crooned reassurance. She consoled and coaxed. She even hummed a lullaby. Her one-sided talk with the intruder was interminable. I, because she did not seem to be at any real risk, went inside and poured myself a powerful scotch on the rocks. At last RuthClaire returned.
“Paul,” she said, gazing into the pecan grove, “he’s a member of a human species—you know, a
“He told you that, did he?”
“I deduced it. He doesn’t speak.”
“Not English, anyway. What do you mean, ‘doesn’t exist anymore’? He’s up in that tree, isn’t he?”
“Up in the air, more like,” RuthClaire said. “It reminds me of that Indian, Ishi.”
“Who-shi?”
“A Yahi Indian in northern California whose name was Ishi. Theodora Kroeber wrote a couple of books about him.” RuthClaire gestured at the shelves across the room from us; in addition to every contemporary best seller that came through the B. Dalton’s in Tocqueville Commons Mall, these shelves housed art books, popular-science volumes, and a “feminist” library of no small proportions, this being RuthClaire’s term for books either by or about women, no matter when or where they lived. (The Brontë sisters were next to Susan Brownmiller; Sappho was not far from Sontag.)
I lifted my eyebrows: “?”
“Last of his tribe,” RuthClaire explained. “Ishi was the last surviving member of the Yahi; he died around nineteen fifteen or so, in the Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco.” She mulled this bit of intelligence. “It’s my guess, though, that our poor wretch comes from a species that originated in East Africa two or three million years ago.” She mulled her guess. “That’s a little longer than Ishi’s people were supposed to have been extinct before Ishi himself turned up, I’m afraid.”
“There goes your analogy.”
“Well, it’s not
“That you’d be wiser calling the bugger in the tree a deranged dwarf instead of an Indian. You’d be wiser yet just calling the police.”
RuthClaire went to the bookshelf and removed a volume by a well-known scientist and television personality. She had everything this flamboyant popularizer had ever written. After flipping through several well-thumbed pages, she found the passage pertinent to her argument:
“‘Were we to encounter
“That may or may not be the case, but I’d still feel obliged to wash up with soap and water after shaking his hand.”
RuthClaire, giving me a look commingling pity and contempt, replaced the book on its shelf. I made up a song—which I had the good sense not to sing aloud to her—to the tune of an old country-and-western ditty entitled “Abilene”:
I telephoned the West Bank to see how Molly was getting on with Hazel and Livia George (she said everything was going “swimmingly,” a word Molly had learned from a beau in Atlanta), then convinced my ex-wife to let me spend the night at Paradise Farm on the sofa downstairs. For safety’s sake. RuthClaire reluctantly consented. In her studio loft she worked through until morning. At dawn I heard her say, “It’s all right, Paul. He left while you were sleeping.” She handed me a cup of coffee. I sipped at it as she gazed out the sliding doors at the empty pecan grove.
The following month—about three weeks later—I ran into RuthClaire in Beulah Fork’s ancient A&P, where I did almost all of my shopping for the West Bank: meats, produce, the works. October. Still sunny. The restaurant business only now beginning to tail off toward the inevitable winter slump. I had not thought of the Ishi Incident, or whatever you might choose to call it, more than three or four times since actually investigating it. Perhaps I did not believe that it had really happened. The whole episode had a dreamlike texture that did not stick very well to the hard-edged banality of everyday life in Beulah Fork. Besides, no one else in Hothlepoya County had mentioned seeing a naked black gnome running around the countryside climbing trees and stealing pecans.
My ex and I chatted, amicably at first. RuthClaire had just finished an original painting entitled
“You don’t have to do this, Paul.”
“I know I don’t. I want a set of those plates. My customers are going to enjoy eating off the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost—not to mention the nine different species of angel.”
“They’re not for dinner use, really. They’re for display.”
“A rank commercial enterprise?” I tweaked her. “Ready-made antiques for the spiritual cognoscenti who frown on bodily functions like eating and ummmm-ummmm-ummm? How about that? You may be catering to an airy crowd, Ruthie Cee, but we’re
Amazingly she smiled, merely smiled.
“I can see you haven’t given up eating,” I pursued. “That’s quite a load you’ve got there.”
Her shopping basket contained six uncut frying chickens, four heads of cabbage, three tins of Planters party nuts, four or five bunches of bananas, and several packages of fresh fish, mostly mullet and red snapper. I ogled this bounty. RuthClaire had never fried a chicken in her life, and I knew that she despised bananas. The other stuff was also out of the finicky pale of her diet, for in hostile overreaction to my virtuosity as chef and restaurateur she—not long before the end—had ostentatiously limited her intake to wild rice, bean curd, black beans, fresh vegetables, fruit juice, and various milk products. This spiteful decision had not helped our marriage any, either. “I’m having some people down from Atlanta,” she explained, rather defensively. “Gallery people.”
“Oh,” I replied.
We looked at each other for a moment.
“They’re all invited guests, I take it,” I said at last. “You don’t want any uninvited drop-ins, do you?”
RuthClaire stiffened. “I don’t feed the uninvited. You know that. Good-bye, Paul. Thanks for taking out a subscription.”
She went her way, I mine. For somebody subsisting on rabbit food and artistic inspiration, I reflected, she looked damned good.
I learned later what had been going on at Paradise Farm. On the morning after my overnight stay on the downstairs sofa, RuthClaire had moved a rickety table into the pecan grove. Every evening she set it with paper plates and uncooked food items, including party nuts in a cut-glass dish that had once belonged to her mother. Further, on a folding deck chair she laid out one of my old leisure suits, altered for a figure smaller than mine, just in case the nippy autumn air prompted the trespasser to cover his nakedness. At first, though, the habiline did not rise to this bait. The dew-laden suit had to dry every day on the clothesline, and every evening RuthClaire had to replace the soggy paper dinnerware and the slug-slimed food items.
Around Halloween, when nighttime temperatures were dipping into the thirties, my ex awoke one morning to find the creature hunkering on the table on a brilliant cloth of frost. The grass looked sequined. So did the habiline’s feet. He was eating unpeeled bananas and shivering so violently that the table rocked back and forth. RuthClaire put on her dressing gown and hurried downstairs. She opened the sliding doors and beckoned the fellow inside, where he could warm his tootsies at the cast-iron Buck stove in the fireplace. Although he followed RuthClaire with his eyes, he did not move. RuthClaire, leaving the glass doors open, fetched a set of sun lamps from her loft. These she placed about the patio area so that they all shone directly into the house—runway lights to warmth and safety.
The sun began to burn away the frost. An hour or so later, watching from her bay window, RuthClaire saw the habiline leap down from the table. For a moment he seemed to consider fleeing through the pecan grove, but soon rejected this notion to stroll—head ducked, elbows out—through the gauntlet of lamps toward the house. A ballsy fellow, this one, and my ex was able to see quite clearly that this appraisal of him was no mere metaphor. A ballsy bantam in blackface.
Her heart pounding paradiddles, RuthClaire went downstairs to meet him. This was the beginning: the
Although over time a few clues have come my way (some of which I will shortly set forth), I do not pretend to know
She also sang to him, I think. RuthClaire has a voice with the breathy delicacy of Garfunkel during his partnership with Simon, and I can easily imagine her soothing the savage breast of even a pit bull with a single stanza of “Feelin’ Groovy.” The habiline, however, she probably deluged with madrigals, hymns, and soft-drink ditties; and although she has always professed to hate commercial television, she has since publicly admitted using the idiot box—as well as song—to amuse and edify her live-in hominid. Apparently, he especially enjoyed game shows, situation comedies, sporting events, and nature studies. On the public broadcasting channels RuthClaire introduced him to such programs as
But only a week or so into the new year did I learn about any of this. RuthClaire drove to Tocqueville to do her shopping more often than she came to Beulah Fork; and our chance meeting in the A&P, despite resulting in my order for the first plate in the
Anyway, on the day before Christmas Eve I telephoned RuthClaire and asked if I could come out to the farm to give her a present. Somewhat reluctantly (it seemed to me), she agreed. Although it was cold and dark when I rang the front doorbell, she stepped through the door to greet me, and we conferred on the porch. The Persian kitten in the cardboard box under my arm cowered away from Ruthie Cee, its wintry pearl-gray fur like a lion’s mane around its Edward G. Robinson face. My ex, emitting sympathetic coos, scratched the creature behind its ears until it began to purr.
Then she said, “I can’t accept him, Paul.”
“Why not? He’s got a pedigree that stretches from here to Isfahan.” (This was a lie. Nevertheless, the kitten
“I just can’t give him the attention he needs.” RuthClaire saw my irritation. “I didn’t think you’d be bringing an animal, Paul. A sweater, a necklace, a new horror novel—anything nonliving I’d’ve been happy to accept. But a kitten’s a different matter, and I just can’t be responsible for him, sweet and pretty as he is.”
I tacked about. “Can’t I come in for some eggnog? Come the holidays, this place used to reek of eggnog.”
“I have a visitor.”
“A man, huh?”
Somewhat gravely, she nodded. “He’s… he’s allergic to cats.”
“Why can’t I meet him?”
“I don’t want you to. Anyway, he’s shy.”
I looked toward the carport. Although RuthClaire’s navy-blue Honda Civic gleamed dully in the sheen of the yard’s security lights, I saw no other vehicle anywhere. Besides my own, of course.
“Did he jog out here?”
“Hiked.”
“What’s his name?”
RuthClaire smiled a crooked smile. “Adam,” she said.
“Adam what?”
“None of your bee’s wax, Paul. I’m tired of this interrogation. Here, hang on a sec.” She retreated into the house but came back a moment later carrying a piece of Limoges ware featuring her painting
“Beautiful,” I said, and I kissed her lightly on the forehead. “Bring this Adam fella to the restaurant, Ruthie Cee. Frogs’ legs, steak, wild-rice pilaf, coq au vin, anything he wants—on the house. And for you, of course, the gourmet vegetable plate. I’m serious now. Take me up on this.”
She returned my chaste kiss along with the kitten. “This is the way you behaved when we were courting. Good night, Paul.”
On my drive back to Beulah Fork, the kitten prowled all over my shoulders and thighs, miaowing obnoxiously. It even got tangled in the steering wheel. I put it out about a mile from Ruben Decker’s place and kept on driving.
In January, as I have alluded, the pieces began coming together. To my surprise, RuthClaire called to make reservations for Adam and herself at the West Bank; they were actually going to avail themselves of my offer. However, even though only the two of them were coming, RuthClaire wanted the entire restaurant, every table. If I would grant them this extraordinary boon, she would pay me the equivalent of a night’s receipts on a typical weekday evening in winter. I told her that she was crazy, but that if she and her inamorato came on a Tuesday, always my slowest night, I would donate the premises as well as the dinner to their Great Romance. After all, it was high time she indulged a passion that was erotic rather than merely platonic and painterly.
“That’s a cheap dig,” my ex accused.
“How many kinds of generosity do you want from me?” I snapped back. “You think I
She softened. “It’s not what you think, Paul.” No, indeed. It wasn’t at all what I thought.
On the appointed evening, Main Street was deserted but for Davie Hutton’s police cruiser, which he had parked perpendicular to the state highway as a caution to potential speeders. Precisely at eight, as I peered through the gloom, RuthClaire’s Honda Civic eased gingerly around the cruiser and slotted into a space in front of the West Bank. Then she and her mysterious beau exited the car and climbed the steps to the restaurant.
Sweet Jesus, I thought, it’s a nigger kid in designer jeans and an army fatigue jacket. She’s not in love. She’s on another I’m-going-to-adopt-a-disadvantaged-child kick.
Disagreements about starting a family had been another front in our protracted connubial war. I had never wanted any offspring, while RuthClaire had always craved two or three Campbell’s Kids clones or, failing that, a host of starving dependents on other continents. She believed wholeheartedly that she could paint, market her work, and
“Paul, Adam. Adam, Paul.”
I did a double take, a restrained and sophisticated double take. For one thing, Adam was no adolescent. More astonishing, he was the same compact creature who had come traipsing naked into the Paradise Farm pecan grove in September. His slender, twisted feet were bare. At a nod from RuthClaire he extended his right hand and grinned a grin that was all discolored teeth and darting, mistrustful eyes. I ignored his proffered hand.
“What the hell are you trying to pull, RuthClaire?”
“I’m trying to have dinner with Adam. This is an integrated place of business, isn’t it? Interstate commerce and all that. Besides, our money’s as green as anyone else’s.”
“His color’s a non-issue. So is your money. He’s—” I gulped my indigestible objection.
“Go ahead, Paul, say it.”
“He’s an animal, RuthClaire, an animal in human clothing.”
“I often thought the same thing of you.”
I backtracked: “Listen, Ruthie, the county health department doesn’t permit barefooted people in its licensed eating establishments. He needs some shoes. Sandals, at least.”
“Shoes are one of the things I haven’t been able to get him to wear.” RuthClaire reached over and lowered the habiline’s outstretched hand, which was still waiting to be shaken. “In comparison to you, Paul, Adam’s all courtliness, chivalry, and consideration. Look at him. He’s terrified to be here, but he’s holding his ground, he’s trying to figure out why you’re so jumpy and hostile. I’d like to know myself. Why are you being such a jackass?”
“He belongs in a zoo. —Okay, not a zoo, a research center or something. You’re turning a scientific wonder, a throwback to another geological epoch, into a goddamn houseboy. That’s selfish, RuthClaire. Pathetic, even. There’s probably a law against it.”
“We’ll sit over here,” my ex said. “Bring us two glasses of water and a menu.”
“Only one menu?”
RuthClaire gave me a look that was blank of all expression; it was also withering. Then she led Adam to a corner table beneath a burlap sculpture-painting (abstract) that she had completed during the first few months of our marriage. Once the habiline was seated, I could no longer see his bare feet; the maroon tablecloth concealed them. RuthClaire deftly removed the beige linen napkins (folded into fans) that I had earlier inserted into the waiting water glasses, for she had made up her mind that my humiliation must continue. This was my reward for making the West Bank available for their preposterous parody of a rendezvous.
I turned toward the kitchen. Livia George Stephens, my chief assistant cook, was leaning against the flocked metal divider separating the cashier’s station from the dining area. I had given Molly Kingsbury, Hazel Upchurch, and my two regular waitresses the night off. Livia George constituted my entire staff. One hand rubbing the back of the other, she was sizing up our customers with a mock shrewdness that was genuinely shrewd.
“Good to see you, Miss RuthClaire,” she said aloud. “Looks like you brought in a friend with some spirit in his bones. Give me a chanzt, I’ll put some meat on ’em.”
“This is Adam,” my ex replied. “He’d say hello, but he’s mute. I’m sure he’s as pleased to meet you as I am to see you again. I hope Paul’s behaving himself for you.”
Livia George tiptoed around this pleasantry. “Where’s he stay?” She nodded at Adam. “I ain’ never seen him ’roun’ here befoah, and I know mos’ evverbody in this part of ’Poya County.”
“Livia George,” I said, “they’re here to eat, not to chitchat. Why don’t you go see about getting ready for them.”
“Nothin’ I can do till I know what they like, Mr. Paul. You wan’ me to start cookin’ befoah they put in a order?”
“I want you to get into the goddamn kitchen!”
Sullenly, her hips moving like corroded pistons, she went. When she had gone, I strode over to the table to pour out the water and to recite our menu items rather than to present them in a printed folder. For RuthClaire, I recommended sautéed mushrooms, an eggplant dish, steamed pearl potatoes, a spinach salad, and a Cheddar soufflé with diced bell peppers and chives. For her tag-along escort, I suggested broiled liver and onions. Side orders of unsalted peanuts and warm egg whites would set off this entrée nicely, and he could wash it all down with a snifter of branch water and branch water.
“I’ll have just what you recommend,” RuthClaire said. “Bring Adam the same and no bully-boy surprises. Water’s all we want to drink, pure Beulah Fork spring water.”
Although I followed RuthClaire’s instructions, the dinner was a disaster. Adam ate everything with his spoon. He bolted every bite, and when he didn’t like something—the eggplant au gratin, for instance—he tried to pile it up in the middle of the table like a deliquescent cairn. For this bit of creative gaucherie, he at first used his hands rather than his spoon, and he burned himself. Later, when the food had cooled, he finished the eggplant monument. Nothing RuthClaire said or did to discourage this project had any effect, and you could not keep from looking at this new centerpiece unless you let your eye stray to Adam himself. A flake of spinach gleamed in his mustache, ten or twelve pearl potatoes bulged out his cheeks, and he nonchalantly poured his ice cubes into the cheese soufflé.
“This is his first time in a public restaurant,” RuthClaire acknowledged.
“And his last, too, if I have anything to say about it.”
My ex only laughed. “He’s doing pretty well. You should’ve seen the food fights we had out at Paradise Farm only a month or two ago.”
“Yeah. Sorry I missed them.”
She thinks she’s Pygmalion, I marveled. She thinks she can carve a dapper southern gentleman out of inchoate Early Pleistocene clay. Well, I loved the lady for the delusions she had formed.
Unhappily, it got worse. For dessert RuthClaire ordered them each a Nesselrode pudding, one of the West Bank’s specialities and major attractions. Adam lifted the dish to his mouth and began eating of this delicacy like a dog devouring Alpo. After a few such bites, however, his head came up, his cheeks began to puff in and out like those of a blowfish, and he vomited all over the table. Guttural gasps of dismay or amazement escaped him between geysers, and in four or five minutes he had divested himself of his entire dinner and whatever else he may have eaten earlier that day. RuthClaire tried to comfort him. She wiped his mouth with a wetted napkin and stroked his furry nape with her fingers. Never before had a patron of the West Bank upchucked the extraordinary cuisine prepared in my kitchen, though, and I may have been more in need of comforting than was RuthClaire’s ill-bred habiline.
“Get him to the rest room!” I cried, much too late to save either the tablecloth or my equanimity. “If nothing else, get him to the goddamn street!”
“He isn’t used to such fare. I’ll clean it up, Paul. Just leave it to me, okay?”
“He isn’t worthy of it, you mean! It’s like feeding caviar to a crocodile, filet mignon to a high school fullback!”
“Hush, Paul, I said I’d take care of the mess, and I will.”
Livia George helped her, however, and when RuthClaire left later that night, she placed three one-hundred-dollar bills next to the cash register. For the remainder of that week, the West Bank reeked of commercial disinfectant and a faint monkey-house odor that no one but me (thank God) appeared to detect.
“She’s living with it,” I told the young man sitting at the cluttered desk, his hands behind his head and his naked elbows protruding like chicken wings. “She’s been living with it since October.”
“Times have changed, Mr. Loyd. Live and let live.”
“It’s not another man, Dr. Nollinger. It’s male, I mean, but it’s not, uh, human. It’s a variety of upright ape.”
“A hominid?”
“That’s RuthClaire’s word for it. Hominid, habiline. A prehistoric primate, for God’s sake. So I drove all the way up here to talk to somebody who might be interested.”
“You could have telephoned, Mr. Loyd. Telephoning might have saved us both a good deal of time.”
“Beulah Fork’s a small town, Dr. Nollinger. A
“A habiline?”
“I want you to get it out of there. It may be dangerous. It’s certainly uncouth. It doesn’t belong on Paradise Farm.”
Brian Nollinger dropped his hands into his lap and squeaked his swivel chair around toward his office’s only window. A thin man in his early thirties, he wore scuffed cowboy boots, beige corduroy trousers, a short-sleeved Madras shirt with a button-down collar, wire-rimmed glasses, and a wispy Fu Manchu mustache with an incongruous GI haircut. Outside his window, a family of stub-tailed macaques huddled in the feeble winter sun in a fenced-in exercise area belonging to this secluded rural field station of the Yerkes Primate Center, ten or twelve miles north of Atlanta. Nollinger was an associate professor of anthropology at Emory University, but a government grant to study the effects of forced addiction to certain amphetamines on a representative primate species had given him an office at the field station and experimental access to the twenty-odd motley monkeys presently taking the February sun beside their heated trailer. They looked wide-awake and fidgety, these monkeys—“hypervigilant,” to use Nollinger’s own word. Given the nature of his study, I wasn’t greatly surprised.
“Why don’t you write Richard Leakey or Alistair Patrick Blair or one of the other African paleoanthropologists specializing in ‘prehistoric hominids’?” Nollinger asked. “They’d jump at the chance to take a living fossil off Ms. Loyd’s hands. A find like that would secure a young scientist’s fortune and reputation forever. Leakey and Blair would just become bigger.”
“Aren’t
“In modest doses, sure.” He refused to look at me. He was staring at a lithograph of an Ishasha River baboon in twelve different baboonish postures, from a grooming stance to a cautious stroll through tall East African grass.
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“Put yourself in my place, Mr. Loyd. It’s a bit like hearing a dinosaur’s been seen wading in the Chattahoochee.”
“I’m not a crackpot, Dr. Nollinger. I’m a respected businessman with no history of mental illness or unprofitable undertakings. My wife—my ex-wife, I mean—is a painter of national repute. Should anything happen to her because you’ve refused to look into the matter, well, the world of art will have suffered a loss as great as that about to befall the world of science. It’s your conscience, Dr. Nollinger. Can you live with the consequences of such a reprehensible dereliction of duty?” I rose to leave.
Stroking his Fu Manchu, Dr. Nollinger said, “Mr. Loyd, after two or three years as a researcher, every competent scientist develops a nose for crackpots.”
“Go on.”
“You came in like a crackpot, with the identifying minatory zeal and traditional combative cast in your eye.” He paused. “But you don’t
“Bingo,” I said.
“I don’t think you’re making this up, sir. That would require some imagination.” He smiled. “So I’ll help you out.” He stopped smiling. “On one condition.”
“I’m listening.”
“Send me a photo or two—all you can—of this dispossessed specimen of
“You got it,” I said.
I walked back to the parking lot past a dozen communities of gorillas, orangutans, pygmy chimps, rhesus monkeys, and bespectacled primatologists, all equally inscrutable in their obsessive mind-sets and desires.
To get a photograph of Adam, I had to sneak out to Paradise Farm in violation of a legal promise to RuthClaire. I had to prowl around the house in the numbing winter dark. Fortunately, no dog patrols the property (otherwise, even Adam would not have been able to sneak into its pecan grove), and I climbed into a magnolia tree near the downstairs bathroom without betraying my presence. I had neither an Instamatic nor a Polaroid, but an expensive Minolta with both a telephoto lens and a pack of high-speed film for shooting in dim or almost nonexistent light.
Voyeurism is not ordinarily one of my vices, but when RuthClaire came into the lavatory that evening to bathe, I trembled. The waxy brown leaves of the magnolia tree clicked like castanets, mimicking the effects of a brutal winter wind. I
The bathroom light went out, and a real easterly wind began to blow, surging through the pecan grove from Alabama. I clung to my perch. Adam and I, it seemed, had traded places. The strangeness of this reversal did not amuse me. The luminous digits on my watch registered 9:48. What if my habiline rival habitually relieved himself in the woods? What if, even in winter, he bathed in White Cow Creek? If so, he would never enter this bathroom, and I’d never get his photo. Dr. Nollinger would dismiss me as a screwball of the most annoying sort. I had made a mistake.
At 11:04 P.M., though, Adam entered the big tiled bathroom. He wore the bottoms of a suit of long thermal underwear and carried what looked like the carcass of a squirrel. He climbed down into the sunken bath, where, after turning on a heavy flow of water, he proceeded to rend and devour the dead rodent. He did this with skill and gusto. I used up all my film taking pictures of the process—whereupon I heaved my own dinner into the shrubbery beneath the magnolia tree.
Turnabout, they say, is fair play….
Later, I sent Brian Nollinger duplicates of the developed photographs and a letter attesting to their authenticity. I added a P.S.: “The ball’s in your court, Doc.”
The anthropology professor was one of those urban people who refuse to own an automobile. He got around the Emory campus on foot or bicycle, and he bummed rides to the Yerkes field station with whichever of his colleagues happened to be going that way. In the middle of March, he arrived in Beulah Fork on a Greyhound bus, and I met him in front of Ben Sadler’s hole-in-the-wall laundry (known locally as the Greyhound Depot Laundry) on Main Street. After introducing Nollinger to Ben (dry cleaner and ticket agent nonpareil) as my nephew, I led the newcomer across the street to the West Bank, where, for over a year, I had lived in the upstairs storage room and taken all my meals in the restaurant proper. Although I could have easily afforded to build a house of my own, or at least to rent a vacation chalet near Muscadine Gardens, I refused to do so in the dogged expectation that RuthClaire and I would eventually reunite at Paradise Farm.
“Take me out there,” Nollinger said over a cold Budweiser in the empty dining area late that afternoon.
“I’d have to call first. And if I tell her why we want to come, she’ll hang up.”
My “nephew” fanned his photos of Adam out across the maroon tablecloth. “You didn’t have an invitation to take these, Mr. Loyd. Why so prim and proper now?”
“My unscrupulosity has well-defined limits.”
Nollinger sniggered. Then he tapped one of the prints. “Adam, as your ex-wife calls the creature, is definitely a protohuman. Even though I’m a primate ethologist and physical anthropologist, not a hotshot fossil finder like the Leakeys or A. Patrick Blair, I’d stake my reputation on it.” He reconsidered. “I mean, I’d
“That’s what I’ve always thought. Edna Twiggs is bound to find out sooner or later, and RuthClaire’ll have hell to pay in Beulah Fork.”
“Mr. Loyd, your wife’s foremost obligation is to advance our knowledge about human origins.”
“That’s a narrow way of looking at it. She also has her reputation to consider.”
“Sir, haven’t you once wondered how a prehistoric hominid happened to show up in a pecan grove in western Georgia?”
“A condor dropped him. A circus train derailed. I don’t care, Dr. Nollinger. What’s pertinent to me is his presence out there, not the weird particulars of his arrival.”
“All right, but I think I know how he got here.”
We each had another beer. My visitor sipped moodily at his while I explained that the best approach to RuthClaire might be Nollinger’s masquerading as a meter reader for Georgia Power. While ostensibly recording her kilowattage, he could plead a sudden indisposition and ask to use the bathroom or lie down on the sofa. RuthClaire was a sucker for honest working people in distress, and Nollinger could buy a shirt and trousers similar to those worn by Georgia Power employees at Plunkett Bros. General Store right here in town. Once he got into the house, who could say what might happen? Maybe RuthClaire would introduce him to her hirsute boarder and a profitable rapport spring up between the habiline and the anthropologist. Twirling the silver-blond twists of his almost invisible Fu Manchu, Nollinger only grunted.
“What do you think?” I asked him.
“I might do better to go out there as an agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Service,” he said, somewhat high-handedly. “I think a strong case could be made for regarding Adam as an illegal alien.”
“How so, Herr Professor?”
Nollinger embarked on a lengthy explanation. Purely on impulse he had shown one of his closest friends at Emory, Caroline Hanna, a young woman with a doctorate in sociology, three or four of my photographs of Adam. Nollinger was seriously involved with Caroline, and he knew that she would not betray his confidence. The photographs had had a strange effect on her, though. They had prompted her to reveal that in her after-hours work with Cuban detainees in the Atlanta Penitentiary she had met one hardened Havana street criminal from the 1980 Freedom Flotilla who confessed that he
“What was a Haitian doing in Cuban waters?” I asked Nollinger.
“Probably running communist guns back to the ill-organized guerrilla opposition to Duvalier in the wilderness areas around Port-de-Prix. Caroline says the Cuban told her the vessel hadn’t yet taken on any cargo when he surprised the gunrunner near Punta Gorda. He knifed the Haitian and threw him overboard. In the process, he became aware of three half-naked
“The gunrunner’s crew consisted of habilines?” For the first time that afternoon, Nollinger had piqued my curiosity.
“I think it did, Mr. Loyd, but all I’m doing now is telling Caroline’s version of the Cuban thug’s account of his round-about trip to Key West. Draw your own inferences.”
“What happened to the last crew member?”
“The Cubans the Haitian gunrunner had planned to rendezvous with to make the weapons transfer pulled abreast of the vessel and took the killer into custody. They also captured the terrified hominid. They confiscated the Haitian’s boat. Our detainee in the Atlanta pen says these mysterious Cuban go-betweens—they were all wearing lampblack on their faces—separated him and the surviving crew member and shipped them both to Mariel Bay for the crossing to the States. Caroline’s informant never saw the funny little man again. Nevertheless, he’s
“Adam?” I asked.
“It seems likely, Mr. Loyd. Besides, this story dovetails nicely with the fact that your ex-wife hasn’t had as much trouble as might be expected domesticating—taming—her habiline. Although he seems to have returned to feral habits while scrounging his way up through Florida while avoiding large population centers, his early days on a tiny island off the coast of Haiti made him familiar with a few of the trappings of civilization. Your wife, although she doesn’t know it, has been
For a time, we sipped our beers in silence. I pondered everything Nollinger had told me. Maybe it explained how Adam had come from Haiti (of all places) to western Georgia, but it did not explain how several representatives of
“Working from Caroline’s informant’s story,” he replied, “I did some discreet research in the anthropological and historical holdings of the Emory library. First, I found out all I could about the island off Hispaniola from which the wealthy Haitian had conscripted his crew. It’s called Montaraz, Mr. Loyd—originally a Spanish rather than a French possession. But in the mid-1820s, an American named Louis Rutherford, a New England aristocrat in our diplomatic service, bought Montaraz from a military adviser to Haitian president Jean Pierre Boyer. This was during the Haitian occupation of the Dominican Republic, which had declared its independence from Spain in 1821. The Dominicans regard their twenty-two-year subjugation to Haitian authority as a period of barbarous tyranny; still, one of Boyer’s real accomplishments was the emancipation of Dominican slaves. But on Montaraz, in Manzanillo Bay, Louis Rutherford reigned supreme, and his liberal sentiments did not extend to releasing his black, mulatto, and Spanish-Arawak laborers or to paying them for their contributions to the success of his cacao and coffee plantations. He appointed a proxy to keep these enterprises going and divided his time between Port-au-Prince and the Vermont family estate.”
“I don’t see what this has to do with Adam, RuthClaire, or me.” In another hour, my first customers for dinner would be coming through the door. Further, at any moment I expected Livia George, Hazel Upchurch, and Molly Kingsbury to report, with my two evening-shift waitresses close behind. Nollinger was ignorant of, or indifferent to, my business concerns; he wandered into the kitchen to help himself to another beer and came back to our table swigging from its can like a skinny athlete chug-a-lugging Gatorade. He had his wits about him, though. He tilted the top of the can toward me and soberly resumed his story:
“In 1836, Mr. Loyd, Rutherford was sent to the court of Sa’īd ibn Sultan, Al Bū Sa’īd, on the island of Zanzibar off the East African coast. We Americans were the first westerners to make trade agreements with Sa’īd and the first to establish a consulate at his commercial capital in the western Indian Ocean. Rutherford went along because of his ‘invaluable experience’ on Hispaniola, where he had had to deal with both conquering Haitians and defiant Dominicans, a situation that some U.S. officials felt had parallels on the East African coast, where Sayyid Sa’īd was attempting to impose his authority on the continental port cities of Mombasa, Kilwa, and Bravanumbi. Moreover, British moral objections notwithstanding, Zanzibar had a flourishing slave market; and Rutherford, as his American colleagues knew, recognized the commercial imperatives that drove even kindly persons like Sayyid Sa’īd and himself to tolerate the more sordid aspects of the institution… to turn a profit. It was the perfect assignment for Rutherford.
“Two years after his arrival on Zanzibar, about the time he was scheduled to return to this country, Rutherford caught wind of an extraordinary group of blacks—pygmies, it was rumored, or hairy Bushmen—who had been taken to the Sultan’s representatives in the continental port city of Bravanumbi by several Kikembu warriors and sold for immediate shipment to either Zanzibar or Pemba to work on Sayyid Sa’īd’s clove plantations. The Kikembu warriors called their captives ‘little ones who do not speak’ and claimed they’d found all nineteen of these uncanny quasi-human specimens in a system of caves and burrows in the remote Lolitabu Hills of Zarakal. The warriors had stumbled upon the system by accident, after watching one of these funny little people, a male, sneaking through a gulley with two dead hares and a kaross of nuts and tubers. The hunters then proceeded to smoke the manikins out. Four or five of the little ones preferred to die in their arid labyrinth rather than to emerge to face the laughing Kikembu, but the remainder were captured and bound.
“An Omani retainer in Sa’īd’s court told Rutherford to go to the slave market there on Zanzibar to see these wonderful ‘monkeymen.’ At present, they were being kept apart from the other slaves to spare them injury at the hands of the larger blacks with whom they would compete for masters. It was also likely that outraged potential buyers might harm them. After all, said the retainer, you looked for strength in a slave, not delicacy or sinewy compactness. Rutherford went to the market and arranged to see the Zarakali imports in private. Apparently, the sight of these creatures entranced him. He wanted the entire lot. He bought them from Sayyid Sa’īd’s representatives with cash and a promise to do his best to establish a cacao-for-cloves trade between Montaraz and Zanzibar. When he left the Sultan’s court, he sailed around the Cape of Good Hope in a vessel laden with silks, spices, and a small cargo of habilines—although, of course, nobody called them habilines then. They were manikins, or monkey-folk, curiosities. Rutherford hoped not only to put them to work on Montaraz but also to breed them into a self-perpetuating population. Later, in the States, he would exploit them—some of them, anyway—for their novelty value.”
“He never did that, I take it.”
“Rutherford died on Montaraz in 1844, the same year Santo Domingo regained its independence from the Haitian interlopers. His holdings on the island were seized by followers of Pedro Santana. What happened to the fourteen diminutive blacks who survived the journey from East Africa—Rutherford’s wife once referred to them in a letter to the wife of another diplomat as ‘endearing little elves, albeit, most likely, the offspring of chimpanzees and debauched Zarakali niggers’—well, at this point, their fate is unclear. We have knowledge of them at all only because Mrs. Rutherford acted as her husband’s secretary and carried on voluminous correspondences with her relatives in Boston and Montpelier. I obtained some of this information, Mr. Loyd, from interlibrary loans and photocopying services, and I’m virtually certain that no one else in the world has an inkling of the importance—the staggering importance—of the material I’ve assembled and synthesized in only two and a half weeks. It’s the major scientific accomplishment of my life.”
“Beats injecting macaques with No-Dōz, huh?” I had begun setting my tables, single-handedly flapping open parachutes of linen and laying out silverware. Just as Nollinger was about to parry my sarcasm, Livia George appeared. As the anthropologist shuffled the photographs of Adam out of her line of sight, I told her, “This is my cousin from Atlanta. He’ll be staying with us a few days.”
“Nephew,” Nollinger corrected me, standing for the introduction.
“Right,” I acknowledged. “Nephew.”
Livia George came over and shook Nollinger’s hand. “Pleased to meecha. You’re too skinny, thoah—all shanks and shoulder blades. Stay aroun’ here a few days and I’ll get you fatted up fine as any stockyard steer.”
“That’s a promise,” I informed Nollinger, “not a threat.”
“Thank you,” he said uncertainly. “Thank you, ma’am.”
RuthClaire did not come to town either of the next two days, and Nollinger stayed after me to drive him out to see her. He was missing his morning classes at Emory, he said, and a colleague at the field station had to oversee the daily amphetamine injections of his drug-addled macaques. He could not stay in Beulah Fork much longer. Did I want him to get Adam out of RuthClaire’s life or not? If I did, I had to cooperate. Had I summoned him all the way from Atlanta only to confine him to my grungy attic-cum-dormitory? Was I
I was ready to cooperate. Entirely at my expense, my counterfeit nephew ate nothing but medium-rare steaks and extravagant tossed salads with Roquefort dressing. Moreover, to amuse himself between his final meal of the day and his own owlish turn-in time, he had brought with him a homemade syrinx, or panpipe, that he played with a certain melancholy skill but an intemperance that sabotaged, early on, my regard. Sometimes (he told me as we lay on our cots in the dark) he played the panpipe for his experimental subjects at the field station, and the strains of this music soothed even the most agitated and bellicose of the males. It was an unscientific thing to do (he conceded) because it introduced an extraneous element into his observations of their behavior, but he found it hard to deny them—completely, anyway—the small pleasure afforded by his playing.
“I’m not a macaque,” I replied. Both the hint and the implied criticism were lost on Nollinger. Anyway, I was not that desperate for a roommate. So, the next day, I swallowed hard and telephoned RuthClaire, explaining that a young man who greatly admired her work had stopped in at the West Bank to request an introduction. Would it be all right if I brought him out? He did not seem to be (1) an art dealer, (2) a salesman, (3) a potential groupie, (4) a college kid with a term paper due, or (5) an out-and-out crazy. I liked both his looks and his attitude.
“Is he your nephew, Paul?”
“What?”
“Edna Twiggs told me yesterday that your nephew was staying with you.”
“That’s right, RuthClaire. He’s my nephew.”
“You don’t have a nephew, Paul. Even Edna Twiggs knows that. That’s because you don’t have any brothers or sisters.”
“I had to tell the home folks
“Not much chance of that,” RuthClaire said. “But why such petty intrigue and deception, hon? What’s the
I improvised. “I’m thinking of selling out,” I said hurriedly. “His name’s Brian Nollinger and he’s a potential buyer. Neither of us wants to publicize the fact—to keep from confusing everyone if the deal falls through. We’re trying to prevent disillusionment or maybe even gloating. You understand?”
“Selling out? But, Paul, you love that place.”
“Once I did. I’ve only kept it these past fifteen months because I thought we might get back together. But that seems less and less likely, doesn’t it?”
RuthClaire was so quiet I feared she’d rung off. Then: “I don’t understand why your potential buyer wants to meet me.”
“The part about him admiring your work is true,” I lied. “You know the three-dimensional paintings you did for the Contemporary Room in Atlanta’s High Museum? He’s seen ’em four or five times since their debut. Come on, Ruthie. He’d like to see you in person. I told him you would. It might help me cinch the sale.”
Again she was slow to answer. “Paul, there are reasons why I might be reluctant to give you that kind of help.” She let me mull the implications. “All right,” she added, “bring him on. I’ll put aside my work and tell Adam to get lost for an hour or so.”
She hung up before I could thank her.
Throughout this conversation, Nollinger had been at my elbow. “I don’t know anything about the restaurant business,” he told me. “As far as that goes, I don’t know very much about art, either.”
“Do you know what you like?”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Never mind,” I said. “Let’s get out there.”
Despite his musical talent and his advanced degrees in anthropology and primate behavior, Nollinger had not been lying about his ignorance of art. I learned the dismaying extent of his ignorance on our journey to Paradise Farm. Anxious that he not tip his hand too early, I alternately quizzed and coached him as we drove. Although not unfamiliar with Renaissance biggies like da Vinci and Michelangelo, he seemed to have abandoned his art-appreciation classes just as they were forging into the terra incognita of the seventeenth century. He knew next to nothing about impressionism, postimpressionism, and the most influential twentieth-century movements. He confused Vincent van Gogh with a popular author of science-fiction extravaganzas, believed that Pablo Picasso was still alive in France, and contended that N. C. Wyeth was a better painter than his son, Andrew, who painted only barns and motionless people. He had never even heard of the contemporary artists whom RuthClaire most esteemed.
“You’re a phony,” I said in disgust. “She’ll sniff you out in three minutes—if it takes her that long.”
“Look, Mr. Loyd,
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
“Why don’t we just tell her the truth?”
“The truth wouldn’t have got you out here.” I eased my car into the gravel-strewn drive before the house. “You’d still be in Beulah Fork playing your panpipe and waiting for your next tactfully mooched meal.”
Nollinger’s jaw went rigid. With visible effort, he swallowed whatever reply he had thought to make. The air of fierce inner resolve radiating from him, much like a fever, began to worry me.
RuthClaire met us on the front porch, shook Nollinger’s hand, and ushered us inside. We stood about in the sculpture-studded foyer like visitors awaiting their guide at a museum. I had not set foot over the threshold since September, and the faint but disturbing monkey-house odor that Adam had left in the West Bank was as hard to ignore here as mold on a brick of cheese. Nollinger noticed it, too, the incongruous scent of macaques in a barn-like Southern manse. RuthClaire was probably inured to the smell by this time, but she caught our sensitivity to it and explained it as the wretched mustiness of a shut-up house after a truly severe winter.
“I’m not an admirer of yours,” Nollinger blurted. His sallow face turned the color of a ripe plum. “I mean, I probably would be if I knew anything about your work, but I don’t. I’m here under false pretenses.”
“Criminy,” I murmured.
RuthClaire looked to me for amplification or aid. I rubbed the cold nappy head of a granite satyr next to the oaken china cabinet dominating the hall. (It was a baby satyr, with a syrinx very much like Nollinger’s.)
“I’m here to see Adam,” he said.
My ex did not take her eyes off me. “He’s outside foraging,” she replied curtly. “How do you happen to know about him?”
“Livia George may have let it slip,” I essayed. “From Livia George to Edna Twiggs to the media of all seven continents.”
“Here,” said Nollinger. He handed RuthClaire the packet of photos I’d taken from the magnolia tree outside the downstairs bathroom. Prudently, though, he saved back three or four of the pictures. Without facing away from me, RuthClaire thumbed through the batch in her hands.
“You’re a Judas, Paul—the most treacherously back-stabbing Benedict Arnold I’ve ever had the misfortune to know. And I actually
To Nollinger I said, “I’m toting up your bill at the West Bank, Herr Professor. It’s going to be a shocker. Just you wait.”
“You told him about Adam,” RuthClaire said. “You
“I was worried about you. Grant me that much compassionate concern for your welfare. I’m not an unfeeling toad, for Christ’s sake.”
“When?” RuthClaire asked Nollinger. “When did he get in touch with you?”
“Last month, Ms. Loyd.”
She counted on her fingers as if computing a conception date. “It took at least four months for this ‘compassionate concern’ to develop? Four whole months, Paul?”
“His instincts were right in coming to me,” Nollinger said. “You’ve no business keeping a rare hominid specimen like Adam in your own home. He’s an invaluable evolutionary Rosetta stone. He belongs to the world scientific community.”
“Of which, I suppose, you’re the self-appointed representative?”
“Yes, ma’am, if you’ll just take it upon yourself to see me in that light.”
“First, I’m not
Nollinger looked at me knowingly. “Your ex seems to be an uncompromising spiritual heir of Louis Rutherford, doesn’t she?”
“What does that mean?” RuthClaire demanded.
“I think what he’s trying to say is that you’ve got yourself the world’s only habiline houseboy and you don’t want to give him up.”
“It’s a form of involuntary servitude,” Nollinger said, “no matter how many with-it rationales you use to justify the relationship.”
“He comes and goes as he likes,” RuthClaire spat. “Paradise Farm is his only haven in this materialistic world of ours. Maybe you’d like him to live in a shopping mall or a trade-school garage or a tumbledown outhouse on Cleve Snyder’s place?”
“Or a fenced-in run at the field station?” I said, turning to the anthropologist. “So you can dope him up with amphetamines for fun and profit.”
“Wait a minute, Mr. Loyd,” Nollinger said. “I’m on your side.”
RuthClaire tore up the prints in her hands and sprinkled them on the floor like Kodachrome confetti. “These are cheap paparazzo snapshots,” she said, teeth clenched. She next went to work shredding the envelope.
“I still have these,” Nollinger told her, holding up the prints he had palmed. “And Mr. Loyd still has an entire set of his own.”
“She feels better, though,” I said, looking askance at RuthClaire.
“Of course she does. Once we’ve gone, she’ll have her habiline houseboy in here to clean up the mess. It’s not many folks in this day and age who command the obedience of a loyal unpaid retainer. She likes the feeling of power she gets from—”
Surprising even myself, I plunged my fist deep into Nollinger’s diaphragm. I would have preferred to clip him on the temple or jaw, but his wire-rimmed glasses dissuaded me—or, rather, my subconscious. Nollinger finished his sentence with an inarticulate “
RuthClaire said, “Maybe
“That’s probably so,” I said, hangdog.
“Get him out of here. I’ll start soliciting bed partners on Peachtree Street before your unmannerly ‘nephew’ ever lays eyes on the living Adam.”
I helped Nollinger up and led him outside to my automobile. Still bent over and breathless, he mumbled that my assault was a classic primate ploy—especially typical of baboons or chimpanzees—to establish dominance through intimidation. I told him to shut up. He did. Thereafter he kept his eyes averted; and as we left Paradise Farm, rolling from crunchy gravel onto pothole-riven asphalt, I saw Adam staring out at us from the leafy picket of holly trees between RuthClaire’s property and the road. The half-hidden habiline, I glumly took note, was wearing one of my old golfing sweaters.
It did not flatter him.
At six o’clock that evening, the sullen anthropologist boarded a Greyhound bus for Atlanta, and I supposed that our dealings with each other had formally concluded. I did not want to see him again, and did not expect to. As for RuthClaire, she had every reason to feel the same way about me. I tried, therefore, to resign myself to her bizarre liaison with the mysterious refugee from Montaraz. After all, how was she hurting Adam or he her? I must get on with my own life.
About a week later this headline appeared in the
“Oh, no,” I said aloud over my coffee. “Oh, no.”
The story featured a photograph—a color photograph—of Adam dismembering a squirrel in the downstairs bathroom at Paradise Farm. Not having reproduced very well, this photo had the dubious authenticity of pictures of the Loch Ness monster—but it grabbed my eye like a layout in a gore-and-gossip tabloid, afflicting me with anger and guilt. About the only consolation I could find in the story’s appearance was the fact that it occupied a small corner of the city/state section rather than the right-hand columns of the front page. The photograph itself was attributed to Brian Nollinger.
“I’ll kill him.”
The
Despite the early hour, I telephoned Paradise Farm to apologize for what had happened and to offer my shoulder either to cry on or to cudgel. A recorded message informed me that RuthClaire’s previous number was no longer functioning. I understood immediately that she had applied for and received an unlisted number. This unforeseen development hit me harder than the newspaper article. Paradise Farm now seemed as far away as Hispaniola or the court of Sayyid Sa’īd.
Before the hour was out, my own telephone began ringing. The first caller was Livia George, who, in high dudgeon, asked me if I’d seen the piece in the
Then, in rapid succession, I received calls from a reporter on the
Then I took my phone off the hook, dressed, and went shopping. My neighbors greeted me cheerily the first time our carts crossed paths, but studied me sidelong as I picked out meats, cheeses, and produce. Every housewife in the A&P seemed to look at me as she might a cuckolded male who pretends a debonair indifference to his ignominy. It gave me the heebie-jeebies, this surreptitious surveillance.
Back at the West Bank my uncradled receiver was emitting a strident buzz, a warning to hang up or to forfeit continuous service. I replaced the receiver. A moment later, the telephone rang, and Edna Twiggs said that RuthClaire was trying to reach me.
“Give me her new number,” I said. “I’ll call her.”
But Edna replied, “Hang up again, Mr. Loyd. I’ll let her know you’re home. I’m not permitted to divulge an unlisted number.”
Although angry, I obeyed Beulah Fork’s inescapable sedentary gadfly, and when next the telephone rang, RuthClaire’s voice sounded soft and weary in my ear: “We’re under siege. There’s an Eleven Alive news van from Atlanta on the lawn, and several other vehicles—one a staff car from the
“Have you talked to any of those people?”
“The knocking started a little over an hour ago. I wouldn’t answer it. Now there’s a man on the lawn taking pictures of the house with a video camera and a stylish young woman in front of him with a microphone talking about the ‘deliberate inaccessibility of artist RuthClaire Loyd.’ She’s said that four or five times, as if practicing. Anyway, I can hear her all the way up here in the loft. They’re not subtle, these people, they’re loud and persistent.”
“Call the police, RuthClaire. Call the Hothlepoya County Sheriff’s Patrol.”
“I hate to do that.”
“They’re trespassing and making nuisances of themselves. Call Davie Hutton here in town and Sheriff Crutchfield in Tocqueville.”
“What if I just poke my .22 out of the window and tell everyone to beat it?”
“It’d make great viewing on the evening news.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t it?” RuthClaire chuckled wryly. “May the seraphim forgive me, but maybe such a display would boost subscription sales for my
“We live in a secular age, RuthClaire.” Then: “How’s Adam taking all this?”
“It’s made him restless and reclusive. He’s pacing the downstairs bathroom with the exhaust fan running—to drown out the clamor from the lawn.”
“Well, I hope you closed the curtains on the upper half of the window in there. Reporters can climb trees, too, you know.”
“Adam and I installed some blinds. No worry there. The worry’s how long this stupid encirclement will last. I can’t work. Adam’s going to develop a nervous disorder.”
“Let the law run them off. That’s what the law’s for.”
“All right.”
“You could have figured that out for yourself. Why call me for advice?”
“To let you know how much trouble you’ve caused us, you dinkhead.” (But her tone was bantering rather than bitter.) “And another thing besides, Paul.”
“Okay, I’ll bite.”
“Adam’s one failing as a companion is that he can’t talk. Maybe I wanted to hear the silver-throated con man of Beulah Fork do his stuff again.” She let me ruminate on this left-handed compliment for a second or two, then gave me her new telephone number and bade me a peremptory goodbye.
I sat awhile holding the receiver, but finally hung up before Edna Twiggs could break in to tell me I was on the verge of forfeiting continuous service.
International media attention converged on Paradise Farm. Neither the Beulah Fork police department nor the sheriff’s patrol from Tocqueville could handle the journalists, TV people, curiosity seekers, and scientists who descended on Hothlepoya County for a peek at RuthClaire’s habiline paramour. For a time, the Georgia Highway Patrol intervened, rerouting the gate-crashers back toward the interstate and issuing tickets to those who ignored the detour signs; but Ruben Decker and a few of the other residents along the road linking Paradise Farm with town protested that they’d been singled out for citations as often as had the journalists and pesky outsiders plaguing the area, many of whom, when stopped, gave false ID’s to prove their claims of being locals. At last, even the highway patrol threatened to retreat from the scene; this wasn’t their fight.
In desperation RuthClaire contracted with an Atlanta firm to erect a beige brick wall around the exposed sections of her property’s perimeter; and this barricade, upon its completion in May, proved an effective psychological as well as physical deterrent to most of those stopping by for a casual, rather than a mercenary or a malevolent, look-see. Pale arc lights on tall poles illuminated every corner of the vast front and back yards and portions of the shadowy pecan grove behind the house. Twice, RuthClaire broadcast stentorian warnings over a P.A. system installed for that purpose and once fired her rifle above the heads of the trespassers creeping like animated stick figures across the lawn. Word got around that it was
Meanwhile, in the absence of hard facts, speculation and controversy raged. Alistair Patrick Blair, the eminent Zarakali paleoanthropologist, published a paper in
Sermons were preached for and against my ex-wife. Initially, fundamentalists did not know which side to come down on because anyone opposed to the scientific method could not be all bad, while anyone cohabiting with a quasi-human creature not her lawfully wedded husband must certainly be enmeshed in the snares of Satan. By the second week of this controversy, most fundamentalist ministers, led by the Right Rev. Dwight “Happy” McElroy of the Greater Christian Constituency of America, Inc., of Rehoboth, Louisiana, had determined that the crimson sin of bestiality far outweighed the tepid virtue of a passive antievolutionary sentiment. Their sermons began to deride RuthClaire for her sexual waywardness (this was an irony that perhaps only I could appreciate) and to pity her as the quintessential victim of a society whose scientific establishment brazenly proclaimed that human beings were nothing more than glorified monkeys (a thesis that their own behavior seemed to substantiate). Happy McElroy, in particular, was having his cake and eating it too. I audited a few of his TV sermons, but almost always ended by turning down the sound and watching the eloquent hand signals of the woman providing simultaneous translation for the deaf.
Sales of RuthClaire’s
“Congratulations,” I told RuthClaire one evening by telephone.
“It’s phenomenally tacky, isn’t it?”
“I think it’s called striking while the iron’s hot.”
“I needed the money. Having a wall built around two thirds of this place didn’t come cheap, nor did the arc lights or the P.A. system. I have to recoup my investment.”
“You think I don’t know?”
“Besides, I
“Maybe I could order five or six place settings of that one for the West Bank.”
RuthClaire laughed delightedly.
Of course, the sermons following hard upon the new AmeriCred announcement were all condemnatory. The depths to which my ex-wife had fallen defied even Happy McElroy’s bombastic oratorical skills. He tried, though. The title of his message on the first Sunday in July was “From Angels to Apes: The Second Fall.” Whereas the celestial hierarchy was an ascent to pure spirit, the blind worship of evolutionary theory—“Theory, mind you!” McElroy roared. “Unsupported
I am not a complete pagan: I joined in.
The attitude of my own townspeople toward RuthClaire during this period was hard to judge. Many had resented the spring’s unruly influx of visitors and the inconvenience of the highway patrol roadblocks and spot identity checks. Still, most did not hold my former wife accountable for these problems, recognizing that she, too, was a victim of the publicity mill generating the crowds and the clumsy security measures finally obviated by the wall. Now the residents of Beulah Fork wondered about the
One sweltering July day, for instance, I went into the Greyhound Depot Laundry to reclaim the tablecloths I had left to be dry-cleaned. Ben Sadler, a courtly man nearly six and a half feet tall, stooped toward me over his garment-strewn counter and in the blast-furnace heat of that tiny establishment trapped me in a perplexing conversation about the present occupants of Paradise Farm. Sweat beaded on his forehead, ran down his ash-blond temples, and gathered in his eyebrows as if they were thin, ragged sponges not quite thirsty enough to handle the unending flow.
“Listen, Paul, what kind of, uh, creature is this Adam fella, anyway?”
I summarized all the most likely, and all the most asinine, speculations. I used the terms
“Do they say he’s human?” Ben wanted to know.
“Some do. That’s what
“And he’s black, isn’t he? I mean, I’ve read where the whole human race—even the Gabor sisters and the Osmond family—I’ve read where we’re all descended from tiny black people. Originally, that is.”
“He’s as black as Hershey’s syrup,” I conceded.
“Do
“Not Adam personally. Prehistoric hominids like him, maybe. Adam’s a kind of hominid coelacanth.” I explained that a coelacanth was an ancient fish known only in fossil form and presumed extinct until a specimen was taken from waters off South Africa in 1938. That particular fish had been five feet long. Adam, on the other hand, was about six inches shy of five feet. Therefore, I did not think it absolutely impossible for a retiring, intelligent creature of Adam’s general dimensions to elude the scrutiny of
“That’s a funny idea, Paul—all of us comin’ from creatures two thirds our size and black as Hershey’s syrup.”
“Don’t run for office on it.”
Ben wiped his brow with a glistening forearm. “How does RuthClaire, uh, look upon Adam?” He feared that he had violated propriety. “I mean, does she see him as a brother? Some folks say she treats him like a house nigger from plantation days—which I can’t believe of her, not under no circumstances—and others say he’s more like a two-legged poodle gettin’ the favorite-pet treatment from its lady. I ask because I’m not sure how I’d greet the little fella if he was to walk in here tomorrow.”
“I think she treats him like a houseguest, Ben.” (I
Ben Sadler grunted conditional agreement, and I toted my clean tablecloths back across the street to the restaurant.
That evening, a Saturday, the West Bank was packed. Molly Kingsbury was hostessing, Livia George and Hazel were on duty in the kitchen, and two college kids from Tocqueville were waiting tables. I roamed from corner to corner giving assistance wherever needed, functioning not only as greeter, maître d’, and wine steward, but also as busboy, cashier, and commander in chef (ha ha).
My regular patrons demand personal attention—from me, not staff members: a squib of gossip, a silly joke, occasionally a free appetizer or dessert. I try to oblige most of these demands. But this Saturday I was having trouble balancing hospitality and hustle. Although grateful for the crowd, by nine o’clock I was growling at my college kids and nodding perfunctorily at even my most stalwart customers. The muggy summer dusk and the heat from my kitchen had pretty much neutralized the efforts of my ceiling fan and my one laboring air conditioner. In my Haggar slacks and lemon-colored Izod shirt, I was sweating just like Ben Sadler in the Greyhound Depot Laundry.
The door opened. Two teenage boys in jeans, T-shirts, and perforated baseball caps strolled in. Even in the evening, the West Bank did not require coats and ties of its male clientele (shoot,
“Shut the door,” I told Craig Puddicombe, tonging ice into somebody’s water glass. “You’re letting in insects.”
Craig shut the door as if it were a pane of wraparound glass on an antique china cabinet. E. L. took off his hat. They stood on my interior threshold staring at the art on the walls and the open umbrellas suspended from the ceiling as atmosphere-evoking ornament. They either could not or would not look at the people eating. I approached them because Molly Kingsbury clearly did not want to.
“You don’t have reservations,” I told Puddicombe. “It’s going to be another fifteen or twenty minutes before we can seat you.”
Craig looked at me without quite looking. “That’s okay. You got a minute?”
“Only if it lasts about twelve seconds.”
“We just want to talk to you a bit,” E. L. Teavers said, almost ingratiatingly. “We think your rights are being violated.”
Craig Puddicombe added, “More than your rights, maybe.”
“Fellas,” I said, indicating the crowd, “don’t choose a battle zone for a friendly little chat about human rights.”
“It was now, Mr. Loyd, because we happened to be ridin’ by,” Craig said. “For something this important, hey, you can spare a minute.”
Before I could dispute this point, E. L. Teavers, surveying the interior, said, “My mother remembers when this was Dr. Kearby’s office. This was the waitin’ room, out here. Whites sat over here, the others over that way. People came out of the examination room painted with a purple medicine Dr. Kearby liked to daub around.”
“Gentian violet,” I told him, exasperated. “It’s a bactericide. Quick, now, as quickly as you can, tell me how my rights are being violated.”
“Your wife—” Craig Puddicombe began.
“My ex-wife,” I said.
“Okay, your ex-wife. She’s got a hibber livin’ with her on premises that used to belong to you, Mr. Loyd. How do you feel about that?”
“A what living with her?”
“Hibber,” E. L. Teavers enunciated, lowering his voice. “It’s a word I invented. Anyone can say it, but I invented it. It means habiline nigger, see?”
“Clever. You must be the one who was graduated from high school. Craig just went for gym class and shop.”
“I’ve got a diploma too, Mr. Loyd. Our intelligence ain’t the issue, it’s the violation of your rights as a white person, not to mention our traditional community standards. You follow all this, don’t you?”
“You’re not speaking for the community. You’re speaking for Craig Puddicombe, teenage redneck.”
“He’s speakin’ for more than that.” E. L. smiled boyishly. The boyishness of this smile somehow heightened its menace.
“We just dropped in to
“I’m busy.” I turned to take care of my customers.
E. L. Teavers grabbed my elbow—with an amiable deference at odds with the force of his grip. I could not shake him off because of the water pitcher in my hand. He had not stopped smiling his choirboy smile, and I found myself wanting to hear whatever he had to say next, no matter how addlepated or paranoiac.
“There’s a hibber—a lousy subhuman—inheritin’ to stuff that doesn’t, that shouldn’t, belong to it. Since it used to be your stuff—your house, your land, your wife—we thought you’d like to know there’s people in and around Beulah Fork who appreciate other hardworkin’ folks and who try to keep an eye out for their rights.”
“Craig and you?” Since finishing at Hothlepoya High last June, I reflected, they had been working full time at United Piedmont Mills on the outskirts of Tocqueville. In fact, E. L. was married to a girl who had waitressed for me briefly. “Knowing that, fellas, has just about made my day. I feel infinitely more secure.”
“You never went to school with hibbers,” Craig Puddicombe said. “You’ve never had to be anything but their boss.”
“Now you’ve got a prehistoric hibber gettin’ it on with your wife.”
“My ex-wife,” I said automatically.
“Yeah,” said E. L. Teavers. “Like you say.” He took a creased business card from his hip pocket and handed it to me. “This is the help you can count on if it begins to seem unfair to you. If it begins to, you know, make you angry.” He opened the restaurant door on the muggy July night. “Better am-scray, Craig, so’s Mr. Loyd can get back to feeding his bigwigs.”
They were gone.
I wandered to the service niche beside the kitchen and set down the water pitcher. I read the business card young Teavers had given me. Then I tore it lengthwise, collated the pieces, and tore them again—right down the middle. Ordinarily quite dependable, in this instance my memory fails me. All I can recall is the gist of the message on the card. But to preserve the fiction of my infallibility as narrator I will give here a reasonable
E(lvis) L(amar) Teavers
KuKlos Klan—Kudzu Klavern
Box 666
Beulah Fork, Georgia
Business had slackened noticeably by ten. At eleven we closed. I stayed in the kitchen after Hazel and Livia George had left to prepare my desserts for Sunday: a German chocolate cake, a carrot cake, and a strawberry icebox pie. The work—the attention to ingredients, measures, and mixing or baking times—kept my mind off the visit by the boys. In fact, I was striving purposefully not to think about it: a strategy that fell apart as soon as I went upstairs to my stuffy converted storage room.
E. L. Teavers, a bright kid from a respectable lower-middle-class home, was a member of the Klan. Not merely a member, but an officer of a piddling local chapter of one of its semiautonomous splinter groups. What had the card said? Zealous High Zygote? Terrific Vice Tycoon? Puissant Grand Poltroon? Something rhetorically cyclopean or cyclonic. The title did not matter. What mattered was that this able-bodied, mentally keen young man, along with his somewhat less astute buddy, had kept abreast of the situation at Paradise Farm and regarded it as an affront to all the values he had been taught as a child. That was scary. I was frightened for RuthClaire, and I was frightened for myself for having rebuffed the High Zygote’s offer to help.
What kind of “help” did he and Craig have in mind? Some sort of house-cleaning operation? A petition campaign? A nightriding incident? An appeal to other Klan organizations for reinforcements?
In all my forty-six years, I’d never come face to face with a danger of this precise human sort, and I found it hard to believe that it had descended upon me—upon RuthClaire, Adam, and Beulah Fork—in the form of two acne-scarred bucks whom, only a season or two ago, I had seen playing (poor) high school football. It was like finding a scorpion in a familiar potted geranium. It was worse than the pious verbal assaults of a dozen different fundamentalist ministers and far, far worse than the frustrated carping of Brian Nollinger in Atlanta. As for those anonymous souls who had actually leaped the barricades at Paradise Farm, they were mere sportive shadows, easily routed by light and the echoing reports of my old .22.
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
“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
“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 he 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 and 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
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,
“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
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
“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 RuthClaire 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.
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.
“
“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.
“
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
“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
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.
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
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
“Hey,” Livia George said, “that’s the fella Miss RuthClaire brung in here las’ January. You know, the one done upchuck all ovah the table.”
“Adam!” I exclaimed.
“Now he’s got so uptown ’n’ pretty he drivin’ a silver bullet. An’ jes’ look who’s with him, too!”
“RuthClaire!” I cried. Even in the mist-cloaked street, the syllables of her name reverberated like bell notes.
We embraced all around. I even hugged Adam, who, in returning my hug, gave my back such a wrench that for a moment I thought a vertebra had snapped. He was gentler with Livia George, probably out of inbred habiline chivalry. When RuthClaire and I came together, though, we bumped bellies. She laughed self-consciously, and I knew that her baby wasn’t long for the womb. In defiance of the real possibility of her going into labor along the way, she and Adam had made the two-hour trip from Atlanta. That struck me as crazy. Angrily, I told them so.
“Relax, Paul. Even if I had, it wouldn’t have been a catastrophe.”
“On the expressway shoulder? Like a savage? You’ve got to be kidding!”
I turned to Adam. Although still far from a giant, he was taller than I remembered, maybe because he was wearing hand-tooled leather boots with elevator heels. I was going to rebuke him for making the drive with his wife so close to delivery, but RuthClaire had launched a spirited mini lecture: “Only a tiny fraction of all the babies born to our species have been born in hospitals, Paul. And that fact has
I whirled on her. “What if you’d had trouble?”
She patted the opaque ball turret of her pregnancy. “Gunner here’s not going to cause any trouble. I’ll have him—or her—the way a birddog bitch drops her puppies.
“When is it due?” I asked, shaking my head.
“They don’t quite know. I’ve been pregnant since June at least. That puts me early in my seventh month.”
“She safe enough, then,” Livia George assured me.
Fresh-faced in the December mist, RuthClaire said, “That’s not altogether certain, Livia George. No one has any real idea what the habiline gestation period is. Or
“Surely, one of those hotshots up at Emory has an opinion on the matter.”
“I’m sure they do, Paul, but we haven’t asked them. We
“Yeah. Even when they’re wearing platform heels.”
“That’s to help him reach the brake and accelerator pedals, not to pamper his vanity. Even so, we had those pedals lifted about four inches from the floorboard.”
“Jesus.” I gazed into the glowering pewter sky. “A thirty-six-year-old madonna on the brink of water-burst and an East African Richard Petty who can barely touch his brakes!”
“You gonna keep ’em out here all afternoon, Mistah Paul, or can they go inside to field your cuss-’em-outs.”
I waved everyone inside and sent Livia George to the kitchen for coffee and hot chocolate. It was still a couple of hours before my dinner crowd would descend.
“Why didn’t you telephone? I might not’ve even been here.”
“You’re always here, Paul. The West Bank’s what you do.”
“Yeah, but why didn’t you phone?”
“I always see Edna Twiggs sitting at the switchboard when I dial a Beulah Fork number, AT&T reorganization and all. I don’t trust the phones—not after last summer.”
“So you’d risk turning Adam into your obstetrician?”
“Absolutely. Adam and I have decided: I’m not having this baby in a hospital.”
Unable to help myself, I rolled my eyes.
“Stop it. You belittle everything you don’t understand.”
“You planning a hot-tub delivery? That’s one of the latest crazes. Mama pretends she’s a porpoise in Marineland.”
“Paul—”
“Birthing stools. That’s big, too. You have the kid squatting, like a football center pulling the pigskin out from under his jersey.”
Adam looked at his crooked hands on my new mint-green tablecloth. RuthClaire spoke through clenched teeth: “I’ll never understand how we got married. Never.”
Knowing I had gone too far, I apologized.
“Neither of those methods is as absurd as you make them out to be. Underwater delivery is nonstressful for mother and child, and a birthing stool gives a woman a degree of control over a process that’s rightfully her own, anyway. If your consciousness is ever raised, Paul Loyd, it’s going to have to be with a block and tackle.”
Livia George came back from the kitchen with our hot drinks. “Had six babies ’thout a doctor ’round,” she told us. “In a feather bed in my own house. Oldest done hit six-foot-four. Youngest ain’ been sick a day.”
Adam made a series of gestures with his hands, which RuthClaire translated: “Adam says to tell you that we want our baby born at Paradise Farm. We’ll even pay for the privilege. It’s important to us.”
“But why?” I asked, almost—but not quite—dumbstruck.
“As soon as I check into a hospital, the media will descend. It’s understandable, I guess, but I can’t let them turn the birth of our baby into an international circus. Paradise Farm’s already got a good security system, and it’s far enough from Atlanta to thwart a few of the inevitable busybodies.”
“RuthClaire, why not fly to some remote Caribbean island? You can afford it. It’s going to be butt-bruising cold here in Beulah Fork—not like in Zarakal or Haiti, kid.”
“Don’t you see? I’ll be
Discomfited, I said, “You can stay out there, Ruthie Cee, on two conditions.”
“
I stood. “Just listen. They’re easy. First, you don’t pay me a dime.” Adam and RuthClaire exchanged a look, the meaning of which was obviously both gratitude and acceptance. “Second, let me find a discreet, reputable doctor to help with the delivery.”
“No! An outsider would needlessly complicate things, and I’m going to be fine.”
I told her there was still a
My forefinger made a stabbing motion at Adam. “It’s hard for me to credit his coming so far in six months. Forgive me if I’m skeptical of his medical expertise.”
“He’s brighter than most, Paul, and he had a head start on Montaraz that nobody chooses to acknowledge.”
“But he’s not a doctor. And that’s my second condition.” RuthClaire stood. Adam stood. For a moment, I feared they’d leave, and I cursed my show of intractability. I was about to rescind my second condition when Livia George gave me a face-saving out:
“S’pose I midwife Miss RuthClaire’s little ’un? How that be?” She fluttered her hands before her. “I got
Hallelujah. RuthClaire, Adam, and I all did double takes. We all liked Livia George’s proposal. There was something about her turn of phrase, her cunning self-mockery. Our conflict thus resolved, we four took turns embracing as we had earlier done on the sidewalk.
I sent the Montarazes out to Paradise Farm with a set of keys. Livia George and I finished decorating and greeted the dinner crowd. Hazel Upchurch and Nancy Teavers came in at 4:30. By recent standards, business was slow and the evening dragged. At 11:30 I roared up the highway to see how my new lodgers were doing.
They had not yet gone to bed. I found them in RuthClaire’s old studio.
Often over the past few months, I had entered the untenanted loft to stand in its memory-haunted emptiness imagining just such a reunion. Now she was really back, my lost RuthClaire.
Adam, of course, was with her, sitting cross-legged on the drafting table opposite RuthClaire’s Naugahyde sofa, a book between his legs and gold-framed granny glasses clamped on the end of his broad, flat nose. The sleeves of his baby-blue velour shirt were rolled up, and he’d unzipped it to the midpoint of his sternum, revealing a flannel-y nest of reddish-black chest hair. He saw me before RuthClaire did.
“Still reading up on childbirth?” I asked him.
He bared his teeth—a smile, not a threat or an expression of fear—and lifted the book so I could see it. RuthClaire pulled herself to a sitting position with my nappy beige rearing-bear blanket around her shoulders. By the door, I leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. Then I crossed to the drafting table to find out what Adam was reading. A small, slick paperback:
“C. S. Lewis?” I said incredulously, turning to RuthClaire. “A habiline holdover from the Pleistocene’s reading C. S. Lewis?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
I took the book from Adam. “Your husband—the living descendant of a bunch of East African mole people—is busily ingesting a work of theology?”
“Do you believe he can read?”
I glanced sidelong at Adam. I knew he’d mastered sign language, I had seen him driving a car, and his eyes were appraising me with a pause-prompting keenness.
“Sure,” I grudgingly admitted. “Why not?”
“Then why find it hard to believe he’s reading C. S. Lewis? The man wrote for children, you know. He even wrote
I changed tacks. “He ought to be reading, uh,
“He’s done that already. Don’t you understand? His consciousness is emerging from a kind of mental Upper Paleolithic. Adam’s trying to find out who he is.”
“More birthing-stool psychobabble?”
“Only if you choose to belittle it as such.”
Adam made signs with both hands. I could not interpret them. The irony of his knowing a system of communication of which I was ignorant underscored the foolishness of my doubting his interest in theology. (If he could sign, he could just as easily genuflect.)
“He wants to know if he has a soul,” RuthClaire translated.
“So do I. Want to know if
“Your lack of a heart may imply something equally discouraging about your spiritual equipment, Paul.”
“It’s after midnight, kid. I can’t believe we’re discussing this.”
“What about it? Do you think Adam has a soul?”
“What kind of soul, for God’s sake? An animal soul? A rational soul? An immortal soul? All this sort of adolescent head game will get you is a migraine and a reputation as a philosophical nitpicker.”
RuthClaire flapped her nappy blanket. “Skip it. You’ve got all the sensitivity of a tire iron.” Dog-tired, I shuffled to the sofa and plopped down opposite her. She took pity and flapped an end of her blanket at me. I pulled it over my knees. “Almost like old times, hey, Paul?”
“I can’t recall having a chaperone before.”
“Livia George.”
“Livia George’s a chaperone the way Colonel Sanders is a spokesman for the Save-the-Chickens Fund.”
RuthClaire laughed, and we began to talk. Somehow, owing in part to Adam’s absorption in his book, it was almost as if we were alone in the wide, chilly room. RuthClaire told me that downstairs she had seen my growing collection of plates in her
“Look,” I said, “you’ve still got ten unissued plates in this series. The eight main hominids on the road to
“Contemporary racial variations.”
“Negroes, Caucasians, Orientals?”
“I’ve already done paintings for those and some others—Oceanics, aboriginals, American Indians. The final four are up in the air because there’s unavoidable overlap. I’ll probably do Eskimos, Arabs, pygmies, and Nordics, but I could substitute Bushmen or Montagnards or Ainu somewhere in there. It’s arbitrary, of course, a way to get the number of plates up to eighteen. AmeriCred’s hollering for the last four so they can put the plates into production. Me, I’m sick of the whole rotten thing.”
“Really? You don’t enjoy doing them?”
“It’s donkeywork. I liked doing the prehistoric numbers, Adam’s portrait and all that. But these last ten are sheer commercial excess. AmeriCred wants their subscribers to pay through the nose for gewgaws. I’m a hack writing otherwise worthless potboilers.”
“Enjoy your popularity. No one’s twisting their arms.”
“It’s not that I’m doing a lousy job, but these latest plates aren’t contributing anything to the development of my art. It’s safe representational stuff. My audience consists of well-to-do old ladies and fat-cat corporate executives looking for a ‘classy’ cultural investment.” She stuck out her tongue, as if to see if there was a piece of lint or tobacco on its tip. “That’s why I’ve been so slow to finish this assignment, Paul.”
“Blame it on your pregnancy.”
“I’ve done that. It’s a lie.”
“People who regret making money are nincompoops.”
“The regret—the guilt—comes from what you do to make it. Even you know that. Right now I’m whoring.”
Adam looked up from
“Whoring? You didn’t feel that way about
“No. Those are breakthrough paintings. I avoided all the clichés—archangels with flaming swords, naked cherubs with wings on their heels, Jesus dragging his old rugged hanging tree. I did something new. It was a small miracle the series was successful. A bigger miracle it ever got commissioned.”
“It made you popular. You hadn’t bargained for that.”
“
“That’s smug elitism,” I said. “It’s probably insincere, too. You pretend to despise success because there’s an old art-school attitude that figures nothing popular can be worth a damn.”
“There’s a backlash against me in the Atlanta art community because of my success. The people who count up there see my work on these stupid plates as a sellout. I do, too. Now, especially.”
“If that opinion takes in the plates you’re proud of, to hell with them.”
“It’s more complicated than that. They don’t respect what I’m doing, and I can’t truly respect it, either—not my last ten examples of porcelain calendar art, anyway.”
“They’re jealous.”
“That enters into it. But I’ve always thought myself something of a visionary. My work for AmeriCred has undermined all that. The worst thing about the backlash is that I know I’ve brought it on myself.”
The studio’s fluorescents flickered palely as the wind gusted and moaned. The yew outside the twin-paned plate glass creaked its tall shadow across our imaginations. Even Adam looked up.
“Is that another reason you came down here? To escape the disapproval of the art-scene cognoscenti?”
RuthClaire frowned. “I don’t know.” Her spirits mysteriously revived. “They
“The West Bank,” I reminded her. “It’s hard to get away.”
“You got away in February when you visited Brian Nollinger at that primate field station north of Atlanta. Well, Abraxas is twenty miles closer to Beulah Fork than that concentration camp for our furry cousins.” A grimace of unfeigned revulsion twisted her mouth, but then her eyes were facetiously pleading. “Listen, Mr. Loyd, I’ve just made you an offer you can’t refuse. Understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Yes, ma’am.”
And so Adam and RuthClaire stayed with me, and Livia George drove home with me from the West Bank every evening in case my ex-wife went into labor. At the restaurant itself, we had a prearranged telephone signal. Adam, out at Paradise Farm, would dial and let the phone ring once. Then he’d hang up, wait thirty seconds, and repeat the procedure. After the second ring, no matter how busy we were, Livia George and I would sprint up the Tocqueville Road in my Mercedes to answer his call.
Atlanta’s news media finally realized that the Montarazes had left the city. They phoned the West Bank looking for a lead. Sometimes they tried to induce Edna Twiggs to give them my unlisted number at Paradise Farm. She resisted. One day at lunch, in fact, she told me how she’d turned down a bribe of money for that information. Edna Twiggs, an ally! Even so, I took the added precaution of connecting all the telephones in my house to an answering machine so that, in my absence, RuthClaire and Adam could monitor incoming calls. Fortunately, no one but me ever tried to ring them up.
I was still concerned that someone in a TV van or a newspaper company car might try to gatecrash. The Atlanta papers had recently featured headlines about Adam and RuthClaire. In the morning
In the afternoon paper, the
The story under this last headline reported an interview with David Blau, director of the Abraxas Gallery. Blau thought that the Montarazes were okay, but still believed they should contact him or one of his associates to confirm the fact.
“Is this guy one of the avant-garde bigwigs who think you’ve sold out?” I asked RuthClaire.
“David’s more charitable than most. He credits me with practicing a deliberate serious-commercial split.”
“Sounds like a decent enough Joe.”
“He is. That’s why I’ve got to give him a call.”
“Don’t,” I blurted. My newfound, but still tepid, regard for Edna Twiggs did not permit me to trust her totally. “Write a note. Put no return address on the envelope. I’ll mail it from Tocqueville tomorrow morning. He’ll have it the day after.”
That’s what we did. While I was in Tocqueville to mail the note, I hired a trio of private guards from a security agency in the Tocqueville Commons Mall. The first man came on duty that same afternoon.
Once the guards began their shifts, my taut nerves loosened. The likelihood of anyone’s circling the farm and coming at us by way of White Cow Creek seemed remote. It must have seemed remote to RuthClaire, too. She made up her mind to have her baby in a peaked canvas tent that she and Adam pitched beneath a pecan tree. The tent was lavender, reminiscent of the floppy conical hoods worn by Teavers, Puddicombe, and their anonymous Klan-mates on the night they came to kill Adam. I told RuthClaire so the morning after their tent first went up, its lavender surfaces sparkling with frost.
“You’re right,” she said, startled. “We bought it at a sporting-goods store in Atlanta and I never once thought of that. Maybe Adam did, though. Teavers’s robe may have kept him from coming down with pneumonia.”
“This tent won’t keep you warm. The temp today is in the twenties, RuthClaire.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“What about the baby?”
“The kid’s half habiline. Habilines are traditionally, and altogether naturally, born out of doors. The tent’s a compromise.”
“Out of doors in Africa or Haiti!”
“If it’s cold, Livia George can wrap the baby in a blanket and take it inside.”
“Then what’s the point of the stupid purple tent?”
“I’ve already told you. Don’t you listen?” She turned on her heel and stalked toward the plate-glass doors glittering above my patio deck. I followed her, shaking my head and mumbling.
Adam continued to read
Adam painted during the days, read in the evenings. Ruthie Cee, on the other hand, neither painted nor read. She usually slept while Adam worked. Sometimes she watched him. (He was putting the finishing touches on a huge, semiabstract landscape featuring a tangerine-red tree that reminded me of an African baobab.) She may have occasionally prepared a meal, but if she did, she wasn’t regular about it. She had no need to be. Livia George and I scrupulously brought them at least one hot gourmet meal a day.
Saturday night at the West Bank: six or seven people standing cheerful but also mildly impatient just inside the door, waiting to be seated. Fur jackets or chic leather car coats on the ladies. The men bundled in herringbone or expensive brushed sheepskin. Cold air swirling around the newcomers like the vapor in a frozen-food bin. The phone next to the cash register rang. I looked over at the flocked divider concealing the phone. A second ring was not forthcoming.
Oh no, I thought, not
I smiled at a woman with a magazine-cover death mask for a face and put one hand reassuringly on the shoulder of her escort. Mentally, though, I counted to thirty. The telephone rang again.
“That’s it!” I cried. “That’s it!”
Livia George scurried in from the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron. Her heavy upper arms were bare, but she made no move to find her coat. “Gotta get goin’, Mistah Paul.” She pushed through the astonished people at the door. “Gotta he’p Miss RuthClaire birth that beautiful baby.” She hustled out the door, down the sidewalk, and into the front seat of my Mercedes, driver’s side. Helplessly, I followed, already resigned to the role of passenger.
The trip took maybe nine minutes.
Our security guard automatically passed us through the gate, and my car’s steel-belted radials flung gravel back at him as Livia George fishtailed us up the drive to the house. I was taking two steps at a time toward the front door when Livvy, at the corner of the house, shouted,
“Not that way, Mistah Paul! She in that purple pup tent out back!”
“Go on!” I urged her. “I’ve got to grab a coat!”
The warmth of the house hit me like a Gulf Coast wind. I took a jacket from the shoulders of the baby-satyr statue on which I’d draped it several days ago, pulled it on, and strode into the living room looking for a shawl or sweater for Livia George. From the back of a chair, I grabbed a peach-toned afghan. But on the way to the sliding doors I hesitated. Did I really want to see the woman I loved in the throes of childbirth? Sure. Of course I did. Wasn’t that what every sensitive with-it male wanted nowadays? Men attended classes to learn how to provide support at the Moment of Truth. Some even scrubbed and put on surgical gowns to participate in the event. If their partners were back-to-nature advocates, they might build birthing stools or prepare for underwater delivery by buying scuba-diving gear. All I had to do was slide open a plate-glass door and trip across my deck to a tent in a pecan grove.
I was no longer RuthClaire’s husband. The child in her womb owed me no genetic debt. It instead owed this paternal debt to a mute, sinewy creature right out of the early Paleolithic. Was the arrival of this squalling relic really an event I wanted to witness? My concern should have been for RuthClaire’s safety, for the health and well-being of her child—but baser impulses had me in their grip and I hesitated.
Taking a breath, I went out onto my deck. The cold hit me like an Arctic hammer stroke, but I staggered through the pillars of my silhouetted pecan trees to RuthClaire’s lavender tent. Inside the translucent smudge of the sailcloth, shadowy shapes stooped, straightened, gesticulated. Adam, I was glad to see, had taken my PowerLite into the tent. He’d even thought to tote one of the studio’s sun lamps out there, an extension cord from the deck down into the pecan grove giving me a trail to follow.
A hundred yards or so beyond the tent, a quick flash of light. I halted, blinked, looked again—but now the corridor of sentinel pecans was empty of any intruder but the keening wind.
“Mistah Paul, you better move your fanny fas’ if you wanna see this!” I moved my fanny fast. After skidding in the frost-rimed mulch, I whipped aside the tent flap, edged inside, and found RuthClaire flat on her back on a mound of blankets and ancient bed sheets spread out on a plastic drop cloth. Adam knelt to one side of his wife, but Livvy squatted between her legs—legs bundled in a pair of those ugly knit calf-warmers worn by women in aerobic-dancing classes—guiding from her womb the mocha-cream-colored product of her pregnancy.
“I told you it’d be easy!” RuthClaire cried, letting her head fall back and laughing.
Livvy did something sure-handed to the umbilical cord, then lifted the minuscule infant by its ankles, bracing its back with one hand and showing it first to Adam and then me. It was a boy, but a wizened and fragile-looking one. When Livvy slapped him on his angular buttocks, he sucked in air and wailed. Surprisingly, the sound lasted only a few brief seconds. Evolution on the Serengeti grasslands, I later came to realize, had selected for habilines whose newborns shut up in a hurry.
“Ain’ he a dandy!”
I put the afghan around Livia George’s shoulders. Adam reached into the wings of the towel swaddling the baby to touch his son’s head. Something like a smile flickered around Adam’s lips.
“Okay,” I said. “Ruthie’s proved she’s game enough to bear her child in the back yard. Now let’s get inside.”
“Got a little bidness to take care of yet.” Livvy handed the baby to its father. She knelt and massaged the undersides of RuthClaire’s thighs. Then she began to push gently on her slack, exposed abdomen, to encourage the expulsion of the placenta. “Y’all go on in. Nothin’ else for you to do out here.”
But before Adam and I could exit, two strangers shoved their way into the tent.
First, a blond man in a double-breasted safari jacket confronted us. Behind him, balancing a portable video unit on his denim-clad shoulder, was a slender black man. These intruders were so businesslike about deploying their equipment and their persons in the cramped interior that I considered the possibility that Adam and RuthClaire had hired them to video-tape their baby’s delivery. If so, they were late.
“I’m Brad Barrington of Contact Cable News,” announced the blond intruder. “My cameraman, Rudy Starnes.” The black man gave a perfunctory nod. “Well, well, well. Is this little fellow the Montaraz baby?” He chucked the newborn under the chin with a gloved finger. “Looks like we underestimated the time it’d take us to get through the woods, Rudy. The big show’s already come off.”
“Sun lamp’s giving us plenty of light to shoot by, Brad. Maybe I can do some reenactment footage to save the situation.”
“Yeah,” said Barrington. “And on-the-scene interviews.”
Grimacing, RuthClaire raised up on her elbows. “What in pity’s name do you guys think you’re doing?”
“You’re trespassing,” I told them. “You sneaked onto Paradise Farm from Cleve Snyder’s property.”
A microphone in his fist, Barrington duck-walked beneath the tilted sun lamp to RuthClaire’s shoulder, where he asked if it had been a difficult delivery. Leaning into the mike, RuthClaire emitted a piercing scream. Barrington recoiled, almost doing a pratfall. Livia George, meanwhile, had slid the glistening placenta into a piece of torn sheet. Her manner implied that the appearance of the two-man Contact Cable News crew was none of her affair. If nothing else, it was preferable to a hurricane.
“Who’s doing security tonight?” I asked. (I always forgot the guards’ names.)
“Chalmers,” RuthClaire replied, spitting out the word.
Barrington, looking more annoyed than abashed, approached her again with the microphone. “Don’t you think this landmark event deserves a permanent video record? Don’t you feel any sense of obligation to history?”
RuthClaire, her breath ballooning, said, “Don’t you feel any sense of shame, hanging over a half-naked woman with that instrument of psychic rape in your fist?”
A thin veil of confusion fell across the newsman’s face.
“Get out of here,” I told him. “My first and last warning.”
“Let’s go, Brad,” the black man said. “This ain’t working out.” Almost certainly at his partner’s bidding, Starnes had just hauled a ton of equipment across five or six hundred yards of wintry darkness, and nothing was going as planned.
“Keep shooting,” the blond man told him.
“Brad—”
“This is a scoop! You see anyone down here from Channel Five or Eleven Alive? You know anybody else who staked out this place for three ass-freezing days?”
“Nobody else that dumb.”
I slipped outside and called for Chalmers, the guard. That did it for Starnes. He decamped, abandoning his associate to whatever fate he chose to fashion for himself. He was hiking speedily off through the pecan grove, his equipment banging, when Chalmers came trotting around the corner of the house with his pistol drawn. The guard started to pursue the cameraman.
“Let him go,” I said. “It’s the talking head in the tent who needs his butt run in.”
Matters unraveled confusedly after that. RuthClaire was yelling at Barrington to go away, go away, and Livia George came out into the cold with the infant, nodding once at the house to show us that she was taking him indoors. Chalmers, a tall young man in an official-looking parka, started to go into the tent after Barrington when Barrington fell backward through the tent flap with Adam’s head in his stomach and his arms pinioned to his sides. In a rapid-fire falsetto utterly unlike his on-the-air baritone, he was pleading for mercy—but he landed on his back with a loud expulsion of breath and immediately fell silent. Adam was all over him like a pit bull, leaping from flank to flank over the reporter’s prostrate form, baring his teeth and growling as if rabid. RuthClaire emerged from the tent, too. Her blood-stained dressing gown hung to her ankles, her incongruous maroon leg-warmers visible just beneath its hem. She grasped one of the tent’s guy ropes for support.
In a tone of rational admonishment, she said, “Adam, I’m okay. That’s enough.”
Through the fog of his rage, Adam still heard her. He stopped, Barrington’s body rigid beneath him, and looked up sightlessly at Chalmers and me. Slowly—almost shockingly—sanity returned to his eyes, and he pushed himself off the reporter with his knuckles and stepped away from his whimpering victim.
“I want to hold my baby,” RuthClaire told him. “Take me in.”
Still trying to compose himself, Adam escorted her to the house. Chalmers and I remained outside with Barrington, the guard pointing his pistol at the newsman’s head. What now? Were we within our rights to shoot the trespasser?
Barrington stopped whimpering. Seeing me upside-down, he asked if he could have a cup of coffee before he called his station for a ride back to Atlanta. “That damned Starnes. He’s probably to Newnan by now.”
Chalmers said, “If Mr. Loyd presses charges, you won’t be going back to Atlanta tonight. I’ll turn you over to the sheriff in Tocqueville for a little quiet cell time.”
Barrington got off the ground, groaning elaborately, and we argued the matter. If he gave his word that Contact Cable News would never air the least snippet of tape taken tonight on Paradise Farm, I told him, I would forgo the pleasure of pressing charges. I’d be damned, though, if I’d serve him a cup of coffee or let him use the bathroom. Barrington grumped about the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press, but verbally accepted my terms.
Then Chalmers and I escorted him to the front gate. There, with a display of loyalty totally undeserved, Rudy Starnes picked up Barrington in the Contact Cable News van in which the two had been camping for the past three ass-freezing days, presumably to drive him back up the lonely highway to Atlanta.
Upstairs, in a tiny bedroom next to the studio, I found Livia George with the new parents. In one corner was a white wicker bassinet, but RuthClaire was sitting in an upholstered chair nursing her baby, whom someone had bagged up in a yellow terrycloth sleeper. A newt, I thought. A salamander. I reported what had happened with Barrington and told Livvy that I needed to get back to the West Bank to oversee the restaurant’s closing—assuming, that is, that my hires had not long since walked off the job in bootless anger and frustration.
“They’ll be back,” RuthClaire said.
“I hope so,” I said. “It’s hard finding good help.”
“Oh, I don’t mean help. I’m talking about those jerks from Contact Cable.”
Adam stalked out of the room. Lights clicked on in the studio, and a wash of yellow lambency unrolled past the nursery.
“I don’t think he remembers the last time he let himself go like that,” RuthClaire said by way of explanation.
“The time he wrestled E. L. Teavers into the brick kiln?”
“That was self-defense, Paul, a matter of life and death. Tonight, the only thing that was truly at stake was the sanctity of our baby’s birth.”
“Adam be awright tomorrow,” Livia George said. “It’s jes’ too much ’citement for one evening.”
“He didn’t even bite the bastard,” I said. “Just knocked him down and growled.”
“He went wild.”
“Everybody goes wild now and then.” I grinned. “Why, Ruthie Cee, even you went a little wild this evening.”
She shifted her hold on the baby. “We discussed naming this little character for you. Keep that up, though, and you can forget it.” Gently, she began to jog the suckling infant in her arms. “Adam sets standards for himself, high ones. They’re high because the general expectation is that he’ll comport himself like an animal. Well, his sense of self-respect demands that he never—ever—fulfill that cynical expectation.”
“Then his standards are higher than nine tenths of the world’s human population.”
“Adam’s human.”
“You know what I mean. I was trying to compliment him.”
The baby—
“Whoever said I wanted a normal life?”
“Look in on Adam, will you, Paul? Right now, another person’s attentions might be better medicine for his blues than mine.”
I looked in on Adam. He was sitting on the drafting table, his stack of read and unread library books teetering at his knees. Although he heard me enter, he refused to look up. We were alone together in the tall drafty expanse of the studio. Despite the room’s chilliness, my hands began to sweat.
“Adam,” I said. “Don’t feel bad about going after that Contact Cable turkey. If it had been me, I’d’ve
The habiline looked me in the eye. His upper lip drew back to reveal his pink gums and primitive, powerful teeth. I looked away. When I looked again, Adam’s gaze had gone back to his book.
“Let me congratulate you on becoming a father, Adam. The kid’s a crackerjack.” No response. “What’s that you’re reading?”
The cloak of civility he was trying to grow into would not let him ignore a direct question. He lifted the small volume so I could read its title. Ah,
“You ought to try Lewis’s
Adam tweezered the book from my two-fingered grip, pulled it to his chest, and then flung it past my head to the far end of the studio. Like a broken-backed bird, it flapped to a leaning standstill against the baseboard. Adam took advantage of my surprise to hop down from the table. Exiting the studio, he put me in mind of a lame elf or an oddly graceful chimpanzee: there was something either crippled-seeming or animalish about his walk. “Shame on you, Loyd,” I scolded myself.
Papa, Mama, and Little Baby Montaraz went back to Atlanta. The international media descended upon their home not far from Little Five Points, a two-story structure with a ramshackle gallery, lots of spooky gables, and a wide Faulknerian veranda. The house became almost as famous as the kid.
As for little Paul, he rapidly turned into the anthropological prince of American celebrity. Everyone wanted a piece of him and his parents.
But I’m running ahead of myself. Let me back up.
In the absence of an attending physician, Tiny Paul required a birth certificate. Because his parents had left Paradise Farm early on Sunday morning, there was no way for them to obtain a file form on which to apply for a certificate from the Hothlepoya County Health Department. On Monday, then, I drove to Tocqueville to pick up the form. I filled it out standing at the registrar’s counter. Surprisingly, she treated the application as a routine matter. When I questioned her, she told me that the form would now go to the Office of Vital Records in the state-government complex in Atlanta.
“What about the birth certificate?”
“Send in a three-dollar filing fee and they’ll send it. It really doesn’t take long.”
“If I write the check, should I specify that the certificate itself should go to the parents’ Atlanta address?”
The young woman—trim, deftly mascaraed—looked at me with a flicker of interest. “Why would they send the certificate to you? Writing the check doesn’t make you the child’s father.”
“Then it isn’t necessary?”
“Of course not.”
Irritated, I sought to shock her. “What if I
“Then it’s awfully big of you to pay the filing fee,” she said smoothly.
I grunted, pocketed my checkbook, and left.
On Wednesday, I received a long white envelope from Atlanta, not from the Office of Vital Records but from RuthClaire and Adam. The notes inside were both in Ruthie Cee’s peculiar El Grecoish script—tall, nearsighted characters in anguished postures—but the second was reputedly dictation from Adam. Even in my ex’s etiolated script, Adam’s was the more original and perplexing document:
Well-loved Namer of our Son,
We are back, but are we home? My homes keep jumping around. Paradise Farm I love for there I met RuthClaire. For a while now it is the only one of all my homes that does not jump. Tiny Paul has just jumped into the world from my one home that stands somewhat still. You are like a fierce seraph that holds down the corners of my jumping Eden. Thank you, sir, for doing that.
I must say two more things and maybe a little else. First, thank you for bringing me books on your card about God and thinking on Godness. Some of these I have regotten on my Atlanta card, so much am I interested. Second, deeply sorry for throwing one book—even if it was my own—across your room in my bitter fit of not behaving right. It makes me laugh a little, with angry mirth, to say or see that title, THE PROBLEM OF PAIN.
I am also sorry for attacking the vile man Barrington. I should write to him to say so, but he should write me to say himself sorry a THOUSAND times. He should write Miss RuthClaire. He should write YOU. He should quit his name from the station that sends him forth. God and thinking on Godness should quiet my anger, but (too bad) they do not. Barrington needs better etiquette and also probably religion. So do I. But I have a long walk to get there.
This is my last “a little else” to ask you. One day this year Miss RuthClaire may ask you to come see about her seeing about me. Some doctors at Emory are plotting now a surgery to humanize me for this time and place. Do please come when she asks. We will reimburse—a pretty word—all losses. If both agree to the niceness of using one bed during my hospital stay, I have no argument or jealousy to put against that wish.
P.S. Miss RuthClaire has written my last a “little else” in some anger. I must learn, she says, that no married person except maybe an Eskimo has a right “to dispose of the other’s affections.” I am telling her that I knew THAT already, and that the words
P.P.S. Tiny Paul does well. Sleeping at night very well. Making no noise. Good baby etiquette.
P.P.P.S. I would like—much—a pen pal on spiritual stuff, but you undoubted lack for time?
I reread this letter closely several times. What wouldn’t a reporter give to lay hands on it? I thought briefly of letting different outfits bid for it, but once I had rejected this course as vile beyond even my notorious reverence for the profit motive, I never looked back. Adam was no longer my rival, he was my friend.
I tried to imagine what sort of surgery the specialists at Emory were planning for Adam, but could adduce only such routine operations as appendectomy, tonsillectomy, molar extractions, and, forgive me, circumcision. Then it occurred to me that the doctors might be contemplating more exotic procedures, viz., rendering Adam’s thumbs wholly opposable, surgically removing his sagittal crest, or increasing his body height by putting artificial bone sections in his thighs or lower legs. The first and third options would perhaps make it easier for Adam to function among us, but the second was a potentially dangerous sop to his or RuthClaire’s (vicarious) vanity—for which reason I struck it from my catalogue.
What then? What were they going to do to Adam?
I folded the notes back into their envelopes, feeling good about having decided to consider Adam my friend. Now I must act on that decision and enforce it by framing a reply. I found a grungy 13-cent postcard and wrote on it the following message:
Dear RuthClaire and Adam: I will come any time you need me. Just ask. No sweat about throwing C. S. Lewis across the room. I was once tempted to do the same thing. I’m the wrong pen pal for discussion of God and Godness, grace and salvation, extinction and immortality, even good and bad etiquette in situations with a moral angle. For that reason—not lack of time—I can’t promise anything.
Kiss the kid for me.
Christmas came and went. In Atlanta, the circus had begun. I wondered if my postcard had passed under prying eyes, thereby triggering the Montarazes’ ordeal with the press. In the future, sealed letters only.
Early in February, RuthClaire wrote to say they had received Tiny Paul’s birth certificate. She included three dollars to cover the cost of the registration fee. I sent the money back. But with the bills and the note was a printed invitation to Adam’s first exhibition of paintings at Abraxas. A wine-and-cheese reception in Adam’s honor would precede the show, and I was also invited to that. On the printed card RuthClaire had written, “
The reception was on a Tuesday evening. I closed the West Bank after our midday meal, gave Livia George and the others both that evening and Wednesday off, put a sign on the door, and set off for the Big City… just in time to collide with rush hour.
Dristle kept my windshield wipers klik-klikking, and it was almost completely dark when I finally made my way up Moreland Avenue to Little Five Points and the Montaraz house on Hurt Street. That house, how to describe it? Its silhouette oozed a jolly decadence suggesting Mardi Gras, shrimp creole, tasseled strippers, and derby-hatted funeral processionaires. A pair of lamps on black cast-iron poles shone on either side of the cobbled walk, their globes like spheres of shimmering, honey-colored wax. By their light, I saw two indistinct figures come out on the front porch, down the steps, and hand in hand through the mistfall to my car. I let them in.
RuthClaire and Adam, of course, in polished boots and fleece-lined London Fog trench coats. From their bodies wafted the smells of soap, cologne, lipstick, aftershave, winter rain, and something peculiarly oniony.
“Don’t I get to come in?” I squinted at my invitation. “This is a wine-and-cheese reception, not a dinner.”
Adam sat next to me, but his lady had slid into the back seat. “David Blau,” she said, leaning forward, “asked us to come a tad early, Paul. We’re letting you drive to throw the press off. They’ll be looking for our hatchback.”
“I thought they always had your place surrounded.”
“Until we got Bilker Moody, they usually did. Tonight, though, the majority’s already at Abraxas.”
I asked about my godson. He was with the sitter, Pam Sorrells, an administrative assistant at the gallery who had sacrificed her own attendance at the opening to free Adam and RuthClaire for the event. An armed security guard—the aforementioned Bilker Moody—was also in the living room to protect La Casa Montaraz from uninvited guests. Bilker was nearly always present. That was the way their little family had to live nowadays.
“Look, the show’s not officially over until eleven, Ruthie Cee. My stomach will be rumbling like Vesuvius by then.”
Adam reached into the pocket of his trench coat and withdrew a McDonald’s cheeseburger in its Mazola Oil-colored wrapper. It was still warm—warm and enticingly oniony-smelling. I glanced sidelong at this object of gastronomical kitsch.
“Dare we offer a five-star restaurateur a treat from the Golden Arches?” RuthClaire asked.
“Ordinarily, only at your peril. Promise not to tell anyone, though, and tonight I’ll discreetly humble myself.”
I ate the cheeseburger. Adam produced a second one. I ate it, too. For dessert, RuthClaire handed me a (badly needed) breath mint. Then off we drove. A nondescript pickup truck materialized about midway along the block behind us and tailed us all the way to the gallery.
The
In Atlanta, the gallery called Abraxas is an influential but underfunded alternative-arts center in a predominantly black section of the city. The buildings making up the complex—a print shop, a theater, the galleries, and the studio wing—used to belong to a school. With the exception of the print shop and the studio wing, they were built early in the century in a stolid red-brick architectural style giving them the grim look of a prison or an oversized Andrew Carnegie library. Coming toward Abraxas from the east, you swing back and forth along Ralph McGill Boulevard between modest clapboard and brick houses until you attain the crest of a hill that plunges precipitously toward the foot of yet another hill. Abraxas, though, sprawls along the weedy mound of the first hill, partially obscured by the fence of a factory parking lot.
I was cheerfully dive-bombing the Mercedes past the gallery when Adam tapped my knee and RuthClaire cried, “Stop, Paul, you’re missing it!”
My first good look at Abraxas left me chilled and skeptical. A one-person show at this abandoned school, I mused, could hardly have any more cachet or impact than a violin recital in a garage in Butte, Montana. Adam’s show was clearly small potatoes. The movers and shakers of the Atlanta art community had granted him this venue because his work had nothing but its novelty (“Prehistoric human relic actually puts paint to canvas!”) to recommend it. Maybe they had given him this show as a courteous bow to RuthClaire, in the hope that she would contribute to the center’s funding. This decaying three-story shell of chipped brick and sagging drainpipes was Abraxas?
RuthClaire seemed to be monitoring my thoughts. “It’s better inside. You have to park around back.” The lot had already begun to fill. We inched along behind earlier arrivals before finding a space under an elm tree at the end of the studio wing. Quite a crowd. “The third-floor gallery has three main rooms,” RuthClaire explained. “Adam’s paintings occupy only one of them. Some of these people have come for the Kander photographs or the Haitian show.”
We got out and crossed the lot to a plywood ramp leading into the old school’s first-floor corridor. A security guard saluted RuthClaire and Adam and directed us up the cold inner stairs to the third floor. Little inside the place contradicted my first impression of it as a candidate for the wrecking ball. At last, a formidable door, preventing entry to the gallery. Adam pressed a buzzer on the crumbling wall next to the door.
“I need a password,” said a muffled male voice beyond it.
“Chief Noc-a-homa,” RuthClaire said. This was the name—the stage name, so to speak—of the Indian who served as the official mascot of the Atlanta Braves. It was also the necessary password. The door opened.
“Welcome to the Deep South franchise of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land,” said a tall, disheveled man in a lime-colored sweater and a gray corduroy jacket with elbow patches of such bituminous blackness that it looked as if they would leave smudges on any surface they touched. The wearer held his elbows close to his sides as if to keep from leaving charcoal blots here and there about the gallery. This was David Blau. He was nearly my age, but he exuded a boyish enthusiasm that seemed a permanent attribute of his character. RuthClaire made the introductions, and we went around the corner into the director’s huge, drafty “office.” In the middle of the room, a set of unfinished stairs climbed to a jutting mezzanine that may have been a jerrybuilt studio loft. A lumpy sofa squatted with its back to the steps.
People milled about between the sofa and its coffee table, between Blau’s desk and a metal desk piled high with tabloid art publications. Other people, wine glasses in hand, sat on either the steps or the sofa, chatting, laughing, enjoying themselves. Blau said they had a perfect right. Most of them had worked hard for the past ten days to make this opening possible. A woman in designer jeans and high heels approached with a tray of wine glasses and decanters of burgundy and white. Each of us took a stem, and even Adam drank, sipping at his glass rim as suavely as any cocktail-party veteran.
“Hey, Paul,” RuthClaire whispered, “still think this is the Siberia of Atlanta’s art world?”
Blau overheard her. “It’s the High Museum that’s the real Siberia. Every time I look at it I see a heap of trash-compacted igloos.”
“I like it,” RuthClaire said. “It’s a lovely building.”
“It’s cold,” Blau retorted. “Cold and sterile.”
“You’re not responding to the architecture, David. You’re responding to the fact that its exhibition policies are different from your own.”
“Southern artists can get shown in Amsterdam or Mexico City more easily than at the High,” Blau told me. “The High’s safe. Colorful abstracts with no troubling political or social messages. Artists safely dead or with one foot in some collector’s anonymous Swiss bank account.”
“It’s supposed to be safe, at least in comparison to Abraxas. It’s Abraxas that’s supposed to be dangerous.”
“Is Abraxas dangerous?” I asked Blau.
The
“That wasn’t fair,” I said. “That guy didn’t strike me as another Barrington.”
“He’ll survive,” RuthClaire said. “Maybe he knows sign language.”
“What about Adam? Isn’t it awkward for him, too?”
“He appreciates the situation’s humor. The reporter will blink first, believe me.”
Blau swept an arm at the walls of the spacious new chamber—careful, though, to keep his elbow tight against his side. “Is Abraxas dangerous? Hell, yes, Mr. Loyd.”
The white plaster, or Sheetrock, walls rose to a height of ten feet or so. Above them, extending another ten or twelve feet, were the cold red bricks of the old school’s outer walls. Ceiling fans with wooden blades, motionless now, hung down from the shadows of the loft space. Then I dropped my gaze to the banners and paintings of the Haitian exhibit.
“Witch-doctor territory,” Blau said, laughing. “One of the best collections of primitive Caribbean art ever put on display in the South. We did back flips to get it.”
“Expensive?”
Blau shook his hand at the wrist. “Under this administration, military bands receive more government money than does the entire National Endowment for the Arts.”
Dazzling tropical colors and bustling marketplaces danced in their frames on the Sheetrock. I liked what I saw. This painting was recognizably a portrait, that a landscape, this one a street scene. The banners at intervals among the paintings were more puzzling. They featured beaded or sequined designs on long strips of silk or velvet. Even so, their cabalistic patterns seemed right at home in a gallery billing itself Abraxas.
“What’s dangerous about these items?” I asked.
“By themselves, I guess, not much—unless
“What’s dangerous about this exhibit,” RuthClaire said, “is that David and the others have put articles about the Duvalier government and our treatment of the Haitian boat people in odd places around the room. David’s originally from Brooklyn—a radical-pinko-commie with a monthly car payment.”
Blau put one arm across his midriff and bowed.
“What made you decide to go after Haitian art?” I asked.
“Adam did. He’s from a little island off the Haitian coast.”
“Paul knows,” RuthClaire said. “That’s how we got our surname.”
“Anyway,” Blau continued, “it seems that Adam’s people—the habiline remnant he was raised among—had occasional contact with members of the
RuthClaire said, “Paul thought that a show in this old building was tantamount to deep-sixing an artist’s work in the Chattahoochee.”
“Not a bit,” said Blau, taking her arm. “Let’s show Mr. Loyd what
“Eroticism,” she said. “Radical politics upsets fewer people than does graphic sex or nudity.”
“Especially if it has a racial or religious angle,” Blau added.
“Yeah, you get red faces, resignations, and withdrawn funding pledges.”
“Especially withdrawn funding pledges,” Blau said.
“Then why bother to show it?” I asked.
At which point I discovered that on the chamber’s curved wall, and on the two long straight walls connecting with it, were arrayed thirty or forty large black-and-white photographs in simple chromium frames. A piece of Plexiglas as big as an automobile’s windshield hung eight feet off the floor in the room’s center, and inside it was the word
in thick, emphatic red letters, with the photographer’s name—Maria-Katherine Kander—in smaller characters beneath it. The photos jumped out like a sudden angry slap.
“Holy Christ,” I murmured.
“They’re best taken in small doses,” Blau told me. “But in here, you’ll have to prepare for a full-scale assault. Have a gander. We’ll stay out of your way.”
He and RuthClaire withdrew so that I could prowl along the curved wall looking at Ms. Kander’s outrageous photographs. The first I stopped at, and studied, showed an angular black woman lying naked on her back on a sterile white sheet. Stacked between her legs, and in turgid piles around her thighs and belly, lay at least a dozen tiger-striped watermelons, a gang-banging team of watermelons. The expression on the woman’s face suggested nothing short of complacent ecstasy.
I moved on.
Another photograph was a frontal nude of a black man from the shoulders down and the thighs up. This faceless man had a daunting erection. At an upward angle paralleling that of his hard on, he gripped the ebony barrel of a submachine-gun. I blinked and moved on. Next, an anorexic white woman in high heels and leather panties was lowering her mouth to the head of a microphone held out to her by a disdainful rock musician with an electric guitar draped across his body. Yet another photograph featured a sunken-eyed man in concentration-camp garb, a Star of David stenciled on his arm band, gripping the bars of a bank vault. Ingots of gold bullion—like so many loaves of gilded bread—loaded the shelves behind him.
An even more elaborate photograph showed a priest in a cassock speaking to a congregation of naked parishioners, his fingers crossed behind him. Some of the people in the pews were fondling each other, while a few elderly worshipers, pathetic in their wrinkles, frowned or slept. At the altar below the priest—the picture had been taken from behind his head—kneeled a chimpanzee in black tie and tails, a top hat on its head. I wondered at the length of time it must have required to stage that one.
Blau approached. “What’s the verdict?”
“They’re actually offensive. They seem to be
“They are.”
“They succeed.”
“If you say so,” Blau replied, “yes, they do.”
“Succeed in offending me?”
“In offending you and in fulfilling the artist’s intention.”
“That intention being to offend?”
RuthClaire appeared at my elbow. “You’ve got it.”
“Good,” I said. “Until just now I was pretty sure you guys would regard my taking offense as reprehensibly unhip.”
“No,” Blau conceded, “they’re definitely offensive.”
RuthClaire nodded agreement. “
“Offensive in an absolute sense,” Blau added.
We stood in the gallery room looking at the definitely offensive, intrinsically offensive—offensive in an almost absolute sense—photographs of Maria-Katherine Kander. Our abashed reverence before these disgusting artifacts began to irk me. Their “eroticism”—I hadn’t seen anything that truly qualified—seemed to consist mostly of exposed flesh and simulated acts of fetishistic sodomy. Despite RuthClaire’s implied disclaimer, I saw the pictures as pornographic
“What’s the goddamn point?”
“Paul, try not to get ridiculously worked up over this.”
“You mean there are
“Really,” he replied, “it would be out of bounds for me to speak for Ms. Kander. Worse, you’d probably take it as some sort of definitive statement or explanation of her intent, which wouldn’t be fair to either the artist or you.”
“Criminy!” I said. “Who is this gal? Her name sounds German. Is she a Nazi?”
RuthClaire, who had an ostensibly calming hand on my arm, said, “I don’t know her ethnic background. She’s from Tennessee.”
“She doesn’t live in Atlanta,” I hazarded. “She’d be an idiot to show such crap here—in this neighborhood, in a city with a black mayor—and try to live here, too.”
“She’s based in New York City,” Blau said, “but she could live in Atlanta if she wished. Atlantans are more knowing about contemporary art than you might think.”
“Unlike your average hick from Beulah Fork?”
“Paul,” RuthClaire said, “let’s go see Adam’s work.” She put a gentle pressure on my arm. “Before the crowd comes in.”
“Wait a minute. I want to know David’s interpretation of Ms. Kander’s intent.”
“But that would be to preempt—”
“RuthClaire, for God’s sake, let me talk to the man.” I rounded on Blau. “Look, I’ve got a mind of my own. You won’t unduly influence my own final stance. I’m trying to understand—to
Blau surrendered to my tirade. “Okay, you’re passionate about this. You deserve an answer.”
I waited.
“I think Kander’s attempts to offend are motivated by a desire to heighten our outrage at the stereotypes she presents. It’s satire, Mr. Loyd, not a call to embrace what you see as, God forbid,
“That’s one word for it,” I said. “But is that how everybody who walks in here will finally interpret her work?”
“Oh, no. Some will take one look, turn around, and walk out. Others won’t see anything but naked flesh. For them, it’s pornographic, and they’ll either enjoy it or scorn it as such.”
I waved at the walls. “Is this stuff for sale?”
“Well, prints are. That’s how Ms. Kander makes her living. By today’s standards, they’re dirt cheap—but Kander’s popular and sells in volume.”
“Who’s she popular with? Voyeurs? The artsy-fartsy crowd?”
“Both, I guess. There’s no form to fill out to buy one. So far as I know, you don’t even have to be twenty-one.”
“Where would you hang these things? The bathroom?”
“That’s up to you. Are you thinking of ordering one?”
“Hell, no!” I virtually shouted.
Adam arrived in the company of a staff member named Bonnie Carlin, but I was still hot about the rub-your-nose-in-your-own-smug-prejudices strategy of Kander’s “art.” Everything Blau had said about it made a kind of backasswards sense, but I kept thinking that, for all her cleverness and technical skill, she was really accomplishing the Unnecessary, often for the Uncomprehending, and almost always with a (pardon me) Drollery that bespoke a superior smugness all her own.
Phooey, as Lester Maddox used to like to say.
Bonnie Carlin delivered a message—it was time to let the clamoring crowd in—and departed. We, too, abandoned the M.-K. Kander Room, crossing the corridor into the third and final gallery room, where Adam’s paintings hung. This room was like the first, but not so large. A single darkened studio loft brooded above us. Below it, all four walls seemed to resonate with the vitality and prehistoric wildness that Adam—who had even begun to wear deodorant—would no longer permit himself to reveal in his day-to-day relationships with others.
I saw the huge barbed baobab that he had painted at Paradise Farm. I saw rolling silver-brown mounds that could have been either the Lolitabu foothills or a herd of headless mammoths on a dusty African plain. I saw grass fires, volcanic eruptions, jags of icy lightning, and a crowd of silhouetted human (or semihuman) forms either fighting or feasting or copulating. I also saw a series of ambiguous mother-and-child portraits that could have been of RuthClaire and Tiny Paul, or of a baboon female and her capering infant, or even of a genderless adult attacking a smaller figure of the same unidentifiable, but monkeylike, species. There was also a painting of a hominid creature with the head of a dog or a jackal or a hyena, and around its head there glowed a brilliant orange-red light. The exhibit as a whole communicated energy and excitement.
By my standards, very good stuff.
Demurely, Adam hung back, his hands behind him. His eyes shifted from side to side, as if he was fearful that I would ridicule this painting or take umbrage at something and walk out. At Paradise Farm, he’d had no such qualms. Here, though, as the only artist on the premises, he appeared to be suffering a terrific bout of the butterflies.
“They’re good,” I told him. “I like ’em all.”
Adam smiled. His lips drew back to reveal teeth and gums. Then, flustered, he pursed them shut again.
By the terms of his contract with Abraxas, Adam had to stick around long enough to meet some of the general public at the opening. Members of the board of directors who had not been able to attend the reception would want to greet him, as would some of the wealthier patrons who always arrived late. Moreover, Blau encouraged his artists to talk to students, impulse visitors, reporters from the Atlanta papers, and other media people. Temperamental aloofness could hurt fund-raising efforts.
The reception officially ended, and the crowd swarmed in. Adam and RuthClaire withdrew to Gallery Three to receive congratulations and autograph Abraxas flyers. I retreated to Blau’s office and poured myself the last half-glass of Asti Spumante from the only decanter not already empty. Then I drank it up and wandered into Gallery One.
Haitian art was scoring heavily tonight. I had to reposition my shoulders every few steps to slide through the pockets of people discussing it. Gallery Two, featuring Kander’s work, was also packed. Flushed with admiration or chagrin, two women squeezed out of that gallery into the hall.
“It’s a wonder the place hasn’t been raided,” one of them said.
“Goodness, Doreen, the woman’s making a
I followed Doreen and her scandalized friend into Gallery Three. The Montarazes, huddled together for mutual protection, stood at the front of a ladder-like contraption giving access to the loft overhead. The sight of one particular hanger-on surrounding them brought me up short.
There before me—in checked shirt, green knit tie, dun pants, and fake suede jacket—slouched Brian Nollinger, the anthropologist from Emory, the Judas who had tried to turn Adam over to an agent of the INS. He had shaved his Fu Manchu, but his granny glasses and his air of unflappable belonging—“Why would anyone be unhappy to see me here?”—identified him more surely to me than a fingerprint check. And it was no comfort remembering that, but for my own jealous meddling, Nollinger might not have come into any of our lives. In a sense, I had created him… as an ongoing annoyance, if not as a human being.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
Nollinger turned. “Hello, Mr. Loyd. I came to see the show.”
“How long does it take you to see it?”
“Well—”
“You don’t know a damn thing about art. You’re the kind of gallerista who thinks Winslow Homer was a blind Greek poet.”
“Look, if it’s okay with you, I came to apologize.”
“For calling me an enemy of science?” RuthClaire asked. “For accusing me of keeping my own private slave?”
For a moment, Nollinger looked profoundly embarrassed. “Yes, ma’am, I regret that. I was feuding with Alistair Patrick Blair.”
I shooed off the other hangers-on. “A scholarly feud excuses you of slinging mud at an innocent woman?”
“I had no idea she’d marry Adam, Mr. Loyd. At least I believed the creature—the person—under her roof was a living representative of
“Are you still shooting monkeys up with No-Dōz?”
That was a rabbit punch. The whites of Nollinger’s weary eyes swung toward me. “I concluded those researches long ago. I’ve been trying to obtain a grant for some field work outside the States. But this isn’t an easy time to find funding.”
“So you showed up here to put the pinch on RuthClaire and Adam, I take it.”
He shook his head, less in denial than in pity for the depth of my pettiness and suspicion. But one amazing consequence of this exchange was that RuthClaire had begun to turn a sympathetic eye on the man. She lacked the constitution for a sustained grudge, a character trait from which I, too, had benefited.
Nollinger gestured at the painting nearest us. “Another of my reasons for coming was professional. I’ve always taken an interest in documented cases of the creative impulse in collateral species.”
The poor fool was digging his own pitfall. I decided to lend him a hand. “What kind of cases, Dr. Nollinger?”
“Well, some years back, a chimpanzee in the London Zoo learned to draw and paint. He became proficient at putting circles and crosslike designs on canvas.”
“A chimpanzee?” RuthClaire said.
“That’s right. I believe his name was Congo. They gave him his own show. He even sold some paintings. The literature calls it the first documented exhibit of subhuman art in history.”
RuthClaire’s eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to say that this is the second?”
Nollinger was not an utter idiot. His face turned red. “N-no, of course not. It’s just that… well, w-w-we’re all primates, you know. The impulse for self-expression may be b-basic to every primate species.”
Abruptly, Adam turned and climbed the wrought-iron ladder into the gallery loft. Once there, he squatted in the shadows like a lissome Quasimodo.
“Go away, please,” RuthClaire said.
“Wait a minute,” Nollinger said. “This is a public exhibit. You can’t run me off.”
“Have you seen the photographic exhibit?” I asked. Mindful of the time I had hit him, he took a step backward. “You’ll like ’em. Each and every one of them is an insult to people of taste and intelligence.”
“I’m trying to talk to the Montarazes.”
“You’re going into the Kander exhibit.” I turned Nollinger around and headed him toward Gallery Two. He tried to yank away, but I applied a bouncer hold and marched him out.
Fear of creating a scene prevented Nollinger from resisting me further. I took advantage of that scruple—at least he had
“Here,” I said: “Another fascinating instance of the primate creative impulse.”
This photo, and the others around it, mesmerized Brian Nollinger, and I left him there in the crowded gallery room.
David Blau helped us escape Abraxas without running a gauntlet of reporters. We used an auxiliary stairwell to get away, emerging in the parking lot to find that it had stopped raining. Water glistened on the asphalt. The trees dripped diamonds. In one patch of sky, a few fretful stars struggled to blink aside the cloud cover.
We drove to Patrick’s, a restaurant in Little Five Points, and asked for a table away from the long storefront windows facing Moreland Avenue. Here we ordered more white wine, with a fresh spinach salad and a breast-of-chicken entrée. Because Nollinger had rained on Adam’s parade, we had a hard time sustaining conversation.
“Consider the source and forget it,” I told Adam. “Your opening was packed. How often does that happen?”
“Rarely,” RuthClaire said. “Not often at all.”
“There, you see? It’s a triumph, Adam. Forget about that guy’s fatuous faux pas.”
Adam wiped his fingers on a linen napkin. Leaning back in his chair, he signed gracefully in the candle-lit dining room. Adam (according to RuthClaire’s translation) did not regard the turnout at Abraxas as a personal triumph. At least half the people there had taken advantage of the respectability implicit in a gallery opening to ogle Kander’s photos. The most knowledgeable and devoted gallery patrons, Adam went on, had come for the Haitian exhibit. Those who had come to see his paintings (people like Nollinger, for instance) were motivated less by faith in the potential importance of Adam’s work than by curiosity. What sort of Rorschach blotches would a living hominid anachronism put to canvas?
Half of Adam’s meal remained untouched. RuthClaire gripped him fondly on one side of his neck and massaged the taut sinews with a gentle hand. He closed his eyes, enduring this display of affection as if unworthy of it. Once upon a time, I knew, I would have killed to experience such tenderness at RuthClaire’s hands.
“
“What do you want to know?” RuthClaire finally asked.
“What kind of surgery? When’s it supposed to happen? When will you need me? Why so secretive?”
“You’ll come?”
“I’ve already said so.”
RuthClaire looked at Adam. He nodded a curt okay. “This summer,” she said. “It’s exacting plastic surgery. The point is to enable Adam to speak. It involves reshaping the entire buccal cavity—without deforming his facial features.” She gave Adam a smile. “Hey, fella, I love that face.” To me, she said, “There’s work to be done on his vocal cords and larynx, too. Don’t ask me to explain it all. It’s already required several X-ray sessions, some plaster castings, and more psycho-medical sessions than you’d expect a candidate for a sex change to sit through.”
“Adam’s going to be able to talk?” I turned my hand into a gibbering puppet.
“That’s the basic idea.”
I sat back in my chair. This particular basic idea had never occurred to me. Adam an orator? Picturing him talking—like Brad Barrington or Dwight “Happy” McElroy—unnerved me. What impact would the ability have on him? On others? Would my acceptance of him—my commitment to him as a
“What’s the matter, Paul?”
“How much is this going to cost?”
“Lots.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“For something this crucial, we’ve got it to spend.” She eyed me shrewdly. “You don’t approve?”
“It sounds great. Adam and I will be able to commiserate about the weather.”
What was wrong with me? I’d accepted so much else about Adam—his marriage to RuthClaire, his biological compatibility with my former wife, his developing literacy, and even the half-pathetic sincerity of his spiritual yearnings. Why couldn’t I accept his desire to talk? To put my selfish reluctance in the best possible light, maybe I had a faint intimation of all the trouble looming ahead for us.
RuthClaire paid the bill, but I insisted on leaving the tip.
We returned in my car to the sprawling Montaraz bordello-cum-boarding house on Hurt Street. It was too late to play with Tiny Paul, but when we looked in on him sleeping in his bassinet, I was startled to see his dreaming features betray a hint of the feral self-sufficiency that only a moment ago, leaving Patrick’s, I had seen in his father’s face. All babies have something endearingly pongid about them, but there in the sheen of his night light my godson’s resemblance to a “collateral primate”—a baby gorilla!—brought the forests of Uganda’s Virunga Mountains right into a bedroom near Inman Park.
Life is strange, I thought, and I kissed the kid so that we could withdraw and leave him to his sleep.
RuthClaire pointed me to a second-story guestroom wallpapered with a repeating pattern of pale green bamboo shoots, and Adam nodded a friendly goodnight on his way downstairs to drive Pam Sorrells home. Alone, sitting on my bed, a paperback novel in my hands, I thought of Adam’s naive invitation to share a bed with his wife while he was in the hospital—if, of course, we both agreed to the “niceness” of the sharing. How could I tell RuthClaire’s new husband that tonight I wanted her beside me not to ravish but to cherish, not to penetrate but to pet? These days, away from the West Bank, it was loneliness rather than sexual desire that ate at me, and that, of course, was why I kept myself so busy. At last I put my book down, heel-and-toed my shoes off, turned out the light, and stretched out to await the onset of sleep. It delayed and delayed, but eventually, two or maybe even three hours later, came.
I spent Wednesday with the Montarazes, most of which we devoted to a tour of the High Museum on Peachtree Street. On Thursday, I returned to Beulah Fork.
Business continued to boom. People came in and went out, and so did money. I yelled at Livia George, she glared at me in insulted contempt, the dristles of winter gave way to the hurricanes of spring, soldiers of twenty or more nations died in almost all the senseless ways it is possible to die, dining-room help arrived and departed, and the president of the United States asked Congress to okay funds for a defense force of mutant giant pandas with which to protect the Aleutian Islands from Soviet invasion. Something like that. I was too busy to pay more than passing heed to the news.
At last the summons came. I got to Atlanta on the day after Adam had undergone the six-hour surgical procedure designed to give him the ability to speak. I would have been there for the operation itself but RuthClaire delayed asking me to come until the next morning, when it was already clear that her husband was out of danger. Whether all the tinkering would have the desired effect remained a question of prime concern, but not whether he would live or die. All this, defying the possibility of a tap, RuthClaire had told me in a phone call—but when I reached Emory Hospital, I was still angry about not having had the chance to sit with her during the surgery.
RuthClaire met me in a corridor below the pagoda-like parking tower where I had left my car. She wore a white blouse with scrollish cutouts in the collar, a seersucker skirt, and a pair of Italian sandals. She had a baby-carrier on her back, but it was empty because Tiny Paul, not yet nine months old, stood at her knee gripping one of her fingers with a tentative hand.
I could not believe it. T. P., whom I’d last seen zonked in a bassinet, was walking. He wore navy-blue shorts, a powder-blue shirt, and a pair of minuscule tennis shoes with racing chevrons. There was nothing even remotely gorillaish about his appearance today. No baby fat, no leathery sheen on his forehead. As I neared him and his mother along the corridor, he eyed me with the solemnity of a pint-sized state legislator.
“Don’t start in.” RuthClaire raised her free hand in warning.
“Everything’s fine.” I knelt in front of the kid to give him a gentle poke in the breadbasket. His gums pulled away from his teeth in a… well, a
“Since April, Paul. He’s a dynamo. All the activity has slimmed him down.”
“Walking at five months? Does he talk, too?”
That one earned me a rebuke. “His dad’s just had surgery to allow him to speak, and you’re asking me if our son’s talking yet? Do you want to make me cry?”
“RuthClaire—”
“Some children don’t talk until they’re two or more. It’s nothing to fret about.”
“Listen, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“Come on,” she said angrily. “Let’s go see Adam.”
We averted an argument by walking to the elevators at the far end of the echoing corridor. T. P. kept up with us with an effortless trot, like an Ethiopian conscript of the 1940s jogging to the front. Upstairs, the nurses at the nurses’ station got our names and let us proceed down the hall to Adam’s room. It was a long walk. I used it to start to berate my ex for not calling me sooner, but she cut me off with a recitation of all the people who’d already come by to see her and lend moral support.
“You don’t need me anymore, do you?”
“Give that man a cigar. He finally digs the full implications of our divorce.”
“Why call me at all, then?”
“Adam thought you should be here. He’s trying to be the alpha-male of our household, appointing a lieutenant until he’s well enough to return.” Like an invisible tide of warm honey, a mellifluous laugh came rolling out of Adam’s room.
“What the hell was that? Surely, not Adam?”
“We’ve got a visitor. He stopped by yesterday, too. I’d’ve run him off if Adam hadn’t asked me before the operation to let the clown come calling.” RuthClaire set Tiny Paul down, and the kid trotted into his father’s room. “Come see.”
We entered the room after the precocious toddler, who was already in the male visitor’s arms. Adam lay on the bed beside them, his mummy-wrapped face tilted toward the door. A pole-mounted IV bottle dripped glucose into his bloodstream.
“Paul Loyd,” RuthClaire said, “meet the Right Reverend Dwight McElroy.”
Most television evangelists, I had long ago decided, looked like affluent mobile-home salesmen. An eye tic or an unruly forelock of pomaded hair was the sole outward manifestation of the emotional kink that kept their motors going. But McElroy, whom I’d watched for only a few fascinated weeks on his syndicated
“Just call me Happy. None of this Right Reverend business, now. Sometimes it flat wears me out, Paul.”
“Me, too,” RuthClaire said.
I shook the proffered hand. “I’m not a fan, Happy. Forgive me for saying so.”
“I’m not a fisher of fans, Paul. I’m a fisher of souls.”
“Any bites?”
“They’re always biting, Paul, always just waiting to be fed.” (I knew the feeling.) “That’s why I try to keep my lines in the water.”
“And your hooks out?”
He knew he was being baited (as the Elizabethans baited bears, not as a southern angler readied a worm for skewering), but he neither laughed foolishly nor surrendered outright to my barb. He gave me a smile and bounced T. P. lightly against his flank. “And my hooks out,” he echoed me. “The kind that don’t tear, that lift one up into the sun.” He smiled again, as if to illustrate his meaning with a show of teeth.
I turned to RuthClaire. What was this joker doing here? A little more than a year ago, he’d condemned her from the pulpit as a twentieth-century sodomite, speaking with great force on two matters about which he undoubtedly remained acutely ignorant, evolutionary theory and the exact nature of RuthClaire and Adam’s relationship. Did the man have no shame? I stated my objections to his presence and asked him if he did.
“I don’t feel out of place here, Paul. It’s not possible for me to hate the sinner as much as I do the sin. In fact, I don’t hate the sinner at all. I
Adam’s eyes pleaded with RuthClaire to forgive their visitor—this rich, famous fool for Christ—the foolish words that had wounded her so deeply a year ago. T. P. had begun to squirm. McElroy set him down.
Then he said, “They say your husband’s a
He gestured at Adam, prostrate under a stiff hospital sheet. “That’s not a
“It’s likewise because I supposed—along with millions of other folks—just what the liberal press and those high-profile network TV folks
“Really?” I said. “What if, instead of forgiving you, they sued?”
McElroy flicked me an annoyed look, but again importuned RuthClaire: “I’m quite serious about the fullness of my sorrow over this. On the next
Wearily, RuthClaire removed the empty baby-carrier from her back and slid it gently across the floor to the foot of Adam’s bed. Then she crossed the room and sat down in the folding chair that McElroy had been using. T. P. trotted after. She collared him and absent-mindedly knuckled his miniature Afro.
The evangelist spread his hands. “Well? Can you forgive me?”
“It’d be my pleasure, Mr. McElroy, if you’d just leave Adam and me out of your broadcast.”
“Nothing else?”
“That’d be plenty. Oh, you could find Paul a chair. And one for yourself if you’re going to stick around any longer.”
McElroy smiled, did a heel click, and departed to look for two chairs. I shuffled to the bed, grabbed Adam’s toes through the sheet, and wobbled them affectionately back and forth. He smiled up at me with his eyes.
Considering the ease of his task, McElroy was gone a while. RuthClaire used his absence to fill me in. The man had come to the Emory campus at the invitation of the Institute for World Evangelism at Candler Theological Seminary. He’d been in the city three days, speaking to seminary students and faculty at a variety of venues, including the William R. Cannon Chapel, one of the auditoria in White Hall, and the sanctuary of the Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church across North Decatur Road from Emory Village. Adam had deliberately scheduled his surgery to coincide with McElroy’s visit. Indeed, he’d written the evangelist a letter explaining the operation’s purpose, asking him to look in on RuthClaire during the procedure, and requesting, too, a visit from the busy Right Reverend once Adam entered a recovery room. He had improved his chances for a favorable response by including a $250 contribution to McElroy’s television ministry. He had also worked to pique the man’s curiosity (an instance, given the national appetite for news of the Montarazes, of almost touching overkill) by outlining his largely unguided religious researches over the past ten months. Now, though, he wanted an authoritative pronouncement about his spiritual state. Did he, or did he not, have a “soul”?
McElroy had replied that of course he did. On the other hand, he ought to give over the Biblically unsound, and soul-destroying, notion that he belonged to a prehuman species out of which yet another prehuman species had arisen, etc. A belief like that, denying the straightforward creation account in Genesis, put the soul in mortal jeopardy. Adam was obviously sincere in his questing, but sadly misled about which direction to go by today’s God-lost scientists and technocrats. McElroy would gladly counsel with Adam, even pray with him, while he recovered at Emory Hospital.
“He wrote McElroy?” I asked incredulously. “Sent him money?”
“Oh, yes. Adam’s keeping his options open. He’s written the Pope, the Dalai Lama, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the chief elder of the Mormons, two or three ayatollahs in Iran, and a couple of voodoo artist-priests who exhibited work at Abraxas in February. If it meditates, sacrifices, or prays, Adam’s written it. Most of his correspondents reply. We have a scrapbook. We may need another one.”
Adam worked his hands free of the sheet and tried to sign. By appearing to focus his will, he made these gestures distinct enough for RuthClaire to interpret. She must give over her hostility to McElroy, he advised, for the man was there on his own valuable time to affirm Adam’s humanity.
With a folding chair and a chair with a cushion, McElroy returned. On the cushion rested a shiny bedpan in which two or three inches of water shimmered under the room’s fluorescents. McElroy set this chair down without sloshing any water out of the pan. The metal chair he gave to me to unfold for myself. Then he placed the bedpan—with a hokey flourish—on the food tray that swung out from Adam’s bed.
“This is distilled water,” he said. “I got it at the nurses’ station, and it’s physically pure, free of germs and pollutants.”
“Can the same be said of the bedpan?” RuthClaire asked.
“Oh, yes, ma’am. It’s been in an autoclave.”
“Well, Adam’s already had a sponge bath, Reverend McElroy. I gave him one this morning. There’s no need to repeat it now.”
“Has he been baptized?”
“What?”
“Has he received the sacrament of ultimate cleanliness?”
“I’m not sure I—”
“Has he been washed in the Blood of the Lamb?”
“From a bedpan?” I wondered aloud.
McElroy laughed. “The Lord and I make do with what’s available. By remaining unbaptized, Adam has begun to doubt his possession of the soul that even now he’s in danger of leaving to the Prince of Darkness forever. I can’t allow that, sir.”
Her hands on T. P.’s shoulders, RuthClaire stared at the evangelist as if he had proposed dousing Adam with lighter fluid. “This is in the worst possible taste,” she finally managed.
“You may be right, Mrs. Montaraz. Damnation has the weight of public favor on its side nowadays—it’s the in thing to shoot for—but your husband isn’t one to go along with the crowd simply
Realizing that McElroy had played an unanswerable trump, RuthClaire pulled Tiny Paul onto her lap and numbly shook her head.
“I’ll ask him, then.” Looking down on Adam, McElroy said, “Do you wish to receive the holy benison of baptism?”
Adam made the gesture signifying Yes.
RuthClaire shook her head again, not believing that her husband would consent to what she regarded as a parody of the baptismal rite—but loving him too much to forbid him to continue.
McElroy closed his eyes. He asked God to further purify the water in the bedpan, immersed his hands, lifted them dripping, carried them to Adam’s head, and dramatically brought them down on the faint sagittal crest dividing his skull into hemispheres. “Be careful,” RuthClaire warned. “Adam’s jaw is a jigsaw puzzle of fitted pieces. If you slow his healing, I’ll…”
She stopped, but the warning got through McElroy’s devout trance to his understanding. Crooking his elbows, easing the pressure on Adam’s head, he intoned, “Adam Montaraz, husband and father, by the authority invested in me as a minister of the gospel, I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
“Amen,” I said. The word slipped out, impelled, I think, by an unconscious memory of my slipshod Congregationalist upbringing in Tocqueville.
Theoretically a believer, RuthClaire gave me a dirty look.
McElroy wiped his hands. “Mrs. Montaraz, please know that I’ve also lifted a prayer for Adam’s speedy recovery.”
“Thank you.”
“What about that handsome boy there?”
“What about him?”
“Has
RuthClaire folded her arms around T. P. “You’ve performed your ceremony for the day. It’s time for you to leave.”
“Delay could be a mortal mistake, ma’am. It could cause—”
“He’s hardly in danger. Baptists wait until they’re twelve or thirteen, don’t they?”
“You’re not Baptists, ma’am. Nor are we at the Greater Christian Constituency. We embrace the denomination, of course, but my own doctrinal origins are Methodist. We’re brother and sister, Mrs. Montaraz.”
Adam began to sign, feebly but urgently.
“No,” RuthClaire told him. “Absolutely not. If it’s done, it’ll be done in a church, with a congregation and a robed minister.” When Adam persisted, she bore down: “You’re overstepping what you have a right to ask! You’re not the only one in this room responsible for Tiny Paul’s spiritual dispensation!”
McElroy said, “There’s a Biblical injunction commanding wives to—”
“Get the holy hell out of here!” RuthClaire yelled. T. P. burrowed into her armpit. Adam’s eyes fluttered shut. Like me, he had probably never heard her utter an epithet stronger than “Heck!” or “Drat!”
McElroy appeared ready to keep the argument going, but a portly man and a youth in his early twenties stopped at Adam’s doorway, distracting him. The younger of the two men reproduced McElroy’s lank physique almost exactly.
“Daddy,” he said, “Dr. Siebert’s come to take you to your next lecture over in White.”
“Adam, stay in touch, hear?” McElroy said cheerily. “It’s been a joy, sanctifying you in Christ’s sweet name. The boy next time, mebbe.”
“Take the stupid bedpan with you,” RuthClaire said.
McElroy gave her a thin smile and spoke to his son: “Come get the font, Duncan. I’m finished with it for today.”
Duncan McElroy obeyed, retrieving the bedpan from the cantilevered tray and carrying it out of the room like a wise man bearing a thurible of perfumed incense. The evangelist gave a perfunctory salute, then followed Duncan and Dr. Siebert out of the room—off toward the elevator and another elevating session with some of Candler’s theology students.
RuthClaire, wrung out, began very quietly to cry.
Over the next week, RuthClaire and I visited Adam daily, spelling each other when one of us needed a break. Livia George managed the West Bank in my absence. I drove down twice to check up on her, but her efficient handling of matters made me feel about as useful there as a training wheel on a tank.
Adam improved rapidly, but his doctors still forbade the removal of his plastic chin support and the bandages holding it in place. So he took nourishment intravenously and talked with us with sign language. Also, he had a lap-sized electric typewriter that he had taught himself to use by the hunt-and-peck method.
McElroy returned to Louisiana the day after Adam’s baptism, but one unsettling consequence of the Bedpan Ceremony was the habiline’s frequent recourse to prayer. The Lord’s Prayer. The prayer of St. Francis of Assisi beginning, “
Indeed, although Adam had accepted baptism in Christ Jesus’s name, the prayer ritual in his hospital room had an ecumenical cast. Here is one of his prayers, typed out on the little machine he used to engage in animated dialogues with us:
After the baptism, every visit to Adam’s room concluded with a prayer. Once, I asked him what he believed he was accomplishing with such ritual.
On his lap machine, he typed: THERE IS NO TRUE RELIGION WITHOUT PRAYER.
That led me to question the value of religion, true or not, and Adam struggled to answer that one, too. Finally, he typed this compound word: SELF-DEFINITION.
He found it amusing that the value of a belief in a Higher Power had its ultimate ground in one’s own ego. Was that a contradiction? No, not really. A paradox? Probably. But if Adam felt a greater sense of urgency about his relationship with God than did most twentieth-century human beings, the ambiguity of his status vis-à-vis both God and his two-legged fellows fueled that feeling.
“You know,” I told him after reading his “Gut and Mind” prayer, “you’re assuming a rigid line between the ensouled and the soulless, human beings and humanoid animals.”
Go on, he signaled.
“You’ve made it an either/or proposition. But what if there’s a gray area where the transition takes place?”
LIKE THE DUSK SEPARATING DAY FROM NIGHT?
“Exactly.”
I read his next haltingly written response over his shoulder: I UNDERSTAND, MISTER PAUL, THE BASIS OF HOW YOU ARGUE HERE. THE WORRY ABOUT WHAT AN EARLY HOMINID IS, BEAST OR PERSON. BUT MANY THINGS, I THINK, IT TAKES TO MAKE A CREATURE
“Okay, Adam, if you believe that human beings have souls, then anyone on this side—
IT IS NOT SO EASY
“Why not?”
BECAUSE A CREATURE GOING THROUGH ANIMALNESS TO HUMANITY—IN THEORY, I TELL YOU—GOES THROUGH A MAPPABLE SORT OF EVOLUTIONARY JOURNEY. BUT A SOUL DOES NOT DIVIDE OR BREAK. YOU CANNOT GET CHANGE FOR IT. YOU HAVE ONE IN YOUR POCKET OR YOU DO NOT. WHERE DOES GOD REACH INTO THE DUSK TO GIVE A SOUL TO ANY CREATURE ON THIS JOURNEY? WHAT REASONS DOES HE HAVE TO MAKE THIS MYSTERIOUS GIFT?
“If God’s gift is mysterious, Adam, maybe it’s impossible to know and futile to fret. Maybe we should forget the whole stupid notion of souls, immortal or otherwise.”
DOES IGNORING SUCH HARD QUESTIONS SEEM TO YOU, MISTER PAUL, AN ADMIRABLE WAY TO LIVE?
“If they’re nonquestions. If they don’t have any answers.”
Adam considered my reply. FOR ME, THEY ARE REAL QUESTIONS. He advanced the sheet of paper and added at the bottom of the page: LET US PRAY.
RuthClaire, present throughout this verbal and typed exchange, took from her handbag a slick little paperback,
“
Soon RuthClaire was leading us in chanting the pilgrim’s habitual prayer, the Prayer of Jesus, which goes, “
Damn her, anyway.
At the Montaraz house, I earned my keep preparing all the meals that we did not take at the hospital or at off-campus eateries. Keeping my hand in, I called this culinary activity. T. P. ate with us on most of these cozy occasions, growing fonder of me with each bite. He no longer
RuthClaire and I got along like brother and sister. Nights, I kept to the upstairs guest room with its bamboo-shoot wallpaper while she kept to the master bedroom just down the hall. T. P. awoke me in the morning by filching the bedcovers with a clever hand-over-hand motion that left the sheet and spread piled up on the floor like a drift of Dairy Queen ice cream. He wanted that gourmet omelet, and I was just the man to rustle it up. Less a godfather than an indulgent uncle, I happily obliged him.
Sister and brother, RuthClaire and I. My stay in the Montaraz house finally reconciled me to our divorce. In the bathroom, too many conjugal clues to overlook: a common toothpaste tube (neatly rolled up from the bottom), His & Her electric razors, a jar of antiperspirant that they no doubt shared. We did not sleep together during my stay, RuthClaire and I, and the tension between us drained away. I was at ease in the Montaraz house, in total harmony with all its occupants. Or almost total harmony.
How do you develop a cordial relationship with a hefty bearded young man who wears a .38 pistol strapped to his right ankle and a Ruger .357 half hidden under a fold of his Chattanooga Choo Choo T-shirt? This was Bilker Moody, the laconic Vietnam vet and erstwhile automobile repossessor who served as the Montaraz family’s chief security guard. Unmarried and virtually relative-less, he had adopted RuthClaire, Adam, and T. P. as surely as they had adopted him. I had met Bilker back in February, but he had stayed obsessively out of sight during those three days, as if the announced brevity of my visit required from him this considerate disappearing act.
Now, I saw Bilker Moody every day. Although he reputedly had an apartment of his own somewhere, during the week he slept in a small bare room—at one time a walk-in pantry—between the kitchen and the garage. The Montarazes had agreed to this live-in arrangement because it obviated the need to hire guards in shifts, as I had done at Paradise Farm. Also, Bilker had insisted that his vested interest in his own quarters would make him more vigilant than a guard from off the premises.
True, he sometimes took catnaps, but his experience in Southeast Asia had taught him to leap up at the tread of a cockroach. Besides, his peculiar circadian rhythms made him keenest at night, when the threat of intrusion was greatest. He was no slouch during the day, either. He had the reflexes, instincts, and nerves of a champion
Bilker Moody genuinely esteemed the folks under his care. T. P. was fond of him, too, and had a remorseless fascination for the big man’s full-face beard. Around the child, Bilker displayed the retiring gentleness of a silverback gorilla. Usually, though, he avoided any play activity for fear of letting his guard slip. Enemies of the Montarazes’ privacy were everywhere. During my stay in July, he intercepted and politely ran off any number of curiosity-seekers. That was his job, not babysitting.
Bilker had as little to do with me as possible. He refused to eat the meals I fixed for RuthClaire and T. P., but clearly did not believe I was trying to poison anyone. If he and I chanced to approach each other, he showily gave me room to get by, sometimes mumbling “Hey” and sometimes not. RuthClaire said this was a respectful posture that, as an enlisted man, Bilker had automatically assumed for officers—but all I could think as I eased past was that he was pulling the pin on, and preparing to toss, a fragmentation grenade. Didn’t he know that in the late 1950s (ca. Elvis Presley’s induction), I had spent two years of obligatory military service as an enlisted man?
“Is it my breath?” I asked RuthClaire. “Too much garlic in the blintzes?”
“He’s shy, that’s all. His duty here is his life.”
“Shy, huh? How long had you and Adam known him before he began spilling his war and repo-man stories?”
“He wanted a job, Paul. He had to talk to get it. He doesn’t dislike you. He just feels uneasy about you, knowing you came to bolster the guard.”
Late one evening, then, after cleaning up after another midnight supper, I went to Bilker’s pantry to air the question man-to-man. The door to the pantry was ajar, revealing one wall of naked studs and a section of ceiling composed entirely of ancient tongue-and-groove slats. Tentatively, I rapped.
“What?” demanded Bilker Moody.
Beyond the pantry’s raised threshold, he sat on his rollaway bed with his Ruger trained on my abdomen. Recognizing me, he laid the pistol down. Disdainfully.
“Thought we could talk a minute,” I said.
The pantry contained a plywood counter upon which sat a sophisticated array of surveillance equipment, a hotplate, a General Electric coffee maker, a computer, and a small wire rack of paperback computer manuals and soft-core pornographic novels. A huge commercial calendar hung over the bed. Its pinup photograph was not of a bare-breasted nymphet but of a customized car with mud flaps and Gatling-gun exhausts. The company responsible for the calendar made socket wrenches.
Bilker Moody shook some cartridges into his palm from a box. He inspected each bullet tip in turn.
“I’ve been impressed with your performance around here,” I told him, hoping to disarm him with praise. He looked me full in the face, his expression grim. “Do I rub you the wrong way, Mr. Moody?”
“Ain’t no right way to rub me. Don’t like to be rubbed.”
“I’m not here to put your job in jeopardy. I’m
“Why?”
The question surprised me. “As a kindness to RuthClaire, I guess.”
“If Adam likes you, you can’t be
That stopped me briefly. Then I said, “That’s what I tell myself when I’m feeling down: ‘Hey, Paul, if Adam likes you, you can’t be too big a turd.’ Cheers me right up.”
“Stay out of my way.”
“This time next week, I will have been gone three or four days.”
“I tell you that,” Bilker Moody said, unblinking, “’cause wherever I am, that’s where the heat’s gonna be. You come in, I go out. It’s for your own good.”
“That’s a little melodramatic, isn’t it?”
“You’re the joker got took for that joyride down in the Fork? The one got a cross burned on his lawn?”
“So you’re really expecting trouble?”
“I’m paid to expect it.”
“Then maybe I’d better leave you to your work.”
“’Night,” he said. “And on your way out—”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t let the doorknob ream you in the asshole.”
“Mr. Moody—”
“Call me Bilker.” His eyebrows lifted, maybe to suggest his vulgar parting shot had been intended companionably, maybe to stress the irony of inviting me to use his first name after firing that shot. He raised the Ruger and waved it at the door.
“Good night, Bilker. Really enjoyed our chat.”
The next morning, I told RuthClaire about this exchange, as nearly verbatim as I could make it. She said I’d made a skeptical convert of Bilker. The proof of his good opinion was that he never joked with incorrigible turds, only those who struck him as recyclable into relatively fragrant human beings. Thanks a lot, I said. But I settled for it. It was better than getting fragged in my sleep….
RuthClaire and Adam had a downstairs studio, once a living room and parlor. Previous occupants had knocked out the wall, though, and now you had elbow room galore down there. In this vast space were unused canvases, stretching frames, makeshift easels, and even a sheet of perforated beaverboard with pegs and braces for hanging art supplies and tools. Elsewhere, finished and half-finished paintings leaned against furniture, reposed in untidy stacks, or vied for attention on the only wall where the artists had thought enough of their work to display it as if in a gallery.
“No more plate paintings,” RuthClaire told me the night after my visit to Bilker. “I’m off in a new direction. Wanna see?”
Of course I did. RuthClaire led me to a stack of canvases near a table consisting of three sawhorses capped by a sheet of plywood. All the paintings were small, no larger than three feet by four, most only a foot or two on their longest sides. RuthClaire had painted them in drab washed-out acrylics. They weren’t quite abstract, but neither were they representational—an ambiguity they shared with Adam’s bigger, bolder canvases.
To me, in fact, RuthClaire’s new paintings looked like preliminaries for paintings she had not yet essayed in final form. That she considered them finished, and regarded them with undiluted enthusiasm, astonished me. I wondered what to say. M.-K. Kander’s photographs had at least given me the verbal ammunition of my outrage. Here, though, was little to comment on: murky beige or green backgrounds in which many anonymous shapes swam.
“Well?” Then, noting my hesitation, she said, “Come on. Your honest reaction, Paul—the only kind that’s worth a flip.”
“The honest reaction of a chef probably isn’t worth even that, Ruthie Cee.”
“Oh, come on. You’ve got good art sense.”
“Let me off the hook.”
“You don’t like them?”
“If I’d crayoned stuff like this in Mrs. Stanley’s fourth-grade class in Tocqueville, she’d have said I was wasting paper. That honest enough for you?”
As if I’d yanked an invisible bridle, my ex’s nostrils flared. But she recovered and asked me why Mrs. Stanley would have made such a harsh judgment.
“For muddying the colors.”
“The muddiness is deliberate, Paul.”
I said that, as a consequence, these paintings looked anemic, downright blah.
“That’s an unconsidered first impression.”
“I’ve been staring at them a good five minutes.”
“A gnat’s eyeblink. Maybe you should live with one a while. Pick out the one you hate the least—or hate the most, for that matter—and take it home with you.”
I sighed. RuthClaire’s pitiful acrylics belonged on a bonfire. Even Paleolithic cave art—the least rather than the most polished examples—outshone these hazy windows on my ex’s soul. In the nearly ten years I’d known her, I’d never seen her do less challenging or attractive work. It was hard to believe that living with one of these paintings would heighten my appreciation of it or any of the others.
She began to explain what she was up to: freeing the work of pretense. Bright colors had a primitive appeal that rarely engaged the intellect. She was after a subtler means of capturing her audience. Artists had to risk alienating their audience—not with violence, sacrilege, or pornography, but with the unfamiliar, the understated, and the ambiguous—in order to
“But what if the paintings are
“Then they’ll never enlighten you, no matter how long you hang around them. Eventually, your negative reactions will be vindicated.” Quickly, though, she hedged this point: “Or maybe you’re just color-blind or tone-deaf to the work’s real merit.”
“I know spoiled pork when I smell it. I don’t have to eat it to know it’s bad.”
“A gourmet chef is a gourmet chef is a glorified short-order cook. An artist is an artist is an artist.”
“That’s smug, RuthClaire, disgustingly smug.”
She kissed my cheek. “You’ve noticed how small they are?”
“A point in their favor.”
“Another way to free them from pretense,” she said. “Rothko liked big paintings because the viewer has to climb into them and participate physically in their energy and movement. Well, I want the viewer to climb into these canvases intellectually—not in the clinical way a Mondrian demands, but in the spiritual way a decision for faith requires.”
“You want the viewer to take the merit of these paintings on
“I call the series
“And that, of course, explains everything.”
At this juncture, RuthClaire good-humoredly decided to end the argument. Never had we been so badly at odds on the subject of her art, and never had our disagreement on the subject had less effect on our good opinion of the other: weird.
“Let’s go see Adam,” she said.
That afternoon I left the hospital with T. P.—to give Adam and RuthClaire time together alone. Our destination was a recently remodeled restaurant called Everybody’s. It served beer, sandwiches, pizza, salads, and pasta in an airy, relaxed atmosphere perfectly suited to its mostly college-connected clientele.
I ordered beer and a bacon-cheeseburger, but a Coke and a cheeseburger for my temporary ward. T. P. sat in a kiddie chair with a booster seat, and we whiled away forty-five minutes eating and watching people. Traffic plied the hill on North Decatur Road, squirrels scampered across the dappled campus, and emerald-necked pigeons strutted the sidewalks. I felt loose and at ease, almost ready to drowse. Staring into my beer, I may have actually done so.
And then someone stood beside T. P. under Everybody’s angled skylights. I almost spilled my beer reacting to her presence.
Before I could stand up, though, she sat down on the chair opposite mine. “Hello, Mr. Loyd. I recognized you from newspaper photos. The baby’s being here didn’t hurt, though. That made me look twice. Otherwise, I’d have walked on by.”
“Another tribute to my personal magnetism.”
The woman gave me a look of amiable amusement. I figured her to be in her early thirties—
“My name,” she said, “is Caroline Hanna.”
I tried to get a grip on the familiarity of her name.
“You’ve heard of me before. Once, at Brian Nollinger’s urging, you took some photographs of Adam. Brian showed these to me. And it was from me that he got the clue to research the island of Montaraz as Adam’s possible point of origin.”
“Nollinger,” I said numbly.
“You don’t like him, do you?”
“In my book, he’s a world-class jerk.”
“That’s not entirely fair,” Caroline Hanna said evenly.
“I’m sure it isn’t. But his kindness to you, or to his aged mother, doesn’t absolve him of the dirt he kicked on my ex-wife. It doesn’t clear him of abusing my hospitality in Beulah Fork. To three quarters of his acquaintances, the man may be nobility incarnate—but if he shows me only his pimply backside,
“Call me Caroline.”
“Paul.” I tapped my thumb against my chest. “Anyway, I’m sorry to say your pal Nollinger, back in February, even had the brass to ask RuthClaire and Adam for money. He needed funds for field work he wanted to do somewhere.”
“He’d come to apologize.”
“Well, he blew that. He started talking about some painterly ape in England.”
Caroline Hanna smiled wistfully. “That’s Brian, all right.”
“What can I do for you? Would you like a beer?”
She declined, saying she’d only wanted a closer look at T. P.—the sweetie—and to introduce herself to the man who’d tied Brian into the biggest event in evolutionary science since the publication of Darwin’s
Ever the diplomat, I said, “Like what?”
She said, “I wasn’t fishing for a chance to list them, honest.”
“You don’t have to
Caroline considered this. Then she said, “Brian left Emory in June. He resigned his post in the anthropology department and left—without telling me anything. No foul play. He told the folks in his department. He just didn’t divulge his plans to me.”
“Another teaching or research position somewhere?”
“Not according to his department head. Brian said he was going to take off for a year and go overseas.”
“Maybe to visit Alistair Patrick Blair in Zarakal.” Caroline smiled wanly. I added, “Self-possessed women frighten him. The lack of a goodbye is the damning proof. He’s what my mother would have called a cad.”
“She would’ve had every right, but I’m not your mother.”
I lifted my beer mug to Caroline. “Amen to that.” I set the mug down. “But what else? Surely, getting shut of the biggest No-Dōz pusher at that primate field station can’t top the list of your woes.”
“You know you’re out of line, don’t you?”
“Sorry. I can’t help my feelings about, uh,
She started to rise. “Forgive me. I’ve got work to do.”
I caught her wrist. “One more chance. One more item from your list of worries. And I won’t be such a sarcastic bastard again, believe me.”
“No, you won’t,” Caroline said, subsiding. “How about this? The situation among the Cuban detainees in the Atlanta Penitentiary has me down. Some of those people
“I’m in sympathy with it.”
“Stupid idealist.” She smiled gently. “I’m going.”
“Don’t you want to know what I’m doing here… with T. P.?”
“T. P.’s the baby? No. No, I don’t. It’s none of my business, and my business isn’t really any of yours, either.” Again she made as if to stand.
“Give me your address so we can redefine the limits of each other’s business.”
Hastily, she scribbled on the edge of a napkin. “Here’s a telephone number. Now I’ve got to go, really.”
T. P. reacted to her move—throughout our talk, he’d stared at her with moony adoration—by reaching out and upsetting his drink. I gathered napkins with which to blot the mess. In order to get at it, I lifted T. P.’s chair out of the way.
“Do you need some help?” Caroline asked.
“No, I’ve got it. Look, though. The little bugger’s stuck on you, lady. So am I.”
“Hush. That’s embarrassing.” She spoke in an undertone and looked around Everybody’s at everybody looking at us.
“Knocking over his cup? Nah. Happens all the time with kids. Not embarrassing. People make allowances.”
“I’m not talking about that, and you know it.” She retreated a step or two. “I won’t mind if you call, though—not at all.” Before I could reply, she’d gone.
A young man with bushy hair and a long apron helped me finish cleaning up, and I sat back down. During her fifteen- or twenty-minute stint at our table, Caroline Hanna had affected me in the powerful, nonrational way teenagers sometimes collide with each other. A pulse in my throat was working, and a film of sweat on my palms endangered my grip on my beer mug. How ungrown-up. How immature. In a few years I would be fifty, and here I was actively encouraging the kind of hormonal rush that sends callow high-school aspirants to ecstasy screaming to the showers. Nobody since RuthClaire had made me feel that way, not even Molly Kingsbury.
Later, our bill duly paid, T. P. and I returned to the hospital.
Back in Adam’s recovery room, RuthClaire told me that David Blau had invited us to go with him and his wife Evelyn to a nightclub near the Georgia Tech campus. The club—Sinusoid Disturbances—was on a narrow alley perpendicular to Spring Street. Its main attraction was live music, but it also featured (although only on Fire Sine Fridays) the work of avant-garde “performance artists.” These artists used music, projected visual images, props, the spoken word, and a lot of strange choreographies to make statements about art and life. David ranked high among the performance artists who had given Sinusoid Disturbances its reputation as Atlanta’s leader on the New Wave nightclub scene. His group, consisting entirely of people from Abraxas, would headline at tonight’s Fire Sine Friday. And so Blau wanted RuthClaire and me to attend.
“What about Adam?” I asked.
The habiline typed: I BE FINE. TOMORROW, I AM UNWRAPPED. ME FOR REST AND READING.
“May I bring a date?”
This request startled RuthClaire. “A date?”
“That’s right. A woman.”
“I never assumed you meant a two-legged raisin. I just didn’t know you knew anybody up here to ask.”
“I’ve been shinnying down a knotted sheet every night at your house, Ruthie Cee. Meet a lot of folks that way.”
“It’s amazing Bilker hasn’t shot you. What’s her name?”
“Caroline Hanna.”
As I had done, RuthClaire struggled to locate this name in her mental ledger of friends and acquaintances. I let her struggle. In fact, I left Adam’s room in search of a telephone, found the number of the sociology department, dialed it, and asked to be put through to Dr. Hanna’s office. Although startled to hear from me so soon, she accepted my invitation, offering to meet me at the Montaraz house at seven-thirty, if that would simplify our rendezvous. Right now, though, no time for chitchat—she’d promised the students in her next class she’d have a test graded for them today.
RuthClaire and I left the hospital at five-thirty, T. P. dead to the world in my lap. On Hurt Street, Bilker emerged from the garage like a troll forsaking the shadow of its footbridge to terrorize a wayfarer. Hands on hips, he bulked in the sunlight, malevolently squinting.
“We’re going out on the town, Bilker,” RuthClaire said. “Set the security alarms, lock everything up, and don’t sweat the traffic around here. I’ll ask the Fulton County police to make extra tours of the neighborhood. I need an escort, Bilker. Mr. Loyd, my ex, already has a date.”
Even in the garage, Bilker squinted. “To where, ma’am?”
“Sinusoid Disturbances. Wear some struttin’ duds, okay?”
“For a trip to the doctor. Whose sinus trouble is it, anyway, yours or—” He jerked a thumb at me, unable to speak my name aloud.
“Informal clothes, Bilker. Don’t worry about a thing tonight. Tonight’s for fun.”
The Blaus arrived at a quarter past seven. David had dressed like a painter, not the beret-and-palette, but the extension-ladder-and-gallon-bucket, kind. His wife, Evelyn, although at least forty, wore a little girl’s party gown and patent-leather shoes with buckles. The Blaus liked costumes, obviously.
Caroline Hanna, as good as her word, pulled up in front of the house at seven-thirty, in a blue Volkswagen Beetle. I helped her out, and the small boy in me responded approvingly to her neat, fairly conservative clothes. Her skirt, a beige wraparound belted with a chain similar to the hinged necklace still at her throat. Her jersey had stylized chevrons on its three-quarter-length sleeves, giving her the look of a drill sergeant in the Scandinavian Fashion Force. I walked her to the porch to meet the others.
T. P., who was going with us, was natty in white shorts and a T-shirt with a polka-dot bow tie printed on the material. He reached for Caroline. She took him from Bilker and jogged him in her arms. Bilker looked relieved. After a bit more small talk, we split up for the drive to Sinusoid Disturbances, the Blaus taking their car and Bilker assuming my Mercedes’s wheel to chauffeur the rest of us.
The sidewalk in front of Sinusoid Disturbances angled by at a daunting grade. As we drove past looking for a parking spot, I wondered if the bistro’s patrons had to walk around inside the club like sheep on a hillside, struggling not to topple. No one would ever mistake the crumbling, two-story building for Caesar’s Palace.
“Uh, what kind of crowd do they get here?” Caroline asked.
“A pretty weird mix, David says,” RuthClaire replied, her arms on the seat back. “Tech students, punk rockers, Atlanta College of Art attendees. It’s mostly the last group that gets off on Fire Sine Fridays. Some of the punks’ll go along with it, too, but the Tech students—the men, anyway—have a tendency to disrupt things.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Oh, it’s not so terrible. David sees the disruptions as part of the spectacle.”
Bilker, stymied in his efforts to find a parking space, let us all out in front of the nightclub. A boy with an oversized safety pin through his cheek opened the front door for Caroline, who was carrying T. P. for RuthClaire. This door was a slab of stained oak with a window of amber glass featuring a sine-curve pattern etched into it in spooky crimson. I thanked the boy for his courtesy, and he replied, almost as if he were human, “You’re welcome.” Then the door shut behind us, and darkness settled upon our gingerly stepping group like a coffin lid. Criminy, I thought.
But RuthClaire, who had my arm, directed Caroline and me to a teller’s cage from which a reddish glow emanated. We were in a foyer of some kind, and at the cage I bought four admissions from a woman in cutoff jeans and a short-sleeved sweatshirt—after the punk at the door, a paragon of Middle American normality.
A few more steps put us on a concrete landing just beyond the foyer. Concrete steps descended from the landing to the floor, twelve feet down, or you could squeeze along the outside wall of the ticket cage to a mezzanine that projected from the bistro wall paralleling the interstate highway outside. Chairs and circular tables crowded both the mezzanine and the main floor below, and almost all of this furniture had the look of radioactive wrought iron.
Higher than the mezzanine level on the club’s uphill side was a control booth for Sinusoid Disturbances’s lead disc jockey. It had champagne-tinted Plexiglas windows, and a big, acorn-shaped flasher that whipped strobes of blue and white light around the interior. Loud music played, and below us, flailing away in the noise storm, jitterbugged a host of damned-looking human wraiths. T. P. was as awe-stricken, or as horrified, as I. He clung to Caroline as if she might toss him over the rail into the cobalt chaos of the pit. RuthClaire pointed out a table on the club’s far side, next to the projecting runway of the stage on which live entertainers would perform, and said David had reserved it for us.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Backstage with Evelyn. They’re setting up. It’s probably going to be another thirty or so minutes before they come on.”
A trio of dubious humanoids brushed past us on the way downstairs. One of them bumped me in the back. Her hairdo was by the
“Oh, no! I really did hurt you!”
I assured her that I was fine, that my allusion to a disabled kidney had been meant as a joke. But even in retreat the girl apologized, and soon Caroline and RuthClaire were laughing. “What the hell was that all about?” I asked them.
“Really, it’s not about anything,” RuthClaire said. “David says this is the only part of the country where kids who go punk forget to stop saying please and thank you. It’s a cultural thing. Atlanta’s punks are polite.”
“All of them?”
“A
Caroline shifted T. P. from one hip to the other. He waved a fist in time to the music, his head ticktocking—the sort of repetitive actions that wear out a person holding a child. RuthClaire noticed and took T. P. from Caroline, and we waited on the landing until Bilker swaggered up behind us. His gait seemed designed to intimidate anyone who took exception to his string tie or his undisguised contempt for Sinusoid Disturbances. Under his tan jacket (whose maroon back vents occasionally opened out like the gills of a gasping bass), he wore, I knew, his Ruger.
On duty. Ready for action. Anticipating the heat.
A little melodramatic, I thought again. Bilker clearly envisioned himself a latter-day Rooster Cogburn charging in single-handedly to rout the bad guys.
Once on the main floor, I saw that some of the club’s patrons were not flamboyant punks but intelligent young men and women of student age. I was probably the oldest person on the premises. I felt a tad more comfortable here, among the kids wearing neat and modish clothes, but I was still a relic among these bionic space babies. Then the music stopped, and Bilker allowed that the only thing any noisier he had ever heard was a dusk-to-dawn mortar attack on his barracks near Da Nang. He was a country-music fan, a devotee of the no-nonsense article spun out by Roy Acuff and George Jones. Groups like the Oak Ridge Boys and Alabama soured his stomach. The former did too many cutesy-poo songs, and the latter, God save their souls, he’d once seen at a country music festival wearing short pants—short pants, for pity’s sake. That was okay on a cookout, mebbe, but not on grown men making their living in front of the public.
I’d never heard Bilker do so much talking. Through his tirade, I held Caroline’s hand, pinning it to my knee under the tabletop. Then the club’s DJ spoke, and the sound system permitted his words to reverberate over our heads like an articulate siren:
“Welcome to another Fire Sine Friday at Sinusoid Disturbances, culture freaks! Comin’ atcha from his plastic cloud is Hotlanta’s answer to that silver-tongued sweetie in the White House, Bipartisan Bitsy Vardeman! Ol’ Bitsy’s here to ease the strain ’twixt donkeys and heffalumps, honkies and cooler cats, menfolks and ladies fair, hetero and homo pairs, an’—Lawd have mercy, y’all!—’twixt your ever-lovin’ bodies and your ever-livin’ SOOOOOUULS!” This last word stretched out until it had five or six syllables and the pitch of a freight-train whistle.
The curtains on stage parted, and the Moog-warped melody of an old standard set to a fusion-rock beat surged back and forth through the bistro. Seven well-endowed young women in body stockings pranced into view, tossing their heads, rotating their arms, and trying very hard to unsocket their pelvises.
“Prepare yourselves, culture freaks,” cried Bitsy Vardeman from aloft, “for a little heartstoppin’ boola-boola from Ess Dee’s very own sultry and sensual ballet corps, the
RuthClaire shouted, “David hates this, but it always gets a Friday-night crowd to pay a three-dollar cover for an evening of performance art!”
Finally, after a raucous eternity, the dancers departed, and Bipartisan Bitsy Vardeman announced, “Okay, babies, here tonight from Abraxas, Atlanta’s Hall of Miracles and Mirages, David Blau and the Blau Blau Rebellion! Give ’em a hand, culture freaks! I say now,
Eventually, though, David Blau’s voice spoke from behind the sequined curtain: “
“And Adam knew Eve,” he declared in actorish tones. “And knew her, and knew her, and knew her. And so the generations of Adam evolved. They evolved, my friends, toward the many likenesses of God you see sitting at tables all around you.”
An unexpected blackout.
In this darkness, everyone in Sinusoid Disturbances could hear some hurried but efficient-sounding rolling noises. Then the footlights came on, and we could see a group of two-dimensional cardboard figures on wheels lined up in front of the tarp. Each cutout depicted a different representative of five early hominid species. The figures to the left looked noticeably more apelike than those to the right—although, anomalously, the figure in the middle had the most brutish physique. The oddest thing about the cutouts was that through holes corresponding to the figures’ mouths, there hung limp blue balloons. Suddenly, all five balloons inflated, obscuring the painted faces behind them, and each balloon jiggled against the head of its cutout as if yearning to escape skyward. Because of the frank frontal nudity of the five hominids, this was an especially ludicrous sight, and many of the kids around us sniggered.
A man of Oriental descent stepped out from behind the figure on the far left. “
Pam Sorrells’s head appeared above that of the second figure in the line. “
Then David Blau peeked mischievously from behind the third figure. “
Evelyn Blau popped up behind the fourth figure. This one bore an uncanny and obviously deliberate likeness to RuthClaire’s Adam. Said Evelyn distinctly, “
A black man in painter’s coveralls—a young artist with a studio at Abraxas—stepped from behind the final cutout. He said, “
From the pocket of his coveralls, this man took a pellet pistol, an act that prompted Bilker Moody to reach for the shoulder harness under his coat, but RuthClaire patted his wrist and shook her head. Meanwhile, the performance artist with the pellet gun turned toward the cutouts, aimed his weapon, and, squeezing off a shot, popped the balloon belonging to
Blackout.
A bewildered silence gripped everyone in Sinusoid Disturbances. Someone—a football player from Tech?—shouted, “What the fuckin’ hell was
Bitsy Vardeman averted a donnybrook by spinning Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family,” a hit even before Adam’s appearance at Paradise Farm. Many in the audience clapped their hands, sang along, and boogied around their tables.
The lights in the club came up full, and all five members of the Blau Blau Rebellion were revealed on stage, each one clutching a bouquet of ten or fifteen lighter-than-air balloons. David, Evelyn, and their fellows handed the balloons to various people in the crowd, beckoning folks toward the stage or ambling out the runway to make the transfer. T. P. stood up in RuthClaire’s lap, his arm stretched out for a balloon. Pam Sorrells, I saw, was coming down the runway toward us, Sister Sledge continuing to chant the lyrics of their repetitive anthem and dozens upon dozens of people now surging forward to intercept Pam.
“Remember,” she cried over the music, “don’t take one unless you believe—”
“Believe what?” a male student shouted.
“Unless you believe you’re immortal! And if you take one, don’t let it pop!”
“Why the hell not?” shouted the same young man, who had cleared a path to the end of the runway.
Pam replied, “Because if you let it pop, you’ll die.”
“Oh, come off it.”
“This is your soul. If you let it pop, you’ll die within three days.”
“Bullshit!”
David Blau came to the end of the runway, lifted his cluster of balloons, and told the entire bistro, “It isn’t bullshit. Whoever accepts one of these, but fails to care for it and lets it pop, well, you’ll blow away on the wind as if you never existed.”
The theatricality of this speech did not deprive it of effect—just the opposite. It clearly frightened some of those who had come forward for balloons. David had uttered a formula, and that formula produced the desired result: an explosion of superstitious doubt in people who ordinarily took pride in their hardnosed pragmatism. Even I found myself believing David’s weird formula. Some folks backed away, others shoved forward to replace the faint-hearted. T. P. had no doubt. He wanted a balloon.
“Hunh,” he said, almost toppling from RuthClaire’s arms. “Hunh, hunh, hunh!”
“Go get him one,” Caroline Hanna urged me.
Pam Sorrells had just about given out all her balloons, while the black man who had shot out the bobbing souls of the cardboard hominids was distributing his dwindling supply on the runway’s opposite side.
“That’s okay,” RuthClaire said. “Bilker’ll get him a balloon.”
“No, ma’am. I got other work.”
“I’ll do it, then,” Caroline said.
“You’ll get an elbow in the lip,” I warned her.
Almost miraculously, a punkette with a cottony white scalp lock and no eyebrows appeared at our table. A frail creature in a vest lacing across her midriff, she extended her arms to T. P., who went to her as if she were an old and trusted friend. RuthClaire gave the kid to the newcomer as much to relieve the pressure on her arms as to humor T. P. “I’ll get him a b’loon,” the girl growled, screwing up one eye to look at my godson at such close range. “Friend a mine round there’s got one awready. He don’ want it. I’ll give it to your nipper. Be rat back.” She sounded as if she had a mouthful of cornmeal. Half stupefied by surprise, half grateful to her for calming the baby, we watched as she backed away to fetch the “b’loon” from her friend. She scarcely seemed to move her feet.
Then Bilker awoke: “Hey, wait a minute!”
“I think it’s okay,” RuthClaire said. “She seemed familiar. She’ll get Paulie a balloon and bring him back in a better temper.”
“I’d better go after her,” Bilker said.
Something in me was belatedly alerted to the situation’s queerness. “Look, Bilker, you stay with RuthClaire and Caroline.
“What’s the matter?” Caroline grabbed my arm. Patrons near the end of the runway engulfed the white-haired girl, and the balloons floating above the crowd were no more useful as markers than clouds.
“I think I know her,” I said, shaking free. “That’s what’s wrong.” I plunged past Bilker, rebounded off a Tech student heading for the stage, squirmed through a gap, and, my heart pounding mightily, sidled around the end of the runway. Spotlights continued to rake the club’s interior, and behind me RuthClaire cried in anguish, “
Beyond the runway, I broke into an open area, but T. P. and his abductress had already vanished. They might have taken any of four or five different routes, but I headed for the nearest exit, a heavy door to the far left of the stage. I slammed its push bar, opening it on the intimidating whirr and rumble of the expressway. An automobile was heading down the hill past the front of the club, but it was hard to believe the punkette had trotted through the alley and climbed into that vehicle so quickly. I ducked back inside Sinusoid Disturbances, and the door wheezed shut on its pneumatic retards.
Bilker was at my side. “She got away?”
My helpless look said all he needed to know.
“Shit!” he said. “It’s a kidnapping, a goddamn kidnapping.”
“Maybe not. This place is crazy. She could turn up again in a couple of minutes.”
“Yeah,” said Bilker. “And the Rooskies could unilaterally disarm tomorrow.” His hand inside his coat, he scanned the crowd for one face in a shifting mosaic of faces. “Friggin’ donkey brain.”
“If I’m a donkey brain, you’re its butt. You let RuthClaire hand the kid over.”
Bilker looked at me with malevolent contempt. “Who said I was talkin’ about you?” Someone had kidnapped Tiny Paul, and we were at loggerheads over a matter of no consequence. Even Bilker understood that. He grabbed my arm and dragged me back to the table where RuthClaire and Caroline were waiting. T. P. might be lost (for the time being, if not for good), but he had no intention of compounding his failure by letting someone else abduct RuthClaire.
“What happened? What’s going on?” The women spoke almost in unison. Bilker mumbled something about our having lost the girl’s trail, and RuthClaire, glancing back and forth between her bodyguard and me, clutched my lapels.
“You know who it was, don’t you?”
“Maybe I’m wrong,” I said, “but I think it was Nancy, with her eyebrows plucked and her head partly shaved. You know, little Nancy Teavers, Elvis’s wife.”
Bilker spent the next thirty minutes charging through the crowd at Sinusoid Disturbances, buttonholing people to ask if they’d seen a skinny female carrying a kid in white shorts. He barged into the restrooms—the women’s as well as the men’s—to identify the startled occupants of the toilet stalls. His efforts were unavailing, but he kept trying, as if single-minded persistence would make T. P. reappear.
I telephoned the police, who sent a squad car and notified the offices of several other area law-enforcement units. The cops who came interviewed RuthClaire, Caroline, and me while Bilker continued to play detective on his own. The older of the two policemen did all the questioning. His nametag said Crawford. He was a stocky man with a forehead furrowed by years of occupational squinting and skepticism. So he could hear our answers, he questioned us on the sidewalk out front. His partner, meanwhile, descended into the pandemonium of Sinusoid Disturbances to look under the rocks that Bilker had not already turned over.
Aboveground, Crawford pursued his interrogation: “She was a waitress in your restaurant in Beulah Fork?”
“Once upon a time.”
“Why would she kidnap the Montaraz child, Mr. Loyd?”
I told Sergeant Crawford about the Ku Klux Klan involvement of Nancy’s late husband, E. L. Teavers. I told him how Adam had wrestled E. L. into the vat of an abandoned brick kiln in Hothlepoya County. That was all it took. Crawford recalled the story. Every city cop and backwoods deputy in Georgia knew it. He took a note.
“Revenge? You think her motive’s revenge?”
“I don’t think she planned this herself,” I said. “At the West Bank, she was a sweet, hardworking kid. She liked me. She liked RuthClaire. Somone’s gotten to her.”
“Who?”
“Craig Puddicombe, to put a name on him.”
“Oh, God.” RuthClaire slumped into me. “I handed Paulie over to her. I
“On some level,” I said, “you recognized Nancy. She took T. P. from you, you didn’t foist him on her.”
“I might as well have wrapped him up in a box and mailed him to her doorstep.”
“Look, you’d been entertaining T. P. all evening. The subliminal-recognition factor made you trust the girl in spite of her getup. You befriended her after E. L.’s death, you certainly didn’t expect her to betray that friendship.”
“I wasn’t thinking about
“That’s my point. It all worked on you subconsciously. Stop blaming yourself for somebody else’s villainy.”
Crawford tapped his pen on his notepad. “Puddicombe vanished after that brick-kiln business. His picture’s in every post office in the Southeast, but nobody’s seen him since.”
“Nancy Teavers has.”
“What makes you so sure?” Crawford eyed me from under his furrows. “For all we know, Mr. Loyd, the kid could be living in Acapulco.”
“For all we know, he could be sitting down there in Sinusoid Disturbances with a Mohawk haircut and a safety pin through his cheek. Nancy would have never planned something like this by herself. But Craig may’ve convinced her that this is how to pay back Adam and RuthClaire for E. L.’s death—even if he did bring it upon himself.”
“Adam has to be told,” RuthClaire said. “He has to know.”
Curious patrons, wraiths from the pit, had gathered around us to gawk and eavesdrop. At last, though, David and Evelyn Blau came out to us through these bizarre figures—with Bilker Moody and Crawford’s young partner right behind them. Mireles, the second cop, approached Crawford. “The ticket seller says the kidnapper—the female punk you described—began showing up for Fire Sine Fridays in June.”
“Alone?” said Crawford.
“She isn’t sure. It’s dark in there. The girl always paid her cover and went on in.”
“She just came on Fridays?”
“The ticket seller only works three nights a week, which helps pin it down. She remembers her coming especially for Fire Sine Fridays.” Mireles flipped open a notepad of his own. “The only time the suspect ever spoke, the ticket seller says, she asked if… uh, the Blau Blau Rebellion was doing a gig.”
“A
“When she found out they weren’t,” Mireles added, “she didn’t bother to pay the cover. She left.”
“A fan,” Evelyn Blau said. “There’s loyalty for you.”
“And she came alone?” Crawford pressed.
Mireles had a thin, sallow face with eyes as brown as Hershey kisses. “It’s like I said, Sergeant, she was careful to
Bilker said, “I found a guy who’d seen her with somebody.”
Sirens wailed. Traffic on the nearby expressway and the bass notes thrumming through the nightclub made the whole hill quiver like a drum skin.
“One of the yahoos who kep’ yellin’ during y’all’s show,” Bilker said. “He got concerned when I told him what happened to Paulie. He said the freak that took him would sometimes sit at a table with a bearded fella.”
“More,” Crawford demanded.
“He tried to play it cool-punk, like—but he couldn’t quite get it on, the look and all—cowboy boots ’n’ jeans instead of tennis shoes and pleated baggies. Like a guy with an eight-to-five job whose boss would can him if he ever showed up lookin’ freaky.”
“Craig Puddicombe,” I said.
“
“Somebody needs to go back to your house,” Crawford said. “There may be a telephone call. That’s almost always the next step, the telephone call.”
“Not if the motive’s revenge,” RuthClaire said. “They may just kill him.”
“Not too likely,” Crawford said. He explained that a kidnapping usually pointed to a less gruesome motive, like extorting a ransom. If Paulie’s abductors had merely wanted to kill him to punish his parents, they could have shot him from ambush. They could have run him and his guardian down with a car. They could have set off a bomb on the porch. Instead, they’d staged a crime requiring some knowledge of the kid’s mother’s movements, some fairly elaborate disguises and subterfuge, lots of patience, and an entire bistro basement full of luck. Tonight, everything, including Adam’s confinement in the Emory hospital, had come together for them. It was even possible that the accidental conjunction of all these elements had provided the couple an irresistible opportunity to act on impulse. Now, though, they’d try to cash in. Crawford staked his reputation on the inevitability of a telephone call demanding money and outlining a sequence of steps for delivering the ransom.
Caroline, who had held RuthClaire’s arm throughout this spiel, spoke up: “You’re not being clear, Sergeant. Do you think the kidnappers planned the whole thing in excruciating detail, or just got lucky and took the main chance? It seems to me that their initial motive might tip their ultimate behavior.”
“I’m not being
There was more discussion. Bored now, the hangers-on on the sidewalk began to drift away. Vehicles eased along Spring Street and our own little alley in deference to the squad car at curbside. The night smelled of engine oil and abused asphalt. Neon streaked the floodlit edges of the sky.
The Blaus agreed to take RuthClaire home. Bilker would ride with them. Caroline and I would go to Emory Hospital to break the news of T. P.’s abduction to his father. The police would send detectives to the Montaraz house, both to protect its occupants and to monitor the kidnappers’ unfolding extortion strategy. If twenty-four hours went by with no break in the case, the FBI would soon play the most prominent role. Meanwhile, Crawford and Mireles would keep following up leads here at the nightclub. Elsewhere in Fulton County—as in DeKalb, Cobb, Clayton, and Gwinnett—sheriff’s patrols and municipal police forces would set up interlocking dragnets.
Bilker told me where he’d parked my car. When I got the directions straight, Caroline and I told the others good night and walked arm in arm down the sidewalk and through an alley to a crumbling asphalt terrace. A smelly Dempsey Dumpster occupied most of this space. Bilker had left the Mercedes beside the dumpster with two wheels on the terrace and two on the alley’s broken cobbles. No one else had even considered contesting the spot. Ignoring the effluvia from the trash bin, I pulled Caroline to me and kissed her full on the lips. She broke away.
“Men have all the innate romance of doorstops.”
RuthClaire had said something like that to me back in December. I wrinkled my nose and looked around. “Not exactly the Moulin Rouge, is it?”
“Paul, please don’t fantasize a friendly fuck later tonight. I’m not ready for it. Even if I had been, this kidnapping would’ve changed that.”
A friendly fuck, I thought. Now there’s an expression RuthClaire would have never used. But hearing it spoken had an effect the reverse of what Caroline intended—it excited me. Maybe I was a bleary-eyed lecher for whom dirty talk is an aphrodisiac. Dirty? A single four-letter word of hearty Anglo-Saxon origin? Maybe, instead, I was a macho bigot who believed “bad language” was the province of males only. Me, macho? A bigot, maybe—but not a muscle-flexer. More than likely, I was simply unused to hearing “bad language” on a woman’s lips. The cultural upheaval of the past two decades had passed me by. I was a forty-seven-year-old southern gentleman only now getting straight the distinction in nuance between
“Look,” Caroline said, “my car is still in front of the Montarazes’. Tomorrow when you and RuthClaire visit Adam, one of you can drive my VW and leave it near the sociology building.” She handed me her keys. “I
“Life’s short, Miss Hanna. This proves it.”
“Ah, another disciple of the
“They may.” My knuckles whitened as I tightened my grip on the steering wheel. “Puddicombe may, at least. It’s hard for me to believe Nancy’d go along with him on that score. I don’t know what he did to entice her up here, to get her to go punk—but they do share a common pain.”
“The fact that Teavers died.”
“Right. Her husband. His friend. I thought Nancy was free of that taint, though. I thought she’d managed to work through it all unscathed.”
What Caroline answered struck me as a sorrowful rebuke: “People who work through everything unscathed are rare. There may be nobody like that at all, only good pretenders.”
“Maybe so.”
“Could we trust an unscathed person, Paul? He—or she—wouldn’t be human.”
I looked at her sidelong. “The trouble is, you can’t trust a scathed person, either. You can’t trust anybody.”
“No,” Caroline murmured. “You can’t trust anybody.”
We rode for a time. Then I began to speculate on the kidnapping. Puddicombe had been hiding out for a year, eluding the police and plotting revenge. On the night of E. L.’s disappearance into the brick kiln, he had probably lit out for Alabama in his buddy’s truck. There, after ditching the vehicle, he had lain low, probably with the active aid of fellow Klan members. Maybe he had left the Southeast completely, striking out for the Rockies or the California coast. But if he had, he had almost certainly acquired another car. Teavers’s pickup would have been a red flag to every highway patrolman between Opelika and Amarillo. Or maybe he had simply disguised himself—by growing a beard, say—and ridden the bus.
Eventually, though, Puddicombe had returned from his fugitive exile, migrating as if magnetized to Georgia’s capital city. In Atlanta, after all, it would not have been hard for him to find work as a dishwasher or a garage mechanic. The biggest threat to his job would have lain in the likelihood of someone from Beulah Fork catching sight of him, but if his work had kept him, so to speak, backstage, that likelihood would have been a skimpy one. On the street, a beard and sunglasses would have preserved his cover. To trip himself up, he would have had to run a traffic light or neglect paying a bill. And so far, Puddicombe had avoided those kinds of trip wires.
“How would he have involved Nancy?” Caroline said.
Probably a letter, I told her. He would have written only once, and he would have stipulated a meeting somewhere between Atlanta and Beulah Fork. At a roadhouse or a small-town cafe, he would have pressed his case, playing on Nancy’s submerged bitterness and arguing the need to bring about E. L.’s posthumous vindication. Initially, she may have resisted these arguments, but at later rendezvous, each new meeting arranged at the one before, she would have begun to relish the idea of avenging her late husband—maybe not by killing anyone, but by bringing E. L. back to life as a worrisome force in the Montarazes’ undeserved paradise of love and success. Indeed, she and Craig may have fallen in love. Once, after all, E. L. and Craig had been as close as brothers, and somewhere in the Bible it was written that a man ought to wed his brother’s widow to protect her person and champion her causes.
“You know the Bible?” Caroline asked.
“Only by hearsay. The same way Puddicombe would know it. In Beulah Fork, distortions of it contaminate everyone’s thinking, mine included. We have a bountiful legacy of high-minded misquotation.”
“You think they’re lovers?”
“If not lovers, sweethearts. In this day and age, probably lovers.”
“Why so certain?”
“Nancy’s only eighteen. She was widowed at seventeen. Most of her school chums have moved from Beulah Fork, or married, or both. When she told me she was leaving the West Bank, she said it was to ‘seek her fortune.’ Male chauvinist pig that I am, I took that as a code word for husband. She was bored, lonely, and vulnerable. Why wouldn’t she fall in love with Craig?”
“Or he with her?”
“Right. Craig was E. L.’s twin in a lot of ways, and Nancy is a pretty little girl, or was, anyway. They’re both probably fighting to make sense of events and attitudes they haven’t handled all that well by themselves.”
“Nancy was doing all right, wasn’t she?”
“Until Craig contacted her again.”
“Do you think they’ve been following RuthClaire and Adam around, waiting for an opportunity like tonight’s?”
“Looks like it.”
“Then tonight had to be a dream-come-true for your… well, your Puddicombe Conspiracy. Everything fell into place. Nancy was able to walk off with Paulie as easily as a kid steals an apple from a produce bin. Doesn’t that strike you as—” she hunched her shoulders, shivering in recollection— “weird?”
“But everything didn’t fall into place. Bilker came along. You and I came along. They had to make some of their own luck, and they did that. Nancy’s costume, her choice of the balloon handout as the best time to approach us, their goddamn perfect getaway.” I took a quick glance at Caroline. “What are you trying to imply? That there’s something fishy about this business?”
“Paul, please don’t take this wrong—”
“God save me, take
“I don’t know RuthClaire. I don’t know Adam. For that matter, I really don’t know you. It crossed my mind—just briefly—that this might be a, you know, a publicity stunt. To promote their art and David Blau’s gallery.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“Look, Paul, I know it’s backasswards and egotistical, but for a moment I was afraid I was being made sport of.”
“Sport of? What do you mean,
“Not after the police arrived. And not really before, either, but nothing that happened at the club seemed real. I felt like an outsider, someone not getting the joke.”
“What cynicism! Five minutes ago you were berating me for hoping for a friendly fuck on the same evening my godson gets abducted!”
“Paul, I was confessing a doubt I had, not leveling an accusation. You’re turning this into something it isn’t.”
I was thoroughly confused. Our conversation had gone off the rails with her plea not to take her next remark wrong. Had I taken it wrong, or had she impugned RuthClaire and Adam’s integrity as artists and parents? I thumbed an antacid tablet out of a roll in my pants pocket and slipped it under my tongue.
“Take me home, Paul. You don’t need me at the hospital. Adam doesn’t need me there, either. I’m sorry this has happened—deeply, deeply sorry.”
I took her home, to an apartment complex on Clifton, not far from the Emory campus. My attempts to get her talking again met with monosyllabic rebuffs. She had wounded me by taking potshots at my friends. I had wounded her by calling her to account for her meanness and vanity.
Caroline’s apartment building had pinkish stucco walls, gables with casement windows, and rustic Tudor trim. I parked beside the walk to her front porch, but before I could even undo my seat buckle, she got out. Then she leaned back down and gave a harsh barking little laugh.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I was about to tell you how much I enjoyed the evening.”
“Oh.”
“Parts of it, I did.” She slammed the door and hiked up her walk like a drill sergeant in the Scandinavian Fashion Force. I waited until she was safely inside before giving a salute and driving wistfully away.
“He’s awake,” the nurse on Adam’s floor said when I showed up at the hospital to fulfill my role as Evil Messenger. “He doesn’t sleep that much anyway, but after Mrs. Montaraz called to tell us you were coming, I went to see if he needed to be awakened. He didn’t.” A middle-aged woman with strong features and eyes like indigo marbles, the nurse tilted her head. “Is there anything I can do, Mr. Loyd?”
“Make sure we’re not disturbed for a while.”
The nurse could not contain herself. “What’s wrong?”
“If RuthClaire didn’t tell you when she called, then I can’t tell you.” My words came out, unintentionally, like a reprimand. I patted the woman’s shoulder to soften their impact. Then I walked down the long, antiseptic corridor.
Adam was sitting up in bed in the dark. He had two pillows behind him, and his legs were crossed beneath his sheet in the lotus position of an Oriental contemplative. The IV bottle beside him, its tube running to his wrist like a life-giving amber fuse, glinted eerily in the darkness. The bandages on his lower face gave him the look of an unfinished plaster-of-Paris bust. He sat remarkably still, and I felt as I had felt as a small boy, approaching my father after some terrible disobedience. I did not reach for the light switch—maybe for reasons of self-concealment. I stood in the doorway letting my eyes adjust and noticing with what stoic endurance Adam’s own eyes tried to allay my fears. Somehow, he had sensed them, like a faint but acrid odor. Don’t quail from necessity, his eyes said. Come sit down.
I crossed the room and sat down in the chair that RuthClaire ordinarily used. But I must have appeared ready to bolt, for Adam lifted the arm attached to the IV tube and gently patted me, as I had patted the nurse.
Go ahead, he was telling me: Be as brutal as your news demands.
“RuthClaire would have come to tell you this, Adam, but circumstances don’t allow. I’m her emissary. I’m here to tell you what nobody—not even your own wife—could tell you easily.”
Adam made a series of signs that somehow permitted me to interpret them.
“No one’s died. So far as we know. Tiny Paul’s been taken.” And I told him in detail what had happened at Sinusoid Disturbances and afterward, including the police’s conviction that we would soon receive a ransom demand and my own speculations about the identities of the kidnappers. At the moment, though, everyone was walking gingerly across a rope bridge over a chasm of indeterminate depth. We would not be able to see how far it was to the bottom until Craig Puddicombe or Nancy Teavers called. Lamely, I concluded, “All we can do is wait.”
Adam pulled the IV tube free of the plastic connector in his wrist and lifted himself up high enough to hook the tube over its pole. There, it ceased to drip. My friend wore one of those hospital gowns with the split up the rear, a design feature of curious motivation. Was the split to make it easier for orderlies to administer enemas, or was it a sartorial aid to patients frequently victimized by sudden diarrhea attacks? These seemed mutually exclusive goals, but the gowns were an immemorial hospital humiliation. Adam managed to wear his without looking totally ridiculous (maybe because nudity held no terror for him), but when he hopped nimbly down from his bed in the garment, I found myself glancing around the room in search of a safety pin with which to close up the vent in back. At Sinusoid Disturbances, I would have had no trouble finding one.
“Adam, what are you doing?”
He brushed past me to the sink and mounted a stair-step stool allowing access to his image in the mirror. His hairy buttocks peeked through the split, and the backs of his thighs tightened and relaxed as he raised and lowered himself on tiptoes. I then realized he was undoing the gauzy cerements binding the lower half of his face.
“Adam!”
He shot me a warning look and resumed unpackaging his jaw. He had already dropped the foam-rubber cup for his chin into the sink. Only the light spilling in from the corridor enabled him to work, but he was peeling off layer after layer with an alacrity that suggested he knew his business. Had he practiced for a moment such as this? It hardly seemed likely, but how else account for the knowledgeable speed of his fingers?
I whispered, “Adam, there’s nothing any of us can do until they call.”
His fingers slowed, but he kept unpeeling gauze.
“What if the kidnappers ring up the nurses’ station instead of the house? If you rush home to RuthClaire, there’ll be nobody here to take their call—nobody who can respond to their demands.” I was improvising, but the possibility sounded realistic to me. “You couldn’t talk to them, of course, but you could authorize me to act as spokesman. Think about it, Adam. Somebody has to be here.”
He shrugged my hand away and finished taking off his bandages. I looked at him in profile. His nose seemed less flat, his cheekbones higher, his chin more pronounced. Not only had the plastic surgeons reconstructed his buccal cavity, they’d given his entire face a modern configuration. None of the changes was severe or blatant, but together they gave him a streamlined, Nilotic handsomeness.
Adam dismounted his stool so that I towered over him again, embarrassed by my moronic tallness. From a hamper he seized a pair of clean white towels, which he folded double and spread out on the floor by the bed. He nodded me down. I knelt on one of the towels, and he, of course, knelt on the other, turning me back into Goliath to his humble shepherd boy.
But, side by side, we prayed. Or, Adam prayed while I knelt beside him with my brow pressed against the mattress edge. “Pray without ceasing,” it says in Thessalonians, but I couldn’t get past the part about forgiving-our-trespasses-as-we-forgive-those-who-trespass, etc., without thinking about Nancy’s perfidy, Caroline’s presumption that the kidnapping was a publicity stunt, or my need to resume my responsibilities at the West Bank. Pray without ceasing? I could do no better than an intermittent, “Don’t let the bastards kill him, God,” between which times I fantasized slitting Craig’s throat, taking Caroline to bed, and catering the reception of a wedding party at Muscadine Gardens—not necessarily in that order or all at once. My knees got sore, my kidneys ached, but somehow I shared Adam’s vigil on the floor for almost three hours.
At 3:57 A.M.—I checked my watch—the nurse came to the door to report that Adam had a telephone call.
“I tried to tell him that this was an absurd hour to call,” she said, “but he told me if I didn’t fetch Mr. Montaraz, I’d
“It’s Puddicombe,” I whispered. Aloud I said, “We’ll be down there in two minutes. Go back and tell him.” My heart leapt against my rib cage. Too often, the parents of stolen children hear nothing from the abductors. A break like this one—a break I’d desperately anticipated—was a kind of sardonic miracle.
The nurse left. I banged my forehead against the mattress in despairing joy. The son of a bitch had telephoned! I rocked back on my heels and mouthed a silent thank you. Adam touched my shoulder.
“
I gaped at him. Adam had spoken, and never had I heard a voice so oddly pitched and modulated: a scratchy computer struggling to sound human. Impulsively, I hugged the little man. Holding him at arm’s length, I told him he’d better put on a pair of pants. If we were too long getting to the nurses’ station, Puddicombe—or whoever it was—would get antsy about the delay and hang up. I rubbed two fingers along the side of my nose. They came away wet.
A pair of khaki trousers his only clothing, Adam accompanied me to the nurses’ station. The duty nurse waited for us with her hand over the telephone mouthpiece.
“Is there an extension?” I said.
She nodded at the glass-walled office behind the counter. “In there. If you want to, you can cradle the receiver on a speaker device, and it’ll broadcast like a radio.”
“Good,” I said. “You don’t happen to have a tape recorder too, do you?”
“Another nurse, Andrea, has a jam box, a big silver thing she hauls around to deafen her elders with. It also records. Andrea leaves her tapes in the drawer. You can tape over one of those—if you take responsibility for ruining a favorite of hers.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
At which point the nurse realized that Adam’s face was free of its bandages. “Oh, my God! Those weren’t supposed to come off yet. Dr. Ruggiero will flay me alive.”
“No, he won’t,” I said. “Mr. Montaraz is healing nicely.”
I led Adam into the office, found the jam box, rummaged up an unmarked tape, put it in the machine, and pressed the record button. Then I set the telephone receiver into the amplifier unit and depressed the lighted button on the base of the telephone. The nurse, having observed all this through the glass, hung up her phone and left to make a tour of the floor—efficient and discreet, that good woman.
“We’re here,” I told the caller.
“Who’s ‘we’?” he asked, two syllables that identified him: Craig Puddicombe. He had made no effort to disguise his voice. (If the restaurant business ever got too tame for me, maybe I could go into police work.)
I told Craig who I was.
“The first dude in history to let a hibber snake his old lady.”
“We were divorced when RuthClaire married Adam.”
“Yeah. You even played pimp for ’em, didn’t you? Now you’re in the hospital holding the hibber’s hand. Jesus, Mr. Loyd, you take the cake.”
“But you and Nancy took the child. What do you—?”
Puddicombe broke in: “Get your tape recorders all set up? Get a call off to the police? That why you took so goddamn long pickin’ up the phone?”
“Adam had to dress. His room’s at the far—”
“Stuff that, Mr. Loyd.” He said something to somebody in the room with him, but it was all muffled, indistinct. Then: “Prove to me the hibber’s really there.”
“How? You know he can’t talk.”
“He can sing, can’t he? He can hum like a rotary engine.”
“Craig, he’s had an operation. His face is bandaged. The entire lower portion of his face was remodeled.”
“He’ll still be stump-ugly to me. Have him hum through his bandages.”
I started to protest, but Adam took my handkerchief from my coat pocket, tied it around his face as a bandanna, and stepped to the amplifier to hum a Cokesbury hymn.
“That’s the hibber, all right—a mule brayin’ into a barrel.”
“Prove you’ve got Tiny Paul,” I said.
“How? You wanna hear him scream?”
Adam stopped humming—half lament, half yodel—and removed the bandanna. He shook his head in response to Craig’s last question.
“Never mind,” I said. “What do you want?”
“A ransom. If Mister and Missus Hibber give it to us, they’ll get their filthy little whatever-it-is back.”
“How much money, Craig?”
“Who said anything about money?”
This reply shocked me. What sort of ransom required no monetary payoff?
“Y’all still there?” Craig asked.
“Tell us your terms. We’re listening.”
Craig consulted with his accomplice. Then, as if reading from a script, he said, “We don’t want money. We don’t do violence. What we want is what’s right. You may think the brat’s been taken because his hibber daddy killed E. L. You may think we covet what the brat’s unnatural family has built up for itself since the hibber did that killin’. It ain’t so, though, neither of those things. We took the brat to make some undone justice get done. We took him to set some wrong things right.”
This nonsense scared me. “Come on, Craig, get to the point.”
“Have a little patience,” the amplifier said, mockingly polite. A paper rattled. “You get your little half-breed back if and when you do the following. First, Mister and Missus Hibber they stop livin’ together. Second, they tell the papers and the TV they’ve stopped and they regret the sinful example they’ve set decent whites and blacks all over the world by bringin’ their mongrel brat into it. Third, they—”
“Craig,” I pleaded.
“Third, they apologize to the parents, family, and widow of E. L. Teavers, my friend. And fourth, the hibber gives himself up for trial on charges of—” a meaningful pause—“uh, malicious homicide.”
“Craig, E. L. was trying to
“Look, we was just tryin’ to scare some sense into you. Nobody out to Snyder’s place was gonna get kilt—until your goddamn hibber chucked E. L. down that hole.”
“But E. L. was trying to do that to Adam, Craig!”
“Puttin’ your hibber down a hole didn’t kill him, did it? Him and his kind lived hundreds of damn centuries in caves. So puttin’ a hibber down a brick-kiln hole hurts it ’bout as much as tossin’ Br’er Rabbit into a damn briar patch. He popped back out, didn’t he? That proves it.”
Absurd. Puddicombe and I were working from entirely different sets of premises. I changed tacks: “Is that it? Four things to do to get T. P. back?”
“We got a fifth un.” Our tormentor rattled his prepared text. “Inasmuch as Mister and Missus Hibber have made big bucks from the dirty degenerates of American society, and are richer than all but the upright and godly ought to be, they’ve got to—” Craig halted. His fancy lead-in had taken some steam out of his delivery. “Inasmuch as all that, they’ve got to contribute fifty thousand dollars to ten different charities and political groups of our choosing. They’ll get the list on Monday or Tuesday. Each group gets at least three thousand, but—and this is big of us, now—Mister and Missus Hibber get to decide how to ladle out the twenty thousand left over after the first split.”
“Money. It comes down to money.”
“The money ain’t important, Mr. Loyd. It’s not for us, anyhow. It’s only ’cause they got it and don’t deserve it and need to give it to somebody who does—that’s why we’re makin’ ’em do it. They do it by check, too. We need to see the canceled checks as proof that everything’s been done like we asked. The list comin’ in the mail will explain the whole system.”
Angry, I said: “They won’t get T. P. back until the canceled checks come in?”
“Actually, not till after they’ve split up, broken their ungodly marriage, and lived apart long enough to show us they’ve really done it.”
“Craig, give us a time frame? How long will you hold Tiny Paul? There’s no give-and-take here. For you, it’s open-ended. For RuthClaire and Adam, it’s a nightmare. And if they’re living apart when you release the kid, who will you release him to?”
“To your ex-old lady, of course. The hibber don’t have any rights in this.”
“But
“They’ll know when we do, won’t they?” And he hung up. The speaker on the amplifier was amplifying a dial tone. No way to trace the call. It had come through the hospital’s central switching system. So Craig Puddicombe and Nancy Teavers, with T. P. in their doubtful care, had sunk again into the impenetrable anonymity of a metropolitan area with nearly four million people—if they hadn’t made their call from Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, or one of the Carolinas. And even if they were still in Greater Atlanta, they had more than a hundred square miles of labyrinthine territory in which to go to ground.
Adam slumped into the chair at the desk. His voice, when he spoke, was a series of agonized croaks: “
Adam decided to leave Emory Hospital. While I telephoned RuthClaire, he dressed, packed a suitcase, and faced down the bemused night nurse with a painful repetition of the words, “Goodbye, goodbye. Going now.” During this confrontation, he maintained the dignified decorum of a Japanese charge d’affaires. When I got off the phone, the nurse put through a hasty call to one of Adam’s doctors, who at first voiced angry opposition to our plans to decamp at this hour. Talking to me, though, he at last gave his reluctant consent, and the orderlies who had been summoned to keep Adam and me from hijacking an elevator to freedom backed off. The nurse then rode downstairs with us, reminding Adam to eat nothing chewier than oatmeal until Dr. Ruggiero had examined him again and noting that he would not be able to speak as well as he wished until he had undergone his scheduled speech therapy.
At the Montaraz house, only a few minutes later, RuthClaire ran to Adam and embraced him. I stood just inside the door connecting the kitchen to the big downstairs studio. The other three men present were Bilker Moody and the same pair of GBI agents who had driven RuthClaire and me back to the Snyder property on the day after our abduction from the West Bank: Niedrach and Davison. They wore nondescript business suits of flimsy black cotton, almost as if they had picked their outfits off the same rack. Davison, however, sported a beige Banlon shirt under his jacket, while Niedrach had made his own distinguishing fashion statement with a red clip-on tie and a red canvas belt on whose buckle shone the embossed head of the mascot of the University of Georgia, a bulldog wearing a freshman’s beanie.
Bilker’s opinion of the GBI agents revealed itself in the curl of his upper lip.
At last Adam and RuthClaire separated, and RuthClaire reintroduced everyone. I gave Niedrach the cassette on which I’d recorded Craig’s ransom demands. A tape player was produced, and the GBI men sat down to listen to the cassette. Bilker retreated to the bar, Adam paced, and RuthClaire perched on the arm of the divan beside Niedrach. I squatted opposite the divan on the other side of the marble coffee table.
“
Niedrach said, “That’s by far the craziest set of ransom demands I’ve ever heard.”
Sitting hunched on a high-gloss red bar stool, Bilker drawled, “The reason you’re dumfuzzled is that this ain’t a kidnapping anymore.”
Niedrach raised his eyebrows. “No? What is it, then? A dope deal?”
“A hostage situation.”
“Every kidnap victim is a hostage,” Niedrach countered with as much tact as he could muster. “That’s tautological.”
“Yeah. Logical ’cause you’ve been taught it. But a hostage situation’s different from a kidnappin’. Money ain’t the perpetrator’s number-one priority. It’s the pursuit of a far-out political or ideological goal by means of terroristic threats.”
“He told us they wouldn’t kill Paulie,” RuthClaire said.
Bilker revolved a half-turn this way, a half-turn the other. Because of his bulk, I half expected the legs of the stool to screw curls of hardwood up around themselves as they sank into the floor. “Yeah, well, Puddicombe’s cooler than any kidnapper ’cause the Great White Jehovah, Jumper of Jigaboos, is on his side. He’ll take more chances than a two-bit kidnapper. If you push him, he’ll raise the stakes.”
“The stakes he’s playing for are revenge,” I said.
“Mebbe so. But he gets it by makin’ us dance to his fiddlin’, not by crashin’ the Montarazes’ bank accounts.”
“So?” said Niedrach.
“We better dance to his fiddlin’. Or make it look like we are. Otherwise, he’ll—pardon me, Mrs. Montaraz—he’ll off his hostage.”
Davison said, “How do you know so much about it?”
“Mebbe I watch the
Niedrach stood and pocketed his hands. “Mr. Moody’s pegged this exactly right. Now we know it’s a kidnapping—or a hostage situation involving a kidnap victim—the FBI will assume primary responsibility for the case. We’ve got to contact them.”
“But you and Mr. Davison have been through this with us before,” RuthClaire said. “The FBI won’t dump you fellows completely, will they?”
“I’ll try to make that point, Mrs. Montaraz, in telling them what’s happened so far. Meantime, though, Adam—Mr. Montaraz, I mean—should move out, to give every appearance of complying with the sickies’ demands. Mr. Moody’s right about that.”
Bilker grunted, startled to find an ally where he’d posited a bungling bureaucrat.
RuthClaire said, “I can’t believe Nancy’d let anything happen to Paulie.”
“Nancy may be in as much danger as your son,” Niedrach said.
And so it was decided that Adam would leave the house on Hurt Street. Niedrach would have a secretary at the state GBI offices telephone the Atlanta newspapers with an anonymous tip about the deteriorating marital situation of the Montarazes. She would claim to be a neighbor with firsthand knowledge of their troubles, including a confidence from RuthClaire that her husband had agreed to a trial separation requiring his immediate departure from the household. RuthClaire would grant the papers a tight-lipped interview omitting any mention of the abduction and confirming the anonymous friend’s separation story.
“But a separation on what grounds?” RuthClaire pleaded.
“Anything you can think of that doesn’t strike you as unseemly,” Niedrach said.
Adam tried to speak, but his gravelly computer voice would not cooperate, and he reverted to sign language. RuthClaire interpreted it for us. “Career incompatibility,” she said. “We’ve been arguing about Adam’s career plans. I want him to keep painting, but he wishes to enroll—” she struggled to read his gestures correctly— “in the Candler School of Theology at Emory. He wishes to take the curriculum leading to the Master of Theological Studies degree. I’ll tell the reporter that Adam has gone off the deep end on matters God-related.”
“That’s great,” Niedrach said. “That’s inspired.”
Davison grimaced. “A habiline religious nut?” Yes. Apparently so. The point of the ruse, of course, was to get word to Craig that RuthClaire and Adam had stopped living together. The story’s appearance in print would insure its finding its way onto local TV news broadcasts, where Craig could monitor recent muggings, rapes, street-name changes, city-council shouting matches, and mayoral trips overseas.
“What’s the chance of the media catchin’ wind of the kidnappin’ itself?” Bilker asked.
“Dust-ups at Sinusoid Disturbances are a regular thing,” Davison replied. “We’re in the clear for now.”
Niedrach said, “Puddicombe may break the news himself. Publicity doesn’t worry him. He might even like it. So if the story leaks, Paulie won’t be in any more—or any less—danger than he already is.”
Where was Adam going to move to? We mulled the options. He needed a shelter offering privacy as well as a certain remoteness from the urban bustle of Atlanta. What qualified? A rented house in Alpharetta? A lakeside cottage in Cherokee County? The monastery in Conyers?
“Let him come to Paradise Farm with me,” I suggested.
RuthClaire said, “Wouldn’t Craig look askance at that? You’re my ex-husband. You’re also Paulie’s godfather.”
“Two castoffs commiserating,” I said. “It’s honky-on-hibber marriage that upsets Puddicombe, not white and black males cohabiting.”
“What would that do to our cover story about his decision to attend the Candler School of Theology?”
Adam signed again, and RuthClaire said, “It’s too late to enroll for summer term there, and fall semester doesn’t officially start until the last Monday in August.”
“So the alibi holds,” Niedrach said. “Take him with you, Mr. Loyd. We’ve got an agent in Hothlepoya County investigating the drug scene there. He’ll act as a go-between, relaying information from us to you and vice versa. So go on.”
“When?”
“As soon as he can get ready to go. Now, if possible.”
RuthClaire and Adam climbed upstairs to get him packed for his stay at Paradise Farm, and to tell each other goodbye. Bilker and the GBI agents, discreetly embarrassed by this turn of events, huddled in the kitchen drinking coffee and swapping companionable tall tales about their prowess as bodyguards and their expertise as sleuths.
“I’ll be back in an hour,” I told them.
Davison, who had draped his black jacket over his chair, blurted, “An
“To tell somebody goodbye.”
I drove to Caroline’s—not in her little blue beetle, but in my big silver Mercedes. I arrived at 9:37 A.M., bleary-eyed, funky, and anxious about the deadline I’d set myself. An hour? I now had only forty-six minutes. It might take me that long to convince my hapless generative equipment that it could still pretend to that title. It might take me longer to convince the lovely Caroline to let me try to convince my equipment. Wasn’t I presuming too much?
Staggering along the walk to her porch, I felt that I was bound in a pair of tinfoil shorts. I itched. I had not slept all night. My stubbly beard seemed to be infested with microscopic lumberjacks sawing away at every follicle. Who—
Forty-four minutes.
At last at her door, I leaned with one elbow and all my bathetic longing into the tiny button that rang her bell—her dear, melodious bell. Inside her apartment chimed the opening eight notes of “Tara’s Theme” from
Forty-three minutes.
“Who is it?” Caroline’s voice cried.
“Me.”
She opened the three inches her safety-chain allowed. “What do
“A friendly fee-fi-fo-fum.”
“Has anything happened? Have they found Paulie?”
I tried to alchemize my weary nonchalance into concerned sobriety. “Listen, Caroline, if you’ll—”
“That’s not my car,” she said, peering past me. “How am I going to get my car home?” She shook her head. “Damn! That’s not important. The important thing is Paulie. I’m still three-quarters asleep.”
“If you’ll let me in, I’ll tell you all I—”
Caroline unhooked the chain. The door opened, and she was standing against a backdrop of framed Broadway posters, porcelain flower vases, and at least two copper umbrella holders. The breath of the apartment’s air-conditioning rippled over me. As for Caroline herself, she wore a yellow dressing gown that seemed to be lined with layer upon liquid-thin layer of an even paler material. She looked and smelled like the demigoddess of a fragrant wheat field.
“You have to shower. And talk to me. And eat breakfast here.”
“Forty-one minutes,” I said. “I’ve got forty-one minutes.”
“Listen, Mr. Loyd, there’s a clock in every room but the bathroom. You can hang your watch on the shower spigot for all I care. If you have any sense, though, you’ll forget about your stupid forty-one minutes and put your watch in one of your shoes.” She pulled me inside and shut us both into her apartment’s Fundy Bay briskness.
As matters unfolded, I put my Elgin in one of my shoes and deliberately forgot about it.
I spent more than forty-one minutes at Caroline’s. I spent more than
“And RuthClaire might like having another woman around for a while today,” I said. “It won’t be easy for her with Adam gone and only Bilker’s shoulder to cry on.”
Bilker snorted, in agreement rather than indignation.
And when the Montarazes came downstairs, RuthClaire and Caroline embraced like long-lost siblings unexpectedly reunited, and as they did, Adam and I carried his belongings out to my car for the trip to Beulah Fork. Bilker lent a hand. Even on its high-performance shocks, the rear of my Mercedes began to sag. Adam had added to his own luggage at least three dozen of RuthClaire’s more recent paintings. Although fairly small, the canvases were still affixed to their frames, and Bilker and I had to struggle to wedge them into the trunk between the suitcases and the pasteboard boxes.
“Adam, what’s the point of taking the paintings?”
“
Because it hurt for him to speak, I did not question him further—but it occurred to me that he was preparing for a long separation from RuthClaire. This was not a surrender to despair, though, but an act of faith. If he and his wife were to be reunited with their child, they would have to accede to and endure the stipulations of the kidnappers. With luck, the GBI might break the case, but there was no guarantee.
These paintings—the drab acrylics she’d hopefully entitled
We got away from Atlanta shortly after noon. On our drive down, Adam read. He had a stack of hardcover titles on the floorboard, and he seemed to pick up and peruse a new one every fifteen minutes or so.
At Paradise Farm, unloading, I broke my quirky vow of silence: “Adam, you know the story you told RuthClaire to tell the reporter about your reasons for separating?” He raised his eyebrows. “The one about entering the seminary this fall?”
“Yes?” he croaked.
“That alleged fiction came to you so quickly, I wondered if… well, if it might really be something you’d like to try.”
“Oh, yes,” he managed. “I. Have. Thought. About. It.”
Livia George, Hazel Upchurch, and our latest little waitress from Tocqueville Junior College did not jump for joy on my return. An hour earlier, a tour bus from Muscadine Gardens had dropped off forty people at the West Bank. These people had descended like a flock of crows, eaten a dozen different menu items, left a skimpy collective tip, and flown away in their bus with a rude backfire.
“Did you give them the substitutes they wanted?”
Livia George sat spraddle-legged at a table near the cash register. “Don’ I always, Mistah Paul?”
“Everybody was taken care of?”
She gave me a disgusted look. “We turned you a pretty profit, and we done been doin’ that the whole live-long week. You jes’ like a man runs up to put out a fire when it’s awreddy burnt down his house.”
“Livvy, you say the sweetest things.”
“How’s Mistah Adam?” she asked, sitting up straight to wipe her brow. “How’s Miss RuthClaire?”
“Fine,” I lied. “Fine.”
I made some noises about the apparent success of Adam’s operation, but beyond that partial truth I could not comfortably go. To prevent any further discussion of the matter, I helped clean up the restaurant and stayed on for the five-o’clock dinner crowd. Our receipts for the day were encouraging, and I drove Livia George home without once mentioning that I had a guest in my house.
Next morning, closer to noon than to sunup, the TV set downstairs awakened me.
I knotted my terrycloth robe at my waist and stumbled barefoot down the steps to find Adam cross-legged on the floor with a section of the Sunday
“
Shots of the choir alternated with wide-angle pans of the congregation in McElroy’s huge Televangelism Center in Rehoboth, Louisiana. This soaring, baroquely buttressed structure had been paid for by the four-bit to five-dollar donations of hundreds of thousands of low-income subscribers to the doctrinal guidelines of the Greater Christian Constituency of America, Inc. Despite the raddled colors on my picture tube, I could see that attending the service were more enraptured souls than you could usually find at the Omni during an Atlanta Hawks basketball game. Seven thousand people? Ten? However many there were, they must have converged on Rehoboth from every city and hamlet on the Gulf Coast, not excluding Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Biloxi, and Mobile. The blessed place rocked.
“Ah,” I said. “Your favorite show.”
Adam had already dressed: a pair of light brown bush shorts and an orange T-shirt celebrating the pleasures of River Street in Savannah. He handed me a section of the paper called “The Arts.”
“Turn first page,” he growled, but, overnight, his speech had become more fluid.
I obeyed. What greeted my eye on the inside page was this headline:
Beside the brief story was a file photograph of Adam and RuthClaire in “happier times,” namely, at the opening of his Abraxas show in February. My face was a smudge of dots among other ill-defined faces in the background.
“That was quick, wasn’t it?”
I read the story. It quoted RuthClaire to the effect that Adam’s pursuit of spiritual fulfillment had left him little time for either Tiny Paul or her. She still loved him, but that very love insisted that she give him what he most wanted, a chance to study at Candler without family encumbrances. She wanted to support him in his quest for a theological degree, but all he wanted was complete freedom. No one alive fully understood the habiline mind, but in some ways Adam’s outlook was that of a medieval ascetic with a calling for the priesthood. Had she not intercepted him on his northward trek through Georgia two years ago, almost certainly he would have discovered his spiritual bent without first marrying.
Adam grunted. “She does not add. That ‘almost certainly.’ I would have. Stayed a naked animal.”
“Never mind. You still end up looking like a horse’s butt, Adam.”
“‘
“What kind of man leaves his wife and son to study religion? Jesus.”
“I do not care. How I end up. Looking. To people who do not know me.”
“You just want Paulie back?”
“Yes.”
On
“…a continuing assault on the American family,” he thundered, waving the newspaper at his auditors. “I’d planned to apologize today for my overzealousness last summer in castigatin’ the former RuthClaire Loyd for livin’ in sin with a male creature not her husband. Well, it’s long since become evident to everybody that this so-called creature is a man. He and Miss RuthClaire were in fact husband and wife at the time of their apparent illicit cohabitation. That bein’ so, they
The people in the Televangelism Center roared, “
“At the same time, I unburdened my spirit of its load of guilt and sorrow to
“To God give the glory!” a member of the audience cried.
“But this morning I read that this same couple, so concerned and carin’ only five days ago, has fallen to the epidemic of sundered relationships ravagin’ our country the way the plague once ravaged Europe! This story wounds me so bad because RuthClaire Montaraz has broken her marriage for one
The congregation groaned collectively.
Adam sprang up from the floor and punched the button turning the set off. “That. Son. Of. Bitch,” he enunciated.
“RuthClaire didn’t let him baptize T. P. He resents her for that, Adam. He’s trying to get back at her.”
“He has. Misread the story. I am the one. Who has deserted my family.”
“Adam, it’s all a fabrication. Everything in that story.”
Adam struggled to explain himself: “But he has misread, even, the fabrication. A person working for a Master of Theological Studies… is not preparing for the ministry. That is the degree of a lay person. Mr. McElroy should know that.”
“RuthClaire balked him. That’s all he knows.”
“So he blackens her name from his pulpit? For oh-so-many viewers? Is that what he does?” Adam stopped pacing, rubbed his lower jaw, and pointed a bony finger at the blank screen. “Dwight ‘Happy’ McElroy, you are a… very unpleasant… son of bitch.”
I calmed Adam down and got him into the kitchen where, remembering the orders of Dr. Ruggiero, I prepared him a plate of soft scrambled eggs and a bowl of oatmeal. Adam ate ravenously, polishing off his eggs before turning his spoon to the still steaming, cinnamon-sprinkled oatmeal.
The West Bank was closed on Sundays, not so much to honor the sabbath as to acknowledge the mores of the townspeople who honored it. And, like God, I myself was not opposed to twenty-four hours of uninterrupted rest every seven days. At any rate, that afternoon Adam and I entertained ourselves preparing a makeshift gallery display of RuthClaire’s paintings
Warm afternoon sun came through the dusty Venetian blinds in zebra stripes of marmalade and shadow. Then, when I hoisted the blinds, the same light flooded the entire studio. Prismatic dazzle bounced around the room, and our placement of the canvases, along with the sunlight streaming in, transformed them from muddy, earthbound mistakes into oddly spectacular affirmations of their creator’s talent.
“My God,” I said.
Adam pointed at this canvas and then at that, daring me to note how the finishes that had once seemed flat and monolithic now had depth and intricacy. Under the mute pastels lay eloquent patterns of shape and line, iridescent commentaries on the otherwise commonplace surfaces in which they were embedded.
“I never saw any of this before. It’s hard to believe.”
“I know,” Adam said.
“Is this the way
“Of course not.”
“But the other way, they’re inexcusably ugly… hardly worth keeping.”
“Sometimes they might seem so. I have heard Miss RuthClaire admit the same.”
“A desire to undo them? A desire to destroy them?”
“Yes. But only when she has got…
Above Paradise Farm, summer clouds pushed in from the west, mounting one another like amorous sheep. The light in the studio changed. Someone had swaddled the sun in gauze.
“They’re ruined,” I said, meaning the paintings. “They’re back to normal.”
Adam gave me a funny look. Then he patted my shoulder: Don’t fret, Mister Paul.
A golden glory poured through the summer clouds. Only a little less dazzling than before, sunlight pirouetted through the studio. I looked again at RuthClaire’s paintings. No transcendence. The infinitesimal change in the light had somehow leached them of magic. And no matter how hard I tried over the next few days, I was never able to enter the studio at a time when the light slanted in at the necessary angle and chromatic intensity to bring the canvases back to life.
On Monday morning, Adam and I each tried to disguise from the other our individual senses of expectancy. Today RuthClaire was supposed to receive from Craig a letter stipulating the groups—charities, political organizations—to which the Montarazes must write their ransom checks.
At 10:01, I began to get ready to drive into town for my luncheon business. Niedrach should have called, I told myself. But I withdrew that thought, doubting the security of Beulah Fork’s telephone lines. Craig did not need to know where Adam had gone, only that he’d moved away from the big cupola’d house on Hurt Street. As for Adam, he was walking barefoot through my pecan grove, contemplating his and RuthClaire’s misfortune. I went down my sundeck steps to talk to him. “If anything happens here, keep me posted. Call me at the West Bank. Even if Livia George answers the phone, she won’t recognize your voice. She’s never heard it before.”
Before Adam could reply, a vehicle crunched through the gravel on the circular drive fronting the house. Who? Friend, foe, or unsuspecting Avon lady?
“Get inside,” I said. “I’ll check this out.”
Adam obeyed. In the sweltering midmorning heat, I trotted around the house beneath the studio loft and turned the corner in time to see a male figure climbing down from the cab of a glossy violet pickup. The truck was jacked up so high on its oversized wheels that the man’s final step was a low-level parachute jump. He saw me the moment he landed and stood staring at me with a resolute skepticism. “You Mr. Loyd?”
“Depends on who I’m talking to.”
Neither clean-shaven nor bearded, neither a Beau Brummell nor a hobo, the man closed the distance between us. “A chameleon, huh? Well, so am I, I guess.” He halted about five feet away, his outfit that of a pulpwood worker: khaki pants, blue work shirt, rope-soled shoes, and a ball cap with a perforated crown.
“I’m Special Agent Neil Hammond. Can we go inside?”
These words lifted a weight. I shook Hammond’s hand and led him inside through the narrow front foyer. We found Adam sitting on the stairs with a shoeshine kit applying cordovan polish to the hand-tooled leather boots (with elevator heels) he’d worn to the West Bank in December. In his slacks and T-shirt, in his dedication to the simple task, Adam reminded me of an elderly black man who had shined shoes at the Ralston Hotel in Columbus in the early 1960s. Sitting halfway up the stairs, he nodded at Hammond and me without ceasing to rub polish into the toes and heels of his boots. There was an air of melancholy to his expertise, but a melancholy devoid of self-pity. Hammond and I watched him work. Adam finished applying the wax, tugged his left boot on, grasped a shoeshine brush with his bare right foot, and buffed the instep of the boot with an easy rocking motion that made a whispery noise in the stairwell. This sound was strangely soothing. Adam brought the left boot to a high cordovan shine, then removed it and duplicated the procedure in reverse, wearing the right boot and brushing it with his left foot. Hammond and I stood there beneath him in the stairwell, entranced.
“Done,” Adam said. He positioned the polished pair of boots on the step so that the toes were even with its outer edge. They shone. They smelled good.
Then Special Agent Hammond began to speak. He had just arrived from Atlanta with a photocopy of the letter addressed to the Montarazes by the kidnappers. On Saturday, the GBI had received federal authorization to fetch the letter from the U.S. Postal Service in advance of its scheduled Monday delivery. That was how he had managed to bring the message to Adam so early in the day. For the past month, Hammond explained, he’d been doing undercover investigation for the Bureau’s drug unit in Hothlepoya County. Yesterday morning, he’d been summoned back to Atlanta to assume the role of message runner for this particular case. He was living in a mobile home between Beulah Fork and Tocqueville, frequenting grubby roadhouses every evening to see if any dope deals were going down, and periodically staking out the Muscadine Gardens private airport to determine if any of the aircraft coming into it were pot planes. Although it might be wise if Adam and I kept our contacts with him to an absolute minimum, Niedrach wanted us to know that Hammond was our official liaison in Hothlepoya County.
“The letter,” Adam croaked.
Hammond went up the steps with the photocopy. I climbed to a spot behind Adam so I could read it over his shoulder. It was a tight fit for the three of us—but we arranged ourselves cozily enough, and Adam shook out the photocopy.
“Fingerprints on the envelope have already conclusively identified the author as Craig Puddicombe,” Hammond said.
The letter consisted of an introductory paragraph, a list of the ten organizations to receive donations from the Montarazes, and a final paragraph directing them to post the “genuine canceled chex” in a glass case at the interior entrance to Rich’s department store in Lenox Square Mall. The “genuine canceled chex” had to be posted by the second Monday in August, two weeks away, so that thousands upon thousands of mall patrons could view them as they entered Rich’s. The well-known signatures on these checks, and the surprising fringe organizations on their PAY TO THE ORDER OF lines, would surely stimulate a flood of copy-cat contributions. Also, nearly every young person who glanced at the canceled-check display would become a suspect in the kidnapping—assuming, of course, that either the FBI or the GBI set up continuous video surveillance of the store’s entrance.
“Which we will,” Hammond said. “This isn’t as clever a ploy as Puddicombe thinks. It’ll be very easy to fake the canceled checks.”
I tapped the photocopy. “He says he’ll ask the organizations in question if the contributions have really been made.”
“A bluff, Mr. Loyd. Why have the canceled checks posted in a public place if they already know what posting the check is supposed to prove?”
“For publicity’s sake,” I said. “To humiliate RuthClaire and Adam.”
Adam looked up. “Would these organizations actually take our forced donations, Mr. Hammond?” His most fluid speech yet.
“Some are outfits of dubious probity. They might. It seems to be this character’s idea that we’re to keep the kidnapping hidden from the general public—at least for now. That being the case, the outfits receiving the checks would have no reason to suppose you’d sent them under duress.”
“Couldn’t they tell their directors in private?” I asked.
“Of course. But that would entail a certain risk. If Puddicombe has an informant in just one of them, he’d figure out damned fast we’re using the same line of approach with all the other organizations. The danger to the kidnap victim is clear.”
“Say nothing to any of them, then,” Adam directed. “We will send only genuine cashable checks.”
“After Paulie’s recovered, Mr. Montaraz, there are steps we can take to recover the money, too. It’s possible a few of these outfits, understanding the full situation, would hand it over willingly—but it’s also likely that a couple of them, maybe more, wouldn’t mind profiting from your ill fortune. We’d go after them via the state attorney general’s office, but it could prove a messy set-to. Even a loud public outcry against one of these goofy bunches—Shock Troops of the Resurrected Confederacy—might not make them relent. It might even strengthen their will to take on our mainstream legal apparatus.”
“About the money I have no care,” Adam said. “Let it go.”
Looking over his shoulder, I studied the list. In addition to Congressman Aubrey O’Seamons, the Klairvoyant Empire of KuKlos Klandom, and the Shock Troops of the Resurrected Confederacy (STORC), Craig had specified an odd array of praiseworthy, semirespectable, and doubtful groups. The Methodist Children’s Home in Atlanta was cheek by jowl with the National Rifle Association and the Rugged White Survivalists of America. Neither Adam nor I could help noting that the last organization on the list was Dwight McElroy’s Greater Christian Constituency. Ever helpful, Craig had provided up-to-date mailing addresses for each and every one of these organizations.
“You give twenty-three thousand to the Methodist Children’s Home,” I advised Adam. “Three thousand each to the other nine groups.”
Adam said, “We lack so much money in our bank account, Mr. Hammond.”
“If you’re sure you want to handle this by writing the checks,” he said, “we’ll deposit the amount needed to cover them—to fortify our case in seeking reimbursement from any really hard-nosed ransom recipient. Remember, though, that if you’d let us, our documents division could easily fake the canceled checks.”
“Craig Puddicombe would find out,” Adam objected.
“That’s a very real possibility.”
“Then I must ask the aid of state in making up the total fifty thousand dollars.”
“All right,” Hammond said.
For a time, we sat in silence in the narrow chute of the stairwell, stymied by the harsh reality of the letter in Adam’s hands. Is every vice a corrupted virtue, every evil a perverted good? I don’t know, but the anguish and pain that Craig Puddicombe, a mere boy, was inflicting on the Montarazes—and on me by my willing involvement in their predicament—stemmed entirely from his pursuit of a variety of justice that was not only blind but tone-deaf and unfeeling. Further, he had implicated Nancy Teavers in his militant passion for left-handed justice. How, I wondered, could one misguided person trigger such ever-widening chaos?
“What now?” I asked Hammond.
“Mr. Montaraz writes the checks, addresses the envelopes, and gives them to me to mail from a letter box in downtown Atlanta. And then you two fellas wait.”
“Two weeks?” Adam asked. “Another two weeks?”
When I reached the West Bank later that morning, Livia George came at me out of the kitchen with a section of Sunday’s paper rolled up like a rolling pin. She knocked me into a chair by the door with it.
“You tole me they was fine! You tole me Adam was healin’ up real pretty ’n’ evverthin’ else was hunky-dory too!”
“Hey, I thought it was.”
“Their marriage done broke and you think that’s a up-tight development? Where you get your smarts, Mistah Paul? A Jay Cee Penney catalogue?” She laid the newspaper down, flattened it in front of me, and read aloud the story of Adam’s decision to forsake his family for an intense period of study at the Candler School of Theology. “I nevah figgered him a no-’count, Mistah Paul. Not for half a minute. Whyn’t you talk him out o’ this scheme while you was up there?”
“He was bandaged from his operation. Neither let on they were having trouble.”
“Poo!”
“Livvy, they waited till I’d left town to divulge their story to the press. That was deliberate. They hoodwinked me—to spare me the agony of
“You go ’phone that crab-walkin’ Mistah Adam and tell him to get his fanny on back to his woman ’n’ chile!”
“Nobody knows where he is, Livia George. He’s moved out.”
For the rest of the day, my cook behaved like a woman infinitely sinned against, slamming pots and pans around and muttering. Once, she came out of the kitchen to glare at a red-haired man who’d returned his Continental Burger as oniony and overcooked.
“Overcooked?” she said, loud enough for the patron to hear. “’F I had me a pasty face like that fella’s, I wouldn’t eat nothin’ that wasn’t burnt to a crumbly char. He get a taste of underdone raw evver time he bite his bottom lip.”
Only by natural charm could I herd her back into the kitchen, and only by waiving his tab could I mollify the red-haired man she had insulted.
In my heart, though, I blamed the whole situation on Craig Puddicombe.
To forestall Craig’s using the Montarazes’ failure to comply with all his demands as an excuse to hurt their baby, Adam wrote this letter to the Atlanta newspapers:
In your pages this past Sunday, a story suggests my wife and I have separated because of my interest in theology. Although in so saying, Miss RuthClaire says a partial truth, it is ONLY a partial truth. In whole truth, I have broken this marriage because a person of my subhuman species has no right to marry a Caucasian representative of
Further, Miss RuthClaire is too fine a person to continue sharing her bed with subhuman murderer such as I. The parents of the late E. L. Teavers of Beulah Fork, Georgia, know of what I speak, as do his Brothers, Sisters, Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, and unhappy Widow, Nancy, to all of whom I extend heartfelt apologies for surviving the murderous fall that for Mister Elvis Lamar was very fatal. I am sorry, I am sorry.
Finally, I hereby surrender myself to any police or government body that wishes to arrest and prosecute me for the evil homicide of E. L. Teavers. Please, O police chiefs, sheriffs, or special agents, publish in this Letters to the Editor column your desire so to do, and I will surrender myself to you in the lobby of the
The letter appeared in the
Special Agent Hammond visited Paradise Farm shortly before midnight on Thursday. He told us that Niedrach had doubts similar to mine about the efficacy of Adam’s “Apology & Confession.” If Craig were in a touchy mood or if he thought Adam had played him false, T. P. might suffer the consequences. Or the letter might lead Craig to contact the Montarazes, thus multiplying the clues about his and Nancy’s whereabouts and inadvertently laying the groundwork for their capture.
Southern Bell Security had cooperated with the GBI in setting up a trap on my telephone by installing a pin register—a device capable of holding a line open even after the caller has hung up—in the office of the Beulah Fork exchange, but had not bothered to put a trap on the phones in the Montaraz house on Hurt Street because of Atlanta’s prohibitive number of exchanges. So I did not see how Hammond could say another call from Craig might prove his ruin. Besides, it was hard to imagine him calling Paradise Farm. He’d have to have a sudden prescient hunch about Adam’s hiding place.
“What in my letter could give offense?” Adam asked Hammond.
For someone able to grasp the metaphysical depths of various spiritual issues, Adam was curiously obtuse on this score. I told him his expression of regret felt tongue in cheek, his apology a clever indictment of Teavers, and his offer to give himself up a parody of genuine confession.
“You’ve complied with the letter but not the spirit of Craig’s demands.”
“How can I comply with the spirit of demands which I abhor?”
“You can’t,” Hammond said. “But you can pretend to.”
“I am no good at this pretending,” Adam growled. A tear formed in his eye. He blinked, and the tear slid moistly down the gully between his cheek and his habiline muzzle. “I can no longer make-believe I am happy apart from my wife. I can no longer make-believe my praying is helpful. I can no longer make-believe the God of Abraham and also of the converted Paul cares very much about my family’s dilemma.”
Hammond said, “We’re here, Mr. Montaraz, caring as much as we can.”
Seated at my dinette table with a bottle of Michelob, Adam broke down. He sobbed like an affronted toddler, his fragile lower face scrunching around alarmingly. I feared he was about to undo some aspect of the surgery that had “humanized” him.
“You should read the Book of Job,” Hammond said.
Adam shrugged aside the special agent’s hand. “Quiet the hell up!” he wheezed at Hammond. “My people have known two million years of trial, even to the need of hiding from our own descendants—but not even as free person in U.S. of America can I escape further tribulation. So I beg you most imploringly,
“Touchy tonight,” said Hammond, not unsympathetically.
“Have you guys made any progress up there? What about Craig’s family here in town? Have you talked to them?”
“We haven’t talked to Puddicombe’s mother or any of his other family members because if we did, they’d try to tip him off. It’s that kind of family.”
“What’s Niedrach doing? And Davison? And their FBI liaison? Nothing’s happened since that letter came.” I was mopping spilled beer with paper towels.
Hammond tore two sheets of toweling from the roll and knelt next to the refrigerator to help. “They’re working. We’re all working. Sometimes you need a lucky break.” He carried the pieces of sopped toweling to the waste basket. “By the way, your friend Caroline Hanna told me to tell you hello. She’s over there with your ex-wife every moment she can spare away from her work—a friend indeed, that lady.”
God, I thought, they’re comparing notes. “Thanks. So what do we do now?”
“Sit tight, Mr. Loyd. Sit tight.”
Adam and RuthClaire had written the ten checks demanded by Craig’s letter for five thousand dollars each. Although these were big contributions by the standards of most American taxpayers, none by itself would seem remarkable coming from national figures of the Montarazes’ suspected wealth. The GBI agents had dissuaded them from writing any check for an amount conspicuously larger than the others for fear that Craig would use this disparity as an excuse to make further demands. He seemed to enjoy the game he was playing, as if the rush of making complex demands and having them carried out was a well-deserved bonus for his pursuit of “justice.”
By the end of the week, we learned, the Montarazes’ bank in DeKalb County began making payments on some of these drafts. STORC, the Klairvoyant Empire, the Rugged White Survivalists, the Methodist Children’s Home, and Aubrey O’Seamons had wasted little time cashing their checks. As a result, it might be possible to put all ten canceled checks in that display case in Lenox Square a few days ahead of schedule. Late Friday night, in fact, exactly one week after the kidnapping, Hammond informed Adam and me that the FBI had taken several discreet steps to have the checks in place by midweek. There was no sense delaying their availability to the kidnappers until the second Monday in August if they had already cleared. Whether Craig would let T. P. go before Monday was problematic, but we all agreed that it was worth a try. Meanwhile, video surveillance equipment had been concealed in front of Rich’s by specialists working in the mall after regular business hours.
Adam and RuthClaire traded letters during their separation. Bilker mailed them from random sites around the city, while I sent all of Adam’s billets-doux to Caroline Hanna’s apartment so she could carry them to Hurt Street when she visited RuthClaire. We took these precautions because Niedrach believed that Craig would interpret any sign of contact between the Montarazes, even from afar, as a violation of their promise to live apart. Phone calls were also out.
Caroline and I were under no such ban. So long as I placed my calls to her from the West Bank rather than Paradise Farm, no one objected to our talking to each other. Also, Caroline took pains to call me only at the restaurant. If she phoned during business hours, I clambered up to my sweltering second-floor storage room to take the call on the extension there. Downstairs, Livia George would hang up, and Caroline and I would jabber like furtive teenagers. The heat of the storage room, with its low musty cot and its listing pyramids of cardboard boxes and vegetable crates, heightened my sense of the illicitness of our hurried conversations. But I liked that feeling. It was absurd, feeling like a teen again, but it was splendid, too, an unexpected benefit of T. P.’s kidnapping that in full daylight I could in no way square with the horror of that event.
On Saturday night, Caroline called at 11:30, just as Hazel and Livia George were about to go out the front door. But with only an ancient rotating floor fan to keep me from collapsing of heat stroke, I took the call upstairs, anyway.
“Talk to me, kid.”
“Not for long, Paul. Listen: we’re hanging on, and Ruthie’s unbelievably self-possessed. Me, I’m done in.”
“Me, too. Frazzled. Big crowd tonight.”
“Adam?”
“I’ve begun to worry about him, Caroline. His odd amalgam of religious beliefs—his faith, if you want to call it that—seems to be deserting him. He walks around my place like Roderick Usher, morose and supersensitive. Know what he told me this morning? ‘I’m a lightning rod for human cruelty.’ His exact words.”
“That doesn’t sound like him. It’s self-pitying.”
“It is and it isn’t. I think he was expressing a
“Well, he could just as easily say, ‘I’m a lightning rod for human charity.’ He’s looking at things backwards, Paul.”
“Is he any different from the rest of us? He takes the good for granted. Evil thoroughly confounds him.”
Caroline said, “
“What is it?” I asked her.
“Do you recall how Adam may’ve got to the States? How he was one of three habiline crew members on a fishing boat running guns from Punta Gorda in Cuba to the guerrilla opposition to Baby Doc in Haiti? Only that boat never made it back to Haiti. The Cuban I interviewed in the Atlanta Pen—Ignacio Guzman Suarez y Peña—well, Ignacio murdered the captain of that vessel and two of Adam’s fellow habilines. That’s another instance of violence that haunts Adam, another reason he keeps seeing himself as a ‘lightning rod for human cruelty.’ We keep forgetting he has a past antedating his first appearance in Georgia.”
I started to object, but Caroline cut me off:
“RuthClaire does, of course, but the rest of us have no strong sense of the hardships he’s already survived.”
“I love you, kid,” I said. Only the faint idiot singing of the wires—the roaring of the voiceless inane—still linked us. I shifted on the sagging cot, sweat lubricating my flanks. “You still there, Caroline?”
“You might have had the decency to tell me that last Saturday morning.”
“What’s wrong? Everything was okay yesterday, wasn’t it? Between us, I mean.”
She let the wires sing a few seconds. “Paul, I got a letter from Brian today.”
“Nollinger?” My heart sank.
The very one, she admitted. The letter had come from a city called Montecristi in a northeastern province of the Dominican Republic. In it, good old Brian spent several paragraphs justifying his abrupt departure from Atlanta. His position in the anthropology department at Emory had steadily deteriorated. His well-publicized quarrel with the Zarakali paleoanthropologist Alistair P. Blair had put him on mushy ground with his colleagues, most of whom revered the cantankerous old fart. Nor had Brian improved their opinion of him by accusing the artist RuthClaire Loyd of making Adam Montaraz, the habiline refugee from the Caribbean, her personal “slave,” when, in fact, the two had freely married each other. Unleashing an agent of the INS on Adam had been yet another regrettable mistake.
“He made plenty of ’em. Glad to know he’s begun to regret them.” Caroline shushed me. Gradually among Brian’s colleagues, she continued, paraphrasing the letter, there had grown a perception that he was trying to milk the habiline controversy of every last drop of career benefit. (And ineptly missing the pail.) He had further compounded his problems in the department by belatedly developing scruples about some experiments, with primates, at the field station north of Atlanta. Did these experiments serve any essential research purpose, or were they only a convenient means of generating grant money for ethologists who might otherwise lack employment? At last, chagrined by his own complicity in this system, he had made loud noises about the inhumanity of his long study with stub-tailed macaques. Never again would he exploit innocent primates for research purposes, no matter how noble the cause. Colleagues with funded experiments of their own had interpreted Brian’s newfound scrupulosity as a holier-than-thou slap in the face. His reputation as a limelight-seeking cad had grown into a behemoth.
“He deserved that reputation.”
“Maybe. He says that since last summer he’s been a waking nightmare. He says if it hadn’t been for my affection and support, he would’ve overdosed on sleeping tablets by Christmas.”
“That’s touching. Considering the debt he feels he owed you, why do you suppose he never bothered to tell you goodbye?”
“He apologizes for that. He feared if he came to say goodbye, he’d chicken out and stay. When he learned he’d landed a research position with an American concern in the Dominican Republic, he didn’t know whether to cheer or what. It was such a drastic break with his own past: a Georgia boy with advanced degrees in anthropology and primate behavior. He turned his back on all that. He didn’t know if he could do it, Paul.”
“It looks like he managed.”
“Relax, will you? I’m not buying an airline ticket to the Dominican. I don’t love Brian. I’m just relieved to know he’s okay.”
I did relax. She no longer loved the man. Why, then, had she been so tentative about telling me he’d written? Well, my attitude toward him precluded comfortable talk about her former lover. She’d been afraid to mention Brian’s name, much less tell me about his letter. Also, she’d felt that to hold back word of the letter would be to sabotage whatever degree of trust we had so far created between us.
“What the hell’s he doing down there, anyway?” I blurted.
“He’s a sugar-industry hire.” I heard Caroline shuffling the pages of Brian’s letter as I’d once heard Puddicombe uncreasing his list of ransom demands. “The plantations on which he’s to work are owned by the Austin-Antilles Corporation. They’ve asked him to look into the conditions of Haitian canecutters. The canecutters are hired on a lottery basis by the local sugar-harvesting network. Brian’s supposed to propose cost-efficient ways of improving their lot—without destroying the economic base of the Haitian or the Dominican government.”
“Cripes. “
“What? Brian says he’s already begun spotlighting the squalid conditions of the canecutters. He’s excited. He thinks finding a way to channel some of Austin-Antilles Corporation’s money to these folks will be a challenge. He’s using his anthropological background for a humane sociological purpose.”
“Caroline, it’s a shortcut to crucifixion.”
“Why?”
“Don’t kid me. You’re the one who’s worked with Cuban and Haitian refugees.”
“Not down there. Only here. What’re you getting at?”
“Haitian politics are nasty. Dominican democracy is fragile, and Austin-Antilles is a multinational conglomerate that’s never shared the wealth with peons. The reverse, in fact. From what little I know, it sounds to me as if your friend Brian is getting caught in the middle of a canecutting public-relations ploy. Haitian workers always get the shitty end of the stick.”
“Brian thinks he may be able to do some good.”
“Let’s hope he doesn’t end up with nails in his feet and palms.”
Caroline chuckled mordantly. “That’s the first time you’ve wished him anything less fatal than hanging at dawn, isn’t it?”
Probably, I admitted. I also told Caroline that if Brian did his job too well, and if Austin-Antilles did not fire him for his presumption, he’d surely be transferred to a less controversial company enterprise elsewhere. That was how the Big AAC did business.
For a moment, inarticulate arias of static. Then my caller said, “I love you, too,” and hung up. I sat there in the heat, stunned, savoring her words.
At Paradise Farm, Adam was vegetating. If he wrote RuthClaire a letter, he forgot to give it to me to mail. If he started a crossword puzzle, he soon lost interest. His books on theology, religious history, the philosophy of religion, and contemporary creation theory sat untouched in their boxes in the second-floor studio. Neil Hammond did not come by with news, and on Sunday morning, too wrought up by Caroline’s declaration of love to sleep late, I was the one who turned on
Maybe I had a hunch that McElroy would mention a recent $5,000 contribution from Adam Montaraz. Bingo. He acknowledged it just as an army of cleancut ushers began filing toward the altar to pick up the collection plates. Adam, too busy trying to think of a nine-letter word for “false piety” to glance at the set, made no sign he’d heard McElroy acknowledge the donation.
That afternoon, however, he fell asleep while watching a Braves game on Channel 17. I turned off the set without rousing him, a notable achievement because he usually slept as lightly as a cat. McElroy’s sermon had been called “Energizing Commitments,” and that was what Adam seemed to need. Unfortunately, he had not listened to the man.
On Monday about 10 A.M., I drove into town and stopped first at the Greyhound Depot Laundry to pick up my tablecloths. Ben Sadler, already looking rumpled and dehydrated, had them waiting on the counter. The black woman who operated his steam press—a forbidding-looking instrument with a lid like a coffin’s—also made a point of marking my entrance. Uh oh, I thought. What’s going on?
My subsequent talk with Ben was curiously aimless, focusing on such weighty topics as the humidity level and hog-market prices. Strange. Ben usually liked to provoke a verbal scrap over the deployment of U.S. forces in Central America or the morality of alcoholic-beverage licenses for local eating establishments. I started to leave.
“Say,” said Ben, “do you take
“I don’t subscribe. Occasionally, I’ll buy a copy. Why?”
“Have you seen this week’s issue?”
“Is it out already?”
“Hy Langton, over at the drugstore, gets his copies first thing Monday mornin’. I bought one right off. He don’t know what to do with the rest of ’em, though—put ’em out for sale or stash ’em down under the register.”
“
“It’s a eye-opener, the new one. Milly and me—” nodding at the steam-press operator, who looked down in acute embarrassment— “we’ve been discussin’ how much times’ve changed, to let a magazine like ol’
“But you bought a copy?”
“I got it for you, Paul.” Even in the morning heat and the heat of the laundry, Ben managed to blush. “Don’t be insulted. It’s not that I think you’re a creep or somethin’. It’s just that, you know, once bein’ married to an artist and all, you’re more sophisticated than most folks in Beulah Fork. You know how to take such stuff ’thout bein’ prurient about it. Isn’t that the word,
“For God’s sake, Ben, what are you talking about?”
“Here.” With one emphatic motion, he produced the magazine from beneath his counter and plonked it down on the folded tablecloths. The magazine’s cover slapped me hard, but I kept my face as noncommittal as I could. Let Ben and Milly invent a reaction rather than simply relate it. The gossip mills would grind no matter what I did.
And the cover on the new
Well, it consisted of a photograph of Adam and RuthClaire standing side by side, frontally nude, Adam to the left, RuthClaire to the right. Adam had his hand raised in a venerable human gesture signifying “Peace” or “I have no weapon.” My ex-wife, although visible frontally from head to toe, was standing with her left leg slightly extended and her body canted a little bit toward Adam’s. Eye-catching as they were, the couple occupied only the vertical right half of the cover.
The other half contained a pair of clocks side by side beneath the second three letters of the
“Bet this gets a lot of bluenoses to cancel subscriptions,” Ben said.
I didn’t reply, but Ben was probably right. Whoever had taken this photograph had not bothered to air-brush the pubic hair or private parts of my ex and her husband. That was why I thought I knew the photographer’s identity. I flipped to the cover story at the magazine’s heart. Scanning its lead and several paragraphs, I found the name Maria-Katherine Kander repeatedly. In fact, two of the photos accompanying the article were fairly tame portraits—i.e., the models either in shadow or semimodestly draped—from the Abraxas show that had featured Adam’s paintings and the colorful work of various Haitian artists. I had stepped into a timewarp flinging me back to February.
“Did you know they’d done this, Paul? Had their pictures taken nude?”
“No. No, I didn’t.”
It was hard to imagine RuthClaire consenting to such a portrait. She was as naked in this
In a way, of course, that was exactly the point.
I set the magazine atop the tablecloths and gathered it and them up in my arms. “Thanks for the
Neil Hammond’s jacked-up purple pickup sat in front of my house at Paradise Farm. Hammond was in the living room with a stack of
“You’ve seen it,” Hammond said. “You’ve seen the day’s major disaster.” He gestured at the magazines. “I saw it about an hour ago, when I went to the drugstore to buy my wife an anniversary card. I bought every
Adam and RuthClaire, Adam and RuthClaire, Adam and RuthClaire.
I looked at Adam. “What the hell did you two think you were doing?”
“They’ve contributed to what’s likely to become its most collectible issue—cover intact, of course—of
“Do you remember how that flaky Beatle and his Japanese old lady made an album called
Adam, hands clasped between his knees, looked up. “Neither RuthClaire nor I had any inkling this shot would appear—” gesturing vaguely— “as it so upsettingly has.”
“But why’d you pose for something like this?” I asked.
“In April, Mister Paul, long before my surgery, this M.-K. Kander person came to Atlanta on business at Abraxas. About ‘shooting’ RuthClaire and me, she inquired. The idea of the Primeval Couple had great appeal to her. Mister David did introductions. And Miss RuthClaire and this M.-K. Kander person, they took to each other fast. So when her new friend suggests we pose as you see, my wife has no great objection. Nor I. So our photo got taken in gallery room where Ms. Kander had February show. Later, she kindly sends us prints of very same one
“It’s a disaster,” Hammond reiterated.
I opened out my scrolled copy and held it up. “But why like this, Adam? Why did she want you to pose like this?”
His growl tentative, Adam said, “The set-up was greatly symbolic. The Primeval Couple, as I have said. My name is Adam, and I am a habiline with origins going deeply past those of even Biblical Adam. So said Maria-Katherine. Miss RuthClaire, to the contrary, is modern woman with life in technological times. So, again, said M.-K. Kander. Our union, she told us, ties up past and future of species in exciting new Now.” He paused. “Maybe this symbolism lacks clarity, but in standing naked beside my wife, I saw no harm for this talented picture-taking person. Early Adam and somewhat later Eve. Miss RuthClaire thought it—you may be surprised—very funny and also enjoyable.”
“This pose reminds me of something, Adam,” I said. “But what?”
“Maria-Katherine patterned her shot after the plaques sent out into cosmos aboard Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. They feature naked male and female side by side, the man with his right hand raised. On those plaques, male is taller than female, and islands at bottom are not Cuba and so on, but the sun and planets of our solar system. A miniature of the spacecraft is leaving third such body and flying off between Jupiter and Saturn into cosmic ocean. Again, it was Kander person’s idea to use this pattern. A Plexiglas model of Africa hangs to right because our kind, it seems, did begin there. Miss Maria-Katherine made this continent artifact herself.”
Hammond twisted his cap in his hands. “You had no idea this photograph would show up as a
“They would have,” I said, “if the cover story had been about them. The editorial staff would have said so. But this issue’s cover story is about the new photography, and the only release the editors probably needed was from M.-K. Kander.”
“If we’d known they were going to use it,” Hammond said, “we would have told them what was going on down here. We’d’ve asked them to deep-six the damn thing or at least delay it another week. There’s nothing
Adam stood, thrust his hands deep into his slacks pockets, and, balancing on one leg, picked up a copy of
“I am very unhappy with Miss M.-K.,” he said, “very unhappy, indeed.”
I returned to work. Hammond remained at the house with Adam. At six o’clock that evening, the agent telephoned the West Bank to tell me that something had happened and that he and Adam must leave for Atlanta.
“Wait a minute. I want to go with you.”
Livia George, at my elbow beside the cash register, said, “This got somethin’ to do with Miss RuthClaire gettin’ jaybird-skinny for that cover?”
“Hush, Livia George.”
“City did this to ’em. City made ’em think they could shuck their clothes for some hotsy-totsy nashunal magazine.”
“Damn it, get out of my ear for a minute!” I muffled the telephone’s mouthpiece. A couple at a nearby table peeked up at me, disapprovingly.
Hammond’s voice said, “This isn’t your affair any longer, Mr. Loyd. Niedrach’s just called. We’ve got to go.”
“T. P.’s my godson. Give me ten minutes and I’ll be there with you.”
“We’re leaving.”
“I’ll follow.”
“That’s your prerogative.”
“The Montaraz house on Hurt Street?”
“Goodbye, Mr. Loyd.”
“What happened? Did Craig call? Did someone see him?”
But all I had in my ear was a busy signal. I barged into the kitchen and found Livia sullenly slicing tomatoes into a salad. Hazel Upchurch was sautéing mushrooms in a cast-iron skillet. Debbie Rae House, my new waitress, was watching them, bored.
“Pray,” I commanded. “I don’t know what the hell good it’ll do, but pray. Pray for T. P.” Then I was gone.
Despite their head start, I caught up with Hammond’s pickup between the two exits sandwiching Newnan, Georgia, on I-85. The sun was lowering itself rung by rung to the western horizon, but daylight still lingered above the heat-browned meadows flanking the interstate, and traffic was brisk in both directions. Doing eighty, I had to hit my brakes to keep from overshooting the agent’s truck, and my own car almost got away from me before I brought it under control and followed Hammond and his habiline passenger into Atlanta without further incident. We parked across the street from the Montaraz house and went inside.
Adam and RuthClaire embraced.
Niedrach was present, Davison was not. In the latter’s place were two men in sports jackets and spiffily creased slacks. Neither of these men had yet hit his fortieth birthday. One had stylishly long hair that just touched his collar in back but stayed well off his ears. He was pink-cheeked and clear-eyed, after the fashion of a second lead in a B movie of the 1940s. The other man had an astronaut’s conservative haircut, a nose that had once been broken, and a shovel-shaped mouth that sometimes seemed to move as if it had a will distinct from its owner’s. Feds, these fellows. Latter-day heirs of the late, unlamented J. Edgar Hoover.
Bilker Moody introduced these men as Investigator Tim Le May (the B-movie second lead) and Investigator Erik Webb (the shovel-mouthed astronaut). They had taken over the case on the Saturday afternoon following the kidnapping, but Niedrach had stayed on to coordinate their investigation with local police departments and the antiterrorist unit of the GBI. Given federal jurisdiction over most kidnappings, this was a somewhat unusual arrangement, but Niedrach’s familiarity with Klan tactics and his knowledge of events precipitated last summer by the Kudzu Klavern had argued tellingly for his uninterrupted involvement with this case. I was glad to see him. He wore his bulldog belt buckle and a navy-blue windbreaker that made him seem out of uniform. He looked like the fatigued, seedy uncle of the younger, more dapper FBI agents.
Adam approached him. “What has happened?”
“The bastard phoned,” Bilker Moody said, his upper arms straining the sleeve bands of his sweaty Banlon shirt.
“We’ve got a tape,” Le May said. “Come into the kitchen and we’ll play it.”
We filed into the kitchen. The tape machine, with two sets of headphones, was connected to the wall phone beside the door leading to Bilker’s pantry headquarters. Still, you could sit at the kitchen table while listening to or taping a call, and Adam and RuthClaire sat down there with Niedrach, Le May, and Webb. Hammond, Moody, and I found corners into which to wedge ourselves, and Le May turned a dial on the antique-looking recorder. Its milky reels began to turn, but at first all we could hear was the low hum of the refrigerator. Then Craig Puddicombe’s voice said, “
“
“
“
“
“
“
“
“
On the tape, RuthClaire began to cry. “
“
“
“
“
Puddicombe was silent a moment. Then he blurted, “
“
He broke the connection. On tape, RuthClaire’s voice hurried to ask, “
Le May turned off the recorder. “Telephone technology’s changing every day. If an exchange office has a computerized system, you don’t have to rely on taps and pin registers to trace calls. The computer will print out the number for you, then search its memory and identify the owner. This time we got lucky. The number Puddicombe called from belongs to a newly computerized exchange. We asked at all such offices and found an exchange with a recent call to this house. The time’s matched up exactly.”
“He phoned from College Park,” Webb said. “Not far from Hartsfield International.”
“Then you can catch him,” I said. “You can send people down there to stake out the place and grab him.”
Niedrach said, “If he were a complete dolt. But he isn’t. The number belongs to a pay phone in a public booth off Virginia Avenue. The College Park police checked it out, but Puddicombe hadn’t hung around long enough to say hello to them.”
“Then what the hell good does knowing where he called from do us?” I asked. “He’s gone, and we don’t know where.”
Investigator Webb, the agent with the Gus Grissom haircut, said, “We know he’s in Greater Atlanta. And we’ve got people in College Park asking questions of all the folks who might’ve seen Puddicombe using the booth. It’s on a sidewalk by a fast-food place, and the call came at a busy time in the afternoon. There’s a lead or two, Mr. Loyd. We expect something to break tonight.”
“And just what is it you expect to break?”
My question elicited embarrassed silence for an answer. No one in the Montaraz kitchen knew what to expect. Despite his Klan activities in Hothlepoya County, Craig was mostly an unknown quantity to these officers. The unpredictability of his behavior—the virulence of his racial and sexual hangups—could not fail to disturb us. My anxiety level was steadily mounting. That much I knew, but not a lot more.
Taking pedantic care with his phrasing, Le May said, “Seeing first that the perpetrator is still out there and, second, that his whereabouts aren’t fully pinpointed, we thought it best to have the Montarazes obey his last demand.”
“The bozo’s gettin’ ready to do something,” Bilker Moody said. “He’s just gettin’ everybody in place so the show can start. He
“A surprise,” Niedrach said speculatively. “A surprise.”
Niedrach, Hammond, and Le May left the house to continue their investigative work elsewhere. Webb stayed to monitor the telephone and the recorder to which it was wired. Bilker and Adam went into the studio to play several tension-defusing games of Ping-Pong. Even in the kitchen, I heard the racket they made grunting, trading slams, and throwing their bodies across the table to return drop shots just over the net. RuthClaire, who might have been expected to want some time alone with Adam, approved their play. Just the simple act of spectating seemed to calm her nerves.
I stayed in the kitchen with Webb—Ping-Pong is not my game—and asked him what leads they had.
His mouth began to move even before any words came out. “Woman working at the fast-food place next to the phone booth. This gal says she saw a guy in a painter’s white coveralls go past the front window about the time our call was made. Bearded fellow. Young. She remembers because her boss had talked about repainting the divider lines in the parking lot. She wondered if the guy was there to do that. He must not’ve been, though, because there was only that one time he went by and the divider lines in the parking lot still haven’t been repainted.”
“You think Craig’s wearing a painter’s coveralls?”
“Her description of the fella sounds like Puddicombe.”
“Did your witness happen to see what he was driving?”
“Her position behind the counter didn’t let her, no.”
“That’s one helluva lead. If he keeps his coveralls on and walks around the city everywhere he goes, you’ll nab him before the year’s out.”
Webb smiled. “Touché.” His FBI affiliation had not gone to his head. Provincial rather than Prussian in his slacks-and-sports-jacket uniform, he had no trouble admitting that this investigation had him groping down one blind alley after another. His easy-going agreeability irritated me.
So I wandered down the hall to Bilker’s pantry headquarters.
A comforting thought. I entered the pantry and sat in front of the TV monitors on the plywood counter. Why hadn’t the FBI set up in here? Well, Bilker had denied them access. The pantry belonged to him, and
“Comfy, fella?”
I looked over my shoulder. It was Bilker, his T-shirt three different shades of dark green and his face as red and shiny as a candy apple. His expression was malevolent. I hoped that he remembered Adam’s good opinion of me.
The TV monitor came to my rescue. “Look.” I pointed. “Somebody’s coming.”
In fact, two cars were pulling up in front of the house: a late-model Plymouth glinting indigo in the actinic glare of the MARTA lamps and, right behind it, a blue VW beetle of older vintage. Caroline Hanna climbed gingerly out of the Volkswagen; then, as if they had taken a moment to settle a minor disagreement, Le May and Niedrach hatched from opposite doors of the Plymouth. All three people started up the walk to the house together, and another monitor picked them up.
“Whyn’t you go greet your sweetie ’fore I yank this here chair out from under your tail?”
“That’s a good idea.”
Only by coincidence had Caroline and the agents arrived at the same time. She was surprised to see me, even more surprised to see Adam. She had come to provide RuthClaire with female companionship for the rest of the evening. But face to face with me again, Caroline was shy. She hoped to let her entire greeting consist of a friendly pat on my arm, but I pulled her to me and brushed her forehead with my lips. Niedrach interrupted to say that he and Le May had to talk to me in private, and Adam led Caroline into the studio.
“What is it?” I asked the investigators.
“We want you to come with us,” Le May said.
“Where? What for?”
Adam returned as if to eavesdrop on the rest of our talk. Le May hesitated, afraid to proceed in front of the habiline, and my stomach clenched.
“You must tell me, too,” Adam said. “I am deserving to hear.”
Niedrach nodded. “We want to see if Mr. Loyd can make an identification for us.”
“What kind of identification?” I asked.
“Take a ride with us,” Niedrach said. “We’ll show you.”
“I am going, too,” Adam declared.
Le May started to protest, but Niedrach shook his head. So, after telling the others we’d be back shortly, the four of us went out into the muggy summer evening under smog-blurred stars and got into the FBI agent’s Plymouth. A mosquito was trapped in the back seat with Adam and me, and we listened to its faint but annoying whine until the habiline jerked his head and snapped his mouth shut on the insect. He settled back into his seat. Helplessly, I stared at him.
“Forgive me, Mister Paul. I am edgy this night.”
Le May spoke into a hand-held mike from under the dash. “We’re on our way.”
Static answered.
At the bottom of Hurt Street, Le May turned right on Waverly, part of a historic enclave dense with trees and Victorian houses in various stages of decay or renovation. From Waverly, we wound onto the southwest-to-northeast diagonal of Euclid Avenue, eventually creeping uphill past a row of shops to the brightness of Little Five Points. We crossed Moreland and dipped away from the bustle of the Points into a neighborhood of shabby clapboard bungalows and red-brick apartment buildings from the 1940s. I had no idea where we were going, but Adam seemed to.
“The Little Five Points Unaffiliated Meditation Center?” he asked.
“That’s right,” Niedrach replied. “How did you know?”
“Here, for many Sundays and a few troubled weekdays, Miss RuthClaire and I took our church before my surgery. I liked it. It had no rigid doctrines and welcomed anyone who had a spiritual hungriness.”
Presently, then, Le May let the Plymouth coast to rest behind a Fulton County police car and an ambulance parked beside the Little Five Points Unaffiliated Meditation Center. A host of people stood on the narrow front lawn. The blue-and-white flasher on the squad car picked these people out of the darkness, again and again. The door to the Meditation Center—once, I could tell, a single-story brick house like many other houses here—stood open. The stained-glass fanlight above the door was illuminated from behind by a cruel electric glare. Obviously, the police had been here a while.
Niedrach told Adam and me that when we entered the building, we would see just what the Meditation Center director, Ryan Bynum, had found upon entering its sanctuary at 8:47 P.M. for a routine check of the premises. The policemen working this crime had restored the scene to the physical conditions that had greeted Bynum.
Le May had already threaded his way through some of the teen-age gawkers on the lawn. He beckoned us after. Adam and I reluctantly obeyed. One of the young people, recognizing Adam, came forward with a copy of
“You’re impeding a murder investigation,” Niedrach told him.
“Four letters,” the kid snarled. “Just his goddamn first name.”
Distractedly, Adam signed the magazine, printing ADAM beneath the image of his naked feet. The kid grumbled thanks and moved back into the crowd loitering nearby.
“He’s going to sell it to a speculator for two hundred or so bucks,” Niedrach said.
Adam shrugged.
In the church’s foyer, a man with a gold teardrop in his left ear lobe hugged Adam possessively. Tall but graceful, he had to stoop to do so. I knew without being introduced that this was Ryan Bynum, the Center’s director.
“Good to see you again, Adam,” Bynum said. “You’ve been away too long.”
Adam said, “I am not here to rejoin, but—”
“You can talk! My God, it’s a
“—to accompany Mister Paul. These agents think he may be able to identify the victim.”
Bynum was beside himself over Adam’s ability to speak, but, upon receiving a condensed version of the events that had brought it about, began to discuss tonight’s untoward happenings: “Some churches get firebombed. Some get defaced with graffiti. But ours draws a more creative, more neurotic, kind of vandal.” Bynum was sidling along the foyer wall so that we could squeeze past him into the living-room-sized sanctuary. “Whoever did it, well, he ought to be a member. He
The sanctuary, or main meditation room, was brightly lit—a departure from the way Bynum had found it only an hour ago, a departure from the aqueous gloom into which members had to tiptoe when they wanted to meditate or commune. Because of the lights, we could look across the sanctuary to the dais under a huge bronze mandala and see exactly what Niedrach and Le May wanted us to see, namely, the murder victim, who reposed in a leather lounger that someone had wrestled onto the dais so that it sat there like a laid-back throne.
Adam and I exchanged puzzled looks because a shaggy, orangish-red orangutan sprawled in the lounger. The creature wore a set of headphones, but its posture betrayed its lifelessness. Upside-down in its lap was a naked plastic doll: a black baby doll for a black child. It had fallen across the orangutan’s lap so that its head was wedged between one shaggy thigh and the lounger’s leather armrest.
“It’s a costume,” Niedrach said. “Mr. Bynum found the victim this way. The head comes off.” He wove his way through rows of loungers and divans to the dais. There, gripping the orangutan head at the neck, he turned it—as if trying to unscrew a diving helmet from a diving suit. A moment later, he lifted the head clear and gestured at the startling human visage protruding from the costume’s neck hole.
It was Nancy Teavers. Her head shone like a large mottled egg. Either she or Craig had shaved off every lock of her hair. The spiky white coiffure she had worn to Sinusoid Disturbances had been a wig. Whatever the case then, tonight she was bald. Her eyes bulged. Bruises discolored her cheeks. Her lips were bloated. I still recognized her as the unhappy waitress who had decided to go west to make her fortune. Instead, she had gone to Craig Puddicombe, and Craig had turned her into a punkette, a babysitter for the kidnapped T. P., and an orangutan. What did this grotesque progression mean? Perhaps a bizarre homicidal performance-art parody of Darwinism and evolutionary theory.
“Do you remember his first call?” I asked Niedrach. “He claimed he didn’t do violence.”
“We all knew he was lying… to himself as much as to us.”
Adam, who’d gone forward, started to pick the doll out of the victim’s orangutan lap, but Le May caught his wrist. A Fulton County detective, he said, would have to bag the doll for forensic analysis. Fingerprints, Mr. Montaraz, fingerprints.
“It proves our Paulie is dead,” Adam said. “That’s the doll’s terrible meaning.”
“Not necessarily,” I said.
“That’s right,” Ryan Bynum said. “How could it mean that? You don’t believe in voodoo, do you?” Ignorant of the kidnapping, Bynum had jumped to the conclusion that Adam was surrendering to an atavistic Carib superstition.
My unofficial identification made, the Fulton County detectives shooed us out so they could finish their work. As we stood on the lawn, two men with a stretcher entered the building and reappeared a few moments later carrying the costumed Nancy. The ambulance at curbside took her in and departed with her without benefit of siren or flasher. After all, what was the hurry?
“It looks as if she was strangled,” Le May told us. “But it didn’t happen here. The only sign of struggle has to do with rearranging furniture. No breaking and entering, either. Puddicombe used somebody’s membership card, opened the back door from the inside, and dragged Nancy in from the rear drive.”
“I am so sorry for her,” Adam said.
We left the site in Le May’s Plymouth, and Niedrach told us that shortly before noon, just three or four hours after most newsstands and drugstores had begun selling the latest
He had claimed to be a student at Georgia Tech, wanting the costume for some kind of fraternity prank. He had paid a deposit in cash—rather than with a check and the supporting evidence of a student ID, but the address he had given as his parents’ seemed more than peculiar in retrospect: it was Adam and RuthClaire’s address on Hurt Street. His name he had given as Greg Burdette, and for that he had shown a current driver’s license with a photo of his own likeness. He had struck the clerk as an oddly somber type to be renting an orangutan costume, but she had rationalized this anomaly of bearing as an attempt to complete the rental with a deadpan savoir-faire. In fact, once he had left the front counter, she had burst out laughing at his successful act.
“Did she see what he was driving?” (My obsessive concern.)
“Unfortunately, no,” Niedrach confessed.
Adam said, “No one here should tell Miss RuthClaire what we saw at Meditation Center. Already, she has enough to cope with.”
I looked at Adam. I had no doubt that in his mind’s eye was a picture of that black doll upside-down in Nancy Teavers’s lap.
But back at the house, RuthClaire got the truth from Adam in five minutes. He could not lie to her, and she would not be put off with stalling tactics or verbal evasions.
“You didn’t think I could handle the news, is that it?”
“I wanted only to—”
“To keep it from me. That’s sweet. But I’m not a little girl. I’m an adult.”
Small and forlorn, Adam stood in shadow with his back to the beaverboard panel in the downstairs studio, his profile at once heroic and prehistorically feral.
“Nancy dead, strangled, dressed in a monkey suit, put on display in Ryan Bynum’s Meditation Center. But why? To horrify us? To put us on notice?” RuthClaire paced among her canvases.
“A puke-livered terror tactic,” Bilker said from the far side of the big room.
“Paulie’s dead already,” RuthClaire told us, ignoring the security guard. “Or else Craig plans to kill him this evening. We’ll find the body tomorrow.”
“That’s a defeatist look at the situation, ma’am,” Le May said.
“You think I
“Mine, too,” Adam said—so simply that I was moved for both of them.
“It’s the waiting that’s killing me,” RuthClaire said. “Craig’s told us what he’s going to do, and we’re
“This such fella takes it very badly,” Adam said.
RuthClaire went to him, and they embraced. Then she turned to Caroline. “Come upstairs, Caroline. I want to lie down, but it would be nice to have somebody to talk to.”
The two women left. I sipped at a Scotch on the rocks that Bilker had made for me. I felt a hand on my arm. It belonged to Adam. Its grip on my biceps tightened inexorably. “You’ve had enough, Mister Paul.”
“I haven’t even had
“Abraxas,” Adam said.
“What?”
“We should go to Abraxas. I, Mister Paul,
“What’s going on at Abraxas? Aren’t they closed on Mondays, like the High and most independent galleries? Besides, they’d all be closed by
Adam said, “Nancy Teavers dead in Ryan Bynum’s church is a red flag waving. Interpret the signal. Where might Mr. Puddicombe next appear?”
“Abraxas?”
Bilker Moody had his hands in a stainless-steel basin full of suds and highball glasses. “Hell, yes,” he said. “
Niedrach and Le May were no longer with us. Back in the kitchen with Webb? Probably. “Tell Niedrach and the FBI men,” I urged Adam.
“I don’t think so. They are worthy gentlemen. I like them very much. But none of them has read the signals.”
“Tell them, then, for God’s sake!”
“This is my fight, Mister Paul. I am the cause of it all, basically. If you are not coming with me, promise to say no word to the special-agent gentlemen when I go.”
“And if I don’t promise?”
Adam eyed me speculatively. Then he gave me his fear grin, his lips drawn back to reveal his realigned but still dauntingly primitive teeth. “I will bite you, Mister Paul.” In the light from the cut-glass swag lamp at the end of the bar, Adam’s teeth winked at me like ancient scrimshawed ivory.
“You give me no choice,” I said.
“I’ll get my jacket and some heat,” Bilker said, wiping his hands on a towel. He exited the wet-bar booth and trotted off toward his converted pantry.
We told the agents we were going out for some fresh air and doughnuts from Dunkin’ Donuts. We’d bring back whatever they wanted—cream-filled, buttermilk, old-fashioned, they could choose.
“Make it quick,” Le May cautioned. “Mrs. Montaraz can take a call upstairs, but we’ll need your input after we’ve taped it. Going out’s risky. You could miss it.”
“Thirty minutes,” Adam said. “No more.”
We took my Mercedes because I did not feel competent to handle the hatchback with its elevated foot pedals or Bilker’s dented ’54 Chevy. I was driving, rather than Bilker, because Adam wanted Bilker to have his hands free. He was riding shotgun, a position of “great importance.” Now, though, it seemed funny to be driving so big and expensive an automobile as my Mercedes to a one-sided rendezvous with a murderer.
Adam directed me to park on Ralph McGill Boulevard about two blocks below the old school buildings housing the Abraxas art complex. We would have to walk the rest of the way, but Craig was not likely to shoot out my windshield or riddle a sheet of the car’s body metal with bullet holes.
It had begun to rain, lightly. An ocean of upside-down combers rumbled above the treetops. Traffic was nonexistent, and the three of us trudged uphill on the margin of the street. The plummeting runoff had not yet acquired volume or momentum, our shoes remained dry, and the cooling thunderstorm seemed an ally rather than an enemy.
“Dristle,” I said. “That’s what Livia George calls a rain like this.”
“Very good,” Adam replied.
Bilker halted at the top of the hill. An elm-lined row of clapboard houses curved downhill to our left. In the dark, we could see Atlanta’s skyline, traffic lights reflecting on wet pavement between Abraxas and the city. The old school building loomed in the rain like an insane asylum from a florid gothic novel. Its studio annex perched on the downslope of the ill-kept property as if it might soon slide away, like a stilt-supported house on the California coast. Brooding. Medieval. (Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe would have loved the place.)
“No security?” Bilker said. “At a gallery?”
“The third-floor galleries are between shows,” Adam said. “So the studio wing is tightly locked.”
“Locked-schmocked. Folks will pick locks. This place needs round-the-clock security. Needs some lights on it, too.”
“Needs its grass mowed,” I said.
“No money for a guard,” Adam said. “No money for lights.”
I remembered that on my first trip to Abraxas, David Blau had griped about the current administration’s miserly treatment of the arts. Of course, Blau and his staff members could, and did, initiate money-raising projects of their own, but funding a security force had always taken a back seat to strong financial support for major new shows and deserving artists. For the two weeks of the Kander-Montaraz-Haitian exhibit, Blau had in fact hired a full-time security guard, but no one served that function tonight because there was nothing noteworthy to protect.
Adam said we must enter from the back. We crossed an asphalt drive that dead-ended forty or fifty feet farther on, and crept into the shadow of the print shop next to the school. We advanced single-file through soggy leaves and grass, hung a left at the end of the print shop, and wound up staring into the rear half of the facility’s car park. Trees closed off the back of the lot. Power-company spools and strange varieties of metallic trash showed in the gaps among the trees as mysterious lumps and silhouettes. Tonight, unlike in February, the trees’ branches were weighted with summer foliage, and the mist dripping through the leaves made the asphalt echo as if it were a basement drying room with dozens of frilly black-green dresses on its lines. We entered the shelter of a covered rampway leading directly to the main building’s rear entrance. From this ramp, we saw the whole parking lot and, straight across from us, the studio wing enclosing the lot on that side. Near the building’s door sat the only vehicle in the lot, a red GM pickup with its tailgate lowered. Whoever had parked it had placed an extension ladder in its loadbed so that the ladder cleared the rampway’s corrugated roof and leaned against the wall about twenty feet above the covered door.
“He’s here,” I said. “The bastard’s actually here.”
Adam shushed me. He told Bilker and me to stay under cover while he tried to determine exactly how Craig had entered Abraxas. Adam would go because he was less likely to be seen than Bilker or I. So, bending his back almost parallel to the asphalt, he did a graceful Groucho Marx slither that carried him to a crouching position behind the GM. He tilted his head to gaze up into the rain at the ladder and the wall. Then he Groucho Marx’d his way back to us and said that Craig had apparently climbed to the full extension of the ladder and then thrown a rope with a grappling hook into the barnlike window on the building’s third floor. This window belonged to a vacant supply room across an interior corridor from the curator’s office. The grappling hook was still caught on the sill, the rope from it dangling down a foot or two below the top of the ladder. Craig probably did not intend to use it again, though, because he could far more easily come down the stairs and let himself out the back than risk the slippery rope and the slippery ladder by which he had gained entry.
“We ought to call the house,” I said. “Tell Niedrach.”
“No. Up there, Mister Paul, I am going now.” Adam took a key from his trouser pocket and gave it to Bilker. “Go inside and guard the stairs so that, by them, the villain does not make successful his getaway.”
“What am
“Following me up is okay and probably silenter than taking stairs. Or wait down here. I am happier, though, should you come.”
“Why?”
“Morale support: To subdue young Puddicombe may take two of us—someone to bludger him, someone to rescue Tiny Paul.”
“Then you’d better let me do it,” Bilker said.
“I fear you’re too heavy,” Adam said. “Paul is much lighter.” He looked me over a tad grimly. “By comparison.”
I was scared. Neither Adam nor I had a firearm. Bilker would have the Ruger, of course, but he would be standing in the downstairs corridor waiting for Craig to come to him. Craig might not choose to do so. He’d have a weapon or two of his own, and if Adam and I bumbled into him in the galleries, he would not hesitate to cut us down. More important, if he had rappeled up the wall after climbing the first third of the way on his extension ladder, could we expect him to have T. P.? Our chances of retrieving the child alive dwindled by the moment. I think even Adam knew that.
To Bilker’s and my surprise, the habiline shed his clothes. He pulled off his shoes, shimmied out of his trousers, and ducked free of his shirt. “I am silenter this way, and better camouflaged… like a commando.” He looked at me. “You too?”
“Oh, no.”
“The shoes, then. The shoes and socks. To make you have a grip both firm and silent on the ladder rungs.”
Bilker grinned, enjoying my discomfiture. I removed my shoes and socks. Adam nodded the bodyguard toward the door, and Bilker used the key to open it. He gave us a thumbs-up sign and disappeared into the concrete maw of the building. Adam and I ran to the truck’s loadbed, eased into it, and squatted in the rain looking at the great hinged door high in the rear wall. Next to this door, or shutter, were three tall windows of a more conventional design; they lacked glass, and someone had fitted them with opaque sheets of polyethylene, which, now tattered, made faint popping noises. My fear deepened. I was developing, while still on the ground (or near it), a bad case of acrophobia. A surreal kind of dizziness gripped me. Adam attributed to me more courage and athletic ability than I had. By this route, I could fall to my death trying to enter Abraxas.
“Adam—”
“I will go first. No need to brace ladder. Side of truck suffices.” Naked, the mist matting his body hair, he swung to the pickup’s side to mount the ladder. Bouncing on its rungs and pulling at its uprights, he tested its reliability. “Is okay,” he announced, and he climbed it like a monkey shinnying lickety-split up a tree. At the top, Adam grabbed the rope hanging from the sill and threw himself clear of the ladder. Expecting him to come crashing down on the rampway’s corrugated roof, I flinched. Adam’s feet hit the vertical face of the wall, though, and he walked himself up the rope to the hinged window shutter. Here, he turned and squatted on the sill, a gargoyle on a somewhat shoddy cathedral. The gargoyle beckoned to me.
I willed myself to move. My bare feet tingled on the ladder’s cold aluminum rungs. I climbed with my eyes on Adam. If I looked down, I’d panic. The habiline drew nearer as I rose, but still seemed far, far away. At the top of the ladder, I had no idea what to do. I could not grab the hanging rope without letting go of the ladder’s uprights. Trapped between heaven and hell, I laid my face against the unyielding bricks of the building. Dear God. Dear God.
A creaking sound made me look up again. A second rope fell out of the sky, to slap and abrade my forehead. Adam had pushed the hinged door of the window outward, revealing a block-and-tackle by which the gallery sometimes lifted heavy objets d’art to the third floor. I slipped the loop of this rope around my waist and gripped it high with both hands. Adam, holding the other end, backed away from the window, and I began to rise, my feet dangling like stunned pink fish. I closed my eyes until the faint squeaking of the pulley had ceased and the window ledge was there before me as an accomplished fact. More noisily than I wanted, I went over it into the supply room.
Adam touched my shoulder. “Somewhere he is in the galleries. As yet, I think, the rain has let us escape his detection. Soon, he will return. Come.” Even his whisper was something of a growl. I disentangled myself from the rope, and together we crossed the supply room to the door. We eased through into nearly impenetrable dark, hearing the rain as a steady drumming, a hum like that of a huge refrigerator. Without it, Craig would have long since detected us—or
We crept past Blau’s huge office into Gallery One: a bleak, echoing immensity. A miserly kind of illumination entered via the horizontal windows at the top of the wall fronting McGill Boulevard. No paintings, installations, or sculptures. Abraxas was between shows, and the galleries reposed high above the street like empty boxcars. Gallery Three was even darker than the one in which we were standing. It had no windows. But from Gallery Two, the chamber in which Blau had shown M.-K. Kander’s upsetting photos, pale light spilled. It lay across Gallery One’s scuffed hardwood floor like a film of buttermilk, a liquid gleam in the dimness. Adam pointed at it. With his other hand, he clutched my arm. I imagined him clutching a habiline lieutenant on a prehistoric African savannah, giving directions for a life-or-death hunt, just as he gripped me now. What we did in the next one or two minutes would no doubt determine the outcome of our stalk.
Adam said, “I go to door. You make noise. He come out, I grab. This not work, you shout,
Adam floated, making no noise, across the room, flattened his back against the wall, and twisted his torso to look into Gallery Two. Then he vented such a powerful cry that it vibrated my bones, bounced from the walls, and flooded the building like a dam burst of gasoline, threatening to plunge everything into a chaos of fire. Still yelling, Adam charged into the gallery. Without listening for them, my ears registered Bilker’s footsteps and belugalike snorts as he pounded upstairs to the third floor.
“You goddamn hibber!” a voice in the lighted chamber cried.
A gunshot barked, reverberated, pinged away. Fear forgotten, or submerged, I sprinted toward the sound. A two-legged blur in stained whites burst from the chamber, bumped me hard, and spun away from the impact as I crashed down on my tailbone and slid backward across the floor. Sprawling sidelong, I saw this figure disappear into the supply room through which Adam and I had entered.
As I tried to sit back up, Adam scampered in from Gallery Two, one gnarled hand holding his forearm just below the elbow. Blood glistened on his hairy fingers, oozed from the wound beneath them. He paused to regard me sitting on the floor, but his eyes danced frantically from me to the supply room.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Yeah. Okay.”
“’Bye. Be back.” He hurried toward the supply room, and I shouted a warning that the other man still had his gun. As soon as I did, the figure in white reemerged from the supply room and fired several more shots into the gallery. Flames leapt from the stubby barrel like the sinister tongue flickers of a gila monster. Adam dove to his left, while I rolled over and over, praying the bullets gouging the nearby hardwood would not ricochet into my body. The gunman decided against trying to escape by rope and ladder, unlatched the big door between Blau’s office and the supply room, and slipped into the stairwell opposite the one by which Bilker Moody had just now reached the galleries. Adam, back on his feet, pursued the fleeing man.
Another gunshot sounded in the dark, this one from behind me. I ducked and covered my head. Two more shots bit into the third floor’s sundered stillness. I uncovered cautiously. Bilker had shot the lock off the door blocking his way into Abraxas’s main display rooms. He kicked that door open and waddled into view like a trash-compacted Marshal Dillon. “Why’re you sittin’ there on your butt, Mr. Loyd?” He blew on the barrel of his Ruger. “Where’d they go?”
“Down. Out. Lot of good that pistol of yours did us.”
Bilker looked about, narrowing and widening his eyes, to get them to adjust. The light spilling from Gallery Two seemed the major source of his discomfort. He shielded his eyes with his hands.
“Craig wounded Adam,” I said. “He damned near
“Mr. Montaraz posted me downstairs.”
“You’re not there now. Craig’s getting away.”
“You think I’m fuckin’ twins, a upstairs Bilker to hold your hand, a downstairs Bilker to guard the exits?” He’d just lumbered up three flights, exertion equivalent to an average man’s doing the same thing toting fifty pounds of potatoes. Miraculously, he was not breathing all that hard. “I got one body, doofus. It don’t do simultaneous appearances at two or three different locales.”
“I guess not. Forgive me.”
“Mr. Montaraz’ll catch the sucker. The bastard’s doomed in a foot race.” But he had finished bantering. “Where’s Paulie?”
The question sobered me. I nodded at Gallery Two. “In there, I’m afraid. The scream you heard—it was Adam’s. Something in there set it off.”
Side by side, we entered the peculiarly shaped room. Bilker stared for several moments at what it revealed. Then he mumbled a threat against the perpetrator, backed away, turned, and trotted off after Adam and Paulie’s murderer. I heard him yank open the stairwell door and its wheeze as it shut behind him. Then there was nothing but the air-conditioner hum of the rain.
Evidently, Craig had brought T. P. up the ladder with him dead. He’d carried the kid in a cardboard box with makeshift rubber shoulder harnesses (pieces of innertubing) pushed through slits in the cardboard. The box lay at the far end of the gallery. It had contained a few other items besides my godson’s body—a sheaf of
I wondered what her name was. Babyland General gave them all their own names, no two alike, and Xavier Roberts, their creator, and his staff had once sent birthday cards to the dolls and their owners on the dolls’ “placement dates.” Many times at the West Bank, I’d had to fix a special plate for a doll whose pouting adoptive mother had refused to eat her own meal unless Abigail Faye or Dorothy Lilac was served something, too. We had made a little extra money from the intractability of these little girls, but the sniveling surrender of their parents and the sight of a moronic fabric-sculpture doll leaning into a bowl of chocolate chile had always galled me. Moreover, the supposedly individualistic Little People had cost seven or eight times what a poorer or less indulgent parent would pay for a plastic doll of comparable size—a doll like the one Craig had left in Nancy Teavers’s lap at the Unaffiliated Meditation Center on Euclid Avenue.
Anyway, this naked Little Person hung four feet off the gallery floor on a piece of nylon cord. The cord was tied to a movable metal track just below the ceiling. As naked as his female companion, Tiny Paul hung to her left on another cord. Both pathetic little figures were lifeless, the doll from the moment of its manufacture, Tiny Paul deprived of breath at an instant I could not estimate. Limp blue balloons clung to the mouths of both figures. Craig had stuck them to their lips with mucilage. Excess mucilage glittered on their faces like dried semen. Other limp blue balloons lay strewn about the floor as if the Great Inflator had lost either his faith or his mind. By contrast, Paulie’s minute penis poked out like the valve on a bicycle tire, mocking the flaccid bladders on the floor. I sagged against a wall and knocked four or five
That’s what Craig had been doing when Adam looked in, pasting up magazine covers, applying them with a hand-held brush and a solution of wallpaper paste. A Tupperware container full of the oatmealish goo was propped at an angle against the base of the door. Craig had brought everything upstairs with him in his cardboard box: murder victim, doll, magazine covers, cord, brush, wallpaper paste. A performance-art activity of fatal comprehensiveness, the ultimate existential Dadaism. I slumped to the floor, dragging more covers down with me. Fie on art. Fie on THE NEW PHOTOGRAPHY. Fie on Craig Puddicombe.
Looking at my godson’s rotating shadow on the floor, and then at my own upward-jutting toes, I began to weep. This little piggie went to market, this little piggie stayed home. I studied my toes through a distorting film of tears. They were fascinating, my toes, each indisputably unique: Abigail Faye, Dorothy Lilac, Hepzibah Rose, Karma Leigh, and Cherry Helena. The other five had names, too. They were all detachable. You could unplug them from my feet and adopt them out to deserving amputees. Some of the sorry farts would treat them badly, of course, and maim them in unconscionable ways that made you ashamed to belong to a species possessing toes. Detachable little piggies suspended from gallows, so many innocent little lynching victims….
Bilker had his hand on my shoulder. “You didn’t cut the poor little fella down, Mr. Loyd?” His voice was gentle.
“I was going to.”
“I’ll do it.”
A scruple surged into my murky brain. “Should you touch him? This is a crime scene, Bilker. Shouldn’t everything stay as it is?”
“The poor kid’s been away from home long enough as it is.”
I began to get to my piggies, my bare, dirty feet.
Bilker doubled a loop in the nylon cord above Tiny Paul’s head, inserted the blade of his pocketknife, and sawed at the cord vigorously. “Do I give a shit,” he said, “about the holiness of crime scenes? I’ve just blown Puddicombe’s fuckin’ face away. Which the Effin’ Bee Aye ain’t likely to be crazy about, neither.” He sawed and sawed. “And I’ll be damned if even
Did I want to hold him? I must have appeared to, for Bilker brought the child to me and put him in my arms. He was cold and rigid, like a plastic doll. The small pudgy half-breed who had charmed Caroline in Everybody’s. The same but not the same. A shell. A gallery room without statues or paintings. Where had all the life gone?
And where was Adam? I asked Bilker.
“Puttin’ on his clothes. I tied a hankie ’round his goddamn elbow. It’s not too bad. C’mon, let’s not make him shinny up here after us again. He might pass out.”
I pulled the balloon off T. P.’s lip and dropped it into the container of wallpaper paste by the door. We left the galleries by the stairs that Bilker had earlier climbed and found Adam in the parking lot, fully dressed except for his shoes. He was holding his shoes with his fingers hooked inside their heels so they hung down beside his knee. As he stood in the middle of the parking lot, rain slowly filled the oily puddles around his bare feet. Puddicombe’s truck sat behind him with its driver’s-side door open and the driver slumped forward, his head between the open door and the steering wheel. The ladder once propped against the wall from the loadbed lay on the asphalt, on an impotent diagonal.
Apparently, Craig had pulled the ladder clear of the rampway roof, driven out of the lot, and then reversed directions in an attempt to back over his habiline pursuer. Adam had leapt into the truck, Craig had made the GM fishtail to shake him out, and Bilker had lumbered out of Abraxas in time to fire his Ruger .357 magnum through the pickup’s open window into Craig’s head. Puddicombe had been so focused on bucking Adam out of the truck that he had not even seen Bilker. As a result, his determination to leave tire tracks on Adam had proved fatal… for him.
I was not sorry. I was relieved.
Bilker and I stepped through the fallen ladder’s rungs and joined Adam in the middle of the lot. I held Paulie out to him. Adam set his shoes down, in a puddle that half-submerged them, and took the child, holding T. P. with his hands under his back so he could nuzzle his son’s bloated belly and mumble comfort into his death-stopped ears.
Bilker approached the truck and tumbled the killer from the driver’s seat. With a sucking thud, his corpse sprawled onto the ebony pavement, most of its face gone. He was unrecognizable as anything but an adult male in stained painter’s coveralls. Where had the malevolent energy of his life just fled? Bilker kicked the corpse three or four times, each kick more vicious than the last.
“Don’t,” Adam said. “For him, it is over.”
Bitterly, Bilker said, “It ain’t over for you and Mrs. Montaraz, or for me. We’ll be livin’ with the fuckin’ fallout from this for the rest of our lives.”
Still holding his dead son, Adam walked over to Bilker and looked him full in the face. “I don’t think so. We will not forget, but later our shroud of grief will unravel, and we will be as good as new again.” Bilker and I gaped at Adam. Bilker turned and spat into a puddle, but we both understood there was something willful about Adam’s saintly serenity. It was too soon for forgiveness and reconciliation, too soon to offer up T. P.’s innocent body as a sacrifice to human understanding. Bilker and I were appalled. We had angers and hatreds to be worked out, sorrows and sufferings from which to distill a thin, bittersweet balm. Magnanimity, right now, was an emotional non sequitur.
“I’ll get the car,” I said. But Bilker and Adam walked with me, and we drove back to Hurt Street without saying another word.
Fingerprints identified the man shot by Bilker as Craig Raymond Puddicombe. In the dead man’s wallet were two driver’s licenses, both of them false. One identified him as Teavers, Elvis Lamar. He’d taken great care to use this alias and the Montaraz address near Inman Park when he did not wish to be traced to his rental property, a frame house on the southeastern arc of I-285. The other driver’s license gave his name as Burdette, Gregory R. It pinpointed the location of his house off the perimeter expressway. As Greg Burdette, Craig had lived in Atlanta for nearly eight months, working in a collateral branch of the profession practiced by Adam and RuthClaire. Like them, he was a painter. Unlike them, he did houses, garages, and signboards. He worked fairly regularly, but had to scratch for jobs to stay ahead of his debts.
For two reasons, the FBI let Special Agent Niedrach and his GBI colleagues conclude the kidnapping investigation. First, Niedrach and Davison had handled the Klan episode in Beulah Fork at the end of last summer; and, second, Craig Puddicombe and his accomplice-victim had never taken Tiny Paul out of the Greater Atlanta area.
Therefore, local agents interviewed the woman who had rented “Greg Burdette” his house, his most frequent fellow painters, and some of the contractors and home owners who had hired him. Their assessment was that Burdette lived quietly and frugally, never talked about his past, never shirked on a job, and tackled even the dull business of caulking a rain gutter as if it were a signal step in a fiscal game plan that would one day free him of the need to paint houses. Everyone who had known him, in fact, assumed that his highest purpose in life was to become rich. Although he never flaunted this ambition, he took care of his money, made his bids competitive without underselling himself, and insisted on payment in full before leaving the premises of any completed job. He set forth this condition at the outset of every enterprise, and his reputation as a conscientious workman—one who’d clean rain gutters, scrape away old paint, apply reliable primers, and so on—rarely failed to win his employers’ agreement.
His Achilles heel, if he had one, was an inability to work with blacks. He refused to do so. Blacks never appeared on any of the painting crews he hired out to or put together himself. Two or three times, at least, he had passed up jobs because a contractor had wanted him to share the work with a black painter. Similarly, he painted the home of a black only if he could work with a crew consisting solely of whites. This seldom happened. Oddly, though, his refusal to work with blacks never led him to badmouth them. Stereotypical comments about intelligence levels, food stamps, welfare Cadillacs, and illegitimate babies never passed his lips. He shut down on the subject of blacks altogether, visibly holding himself in, as if struggling to obey the homely injunction, “
One former associate remembered that Greg strongly approved of the Fulton County DA’s crusade against pornography. Massage parlors, adult bookstores, and adult theaters disgusted him. He would cuss a blue streak with no qualm or discernible sense that some people might find such language as offensive as he found photographs of naked people. In hot weather, he worked in denim cutoffs and tennis shoes, shirtless and proud of it—but, given a context marginally interpretable as erotic, bare skin outraged him. Once, during a lunch break, he had yanked a men’s magazine from a seventeen-year-old apprentice who had held up the foldout for his approval. “This is shit you’re lookin’ at!” he had raged.
The house on I-285 yielded even more information. As Greg Burdette, Craig had been careful not to subscribe to any publications that state or federal law-enforcement agencies might classify as racist or provocatively right-wing. But he had bought them from newsstands, where possible, and had taken pains not to visit the same newsstands often enough to give their operators any real grasp of his reading habits. These were magazines devoted to firearms, post-nuclear-holocaust survival, legal redress for white “victims” of affirmative-action laws, and creationism. Along with these magazines, agents had found, stuffed in drawers, circulars announcing Klan meetings and pamphlets on many topics from ultraconservative politicians. Also, Craig had possessed a small arsenal of unregistered handguns, most with serial numbers metal-rasped or sandpapered away. A bulletin board in his bedroom displayed clippings from the Atlanta newspapers about racial conflict and crimes perpetrated by blacks. Prominent among these clippings was one recounting the acquittal of some Klansmen in a Greensboro, North Carolina, murder trial. Craig had marked every word in the headline with a red highlighter.
Also in the house: items suggesting that Nancy Teavers had lived there with him at least three months—clothing, toilet articles, mementoes of her marriage to Craig’s dead friend, E. L. In fact, the arrangement of sleeping quarters in the little house—Nancy occupying a room that Craig had once set aside as a business office—strongly suggested that they’d treated each other as brother and sister. The punk wardrobe that Nancy had worn to Sinusoid Disturbances, the GBI agents discovered not in Nancy’s bedroom but in a steamer trunk at the foot of Craig’s bed. Perhaps he had had a fetishistic fascination with such items. The clothes in Nancy’s “closet,” a cardboard chifforobe purchased from a long-defunct Forest Park dry cleaners, had about them a small-town conventionality totally at odds with the shabby glitter of the getup in the trunk. Moreover, Nancy had filled her bedroom with decorative pillows, stuffed animals, even a few dolls. The Little People doll that Craig had hung up in Abraxas beside T. P. had been Nancy’s. Her late husband had given it to her for Christmas over three years ago. An interview with Nancy’s mother revealed that, in the privacy of her mobile home in Beulah Fork, the young woman had behaved around that fabric-sculpture infant—Bonnie Laurel—as if it were a living baby. More than anything, Nancy’s mother told the GBI interviewer, her daughter had wanted to bear her own child. She and E. L. had just about decided to take the plunge when… but if you knew E. L.’s fate, those words constituted an unfortunate turn of phrase.
Craig had strangled Nancy in the little house off I-285. The
As for Tiny Paul… Is there any need to continue? The reader can imagine the details of the child’s execution far more easily than I can write them.
Late on Tuesday afternoon, the child’s body was shipped to a crematorium in Macon. On Wednesday, his ashes were returned to the Montarazes in an ornate funerary urn. They had decided together on this means of disposing of the corpse, and, upon the recovery of Tiny Paul’s ashes, they observed a private memorial service in their own home. Bilker Moody attended these rites, but Caroline Hanna and I did not because Adam had asked me to run an errand in Beulah Fork—to visit Craig’s family and to invite his mother to bury Craig beside T. P.’s ashes in a state-approved plot of my pecan grove on Paradise Farm. It was an errand I might not have accomplished without Caroline along for moral support.
Public reaction to Tiny Paul’s murder was prolonged, sometimes thoughtful, occasionally fulsome, and always wearying. The President sent a wire, as did other prominent heads of state, including the Pope. A triumvirate of East African leaders released a joint communiqué offering the Montarazes citizenship in their countries and free transportation “home.” A. P. Blair, the Zarakali paleoanthropologist, sent a two-page handwritten letter of commiseration and belated apology, but neither RuthClaire nor Adam could deduce from his self-referential prose the specific injustice for which he was apologizing. A host of network commentators and TV evangelists delivered eulogies. Every major daily newspaper in the country ran an editorial. In Atlanta, by special gubernatorial dispensation, the flags on the capitol grounds were flown at half-mast. Even more impressive, a procession of people clad in crepe marched in triple columns through Inman park to the mournful music of drums, fifes, and bagpipes. In Beulah Fork, I closed the West Bank for the remaining five days of our work week.
Georgia Highway Patrolmen directed traffic. Uninvited out-of-towners they sent back to the interstate. Relatives, friends, and invited locals, they checked through the front gates of Paradise Farm. They also saw to it that those who could not park their vehicles inside the walls pulled them safely off the two-lane connecting Tocqueville and Beulah Fork.
Through the window of the upstairs bedroom we’d shared, Caroline estimated that nearly every inhabitant of Beulah Fork had showed up—nothing like a funeral to draw people together and nothing like a double funeral for a killer and his final victim to swell the crowd a hundredfold. My parched front lawn swarmed with would-be mourners. Most women wore Sunday dresses or tailored Sunday suits. Most men, ties knotted beneath their Adam’s apples like tourniquets, sported linen or seersucker jackets. A gay solemnity informed their movements. Some children with scrubbed faces clung to the adults’ hands. Other children, more eager, darted through the maundering crowd to find good places in the pecan grove from which to watch the ceremony.
“Thank God we don’t have to feed this bunch,” Caroline said.
Standing at a mirror trying to put a Windsor knot in a new tie, I grunted.
Fifteen security guards roamed the grounds, while a sixteenth had his vantage on the widow’s-walk just above the room that Caroline and I were in. The Montarazes and I were sharing the cost of the guards, RuthClaire and Adam because the FBI had told them that most of their ransom money would be recovered, I because I hoped to keep a few of the rowdier mourners out of my flowerbeds and shrubbery.
Caroline kept tabs on the number of mourners here for Craig Puddicombe and for Tiny Paul. So far, she said, the
“Have you seen Craig’s mother?”
“Bilker met her at the gate and took her around back fifteen or twenty minutes ago. She’s fine.”
“Does she know Bilker shot her son?”
“I don’t think so. I hope not.”
Beyond the gate, Caroline saw vans belonging to the Atlanta, Columbus, and Tocqueville newspapers, and three or four TV news vans too. I had asked the highway patrol to keep them from entering. I had also ordered my security people to apprehend any intruders and return them to the gate. Paradise Farm was private property, today’s ceremony was to benefit family and guests, and reporters in their capacity as reporters were not welcome. If they chose to ignore these fiats, the Montarazes would sue them for invasion of privacy while I pressed charges for unlawful trespass.
At last, I signaled to Caroline I was ready to go. To my shame, she had finished dressing at least ten minutes before me. Her knee-length white dress had bunched sleeves and a rectangle of blue-and-white English smocking across the bodice. She put her arm through mine, and we left the room together.
“I could not have done this if RuthClaire had come,” she said.
She was talking about spending the night with me in my former wife’s old house. It had seemed strange to me, too. Had RuthClaire accompanied Adam to Paradise Farm, I would have been no more able to share a bed with Caroline than Caroline with me. But my ex had not come to Beulah Fork. The very thought of a double funeral for her son and his murderer had appalled her. Therefore, she and Adam had had a private ceremony on Hurt Street. Afterward, she had flown to Charlotte to visit an octogenarian maiden aunt and to recuperate from an ordeal that would always haunt her. She was there now, boycotting Adam’s ostentatious show of generosity and forgiveness.
In the back yard, Adam stood on the deck facing a crowd that pressed against the cedar platform and spread out into the pecan grove. In a grassy area cordoned off with red velvet ropes and brass posts, Caroline and I joined the Puddicombes. We stood right in front of the deck, and none of the Puddicombes looked at or spoke to us as we entered. I nodded at familiar faces outside the paddock, but to most of the mourners our arrival was a sign to shut up and stop jostling. Only the midges and a few frolicsome mockingbirds in the pecan trees refused to settle down.
“Welcome to these sacred rites,” Adam said. Of all those present, only Caroline, Bilker, and I had ever heard him speak before, and the guttural aspect of his voice—its powerful
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the habiline said. He gave everyone a painful grimace, almost a fear-grin. “For most of my last year in your strange country, it has worried me, the problem of what I am to you and how I must be standing spiritually in the scales of God. Longer, I will not worry. We all come from and go back to dust.”
“Amen!” said Livia George behind us. She, Hazel Upchurch, and a small contingent of local blacks occupied an area between the trees and the sundeck.
“My dead son had a soul, as did the young man who murdered him. And I, Adam Montaraz, citizen and exile, habiline and human, have a soul—as does the heartbroken mother of Craig Puddicombe. All God’s children, I say unto you, have souls.”
“Praise the Lord,” said a man next to Hazel Upchurch.
“All who suffer and know that they suffer, all who yearn for solace and know that they yearn, all who have heavenly expectations and know that they have them—all such, I emphatically say, have souls, for it is our souls that suffer, yearn, expect, and
“Amen,” murmured many people approvingly.
“My God,” I whispered, “he’s preaching a full-bore sermon.”
Caroline shushed me.
“The soul is what the body does, I say. It is also the perceptive self-knowledge of its doing what it does. Paulie, my dead son, was beginning to grow into such soulful awareness. His soul, I must tell you, was beginning to bloom. No one here today, I fear, can guess at the shape toward which it was tending, but in my heart—yes, my father’s proudness speaks now—I am almost sure it would have been beautiful, very beautiful.”
“Praise God.”
“The soul of Craig Puddicombe had already opened.” He gestured at the
“Growing up, he was always a good boy!” shouted Craig Puddicombe’s mother. “His soul was as handsome as anybody’s!”
This outburst embarrassed Mrs. Puddicombe. She folded her arms beneath her breasts and hunched her shoulders. Caroline reached as if to pat her on the arm, but the woman leaned into her father-in-law, a sickly man with glazed eyes, to avoid an outsider’s touch.
“I am very sure that was so,” Adam told the woman, gazing at her with a puzzled expression. “He did as other children do, and his soul was what he did. Later, his doings—and thus his soul—fell under sway of older, more twisted souls, and so began to deform its youngling beauty toward these unhappy shapes. In children, my many friends from Beulah Fork, the soul is very plastic.”
“The soul ain’t plastic, Mister Adam!” shouted a black man next to Livia George. Several people, including two devout fundamentalist whites, seconded this objection.
“Never do I mean to imply the soul is what you would call, well, a synthetic polymer,” Adam said. “Please understand. The soul is immaterial. It has no location. But because it is what the body does and knows, it can be shaped. Metaphorically, I say. Likewise literally. All this, I have learned painfully in your great but strange country.”
“The soul don’t have nothing to do with the body!” shouted Ruben Decker, my neighbor one farm to the south. “It’s spiritual and everlasting!” Adam, somewhat sadly, was shaking his head. Other people in the crowd, primarily men, loudly proclaimed both a rigorous body-soul dichotomy and the immortality of the soul in that transtemporal realm known as heaven. Their phraseology was country allegory—“The body die, but the soul rise up!” “Gonna live forever with Jesus!”—but the message, a kind of received Protestant consensus, set Adam back on his heels.
My hands had begun to sweat. To Caroline, I whispered, “Can you believe this? A theological donnybrook in my own back yard.”
Adam took off his top hat and peered into it as if searching for the proper reply to those whose ire he had aroused. As he readied to speak, the sounds of the rotary blades of a helicopter—
Raising his hands, Adam called, “Please, everyone! Let the security persons do their work! No pretext here for rushings about and shovings!” These admonitions calmed many in the crowd, but the hubbub prompted by the helicopter’s arrival kept Adam from continuing the funeral rites. For reassurance, I took Caroline’s hand.
Presently, an entourage of three men in expensive suits, flanked by guards, strode around my house’s corner. The leading figure in this procession was the Right Reverend Dwight “Happy” McElroy. With film-star winks, victorious-politico smiles, and aw-shucks-country-boy nods, he acknowledged the disbelieving delight of many of the mourners on hand. His son Duncan marched two or three steps behind him, while his other meticulously dressed lieutenant—a man with a blond flattop and a suspicious eye, the civilian equivalent of a Secret Service agent—stayed at McElroy’s elbow.
McElroy escaped only by mounting the sundeck and walking toward Adam with his right hand extended. To cheers and applause, he and the habiline shook. My small friend appeared as perplexed as the tall evangelist looked amused and confident: Mutt and Jeff. The men were such physical contrasts that many people laughed.
“What’s ‘Happy’ McElroy doing here?” the evangelist suddenly asked, as if about to launch his own homily. “Well, my son Duncan and I are just in from Louisiana, via Atlanta, to share the grief of two bereaved families; also, to honor Adam Montaraz for a saintly gesture worthy of Our Lord Himself. We could
“Amen!”
“Tell it!”
“But I come for another important reason, too, dear friends—to bring back to this noble man the bread that he and his equally noble wife cast upon the waters of faith, hoping thereby to save the life of the unbaptized infant whose ashes occupy this jar.” McElroy nodded at the urn. He withdrew from an inside jacket pocket (peacock-patterned silk) an official-looking envelope. “Duncan and I, not to mention my wife and Christ-proclaiming partner, Eugenia Lisbeth, are proud to return to the Montarazes the five thousand dollars that their son’s murderer extorted from them as an illicit ‘donation’ to the Greater Christian Constituency. Let no one say that ‘Happy’ McElroy accepted blood money—other than that consecrated in the blood of the Lamb—for God’s work. Let no one say that a life devoted to love chose to profit from the wages of bigotry and hate. Here, Adam, take this check, to put it to more fruitful work than it has thus far done.”
A hush gripped the crowd. Even the mockingbirds had stopped calling and flitting about. McElroy’s offering—his refusal to profit by another’s misfortune—had paralyzed his sweating onlookers with holy wonder.
Adam put his hands behind his back. “Thank you, but I cannot accept it.”
McElroy beamed. “The saintliness of this man is going to be
Before the crowd could start
Everyone gawked, me with all the others, the evangelist and the habiline likewise visibly taken aback. The other Puddicombes, the woman’s in-laws and children, stumbled forward to uphold her demand.
“Yes,” Adam finally managed. “Give it to her.”
“But it’s made out to you,” McElroy said. “Not to this improvident person—who whelped the animal that killed your son and the frail woman that helped kidnap him.”
Said Craig Puddicombe’s mother, “He had his bad pints, Craig did, but he never let no one stick his pitcher on a magazine ’thout his pants on. He never held up the poor for pennies on a TV church service.”
Bilker Moody, slouching against a railing behind young Puddicombe’s casket, snickered.
“Mrs. Puddicombe—” McElroy said, uncharacteristically at a loss for words.
Said Adam, “I will, what do you call it,
“We’re awful hot,” she said. “You put Craig down decent, now. We’re gonna trust you to do it. Daddy’s too sick to stan’ and watch it. We’re goin’ on home.” With no more fuss, she led her family out of the roped paddock and around the house toward the distant front gate—five thousand dollars richer, beneficiary of a habiline saint.
Caroline and I were now the only two people in the area set aside for Tiny Paul’s and Craig’s immediate families. I looked back to see if my neighbors were staring at us, only to catch a glimpse of Rudy Starnes, cameraman, and Brad Barrington, anchor-flake par excellence, sneaking through the crowd to record another event that was none of their business. They soon reached Livia George and her friends.
Starnes videotaped the crowd, the sundeck, the departing Puddicombes. His sun-bronzed colleague held impromptu interviews with some of the startled people around him. When Barrington accosted Livia George with his mike, though, she shook her finger under his nose, but her apparent fear of further disrupting the ceremony made it hard to hear what she said. My attention shifted when McElroy began talking again:
“Let’s pray for the immortal souls of these dead brothers, the murderer and his innocent victim,” he shouted, still recovering from the loss of his check. “The one seems hellbent by virtue of the virtues he sadly lacked, the other as a result of his parents’ failure to baptize him into the living community of Christ. And so, brothers and sisters, let’s pray for God’s great and redemptive mercy on their immortal souls. Bow your heads and observe with me a moment of loving, intercessory silence.”
“Please leave this platform,” Adam said. “The usurping of my intention to preside does not become you.”
McElroy replied, “Goodness, Adam, I’ve only come to help. You’re gettin’ sorta territorial about this, aren’t you?”
“The soul,” Adam countered, “does not everlast. I am sorry to have to tell you so, but it is what its body did and also its unplaceable self-awareness of that doing. In death, Paulie and Craig are reconciled. Neither goes to hell, neither to heaven. The great pity I feel for them is my pity for the extinction of their souls, one before it could un-deform and one before it could bloom to beauty.”
“Uh oh,” I said.
“Soul is mind,” Adam said patiently. “Neither has location. Neither goes beyond the stoppage of body death except in the continued cherishing of the souls and minds that knew them. All of us have souls, as do I. Important, very important it is that all of us apprehend the other’s soul and value it as we do our own. That is why the ashes of my son I have brought to rest beside the body of his unhappy killer.”
Rudy Starnes had been creeping slowly forward with his portable camera. Soon, he was shooting this scene from the southwestern corner of my sundeck. Barrington, his partner, had already escaped Livia George’s scolding to reach the same vantage and was leaning between two cedar railings to pick up the argument between Adam and McElroy with his hand-held microphone. I wanted to go after them, but Caroline stopped me.
“Bastards think they’re getting a scoop.”
“They are, Paul. Just forget it. Haven’t you been listening to Adam?”
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?”
“Do unto others as they would be done by—insofar as it’s possible to know what they want and insofar as respect for your own sacred self permits you to do it.”
“Is
“Not in those words, no. In
McElroy said, “The talk you’re talking, Adam, is devil’s talk.”
“Maybe he’s a devil!” shouted a balding man with a string tie and acne-scarred jowls. I uncharitably identified him as a Puddicombe partisan, an unsheeted Klansman. It is possible that he was simply a Baptist.
Adam had no care for the impact his words were making on people like the bald-headed man. “Craig Puddicombe and Tiny Paul live at this moment,” he explained, speaking to McElroy but loudly enough to be heard by all, “because in our respectful ceremony they even yet
McElroy stared down at Adam like a schoolmaster eyeing a boy who has just wet his pants. “That’s very pretty, Adam. It’s also secular-humanistic buncombe.”
“
“
“Yes, ma’am,” said Caroline.
Barrington, the Contact Cable News reporter, had climbed onto my sundeck, near Craig’s casket. Bilker, seeing him, stepped toward the man, but Barrington had already reached across the bier to shove his microphone into Adam’s face.
“Repeat for our viewers what you’ve just said,” he demanded while Rudy Starnes, hunched below the platform, continued to video-tape.
Swiftly breaking in, Bilker slapped the reporter’s mike into the crowd. Several people gasped. McElroy, a more prescient interpreter of danger signals than Barrington, cringed away from this blow and left the deck by the stairway he had earlier mounted. Then he, his son, and their bodyguard retreated around the corner of my house. During their strategic withdrawal, Bilker shook the Contact Cable newsman.
“Your ass is grass, fella.”
“What was that?” Miss Mildred asked Caroline. “What did he say?”
“Let him go,” Adam commanded Bilker. “No hair on his head should you even breathe on.” He dropped his top hat and began to remove his coat. “No more memory rite today,” he told the rest of the mourners in the pecan grove. “You are everybody free to go now. If you stay, I must warn you, you may turn out to act unhappily in something for which you did not bargain.” He folded his coat and placed it on the casket. “Very sorry that bad behavior of Mr. McElroy should prove so deadly to the graceful remembering planned by me for this double funeral.”
“What about the buttin’ in of that fella there?” Livia George shouted, waving her liver-colored palm at Barrington.
“Him, too,” Adam agreed. “Now, everybody, please go.”
I asked Caroline to see Miss Mildred safely to the front gate, where she would have no doubt parked the monstrous Lincoln Continental that her failing eyesight had not yet convinced her to give up driving. Reluctantly, then, the mourners began to straggle along in Caroline and Miss Mildred’s wake, a process not unaccompanied by peeved looks and audible grumbling. Starnes, the cameraman, recorded this withdrawal from my back yard, but not without several glances away from the viewfinder to note how inexorably it was leaving him and Barrington beached on a hostile shore. At last he stopped taping altogether.
Adam had removed his tie and vest. He started to unbutton his shirt. “Once, you barged onto Paradise Farm to film my son’s birth,” he told Barrington. “Today you have barged again, to make unauthorized tape of his burial. True?” He dropped his shirt on the cedar planking.
“It’s our job,” Barrington said. “Getting the news.”
“A sleazy tactic, such sneakery. Do you remember, Brad Barrington, how such provocation stirred me in December?”
“Just let us get our stuff together and we’ll go, Mr. Montaraz.”
Adam, hopping on one foot and then the other, yanked off his shoes. Then he shed his striped ambassadorial trousers. As naked as the day he’d first come to Paradise Farm, he crouched and gave the reporter an alarming threat-grin. Barrington turned, vaulted the deck rail, and landed on the grass beside his cameraman. With no apparent regard for what might become of Starnes, he sprinted through the pecan grove toward Cleve Snyder’s property. Adam jumped to the top of the deck rail, sprang forward ten or twelve feet, and ran Barrington to ground almost effortlessly. He toppled the reporter by leaping on his back, wrapping his legs around the man’s midriff, and applying a half nelson to the nape of his neck. The newsman staggered and fell. A squirrel scampered off through the grass, and the full-throated snarling of the habiline soon had the terrified Brad Barrington crying for mercy.
Bilker came down from the deck, disengaged Starnes from his camera, and threw it against the nearest tree trunk. Its casing shattered, and the sound of its impact echoed away through the pecan grove. “No sweat,” Starnes said, lifting his hands. “I ain’t gonna get testy with you, man. Ain’t my way.”
I hurried out of the paddock to make sure Adam didn’t kill Barrington. Squatting beside the two wrestling men, I tried to grip Adam by the shoulders and pull him away. But where Adam was one moment, Barrington was the next, and their ever-revolving entanglement stymied my efforts to play peacemaker.
Soon, though, I realized Adam was mauling his enemy with saliva and sudden unpredictable shifts of weight. Barrington would be black and blue for a couple of weeks, but he’d survive this noisy struggle—just as he’d survived the one in December. That he had doubts on this score perfectly suited Adam’s purpose. Finally, Barrington curled in upon himself like a fetus, whimpering, and Adam rolled clear of the man.
“Can’t say that I blame you,” I told Adam, above his victim’s caterwauling, “but you’ve used this poor jerk for a scapegoat. You know that, don’t you?”
“I am
He got up and strode toward the house, his swarthy buttocks moving in elegant synchrony, the muscles in his back agleam. “
I found myself patting Brad Barrington’s shoulder. “It’s okay, fella. Listen, it’s okay.” But I really had no idea what I was saying.
On Thursday morning, Adam, Caroline, and I attended Nancy Teavers’s funeral at the First Baptist Church in Beulah Fork. It was not as well attended as the fiasco at Paradise Farm, but the pastor eulogized Nancy in a way that actually enabled me to call up her face—not the wan, black-eyed visage of the murder victim in the orangutan costume, but the lively, often mystified features of the young woman who had worked for me at the West Bank. The organ played, and people cried. I wasn’t one of them, though. It was hot, and I was numb.
Craig and Tiny Paul were decently buried. During the relative cool of twilight, long after the inconclusive rites of Wednesday afternoon, we had laid them to rest. Bilker and five members of our security force had played pallbearer for the casket, while Adam had marched behind them with the burial urn in his arms. Both the casket and the urn had gone into the ground in a lovely section of the pecan grove bordering Ruben Decker’s farm. Nancy, of course, was buried next to E. L.’s grave in the cemetery near the school, and it finally seemed that we had all reached a place in our lives where, radically transfigured, we could begin again.
RuthClaire was still in North Carolina and would stay there through the weekend. She and Adam had talked last night on the telephone, but what they had said to each other—how they’d resolved or failed to resolve their quarrel over the double funeral—only they knew. RuthClaire had not asked to speak to Caroline, and Adam was saying nothing about the present state of their relationship. Still, his silence and his listlessness suggested a debilitating melancholy.
Back from Nancy’s funeral, Adam asked me to drive him to the abandoned brick kilns where the young woman’s husband had died. “Why?” I asked him.
“I wish to meditate. And to fast.”
Caroline said, “Couldn’t you do that here?”
“It requires, I think, solitude. And a chance to feel the earth enfolding me as it enfolds my son.”
“But the
Adam insisted. We could not argue him out of his desire to visit that forbidding place. Finally, Caroline and I drove him there by a county-maintained road. While we sat in the car, he walked along the lips of the crumbling vats. Blackberry vines and poke weed filigreed the red-clay mounds into which these shafts descended, and mockingbirds warbled dark songs. At one opening, Adam knelt and peered downward. Then he eased a leg over and lowered himself into the vat.
I shouted his name.
“Come back for me Sunday morning,” he called. “Until then, never worry.”
“Sunday morning?”
“It is fine, Mister Paul. It is what I need. Water aplenty down there, and in three days no habiline has ever hungered to death.”
“Caroline, tell him to come back to his senses.”
“There’s nothing I can do. He’s made up his mind.”
And so he went down, stayed in the depths of those bottomless kilns until Sunday morning, and greeted us then with a song that spiraled up like a chant through the frozen prayer of a cathedral. Then he emerged into the sunlight physically weaker but spiritually fortified. That afternoon, Caroline drove him back to Atlanta, where he was reunited with RuthClaire on Hurt Street.
And I?
From my position as restaurant owner, gentleman farmer, bachelor, and pagan, I contemplated these matters and decided it was time for me to become… something else, something new, something other.
On the first anniversary of Tiny Paul’s birth, Caroline and I were married in Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church on the Emory University campus. Over the autumn, I had prepared for this event by divesting myself of both Paradise Farm and the West Bank. My house and grounds (excluding only the burial plot near Ruben Decker’s place) I sold to a pecan-growing cooperative based in Americus, Georgia.
The restaurant, of course, went to Livia George. With a lawyer’s help, I arranged to receive a small percentage of her monthly profit for the next ten years, but conveyed full title to her and dissociated myself from the West Bank’s operation. If Livia George contracted any debts, a possibility that her experience and managerial skills greatly minimized, I had no responsibility for them. I wanted only to be free of Beulah Fork, its people, and my past there.
RuthClaire and Adam did not attend the wedding. In September, they had moved out of their house on Hurt Street to begin a month-long tour of England and mainland Europe. From October through December, they lived on a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. Both were working, but no specimen of their art or word of its character got back to the States. By the middle of January, they had returned to the Western Hemisphere, as a postcard from Mexico City attested. By late February, as another hasty card told us, they were living in a stucco beach cottage near Rutherford’s Port on the island of Montaraz, Adam’s birthplace. Neither Caroline nor I knew what to make of this last development, which took us wholly by surprise.
For a while, I had toyed with the idea of opening a restaurant in Atlanta. I dropped it not only because the city has eating places the way the Sahara has sand, but also because I was tired of the restrictive lifestyle. I had kept the West Bank going for nearly ten years, and the thought of resurrecting that routine for another decade turned my brains to tepid Creole gumbo. So, with David Blau’s consent and encouragement, I approached several of the artists at Abraxas to offer my services as business manager and artist’s representative. Six of these young people accepted, and I recruited other clients from Atlanta’s talented art students and independent craftspeople. By building rapport with art dealers, gallery directors, museum curators, and department-store buyers (ordinarily, a casual reference to my past association with RuthClaire turned doubtful frowns to expectant smiles), I was soon earning money for my clients. Although I had a small office near Emory Village, I liked my new work primarily because I was not shackled to a desk.
Caroline continued to teach her classes and to conduct periodic interviews with the Cuban refugees still in detention in Atlanta’s aging federal prison. Like an armada of doomed mariners sailing toward the edge of the world, the Freedom Flotilla of 1980 kept receding into the past; and most of the prison’s current detainees had paperwork identifying them as hard-core criminals. Caroline had no wish to put these people out on the streets, but the cases of three or four young men deeply troubled her. She saw these prisoners as captives of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy and feared they would remain wards of the state forever.
Our marriage was working. Caroline never scolded me for letting the dental floss slip down into its plastic container, although I did that a lot. More important, neither of us currently wanted children. Later, T. P. having softened my objection to parenthood, we might consider adoption, but not now. There was too much to learn about each other and too much to do. We were learning. We were doing.
Montaraz is a Spanish word meaning
Most of the island’s population lives in the only noteworthy town, Rutherford’s Port, or in various fishing villages or tourist resorts along the many miles of twisty coast. In terms of health and economics, the native human population may be slightly better off than their counterparts on Haiti proper, but that assertion invites debate. Even a poverty-level citizen of Atlanta would incur envy in the waste archipelago of “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s rule.
Until 1822, Montaraz had belonged to Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic), but with Jean-Pierre Boyer’s subjugation of the Spanish-speaking sections of Hispaniola in that year, it became the property of Haiti. The Dominicans expelled the Haitians from their country in 1844, but by this time Louis Rutherford, an eminent American citizen, had acquired Montaraz by outright purchase. Therefore, although equidistant between Haiti and Santo Domingo, it was legally (albeit quite irregularly) another Caribbean territory of the United States. Rutherford died during the Dominican uprising against the Haitians, and followers of Pedro Santana quickly reclaimed the island as their own. Rutherford’s widow and grown sons protested to the new Democratic administration of James K. Polk, who had campaigned as an ardent expansionist, and Polk threatened the Dominicans with an invasion of marines. Judiciously, the Dominicans heeded the threat.
For another thirty years, then, the heirs of the late U.S. ambassador to Haiti ruled like kings on Montaraz. In 1874, however, Peter Martin Rutherford, the oldest grandson of the clan’s patriarch, negotiated an agreement with President Nissage Saget returning the island to Haitian sovereignty. This agreement gave the Rutherfords two important guarantees: (1) nonrescindable ownership of an estate occupying one fifth of the island, and (2) nonrevocable use of the English name Rutherford’s Port for the island’s only real town. Saget was able to conclude this agreement, where other Haitian leaders, notably Faustin Soulouque, had failed, because he was a sensible man with no major vices or reason-crippling ambitions. Peter Martin Rutherford liked him. The transfer was a fait accompli before the Dominicans had time to register the fact, and Montaraz has remained an unquestioned part of Haiti’s political sphere until the present day.
Montaraz appears on very few maps of the Caribbean. Early maps by Spanish cartographers feature it clearly enough, but maps drawn and printed during the twenty-year dictatorship of Boyer omit it completely. Although inescapable common knowledge to locals, the island’s presence in Manzanillo Bay remained obscure to outsiders through the 1870s because the Rutherfords did not wish to advertise it. After the negotiated Haitian takeover, however, Saget and his successors discouraged its appearance on maps as a peculiar kind of sop to Dominican pride. The Haitians apparently believed that if both sides pretended that Montaraz wasn’t there, their Spanish-speaking neighbors would shelve any strategies to reconquer it. You can’t plant a flag on invisible real estate. That the island was visible from the mid-northern coast of Hispaniola, if not on maps, both sides contentedly ignored.
Few Americans—few civilized people anywhere—had heard of Montaraz until Brian Nollinger broke the story of Adam’s presence on Paradise Farm to a reporter from the
Very little came of this goal-oriented flurry of tourism, however, because the first eager visitors to Montaraz could find no habilines. They found blacks, mulattos, Spanish-Arawak survivors, jaded white Europeans, and affluent Japanese in polite, businesslike tour groups. They even found a puzzled party of middle-aged Kansans wearing Bermuda shorts, Italian sandals, and jaunty straw hats with green plastic visors. What they could not find, no matter how hard they searched, was anything remotely resembling a habiline. By this time, the government had placed a moratorium on issuing visitor permits to Montaraz, and word of the first arrivals’ lack of success began to migrate stateside. When Alistair Patrick Blair published his paper in
After the deluge, silence. More or less.
Anthropologists who accepted Dr. Nollinger’s contention that Adam was a living representative of
Three months after the double funeral at Paradise Farm, Brian Nollinger’s point of view received some convincing support from the surgeons who had operated on Adam to enable him to speak. With permission, they released to the press several X-rays of Adam’s skull. Taken from different angles, these X-rays created a small sensation. Never before had RuthClaire or Adam let anyone examine him with an eye to precise physical measurement or speculative comparison. These X-rays, along with the plastic surgeons’ computer-generated “blueprints” of Adam’s head, revealed that he had a cranial capacity of 870 cubic centimeters. This figure exceeded that of most known fossil representatives of
By this time, however, the Montarazes had left the country. A few of their friends in Atlanta, among them the Blaus and the Loyds, knew their general whereabouts, but refused to divulge the information to reporters or scientists. RuthClaire and Adam had gone away to
But the Montarazes apparently wanted to be found. Soon after she had sent us a postcard from Rutherford’s Port, RuthClaire wrote a bona fide letter. It reached us early in April. Here is what it said:
Dear Caroline and Paul,
Once, in a letter, Adam called Paradise Farm his “unjumping Eden,” because although everything else might go blooie for him, Paradise Farm would remain the fixed center of his Coming of Age as a civilized being. It was where he and I met, where he outgrew the feral habits of his youth, and where his son was born. Today, of course, it’s where his son lies buried, next to the coffin of his murderer.
Well, Paul has sold Paradise Farm, and Adam’s Eden has—forgive me, there’s no other word for it—
I’m writing not only to give you news of our doings but also to ask you a favor. One big favor, actually, with at least three little favors nesting inside it like—well, you know. Ready for the big favor? It’s this: Adam and I want you to drop what you’re doing in June and come down to Rutherford’s Port (our beach cottage, actually) for at least a month. We’ve already asked for and received the special permits to visit Montaraz that you’ll need from the Haitian Ministry of Tourism, and Adam has extorted from the publishers of
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The first little favor nesting inside the big favor of coming down here requires you to bring Tiny Paul’s ashes. Because Adam’s entire preconscious past belongs to Montaraz, we’ve decided to make the island our permanent home. We’d like to have Tiny Paul’s physical remains close to hand. Sentiment rather than reason talking here, but sentiment has compelling reasons all its own. The distasteful part for you guys—for Paul, anyway—is that you’ll have to dig up our baby’s burial urn and carry it down here virtually in your arms. No checking it with your airline baggage. No consigning it to steerage or the cargo hold when you board your Cavalcade Caribbean cruiseship out of Miami. It’s too valuable for that, and you may come to regard it as a nuisance before you’ve actually handed it over to us. Forgive us for asking such a thing, but we—or, to be fair to Adam,
The second little favor inside the big one: David Blau tells us that in only a few months Paul has become an able artist’s representative. (He wasn’t too bad at that while we were married, but he was always more interested in peddling avant-garde marinades and sauces than avant-garde paintings and sculptures.) Adam and I would like Paul to ply his new trade on behalf of a small contingent of local artists whose work you can see when you get here. You’ll need to bring photographic equipment with you to capture some of this work, however, and high-speed color films capable of producing quality images in poor, sometimes nearly nonexistent, light. (See the attached list for the recommended brands and quantities.) What Adam hopes for, Paul, is a modest habiline show at Abraxas similar to the Haitian exhibit of fifteen months ago. (Probably, though, we won’t want to call the artists habilines.) As you may have already guessed, these artists are Adam’s habiline relations. They exist. They live here. Because I’ve met them, I know they’re more than just the diminutive Caribbean equivalent of the Northwest’s elusive Bigfoot. Adam wants you and Caroline to meet them, too.
And the third little favor: Caroline’s interview and/or article for
As you know, Adam and I spent most of last fall on the Greek island of Skiros, working and recuperating. In mid-November, there was an international convocation of paleoanthropologists in Athens. This affair lasted a week, and the rumor of our presence less than a hundred miles away (as the Olympian eagle flies) got back to these men and women. Blair was in attendance from the University of Marakoi. (Richard Leakey was there from Kenya, Donald Johanson from the United States, and so on.) Blair didn’t want to commit himself to a wild-goose chase, but, if the rumor were true, he didn’t want to miss out on talking to Adam in person, either. So he sent a grad student from the University of Marakoi, an apprentice paleoanthropologist in his party, to Skiros to check out the scuttlebutt. She was a native Zarakali of the Sambusai tribe, and she tracked us to our little villa as expertly as her forefathers had tracked their enemies across the salt flats of the Lake Kiboko frontier. She wanted us to go back to Athens with her. If that was unacceptable, she wanted us to grant Blair an exclusive audience on Skiros at the end of the big paleo-powwow in Athens.
We didn’t want to go to Athens, and Adam wasn’t quite ready to meet Blair face to face. So we gave the Zarakali student a letter outlining the conditions under which we might later grant Blair an interview, and, as soon as she’d left, we made our own plans to leave. We didn’t actually pull up stakes until December, though, and by January we were in Mexico City. There, feeling guilty about denying Blair’s interview request, Adam wrote the Great Man in care of the Interior Ministry of Zarakal, clarifying the conditions set forth in the first letter and specifying a June meeting here on Montaraz. Blair responded quickly. A June meeting in the Caribbean suited his schedule and travel itinerary almost perfectly. So, at long last, it will happen, and Adam will finally show the old bastard he’s not wearing a latex mask.
Let us know if you’ll be able to come. We’ll help you financially as far as we can, but both Adam and I believe you can make some money from this trip. Just exercise your professional skills and try to get some funding in addition to the
P.S. Three days ago, I saw Brian Nollinger at the open-air market in Rutherford’s Port. You thought he was somewhere in the Dominican Republic, didn’t you, Caroline? But he’s not. Austin-Antilles has apparently relieved him of his duties as a canecutter demographer there. Adam says it’s possible he made suggestions for improving the workers’ lot that struck company officials as dangerous boat-rocking. On the other hand, maybe he’s simply doing the same kind of work for them on their Montaraz coffee plantations. Forgive me, Caroline, but I can’t help seeing his presence here as highly suspicious. Oh, yes—he didn’t see
P.P.S. Please do us these favors. Adam and I have really missed our friends from stateside. We really have.
Caroline and I decided to go. Our honeymoon over the Christmas break had consisted of five days in Savannah and two on Tybee Island, a week of blustery weather during which we had dreamed of the voluptuous dazzle of summer. Our trip to Montaraz, then, would be an improvement upon our December honeymoon. We would combine business with pleasure. Caroline hadn’t committed to teaching a summer class, and I could set my own hours. That we could deduct almost everything we spent as business expenses had escaped neither of us—the Montarazes had arranged matters to make that possible.
The P.S. to RuthClaire’s letter disturbed me. Last summer, Brian had gone to the Dominican Republic for Austin-Antilles Corporation; now he had shown up on Montaraz at a great time for someone who had once told the world that Adam was a habiline. Had Brian gotten a tip through the paleoanthropological grapevine that A. P. Blair was traveling to Rutherford’s Port for some undisclosed, but promising, reason? I looked at Caroline, remembering her former interest in the man, and my heart misgave me. In my most self-critical moments, I told myself that I had caught her on the rebound.
“When’s the last time you heard from your old flame?”
Caroline’s eyes cut across me like lasers. “In January. He sent a card wishing us happiness and long life. I’d told him we were getting married, and he sent that card.”
“Why tell him anything? Why rub it in?”
“Brian meant something to me once,” she said. “I still consider him a friend. I like to stay in touch with my friends.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve seen every note Brian’s written me since he left Atlanta. There’ve been four, all but the last one mailed before we married. What’s the matter with you?”
“He’s in Montaraz, Caroline, and I don’t want to see him.”
“Well, I had nothing to do with his showing up there, and I won’t pussyfoot around everyplace we go on that damn island trying to avoid him. If I see him, I’ll speak to him. He may not even
“Okay.”
“Get off my case, Paul. I’m not Brian’s pen-pal paramour.”
The conversation ended. I’d almost provoked a serious quarrel, but Caroline had not let me. She’d held her anger in check. As a penance for my boorishness, I took her to dinner at Bugatti’s, and we spent nearly the entire meal making our travel plans.
In mid-May, I drove to Paradise Farm to disinter T. P.’s ashes. The Hothlepoya County Sanitarian, Jim Stevens, approved my request, and a new owner of my former property escorted me to the burial plot, which, in fulfillment of a clause authorizing the sale, his cooperative had enclosed with a treated-redwood fence and a hedge of flowering shrubs. I did the digging myself, and it took only twenty minutes to unearth the miniature casket holding the urn. I removed the urn without pulling the casket clear of the grave and then refilled the hole with displaced soil and sod. A small pink-marble headstone with a brass plaque remained to mark the site. I let the plaque stay, a memorial as much to Adam’s idealism as to the sadly brief life of my murdered godson.
In June, Caroline and I flew to Miami.
The next day we set sail aboard the Cavalcade Caribbean cruiseship
On the boat, the only person who took any notice of us, and who smiled at us each time he caught our attention, was a dark-skinned member of Duvalier’s
“Americans, yes?”
We admitted to the charge.
“On what business do you come?”
I looked at Caroline. How much to tell this bogeyman? Was he making small talk, or were his questions subtle commands for self-disclosure? His teeth, when he smiled, looked like nicotine-stained cuff links—that big, that yellow.
Caroline played coy. “How do you know we haven’t come for pleasure?”
“Rutherford’s Port is, uh,
“Does it make a difference?” I said, more hostile than inquisitive.
The Tonton Macoute kept smiling. “I am practicing my English is all. Sorry to trouble you so.” He touched his forehead again.
To make up for my rudeness, Caroline disclosed our names and said that we had come for business
“Officially, I know nothing. Unofficially, I know it is hard to find this remnant because Papa Doc, the first Duvalier, well, he—” He gave an exaggerated shrug.
“What?” I urged him.
“He encouraged the local
“Duvalier, a medical doctor, thought the habilines were demons?”
“To carry out the
Caroline said, “What would Baby Doc, your current President-for-Life, do if he heard you telling us these things?”
“Is it your wish to inform on me?” asked the macoute, smiling.
“Oh no! But if we went home and had your allegations printed in a newspaper as the story of a talkative civil guard on Montaraz, wouldn’t your loose tongue convict you as a traitor to the late Duvalier’s memory?”
“Things are freer under Baby Doc. Besides, I haven’t said my name, have I?” His big ivory teeth reflected sunlight off the water. “Do you suppose me the only security volunteer on the island?”
“What about all the habiline hunters who swept through here last fall?” I asked. “Did you tell any of those eager people your persecution story?”
“
“Why not?”
“I had not heard it then. It was this recent sweeping-in of foreigners in quest of the
“But you’re telling
“You are nicer people than the pushy ones who came last year. Also, it’s a good story, and maybe nobody anymore will see the
“You think they’ve all been wiped out?”
“
“Do you consider Adam Montaraz a demon?”
“Oh, no. He’s a great man, a great artist.” He touched the forward bulge of his beret. “Call upon me, please, if I may be of service to you during your sojourn here.”
“But what’s your name?” Caroline asked.
He looked over his shoulder at us. “Lieutenant Bacalou, Madame and Monsieur Loyd. Ask for me at our security headquarters in Rutherford’s Port.”
Only later did we learn that
RuthClaire met us in Rutherford’s Port. The city consists of ancient quays, government buildings and churches of a pre-revolutionary Spanish architectural style, a series of palm-lined public squares, a military barracks, and, still at sea level, dozens of private residences designed and built around 1900 by such masters of Gingerbread Gothic as Eugène Maximilien and Léon Mathon. These houses feature balconies, cupolas, and arabesque grillwork even more fanciful than the gimcracks decorating the old Montaraz house in Atlanta. (I was beginning to see why Adam had bought that house.) The yellow bricks used for walkways, foundations, and low decorative walls, RuthClaire told us, had arrived in Rutherford’s Port as ballast in ships coming for the island’s coffee, sisal, and cacao. The most famous house in the city belonged to the grandson of local architect Horacius Dimanche, who’d attended the Paris School of Architecture with Léon Mathon. Later, if we wished, RuthClaire would give us a tour of the Old City.
Above the Old City, climbing the forested flank of the mountain behind it, were two distinct enclaves. On the western side: condominiums of steel and glass, charming old hotels and restaurants (survivors of a recent effort at urban renewal), and a monolithic terra-cotta business complex. On the eastern side: shacks with corrugated tin roofs, slatted or cardboard walls, and doors consisting of rusted scrap metal or ragged woolen blankets. Sunlight ricocheted among these hovels like a bouncing ball above the lyrics of an amelodic song. A sluice of mud ran down the slope of one precarious neighborhood from a broken pump supplying water for half of the hillside’s inhabitants. Shantytown’s only saving grace, in fact, was the open-air market at the foot of the mountain. It boasted colorful pennants, hundreds of booths with thatched roofs, and huge mounds of tropical fruits and vegetables. The bazaar abutted a section of the Old City, through which we rode in RuthClaire’s rented Jeep on our way up the coast to the secluded beach cottage where she and Adam were staying.
“He didn’t come himself,” RuthClaire explained, “because he creates a lingering sensation wherever he goes.”
“What about you?” Caroline said.
“Me? I’m just another American tourist. That’s why I picked you up. Adam’s a local hero, and he’s tired of being mobbed.”
“Don’t they follow you to your house?”
RuthClaire lifted her eyebrows at me. “The people? No. They lack wheels. When we first got here, the press asked for interviews, but we declined. Then Haitian security put out word we weren’t to be bothered. Militiamen with rifles go up and down the road fronting our beach property, patrolling—one or two at a time, on their way back and forth between coastal villages. They’re not actually
“Tontons Macoutes?”
“That’s not the approved term, Paul.”
“We met one on the boat over from Cap-Haïtien.
“They do that, I guess. Instilling terror’s one of their collateral duties. They’ve been good to
Caroline said, “Our Tonton Macoute told us the habilines here are extinct, victims of a Duvalier purge in the early sixties.”
“He’s right about the purge, wrong about extinct.”
“How many remain? When will we get to see them?”
RuthClaire laughed. “All in good time.” Still laughing, she swung the Jeep to the left to avoid hitting an old man wearing a straw hat and a polka-dot neckerchief of red and yellow. Behind the old man stumbled a donkey piled high with foraged firewood.
“What about Blair?” I asked.
“He’s here—another reason Adam didn’t come. He’s hosting the Great Man.”
“With or without his latex mask?”
Squinting at the unpaved, gully-riven coastal highway, RuthClaire sniggered. She was enjoying herself even as we traveled at ten miles per hour over terrain designed to inflict permanent kidney damage. She had not even asked about Tiny Paul’s ashes, and I was damned if I’d remind her that we had brought them.
From the air, Montaraz looks like the three-fingered hand of a Disney cartoon character: Goofy, Mickey Mouse, or that bird Donald Duck. The hand is tilted in Manzanillo Bay so that the thumb points northeast across a hundred miles of ocean at Grand Turk Island. The middle finger shoots a Donald Duck on a long northwesterly diagonal at Miami Beach. (So far as I know, no one in Miami Beach ever takes umbrage.) Rutherford’s Port nestles in its harbor at the base of the thumb, closer to the Dominican coast than to the Haitian. Our destination was an arc of beach on the inside edge of the island’s forefinger. Had there been a road straight across the interior, our trip would have taken no time at all, but no such road existed. Also, Austin-Antilles limits traffic on its coffee plantations, and their access-ways, to company vehicles. Consequently, our switchbacking journey along the coast took nearly an hour and a half.
The beach cottage was slightly more than a cottage—an adobe bungalow of beige stucco some three hundred yards from the road. A ridge of volcanic tuff and a phalanx of coconut palms and prickly-looking beach shrubs hid it from passersby. Whoever had stuccoed the cottage had adorned it with a low-level frieze of sea shells, shark’s teeth, sand dollars, and crab pincers. Red clay tiles shingled the roof, and an L-shaped screened-in porch clung to the building on two sides, one of them fronting the tiny inlet that locals called Caicos Bay. The sand here sparkled like refined sugar. RuthClaire and Adam had turned the porch overlooking this secluded strip of brightness into a studio. Easels, acrylics, canvases, and uncleaned brushes littered the shady L.
Blair, when we arrived, was sleeping, recuperating from a three-legged flight from Zarakal and a vicious case of jet lag. He had reached Rutherford’s Port yesterday afternoon. Although still vigorous at seventy-one, he no longer found it possible to move through time zones without suffering painful temporal discontinuities. His advisors told him that in flying westward he was “gaining” hours, stockpiling minutes that he could later add to the biologically determined span of his life. But the Great Man reminded them that they always depleted this surplus by flying him home the same way he’d come. Why didn’t they ever think to route him back to Marakoi over the Pacific Ocean and the Indian subcontinent? Because jet lag hung on to him like an unshakable bout of intestinal flu, he felt that he was a time-traveler whose time was rapidly running out.
Adam told this story after embracing us and showing us around the cottage. He recited most of it, in fact, while Caroline and I stood with him just outside Blair’s open bedroom door, looking in on the paleoanthropologist’s inert form and the sun-burnished tonsure of his massive head—like parents checking on a sick child. Blair snored while Adam talked: walrus-whistle arpeggios that overrode the lapping of the surf in Caicos Bay. We tiptoed off, and, in RuthClaire’s absence, I gave Adam Tiny Paul’s burial urn.
“Thank you from my heart.” Adam carried the urn into his and RuthClaire’s bedroom and set it on an end table by their bed.
Later, on the porch, Caroline and I had cold rum drinks with our host and hostess. We talked and talked, but never got too close to subjects that might be either emotionally painful or pertinent to our having come so many miles to see them. But that was the way we all wanted it on this first day, and we had a good time, anyway.
The next day, Blair was better: gallant, gracious, and witty. He spoke in the orotund tones of a word-drunk Welsh poet—a cross, said Caroline, between Dylan Thomas and Captain Kangaroo. It was hardly his fault that his every utterance put me in mind of a rutting sea lion. That afternoon, Caroline got out her notebooks and her recording equipment. The interview that she had agreed to moderate for
CAROLINE: It’s on, Dr. Blair. Why don’t you and Adam talk about whatever you like? I’ll stay out of the conversation—except for some followups and maybe some general explanatory comments. Okay?
BLAIR: That’s fine. Adam, I’ve spent better than fifty years digging up the bones of your ancestors and your collateral relations. It’s a surprise, and a profound honor, to meet a representative of your species in the flesh.
ADAM: Thank you.
BLAIR: Once, of course, I doubted. Except for you, I presume, your species is extinct. That
ADAM: Very much more, I would guess.
BLAIR (
CAROLINE: Your Peabody Award for
BLAIR: Never mind that. It was scripted. Adam, let me begin by asking you how you feel about the taxonomic terminology by which the scientific community has designated your species.
ADAM:
BLAIR: Exactly. How do you feel about that nomenclature?
ADAM: About it, to be very candid, I have no feelings at all. Sticks and stones can break my bones, as the children sing, but names can never touch me.
BLAIR: Does it strike you as accurate,
ADAM: “Handyman”? Probably not. I am an artist, but around the house I am no good at all. Miss RuthClaire can vouch for my great
BLAIR: You’re a living fossil with your own fair share of funny bones, aren’t you? That’s quite a droll observation, but it’s not what I’m angling for, Adam. I wonder how you’d feel about adopting a somewhat different nomenclature.
CAROLINE: Excuse me, Dr. Blair. Isn’t
BLAIR: Yes, it is. It means “Zarakali Man.”
CAROLINE: But there’s controversy over that designation. Your skull appears similar to those of the habiline specimens unearthed by the Leakeys at Koobi Fora in Kenya. Richard Leakey, in fact, claims they’re identical.
BLAIR: That may be. We paleoanthropologists are aggressively territorial. What I’ve always stressed, however, is that my discovery is somewhat older—perhaps by as much as a half million years—than the Leakey “habilines.” In other words, this distinctive hominid probably
CAROLINE: But
BLAIR (
CAROLINE: Dr. Blair, it seems to me—
BLAIR: For someone who was going to let Adam and me converse, young lady, you’re becoming a fair threat to monopolize our talk.
CAROLINE (
BLAIR: Now, then, Adam. Which do you prefer?
ADAM: Is not
BLAIR:
ADAM:
BLAIR: But
CAROLINE: He’s thought, sir. He wants to be called
ADAM: In truth, I’d prefer to be called Adam. Adam Montaraz.
CAROLINE: That’s fine with me. How about you, Dr. Blair?
BLAIR: I find it perfectly acceptable. But let’s get on with this. We’ve many important things to talk about.
(
BLAIR: I’m afraid I’ve been doing all the talking, Adam. What I’d like to know, of course, is how you were raised, what you remember of your childhood and youth, and whether any of your people, be they called habilines or
ADAM: Very happy to. The first two are more difficult to answer than the last one, however. I can only do my best.
BLAIR: No one asks more of you, Adam. Begin with the easiest of the three and then proceed as you like.
ADAM: Miss RuthClaire told me once of the Yahi Indian called Ishi, about whom Theodora Kroeber wrote eloquently. Ishi was the last of his tribe in the state of California. Like Ishi, I am the last of my tribe—my species, you would say—on the island of Montaraz. In the entire great world, too, I fear.
(
BLAIR: What happened to your people?
ADAM: Exterminated. Persecuted, hunted, killed. Those who escaped the Duvalier pogrom—a very few—were scattered on the winds of politics and commerce. Off the coast of Cuba, five years ago, two of my people died at the hands of a man greatly more animalish than we. One who died was my brother. These deaths ended all our desperate struggles to prevail in a world such as this. I was then the last one of us all.
BLAIR: Weren’t there any women on Montaraz to keep things going? Isn’t it possible that some far-scattered fellow habilines may still be alive?
ADAM: No sightings, no reports. Such a hope seems foolish.
BLAIR (
ADAM: Don’t reproach yourself too harshly, sir. Should I die before
CAROLINE: You seem to be identifying yourself as a habiline now, Adam. Do you mean to?
ADAM: I am identifying with my people, whom others have called habilines. Also, of course, I’m a good
BLAIR: I take scant comfort from surviving by a mere breath an ancestral human species that preexisted us by at least two million years.
ADAM: Then you are noble, too, sir.
BLAIR: Thank you. I appreciate your vote of confidence.
CAROLINE: Adam, Dr. Blair’s other questions concerned your childhood and youth, your memories of habiline society and culture here on Montaraz. Those strike me as topics of crucial value to any study of your vanished people. Would you tell us what you can about those topics?
ADAM: You and Dr. Blair must never forget that that portion of my life corresponds to the portion of ongoing human experience you call “prehistory.” I have a prehistoric life and an ego-documented life. I’m speaking now out of the latter context. Recovering the prehistoric elements of my life from the vantage of my crystallized ego is very hard. Distortions arise. Who I am now contaminates what then I was. Contaminates and discolors.
BLAIR: You’re wholly unable to reconstruct your early life?
ADAM: Of course not. It goes around in my head like a dream. It’s a hard dream to tell, though, because then I had no language with which to chain and tame it. I had
BLAIR: But was the population of habilines from which you sprang a patrilineal or a matrilineal society? Was sexual dimorphism a factor in assigning domestic tasks and leadership roles? Did you have any noteworthy rites of passage to mark your movement from one stage of life to another? Did you hunt, scavenge, or forage for your food? That’s what my colleagues will ask me, Adam. Can’t you remember, can’t you tell me anything about such basic matters?
ADAM: In the absence of the people themselves, Dr. Blair, such knowledge seems—forgive me—irrelevant, keenly and profoundly irrelevant.
BLAIR: Hardly, Adam. Knowledge of the world is knowledge of ourselves. What you can tell us of habiline mores, customs, and survival strategies will enable us better to comprehend who and what we are.
ADAM: To know the habiline life in any sense truly meaningful, sir, you would have to live it. You would have to stop scrutinizing it from afar and plunge into it with uncritical abandon. That’s possible no longer. Gone, gone.
BLAIR: If nothing else, can you tell me
ADAM: Dominican slaves were freed by Boyer in the 1820s, but it was not until 1874, when Peter Martin Rutherford ceded Montaraz to Haiti, that we habilines obtained our liberty from his cacao and coffee plantations. We left en masse and made a secret republic for ourselves on one of the island’s little-populated fingers. That is all I can say. For a long time, no one bothered us. Then the twentieth century happened, and everything changed. Gradually, oh so piecemeal, for the worse. I’m speaking now, you see, from the vantage of my crystallized ego.
BLAIR: Can you take me to the site or sites of that “republic”?
ADAM: No. It is impossible. They’re gone, and I’ve forgotten.
BLAIR: But, Adam, the island isn’t that large. Suppose the Haitian government were to authorize travel and archeological research in various areas. Don’t you think you’d assist? Wouldn’t you cooperate with me and others in uncovering your people’s past?
ADAM: No, Dr. Blair. Let the dead rest in the memories of their loving kin.
BLAIR: But isn’t it true that you had your son’s ashes disinterred and brought here to Montaraz by your friends the Loyds?
ADAM: It is.
BLAIR: Then I don’t understand the distinction between that and excavating the living sites of your extinct habiline relations.
ADAM (
BLAIR: Sorry. I meant no offense.
(
CAROLINE: All right. I’ve flipped the tape. Dr. Blair, please begin again.
BLAIR: This has been a somewhat frustrating exchange for both of us, Adam. Let me apologize for that again. You see, I never expected to sit down with a surviving representative of any of the hominid species whose bones I’ve been digging up and cataloguing these last fifty years. It’s not a conversation I ever imagined taking place.
ADAM: Of course not.
BLAIR: You don’t knap flint, do you? You don’t chase hyenas off the remains of a lion’s kill. You don’t recall walking upright through the ash storm of an erupting East African volcano. You can’t say anything about the other hominid species—
ADAM: Regretfully, I can’t. I am a product of Montaraz. So were my parents. So were
BLAIR: Doesn’t the allure of Africa niggle at you, Adam? I’ve seen some of your paintings. Baobabs, volcanoes, grass fires, hunting parties. It’s hard for me to believe that the continent of your origin doesn’t arouse your curiosity. Wouldn’t you like to visit? Wouldn’t you perhaps like to emigrate?
ADAM: I would like to see a giraffe.
BLAIR: A giraffe?
ADAM: Yes. It would be fine to see a giraffe performing its dreamy, slow-motion gallop across the great African steppe. Otherwise, sir, I have no ambitions to fulfill on that score. I am home again. Montaraz is home, and it puts me in touch with earlier homes.
BLAIR (
ADAM: Only a little.
RUTHCLAIRE (
ADAM: Before my ego crystallized, here on this island, I was an unconscious animist and also a lip-servicing Catholic. The magic all around me overwhelmed the dogmas of the Roman church. Then, in the late seventies, my ego began to take shape—in response, I am sure, to economic and political realities. At last, soon after the murders off the Cuban coast, my ego was precipitated from the terrible pressures of exile and refugee-ism. I became neurotically self-aware.
BLAIR: Neurotically?
ADAM: Even as you and everyone else alive in your world. To survive today, as “reality” is presently constituted, one must have a competitive neuroticism. So I surrendered to ego development in order to survive. I became an “I.”
BLAIR: And your spiritual longings?
ADAM: Much that my new “I” heard in your world was disparaging of my personhood. I was an animal. I had no soul. On the boat from Mariel Bay to Key West, the passengers were not physically cruel to me; the opposite, rather. They patted my back, laughed at my funnies, and treated me like a friendly performing dog. The “I” that my once-innocent self had become—well, it realized that in their private estimation, I was… soulless. I was excommunicated from real human fellowship because of my unhappy lack of this attribute.
BLAIR: Quite a tortuous chain of reasoning for a brand-new ego, Adam.
ADAM: Yes, but in my brand-newness I was very stupid. I made the mistake of appropriating these misinformed people’s concept of the soul. I began to think of it as an item separable from the body. Like, perhaps, a pocket watch. I wanted such a pocket watch. A pocket watch, after all, may very well survive the death of its owner. It can exist without that person. It can continue to keep its time in a drawer. But it isn’t coequal with its dead owner, and ultimately it, too, will perish. Nevertheless, I wanted this kind of soul, the sort that nearly everybody else mistakenly believes they possess—if, of course, they are “religious.” Having that kind of soul, I thought, would bring my crystallized ego into fellowship with those of the human beings around me.
BLAIR: But you learned better?
ADAM: I learned better than they, sir. If you wish to touch your soul, place your hands on your own body. I had known this as a creature without ego here on Montaraz, but in becoming an aggressive “I” to make my way in civilization, I forgot. The soul is not a pocket watch. It is inseparable from the live body. It does not reside in a pocket. It lives throughout the body’s systems. A dead body does not possess one. It’s dead, in fact, because its soul has been disrupted.
BLAIR: No immortality, then?
ADAM: The fatal disruption of the personality would seem to preclude it, Dr. Blair. But only rigidly crystallized egos despair on this account. A self that understands its subtle ties to the systems around it—family, plants, animals, water, air—knows that healthy living matters more than the egotistical lingering of personality after death. God’s grace is on those who know this.
CAROLINE: Not everyone would find that comforting, Adam.
ADAM: Well, it is the neuroticism of the developed ego that prevents them. It is the unfortunate psychic investment they’ve made in something called “salvation.” They’ve paid in too much for too long to withdraw from this investment. Or maybe they deeply love others who have paid in too much for too long. It’s a hard thing. I have much sympathy for all such travelers on the path to spirituality.
BLAIR: Does your spiritual journey recapitulate that of humanity as a whole?
ADAM: Only in the long view. I have no great hope that the human species will adopt a holistic faith without imposing a lethal rigidity upon it. And maybe, Dr. Blair, the interplay among current faiths, the tensions and slacknesses even yet linking them, is itself a holistic system with certain virtues. I don’t know. A nonneurotic human species would be a species nearly unimaginable. You would have to think up a new taxonomic designation, Dr. Blair.
BLAIR: Perhaps not. Maybe the one we have now would finally begin to imply something other than self-congratulation. What about your “freshly emergent concept of God”? You deny the immortality of the soul apart from the problematically immortal body, and yet still believe in a transcendent deity?
ADAM: Yes, I do. Perhaps, though, it is unimportant. I weary of talking. Do you hear how my voice rasps?
BLAIR: Quickly, then, just a hint of your formulation.
ADAM: It sounds like a paradox. Perhaps it is. I hold that God possesses both a fundamental timelessness—that he exists outside the operations of time—and also a complete and necessary temporality, permitting him to direct and change within the stream of time. There’s a hint, then, of my theology.
BLAIR: But isn’t that like saying that a man both has a head and doesn’t have a head? Or that a certain person happens to be both a Haitian citizen and not a Haitian citizen? It’s self-contradictory.
ADAM: Only because our temporality makes the issue seem baldly either-or. (
No more for now, please. I think I would like to take a swim.
CAROLINE: We’ll wrap it up with that, then. Thank you, Dr. Blair. Thank you, Adam. It’s been a strange but stimulating journey.
This interview was never resumed. Blair wanted to question Adam further. Indeed, he wanted to mount an impromptu expedition to the island’s various peninsulas, to traipse about among the pines and wild avocados in search of Adam’s “secret republic.” But late that afternoon, an advisor arrived from Rutherford’s Port to tell him that the American Geographic Foundation had added to his tour three new lectures and tomorrow he must fly to Miami from Cap-Haïtien. Storming about the bungalow, Blair cursed his advisor and impugned the good name of the director of American Geographic. Finally, though, he subsided, confessing that without this tour much important work at Lake Kiboko would go undone. After collecting his suitcases for the trip to town, he came back into the living room to bid us all goodbye, as downcast and jet-lagged a figure as I could imagine. He was truly disheartened to have to go.
Abruptly, his mood changed. Grinning, he knelt beside one of his leather bags and undid the straps on a bulging side pocket. From this pouch he extracted a magazine. “Adam, would you and RuthClaire autograph this for me? I’m not ordinarily a souvenir collector—fossils are the only souvenirs a man in my line requires—but I’d like to frame this for my office in the National Museum in Marakoi.”
It was the
“Nothing to be ashamed of,” said Blair, buoyant again. “You’ve got quite a respectable little body there.”
“Thank you,” RuthClaire said. (Blair was a father figure, and you never upbraided Daddy for bad manners or an absence of tact. That would be unmannerly, that would be tactless.) But when she signed her portrait, she wrote her name in an angry vertical loop that partly effaced her two-dimensional nakedness. Then she shoved the magazine back into Blair’s chest. It trembled there at the end of her outstretched arm.
A cloudlet of confusion passed over Blair’s face. He took the magazine, regarded it as if it had been vandalized (maybe it had), and, kneeling again, slid it regretfully into the side pouch of his carry-on bag. No one spoke. When he stood again, his expression was abashed and apologetic.
“Body shame’s one of the saddest consequences of western civilization,” he said. “Of course, the commercial exploitation of nudity is a reprehensible thing, too. It’s a prurient outgrowth of that same unhealthy body shame.”
I was sure that this was an astute analysis of something, but a something sadly peripheral to our joint embarrassment.
“Sir,” said the young Zarakali to Blair, “it’s time to go.”
The Great Man agreed. He shook hands with Adam and me, embraced Caroline, and, when she failed to respond to his attempt to hug her, too, kissed RuthClaire on the forehead. Then all of us but RuthClaire trailed Blair and his aide outside and waved them goodbye. Their enclosed four-wheel-drive vehicle spun through the sand, at last obtaining purchase on the road to Rutherford’s Port. Inside again, we found RuthClaire standing in the middle of the living room with her hands limp at her sides and tears flowing down her face. Adam took her in his arms and held her.
Over Adam’s head, RuthClaire said, “Paulie’s dead because of that damn photo, and I thanked that stupid old coot for telling me I’ve got ‘quite a respectable little body.’ I thanked the son of a bitch!”
That evening, near twilight, Adam and I took a walk along the secluded beach below the cottage. Caroline and I had argued because although I had wanted to walk with her, she had insisted on starting the transcription and editing of the tapes. Her holiday would only begin, she declared, when she had accomplished this work. She could not relax with it hanging over her head, and I was selfish to pressure her to go for a skinnydip while the task remained undone. Damn Calvinist, I had thought—for, Blair’s little lecture about western “body shame” notwithstanding, I wanted nothing quite so much as to hold my unclad flesh against Caroline’s in the gently lapping waters of Caicos Bay.
Instead, my companion was Adam Montaraz, now naked. I shuffled along beside him in sandals, loose ebony swim trunks, and a short-sleeved terrycloth jacket. Shells crunched beneath our feet, and stars began to glimmer overhead.
“You told Blair you’re the last of your kind, but RuthClaire’s letter said there were habiline artists here. That’s why I came—to look at their work, maybe even to represent it in Atlanta. What the hell’s going on, Adam?”
“I lied to Dr. Blair.”
“Why?”
“To protect the remnant that survives: five persons, Mister Paul—only five.”
“But if I go back to Atlanta touting their work as the glory of an innate habiline aesthetic impulse, this place’ll be overrun again. You’ll have blown their cover for good. The art will prove they’re here, and bingo! another influx of bounty hunters.”
Adam halted. “Not if you represent their paintings as the work of dead Haitian artists, each item you put up for bid as a discovery from their estates. You needn’t even identify the artists as habilines. Haitian art has many aficionados in los Estados Unidos. Sell it as Haitian art—nothing more, nothing less.”
“It would sell for a lot more if I could reveal the identity of the artists—if, in fact, I could document their identities.”
“But I am not interested in ‘mopping up.’”
“What are you interested in?”
“Secure futures for these last five people. After them, no more. After me, no more. RuthClaire and I want enough money to look after them here on Montaraz, enough to see to their remaining needs.”
“Your own work sells. Let me represent that, Adam. We’d all make money, and you wouldn’t even have to mention your last five habiline relations.”
Adam explained that although their recent travels had stimulated a lot of creative activity, it had also denied them enough time to finish many of these new works. Further, RuthClaire’s latest paintings—the series entitled
“They’re good,” I said. “It’s just that nobody sees.”
“For a time, you didn’t see. And maybe they aren’t good, Mister Paul. Maybe it’s only an accident of light that redeems them from mediocrity.”
“To be truthful, my appreciation of them came and went—just like the light. It’s easy to understand why she’s having trouble selling them.”
“Okay. But that’s why we require money.” He began walking again, his hands clasped in the small of his furry back.
I took two long strides to catch up with him. “When do I meet these habiline artists, Adam? When do I see their work?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Where?”
In the early starlight, he grinned at me. “On the middle finger, Mister Paul. On the bird we shoot at Miami.” He turned, trotted toward the water, and threw himself out into the surf with a splash whose falling canopy of droplets iridesced like the bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war.
After shedding my jacket and kicking off my sandals, I followed Adam into the water. As I had hoped, it was warm without being strength-sapping. My habiline host was dog-paddling about the inlet, sometimes rolling to his back like a sea otter, sometimes treading water with the lackadaisical finning motion of a manatee. I sidled up using an easy breaststroke. He dog-paddled again, but stayed near so we could talk.
“From what you told Blair in that interview, you’ve abandoned Christianity for a new-fangled theory of the interrelatedness of biological systems.” I blew salt water away from my mouth.
“Nonbiological, too.”
“Where did it all come from, Adam?”
“It’s Batesonian, for a man named Gregory Bateson.” He circled me.
“Familiar, I guess, but I don’t really know him.”
“You can’t know him. He died the year my ego was beginning to crystallize out of the Edenic anonymity of my youth.”
“I don’t know his work. Have you uncritically adopted Bateson’s metaphysics? Jettisoned your time-tested religion for some kind of trendy Californian nonsense with pseudo-scientific underpinnings?”
“I adopt nothing uncritically, Mister Paul, and if you don’t know Bateson’s work, you understand nothing about its underpinnings, which are beautifully evolutionary.”
“I was worried about RuthClaire.”
“Why? I love her.”
“I’m sure you do, but it’s hard for me to believe she’s going to be crazy about a ‘religion’ based on the evolutionary interrelatedness of biological—and nonbiological—systems. She’s a traditionalist, but you’ve name-called traditional faiths like hers as egotistical and neurotic.”
He treaded water in front of me. “But I’m egotistical and neurotic. So was the young man who killed our son. I am trying to discover meaning, Mister Paul, also to cure myself of neurosis. Everyone should wish to cure themselves.”
“T. P.’s murder sent you down this path?”
“Yes. You heard the eulogies I spoke. I hurt. RuthClaire hurt. Maybe the family of Craig Puddicombe hurt. My choice was to seek consolation in the orthodox hereafter or find my place in the great systemic neurosis that devoured our son and so begin to heal myself from the inside: my gift to him.”
“Is it really an either-or situation?”
“Maybe not. But first things first.”
“How does what you believe now differ from Bateson’s world view?”
“He sees Mind and Megapattern. I see those things, but also continue to postulate God. It’s a matter of hopeful, nonneurotic faith.”
“Sez you.”
This tickled him. “Yes, sez me.” Both his palms struck the water, launching fusillades of spray right into my eyes. I yelled, clutched my face, and then blindly grabbed for him. He’d already dived out of reach, though, and was sea-ottering through the inlet toward the web of its sandy fingers. Once there, he scrambled onto the beach. Gasping, I waded ashore a minute or two later to join him on the ever-darkening strand.
“Do you mean you’ve jettisoned your favorite theologians for Charlie Darwin and Gregory Bateson? Adam, I don’t know what to say. It’s beginning to look as if we’re brothers under the skin, after all: rational pagans, both.”
“But I am not a pagan.”
“No?”
“I don’t deny the divinity of RuthClaire’s Savior. I don’t deny the possibility of historical revelation. Not at all, not at all. It’s only that the New Testament revelation came at a time and a place inaccessible to my earliest people. I know of another revelation more topical and timely. For me, anyway. For me.”
“What?” He’d completely lost me.
“Tomorrow, Mister Paul. Let’s go back to the cottage.”
So we did, stopping once for me to retrieve my sandals and jacket, and when we entered the house, I heard Adam’s recorded voice saying, “… no great hope that the human species will ever adopt a holistic faith….” The rest I blotted out. Caroline was still hard at work, and I was still resentfully horny.
I awoke with my lust unslaked. Caroline wasn’t in bed. I dressed and went looking for her. Neither she nor the Montarazes had waited for me. They’d gone down to the bay for an early swim. Their voices—or, at least, RuthClaire’s and Caroline’s—piped cheerfully on the balmy morning breeze. My resentment increased. Last night, Caroline had refused to stop work to accompany me to the water’s edge, but rising an hour or so ahead of me—after retiring an hour or so later—was apparently no obstacle to her enjoyment of the beach. I banged into the L-shaped porch overlooking the inlet and made an eyeshield of my hands. Pressing them against the screen, I peered down at the revelers.
Adam, as a concession to the gals’ southern sensibilities, wore a black monokini, while both his wife and mine had outfitted in modest one-piece maillot suits, Caroline’s turquoise-and-navy, RuthClaire’s blood-orange. Arm in arm, they danced into, and scampered away from, the lacy charges of the surf. The hilarity of this game had them struggling to stay upright.
“Shit,” I murmured.
Something on the porch moved. I nearly jumped out of my sandals. One hand went to my heart, the other groped for a support to which to cling. I found the nearest wooden stud bracing the screen and held on to that.
Looking at me from the far end of the porch was a wizened creature wearing a pastel-blue chemise and a grubby white head scarf. She sat on an upturned box with her gnarled hands between her legs and her bare toes playing the planks like so many soundless piano keys. I assumed her female only because of her clothing. For a moment, in fact, I had thought this person might be Adam in drag, joking with me. But Adam was cavorting with RuthClaire and Caroline beside Caicos Bay, and my visitor seemed years older than the habiline. A habiline too, she scrutinized me with beady, alien eyes.
“Good morning,” I said. “I’m Paul Loyd, a friend of Adam’s.” I jerked a thumb in the direction of the surf-teasing trio.
Her eyes remained on me, more watchful than curious.
“Why not tell me your name?” I said.
“Ga gapag,” she said.
This expression meant nothing to me, but I was surprised she had spoken at all. Until his operation at Emory, Adam had been incapable of speech. True, he had never lacked the ability to vocalize, but uttering recognizable phonemes had had to wait for surgery. This woman’s “
“
She shook her head.
“You’re part of the Rutherford Remnant, aren’t you?”
Contemptuously, she everted her bottom lip. The pink flesh curled back on her receding chin like a fan. Chimpanzees perform a similar trick when bored or irritated. Then her face returned to normal, and she looked away as if I had committed an asinine social blunder.
“Wait here,” I said, angry. “Just wait here.”
My command to the haughty gnome was superfluous; she sat stolidly on her upturned crate, “obeying” me only because she had already decided to remain where she was. I yanked open the screen door, descended a set of treated wooden stairs, and put my foot on the first island in a miniature archipelago of stepping stones. Then I floundered through a cut between two shapeless dunes and stumbled down the beach to my wife and our hosts.
Caroline, seeing me, broke free of RuthClaire and Adam. With a gait at once coltlike and feminine, she ran toward me on tiptoes. “Paul!” Her smile wiped out every other lovely natural sight on my horizon—diamond-blue water, glittering sand, even a gliding formation of brown pelicans at the mouth of the bay. She put her cool hands on my shoulders and kissed the bridge of my nose. I returned only a miserly peck.
“Why the hell didn’t you get me up, too?”
“Sleeping, you looked about five years old. How could I wake up a tuckered five-year-old?”
I made an irritated head gesture at the cottage. “There’s a rude little
Adam appeared at Caroline’s shoulder, RuthClaire behind him. “I did not expect her so early. You were alone in the house when we came down here. Not for anything, Mister Paul, would I have caused you discomfort.”
“She scared the bejesus out of me.”
“I’ll bet you frightened her, too,” Caroline said.
“A platoon of marines with a howitzer might frighten her. Me, she found about as scary as a sick ladybug.”
“That’s Erzulie,” Adam said. “My grandmother on my father’s side.”
“Erzulie?”
“Her
“
“She meant,
“If you can follow that,” RuthClaire said, laughing. “What’s she doing here?”
“She is an artist,” Adam said. “Also, she wished to act as our guide. Now you’re awake—and now Erzulie is here—we can eat our breakfasts and go.”
We returned to the cottage. Although Caroline kept her hand in mine, I felt subtly betrayed and so declined to answer her friendly squeezes with squeezes of my own. By the time we reached the cottage, then, she was casting me puzzled looks, squinting for a sign of affection or thaw. I liked that. It served her right. Who the hell enjoyed being told that he resembled a tuckered five-year-old? I had had adult games in mind, but Caroline burnt my hedonistic ambition on the altar of the Protestant work ethic.
We had fresh eggs from the market in Rutherford’s Port. Although I cooked a reproachfully splendid breakfast, Erzulie spurned my platter of fried eggs. Standing at a counter in the kitchen, she drank her eggs raw from a ceramic cup. For a chaser, she downed a jelly jar of native
Everyone else had put on jeans and rugged shoes, but Adam wore the same frock coat and top hat he’d worn to the double funeral at Paradise Farm. Horn-rimmed glasses with no lenses adorned his dark face. (Once, Adam had worn real glasses to read with, but since his operation at Emory, he relied on contacts, and today he was wearing them beneath the phony horn-rimmed glasses.) Sitting beside RuthClaire in the front seat, he had a walking stick between his legs and an unlit cigar in one hand. He clutched the brim of his top hat to keep it from blowing off. Occasionally, though not often, we passed a straw-hatted laborer or a child-toting mother, who, startled, gaped at the Jeep—but especially at Adam—as if seeing a disquieting revenant from the island’s past.
“Why the getup?” I shouted from the back seat. (Erzulie was between Caroline and me, sucking her
“It has religious significance,” Adam said over his shoulder.
“Religious significance?”
“He’s dressed like Baron Samedi, a voodoo spirit,” RuthClaire said. “Some of the Haitians call this traditional spirit Papa Guedé, a ribald authority figure associated with death and cemeteries.”
“Oh, good,” I said. “What’s the point?”
“It’s religious and ceremonial,” Adam snapped, as if he had already explained this and I was being willfully obtuse.
“Instead of another funeral, aren’t we going to the secret habiline republic?”
“That republic’s dying,” RuthClaire said. “It’s been dying for more than twenty years. You’re privileged to be visiting it, but just remember that visiting it is a lot like attending a magnificent funeral mass. So humor Adam in this, okay?”
“I’m here because you guys asked me to be here. Don’t get testy if I can’t help wondering aloud what the hell’s going on.”
“Paul,” Caroline admonished me.
On the dark, fertile slope to our left were the terraces of one of Austin-Antilles Corporation’s coffee plantations. The regularly spaced shrubs, most more than thirty feet tall, loomed over us like fragrant emerald geysers. Their white flowers stirred in the breeze, as did their bountiful crimson clusters of cherries—in this spot, if nowhere else, ready for harvest: coffee, coffee everywhere, but not a cup to drink. I realized that for breakfast RuthClaire had brewed a pot of tea while Erzulie had opted for rum. I needed a cup of coffee. I needed
RuthClaire said, “Papa Doc, the first Duvalier, sometimes wore top hat, horn rims, and tails. ‘I am the revolution and the flag,’ he said. He also liked to present himself as a champion of the people’s folk religion,
“Certainly their fear,” said Adam.
“So now you’re dressed as Baron Samedi,” I said. “You’re emulating Papa Doc, who almost everyone agrees was a paranoid megalomaniac. Pardon me if I see that as a nasty little imposture.”
Adam turned to look at me. “Baron Samedi—Lord Saturday—was here long before Duvalier. So were we habilines,
“Wouldn’t superstition be a better word?”
“
That shut me up. If throwing spilled salt over your left shoulder neutralizes the bad luck supposedly assured by having spilled it, do you call that act superstitious? At the moment, I had no idea. I looked down at the habiline woman Erzulie. Maybe she knew. She looked up at me from under the band of her head scarf and the ridge of her brow. A coquettish glimmer pirouetted in her eyes, reflecting the sea on our right. Then her tiny Tupperware container bumped me in the chest, and she offered me a pinch of
The road climbed, as it sliced tentatively inland. Caroline and RuthClaire talked, but Adam, Erzulie, and I sat like hostages with gags in our mouths. After another twenty minutes, RuthClaire swung the Jeep into a foliage-capped side road that was mostly gravel and eroded channels. It ended about a hundred twisty yards from the main road. “Here we are.” She jammed the Jeep into park, and we all got out, pilgrims on a hidden path to mystery. No one on the main road would ever see us. Indeed, I was trying to figure out how RuthClaire had spotted the turnoff. Creepers netted the rocky ground, and eerily hairy lianas dangled from the trees—a stand of mahogany, I thought—in profligate loops and slings. The coffee plantations of Austin-Antilles lay far behind us to the south, far enough behind us to suggest our isolation and remoteness. A feeling of claustrophobic uncertainty sped my pulse and opened my sweat glands.
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
“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?
“
That was pidgin French, wasn’t it?
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 saintly 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
“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
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
“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
“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,
“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
“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.”
“Forgive me, but that’s not fair. Remember when I showed up at Abraxas to apologize? Mr. Loyd here hustled me off, but I was sincere in my intentions.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” Caroline told RuthClaire.
“Caroline!” I said.
Brian hurried to add, “Can you blame an anthropologist for being obsessed with Adam? The secret of our origins may rest with these persecuted habilines, ma’am.”
RuthClaire slipped her hands into the pockets of her jeans and walked several steps away from our mutual nemesis. “Suppose you do your precious ‘field work’ here. Suppose Adam gives you a free hand. What then?”
“Ma’am?”
“What would you do with the results of your research?”
“Publish them, of course. That’s essential.”
“To whom?”
“To Nollinger,” I said. “He’ll one-up the entire paleoanthropological community, not excepting its high muckety-muck, A. P. Blair.”
“And destroy the Rutherford Remnant in the process,” RuthClaire said. “It was a small miracle they outlasted the first onslaught of scientific fortune hunters. Like their ancestors in Zarakal, they had to go underground—literally—to survive that dismaying siege. Montaraz is a small island, but their cunning and nimbleness, an inherited ability to lie low, saved them. A published account of their culture would be its death knell and eulogy. That’s not alarmism, Dr. Nollinger, but a realistic assessment of the likely results of human curiosity and greed.”
“Including yours,” I told my wife’s ex-beau.
“What if I refuse to pinpoint the location of this village?” Brian said. “It’s almost impossible to find it without prior knowledge. After all, thousands have suspected the existence of a habiline hideaway, but no one’s ever found it.”
“Until today,” RuthClaire said. “And that exception doesn’t prove the rule—it sabotages your entire argument.”
“You were careless, Mrs. Montaraz. You let a habiline woman visit your cottage, and then put her in a Jeep with your two foreign house guests. You took off as if going on a three- or four-day picnic. You never tried a single dodge to see if anyone was following you. And once on foot, you let Mr. Loyd and Caroline yak like school kids on a weekend field trip. Without such carelessness, I wouldn’t be here now.
“Well, you don’t have to be careless,” he went on. “Do things differently. Insure the site’s total anonymity. Keep doing so even after I’ve issued my monograph.”
RuthClaire spoke to the blue Haitian sky: “Too bad I don’t believe in murder. I could end this whole mess by putting a bullet in Dr. Nollinger’s brain.” She stared at her tormentor. “Do you think anybody’d ever find your body, mister?”
“Probably not,” he admitted.
“Your bones, maybe—two million years from now. But only by a conjunction of skill and luck. Too bad murder’s not in my behavioral arsenal.”
“Where’s a bloodthirsty Tonton Macoute when you really need one?” Caroline asked RuthClaire. She added, “Why don’t you talk to Adam? Brian may be just the man to write an ethnography of the Rutherford Remnant… if anyone’s going to do one. I can vouch for his character.”
“And the Pope could vouch for Colonel Khadafy’s,” I said. “Never mind that he’d be an idiot to do it.”
Pointedly, the two women ignored me.
Where was Erzulie? Where were her fellow citizens of Prix-des-Yeux? For that matter, where was Adam?
RuthClaire led us across the clearing to the
But Adam, still in his Baron Samedi costume, was not alone in the
“My God,” Caroline said. “Are they all right?”
“They’re fine,” RuthClaire said. “We just can’t talk to them for a while.”
“But the snake—”
“It’s nonpoisonous, Caroline. Haiti has no poisonous snakes.”
Brian said, “It’s a local kind of python called a
Even in the shade, the python glinted bronze and garnet. Its eyes sparkled like beryls. No one could dispute its prettiness, but it stank. The unmistakable odor of serpent drifted through the
“Cripes!” I said. “How do they stand it?”
RuthClaire regarded me with some sympathy. “It hit me that way, too, at first. You get used to it, just as you get acclimated to Montaraz.”
“But what are they doing?” Caroline asked.
“View the three of them as a symbiotic unit of old Arada-Dahomey spirits—Papa Guedé, Erzulie, and Damballa. There are plenty of other
I was standing just inside the temple’s door again. “That doesn’t sound like Adam, RuthClaire. It sounds like superstitious gobbledegook.”
“The gist of what message?” Nollinger demanded. “What kinds of information are they supposed to be communicating?”
RuthClaire said, “The kinds that can’t be verbalized.”
“That’s appropriate,” I said. “Erzulie can’t talk much, the snake’s probably no orator, and Adam’s natural eloquence is lost on their likes.”
“Telepathy?”
“I wouldn’t call it telepathy, Dr. Nollinger. That has an unsavory paranormal ring. Mostly, though, it’s inaccurate.”
“How about witchcraft?” I said. “When it comes to savoriness, witchcraft takes the cake. Give me witchcraft over telepathy any day.”
“You’re making fun,” RuthClaire said, “but witchcraft implies an element of mysterious interplay that telepathy lacks. To explain what’s going on here, that element has to be accounted for. It’s religious, Paul, not crassly materialistic.”
“Wow. With you and Adam, everything’s religious.”
“Try holy. Or sacred. That’s even better.”
Avoiding the cabalistic
“It’s hard to say,” RuthClaire said. “Details of Adam’s life on Montaraz before ego-crystallization. Maybe some stuff about habiline history both here and in the Lolitabu catacombs. It may go as far back as the beginning of the species. In fact, Adam says it does. Erzulie’s knitting him back into the unraveling fabric of his people without tearing him out of the life he’s made with me. He does this at least once every time we come up here. In a way, I envy him.”
“Why?” Caroline asked.
“Because it’s making it easier for him to forget what happened to Paul. I could use that kind of help myself.”
“Can’t you do this, too?”
“I’m afraid to. And I’m not a habiline.”
“Do you have to be? Isn’t simply being human enough? It was enough for you and Adam to marry.”
“Well,” RuthClaire said, “he’s human, but I… I’m not a habiline. It’s like time’s arrow, I guess—a one-way street. So I’m frightened and envious.”
“If you were an anthropologist,” Brian began, “you could…”
“What?”
“Try to identify with the habilines. Take part in their ceremonies. Translate the nonverbal images Adam and this woman are trading into an impressionistic history of human origins. You can see what that would mean. You can see why I’m badgering you to let me try it. It might revolutionize our whole species’ self-concept, our fundamental notions of who and what we are.”
I said, “You never let up, do you, Brian?”
Here, Adam leaned his head back and let go such a piercing cry that all four of us ducked away from it. Then Adam’s eyes sprang open. So did Erzulie’s. The
The snake knew where it was going, namely, up onto a crude wooden dais beyond the
Adam and Erzulie awakened. They had ceased to be
“Are you all right?” RuthClaire asked, catching him.
He was looking at Brian Nollinger. His pupils had contracted to the size of microdots. Something inside him, I thought, wanted to squeeze Nollinger utterly out of his sight.
“I was,” he said, his guttural voice scarcely audible. “I was.”
The five of us remained in Prix-des-Yeux for three days. We let Brian Nollinger stay because he had found us and would have little trouble finding us again. Too, he earnestly reiterated his promise not to divulge the location of the habiline village, if Adam would consent to his doing a respectful ethnographic study of the Rutherford Remnant. Adam consented, but his lack of enthusiasm suggested that he viewed Brian’s plea as a subtle form of blackmail. If he’d withheld consent, Nollinger could have avenged himself by returning to Rutherford’s Port and telling what he knew. Then Adam’s people would have had to move. Tearing down their
His decision irked me. Caroline’s offering the Montarazes unsolicited testimonials on Brian’s behalf didn’t sit well with me, either. What stake did she have in his staying with us? Why did she so value his talents—wholly untested talents—as an ethnographer? Why did she recall him with such fondness, when he’d deserted their earlier relationship without so much as a flippant ta-ta? I tried to find reasons. He was younger than I. His brief career in the Caribbean, begun out of something like Byronic desperation, gave him an irresistibly romantic air. Or, the least happy of all my conjectures, Caroline still loved him. She’d married me on the rebound, albeit a long one, and Brian’s reappearance in her life had come to her as a godsend.
Self-doubt. Paranoia. An absence of charity. I owned all these negative attributes. I kept thinking about what RuthClaire had jokingly said about killing Nollinger. The surreal tropical setting of Prix-des-Yeux had deprived me of all adult perspective. I was a teenager again, and the fact that I was living an oblique Lost Race fiction out of Bulwer-Lytton and H. Rider Haggard simply heightened my adolescent self-doubt. And the Lost Race whose culture Brian hoped to observe, whose art my new wife and I had come all the way from Atlanta to see, and whose survival the Montarazes wanted to insure? Well, on the afternoon of the day of our arrival, we met these unusual people one at a time over a period of about two hours.
At Adam’s bidding, Erzulie left Prix-des-Yeux, hiked into the dense shrubbery uphill from the huts, and returned in half an hour with one of her habiline compatriots. Then, after mutually awkward pantomimic greetings, Erzulie accompanied her charge back up the mountain to fetch the next. Each habiline came dressed in a togalike garment that varied not at all in style or color from person to person. With the appearance of the third habiline, I realized that Erzulie’s relatives were all wearing the same garment. An ochre stain on its hem gave the game away. Although the motto “one size fits all” was not strictly true (the smallest of the four members of the Rutherford Remnant had to gather the toga’s skirts and carry them across one arm), they pretended otherwise. In the absence of visitors, they obviously wore no clothes at all. Hence these serial debuts.
Erzulie’s head scarf and chemise were dictated solely by her current status as a go-between, a role that she must often have played with the superstitious islanders grubbing out their livings farther down the mountain. Older and more worldly-wise than most of her conspecifics, she could pass herself off as a deaf-mute
In any event, Erzulie—both
The first of the four habilines was a grizzled old man with a broad flap of flesh for a nose and eyes the hue of cloudy gin. He was blind. Adam told us his name was Hector, but, as with all the names that Adam gave us, I felt sure he’d invented it as a convenience for the rest of us. Although blind, Hector oriented himself to every rock and blossom in the landscape as if he could see. Once, when a butterfly with iridescent moiré patterns and peacock eyes on its wings tumbled past us, Hector moved his head as if to follow its flight. RuthClaire conjectured that an acute sensitivity to air currents and minuscule temperature changes had allowed him to perform this trick.
The remaining three habilines came out in turn. They included a furtive, middle-aged male whose pot belly pooched out the fabric of the toga; a relatively young female with a deformed pelvic structure that gave her a gimpy walk without really slowing her down; and an adolescent male whose fierce mistrust of us revealed itself in his flashing eyes and the irrepressible tendency of his upper lip to pull away from his teeth. Adam called these three Toussaint, Dégrasse, and Alberoi. French names, every one. I reflected that before Peter Martin Rutherford deeded Montaraz to President Nissage Saget, most of the habilines had had English or Spanish names—if they’d had names at all. It hardly mattered, though. Among themselves, they most likely used primeval East African syllables, throaty names with no modern counterparts. Or maybe they had communicated by touch, gesture, facial expression, and eye movements. Because none of the Prix-des-Yeux habilines spoke, we had no way of knowing.
Toussaint, we learned, was young Alberoi’s uncle. Toussaint’s brother—the father of the edgy Alberoi—had belonged to the same gunrunning crew with which Adam had worked early in 1980. Adam had seen the murders of Alberoi’s father and his own brother by a Cuban thug (whom Caroline, by coincidence, had later interviewed in the Atlanta Penitentiary). As for Dégrasse, she’d broken her pelvis in a fall from a natural stope in the cave system above Prix-des-Yeux to a chamber far below it. She had been carrying an unborn child. The child died, and she had almost died. Friends managed to get her to the level on which she and her husband had made their home in the catacombs, and here she had eventually recovered. Destroyed along with her baby, however, was her ability to conceive. As the only surviving habiline woman of child-bearing age, she suffered from the knowledge (dim and unfocused, but ever-present) that her tenacious species was finally—after nearly three million self-abnegating years—doomed to pass away. Alberoi might well be the last of them to die, but Dégrasse had been their only viable hope for continuance.
Gone, that hope.
All that was left was for the males to mate with human women. Ironically, Adam had pioneered that option with results that had persuaded him and RuthClaire not to try again. Hector was old and blind. Toussaint and Alberoi might one day seek Haitian brides, but their fear of the human world—their experiences with Tontons Macoutes, plantation overseers, fortune hunters, and Marxist revolutionaries—argued against their doing so. Their people were universal victims. Even others who wished to protect them often endangered them by shining upon them the light of sincere concern. Adam, a habiline himself, had inadvertently done that. So it was unlikely that the anxious Toussaint or the feral Alberoi would ever venture down from their village to woo the sloe-eyed daughters of men.
I asked Adam why he had limited our first contact with his people to these stiff, serial meetings. He said it was simply to give them a chance to get used to our presence. They were suspicious, and shy. Erzulie had had some experience with outsiders, but the other habilines were innocents with soft ego structures. They had threaded their lives into the elemental natural beauties and terrors of the island, but latter-day humankind totally confounded them. Tomorrow, and the next day, we would see more of them. Meanwhile, we must let them think about our first meetings with us. In the darkness of the caves—I began to realize there were caves higher up the mountain—they would begin to weave us into the psychic patterns tying them to Montaraz and their immemorial family past. Or so, at least, Adam hoped.
That night, we lit candles in the
We listened to the tapes. Brian, like a man praying at an altar, leaned forward in the candlelight. Although he laughed aloud during Blair’s attempt to persuade Adam that
“Good stuff, Caroline, but incomplete. You ought to do another interview like that—with me as the third participant.”
“No,” said Adam clearly. “No way.”
We spread out our sleeping bags in the
During the night, all the other habilines but Hector returned from the caves to the village. Alberoi and Erzulie had one of the Shantytown huts, Dégrasse and Toussaint the other. All four were up and about by the time we rubbed sand out of our eyes and pushed our creaky selves off the ground. The men had donned walking shorts, and Dégrasse was a vision of yellow and brown in a floral-print chemise whose pattern reminded me of nursery-school wallpaper: groups of baby ducks swimming through stands of graceful reeds. From hidden larders, the habilines had produced a small black cauldron of red beans and rice that they were heating over a fire not far from the
After breakfast, Brian declared it was time for the habilines to hold free elections.
“For what?” RuthClaire asked. “Five people don’t need a president.”
“To see what they want to be called!” Nollinger replied. “As Alistair Patrick Blair himself pointed out, even the scientific community will be bound by their decision. Let’s round them up so we can propose alternatives to
“Adam,” RuthClaire said, “this is preposterous.”
But Adam had entered into the spirit of Brian’s early-morning madness. “I like it because it
“Does it have to be a Latin term?” I asked.
“The habilines are the sole arbiters,” Brian said. “It can be anything they want.”
The habilines were sitting on the rosewood log beside the village
“Adam, stop him,” RuthClaire said. “You’re betraying your own kind.”
“Only if you suppose Erzulie and the others incapable of deciding what they wish to be called. I give them more credit.”
“So do I,” said Brian. He looked at me. “Any suggestions, Mr. Loyd?”
“Well, they’re about the size of a singing group. How about the Ink Spots?”
Brian translated this for the habilines.
“Lord!” RuthClaire shook her fists at shoulder level and stormed off into a hut to escape an outbreak of silliness that she regarded as low and pernicious.
“That really dates you,” Caroline told me. “Criminy, the Ink Spots!”
“How about the Jackson Five? Is that any better?”
“Singing-group names,” Adam said, deadpan, “are disqualifyingly frivolous.”
“Then how about the Dodgers?” I said. “The Rutherford’s Port Dodgers?”
“The Society for Self-Perpetuating Anachronism?” Caroline said.
“
“The Survivors?”
“Friends of the Earth?”
“Adam Montaraz and the Voodoo Vagabonds?”
“Old and Young Republicans?”
“Stop,” Adam said. “I have a final proposal,
“It’s not that original,” Brian said after the count. “But it does have the force of tradition behind it.”
“Exactly,” Adam said. “Now RuthClaire can write Dr. Blair and tell him of my people’s decision.” He went into Erzulie’s hut to tell her. A moment later, the sounds of RuthClaire and Adam’s argument drifted out to all eight of us in the clearing.
I was frightened. Exploring caves, even in the company of a knowledgeable guide, strikes me as the physical equivalent of exploring the teeming darkness of the id. You have no idea what you will find. And there is no guarantee that once you confront this darkness, you will find the strength to overcome it and reemerge a saner person than you first went in. There is no guarantee that you will reemerge at all.
“Come on, Paul,” Caroline said. “The People do it all the time. Hector, who’s blind, has been doing it for years.”
“It might help to be blind.”
Still dressed as Baron Samedi, Adam led us away from the
“Doesn’t a barricade like that call attention to itself?” Caroline asked, gesturing at the prickly wall.
“Only from the air,” RuthClaire said. “And the only people on Montaraz with helicopters or light aircraft are Austin-Antilles hires. They don’t overfly Pointe d’Inagua very often because they’ve already got most of the good coffee-growing land tied up, anyway. It’s a little weird, a sablier hedge this high, but it’s not so strange as to invite inspection trips. It just keeps tourists and local curiosity-seekers at bay.”
Hector was with us. He stared unseeingly at the wall, a look of fond contentment on his runneled face. He walked unassisted, without even a stick to help him feel his way, and his sure-footed strides amazed me. How, though, would he negotiate this murderous barricade? How, for that matter, would we?
Adam read my mind. “For Hector and the others, going into the sabliers is like Br’er Rabbit being thrown into the briar patch. Come.” He and the old man set off across the terrace, climbing boldly toward the trees. Brian, RuthClaire, Caroline, and I followed, glancing about as if Tontons Macoutes might show at any moment to gun us down.
Hector led us through the barricade. His uncanny second sight allowed him to duck into an opening of spiny boughs that funneled us into another corridor requiring a sideways twist to enter. Each time Hector sensed, or remembered, the next array of spikes ready to stab him, his head bobbed to avoid it. And so we tiptoed behind him, bobbing and feinting as the person in front of us did, trusting that each feint replicated one already performed by Hector. I felt like an upright slug trying to defer my vivisection in a forest of jumbled razor blades.
At last we got through. The pine- and hardwood-studded mountain still loomed over us, but to its right gleamed a wedge of glittering blue from Inagua Bay, a peaceful triangular sail on the water, and the red-tile roof of a solitary villa next to the sea. The clarity of these images—after our claustrophobic hike from the coastal road to Prix-des-Yeux and from Prix-des-Yeux to this overlook—stunned me.
“Find an entrance to the caves,” Adam challenged us.
We stumbled along a dark-soiled cut between the sabliers and the lichen-coated rock formations above. Hector and Adam stood at the far end of this cut waiting for us to pass their test. I began to weary of it.
Turning, I said, “How long are we supposed to look?”
Adam was alone on the spot where he had been standing. Hector had vanished. Had he fallen through a metaphoric trap door into the maw of the mountain? I scrambled down the cut to Adam to try to solve the mystery.
Beside the habiline grew three or four blasted-looking bushes. They had clumped together so it was hard to tell their number. One stuck out and downward from the wall of the gravel-littered cut. Even though the slope of the mountain and the curve of the gully protected this bush from the wind, its inner branches were languidly waving, like sea anemones in a gentle current. I stuck my arm into the bush.
The air that struck my flesh was cool—refrigerated-feeling. This was undoubtedly Hector’s point of entry into the underworld.
“Here,” I said. “Right here.”
“Go on, then,” Adam encouraged me.
I waded into the tangled bushes, stooped to get my head beneath the bush growing out of the wall, and sat down to keep from scratching my face on its branches. Now my legs dangled invisibly beneath me, my upper body enmeshed in brambles like a fly in the pod of a carnivorous plant. RuthClaire, Caroline, and Brian approached me, their faces visible through the interlocking twigs of my prison.
“Drop,” Adam said. “Drop on down.”
“I’m not sure I want to be first.”
“You won’t be,” RuthClaire said. “Hector’s already down there.”
“Wait!” Caroline knelt and shoved a Nikon into my hands. “Hang on to that, Paul. It’s expensive.”
“I know that. Who the hell do you think bought it?” But I gripped the camera more tightly and edged forward until my rump had nothing under it to support it. Like Alice, I fell—into obsidian blackness. Then my feet hit rock and went out from under me, and I was sitting again, albeit painfully. I’d jarred my coccyx, and I could see nothing at all. A hand touched my forehead and then discreetly withdrew.
“Hector? Hector, is that you?”
A hand grabbed my shirt and got me off my tail to a hunched standing position. It was indeed Hector. He was blind—but, down here, so much less blind than I, or anyone else, that his clairvoyance made him king. I feared that if I stood, I’d bump my head.
“That’s not the way to do it,” RuthClaire called from above. “You’re supposed to slide down.” Her words echoed through the catacombs.
Caroline shouted, “Paul, are you okay?”
“I think I’ve loosened the bolt that holds my ass on, kid. Otherwise, yeah, I’m all right.” It gratified me to note that my ex had scolded me, while Caroline had asked after my health. Maybe at some level of its operation, the world was running smoothly.
Then Brian Nollinger cried, “Hang on, Mr. Loyd, we’re coming!” Adam came first, then RuthClaire, Caroline, and Brian. They slid down a natural ramp two feet over from where I’d been sitting, and this body-worn slide deposited them next to Hector and me without fracturing either their feet or their tailbones.
“I am very sorry you hurt your butt,” Adam said, touching my arm. “On this walk-through, we will avoid the most treacherous galleries, the coves and crawlways that speleologists call horrors: no wriggle rooms, rock bridges, or
“
“Cat holes,” RuthClaire said. “You can guess what those are.”
“En avant,” Adam said. He shone his battery lamp into the depths of the tunnel. Its beam lit the glassy black walls of the cavern and a high rugged arch beyond which ran a wall gleaming as if basted with coal oil. We walked toward that wall.
In its center, maybe fifty feet away, writhed a statue—its writhing a trick of the light, the oily dampness, and the sinuous lines of the sculpture itself—of a hominid creature like a habiline. It was carven from a dark, banded rock. Its contorted face had smooth hollows for eyes but an angry mouth and a flat nose with flared wings and nostrils. Its face seemed at once that of both a protohuman and a rabid canine. Its hands were fists, and its arms were raised to embrace or assault whoever approached. It boasted an erection as big and shiny as a Coca-Cola bottle, and testicles as distended and uneven as parallel drippings of candle wax. An agony of love, hunger, and rage emanated from the figure, which RuthClaire said was supposed to represent
“Who did it?” Caroline asked. “Hector?”
Adam said, “No, not Hector. Even he can’t remember who shaped it, or how our ancestors set it here, but for as long as any of us can recall, it has stood at the base of this wall, at the mouth of this gallery: a memorial and a numen.”
“A numen?” Caroline handed me a flash attachment. I plugged it into the Nikon and took a series of photographs of the statue.
“A presiding spirit,” Brian told Caroline. “The creative energy of the caves and of the habilines.”
“Abraxas, if you like,” RuthClaire said.
I looked at her in the wavering light of Adam’s lamp. “What?”
“Not the art gallery,” she said.
“Then what?”
“In Christian Gnosticism, Abraxas was the god of day and night. The long, bitter day of Adam’s people is nearly over. Down here, it’s already given way to night.”
“We must move,” Adam said. “To stay too long is to tire the eyes so they begin to play tricks. You’ll see statues where none exist, wall paintings where none have been painted. Huge figures at a distance will seem tiny figures in a nearby niche. Tiny statues nearby will seem colossi viewed from across a chamber of humbling bigness. Please, let’s move on.”
We obeyed, and what Adam predicted would happen, happened. The longer we stayed underground the less reliable our perceptions of what he was showing us. Today I have a photographic record of our trip through the Montaraz catacombs, but these photos cannot communicate the impact of beholding such powerful art in its hallucinatory natural setting. Even my panoramas of the largest subterranean vaults cannot evoke the feel—the claustrophobic awe—of standing in those places and drinking in the glory of what the habilines had done. Once sundered from the context of the caves, the art loses meaning as well as immediacy. Like the Upper Paleolithic artists who painted the deep galleries of Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain, Adam’s people had decorated their grottoes, corridors, and rotundas for complicated religio-historical purposes—rites of initiation and socialization—that would fail of fulfillment anywhere else. You had to be there for the art to have context, and the art had to have context for its beholders to internalize the sacredness and force of what they saw. That the caves eventually deceive the eye and disorient the body only adds to their importance in shaping the experience of the initiates. What, then, either “correctly” or “incorrectly,” did we see?
With Adam as guide, and with Brian and RuthClaire as additional torchbearers (they had flashlights), we saw all we could see without crawling, rappelling, or sprouting wings and flying. Here on Montaraz, a school of habiline Michelangelos had rendered the entire history of their species in red, black, yellow, and glowing-white symbols. This chronicle began with a parade of East African animals migrating in discrete herds along the wall leading away from the primeval habiline; it concluded with a procession of gunrunning boats, cruiseships, and propeller-driven pot planes along the way leading back to this anguished figure.
In between, deeper into the mountain, these same artists and their descendants had painted awesome murals synopsizing their people’s years on the savannah, their uneasy relationships with
These sprawling, almost phosphorescent murals took our breath away. Moreover, in front of each one stood a rock carving that subtly glossed the mural’s principal theme. Among these statues were a droll granite hippopotamus, a dying australopithecine, and a family of cave bats hanging upside down. I thought Brian would squeeze his eyeballs out of his sockets examining these works. Adam kept reminding him to stop touching the statuary and the paintings, particularly the murals, for too much touching would alter or deface them. Although the habilines’ pigments had strong color fastness, and although their artists had applied them only to the most absorbent rock faces, the preservation of this subterranean wonder still depended on its visitors’ respectful manners.
“You can’t continue to keep this secret!” Brian’s words bounced off a stagger of receding walls.
“We have to,” RuthClaire said. “To save it.”
“But Mr. Loyd’s taking pictures. Do you believe that after they’re published, another plague of professional schemers won’t swoop down on Montaraz?”
Adam said, “But these pictures, he won’t be publishing.”
“Then why am I taking them?”
“As a record,” Adam said. “If anything should destroy this magnificence, whether vandals, war, or volcanic eruption.”
Caroline asked what photos, of what art, I would be allowed to publish or to carry to gallery owners in my agent’s portfolio. Adam replied that he was not asking me to represent the dead habiline cave artists, but instead Erzulie, Hector, Toussaint, Dégrasse, and Alberoi. It was their work that I’d come to photograph for business purposes, not the paintings and statuary now surrounding and thoroughly overawing us. I would also be given the chance to take some of their work back to Atlanta with us. Granted, I was presently taking celluloid inventory of these refrigerated basilica naves, but that was only a sidelight—an important one—of Caroline’s and my voyage to Montaraz. We had come to help the living rather than the dead. The dead were beyond our help, if not our memory and our gratitude.
“Where are Erzulie’s and the others’ paintings?” Caroline asked.
“In Prix-des-Yeux,” Adam said. “Mister Paul could have photographed them this morning, but we became involved in our free election for a species name. It’s best to visit caves early in the day so that nightfall does not catch us belowground. When we get back, you can see the paintings in Erzulie’s hut.”
“How could they compare to these?” Brian made a sweeping gesture.
“Why should they?” RuthClaire said. “They’re altogether different.”
“Not really,” Adam said. “Hector and Erzulie did some of the cave paintings—farther on—of the Duvalier persecution: bogeymen with rifles, our young ones thrown from cliffs, and so forth.”
“I understand their doing so,” Brian said. “Hector and Erzulie were alive during that very bad time. But this stuff—” he pointed at a two-dimensional scene of a habiline hunting party chasing a pack of jackals off a kill—“well, none of the Rutherford Remnant could have experienced it. None of your cave painters ever lived in Africa. Even more obvious is the fact that none of them lived there two million years ago.”
“Very true,” Adam said.
“So how did they render the entire history of their people in this unbelievably glorious way?”
“
“I beg your pardon.”
“Voodoo and revelation,” RuthClaire told Brian. “All the way back in the 1870s, local
“That’s what Adam was doing last night,” I said. “What Adam and Erzulie were doing, I mean. With the snake.”
“Exactly,” RuthClaire said. “Getting in touch with their habiline past. And a trip through these caves can do the same in a way that brings all the rite’s participants closer together. The first cave painters probably began their work believing it would help their people survive by educating and unifying them. It would give them a sense of the sacred. Sadly, the twentieth century has been pretty efficient at destroying the sacred. And how could the cave painters know that a man named Papa Doc would turn into their Stalin, their Hitler, their Pol Pot? They’d never heard of any of these butchers.”
“Voodoo and revelation,” Brian said. “What did you mean by revelation?”
Adam’s lamp lit him from beneath, giving him the look of a disembodied floating head. “That God revealed himself to early
“Your own Christ?”
“Not a prehistoric Jesus of Nazareth,” Adam told Brian. “But God in a form of flesh that any habiline would regard as holy: our own Christ.”
Somehow, our sensoriums overloaded with data, we groped our way to the surface and then back down the mountain to Prix-des-Yeux. Hector remained behind in the pitch-black darkness of the caves. He, after all, was their curator.
In the village, Adam took Caroline and me into the hut that Alberoi was sharing with Erzulie. Its interior was larger than its haphazard outer walls and carpentering had led me to think possible. Alberoi knelt toward the rear of the shanty beneath a hole in the roof through which fell a dusty column of sunlight. Was he sick? I thought for a moment that a stomach cramp had taken him, that he had assumed this hangdog posture to vomit—but then I realized that he was hovering over a small sheet of canvas tacked to a piece of plywood lying flat on the floor. With the edge of a rusted spoon, he applied paint to the canvas: the artist in his studio. Indeed, the hole in the roof served him as a skylight. A rain-warped hatch cover rested on one end of this opening, waiting for the hut’s occupant to grab its handle and slide it into place. In the event of rain, that act would offer a bit of protection. Mostly, though, it would plunge the hut’s interior into leaky gloom.
Speaking hesitant but well-accented French, Adam told Alberoi that we’d come to see his and the others’ paintings. The habiline backed off his canvas and squatted with his spine to the wall and his eyes cutting between RuthClaire and me. He still had his spoon. The pigment on it was a crimson acrylic, as if he had been sneaking tastes from a forbidden bowl of strawberry Jell-O: a naughty boy caught red-handed. We stepped around the room’s clutter—including a large crate resting on a foundation of bricks, a strip of oilcloth covering it—to see what Alberoi had been painting. Fortunately, he was fairly far along in the work, and I could tell a good deal about his talent.
He had talent. The painting was a colorful market scene in the “naive” style that had dominated David Blau’s Haitian exhibit at Abraxas: accessible, representational art. Its human figures had an affinity with the human-habiline figures on the walls of Hector’s caves, but its setting was modern. I recognized the market as the market in Rutherford’s Port. Vegetable stalls, milling people in bright clothes, a pair of buses with baskets tied to their roofs, groups of native musicians soliciting money from tourists. What drew my eye faster than these elements, however, was the grinning, dawdling giraffe in the midst of the crowd, none of whose members regarded its presence as a cause for either alarm or celebration. The giraffe belonged to the scene as surely as did the buses or the women in market garb. Delighted, Adam actually laughed aloud.
“Very good, Alberoi. Excellent.”
“A giraffe?” Caroline said.
“He knows my secret,” Adam said, as if that explained anything. “Do you think you could sell a painting like this, Mister Paul?”
“Sure. With no trouble at all.”
“Then come see the others.” He led me to the crate up on bricks—like a teenager’s engineless jalopy, I thought—and when we were out of his way, Alberoi crept back to his painting, laid the spoon aside, and took up a fine-tipped brush from a tray of acrylics. With this brush, he stippled in the mountain shrubbery behind the market. His concentration was intense. The rest of us might as well have been in Miami Beach.
Adam lifted the oilcloth covering the crate, which thin plywood dividers sectioned into a dozen compartments. Its cover off, the crate looked like a makeshift filing cabinet. Each compartment held canvases, some rolled, some stretched taut on narrow frames. We pulled the paintings from the crate and examined them. Almost all were in the bright naive style of the market scene that Alberoi was finishing. Several were portraits—or self-portraits—of Prix-des-Yeux people, the best being those of Erzulie and Dégrasse, as if the artists preferred the female countenance to the male. Three or four of the paintings, in stark contrast to the majority, radiated a gray or muddy-blue pessimism rather than a gaudy Caribbean joy, but their subjects were Tontons Macoutes or demons from local voodoo lore. Flipping past these, I saw several moderately realistic renderings of such
“Am I supposed to photograph these?” I asked Adam.
“Only if you wish. Take a few with you, if you like, champion them about, and sell them for modest prices. Keep your commission and send the rest to RuthClaire and me. We can ship others to you, if your markets will bear such an influx.”
“I’ll take ten or twelve,” I said. “It’s probably best to see what sorts of interest they’ll generate before taking the lot.”
“You don’t want all of them?” Caroline asked me. “You’ll sell every habiline painting, or toenail clipping, entrusted to you.”
“But he won’t let me identify them as habiline artifacts.”
Caroline looked at Adam. “No? That’s self-defeating.”
“I am not trying to mop up, Miss Caroline, only to preserve what’s preservable and to pay for the privilege as we go.”
I had noticed an unusual, although perhaps not surprising, fact about all the paintings in the crate. “Adam, not one of these is signed. What names do you want to give the artists? I need names for gallery owners and department-store buyers.”
“Not
I glanced at Alberoi. “He didn’t do all of these, did he? Didn’t you say Erzulie painted too? And all the others, for that matter?”
“Erzulie does. Likewise the others. But only one name is necessary for all the paintings, don’t you think? Regard them closely.”
I did as Adam asked. Caroline helped me compare. The canvases, no matter their subjects, did seem the work of a single hand. Brush strokes, color choices, draftsmanship, compositional techniques, overlay patterns—all these telltale criteria suggested but one artist. Even the bleak portraits of the Tontons Macoutes and the Arada-Dahomey demons differed from the other paintings only in color choice, and it was hard to think of many artists who did not sometimes vary their palettes to imply the full spectrum of human feelings. (RuthClaire had stayed with murky pastels for the
“How did they manage this? It’s uncanny, Adam.”
“There is nothing to manage. It happens. In this creative endeavor, at least, the feelings of one are the others’ feelings; also, the talents. Because art requires leisure, they take turns at painting. They work turn by turn, by months. This is Alberoi’s month. Next, Dégrasse’s again. And so on. While the artist does art, the others tend their cassava patches, forage for firewood, or barter with trustworthy islanders for food items and such. It works very well. No one becomes disgruntled.”
Caroline said, “The canvases. The paints. Where do they get them?”
“Of late, RuthClaire and I have supplied them, but before we came, Erzulie went to Rutherford’s Port for them. She took carven figures of rosewood or mahogany to trade in the art shop next to
“Used-car dealers from Ohio,” Caroline said. “Not knowing what they have, they hang them in their dens next to big paintings of Elvis on black velvet.”
“Maybe,” Adam said. “I don’t know.”
I asked him what name he favored for our solitary naif. Would it be wrong to use his? Adam rejected this idea. He was not ashamed to sign these canvases, but no one who knew his own paintings would believe that he’d done these, too. The styles diverged too widely. He worked with the advantage, and disadvantage, of a crystallized ego, whereas Alberoi and the others painted from the soft core of their unspoken common experience, from a collective unconscious too rubbery for any “I” ever to get a firm grip on it.
“What, then?”
“Fauver,” Adam said. “Call this unknown artist Fauver.”
“From
He smiled broadly. “Yes, I know.”
We could have chosen a dozen paintings, rolled them up, and bid farewell to Prix-des-Yeux, but Adam insisted that we must not leave Montaraz without experiencing a
“There’s danger?” I asked. “I need help to see me safely through the ceremony?”
RuthClaire said, “It’s only dangerous, Paul, if you provoke the
“He ought to be able to manage that.” Caroline was teasing, not being malicious, but the remark prompted RuthClaire’s laughter, too. The resurgent chumminess of the women, united again in playful ridicule, stung, and that Brian Nollinger was also present did nothing to pluck out the barb.
“Why the hell do they have to go to Rutherford’s Port?” I asked.
“To do this right,” Adam said. “We need a baptismal gown big enough to fit you, Mister Paul. Also some rum,
“Chickens?”
“Don’t ask,” RuthClaire said, and she and Caroline guffawed again, their arms around each other like long-lost-but-lately-found sisters.
“Do we have to get the chickens, too?” Caroline managed through this sputtering.
“I’ll drive you,” Brian said. “You can shop for trinkets. I’ll buy the chickens.”
“Live chickens,” Adam said.
“They don’t need you to chauffeur them, Herr Professor,” I said.
“I
Brian tried to explain: “I’ve got to check in with my bosses. They give me a fairly free rein with this PADF project, but not so free that I can skip the island.”
Adam’s eyes widened and narrowed again. Nollinger saw, and I think both men remembered that nearly two years ago Brian had betrayed Adam to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. What would keep him from calling in the Tontons Macoutes in the hope of a reward, either money or preferential treatment?
“I’ll tell no one what I’ve seen here,” he said. “You have my word.”
A cynical snort escaped me.
“What would be the point?” he added. “I’d destroy my chance to do important field work here. I’d put myself in competition with dozens—maybe hundreds—of other would-be ethnographers. Do you really think I’d do that?”
“He wouldn’t,” Caroline said. “Brian knows what he’s got in Prix-des-Yeux.”
“And I want to see the
“Crumble sleeping tablets into their feed,” I said. “Do that methodically enough and maybe you’ll get research funding from the National Institutes of Health. You could call your paper ‘On the Tendency of Barnyard Fowls to Fall Asleep When Administered Mickeys.’”
This time Caroline and RuthClaire laughed with me, rather than at me, and I had the pleasure of seeing Brian’s annoyed look. But, hat in hand, he argued that he would be foolish to reveal what he knew and that RuthClaire and Caroline would be better off with him along than tooling down the coastal road unaccompanied. He’d help them load their purchases—he’d haggle for every item on their list. He was an expert at open-air bargaining, a skill he’d picked up in the Dominican Republic.
“We’ll keep an eye on him,” RuthClaire told Adam. “He’ll report to his bosses at Austin-Antilles, and that’s it. No side trips. No private phone calls. Et cetera.”
“Okay by me,” Brian said. He had won. He showed me a raised eyebrow of ironic triumph. Because RuthClaire and Caroline wanted showers and a good night’s rest before going into Rutherford’s Port, they hiked down to the beach that same afternoon and spent the night in the cottage on Caicos Bay. Brian Nollinger drove them. He made a pallet for himself on the porch, and, the next morning, he wrestled the rented Jeep along the coastal road into the city so that the women could do their
At sunrise, the coolest part of the day, Dégrasse brought breakfast: mild Haitian coffee with
We spent all day exploring them. I took so many pictures that my forefinger began to throb. Hector led us through the main rotunda and the most accessible galleries, but Adam, more nimble, took me places that I hadn’t already visited:
By the time Brian Nollinger and the two women returned, I was long since exhausted. Stars had begun to wink through the twilight sky over Prix-des-Yeux, and all I wanted to do was sleep. Adam wouldn’t let me. So I was standing bruised and bone-weary beside the
Toussaint and Dégrasse fed the marketgoers, and Adam urged them to finish eating so that—in his self-appointed role as Lord Saturday—he could initiate the service that would allow Caroline and me to experience the full mystery and power of the
It was totally dark when Caroline, Brian, and I entered the sacred peristyle of the habilines. In his top hat and tails, Adam led us in. RuthClaire awaited us in the palm-thatched
Only Brian, Caroline, and I would be “couched” tonight, “put down on the floor” as potential communicants with the Yagaza gods. This service was expressly for us. We wore white baptismal gowns similar to the cambric robes in which the habilines had first introduced themselves. RuthClaire and Caroline had bought our garments in Rutherford’s Port, and they were spotless when we donned them, as immaculate as new wedding gowns. Candles in globelike pots burned at various places about the temple, reminding me again of the tacky accoutrements at a cheap stateside restaurant. Brian kept saying he wished just to observe, not to participate, but Adam forcibly rejoined that no one who came to Prix-des-Yeux could do so as an observer, that participation in its life and rituals was a requisite for staying.
Erzulie lit two tall red tapers in cast-iron holders at either end of the drum platform. Then she centered herself in front of the platform and nodded at Adam. Behind her, Toussaint began to tap out a light beat on the tallest of the drums; he was seated on a rickety stool that permitted him to lean forward over their taut skins. Alberoi picked up this beat on the set known as
“Lie down by the
Spoons don’t nest, I thought. Spoonbills maybe, but not spoons.
Nollinger and my wife were not so literal in their thinking. They knelt by the center post, then assumed clumsy fetal curls facing it. Nollinger was first, with Caroline cupping her body into his and touching her chin to his shoulder blade. I lay down behind her in the same posture, grateful that Brian hadn’t tried to come between us in this matter. I pressed my groin into Caroline’s buttocks. Our robes were no longer immaculate, our first contact with the ground having soiled them.
Hector and the habiline drummers began to chant—faintly, in a guttural singsong that counterpointed or mimicked the rhythms of the Arada-Dahomey drums. The sound reminded me of Adam’s singing before he’d learned to speak, but rougher and more ritualized. Caroline shuddered. I shuddered with her. My place on the floor kept me from seeing much, but the
Like a spry gnome, Erzulie danced, her bare feet slapping the floor near the center post. The python kept flowing down its own post behind the drum platform, its bronze and garnet body shimmering in the candlelight. A chicken began to cluck: two chickens. Erzulie’s hand came into my view, swinging a chicken by its bound legs. Adam, who appeared above us near the
“O great
The second chicken, which Erzulie thrust aloft, cackled hysterically. It, too, smelt blood, sensing that a like fate lay in store for it. And Erzulie beheaded it as quickly and surely as Adam had executed the other. Blood parachuted away from her like streamers from a crimson Roman candle. I shut my eyes and covered my mouth and nose with my palm. Caroline leaned against me as tense as a vibrating metal pole. When I pushed my groin against her again—to reassure us both—my cock was now a shriveled nub. What, exactly, was mystical about this ceremony? So far, it was an abomination and a horror, and I wanted out.
Drumbeats, chanting, dancing.
Opening my eyes and peering down the length of Caroline’s body, I saw that the
Drumbeats, chanting, dancing. Adam danced barefoot with the barefoot Erzulie. The drummers on the platform—or, at least, Dégrasse and Alberoi—undulated behind their instruments like revelers in a stalled conga line. Even Hector had got to his feet. He bounced up and down behind us, stutter-stepping between the
“O Legba,” Adam cried, no longer dancing, “let the
Someone yanked my head back. Erzulie, I think. Over my split lip, she poured
“Come, Agarou! Mount your horse!”
The center post shook. Brian reached out to steady it. The electricity coursing through the
Agarou, the
Where stars had earlier shone, storm clouds massed in bands above the mountain. Still putting up a token fight for his body, Loyd heard thunder cannonading across the sky as if from the ramparts of the Citadelle Laferrière, south of Cap-Haïtien on Haiti itself. And with each new roll of thunder, the mounted man convulsed. Even as they continued to drum or dance, the habilines watched Loyd. Hector, the blind one, had moved into a corner to escape being knocked down by the flailings of his arms and legs. Erzulie, however, had taken his predicament as a challenge to her skill as a dancer. Above him, she leapt from foot to foot, guessing well where to place her feet without stepping on him. Adam, meanwhile, had renewed his plea for Aïda Ovedo and her husband Damballa to come down the center post into the temple.
The thunder above the mountain boomed louder, and the hidden kernel of Paul Loyd’s consciousness realized that the storm noise would completely drown that of the
“Up, Agarou!” Adam urged the
Loyd felt himself giving in to the inevitable. His movements became less violent. He bridged his
“Adam!” she cried, to be heard over the drumming and the thunder. “Adam, stop it! I think it’s killing him!”
Killing me, thought Loyd dispassionately. This is killing me.
The habiline in top hat and tails turned to his wife. “Oh, no, it is bringing him to life, to a knowledge that he could not otherwise so vividly acquire.”
Loyd placed his forearms on the floor parallel to his arched body. Pushing with them, he sprang off the ground like a limbo dancer who has just crept beneath the lowest level of the bar. Upright, his body swayed in the temple’s candlelit geometries. Caroline and the anthropologist lay beside the center post, entranced but not yet possessed, their blood-spattered gowns making them resemble murder victims: an interesting, but not too disturbing sight, for they weren’t dead, and once Aïda Ovedo and Damballa mounted them, he would have company in his spiritual slavery.
“Aaaawwgh,” he said. Spit ran down his lip and chin.
In his Baron Samedi costume, Adam made an ironic bow. “Welcome, Agarou. Welcome, Agarou. Welcome, Agarou.”
Agarou did a scissoring dance step.
“After such an entrance,” Adam said, “you must have great hunger.” He swept a headless chicken up, dug the nails of his hands into its breast, and broke it open with a wicked popping motion. From this bloody rent, he pulled entrails such as Loyd had never used in his cooking at the West Bank. Adam handed these items to Agarou, who, to Loyd’s consternation, began to eat them. Warm and slippery, they were hard to chew, but Agarou got them down almost as fast as the
RuthClaire (Loyd noticed, stealing a look through the
Loyd drowned not only in this deluge, but also in the ancient personality of the
“Giddyup, horse,” the
Loyd began to walk uphill, as did Agarou. He felt himself two consciousnesses at once, and had the further conviction, as he strode away from Prix-des-Yeux (which had dissolved in the rain along with the
Loyd-
At last the horse came to a palisade of mastodon skulls, sabre-tooth tiger tusks, and chalicothere skeletons twenty or thirty feet high. These bones were locked together like pieces of an enormous ivory puzzle, grim and dazzling in the lightning-riven night. Loyd-
Then reality came back.
How will I see down there? Loyd wondered. His hand raised a flashlight to face level (an instrument he could not recall the god picking up), but when he thumbed its button, no beam shot forth. This won’t do, Loyd told the god of ancestors.
Agarou replied, Do gods need eyes to see in your material darkness? We possess the second sight of divinity.
But—
Shut up, nag. Nag me no more. And Agarou laughed at the timidity and lack of faith of his human horse, and yanked him into the bush through which Hector habitually entered the caves, and pushed him down a body-worn slide into total darkness and the breathy cool of the buried past.
I can’t see! Loyd cried to his
Open your eyes, mon! Open your eyes!
Not realizing that they’d been closed, Loyd opened his eyes. He could see. What he saw, though, came as if by ultraviolet illumination. The cave walls glinted silver and purple-red, as if each rock fracture disclosed a sweating seam of liquid mercury or grape jelly. Also, in order to make out the size and shape of surrounding objects, Loyd had to look at them peripherally. A direct gaze dissolved into mist whatever he sought to view. So, to unlock the gloom’s ultraviolet secrets, he did many quick or slow double takes, lifting or lowering his eyes, ducking and feinting. He felt like a soul in hell.
Yagaza, Agarou corrected him: Africa. The afterlife.
Finally, he realized that Agarou had permitted his own consciousness to resume control of his body. He was still possessed—the
Shadows in the ultraviolet told him that he was not alone. Habiline wraiths encircled him, a hunting party of naked Early Pleistocene males. He walked in their midst in his glowing cambric baptismal gown, a sunlit saint in a pit of resurrected time. He told himself to stop, to turn back and climb out of the gloom just as he’d entered it—but the habilines about him carried him forward against his will. My will, he thought. I can’t do my will. I do theirs. And although he marched with them in apparent freedom, a head and a half taller than the tallest of the ghostly hominids, he had no real choice but to follow their lead and to wish he were less gaudily dressed and a good deal smaller. And when the habilines began to run, they pulled him along: He tottered over them like an effigy on a shoulder-borne float in a religious procession.
They were in the caves and also in an arroyo on the African veldt. The paintings that Loyd had already photographed spun by on the walls like fissures and fault lines, intrusions and alluvial deposits. The habilines tracked a potential kill, carrying bone clubs and stone knives. A two-legged shadow before Loyd threw its club, which disappeared end over end into darkness—to strike something that yelped in pain. In the wake of this yelp, more clubs flew. If Loyd could trust the piteous ensuing sounds, many of these tosses hit their target. Excitement built among the hominids. Loyd was pulled along faster than before.
A gravity well, he thought. A singularity. I’m being sucked into bottomless night with a horde of protohuman spirits…. Agile ghosts scampered away from him, toward their kill, releasing him confused and breathless to the dark. Now, if he wanted, he could turn and grope his way back to the exit. No. No, he couldn’t. Curiosity about what the habilines had wounded in this pocket of space-time had him in its grip. He had to see—if seeing it was—their mysterious victim. And so, in his blood-spattered robe, biting his split lip, he walked toward the place that the habilines appeared to have gone. Gradually, the odd red light visible all about them flooded this hidden place, and he pushed his way through the befuddled hunters to look down on their prey.
It was a monstrous hyena, a prehistoric specimen. Or else it was a large quasi-human creature with a hyena’s head. In the bad light, Loyd could not decide. Whatever it was, the weirdness of its anatomy had halted the habilines. It sat against an outcropping of rock like a man recovering from a long run: hyena or hominid? The head gave one message, the body another. Chest, arms, pelvis, and legs suggested a deformed primate, but the ears, snout, and teeth said hyena… or dog… or jackal. The eyes had a pleading human twinkle that also confused things. The habilines knew that no wounded hyena had ever assumed this manlike posture, and they were chary of the beast.
Once, Loyd realized, something like this had actually happened. With Agarou’s blessing, I’m witnessing what a real band of habiline hunters witnessed in Africa two million years ago. For them, this is an archetypal event. It defined them as human—before the advent of speech—in a spiritual or metaphysical sense. And they know it…. Exhausted and bleeding, the hyena-hominid pulled itself to its feet. It towered over the hunters. It was taller than Loyd too, if only by a little. Although by every objective sign, the creature appeared to be at the mercy of the habilines, they made no attempt to deal it a death blow. The creature commanded their awe. Humbling them by its height and its indifference to its own suffering, it wholly disarmed them. Loyd was frightened. He felt like running, but the habilines, expecting revelation, held their ground. This eerie stand-off continued.
Finally, the hyena-hominid bowed its doglike head. This gesture of resignation or reverence or bodily surrender turned into something else, an act both grotesque and moving. The creature, stretching out its arms and gripping the rock face behind it for support, bent forward until its snout was nuzzling its left breast. The vertebrae on its neck and spine strained against its taut hide. With a jerk of its head, the creature tore the flesh of its own pectoral muscle. Then it straightened, removed one hand from the wall, and cupped from this narrow wound its own beating heart, which it held out to the wonder-struck habiline wraiths as a love offering. All who ate of it would know that the Mind implicit in Nature had affirmed their lives—through the agency of this hyena-headed messenger. Their salvation lay in this knowledge and in their ability to cohabit in a necessarily imperfect world.
Come, the hyena-hominid challenged its pursuers, still extending its heart. Come and partake of my life’s blood.
The largest of the habilines, the alpha male of their spectral party, advanced to accept the offering. Dwarfed by the dog-headed messenger, he tasted of the heart. Having tasted, he carried it to each member of the band, and they, too, cupped the beating organ to their mouths, bit into it, and took into themselves a living piece of their miraculous prey. Loyd could only watch. None of the habilines brought the heart to him—clearly, they regarded him as alien to their world, too alien to benefit from this rite—and he was glad that they ignored him. When the heart was altogether eaten, the gloom of the catacombs absorbed the hominids into itself, and Loyd found that he was alone with the creature that had sacrificed its heart to feed a small remnant of feisty but unprepossessing human forebears.
Agarou, the god of ancestors, had mediated this confrontation in the immaterial realm of Yagaza, but now it was Loyd who had to face the hyena hominid and to demand of it some explanation. His fear came back. What authority did he have to question such a being? What answers—if any—could he expect? The silver-crimson light of the caves coalesced around the two of them like a contracting womb….
LOYD: Who are you?
(
LOYD (
I AM: Names fail. If you like, call me Yagaza, or Lord, or Logos, or even Anima Mundi. None of these titles suits absolutely, but if you have to have a name, pick one that doesn’t belittle me.
LOYD: God?
I AM: In this context, Yagaza might be more appropriate. After all, I’m Adam’s God—Adam Montaraz’s, that is. But, ultimately, I’m yours, too.
LOYD: I thought Yagaza meant Africa—either Africa or the afterlife.
I AM: In the
LOYD: I can’t call you Yagaza. I’m not a voodooist. I’m a victim of possession, but I’m not a voodooist. And you—you call yourself Adam’s God, but all I can see, squinting and cocking my head, is a heartless chimera, part man-ape and part African scavenger.
(
LOYD: Please. Don’t make me look at you now. It’s crueler than you know.
I AM (
LOYD: But you can inject yourself into the affairs of your temporal creation, can’t you? You did that with your hyena-hominid revelation to Adam’s Pleistocene ancestors. You’ve let me witness a reenactment of that “disclosure event.”
I AM: What I’ve permitted you to see is an allegory of that event intelligible to your contemporary human understanding. Had I given you a reenactment of the event as it occurred, you would have misinterpreted it. More than likely, you would have utterly missed its sacred aspect.
LOYD: But you were there, weren’t you? You made yourself manifest in the otherwise mundane history of the planet. You appeared to a small band of habilines whom most of us today would dismiss as protohumans.
I AM: I did.
LOYD: Why?
I AM: You’ve already anticipated me here. To demonstrate my love for them. To affirm them. To validate their struggles to survive and evolve.
LOYD: Can your appearance to them have had any measurable effect? At first, you terrified them. Momentarily, you made them forget their terror by appeasing their hunger. That’s all, surely.
I AM: The Rutherford Remnant—Adam, Erzulie, Hector, Toussaint, Dégrasse, and Alberoi—demonstrates that it did have a lasting effect. They continue to celebrate my earliest quasi-human incarnation by observing Voodoo Saturday Night. Indeed, you’re celebrating that event with them. Possessed by Agarou, god of ancestors, you’re a
LOYD: But what if there were no Rutherford Remnant? What if the species known as
I AM: Does a falling tree land with a thud if there’s no one there to register the thud? Yes. The thud exists as a receivable potentiality in the sound waves generated by the tree’s impact with the ground. Because I was received by creatures now dead hardly suffices to demonstrate that I wasn’t received at all. I appeared to them, and they knew themselves blessed—validated, if you like—by my holy concern.
LOYD (
I AM: It wounds your vanity to think that
LOYD: You wrong me, Yagaza. Frankly, I’m by no means certain that
I AM (
LOYD: I’m possessed. I’m dreaming. I’m talking to a sardonic corner of my own consciousness, not to—God forgive me—God.
I AM: But God has a corner of your consciousness, doesn’t he? If God created you, why, then, he has a lien on all the physico-spiritual systems making up your identity. You’re one of my most valuable means of comprehending God—along with all the other self-aware entities, terrestrial or otherwise, of an ever-questing creation. You should take advantage of your dreaming—your possession—to help me in this self-reflexive quest.
LOYD: You called yourself Adam’s God. Why? Because you appeared in hyena-hominid form to his ancestors?
I AM: In part, certainly. But also because in searching for an element of the sacred to append to his Batesonian philosophy of evolutionary holism, which lacks such a dimension, he decided to repostulate God. I’m the God That Is, but I’m also the God that Adam humbly repostulated. Your species’ hunger for the sacred, going back even to the Pleistocene, doesn’t arise in the absence of satisfying spiritual meat, but in response to its availability in the miraculous slaughterhouse of creation. I AM that meat. I AM the architect of the sacred abattoir. Those who refuse to ignore their hunger will at length find me.
LOYD: Adam told Alistair Patrick Blair that you have both a timeless aspect and a temporality that involves you in the time-bound doings of the material world. Is that true? It sounds paradoxical, probably even impossible.
I AM: Like a man who both has a head and doesn’t have a head?
LOYD: Exactly. That was Blair’s precise objection.
I AM: Well, my temporal aspect hardly requires lengthy justification, does it? In that aspect, or one manifestation of it, I am talking to you now. And in one manifestation of that aspect, I possess both a hyena’s head and the mutilated face of the man who killed your godson. And, if you must know, no head at all.
LOYD: All right. Fine. If you’re conversing with me, then you obviously depend on the flow of time to achieve such communication. But how can you simultaneously—ah, but that’s the wrong word, isn’t it—how can you also have a quality of timelessness that places you either outside or above the ongoing mayhem and muck of the physical universe?
I AM: Because you’re a captive of time yourself, Mister Paul, this will be hard to explain. Timelessness is not an attribute you’re well-equipped to understand.
LOYD: Oh, I see. You’re gearing up for a cop-out.
I AM: Not at all. If you can accept Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in its specific application to quantum theory, confessing that one may know either where a subatomic particle is or how it happens to be moving, but not both attributes at once, why can’t you adopt a like uncertainty principle for a concept as grand and ineffable as that of God? Or, to employ another analogy, if light can be either particle or wave depending on the perspective and the intentions of the observer, why can’t God be a temporal being within the context of creation and a timeless entity in his orientation above, or outside, the universe of matter and mutability? The supposition that he must be one or the other is a reflection of human limitation, which arises not only from finite human understanding but also from your existential immersion in time itself.
LOYD: This isn’t fair. A man who’s spent most of his adult life concocting recipes for cheesecake and pasta dishes should not argue theology with God.
I AM: Who better than you, Mister Paul? A person who has fed publicans and sinners, sociologists and habilines, knows something of what it means to satisfy hunger—as well as to fail in that task.
LOYD: Okay, okay. You’ve mentioned subatomic particles—our ability to know either their location or their motion, but not both. And you’ve mentioned that light can be either a particle or a wave depending on what the observer wishes to find out. But these analogies break down in this situation because atoms and light are temporal phenomena. They have no atemporal attributes at all.
I AM: Congratulations on stating the obvious. Can you think of any phenomena that aren’t finally time-bound or time-determined?
LOYD (
I AM: Then maybe you can see the difficulty of what I want to explain. If you could think of any examples, I’d try to work them into illustrative metaphors for the coincident timelessness and temporality of God. But since you can’t, I’m stuck with phenomena at play within the dimension of time. Thus, everything I tell you is an approximation of something largely inexpressible.
LOYD: Go on. I’ll try to follow.
I AM: Only in my timeless aspect—my supratemporal identity—am I utterly without blemish. There, I AM perfect and fulfilled and all-knowing and, yes, changeless. What I know never alters because it encompasses—until the “end” of “time”—the totality of changes past, present, and future in the physical universe. At my impetus, time—space-time—began on the edge between timelessness and temporality. And one day, in figurative temporal terms, I will put period to time by letting it run the course I’ve already omnisciently calibrated and clocked. Then I will necessarily subsume my temporal avatars and once again simply BE, perhaps from Everlasting to Everlasting. I can’t be more specific than this because my own immersion in the flow of universal time clouds my clairvoyance. Trapped here with you, Mister Paul, I see through a glass darkly—but with a vision, in comparison to your own, pristine and pellucid.
LOYD: Why would a perfect, fulfilled, all-knowing, and changeless deity even bother to inflate the balloon of the physical cosmos? Isn’t that a capricious act? An unnecessary waste of energy?
I AM: I like your metaphor. It has a festive spontaneity totally in accord with the motives of God in my timeless aspect. These motives are complex, innate, and immutable, but they center on the impulse to celebrate my self-awareness with living consciousnesses outside myself. This impulse requires a Creation—the Big Bang that gave birth to space-time and all the galactic populations.
LOYD: How can you describe a God with impulses as “fulfilled”?
I AM: In temporal terms, I can’t. But temporal terms are all we have here. It might be more accurate to say that, even in my timeless aspect, I possess the positive attribute of generosity. In the absence of beneficiaries, however, no one but I could document my possession of this trait. Therefore, I inflated the balloon of the cosmos to affirm the otherwise pointless fact of my generosity. I didn’t need to do so, I wanted to do so. Even this falls short of the reality, Mister Paul, but, here and now, I can scarcely do better.
LOYD: Never mind. What about suffering and death and injustice? How do you square the murder of an innocent child with your hypothetical generosity as the God Beyond Time?
I AM: I don’t. I don’t even try. Every secondary creation of any complexity is flawed. Perfections of various wonderful kinds may occur within it, of course, but the encompassing whole—well, its imperfections are equally numerous. In fact, some of the perfections depend upon them. The just recognize justice by unhappy exposure to its opposite. The wise distill their—
LOYD (
I AM: What you must remember is that no matter how terrible the world may seem, no matter how cruel or pointless, the Mind that nudged its ecosystems toward the evolution of self-aware consciousness did so out of an inexpressible generosity.
LOYD: A ponderous vanity, I’d say.
I AM: And the timeless Mind whose temporal avatars intrude upon Creation to shape and direct it in their puny ways—well, that Mind releases them like antibodies into the besieged body of the world. There they help the sentient creatures of faith and goodwill neutralize the poisons of entropy and accident. I came for that reason. So did Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, and Gandhi, and perhaps the latter-day habiline whom you know as Adam Montaraz. In any case, Mister Paul, Adam came to extend the family of humankind, to demonstrate—via his struggle for personal revelation—the interconnectedness of creation.
LOYD (
I AM: Not at all. Not at all.
(
LOYD (
I AM: By repostulating me as the Alpha and Omega, the supreme primal-and-ultimate holistic concept, you may believe in me again by rediscovering in me the ground of your own existence.
LOYD (
I AM: To realize once again that you were spawned by a multidimensional, paratemporal Benevolence and that even your most pointless-appearing torments mean, Mister Paul. They resonate forever in the all-encompassing Mind of God.
LOYD (
The possessed man slumped from Yagaza’s immaterial embrace. Meanwhile, Agarou, god of ancestors, climbed out of the psychic grotto into which he had earlier withdrawn. He climbed out of it to remount the body of Paul Loyd. He meant to ride his human horse back into the rainy compass of Prix-des-Yeux and its
Let go of me, Loyd told Agarou. I’m sick of the selfish double dealings of gods.
The one who must release you comes now, Agarou said. Patience. Loyd peered through the
Caroline knelt beside him. Adam knelt beside him. Their clothes were drenched, their faces beaded with rain. Behind them, looking down on him, stood two sinister-looking men whom Loyd could not place and whose postures bespoke a belligerent impatience. They carried weapons: rifles or submachine guns. Even the
“Come forth, Mister Paul,” urged Adam in his hoarsest whisper. “Come forth from your possession by Agarou, god of ancestors.”
I sat up straighter. Embarrassed, I let go of the lustrous prick of the statue behind me. I blinked against the flashlight beams of the armed men regarding me with equal measures of curiosity and contempt.
“What the hell’s going on?”
Caroline kissed me and nodded at one of the beret-wearing men. “You remember Lieutenant Bacalou, Paul? We met him on the boat coming over from Cap-Haïtien.”
“Hello again.” Lieutenant Bacalou gave me a curt nod and a superior smile.
Groggy, I tried to stand. With Caroline and Adam’s support, I succeeded, but briefly teetered like a bounce-back toy trying to regain its equilibrium. Five minutes ago, I had been talking to God—scoring points against him in an emotional metaphysical debate that had utterly wrung me out. To find this grim pair of Tontons Macoutes in his place, holding my wife and my friend at gun point, seemed a bleak variation of a nightmare that had already taken place in Beulah Fork. E. L. Teavers and the Klan, Lieutenant Bacalou and another of Baby Doc’s rifle-toting bogeymen: they were mirror images. Or maybe this cave was the darkroom in which the negatives of the unsmiling macoutes would turn out to be pernicious double exposures. No matter where we went, we could not escape the merciless pursuit of zealots.
“All right,” I managed. “Tell me something about this.”
Caroline explained that Lieutenant Bacalou and his men had burst into the
“Erzulie? Hector?”
“They’re okay,” Caroline said. “They’re under guard in a dry corner. Brian and RuthClaire are with them down there, likewise under guard.”
I looked at Bacalou. “Did you bring a whole army up here with you?”
“Not even a platoon,” he said with easy irony. “At first, Monsieur Loyd, it was only Philomé and I who followed the two women and the Austin-Antilles man up here from Rutherford’s Port.” He swung his flashlight in an arc that illuminated his stocky partner’s face. “Monsieur Loyd, Philomé Bobo.”
“On the edge of the
“You’d make a good Boy Scout,” I said.
Bacalou ignored the compliment. “We still have no idea how many
“Not counting myself, only five of my people remained in the world,” Adam said. “You murdered Toussaint. Now there are only four.”
“And what Philomé did was not murder, Monsieur Montaraz, but a very quick-thoughtful defense of the self.”
Further talk revealed that while holding the remaining occupants of the
“Why are we under arrest?” I asked “What have we done?”
Lieutenant Bacalou considered. “You have aided and abetted the
“I doubt that,” Caroline said. “If RuthClaire and Adam disappeared, you’d have world public opinion, a dozen American Congressmen, and Amnesty International breathing down your necks to know why.”
“Probably,” Lieutenant Bacalou said. “And it makes me tremble.”
“And there’s no sense killing Hector and Erzulie, or Alberoi and Dégrasse, either. They’re the last of the Rutherford Remnant. When they die, Lieutenant Bacalou, their species will be extinct. They’re trying to hang on here, not overthrow the corrupt tub of butter who pays you to terrorize the citizenry.”
This sally offended the lieutenant. “We are not terrorists, Madame Loyd. We’re policemen. We keep the peace.”
“A goal that murdering Toussaint has greatly furthered,” Caroline said angrily. “Do you have any proof that he or his kinspeople have tried to bring about the collapse of the Duvalier government?”
“How could I?” Bacalou gestured with his flashlight. “Until this evening, I had no proof that he and the other
Adam interjected, “Please think for a moment about what you’ve just said.”
“Proof of the latter is proof of the former!” Somewhat less emphatically, Bacalou added, “At least in the eyes of my superiors.” He shone his flashlight to the left of the statue, picking out portions of the murals glistening on the cold rocks and undulating across their seams and crevices. “The acme of their criminality—theirs and yours, my friends—is that you have all conspired to keep this mighty national treasure a secret. You have worked to steal from the Haitian people a true marvel of their cultural heritage. And that is clearly criminal. It cries out for your arrest and punishment.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “This is a true marvel of habiline endurance and creativity. It belongs to Adam’s people, not to Baby Doc or the fat-cat foreigners who’ll pour in here to see the place if its secret is betrayed. Is that what you want, lieutenant? Pizza Huts and neon signs and helicopter overflights—right here on Pointe d’Inagua?”
“What are you going to do?” Adam asked him.
“For a man in this kind of work,” he said, “I have too much education. I am not ruthless enough.”
“Philomé is,” Caroline said. (Thank God Philomé had no English.) “Maybe you should let him do a ‘defense of the self’ against all three of us.” She smiled at the
“Let me see more of this,” Bacalou said, ignoring Caroline’s barb. He marched into the rotunda at the end of the righthand corridor. We followed. Both Philomé and the lieutenant splashed their flashlight beams on the ceilings and walls of this vast chamber, and Adam used his battery lamp to supplement their feeble lights. For a long time, no one spoke. The macoutes were wonderstruck. Caroline slipped her arm around my waist and supported me because I was falling prey to dizziness, the peculiar sensory lag of one recently possessed.
I shut my eyes. Agarou inhabited the darkness, as did the hyena-headed godling of the habilines, and a vast, expanding interior light that I recognized as the signature of the Mind Beyond Time that had brainstormed all three of these apparitions. What had I to do with Beulah Fork, Atlanta, or Montaraz’s frigid caves? In Caroline’s loving grasp, I was bound for a temporal union with the source of all being. There, freed from my time-bound prejudices, I would meet and embrace the dead—from spiritually inclined australopithecines to materialistic Bolsheviks. Agamemnon. Cleopatra. Francis of Assisi. Queen Elizabeth. Montezuma. Feodor Dostoevski. Jesse Owens. My parents. Elvis Lamar Teavers. Tiny Paul. Nancy Teavers. Craig Puddicombe. Toussaint. They’d all be there, frozen in the timeless medium of God’s compassionate, all-encompassing, and unifying Thought….
Adam was talking to Lieutenant Bacalou, explaining that this exquisite habiline cave art needed a champion. Why not the lieutenant himself? Surely, he could convince Philomé Bobo to forget what he’d seen here, or to pretend to forget. As for the pair of Tontons Macoutes still in Prix-des-Yeux, the lieutenant need not tell them that he and Philomé had seen these caves. Instead, they’d found me wandering the mountainside or huddled in a rock shelter several hundred yards below the summit. To reveal the presence of the caves would unleash on this lovely peninsula the full apocalypse of development, exploitation, advertisement, and ruin. What good would that do anyone?
“None,” Lieutenant Bacalou said. “But it is my duty to do so. It need not happen as you say.”
“But it will,” Adam said. “You and I, we both know that.” He spotlighted another incandescent historical mural, another sculpture. The hallucinatory rapture of protracted cave-crawling had overtaken us all, even the miserable lieutenant. He was beside himself with awe and indecision.
“What must I do?” he asked.
Adam intuited that a bribe might work. It would present Bacalou with a material rationale for (a) shirking the stringent dictates of duty and (b) surrendering to the call of his own natural decency. A bribe would preserve the man’s self-respect. Succinctly, then, Adam explained that Caroline and I would take a number of habiline paintings back to the States and sell them as the work of a Haitian naif by the name of Francoise Fauver. Bacalou could pretend to be Fauver. For this imposture, he would receive a commission on every painting sold. If the work of “Fauver” proved especially popular, Adam would see to it that Bacalou toured North America with an exhibition of “his” paintings. Further, to keep Philomé Bobo from revealing this ruse to anyone, Adam would finance Bobo’s complicity in it by outfitting him as Bacalou’s amanuensis and valet. Otherwise, Bacalou might have to kill Philomé or frame him as a Castroite bent on the establishment of a Marxist regime in Haiti. “But Philomé hates Castro,” Bacalou told us.
“Then persuade him to be your valet,” Adam said. “You can both resign from the
After pondering a moment, Bacalou said, “I dislike the name Francoise Fauver. It has, I think, the ring of phoniness.”
“What do you prefer?” Adam said.
“Why not my own? My real name, I mean, not my
“And what is that?”
“Marcel Sam,” the lieutenant said. “I have not used it since I was a boy, but it’s a real name, not an invention, and pretty too,
“Very well,” Adam said. “Marcel Sam it is.”
But Marcel Sam’s happiness in this solution began to evaporate. He struck his forehead with an open palm. “Philomé is married. He has seven children. It’s not going to be easy for him to resign and become a traveling valet.”
“Then kill him,” I said impatiently, half meaning it. “Frame him as a Castroite.”
Adam shook his head. “Nothing as desperate as that is necessary. We will think of something, Monsieur Sam.”
And, in fact, we did. We went back down to Prix-des-Yeux with the erstwhile Lieutenant Bacalou in our pocket and his partner persuaded that what he had just seen was a subterranean annex to the Duvalier family’s secret banking and warehousing system, whose existence on Montaraz he dare not bruit about. He could talk of it only at peril to his wife and seven children. For the time being, at least, Bobo, too, was in our pocket, a dupe of a story too plausible to dismiss as fantasy.
The unpleasant banal truth is that every story of individual consciousness—except perhaps God’s—concludes with a death. Toussaint was dead. What had I really known about the little man? Almost nothing. Of the five surviving habilines who’d tried to make a community-in-hiding on Pointe d’Inagua, Toussaint had made the least impression on me. Hector, Erzulie, Dégrasse, and Alberoi all had physical handicaps or personality quirks that quickened them in my affection and my memory. By contrast, Toussaint was a cipher, a pot-bellied, middle-aged little man with no obvious talents and no ingratiating idiosyncrasies. (He could paint, Adam assured me, but June was not his month to do so.) Back in Prix-des-Yeux, then, it surprised me to find that RuthClaire had wrapped Toussaint’s bullet-riddled body in clean linen and knelt beside him in the
A banal truth. A banal consolation.
Like enemies observing a holiday cease-fire, the Tontons Macoutes and our own party cooperated in giving Toussaint a funeral and burial. Mud and mire impeded our labors, but at last we got him into the ground so that an evil
Lieutenant Bacalou assured his fellow
Lieutenant Bacalou led his men down the mountain ahead of us. Alone again, our own party puttered back and forth between the
After a while, he said, “Mr. Loyd?”
“Yeah?”
“What are you going to do with all your photos? Of the caves and so forth.”
I wanted to reply, What the hell’s it to you?—but instead said, “File them until the last of
“Alberoi’s younger than you, Mr. Loyd. He could outlive you. He could outlive you by a great many years.”
“I hope he does.”
In the muggy damp of the hut, poor Brian looked down. The rolled painting in his hands was trembling.
“You’re afraid he might outlive you, too, aren’t you?” I said. “Well, that’s a possibility I’ve got my fingers crossed for.”
“I was going to do an ethnography of this wretched place. I wasn’t going to reveal its location, just record the lifestyle of these last habilines under oppressive conditions: a rigorous scientific study of a lost race of only five individuals. It would have been good, Mr. Loyd. It would have been an unparalleled—an unduplicatable—piece of work.”
“Buck up. You’ve still got your coffee-drying platforms to build.”
“The stupid Tontons Macoutes ruined everything. They barged in, shot Toussaint, and now, to preserve the fiction that he never existed, we’re all having to abandon Prix-des-Yeux. Doesn’t that offend you?”
“Not half so much as the death of Toussaint.” (A noble sentiment. Had I not seen RuthClaire crying over him, though, I might never have thought to utter it.)
“They ought to be exposed and made to pay for their arrogance and cruelty.”
“Exposing the macoutes means exposing the habilines, but that’s what you want, isn’t it? Once the world knows that the Rutherford Remnant is real, you can publish your I-was-there-when-they-victimized-Toussaint memoirs without a twinge of conscience.”
Brian sighed. “You’re really going to stick those photos in a drawer somewhere?”
“Why not? Did you want them to illustrate your paper? Text by Brian Nolo Contendere, pictures by Judas Loyd?” I chuckled. “Of course, you could leave my name out altogether. There’s precedent, isn’t there? You once took credit in the Atlanta papers for a photo of mine.”
“I meant to do you a favor. I was trying to keep your name out of a controversy that might’ve—”
“Do me another favor and shut up.”
He shut up. The damp canvas backpack held as many rolled paintings as I could stuff into it. To get those still remaining in the homemade filing cabinet, we would have to make a second trip. I hoisted the pack, squared it across my shoulders, and bounced it a couple of times to make sure I could carry it.
“Do you remember when RuthClaire told you that murder wasn’t in her behavioral armory, Brian Old Boy?”
“Yes, but—”
“Shut up. Well, it may be in mine. It’s my bewildered belief that if you try to make capital of what you’ve seen here by publishing anything, down to and including a squib in
“Bullshit,” he said, but the bleakness in his eyes told me I’d really scared him.
“I’m talking about the States. Here in Montaraz, it’s Lieutenant Bacalou you’ll have to be wary of. If you make any noises about the habilines while still a guest of Baby Doc, expect a late-night knock. Expect the key in your motor scooter’s ignition to trigger a bomb. Expect your next shower to greatly gratify the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock.”
“You’re all talk, Loyd.”
“Maybe, but Bacalou, well, Lieutenant Bacalou you can’t write off so easily. He knows who you are, and he’s bayoneted babies for breakfast. He’s a butcher, a trained assassin. Just because you think I might hesitate to cut your liver out, don’t sell Bacalou short. That’d be a terrible, terrible error.”
“Don’t you care what light Adam’s people can shed on our species’ history?”
“I’m more concerned that we let Adam’s people—
He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and rubbed their lenses on one of the front pockets of his bush shorts. “Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay, okay, okay!” he sang in annoyance. “I’ll lock everything I know in a vault in the back of my brain and let it molder there until the Montarazes relent and let me bring it out again. Not you, Mr. Loyd, the Montarazes. You’re hardly even a walk-on in this.” He put his glasses back on. Distractedly, he pulled an original Fauver/Sam from the crate, rolled it, and began tapping it lightly but obsessively on the cabinet’s edge. A voodooist coaxing Arada-Dahomey rhythms from some arrhythmic recess of his soul. I grabbed his wrist to make him stop.
“There’s one thing about you I’ll never understand,” I said.
His expression was neutral. I could explain myself or not explain myself—it made no difference to him.
“I’ll never understand what Caroline saw in you.”
“You’re of the wrong generation,” he said indifferently. “And you really don’t get people, anyway.”
I let go of his wrist and stalked out of the hut, my legs as flimsy as licorice braids. My backpack contained more than a major portion of the habilines’ output in acrylics: the weight of everything that had happened. I needed help getting down the mountain, but I needed none falling asleep on the featherbed in the guestroom of Adam and RuthClaire’s cottage on Caicos Bay. The white noise of the surf ebbed and flowed through my sleep like the hydrogen hiss interconnecting the myriad stars….
The following evening, Adam and I were sitting on the L-shaped porch of his cottage, darkness thickening around us. On the beach, visible as lithe silhouettes, RuthClaire and Caroline were building a bonfire. They planned to bake yams deep in the accumulating coals and barbecue several varieties of fish on a smutty grill that RuthClaire had found in the storage shed. Adam and I were supposed to prepare exotic tropical drinks, but the women—who had chosen bonfire-building over tending bar—were gathering driftwood and poking at the feeble flames licking up through the scrap lumber that we had helped them drag down there earlier. It would be a while before we ate, but no matter, for in our anticipation lay much of our pleasure.
Adam said, “Alberoi and Dégrasse joined Hector and Erzulie in the caves today. They’re all well—the last of
I said nothing. Prix-des-Yeux was going to have to be abandoned and torn down. Maybe we had dealt effectively enough with Bacalou and Bobo in delaying the disclosure of the caves’ existence—but, with their own eyes, the other two macoutes had seen the habilines, too. Chances were good that they’d tattle. Rumors would spread, and Pointe d’Inagua would become a popular vacation site, a mecca for rock hounds and hikers and amateur naturalists.
Shifting in his rattan chair, Adam said, “Agarou carried you to revelation? You saw God?”
“I saw something. The prehistoric creature who gave your ancestors a divine validation of their survival struggles. It didn’t look particularly holy, Adam. It was a kind of monster, in fact.”
“All gods, Mister Paul, are monsters in human eyes. That is to say nothing very terrible against it.”
“It looked something like a hyena or a dog. Its head did, anyway.”
Adam smiled. “I know. With a hominid body, yes? What you saw was the avatar of God most meaningful to every prehistoric specimen of the human family—by some reckonings, the Master of the Hunt. It lived in the collective unconscious of
“I saw the Sacred?”
“Yes. A projection of the God Beyond Time into the evolutionary aesthetic of his creation. You saw meaning, Mister Paul, and spoke in your possession to a messenger from its source.”
“Not Buddha or Jesus but the Master of the Hunt?”
Adam—a shadow in the indigo twilight—lifted both hands in an unsettling draw-your-own-conclusions gesture.
I leaned toward him in my rocker. “Why didn’t bells go off, Adam? Why didn’t the sky open up and light pour through? Why didn’t I feel that I could float eight feet off the floor of the cave? I mean, if that was a religious revelation, Adam, I prefer falling in love. With falling in love you get Roman candles and light-headedness and invisible champagne bubbles. With that business in the caves, all I got was horror-movie special effects and a theological lecture, and a lingering headache. How can I put any credence in a revelation like that?”
“Did you learn anything that you did not know before?”
“I was told some things I didn’t know before. Why?”
“Because if you didn’t know them before, or hadn’t been told them before, well, then, you would be foolish to conclude that what you experienced was nothing but your own subconscious talking. Something outside you was putting in its two cents of worth.”
“I don’t feel any different than I did two days ago. I’m the same materialistic rational pagan.”
“Who has been ridden by the
I shivered. “Only in a manner of speaking.”
“It will come gradually, Mister Paul. Your bells will sound like they’re ringing at the bottom of the sea. Your fireworks will unfold in big slow-motion umbrellas. You will float only at the most modest, and so nearly imperceptible, heights. But it will come, and each instance of it will have its own design, and the many individual designs will compose an encompassing pattern, and that pattern will have its ground in the Mind and Megapattern of God.”
“You sound like a crackpot Indian guru, Adam.”
“Then I’ll shut up. Right now. Better to think about eating—” he gestured at the beach— “than get lost in the metaphysics of another.”
We sat in silence watching our wives pull coals into a circle of stones upon which they would soon place the greasy grill rack. Paul and Caroline, Adam and Ruthie Cee. Just another pair of sophisticated fun couples partying in a secluded cove on Montaraz. The bonfire ten feet away from their makeshift barbecue pit leapt like the funeral pyre of a Roman emperor. Caroline’s and RuthClaire’s shoulders gleamed in its roaring blaze as if made of bronze. They tonged strips of fileted fish out of a metal cooler onto the grill rack. They took turns basting each strip with the sauce that I had made. I watched them for a long time.
Finally, RuthClaire stood and shouted, “It’s nearly time to eat!”
Adam and I carried two pitchers of iced daiquiris to the beach, and, sitting on the sand at a remove from the bonfire, we ate and drank—somewhat solemnly, considering the late hour and the formidable size of our appetites and thirsts. Tomorrow, Caroline and I would fly back to Miami from Cap-Haïtien. That knowledge may have contributed to our solemnity, but, of course, a lot of it had to do with Toussaint’s death, the upheaval at Prix-des-Yeux, and the uncertainty of our own several futures. I found myself thinking forlorn thoughts about Livia George, Paradise Farm, and the West Bank. To keep from getting maudlin, I limited myself to three small lime daiquiris in a ceramic coffee mug. In fact, I did everything in threes—three strips of fish, three baked yams, and three avowals of either eternal love (that one for Caroline) or eternal friendship (one for RuthClaire, one for Adam) for my companions on the beach.
The bonfire started to die.
RuthClaire said, “We’ve got to build it up again,” pulled herself to her feet, and trudged up the sand toward the cottage. Halfway there, she turned and beckoned to us with a tipsy wave. “C’mon, you guise! He’p me get some stuff fer th’ fire!” Adam, Caroline, and I struggled up and followed her on her drunken anabasis.
Over the next hour or so, we hauled from their storage niches inside the cottage all the paintings in RuthClaire’s series
“You destroyed them because they weren’t popular, is that it?”
RuthClaire straightened, as best she could. “It was either them or my porcelain plates. Porcelain won’t burn.” She laughed so hard she had to grab Caroline for support, and, again, they shared a sisterly hilarity with a rationale impenetrable to male intellects. Adam and I had no choice but to wait them out. Finally, still leaning on each other, they regained a parody of uprightness.
“The concept was all wrong,” RuthClaire said, swaying a little. “In spite of what the hot-shot critics said, I did ’em okay. I mean, I
“Who said that?” Caroline asked.
“Gertrude Steinem,” RuthClaire said, and they both guffawed. Then RuthClaire waved her hand and said, “What I mean is, the pastels were to show the insubstantiality, the immaterialness, of souls—but souls are living bodies, and so my stupid concept is all wrong. My stupid paintings never lived except when the light hit ’em just right, and they looked better burning than they ever did in the morgue of my studio gallery. I had to get rid of ’em, I have to start over, thash—
“Adam liked them,” I said.
RuthClaire broke free of Caroline, tottered over to Adam, and put her arm through his. “Adam’s my hushbin, Paul.” He grinned, and the bonfire illuminated his teeth as if they were a bracelet of ancient ivory charms.
Still later, a little more sober, RuthClaire fetched the burial urn containing Tiny Paul’s ashes to the beach and asked me to open it. I was T. P.’s godfather, after all, and the honor of scattering his ashes on Caicos Bay was rightly mine. If it weren’t rightly mine—by the standards of Emily Post or proper cremation etiquette—well, she and Adam had decided to countermand those standards with an appeal to simple sentiment. I took the urn to my chest with one arm and tried to unstopper it. Nothing I did budged its form-fitting lid, though, and I feared breaking either the lid or the urn itself.
“My hero,” Caroline said. She took the urn, set it on the sand, squatted next to it, fiddled with it for forty seconds, and successfully unscrewed the fire-baked clay stopper. Then she stood and placed the urn back into my arms. I accepted it, smelling sea and ash and particulate spirit.
“Go on,” RuthClaire said.
So with the urn in my arms the way small children sometimes carry a rubber boot into the water to give them both ballast and a fragile sense of security, I carried Tiny Paul into the shallows of Caicos Bay. Like his father, he was home. Without looking back at the people who had sent me, I sowed the murdered child’s ashes on the murmuring inlet. Those that stuck to my palm I washed away in the gentle lapping of the evening tide. They weren’t inconsequential, I told myself, and they weren’t lost: They were afloat in the consciousness of God.
And I tried like crazy to believe it.
Michael Bishop is the author of the Nebula Award-winning novel
A Fairwood Press Book
September 2013
Copyright © 1985 Michael Bishop
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Fairwood Press
21528 104th Street Court East
Bonney Lake, WA 98391
Cover illustration & design by
Paul Swenson
Book design by
Patrick Swenson
First published in the United States of America by Arbor House Publishing Company in July 1985,
an imprint of Grafton Books,
a division of the Collins Publishing Group in November 1987.
ISBN13: 978-1-933846-39-2
First Fairwood Press Edition: September 2013
Printed in the United States of America
eISBN: 978-1-62579-328-7
Electronic version by Baen Books