Ancient of Days

PART ONE: Her Habiline Husband

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 Thrones), but she stepped away from the easel to look through her bay window at the intruder. His oddness had caught her eye.

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 hairy for most ten-year-olds, whatever their color. Was the trespasser some kind of animal?

“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 isn’t a chimpanzee or a gibbon or an orangutan.”

“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 try to murder the poor innocent wretch with it.”

“‘Poor innocent wretch,’” I repeated incredulously. “‘Poor innocent wretch’?”

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 collateral human species—that doesn’t exist anymore.”

“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 perfect, Paul, but it’s suggestive. What do you think?”

“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 Homo habilis—dressed, let us say, in the latest fashion on the boulevards of some modern metropolis—we would probably give him only a passing glance, and that because of his relatively small stature.’” She closed the book. “There. The creature in the pecan tree is a habiline, a member of the species Homo habilis. He’s human, Paul, he’s one of us.”

“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 Principalities for her porcelain-plate series, and AmeriCred Company of New York, New York, would begin taking subscription orders for this unusual Limoges ware at fifty-six dollars a plate in early December. The artist was going to receive an eight percent royalty for each plate sold, over and above the commission paid her in July for undertaking the work. She was very excited, not solely by the money she stood to make but also by the prospect of reaching a large and undoubtedly discerning audience. Ads for the subscription series, AmeriCred had told her, were going to appear in such classy periodicals as Smithsonian, Natural History, and Relic Collector. I wrote out a check for fifty-six dollars and told RuthClaire to sign me up at the first available opportunity; this was my deposit toward a subscription. Folding the check into her coin purse, she looked unfeignedly flustered. But grateful, too.

“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 both in business, it looks like—business with a capital B.”

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 real beginning.

Although over time a few clues have come my way (some of which I will shortly set forth), I do not pretend to know exactly how RuthClaire domesticated this representative of a supposedly extinct hominid species ancestral to our own—but she was probably more alert to his feelings and needs than she had ever been to mine. In the dead of winter, for instance, she routinely left the patio doors open, never questioning his comings and goings, never surrendering to resentment because of them. She fed him whatever he liked, even if sparerib splinters ended up between the sofa cushions or half-eaten turnips sometimes turned up on the bottom of her shower stall looking like mushy polyhedral core tools. Ruthie Cee may have a bohemian soul, but during the six years of our marriage, she had also evinced a middle-class passion for tidiness; more than once she had given me hell for letting the end of the dental floss slip down into its flip-top container. For her prehistoric paramour, however, she made allowances—lots of them.

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 Sesame Street, Organic Gardening, and Wall Street Week, while the anything-goes cable networks gave him a crash course in contemporary hominid bonding rituals. All these shows together were undoubtedly as crucial to the domestication process as my ex-wife’s lovely singing.

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 Celestial Hierarchy series, had made her wary of running into me again. She stayed away from town. I, in turn, could not go out to Paradise Farm without an invitation. The terms of our divorce expressly stipulated this last point, and my reference to uninvited guests during our brief tête-à-tête in October had stricken RuthClaire as contemptibly snide. Maybe I had meant it to be….

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 looked it.) “Besides, he’ll make a damned good mouser. A farm needs a mouser.”

“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 Angels. “This is the plate for January,” she explained. “Over the course of the year you’ll go from Angels to Archangels to Principalities—all the way up to The Father—and I’ve seen to it that you’ll receive the other eleven without paying for them. That’s my Christmas present to you, Paul.” She took the kitten’s shoebox from me so that I could look at the plate without endangering either the mystified animal or the fragile porcelain. “See the border. That’s twenty-four-karat gold, applied by hand.”

“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 like playing Pandare to you and your new boyfriend?”

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 parent—this was her ghastly neologism—without spreading herself too thin. I surrendered to her arguments, to the ferocity of her desire for issue, and for two years we went about trying to make a baby in the same dementedly single-minded way that some people assemble mail-order lawn mowers or barbecue grills. Our lack of success prompted RuthClaire to begin touting adoption as a worthy alternative to childbirth; the support of various international relief agencies, she avowed, would compensate the cosmic élan vital for our puzzling failure to be fruitful and multiply. We ended up with foster children in Somalia, Colombia, and Vietnam, and a bedroom relationship that made nonagenarian abstinence seem shamefully libertine. Because I had wanted no part of adopting a biracial child to bring into our home, RuthClaire had unilaterally decided that sex with me was irrelevant and thus dispensable. She would rather paint cherubs on teacups. Now here she was at the West Bank with a gimpy black teenager from Who-Could-Say-Where? Guess who’s coming to dinner….

“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 very small town. You can’t direct-dial without Edna Twiggs horning in to say she’ll patch you through. Then she hangs on to eavesdrop and sniffle. Times may have changed, but bestial cohabitation’s still a mite too strong for Hothlepoya Countians. You understand me, don’t you?”

“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 you interested in fame and fortune?”

“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 talk like a crackpot. You talk like a man who’s bewildered by something he doesn’t know how to deal with.”

“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 Homo habilis. Use an Instamatic or a Polaroid and get me some proof. I don’t like wild-goose chases, particularly to backwaters like Beulah Fork.”

“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. We are fam-i-lee, go the lyrics of a recent popular song, but in my entire life I recall feeling close—spiritually close—to only one other living creature, and that is my lovely lost RuthClaire. Why had she taken up with a man-ape when my poor human soul still longed for union with hers?

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 looked, let me confess, but I did not take RuthClaire’s picture. (The only extant print of her bewitching unclad body is the one still burning in my mind.) When she lifted herself clear of the sunken bath, patted her body dry with a lavender towel, and disappeared from my sight like a nymph, I nearly swooned. Each of these three near-swoons was a metaphysical orgasm of the highest order. It had been a long, long time.

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 establish my reputation with a demonstration of that claim. Adam is a living specimen of the hominid Homo habilis or Homo zarakalensis, depending on which ‘expert’ you consult. In any case, your wife has no right to keep her amazing friend cloistered away incognito on Paradise Farm.”

“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 belonged in prison, either in Cuba or in los Estados Unidos. Indeed, Uncle Fidel had released this cutthroat from a Havana lockup on the express condition that he emigrate and commit fifty-seven different varieties of mayhem on every American capitalist who ran afoul of him. Instead, he fled down the northern coast of Cuba in a stolen army Jeep and later on foot to Punta Gorda, where, after hiding out for two weeks, he commandeered a fishing vessel piloted by a wealthy Haitian with strong anti-Duvalier sympathies and the strangest three-man crew that the cutthroat had ever seen.

“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 enanos—dwarfs, I guess you’d say—watching him from behind the fishing tackle and cargo boxes in the vessel’s stern. They reminded him of intelligent monkeys, not just animalistic dwarves, and they made him intensely uncomfortable. With a pistol he found concealed in the pilothouse, he stalked and mortally wounded two of these three mute witnesses to his crime. Their small gnarly corpses went overboard after their captain’s fleshy mulatto body, and the cutthroat set his sights on the last of the funny little men scurrying about the boat to escape his wrath.”

“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 absolutamente cierto this creature reached Florida in one of the jam-packed charter boats making up the Freedom Flotilla. You see, there abounded among some of the refugees rumors of a small hairy mute in sailcloth trousers who kept up their spirits with his odd mimes and japery. As soon as the crossing was made, though, he disappeared into the dunes before the INS authorities could screen him as they finally did those who wound up in stateside camps or prisons.”

“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 reminding Adam of these things rather than painstakingly writing them down on a blank slate.”

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 Homo habilis, more than 1.5 million years after their disappearance from East Africa, had ended up inhabiting a minuscule island off the larger island of Hispaniola. Did Herr Professor Nollinger have an answer for that objection, too?

“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 that desperate for a roommate?

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 something, RuthClaire. They don’t rest easy till they’ve got every visiting stranger pigeonholed. You know how some of them can be. I didn’t want it going around that I’d set up house with another guy.”

“Not much chance of that,” RuthClaire said. “But why such petty intrigue and deception, hon? What’s the real story?”

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, you’re the one who concocted this stupid scheme.”

“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 married you! How could that have happened?”

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 volunteered the information.”

“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 keeping Adam in my house; he’s living here of his own free will. Second, he’s a human being and not an anonymous evolutionary whatchamacallit belonging to you or anyone else. And finally, I’m ready for you and Benedict Iscariot here to haul your presumptuous heinies back to Beulah Fork.”

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 “Umpf!” and collapsed atop the photo scraps.

RuthClaire said, “Maybe you feel a little better, too. Not too much, though, I hope. His insults pale beside your treachery, Paul.”

“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 Atlanta Constitution, which I had delivered every morning to the West Bank:

“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 Constitution’s reporter had created a tapestry of quotations—from Nollinger, from two of his colleagues at Emory, and from RuthClaire herself—that made the anthropologist’s claims, or charges, seem the pathetic fancies of a man whose career had never quite taken off as everyone had anticipated. The press conference he had called to announce his unlikely discovery included a bitter indictment of a “woman of talent and privilege” obstructing the progress of science for selfish reasons of her own. RuthClaire, in turn, had submitted to a brief telephone interview in which she countercharged that Nollinger’s tale of a Homo habilis survivor living in her house and grounds was a tawdry pitch for notoriety and more government research money. She refrained quite cagily, I noticed, from an outright declaration that Nollinger was lying. Informed of the existence of photos, for instance, she dismissed them as someone else’s work—without actually claiming they had been fabricated from scratch or cunningly doctored. Moreover, she kept me altogether out of the discussion. And because Nollinger had done likewise (from a wholly different set of motives), no one at the Constitution had tried to interview me. Ah, I thought, there’s more consolation here than I first supposed. My ex can take care of herself…. She would blame me for this unwanted publicity, though. She would harden herself to all my future efforts at rapprochement.

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 Constitution and wondered aloud how my devious Atlanta relative had managed to take a photograph of RuthClaire’s mute friend Adam in her very own bathroom. “You got a spill-the-beans Peepin’ Tom for a nephew,” she said. “’F he ever comes back to visit you, Mr. Paul, I ain’ gonna do his cookin’, let me tell you now.” I agreed Nollinger was a contemptible sneak and promised she’d never have to wait on the man again.

Then, in rapid succession, I received calls from a reporter on the Tocqueville Telegraph, a representative of The Today Show on NBC, an art dealer in Atlanta with a small stake in RuthClaire’s professional reputation, and two of my fellow merchants in Beulah Fork, Ben Sadler and grocer Clarence Tidings, both of whom expressed the hope that my ex-wife would not suffer disruptive public attention because of my nephew’s outrageous blather to the Atlanta media. An artist, they said, required her privacy. I put their commiseration on hold by agreeing and pleading other business. The reporter, the TV flack, and the art dealer I had sidestepped with terse pleasantries and an unshakable refusal to comment.

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 Columbus Ledger-Enquirer—are parked in the drive or along the roadway behind the hollies. It looks like a gathering for a Fourth of July picnic, Paul.”

“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 Celestial Hierarchy series. AmeriCred has been a little disappointed in the way they’re going.”

“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 dangerous to try to breach the elaborate fortifications of Paradise Farm. I liked that.

Meanwhile, in the absence of hard facts, speculation and controversy raged. Alistair Patrick Blair, the eminent Zarakali paleoanthropologist, published a paper in Nature denouncing the notion of a surviving Early Pleistocene hominid as “sheer unadulterated grandstanding piffle.” Shrewdly, he did not mention Brian Nollinger by name, not so much to avoid libeling the man, I think, as to deprive him of the satisfaction of seeing his name in print—even in a disparaging context. Blair cited the notorious Piltdown hoax as a model of competent flimflammery next to this tottery ruse, and he argued vigorously that the few available photographs of Adam were of a rather hairy black man in a molded latex mask like those designed for his PBS television series, Beginnings. Nollinger rebutted Blair, or tried to, with a semicoherent essay in Atlanta Fortnightly summarizing the extraordinary diplomatic career of Louis Rutherford and condemning the artist RuthClaire Loyd for her tyrannical imprisonment of the bemused and friendless hominid. She was a female Simon Legree with a mystical bias against both evolutionary theory and the scientific method.

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 Celestial Hierarchy porcelain-plate series boomed. In fact, AmeriCred reversed a long-standing subscription policy to permit back orders of the first few plates in the series and announced to thousands of disappointed collectors that this limited edition of Limoges porcelain had sold out. It would violate the company’s covenant with its subscribers to issue a second edition of the plates. But in response to the overwhelming demand for RuthClaire’s exquisite work, AmeriCred, in conjunction with Porcelaine Jacques Javet of Limoges, France, had just commissioned from this world-acclaimed Georgia artist a second series of paintings, Footsteps on the Path to Man, which would feature imaginative but anthropologically sound portraits of many of our evolutionary forebears and several contemporary human visages besides; eighteen plates in all, the larger number being a concession to the growing public appetite for my ex-wife’s distinctive art. Further, this limited edition would not be quite so limited as the previous one. More people would be able to subscribe.

“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 want to do this Footsteps on the Path to Man series. The australopithecines I’ll have to reconstruct from fossil evidence and some semi-inspired guesswork, but for Homo habilis I’ll have a living model. It’s going to be fun putting Adam’s homely-handsome kisser on a dinner plate.”

“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 theory!”—was a footstep on the downward path to Mammon, debauchery, and hell. At the end of his remarks, McElroy asked his congregation to join with his loyal television audience in a silent prayer of redemption for paleoanthropologists everywhere and their avaricious minion in Beulah Fork, Georgia, may God have mercy, RuthClaire Loyd.

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 relationship between RuthClaire and Adam. This preoccupation, depending on their ultimate view of the matter, dictated the way they spoke about and dealt with their unorthodox neighbor. Or would have, I’m sure, if RuthClaire had come into town more often.

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 Australopithecus zarakalensis, Homo zarakalensis, and Homo habilis. I used the words ape-man, hominid, primate, and dwarf. I confessed that not even the so-called experts agreed on the genus or species to which Adam belonged.

“Do they say he’s human?” Ben wanted to know.

“Some do. That’s what Homo means, although lots of people seem to think it means something else. Anyway, RuthClaire thinks he’s human, Ben.”

“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 you think we’re descended from Adam, Paul? RuthClaire’s Adam, I mean.”

“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 Homo sapiens sapiens for the past few thousand years of recorded human history. Of course, I also believed in the Sasquatch and the yeti….

“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 hope that’s how she treats him, I thought. The ubiquitous spokesman for the Greater Christian Constituency of America, Inc., had planted a nefarious doubt in my mind.)

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, I often worked in the kitchen in shorts and sneakers), but something about these two—Craig Puddicombe and E. L. Teavers—made my teeth grind. I could have seen them in their string-tie Sunday best (as I sometimes did) without feeling any more kindly toward them, and tonight their flat blue eyes and sweat-curled sideburns incited only my annoyance. For one thing, they had left the door open. For another, I had no table for them. What were they doing here? They usually ate at the Deep South Truck Stop on the road to Tocqueville.

“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 help you, Mr. Loyd. We’re not bigots. You’re a bigger bigot than E. L. or me ’cause you look down on your own kind who ain’t got as much as you do or who ain’t been to school as long. That’s bigotry, Mr. Loyd.”

“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 facsimile of the message on that small, grimy document:

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 Atlanta Fortnightly. He wanted to know if I had enslaved Adam, if I had Adam doing menial tasks against his inclination or will. It sounded as if he had the questions written down on a notepad and was ticking them off each time he asked one and got an answer. I kept saying ‘No.’ They were that sort of question. The last one asked if I would allow an on-sight inspection to verify my denials and to ascertain the mental and emotional health of my guest. I said ‘No’ to that one, too. ‘In that case,’ the RAJA man said, ‘get set for more phone calls and a racial solidarity march right in front of your sacred Paradise Farm.’ And then he hung up. When the phone rang just now, Paul, I was a little afraid it was him again.”

“Nope,” I said glumly, “just me.”

“I’m catching it from all sides.” The receiver clunked as RuthClaire apparently shifted hands. “You see, Paul, I’ve offended the scientific establishment by refusing to let their high priests examine Adam, and I’ve offended organized religion by trying to make a comfortable home for him. Now, I’ve got Klansmen coming at me from another direction and civil rights advocates from yet another. I’m at the center of a collapsing compass rose waiting for the direction points to impale me. That’s pretty funny, isn’t it? There’s no way for me to escape. I’m everybody’s enemy.”

“The public still loves you. Just ask AmeriCred.”

“That’s a consolation—but kind of a cold one, tonight.”

“Hey, you’re selling more platters than a Rolling Stone. Pretty soon you’ll go platinum. Cheer up, Ruthie Cee.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t sound all that cheery yourself.”

She was right. I didn’t. The scare inflicted upon me by Teavers and Puddicombe had worn off a little, but in its place was nervousness, an empty energy, an icy spiritual dynamo that spun paralyzing chills down my spine to the very tip of my vestigial tailbone. Even in the oven of the storage room, I was cold. RuthClaire and I were linked in a strange way by our private chills. Each of us seemed to wait for the other to speak.

At last I said, “Does Adam sleep with you?” It was the first time I’d asked her this question. Somehow the time felt right. For me if not for her.

“In this kind of weather, Paul, he won’t stay in a bed. He’s sleeping on the linoleum in the kitchen where it’s cool.”

“You know what I mean.”

“One morning I found him lying down there with the refrigerator door open. He doesn’t do that anymore.”

“RuthClaire!”

“What do you want me to say, Paul? I’ve grown fonder and fonder of him the longer he’s been around. As for Adam, well, he’s comporting himself more and more like a person with a real sense of his own innate worth. It makes a difference.”

“You’ve finally got your own intramural United Nations relief agency, don’t you? With a single live-in aid recipient.”

“I can unplug this phone as easily as listen to you, Paul.”

I apologized—quickly and effusively—for my sarcasm. It was, I admitted, rude and inexcusable. It would devastate me if she cut me off. My tone was mock-pathetic rather than sappily beseeching, and she let me get away with it. How many times had we bantered in this way in the past? So long as I did not overstep a certain hazily drawn line, she welcomed familiar repartee. It was, I knew, my one clear leg up on the uninitiated, inarticulate Adam.

“How’s he doing?” I asked, mostly because I knew it would please her.

“Famously. His manners have improved, he’s adjusted to indoor conveniences, he’s stopped killing squirrels (I think), and I’ve taught him how to sing. He probably already had a knack for singing—plaintive melodies that run up and down the scale like a wolf’s howl or the undersea aria of a humpback whale. He does a moving ‘Amazing Grace,’ Paul, he really does.”

“Bring him to the West Bank again,” I said impulsively.

RuthClaire hesitated. Then she said:

“Before this uproar, Paul, I’d’ve jumped at the chance. Now it worries me, the idea of removing Adam from Paradise Farm. He’s happy here, and safe.”

“But he’s something of a prisoner, isn’t he? Just like that jerk from Emory and your caller from RAJA have accused.”

“Everybody’s a prisoner of something, Paul. Paradise Farm isn’t exactly an island in the Gulag Archipelago, though.”

“Then let me treat the two of you to dinner again.”

“Why don’t you come out here? I’ll do the cooking.”

“That’s one of the reasons.” Hastily I added, “Listen, now. I just don’t belong out there anymore, RuthClaire. It isn’t mine, and it hurts to walk around the place. It’s yours, yours and Adam’s. Besides, didn’t you hope that eventually the rest of us would come to regard Adam as a neighbor and a peer? Isn’t that why you brought him to the West Bank in the first place?”

“He’s still not ready for that. It would have to be after dark, Paul, and you’d have to make the restaurant off limits to everybody but us. Just like last time.”

“Deal.”

“When?”

“This coming Tuesday. Nine-thirty. It’ll be dark by then, and I’ll still be able to serve dinner between six and eight.”

RuthClaire laughed. “The consummate businessman.”

“We’re two of a kind.” Then: “I’ve missed you, Ruthie Cee. God Almighty, how I’ve missed you.”

“Good night, Paul. We’ll see you Tuesday.”

RuthClaire hung up. Maybe ten seconds passed before the steady buzz of the dial tone began issuing from my receiver. I sat in the ovenish heat listening to it. A cricket chirruped from behind a wall of cardboard boxes—they’d once held cans of tomato paste, bottles of catsup, jars of fancy mustard—opposite my cot. What an idiot I was. Months upon months ago, I could have built myself a house much nicer than the one on Paradise Farm….

A chaste conviviality suffused our get-together on Tuesday evening. There were only the three of us. Livia George and my other help had left at eight-thirty, and although the odor of my customers’ cigarette smoke often lingered for hours, tonight the old-fashioned two-speed fan whirling among the umbrellas overhead had long since imparted a sea-breeze freshness to the air. It was much cooler than on Saturday, and I had a sense of sated well-being that probably should have alarmed me.

As a treat, as a concession, RuthClaire let Adam order steak, medium rare, and 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 Homo habilis in the entire world,” I interjected. “You think your rights outweigh his, Nollinger, because he’s a unique chance for bigger government grants and a measure of parasitic fame for ol’ Number One—not because he’s an illegal alien.”

Adam was following our argument closely, looking from face to face as each of us spoke and running a forefinger along the edge of the tablecloth. His nail had incised a narrow crescent in the material. A single maroon thread was caught in the notch at the top of this nail. The thread shuttled back and forth with the motion of Adam’s finger, like a minuscule red script on a parchment of the same concealing color. What did it mean? What was Adam thinking?

“Listen, Loyd,” Nollinger retorted, “if he’d thrown up tonight’s dinner too, you’d still be faunching to get rid of him. I’m not the only victim of self-interest under the West Bank’s roof.”

“That’s what he was doing when I found him,” Zubowicz said.

“What are you talking about?” I asked the man.

“Adam,” Zubowicz said. “He was retchin’ into the toilet bowl. Tryin’ to, anyway. Couldn’t get much to come up.”

“Damn it!” I said. “That’s a lie!”

“You rub too much garlic and onion salt into your steaks,” Nollinger testified. “Garlic salt, onion salt, tenderizer—it’s just too much, Loyd.”

Adam bit off the thread caught in his fingernail and signed at RuthClaire.

“It was drinking the wine so fast that did it,” she interpreted. “The steak was prepared and cooked to perfection. He apologizes for the bad impression created by his lapses in table etiquette. He’s fine now.”

“That’s good,” Zubowicz said, “because the prof and I are gonna run him up to Atlanta for bookin’ and arraignment.” He gripped Adam by his hairy elbow.

RuthClaire said, “For being an illegal alien?”

“That’s what I’ve been tellin’ you.”

“What if he were an American citizen?”

Zubowicz smiled deferentially. “What if what?”

“He’s my husband, Mr. Zubowicz. A minister from Tocqueville—an ordained minister of the First United Coptic Church of Dixie—married us in a private ceremony at Paradise Farm over two months ago. We even had blood tests. It’s legal, I assure you. And we can prove it.”

“Jesus, RuthClaire,” I said, “you’re ten—fifteen—maybe twenty years older than he is!”

“That’s a threadbare old ploy,” Zubowicz said. “We’ve gotten really tough on folks who wed aliens just to confer American citizenship on them. It’s become something of an industry, and the penalties for taking part in these fake marriages—for devious or fraudulent purposes, Mrs. Loyd—well, nowadays the penalties are severe.”

“I’m carrying Adam’s child. How fraudulent or devious is that?”

I sat down at the table and exhaled a sigh as profoundly melancholy as I could make it. My ex had just given us offhand confirmation of everyone’s worst suspicions. But unless you insisted on seeing Adam as subhuman, underage, or mentally defective, you could not logically continue to upbraid her for “living in sin.” She was a married woman who had emphasized her bond to her new spouse by cooperating with him in the conception of a new living entity. Sadly, I preferred the living-in-sin hypothesis to so dramatic a demonstration of the lawfulness and incontrovertibility of their union.

Zubowicz turned to Nollinger. “Is it possible? Can a human woman and a, uh, well, a—?”

“Habiline male,” the anthropologist said.

“Yeah, what you said. Can they make a baby? Will the genes, uh, match up?”

“There’s precedent,” Nollinger said. “Of a sort. At Yerkes, not too long ago, a siamang and another kind of gibbon successfully mated when they were caged together for a long period. It surprised everyone, though.” He squinted at Adam. “Interbreeding between distinct human species—Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal, for instance—may’ve been one of the factors responsible for the wide variety among human physiques and faces today. Yeah,” he concluded, almost resentfully, “it’s possible, Mr. Zubowicz.”

I looked up. “RuthClaire, why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’d planned to, Paul. I just didn’t expect the evening to be abbreviated by a close encounter with a stooge from Immigration and Naturalization.”

“Mrs. Loyd,” said Zubowicz, wounded. “I’m only doin’—”

She cut him off: “Mrs. Montaraz, you mean. In private life, I’m now Mrs. Adam Montaraz. My professional name’s still RuthClaire Loyd—that’s what everyone knows my work by—but tonight, considering your mission, call me by my legal married name.”

Zubowicz threw up his hands and turned in an oafish half-circle to escape the fury in RuthClaire’s eyes. As he turned, a hard object shattered one of the windowpanes in my front door. It grazed Nollinger’s head and ricocheted off the metal divider between the dining room and the cash register. Nollinger dropped bleeding to his knees. Glass sparkled like costume glitter in the candlelight. A second missile—both were red-clay bricks, or brick fragments—burst through the picture window near us and toppled a potted geranium, a tall ceramic beer stein, and a fishbowl full of colored sand. Zubowicz had his pistol out again, but now he looped its barrel around urging everyone to retreat to the rear of the restaurant. Dazedly, even Nollinger complied, the gash on his temple leaking a crimson mucilage. Adam loaned Nollinger his shoulder as, bent over like a special services commando, I hustled RuthClaire to the back.

The squeal of an automobile laying down rubber reverberated from one end of Main Street to the other. A backward glance told me that the shadows in front of the Greyhound Depot Laundry had dispersed to their own secret corners of the night. Main Street was empty again, and no more bricks, I assumed, would come flying through my windows.

The vigilantes had had their fun.

“They’re gone,” I said, straightening up. “I think we’re okay. Damn it to hell, though. Look at this mess. Just look at it.”

“Insurance’ll pay for it,” a voice from behind me said. “Never knew a bigshot yet didn’t have him lots of insurance.”

Three people had entered the West Bank by the same route taken only a few minutes earlier by Dick Zubowicz. Two wielded shotguns. All three wore clothing that gave them the look of farmers in an outlandish variety of medieval clerical garb. Winged robes of shimmering lavender, with strange embroidered emblems and decorative piping of a much darker purple, fell just below the intruders’ knees, revealing jeans and scuffed work boots in two instances and pale hairy shins above powder-blue jogging shoes in the third. Pointed hoods—headpieces of grandiose, miter-like impracticality—concealed the men’s faces, but they had also pulled nylon stockings over their features to flatten and distort them. But one intruder had given himself away by speaking. And, by revealing his own identity, he had inadvertently divulged that of one of his seconds.

“Hello, E. L.,” I said. “Hello, Craig.”

Or maybe it had not been inadvertent. The robes, the nylon masks, the lopsided ecclesiastical headgear were more for show, for corny Grand Guignol effect, than for impenetrable disguise. That I could not puzzle out the name of the Ku Klutzer in jogging shoes—a lanky character who slouched along in a stoop—was an irrelevancy. What mattered was that three of my neighbors had worked themselves into a state of self-righteous agitation so calculating and cold that donning pompously comical costumes and trashing my four-star backwater cafe struck them as noble responses to something they just did not understand, or understood in the half-assed way of a house painter viewing Hieronymus Bosch. (Hell, I’m still not sure that I understand what they did or didn’t understand.) Now, dressed like pious executioners, they stood pointing shotguns.

Unignorable.

After taking Zubowicz’s pistol, the Klanners produced two pairs of handcuffs, one of which served to anchor the INS agent to the S-pipe under the sink in my kitchen, the other of which manacled Nollinger to the flocked divider in the dining room. The man in jogging shoes, who never spoke, took care of the handcuffing, and, as he worked, I could not help noticing sweat running down his legs to the tops of his shoes’ perforated ankle guards. The heat under those purple robes—I realized they were almost exactly the color of old Dr. Kearby’s beloved gentian violet—had to be strength-sappingly intense. What imbecility.

“Davie Hutton’s never around when you need him, is he?” Craig Puddicombe had trained his shotgun on RuthClaire, Adam, and me. “Only pops up when you’ve run a stop sign or laid down rubber in the A&P parking lot.”

E. L. Teavers chuckled coldly, and I stared harder at the Klansman in jogging shoes. Was that Davie Hutton? I could not really tell. His possession of handcuffs and his refusal to speak made me suspect that it was. It also helped to explain the blatancy with which the Zealous High Zygote’s cohorts on Main Street had assaulted the West Bank and then made good their getaway. If Davie was with them, then they’d had a free hand. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, Davie had never seemed quite so pale and etiolated as this apparition.

“Time to go,” E(lvis) L(amar) Teavers said.

“Where?” RuthClaire asked.

But now that Zubowicz and Nollinger were secured, the urge to banter with or taunt us deserted the intruders. Grimly unspeaking, they herded us out the back door, past the restroom, and through the grass-grown alley to a small dewy hillock from which Beulah Fork’s water tower rose into the summer darkness like a war machine out of H. G. Wells. Adam stared up into the tower’s crisscrossing support rods, but Teavers, sensing that Adam had it in mind to seek refuge aloft, cracked him across the temple with his shotgun barrel.

“Go on, you goddamn hibber!” he cried. “No hibberish monkey business!”

As Nollinger had done in the restaurant, Adam fell to his knees. His lips curled back to reveal his canines. RuthClaire knelt beside him to whisper consolation. Although Adam wobbled a little after regaining his feet, he was soon striding as assuredly as any of us, and our bizarre little party passed from the water tower’s low hillock into an asphalt-patched street parallel to Main.

From this street we marched into the upper reaches of the playground of the Beulah Fork Elementary School. Crickets were whirring enthusiastically, but otherwise the town seemed uninhabited, a vast sound stage accommodating the silhouettes of a few isolated Victorian houses along with hundreds of cardboard-cutout elm and magnolia trees. The playground itself, on the other hand, was a minefield in the midst of these innocuous props. Crossing it, I kept waiting for Teavers to blow our heads off. It seemed clear to me that he and his purple-capped pals were marching us to fatal appointments, or, at the very least, to a tryst with tar and feathers.

“Is this how you look after the rights of a hardworking white man?” I asked. “Wrecking his business and terrorizing him and his friends?”

“Shut up,” Craig Puddicombe said.

“I mean, when you came in the other night, you were concerned about my rights being violated. Is this how—?”

E. L. Teavers said: “That’s all forfeit, Mr. Loyd. You and your wife are traitors.”

“To what?” RuthClaire asked.

“I said, ‘Shut up!’” Puddicombe said. “We don’t have to explain nothin’ to you!”

“Not now, maybe,” Teavers added, evenly enough.

And then I saw a van parked behind the softball backstop at the northeastern corner of the playground. Two or three robed figures stood beside this vehicle, human carrion birds in the still unsettled dust surrounding it. The cab of a pickup protruded beyond the nose of the van. Its decorated sides the Klanners had obscured with a thick gouache of mud that had long since dried and hardened. As we approached, one robed figure semaphored with both arms, climbed into the van, and eased it along the backstop so that Teavers and Puddicombe could throw back its sliding door and prod their captives inside. Adam and RuthClaire boarded together while I temporized on the threshold, one foot in the dust as an uncertain tie to the reality of Hothlepoya County. These clownish thugs were about to spirit us away to Never-Never Land.

“Get in,” somebody said, not too urgently.

I obeyed, but looked over my shoulder in time to see the man in jogging shoes go dogtrotting off toward a portable classroom behind the school. Puddicombe climbed in after me and banged the van’s sliding door to. RuthClaire, Adam, and I were made to sit on the floor in the center of the vehicle’s passenger section. Around us perched armed members of the Kudzu Klavern, four more people caparisoned in cumbersome purple and redolent of stale sweat. The darkness prevented me from distinguishing the sex of each one, and their shoes—sneakers or penny loafers—were not much help, either. At least one woman had come along: Her high-pitched mocking laughter greeted every underdone bon mot dropped into the deep fry of our fear and confusion.

Now the van was bumping along at good speed.

“Coulda sworn he’d stink,” one of the men said. “I expected dead rat or wet dog, somethin’ foul anyway.”

“Not this one,” Puddicombe replied. “This one wears English Leather or he don’t wear nothin’ at all.”

The woman guffawed. From where I sat, it was impossible to tell to which robed body the guffaw belonged, only that it was nervous and feminine. After a mile or two, though, I arbitrarily assigned it to the penny loafers.

Our van bounded from rut to rut. We did not seem to be on paved highway. Once, our driver sounded his horn. The sour bleating blast of another horn, undoubtedly that of Teavers’s pickup, answered it. We slowed and turned. The penny loafers guffawed, a high-pitched outburst with no apparent antecedent.

“Where are we going?” RuthClaire asked.

No one answered. Adam had his arm linked in mine. Occasionally he looked from side to side as if trying to sort out the pecking order among our captors. I don’t think he was scared. Both RuthClaire and I were near, and with his free hand he absentmindedly groomed my ex, picking tiny knots out of the shingled strands of her hair.

Eventually the van skewed to a stop. Its sliding door popped back like the lid of a capsized jack-in-the-box. Puddicombe, minus his nylon stocking, forced us outside. We stood in the beams of E. L. Teavers’s pickup truck’s headlights, virtually blinded by their moted yellow glare. The van backed away, executed a wild turn on the edge of a trail rut, and vanished into the night with all its robed cargo but Puddicombe.

This frightened me far worse than anything that had happened so far, including even the first burst of brick against glass in the West Bank. RuthClaire, Adam, and I were stranded in the middle of nowhere with the Zealous High Zygote and his chief lieutenant. I looked up. Stars freckled most of the sky, but a migrating coal sack of clouds had begun to eat big chunks of the western heavens. A bottomless abyss opened over my head and under my feet, and the chill of this sensation spookily disoriented me.

The headlights cut off.

From across the weed-choked field, Teavers said, “Bring the hibber here, Craig.”

“Why?” RuthClaire asked. “What do you mean to do?”

I closed my eyes, opened them, and closed them again. When next I peered about, though, the landscape seemed familiar. We stood on Cleve Snyder’s land not far from Paradise Farm, on a piece of isolated acreage that had never been used to grow beans, cotton, corn, or any other crop—not over fifty or sixty years, anyway. Early in the century, a brick kiln had operated here. What was left was a series of red-clay mounds surrounding cistern-like vats that plunged into the earth seemingly without bottom.

Eight years ago, according to the skinnydipper’s horrified playmates, a child from White Cow Creek had fallen into one of the vats. An attempt to locate and raise him had concluded with the absolute frustration of those who had gone down after him in winch-assisted harnesses. Although afterward there had been some community agitation to cap or fill in the pits, Cleve Snyder had offered to build a barbed-wire barricade with warning placards on it, and this offer had quieted the angry uproar. Tonight, glancing about me, I realized that either Snyder had never fulfilled his promise or else the vigilantes of the Kudzu Klavern had undone his efforts to make the place safe. We were in the foothills of a miniature mountain range, far from succor, civilization, or warning signs.

Adam, looking at RuthClaire, made a bewildered hand gesture.

“I don’t know,” she replied, shaking her head.

Puddicombe slapped Adam’s hands down and told RuthClaire to hush. Teavers, a grotesque shadow, climbed into view on a nearby mound. The mounds—it struck me—resembled eroded termitaria on a dusty East African plain. For a moment, in fact, it seemed that the five of us had been translated by some fantastic agency to the continent on which Adam’s ancestors, and ours, had first evolved. Hothlepoya County was Kenya, Tanzania, or Zarakal. We were all Africans….

“Tell him to shed his clothes,” Teavers ordered 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.

“Adam!” RuthClaire cried. She ran to the top of the mound. “Adam, we’re here!”

“Watch it!” Niedrach cautioned her.

The crooning stopped. Everyone waited. A sound like pebbles falling down a well. Another series of high-pitched grunts and wheezes. And then, six or seven mounds away, above the rim of the vat piercing that little hill to an unknowable depth, Adam’s head appeared! A gash gleamed on his hint of sagittal crest. His bottom lip protruded like a semicircular slice of eggplant. Numerous nicks and punctures marked him.

A beat. Two beats.

Adam’s head popped out of view again.

“Adam!” RuthClaire wailed.

Descending the first mound, she ran on tip-toes toward the one concealing her husband. But Adam pulled himself out of the ground before she could reach it. He was wearing, as everyone could now see, the shiny purple robe in which E. L. Teavers had plunged to his death. It hung on Adam’s wiry body in crimps and volutes. It fit him no better than a jousting-tournament tent, but shone with a monarchical fire, torn and sodden as it was. At the bottom of the interconnected vats, he had no doubt put on the robe to keep warm during the rain and darkness, but now seemed to wear it as a concession to West Georgia mores. He had the look of a sewer rat emerging from its chthonic habitations: the King of the Sewer Rats.

RuthClaire hugged him. He returned the embrace, and Nollinger, the GBI agents, and I saw nothing of him but his black, bleeding hands patting RuthClaire consolingly in the small of her back.

“It’s not so surprising he got out,” Nollinger said sotto voce, addressing me sidelong. “His ancestors—the ones the Kikembu warriors sold to Sayyid Sa’īd’s agents in Bravanumbi—well, they lived in caves in the Lolitabu Hills. That’s how they stayed hidden from modern man for so many thousands of years. Adam may have grown up on Montaraz, Louis Rutherford’s little island off Hispaniola, but he clearly retained some of the subterranean instincts acquired by his latter-day habiline forebears in East Africa. I mean, how many of us denatured Homo sapiens could have survived an ordeal so—”

“Why don’t you just shut up?” I said.

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

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

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

Before the Montarazes left Beulah Fork, I threw them a going-away party in the West Bank. Livia George, Hazel Upchurch, Molly Kingsbury, Davie Hutton, Clarence and Eileen Tidings, Ruben and Elizabeth Decker, Mayor Ted Noles and his wife, and even Nancy Teavers were among the guests. I served everyone on Limoges porcelain plates from both the Celestial Hierarchy and the Footsteps on the Path to Man series. The latter was still incomplete, but AmeriCred had sent me a dozen place settings of the most recent issue, “Homo habilis,” with my ex-wife’s compliments. I gave each of my guests this plate as a remembrance of the evening.

Although I had prepared her a vegetable dinner, RuthClaire ate very little. Her pregnancy had deprived her of appetite. She nursed her meal along until she at last felt easy setting it aside for a dessert cup of rainbow sherbet—and then announced to all and sundry that although few contemporary divorces were civil or even tastefully barbarous, she and I were still fast friends. When the baby came, Adam and she had agreed that I would act as its godfather. Indeed, if it were a boy, they intended to name it after me.

“Hear, hear!” everyone cried.

I stood to propose a toast: “You’re a better man than I am, Adam M.” For a time, anyway, I actually meant it. It is not always possible, I’m afraid, to be as good as you should be.